The Case of the Missing Boyfriend

by Alexander, Nick

  And then a woman appears in the doorway opposite holding two cups and says something to the man, and then frowns and nods at me, and he turns, still grinning from some previous remark, and I snap my head back to where I’m headed and hurry on down the lane.

  My heart is racing, but not from being caught out . . . My heart is racing because that house is my house. That house is exactly the house I imagined. In fact, it’s more my house than I ever imagined, only I couldn’t know that until I had seen it. And the woman – that woman holding her cups of tea, or soup, or hot chocolate, or whatever it was – was my height, and my age. Other than her pregnant belly, she looked just like me. And the guy in the hoody, the man with the easy stance and the wry smile looked exactly as I always imagined the missing boyfriend would be. Just for a moment, I feel like an impostor has stolen my life.

  I walk briskly for a few hundred yards, and then, when the first drop of rain strikes my forehead, I spin around and walk back the other way, debating what to say if the woman from the house comes out to ask me why I’m there, or if the guy comes out to offer assistance to this lost, non-pregnant double of his wife.

  But the curtains are now drawn so I take a deep breath of the fragrant wood-smoke and, imagining this other-me inside my house, settling in front of my log fire, with my baby inside, and my smiling boyfriend beside, I walk briskly, and then as rain starts to fall from the sky, run, alone, to my car.

  The Matrix

  As I head back to Plymouth, and then on homeward, I wonder what choices I have made to bring my life to this point . . . I wonder, more specifically, what might have happened if I had moved to, say, Plymouth or Bournemouth instead of London, how different my life might have been. For the first time ever, I wonder if my fragmented, catastrophic love-life might not be a symptom not of what I do, but of where I live . . . if it might not be the trade-off for having chosen the excitement of the capital over the stability and relative calm of a smaller, more rural place. After all, somewhere along the line, there has to be a reason my body-double ended up with the baby and the log fire and farmhouse and the lover, whilst I ended up with the career and the gay friends, and the parties on E and a wardrobe full of Jimmy Choos. Without a doubt part of the cause is me. But maybe, just maybe, part of it is geographical as well.

  I remember Darren telling me that waiting to do things until the right person came along was a mug’s game, and I wonder if perhaps he should had gone to live somewhere else instead of quitting the planet entirely. Might he not have found a better way of living in Cambridge or Edinburgh or France even – one which he found more satisfying? In Darren’s memory, perhaps I should now find out? Because if London really is the problem, then I need to find out now. A couple more years in this rut and my options, both marriage and baby, and career-wise will have narrowed to none-at-all.

  As I come out of Exeter, I realise that I have taken a wrong turn, but recognising the town of Brampford Speke signposted ahead as one of the Cornish Cow sites, and figuring that a few photos of cows will add to the illusion of a busy, fruitful business trip, I carry on up the A377.

  After a few miles and a few turns I find the sign: Cornish Cow: Brampford Speke, and turn onto what is little more than a farm-track.

  It’s only as I park the car in front of a vast grey steel barn that it crosses my mind that not only are there no cows in the fields but that again, we aren’t in Cornwall here . . . Brampford Speke is well within Devon. Is there, I wonder, anything Cornish about Cornish Cow?

  I grab my camera and the portfolio and cross the muddy car park to the only visible door, dwarfed in the middle of the vast grey frontage.

  There are no signposts, no secretaries, no farmers and most notably, no cows. For a moment I wonder if this isn’t a factory or depot rather than a farm, but then the wind changes and the stench of slurry hits me, and the sound of a cow, and then cows plural, reaches my ears.

  I open the door and step into a hallway. It stretches the length of the building with a doorway every thirty yards or so. And then a door a few hundred yards to my left opens and a farmer appears wearing overalls and wellington boots. He looks at me, pauses for a moment, blinks as if he maybe can’t believe his eyes, and then starts to stride towards me.

  ‘Hello?’ he says, his voice rising at the end of the word. His frown looks more like What the fuck are you doing there? than anything else.

  ‘Hello,’ I say. ‘My name’s CC Kelly.’ I offer him a hand but he just frowns a little more and ignores it. ‘I work for an advertising agency and we’re preparing a brief for Cornish Cow,’ I say. ‘I met Roger Niels this morning in Plymouth, and I was just driving past and I saw—’

  ‘Sorry, you’re telling me this because?’ he says, his aggression thinly veiled.

  ‘Well, because I met Mister Niels in the offices I couldn’t get any photos of the cows. So I was just wondering . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘but no. I don’t know you from Adam, and this is a sterile unit. You’ll have to come back another time with proper authorisation.’

  I nod and fake a smile and move to his side as I open the portfolio, more intrigued now than ever to see behind those doors. Something about this guy’s demeanour is profoundly unsettling.

  ‘Here, have a look,’ I say, starting to leaf through the mock- ups. The man folds his arms across his chest, and I think, This really isn’t going to work. But then he uncrosses his arms and reaches out to stop me turning the page. ‘That one’s cute,’ he says, nodding at Darren’s cartoon cow with a milkshake. The man is almost smiling. Breakthrough!

  ‘Ah, OK! You like that one?’ I say. ‘That’s useful. A few people have said they like that one best, but it’s good to get the opinion of someone in the business,’ I add, flattering him intentionally.

  I leaf through the remaining images and then say my parting shot, ‘So surely you could let me take just a couple of shots? Just something for the guys in Creative to work with?’

  He looks at me sour-faced.

  ‘I’ll be less than five minutes. Less than two minutes? Oh go on . . . Please?’ I bat my eyelashes at maximum speed. ‘Pretty please?’

  The man snorts and caves in. ‘OK,’ he says, glancing at his watch. ‘But you need to be out before four because there’s a shift- change then, and I don’t want to get into trouble.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ I say, winking at him.

  ‘Of course,’ he says, leading me to one of the doors, ‘if you want cows in fields, you’d be better going to the show farm in Gwennap.’

  ‘The show farm?’

  ‘Yes. They have a smallholding in Gwennap. Because this place is just a ZG unit.’

  ‘Of course,’ I say as knowledgeably as I can manage. I’m suddenly feeling more like an undercover detective than an advertising exec. We pause in front of a shelf of wellington boots, and the guy nods at my feet.

  ‘You’ll need to take those off I’m afraid,’ he says. ‘As I said, it’s a sterile unit.’

  ‘For diseases and things,’ I say.

  ‘Exactly.’

  I remove my trainers and put on a pair of oversize wellingtons and follow the man through a foul-smelling foot-bath, and then we push through a scratched heavy plastic curtain, and I freeze with the shock of the sight before me.

  For this cowshed is truly vast. In fact, the term cow shed really doesn’t do it justice. I look around as I slowly take in the details: cows as far as the eye can see, cows in perfect rows, packed in, side by side – cows on concrete, cows in four inches of their own excrement.

  ‘God!’ I say. ‘How many are there?’

  ‘About four hundred,’ he says. ‘Three hundred and seventy, to be precise. Thirty are in the calving pen.’

  ‘Of course,’ I say.

  ‘But they’ll be back tomorrow,’ he says.

  ‘Tomorrow? Right. And the babies? Sorry, the calves. I can’t see any here.’

  ‘The heifers will be reared for here in a different unit. And the bull-c
alves go to Europe.’

  ‘They go to Europe?’

  ‘Yeah, for veal. There’s no call for veal here.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So?’ he prompts, nodding at my camera.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, heading for the closest cow. As I approach its rump, I see that its head, which is poking through a metal frame to a feeding tray, is loosely tethered there. Oh, that won’t work . . . he can’t turn round . . .’ I say. ‘I wanted him looking back at me.’

  ‘No, she can’t,’ the man says.

  I pull a face. ‘She! God, how embarrassing. Of course. God I feel like such a twit.’

  The man really smiles for the first time. ‘Here, come round to the feeding alley,’ he says, beckoning with his head.

  I circle the cow and follow his lead climbing over a small wall into a distinct concrete alley between two rows of cows facing each other head to head. The alley is filled with a grey powder which smells almost as rank as the slurry.

  ‘Is this food?’ I ask, looking at the cows unenthusiastically chewing the dust beneath my feet.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says.

  ‘What is it? It looks like concrete.’ And smells like shit, I think.

  He shrugs. ‘It’s high protein dairy feed,’ he says. ‘Soya and stuff.’

  Looking down at the two rows of cows, maybe a hundred heads all turned to face me, each with two huge yellow tags through the left ear, the industrial scale and nature of the operation really hits me for the first time.

  I crouch down to take a close-up shot of the first cow. Now it might just be me projecting, but as I look into her eyes I can’t help but frown in dismay – for I can sense nothing but sadness here. The contrast with Darren’s cartoon cow couldn’t be more pronounced.

  ‘You don’t look very happy,’ I murmur, and I swear that cow stares straight into my eyes, and zaps a reply straight into my brain. ‘Look around,’ she says. ‘Just look around.’

  I sigh and straighten up and smile at the technician. ‘Are there any at all outside I could take pictures of?’

  He shrugs. ‘Not here,’ he says. ‘It’s ZG here.’

  ‘ZG? Sorry . . . we city girls,’ I say.

  ‘Zero-Grazing.’

  ‘Right,’ I say, taking this in. ‘So they just . . . what, stay here?’

  ‘Well, yeah,’ he says, a little incredulous at my stupidity.

  ‘All the time.’

  ‘All the time.’

  ‘They never go outside?’

  ‘Well no. It’s ZG. As I say, if you want to see cows in fields you need to go to the Cornish show farm. That’s what it’s for.’

  I nod. ‘And how many cows are in the show farm?’

  He shrugs again. ‘Ten, maybe fifteen.’

  ‘And here, four hundred.’

  He shrugs. ‘Yep.’

  ‘So do they get any exercise at all?’

  ‘We take them for milking three times a day.’

  ‘OK,’ I say with some relief. ‘Where’s that?’

  He nods to indicate the far corner of the cavernous steel shed where twenty or thirty cows are tethered into different, rotary stocks with tubes from the vacuum pumping devices attached to their udders.

  I feel suddenly sick. Actual bile rises into my throat and I have to swallow it back down. It could just be the smell, for the mix of odours rising from the grey powdered feed and the slurry the cows are standing in, and the smell of milk and udders, is far from a happy one. But it isn’t that; it’s out and out disgust, revulsion even, that humans could invent and build something so . . . obscenely inhuman. For this system, cows tethered in stocks in a dingy smelly barn, cows who can’t turn around, cows standing in shit, cows who have their offspring ripped from them apparently on the day of birth so that we can have their milk instead, this is obscene. This place is Auschwitz for cows and it’s quite literally making me puke. It’s like something from The Matrix, only with one major difference. These cows know exactly what’s happening to them.

  I think about the boss saying that our drawings didn’t look very organic, and ask, ‘Just out of interest. Do they farm organic cows in the same way?’

  He shrugs. ‘I don’t think so,’ he says. ‘I don’t think the rules allow it, but I don’t know much about it, I’m afraid. You’d have to ask a farmer.’

  ‘You’re not a farmer?’

  ‘No, I’m a production technician.’

  Then because my production technician is starting to frown suspiciously at me again, I snap three of the miserable beasts from a variety of angles and then pretending to fiddle with the camera controls, blindly take two random snaps of the whole disgraceful vista without him realising. And then I thank him profusely, and head as quickly as I can from that awful, awful place.

  My trip just gained an entirely new purpose. It’s no longer about gaining a contract, it’s about convincing Peter Stanton that we don’t want the contract. We don’t want it at all.

  I stand outside looking at the empty fields around me, and I wonder why on earth anyone would decide to farm this way? How many pennies do we save on a pint of milk by inflicting such abject misery on so many creatures?

  No, we will not advertise for Cornish Cow. I haven’t felt so determined about anything since I sat in front of those Cruise Missile convoys all those years ago.

  Choreographed Compromise

  Despite a freshly filled litter tray, a salad bowl of cat-munchies, and two full tins of Whiskas, Guinness is furious by the time I get home at ten. He screeches at me discordantly and then sits in front of the back door, his tail thwacking irritatingly against the tiles.

  ‘You really have no idea how lucky you are,’ I tell him, thinking of the cows. I try to stroke him but he’s having none of it so I simply open the door and release him, before heating and eating a bowl of macaroni cheese that’s been sitting in the fridge, and then collapsing into my bed.

  The discussion with Peter Stanton on Monday morning is of course, lively. ‘I hardly think that the current economic climate is the time to get picky about which clients we are going to take on, do you?’ he says.

  I push my photos back across the desk at him. ‘Please,’ I say. ‘Just look at them.’

  He sighs and fingers the photos. ‘Did you ask them if they’re unhappy?’ he says. ‘Do you even know if a cow can be unhappy?’

  ‘Any living thing can suffer,’ I say. ‘And this place . . . this place is a concentration camp for cows. Honestly, Peter, just the stench . . . I couldn’t even put milk in my tea this morning.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ he says, then with another sigh he continues, ‘Look, we haven’t got the contract anyway. So let’s just wait and see what happens, eh? But if they do choose us, well, the future of quite a few jobs here could depend on it. And that would be a hard thing to refuse over mere principles.’

  I nearly challenge him on the concept of mere principles, but think better of it. ‘Well, look . . . I’m sorry, Peter, but I can’t be clearer on this. I won’t work with them. I just can’t.’

  ‘Right, well, if push comes to shove Victoria can do it. As long as she doesn’t visit the farm we should be OK.’

  ‘Victoria won’t want to run the whole caboodle,’ I point out. ‘She won’t want to liaise with Creative and Media and . . . Anyway, the last I heard she’s gone vegan.’

  ‘If she has to she will. And as you know full well, if Spot On don’t do this then one of our competitors will.’

  ‘I expect that’s what the men who built Auschwitz said,’ I say, remembering one of my favourite student arguments.

  ‘I expect they did,’ Peter says. ‘And I expect like Hugo Boss, and Siemens, and Mercedes Benz, they all got bloody rich.’

  ‘Nice,’ I say.

  ‘Indeed. Now, if you don’t mind, I need to get off to a meeting.’

  Mark and Jude are thankfully more understanding of my point of view. ‘If we do have to do it, we’ll do it really badly,’ Mark tells me.

  ‘I’ll make
sure they get the worst advertising campaign Spot On has ever produced,’ Jude agrees.

  Even if we all know that this wouldn’t truly be an option, it’s sweet of them to say so. I can only hope that we never do get that contract.

  On Saturday morning I head up to Waterloo to meet my mother.

  She starts complaining about South West Trains even before she reaches the ticket barrier. ‘Guess how much this cost,’ she says, shouting and waving her ticket at me over the head of an old lady between us. ‘Go on, guess.’

  ‘Hi, Mum,’ I say. ‘Well, at least you didn’t have to drive. You usually arrive fuming about the traffic.’

  ‘Twenty-nine pounds twenty,’ she says. ‘From Camberley! Can you imagine? I could drive to Scotland for that.’

  ‘I don’t think you could actually, but—’

  ‘Completely full, and bubblegum all over the seat. I had to ask a man for a page from his newspaper, and now I expect I have newsprint all over my bum. Honestly. And they wonder why no one uses the train.’

  ‘You said it was full,’ I point out, hugging her briefly.

  ‘Only because the one before was so late everyone got on ours,’ she says. ‘Anyway . . .’

  ‘Yes, forget it now. You’re here. And I’m taking you for a lovely lunch in Covent Garden.’

  As we head across the concourse towards the taxi rank, I wonder if I can ask her straight off what the visit is about. I’m feeling a little sick about our impending discussion. ‘So,’ I say, steeling myself to pop the question.

  ‘So,’ Mum replies, ‘how was your trip to Portsmouth? You drove, you said?’

  ‘Yes. Horrible. Well professionally, it was horrible.’

  ‘I really liked the place myself, but I suppose that was a long time ago.’

  ‘Oh, I liked the towns, and the countryside down there is beautiful. It’s just I had to go to this farm – our client is a dairy company: milkshakes and yogurts and stuff – but it was the most awful place, Mum, honestly you wouldn’t believe it. A factory farm I suppose they call it. All the cows were tied up in rows. They never turn around, and they never go outside. They never even see a blade of grass. Not ever.’