by Adam Roberts
I got up and splashed my face. I dressed in yesterday’s clothes – they didn’t smell very savoury, but I didn’t want to go padding around a hotel naked for fear of startling the other guests. I shouldered my pack and went back to my room. I met nobody on the way. So I took off yesterday’s clothes in the bath and dressed in the more or less dry things I’d washed the day before.
I went downstairs.
I found Anne sitting on the back step smoking a cigarette. The morning light was not flattering on her face: deep lines attended by a greater number of fine lines, and her skin so white as to approach translucence. I sat down beside her and she looked at me, and for a moment she smiled – the first time I had seen her do that. A gush of something marvellous poured through my soul.
‘I don’t like to smoke in the house,’ she said. ‘It makes the furnishings reek, and the guests wouldn’t like that.’
‘Do you actually have any guests?’ I asked.
She stared at the sky. Eventually she said: ‘Would you like some breakfast?’
‘For twenty-two euros fifty?’
And – miracolo! – a second smile. ‘Come through. I have some vatbacon.’ She crushed her cigarette stub into the base of a tin, fitted a lid to it, and went inside. I watched as she emptied the cold ashes into the sealed wastebin, and rinsed the tin, and washed her hands.
We had breakfast together as comfortably as an old married couple. The cat wandered in, rubbed itself like a pole-dancer around the legs of the table, received a scrap of bacon, and went out again. ‘I had quite a chinwag with your cat, there,’ I told her. ‘Last night.’
‘Really? He is usually reticent where strangers are concerned. He must like you.’
He. ‘I am a deeply likeable fellow. It told me to go to the village of Heatherhampton, although it didn’t say why, exactly. Only that it would be in my interest. Is that a thing it does? Your cat, I mean?’
Anne looked blankly at me.
‘What I mean,’ I said, ‘is: does your cat tell all your gentleman visitors to go on a pilgrimage to some tiny Midlands village?’ As soon as I had said this, I regretted it. A barely perceptible flush of colour came into Anne’s pale cheeks. All your gentleman visitors? What was I thinking?
‘I’m an idiot,’ I told her. ‘Ignore what I say. I should have all my teeth drilled through, one by one, without anaesthetic, and then my mouth wired shut with steel wire.’
‘Why would you do anything so horrible?’ she asked me, ingenuously; and I saw that I had misjudged the moment. I am a clumsy fellow.
‘I only mean,’ I add, ‘I’m sorry. I have no right to comment on your private life.’
She didn’t reply. We sat in silence for a while. Then she said: ‘His name is Cincinnatus.’
‘And you said my name had too many syllables in it!’ Her face relaxed at this.
‘I’m glad he likes you,’ she said.
I went out and walked into the centre of town. The aim was to try and pick up butchery work, although without Preacherman’s mediation I found this side of things harder to manage than it had been. I lack his people skills. Of course I still needed money. If I rarely spent time planning for future possibilities it was only because that future seemed so limited. I had the best part of two decades to go before I hit seventy-five and could draw a pension – not that that is a sum of money that goes very far, these days. Until then my options were: either to sign on to the register and look for city jobs, or else to carry on tramping about the countryside. The latter was the preferable option as far as I was concerned, although I could see that eventually I was going to become too infirm for it. And what then? Dump myself on my daughter? I would sooner walk into the sea.
I did at least find a job that day, though only a half-pay gig, the remainder of the fee to be taken in fresh meat. This didn’t suit me, but I didn’t have much choice. So I rode in the back of a van out to a warehouse on the edge of town with four Muslim men; and went inside to find a live cow lying in its own shit and bellowing in pain. ‘It slipped over,’ said one of the men, shouting to be heard over the noise. ‘I think it hurt its leg.’
‘Tough luck, Ermintrude,’ I said to the beast, kneeling in front it. Thankfully, the creature didn’t reply. I like to believe this is because it was a dumb cow, and not a canny cow in too much pain to do anything but howl. I looked at the leg. ‘It’s broken,’ I agreed. The faecal stink was strong and very unpleasant. I put on my body-apron, but the stuff had already got onto my shoes and trousers. ‘Can you get a hose, please?’ I told one of the men. ‘Wash some of this out?’
‘We don’t want to open the door whilst the Dhabibah is going on,’ said one of the men.
I fixed him with my eye. ‘This is legal, isn’t it?’ Yes, they assured me. Perfectly legal. This was no speaking cow. ‘That’s not the only way this could be illegal,’ I pointed out.
‘Tell me,’ said this fellow. ‘You are a Christian? Abi ah halal requires the slaughter be performed by a person of the book. Need not be Muslim, but must be a person of the book.’ I knew this, of course; and was happy to pretend to be as Christian as the job required. But I took his point.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘You guys OK with me doing it here? I mean, you all right with it dying in its own – eh, waste? That doesn’t make it haram?’ The four of them looked at one another. Then they looked at me; but if they didn’t know, I certainly didn’t. ‘It’s your rules, guys. You tell me.’
‘Let’s pull it over to that wall,’ suggested one of them.
It took all five of us to move it, tugging the hind legs of the beast, and it wasn’t happy – mooing fit to break the windows, and intermittently thrashing in pain. We smeared a great trail of shit across the floor. Finally, with the creature lying on its side, I hauled its head back and called out the bismillah and pulled the knife through its jugular, making sure not to sever the spine. Glug, glug, glug went its lifeblood. One of the guys danced back from the expanding puddle.
The warehouse was otherwise empty but, clearly, had never been intended as a slaughterhouse; there were no runnels or drains for the blood for instance, and nowhere obvious to hang the carcass. The silencing of the animal’s noise meant that the guys were less jumpy; so they opened the doors a little, and ran a hose in to wash away some of the filth. I hung a pulley on a hook attached to the wall – not ideal, but better than nothing – hooked the hind legs together and pulled the body up. Then I butchered it as quickly as I could, and the men took the joints as I cut them free and wrapped them in plastic and carried them out to their van. The remnants went into a large plastic sack and they took that as well. I was left with a haunch, and with the money they transferred as the remainder of my fee onto my card. They dropped me outside Anne’s house.
She regarded my gift of a haunch of fresh real beef with suspicion. ‘I can hardly carry it with me on my wandering,’ I told her. ‘It’s real beef! I’m the butcher, and I’m telling you – it’s top quality.’ Actually I had no knowledge about the provenance of this animal, but the flesh looked sound. ‘I’ll cut a joint off it and we can roast it tonight; put the rest in your freezer.’
‘I feel,’ she said, ‘like a World War Two housewife. Husband away at the front, and the butcher attempting to win my favours with gifts of off-the-ration-book meat.’
‘Role-playing is fun,’ I said.
We had a proper roast that evening; and I stayed another night in Anne’s bed. There was another moment of awkwardness when I tried to pay her for my room, despite the fact that I hadn’t slept in it at all. She coloured, as if I were treating her like a prostitute, and I grew in turn stroppy and offended and cut-off-my-own-nose-ish. What can I tell you. That’s my flaw, through me like the word in a stick of Brighton Toothrot: PRIDE. Not in a good sense.
Nevertheless, we parted on good terms. I told her I’d be back. I kept that promise.
I walked north. My path did take me past Heatherhampton, and when I saw the sign it did half-occur to me to detour
and seek out the path of which Anne’s cat had talked. But then I thought to myself: fuck that. No talking cat tells me what to do. I regret this now, of course; but how was I expected to know?
What my daughter told me
Over the course of several days I made my way back up to Droitwich, and when I arrived I called in on my daughter. Her house was a chaos of small children. Jared, her husband, did nothing but sit on the sofa tapping at his iScreen as the kids tumbled and screamed and fought and hugged around him. ‘Albie’s back in the country,’ Jen told me, as she boiled the kettle and halfheartedly wiped the main surface of her kitchen. About half their furniture was rented, and wrapped about in bubbleplastic – although I could see places where the kids had pulled this aside and scratched or drawn on the surfaces.
Light came through the dining-room windows in two hefty great slabs of brightness.
A weekend morning in early October. The playroom wall was showing gigantic cartoon superheroes slugging it out with one another, the volume turned up to 50, every punch and grunt reverberating through the whole house; yet none of the four kids were in there – they were scrambling about in other rooms. I thought about going through to the playroom and turning the programme off, but I wasn’t sure how the system worked.
‘Dad,’ Jen said, a note of warning in her voice, ‘did you hear me?’
‘You said Albert is back,’ I replied.
She put her cloth down, and embraced me. ‘Dad, don’t get angry. He’s given over his job.’
‘Oh?’
‘He’s on a dairy farm now. You could, maybe, be proud of him even – he’s following the family tradition, after all.’
‘When did this,’ I asked, and coughed, ‘happen?’
‘You still smoking?’ Jen asked, stepping away to make the tea. ‘It’s bad for you.’
‘Hardly at all. Don’t change the subject.’
‘He got back a couple of weeks ago. Dad, don’t lose it – here’s the thing. He wants money.’
‘So do I.’
‘Seriously. This farm work is volunteer work, and he’s not being paid. He says he really needs money.’
‘I haven’t any to give him,’ I said. ‘What kind of dairy farm doesn’t pay its workers? He should get a proper job – I could talk to Bob Fetter, get him on the preferential list for any vacancies.’ I hadn’t spoken to Bob in many years, and had no idea if he would even answer my call. But I wanted to say something.
‘He’s gone Green,’ said Jen, not meeting my eye. ‘Albie has, I mean. He’s seen the light and it’s a green light. The dairy farm is canny cows – bêtes, you know? They run it, they take the money. He is a human helper. Trying to put something back, is how he puts it.’
‘Joined the cult,’ was my assessment. I took the tea from Jen. ‘Well, split my liver with a brass harpoon.’
Jen’s phone made a vespine noise and she wandered away to answer it. I peered into the steaming mouth of my mug and sipped the tea. The news about Albert went, slowly, into the vesicles of my brain. I thought: he’s an adult, he can do what he likes. Then I thought: shouldn’t he have had his crazy earth-hugging phase before he got a proper job with an international MicroCorps? Then I thought: it’s a phase, he’ll come out the other side, I only hope he hasn’t burnt his bridges with the world of work. Then I thought: he’s my son.
Jen came back through, with one of the younger twins on her hip. ‘Where is this farm?’ I asked.
‘Dad,’ she said. ‘You’re not to go storming down there with all guns blading. Blazing, I mean. You know what your temper is like.’
‘Guns!’ cried little Darren, and then shot me repeatedly with a finger pistol whilst making pshaow pshaow noises.
‘My temper is perfectly balanced. I’m practically a fucking Buddhist,’ I said.
‘Dad!’ she snapped at me and looked at the infant. I looked at the infant. There was a pause whilst we waited so see if my profanity had made any impact upon his pure little mind.
‘Pshaow!’ said Darren, levelling his finger again. ‘Peeoo! Peeoo!’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Look: I haven’t seen him in the best part of two years. You think I’m going to lose my rag with him? I’m not going to lose my rag with him. But I’d like to see him. OK? He wants to piss – ah I mean pour his life away, that’s his business.’
‘Pisspoor!’ cried Darren, con gusto. ‘Fucking Buddhist !’
‘Naughty step for you,’ said Jen, and hauled the sprog away.
I went into town, marvelling at just how crowded with people Droitwich had become since my last visit. Passing along the pavement meant shouldering your way through a herd of surly-looking people. The buses were all full, and there were so many of them that I had to wait at the side of the road for them to pass before I could cross. The price of everything seemed satirically high: as if the pricing system were some avant-garde artist’s joke at the expense of ordinary people. A cup of coffee for nine euros ninety-nine. A porcelain doll the size of a pepperpot – a present for Jenny, to say sorry for filling her son’s head with obscenities – forty euros. It wasn’t even a particularly attractive piece, I thought; but Jen collected such things, and I bought it anyway.
That evening Jen and Jared and I had a civilized supper at nine, an hour past the kids’ bedtime. But they refused to stay in their beds, and kept coming down. Jen became the cat-herder, scooping one of the four back upstairs as another two crept down. At one point all four were holding what sounded like a play version of the Olympic hundred and ten metre hurdles along the upstairs hall. Jared made perfunctory attempts to engage me in conversation, although his eyes never left his iSlate. I strove to keep my temper, scraping parallel ploughlines through my mashed potato with my fork. Eventually I asked him what was so interesting on his slate. ‘I’m doing some work for Macfarlane, Cressida Macfarlane,’ he replied, without (it seems) noticing the sarcasm in my voice. ‘Or at least for her office.’ When I told him I didn’t know who that was, he at first assumed that I was joshing; and then when he realized I wasn’t said: ‘She’s Minister for Bête Affairs. But there’s pressure on her to stand down, so that the post could be taken by an actual bête. It’ll come to nothing – the satirists are having a field day, Caligula’s horse a senator, that sort of thing. But she, or her office, are trying to get a viral counter-campaign going, and that’s where I come in.’ He met my eye for the first and last time that evening, and grinned at me. Then he went back to his iSlate.
Jen came back to the table, looking exhausted and harassed. The food had long gone cold. It was ten o’clock, near enough. We three listened to the ceiling, like those rebel troops inside the spacecraft under imperial attack at the beginning of A New Hope. Then, accompanied by a barely audible undermurmur of muffled giggling, we three heard the squirrel-like drumming of little feet pass from left to right overhead. Jen let out a sigh. Jared returned his attention to his iSlate. ‘Leave them, Jen,’ I said. ‘Let’s just eat. I wanted to ask you about—’
Her chair scraped noisily on the floor. ‘They are really crossing the line,’ she said.
‘—Albie, and what we can—’
She wasn’t listening to me. ‘It’s because you’re here, Dad,’ she said, as she stomped through the door. ‘They’re acting up, the little buggers.’
I cross-hatched the lines on my mashed potato. There was an unmissable rebuke in that statement. So the following day I made my excuses and left.
What my son told me
I hitchhiked across the ancient kingdom of England, my homeland, my beloved place, all the way to East Anglia. The farm where Albert was working was near a village called Petersholt. Hitching took me longer than usual. The government was bringing in legislation to make hitch-hiking illegal, I was told by one driver. I don’t mind picking you buggers up, but it’ll soon be against the law. Cambridge was the nearest I could get to this place by free rides, so I rode Shanks’s pony the remaining fifteen miles.
I hadn’t called ahead, but (lo
oking back) I deduce that Jen did, because Albert wasn’t surprised to see me. He was hauling bales from a flatback and stowing them in a metal barn when I came round the corner of the lane. ‘Hi, Dad,’ he called.
‘Albert,’ I said. We didn’t embrace. We had never been that kind of father-son. He hauled another bale, wiped his brow on his shoulder, and looked at me.
‘You could give me a hand,’ he pointed out.
‘Glad to,’ I replied, slightly testier in tone than I intended. ‘Provided the pay rate is fair.’
He scowled. ‘Suit yourself, Dad,’ he said, pulling another bale. ‘You always do.’
So I stood and watched as he pulled all the bales off and stowed them. Finally he clambered awkwardly into the cab of the truck – clearly unused to dealing with the clumsiness of farm ordnance after so many years away – and drove it away. I waited. Eventually he came sauntering back round. ‘You want a cup of tea?’
‘I do.’
‘I’ll tell the boss I’m taking a breaking.’
‘And what is your boss’s name?’
He looked at me as if checking whether I was joking or not, but didn’t answer. I followed him round the farm and across an uneven quarter-acre of grass and cowpats. On the far side of a gate was a yard, and in the yard three cows. ‘This is my dad,’ Albert told them, pulling the gate open.
‘Of course it is,’ said one of the cows.
‘Is it OK to take five?’ Albert said. ‘Make him a cup of tea; say hello; sort of thing.’
‘I’m feeling bloaty,’ said the second cow. ‘Please hook me up. After that you’re welcome to have a chinwag with your old father.’ The beast backed up, its udders swinging like a chandelier in an earthquake. I worked cows for two decades, but I never really got used to their udders – that weird goitre-swell and rubber-glove-fingers combo. But Bert went meekly off with the creature into what I assumed was the milking shed. I stayed on the near side of the gate. ‘So,’ I said, conversationally. ‘This is your farm?’
‘Ours,’ said one of the cows, turning her big head to bring one eye to bear on me. ‘All legal and binding.’
