by Johnny Mains
The livestock is skinny and completely shaven. Their elbows are tied together and their hands are tucked under their chins. They are young males with big eyes. They look like each other. Like angels with pretty faces and slender bodies. They start to cough in the acid-stinging air.
Shivering against each other, the smaller one starts to cry and hides behind the taller one, who is too frightened to cry, but pee’s instead, down the inside of his thighs. It steams in the cold air.
‘Dirty bastards. They’ll piss anywhere. Trucks full of it. Yous’ll have to wash that corridor down after we’re gone.’ Weasel Boy pulls the rope taut. Each male wears a thick iron collar that looks loose on his yellowish neck. A rope is attached to the short chains welded to the collars. In his metal hands Weasel Boy holds the slack rope.
As Weasel Boy pulls them across the courtyard, the livestock jogs and jostles together for warmth in the cold air. I run ahead to open the utility door, but can’t feel my legs properly, even when my knees bang together.
Inside the corridor I take off my mask and walk behind the livestock. Weasel boy leads the way to the washroom. The livestock peer about at the storage cages. The small one stops crying, distracted by the paintings and furniture and boxes inside the cages. The taller one looks over his shoulder at me. He smiles. His eyes are full of water. I try to smile back at him, but my jaw is numb. So I just stare at him. His face is scared, but trusting and wanting a friend who smiles on this day when he is frightened.
I think what I think every time the caterers come to Gruut Huis, that there must be some kind of mistake. Livestock is supposed to be dumb. It has no feelings we’re told. But in these eyes I can see a frightened boy.
‘No,’ I say, before I even know I am speaking.
Weasel Boy turns around and stares at me. ‘You what?’
‘This can’t be right.’
Weasel Boy laughs under his pig mask. ‘Don’t you believe it. They got human faces, but they is shit-brains. Pretty as pitchers, but dead in the head. They ain’t like us.’
There is so much I want to say, but all the words vanish off my tongue and my head is filled with wind. A big lump chokes my sparrow throat shut.
‘Git! Git!’ Weasel snarls at the livestock, who cringe at the sound of his voice. On the back of each livestock-boy I see the scars. Long pinkish scars with little holes around the slits, where the stitches once were, after things had been taken out of their thin bodies for the sick. ‘Best meat in town,’ Weasel says to me, grinning. ‘They cook up lovely like. Thousand euro a kilo, they cost. More than fruit in them tins, like. Think of that. More than fruit in tins.’
Weasel Boy is pleased I am feeling dizzy and sick. And, like most people in this building, he likes to tell me things I don’t want to hear. ‘These two, we been feeding for months. Shut it!’ He straps the smaller one, who has started to cry again, on the backside with the end of the rope. The little one suddenly stops crying when the rope makes a wet sound on his yellow buttock. The mark goes white. Then back to yellow again. The force of the blow makes him trip over the feet of the taller boy, who is still looking at me with watery eyes, wanting a smile from me. They have long toenails.
‘Where . . .’
Weasel Boy stops dragging the livestock and looks at me. ‘Aye?’
I clear my throat. ‘Where they from?’
‘Nuns.’
‘What?’
‘Nuns. Them old nuns up in Brussels all died of the milk-leg. So all there shit-brains went to auction. These two were like strips of piss when me and me dad looked at them. No meat on them. All they got fed from them nuns was yeast and water. No good for the meat, see. So we been feeding them for months. Who’s they for, like?’
‘Head Residents.’ My voice is a whisper.
‘Aye?’
‘The Head Residents of the building. For the Annual Banquet.’
‘They gonna love them.’ Weasel boy rips his mask off and points his septic muzzle at the livestock in a grimace to frighten them. They both try and hide behind each other, but get tangled.
The weasel’s bristle hair is wet with sweat. I wondered if the salt stings his pimples. They go down his neck and on to his back. I can smell the sickish vinegar of his boils.
‘Are . . . Are . . . Are you sure it’s OK?’ I know the answers to all of my stupid questions, asked in my stupid voice, but I have to keep speaking to hold my panic back. The livestock starts to giggle.
‘Like I said, don’t be fooled. They’s useless. Was nothing but pets to them nuns. Only me and me dad make them worth anything. They is worth more than the organs in you and me put together.’ He tugs the rope hard so the livestock make chokey noises and their naked bodies slap against his rubber apron. Their eyes are watering. The little one looks up into the Weasel Boy’s rat eyes and tries to hug him.
But the livestock go quiet when the washroom door is opened. Weasel Boy shoves them inside. Through the gap in the door, I can see his fat dad holding a sack open. ‘Get in here,’ he growls at the big one. Both livestocks start to cry.
‘I have to get back to my desk,’ I say, even though I can’t feel my jaw.
‘Fair enough,’ Weasel says, with a smirk. ‘We need you to open the doors when we finished the first one. Me mam is coming at three. She’s the cook. Me dad’ll bring her later. We’ll do the second one in the morning.’
He closes the door. Behind me the livestock is crying in the washroom. The Fat Dad is shouting and the Weasel Son is laughing. I can hear it all through the white tiled walls. I put my fingers inside my ears as I run away.
Follow me through the dark house. Watch me kill the old lady. It won’t take long.
My little brass clock says it’s three in the morning, so I’ll go and put a pillow over Mrs Van den Broeck’s bird mouth until she stops breathing. It’ll be all right as long as I pretend it’s just an ordinary thing that I’m doing. I know because I’ve done this before.
Above my bunk, Vinegar Irish is asleep and snoring in his bed. He won’t see me leave the dormitory room. After drinking so much this evening – the cleaning liquid with the wet paint smell that I stole from the stores for him – he climbed into bed on his hands and knees with eyes looking at nothing in particular. Most mornings it takes me over twenty minutes to wake him for our work upstairs behind the reception desks. He drinks all day, can remember nothing and needs his sleep. His face is purple with veins and his lumpy nose smells of bad yeast.
I go out of the dormitory with the bunk beds and I follow the cement path through the big store room. There are no lights on in the store because we are forbidden to come here at night, but I know my way around in the dark. Sometimes at night I go into the cages with a torch and the master keys to poke around the boxes, trunks and cases full of things that used to matter in the world. But nothing you can eat or sell for food so it has no value now. Sometimes, as I walk through the store, I feel I’m being watched from inside the cages.
Slowly, I unlock the air-tight door that opens into the courtyard. Already, since I have worked here, five residents have jumped from the sixth floor and smashed themselves on the tarmac below. They had the lunger disease and were choking on red brine. At night you could hear their voices in the cold courtyard, drifting out of windows and spanking off all the brick walls as they drowned in bed. Whuff, whuff, whuff they went.
I go out from the store and step into the mist. The door shuts behind me with a wheeze. Cold out here and the rain sizzles through the fog to sting the thin skin over my skull. Then the air gets inside my nose and mouth too and it feels like I am sucking a battery. No one is permitted to go outdoors without a mask because of the poison in the air, but the porter’s masks are only sacks with plastic cups sown over the mouth-part. My face stings just as much with a mask on and I sweat too much inside the linen, so when no one is watching I go out without a mask over my big white head. I’m
not too worried about dying. At the boy’s home I came from, the nurses told me ‘people in your condition never see their teens’. I’m eighteen so I should be dead soon. Inside my see-through chest one of the little grey pumps or blackish lumps will just stop working. Maybe I’ll go greyish first like most of the residents dying upstairs inside the flats.
Crouching down, my shoulder in the night-gown slides against the red brick walls. A special coating to stop the air dissolving the whole place has made the bricks smooth. Taking shallow stinging breaths, I look up. Most of the apartments are dark, but a few yellowy kitchens shine like little boxes, high up in the vapours that fill the world outside our airlocks and sealed doors.
I go up the giant black metal fire escape to the airlock that will get me into the west wing reception. If there was a fire here, and the thought of it makes me grin, where could the residents be evacuated to? They would stand in the courtyard and watch the building blaze around them until the air in their masks ran out. This is the last place they can retreat to in the city. There’s nowhere left to hide from the mist in the world. At night, when I stand on the roof by the big satellite dishes, I see fewer lights out there in the city. Like the people, the lights are all being turned off one by one.
Outside the little back door of the west wing, I wait for the dizzies in my head to stop. I’m so scared now my dolly hands and puppet legs have gone all shaky. Closing my eyes, I tell myself this is going to be easy, it’s just an ordinary thing that I’m about to do.
I think of the two little boys that came here inside the white truck. I will always see their frightened faces as they are pulled by the caterer’s ropes. Mrs Van den Broeck wanted them. She brought them here. So now I am going to her.
Feeling stronger after the attack of the dizzies passes, I tap the code into the steel number pad on the wall beside the little back door: 1, 2, 3, 4. An easy sequence to remember so Vinegar Irish can always get inside. The door unlocks with a click and hiss. I push it open.
Yellow corridor light, the smell of cleaned carpets and polished wood comes out the door to die in the mist. Ducking my head, I climb through quickly. If any of the doors of the building are open for longer than five seconds a buzzer will go off behind the reception desk and wake the night porter.
Blinking my black button eyes I get rid of the outside mist in my tears. The corridor becomes clear. It’s empty. Only thing I can hear is the sound of the ceiling lights as they buzz inside their glass shades. My thin feet go warm on the red carpet. This corridor will take me down to reception.
Creeping and sneaking, I go grinning down the passage and stop at the end where it opens into the reception. Listening hard with my eyes-closed I try to hear the squeak of the porter’s chair. But there is only silence down there behind the reception desk. Good.
Going down to my hands and knees I peek the top half of my head around the corner. I smile. Leaning back in his chair with his red face pointed at the ceiling, the white ape sleeps tonight. Big purple tongue and one brown tooth, hot with shit-breath, swallowing the clean air. He is supposed to be watching the monitor screens on his desk. But he has even taken his glasses and shoes off. I can see his black socks full of white hair and yellow claws on top of the desk.
I go into reception on my dolly hands and bony knees and I crawl to the staircase that will take me up to her. Even if the white ape’s eyes open now, he won’t see me because of the desk’s high front. He would have to stand up and put his glasses on to catch sight of my thin bones in the night-gown and my swollen skull going up the stairs like a spider.
I go up the stairs to the second floor and stand outside the door marked number five. Her smell is strong up here, perfume and medicine. When I think of Mrs Van den Broeck’s grey bird head on a fat silk pillow, sleeping somewhere on the other side of this wooden door, my slit-mouth trembles.
All day long I run up and down these stairs on errands for the residents, they who cannot be argued with at any time. But now I am up here in a flappy night shirt with a stolen key because I mean to drown one of them in pillow softness. A big part of me wants to run back down the stairs, go through the building and across the courtyard to my little warm bunk in the dormitory where Vinegar Irish snores and wheezes above me.
Resting on my ankles, I put my head between my knees and screw my eyes shut. All of this – the building of old brick, the shiny wooden doors, the marble skirting boards, the wall mirrors and brass lights, the rich people and Mrs Van den Broeck with her white gloves and pecking face – are so much bigger than me. I am a grain of seed that cannot escape her yellow teeth. In my left doll hand I squeeze the key until it hurts.
Today, two pale boys with pee on their hairless legs, stepped about on cold toes in the back of the caterer’s truck. They held each other with small hands, crying and smiling, and making throaty sounds to each other. They were marched by the caterers to the wash room with the white tiles and the big plug in the middle. And then the smaller one had to watch his brother put in a sack . . .
Inside my slit-mouth my squarish milk teeth grind together. Inside my fists my long nails make red half-moons on my palms. She brought them here. Mrs Van den Broeck called for the white truck that had the bumping sounds of boys inside. My stomach makes squirly sounds as the rage makes me shake and go the pink colour of the blind things that no chemicals can kill, who flit deep in the hot oceans, so far down they cannot be caught and eaten.
With a snarl, I stand up. Into the brass lock of her front door goes the key. The thunk of the lock opening feels good within the china bones of my dollish hand. My fingers look so small against the brown wood. I push the heavy door. A sigh of air escapes. The whisper of her apartment’s air runs over my face: medicine, dusty silk, old lady sour smell.
Inside it is dark. The door closes behind me with a tired sound.
Waiting for my eyes to get used to the place, the outlines of vases, dry flowers, picture frames, a hat-stand and mirror appear out of the gloom. Then I notice a faint bluish light spilling from the kitchen. It comes from the electric panel with the warning lights about leaks and gases and fires; all the flats have them. In the kitchen is where I usually take yeast tins and put them on the blue table for the maid Gemima to unpack. Gemima is the tiny woman who wears rubber sandals and who never speaks. But after tonight, Gemima will also be free of Mrs Van den Broeck, and there will be no more journeys up here for me with the wet meats inside the plastic bags. No more feeling like my body is made of glass that will shatter when she shouts. No more poking from her bird claws. No more squinting from her tiny pink eyes when she teeters out of the elevator in the afternoon and sees my big head behind the reception desk.
I look down the hallway and see her bedroom door at the end. I pass the living room where she sits in the long silk gown and scolds us porters down the house phone. Then I tippy-toe past the bathroom where Gemima scrubs Mrs Van den Broeck’s spiny back and rinses her shrunken chest.
I stand outside the two bedrooms. Gemima sleeps in the left one. Now she will be resting for a few hours until her mistress’s sharp voice begins another day for her. But part of Gemima never sleeps. The part of Gemima that must listen for the sound of Mrs Van den Broeck’s bird feet on the marble tiles and the scratch of her voice, calling out for attention from among the crystals and china cups and photos of smiling men with big teeth and thick hair in her room. This part of Gemima I must be careful of.
Mrs Van den Broeck sleeps behind the right door in a big bed. I go in on legs I cannot feel. In here there is no light, the curtains are thick and fall to the floor. There is complete darkness . . . and a voice. It crackles in my ears. ‘Who’s there?’
I stop moving and feel like I am underwater and trying to gulp a breath that will never come. Taking a step back, I want to run from here. Then I am about to say my own name, like I do on the house phone when the residents call down from upstairs. Hello, Bobby speaking. How may I help?
I stop myself before my lips form the shape of the first word.
‘Is that you, Gemima?’
Has my heart stopped beating inside its cage of thin bone and see-through skin?
‘What’s the time? Where are my glasses?’
I listen out for Gemima and imagine her rising without thought or choice from her cot next door. The other room stays silent, but it won’t for long if Van den Broeck keeps talking. Somewhere in front of me I hear a rustling. Out there in the dark I know a birdie claw is reaching for the switch of a table lamp. It the light comes on there might be a scream.
I cannot move.
‘Who is there?’ she says, her voice deeper. I can imagine the squinty eyes and pointy mouth with no lips. Again, I hear her long claws rake across the wooden surface of the side-table by the bed. The light cannot come on or I am finished. I race to the sound of her voice.
Something hard and cold hits my shine bones and blue streaks of pain enter my head. It is the end of her metal bed-frame that I have run into, so I am not in the part of the room I thought I was.
Greenish light explodes through the glass shade of the table lamp and makes me flinch. Propped-up among fat pillows with shiny cases is Mrs Van den Broeck. I can see her pointy shoulders and satin night gown where the bedclothes have slipped down. Collarbones stick through skin. She must sleep with her head raised and ready to snap at Gemima when she comes in with the breakfast.
Small red eyes watch me. Her face is surprised, but not afraid. For a while she cannot speak and I stand dizzy before her with pinpricks of sweat growing out of my whole head.
‘What are you doing in my room?’ There is no sleepiness in her voice, she has been awake for a long time. Not even her hair is mussed-up or flat at the back. Her voice gets sharper. It fills the room. ‘I knew it was you. I always knew you were not to be trusted. You’ve been taking things. Jewellery. I suspected you from the start.’
‘No. It wasn’t me.’ I feel like I’m five again, before the desk of the director at the boy’s home.
