by Cynan Jones
When the bigger animals came through the pen the sound was more that of a long queue. It reminded Grzegorz of waiting on the gangplank of the ferry when they came over, finally off the cramped bus after hours of travel. There was the odd sound of metal clanking, as now and then the cattle brushed the railings of the four-meter walkway. They didn’t have the panicked, startled look of the lambs. They were droll. There was a checkpoint, and as the cows came through one of the men stopped each animal and checked its ear to see that the tag and passport corresponded and then moved it along up the ramp.
They came up docile and oblivious, with the kind of calm factuality of big, heavy animals, and one by one they stepped into the kill pen.
There was the grating sound of the metal end door as it slid up and the cow went in, then it clanged down and the animal, unable to move in the small pen, stayed calm. The first metal plate rose up onto the animal’s nose and it seemed to sit down and crumple, as if it had chosen to rest for a while. Then the second plate came up onto the animal’s chest and the cow shook for a few seconds then went still.
It was the strange, detached process of the electricity that Grzegorz could not get used to, the passivity of the whole thing. Then the side door of the pen slid up and the animal fell on its side and rolled out onto the counter in front of him.
“I can’t do this,” thought Grzegorz. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this. Not for what I’m getting back from it.” The blood from the animal was washing into the gutters and into the drains. He thought about the rich scents of his grandparents’ farm and the intimacy of it and of the mists coming with the cow’s breath in the early morning. Of the humble pace. “That wasn’t enough,” he thought. “That could never have been enough. We could never have kept it. Not the way the world’s gone now. It was never enough anyway.” He thought of the long, flat, difficult land.
His wife had been dropped to two shifts at the factory but they still had to pay the week up front to keep the places in childcare that the agency organized. It’s oversubscribed, they said. You can’t pick and choose. He was working all the time he could. “I have to get ahead,” he thought. “I just have to get my nose ahead then we can move on to the next step. We can get out of the shared house and have some room of our own.”
Around him, as the carcass disappeared, he could hear the men sharpening their knives. Then he heard the metal scrape and clang, and another animal went into the kill pen.
Hold steered the boat in to the quay and the man was there waiting for him. The group of seagulls that had followed him in stopped at the harbor mouth as if there was some line there, invisible. He could feel the boat surf a little in the swell into the harbor mouth.
There were a few people walking about and you could hear the bigger traffic going past on the road even over the engine of the boat. It tocked and splashed as he slowed it up and the smell of it came to him as he cranked the propeller into reverse to stop the boat and then idled it and threw up the rope-line to the man.
“How’s the sea?” said the man. He knew he didn’t know his own boat. His ownership was of the idea of the boat.
Hold looked up at him. “Getting up a little.” The man was on the quay wrapping the rope around the iron cleat.
“Tomorrow?” said the man.
He stood up from the rope. There were a few people stopped on the quay looking down into the boat at the coiled lines and the bounty of fish and at the spider crabs and the one big lobster.
The man was looking down into the boat at the boxes of fish. They were so fresh they hadn’t started to lose their color yet and in the light the fish were very fine things, and there was something somehow religious about them.
“It’s your boat,” Hold said up.
“You’re in it,” said the man.
Hold looked out at the sea rising slightly in a swell. “I’m happy to take her out tomorrow.”
They’d loaded the fish up onto the quay and the man had gone into the hotel there and the restaurant manager had come out with him and chosen the fish he wanted. It was a public act and it was a very good advertisement for the hotel to the few early tourists. In the summer, the tourists were bolder and would gather like gulls and they would sell direct to them, setting the scales up on the quay wall.
The manager wanted the fish and the lobster and gave the man cash for them and the man wrote it down in a duplicate book and gave a copy back to the manager. Then he counted off the percentage of the money and added the fee to it and wrote it down and gave it to Hold.
“I took some fillets,” Hold said. He was very clear like that.
“Fine,” said the man.
“Drink, guys?” the hotel manager said.
They both declined and the restaurant manager said to Hold, “Could you get some rabbits for me? Dozen?” and Hold said he could. And the manager said, “For Friday.”
“Okay,” said Hold. “I’ll go out tonight. I’ll bring some in the morning or the morning after.” He knew it was a full moon and not a good night for it but figured that over two nights even with bad shooting he could get a dozen.
Every now and then he rubbed the nub of his thumb where something he’d got under his skin was swelling into a small sore. “It’s a bit of fish bone,” he thought. Or perhaps something off the boat. He examined it casually and scratched at it with his other thumbnail but the skin didn’t lift.
“Do you want the crab?” asked the man.
The restaurant manager looked at them and looked back at the hotel doubtfully and said, “They’re fiddly as hell…” And Hold said, “They’re in early. Really early this year.”
“I’ll take them,” said the manager. Their meat was very sweet and of great flavor, but it was work to get the meat out in terms of time. “I’ll cook them up,” the manager said.
“You can have them,” said the man, and looked at Hold as if to check it with him. Hold shrugged. He flicked with his nail at the little sore again, trying to see what it was that was under his skin. He was perturbed at the crab being in so early. Usually it was from May they came in any numbers.
Hold put the tub of spider crabs on the quay wall and they loaded the rest of the fish into the 4 x 4 and poured over them the crushed ice that was softening in a plastic sack in the back of the vehicle. Then the man drove off with them. People were staring into the big tub of spider crabs. The crabs looked very alien there on the quay wall.
Hold unwound the rope-line and cast it down into the boat and went down the ladder, kicking off the heavy boat from the wall, and the restaurant manager came out and took the crabs to cook.
Big mullet were coming in on the tide and grazing the harbor wall and people were remarking on it.
Hold headed the boat over to her mooring and tied her up and took the fillets he had cut and his water bottle and rowed the tender over to the slipway and got out. There were mullet pecking at the slipway. Around all the motors of the boats there were little rainbowed pools of oil like liquid peacock feathers lain on the water. Hold could still taste the fish in his mouth. It was a hell of a fish this way. It made it a shame to cook it.
The waste was difficult to accept. He thought woefully of how his grandparents would be horrified by the wasteful policies of the place, of the perfectly good meat that was thrown away here.
“This is a comfortable culture,” Grzegorz thought. “It is a comfortable culture and a culture that doesn’t have time for food that takes hours to prepare. People here can choose not to eat meat. They are actually comfortable enough to be able to say ‘I won’t eat meat.’”
He thought of the feet, the cow’s lips, all the slow-cooked things of his upbringing, with the better cuts being sold. He saw all these unwanted organs thrown into bins and dye tipped over them, things perfectly good to eat.
“It is not what we do in this country,” he told himself. “There is enough here.” He thought bitterly of the useless farm back home, the place he had always imagined himself staying. Felt the dagger
of his naivety in that. “We have to move on. Get more sophisticated.”
Most of the farms round here were small. Not by Polish standards, but they were small and they sold through organizations that had contracts with the big supermarkets. For most people, there was no getting away from that if they wanted to make the farm work.
When a supermarket put in a big order for something they wanted to sell on offer, they got the animals they needed in and took just those parts and threw the rest of the animal away. The supermarkets, for example, would want lamb chops, so they’d extract the chops and send them on down to the packing line and the rest of the sheep would be tossed, and the dye thrown on it. Then the chops would be driven for hundreds of miles around the country.
The suppliers and the farmers would have to take the financial hit on the offer or risk losing the supermarket contract, and if any of the product was left unsold when the offer ran out, the supplier had to buy it back.
Grzegorz thought of the animals butchered in the old kitchen, the pig hanging from its sinews by the big iron hooks and his grandfather’s saw cutting down through the ribs, the collected pudding of the blood, the rich, powerful smell of the fresh offal on the wood-fired stove. “This gratefulness to an animal,” he thought, “is what’s gone here. There is a sorrow for it, as there always is, but it is without gratefulness and eventually you just go numb to it. It’s the way you have to feel about crowds of people, about strangers. You can’t care for them. You can’t let yourself. There’s too many of them.”
Much of the meat that should have been destroyed went missing. You couldn’t work in that wastefulness and go home and see people eating poorly, counting their pennies. That was one thing about the house, despite the lack of ready money—they ate well. At least, they ate richly from the cuts the men could bring. Last week a whole truckload of chops had come back. They’d gone all the way through, through the packing lines and onto the truck and the hundreds of miles to the supermarket depot and they were rejected because the rind of fat was half a centimeter too thick. They had to be destroyed. The supervisor came out to oversee that one and they had to watch the whole lot go to waste. It was perfectly good meat.
He thought tiredly of the dressing down again. The bullying, as it was, by his line manager. “Maybe I attract it,” he thought. “Maybe I attract that kind of thing. They think I’m weak because I’m quiet. I’m not a city boy like them. I never learned to be aggressive like that.”
He looked up at his wife. She was shushing the baby in this kind of worn-out way, the other people in the kitchen moving round her. He was losing hope, he could feel that. He could feel the energy that came with that first, excited belief disappearing. And she seemed to be disappearing with it.
At first, there had been something alive in the snatched, silenced embraces they had stolen in the crowded house. This fresh sense of newness about everything. Now they were too tired, too ashamed, too aware of the eleven other beds in the room, the baby in the basket by their bed. He thought of the farm, his own childhood. Whatever it lacked, of the richness of the space. “To bring a baby up here, in this,” he thought.
He pushed the food around his plate, bumped and jostled as others cooked and ate in the small kitchen.
He could see out of the window the big graffiti saying “Polish out,” and could hear his wife chuck to the baby. He felt this loss of her happening.
“Wciąż się kłócimy,” he thought. We are always quarreling now.
He could feel the drudgery come round him the way it had become at home, as if it was something physical that could happen to you. The automaticness to just get through.
“It doesn’t change,” he thought. “Life stays the same, relatively. Unless you get one big chance to get yourself ahead, properly ahead, then it just stays the same.”
It was getting enough to make the next step, that’s all it was. They put what they could away, but it was hemorrhaging with what everything cost here. It was all relative. He believed it was just the next step, then he could change everything.
“I didn’t expect to be here for so long,” he thought. He meant the house. He looked at his wife. He could see she looked visibly older.
Hold drove the old van back. There was the sense that the van somehow hung together around him. The repairs Hold had made himself were all over and there were many patches of gaffer tape spread over the van like a kid who had come off his bike. He was never someone who had craved great amounts of money but it was tiring to not be able to afford simple things anytime, like a pair of new boots, or to have the money just to fix up the van.
Of course, there was always the dream of a fortune, just to make everything safe and fix up the place, but it was not a wistfulness in him. But now came this. This need for big money, or the house would go.
He pulled up by the trailer and got out and then rethought and leaned back in to pick up the fillets from the front seat, as the sun warmed in through the windshield. He took the fillets and went into his trailer and put them in the paper in the fridge and he looked down at some of the stray scales still on his hands and went into the shower.
The house had been Danny’s grandparents’, and as they had aged they had sold off the land and the bungalow they had built on it but had kept the old house. For the first ten years of their life, the place had been their universe, Danny’s and his, and Danny had been crushed by the selling of it. For a child, it was not possible that things could not be permanent. With the money from selling off the land, his grandparents had rented a small place in the village, and the old house decayed on the plot. The dream in the family was that one day they could rebuild it and move into it in a kind of reclamation, and it had been Danny’s great hope that he would be able to do this.
Danny was a dreamer. That is not to say he was not a determined man, but he was a man who set up great dream-like things all the time and had this refusal to accept the unlikeliness of them. Often in the sight of the big idea, Danny would overlook the processional steps you needed, the simple things to get somewhere. There was something childlike in this, but he had a great way of bringing you with him, so even when you knew the end was not possible you would get caught up in the getting there. It was a very contagious thing. There was something in his belief that was very contagious and made you wish you didn’t have an idea of reality sometimes. But the house was not an impossibility. The house just needed the hours spent, the materials gathered, the skills applied.
Hold came out of the shower and stood in the steam that roiled out of the small shower room and watched the motes of moisture catch the incoming light. Through the window he could see the house and there was, every time he looked at it, this recall of the promise he’d made. This unmovable, stone-built thing of it.
“Finish it for him. Finish it for Jake.” Hold had sat by the bed, his wasting friend seeming to desiccate before him, and him hardly able to take in the actuality of it.
He looked now at the way some of the limed whitewash was lifting, aged, off the wallstones and thought of his friend’s skin seeming to dry off, to flake away as he lay there. He looked out and saw that the stray cat had come to sit on the van bonnet for the dissolving warmth of the engine. He was always taking in strays; he preferred it to the responsibility of ownership.
“I want to give him something to belong to,” said Danny.
“I’ll do that,” Hold said. “I’ll do that thing.”
Since then, any money he had he put into the things he needed for the house, and it was coming, bit by bit. He had long resolved for it to be a far-off thing to achieve, but now had come the bombshell. Danny’s sister wanted her share of the money from the place. It was like she’d held out while Danny was alive, swayed by his promises that he’d find the money to buy her out. Then had come her divorce, and then Danny had gone. She needed the money, now. It was like this giant, final, impassable wall.
Hold had tried everything he could. He had submitted a business plan to the bank himself,
for a boat of his own, the likely return after three and five years, all as it said in the book he’d bought. He had been cautious and harsh with the plan but the figures still looked good, but the bank had simply refused. You have nothing. We can’t lend without security.
His idea had been to borrow the money for the startup but to siphon some off and arrange to buy her out bit by bit, as the money came in. But Cara wouldn’t consider it. It was enough for her to know he had worked on the house for Jake. All these things he did were for Jake, they both had to believe that. It was academic anyway. He couldn’t raise the money.
He took a sliver off one of the fillets and took it outside and gave the sliver to the stray. He had to choke down this moment of sudden anger at knowing that the house was going to slip away because of the one thing he could not compete on, money, and that this castle they’d played in would be knocked down and rebuilt and sold off to the highest bidder, almost certainly as a second home. He saw the two of them inside, juvenile, the dangerous fires they had lit there in secret, the things they’d invented with great weaponry value hidden there, the plans they’d made, the first girlfriends they had brought there.
