Bruno grabbed Snipe by the back of the neck, his customary grip, and propelled him towards a curtain at the back of the study. Pulling it open revealed a door in the wooden panelling. Bruno opened it and pushed Snipe onto a dark staircase that led straight down.
‘Oh, and Bruno, leave that open would you? I may pop down for a few minutes when Cleaver gets to work.’
Like many workers in the meat industry, Shanti was missing a digit. In his case it was the thumb of his right hand. Unlike the others, injured in the course of a day’s meat processing, he had lost his in an accident of which he had no recollection. It had happened before he was even a year old and he had learned to cope without the use of it very well. It didn’t hamper his use of the captive bolt gun at all.
As far as management were concerned, his dexterity was prized not because it was humane but because it meant more meat through the chutes each day. Shanti believed himself to be a kind, compassionate man and he dealt death as swiftly and painlessly as possible. He abhorred the thought of suffering in any creature but himself. What he saw each day was not a parade of mindless cattle, nor was it a queue of expressionless, animal faces. It was not lives he saw passing him by and winking out. No, that was too great a reality to take in. What Richard Shanti saw in the lines of Chosen that passed each day was a montage of eyes.
The eyes were luminous woodland green. The eyes were polished antique brown. The eyes were wise grey. The eyes were the blue of free skies and shattered sapphires. The eyes were ringed with the whites of pleading, whites of staring. The eyes were set in resolute white. Trapped in resigned white. Surrounded by the whiteness of death. The eyes spoke to him because the owners of the eyes could not.
Though he did not listen, he could not help but hear.
For calves of the Chosen, the various rituals performed that branded them cattle for the rest of their lives took place in their infancy and over several weeks. For Greville Snipe the process took less than an hour.
He had to wait while Cleaver finished his lunch. Bruno watched over him to make sure he didn’t bolt when he saw the room they’d brought him to. Snipe had seen many of the procedures performed on young calves and had never given it much thought. Now he was in a windowless room where all these measures, and many others that usually occurred in the slaughterhouse and meat packing areas could be carried out. The vibrating that began in his body was very different from the one he’d felt whilst conjoined with the object of his sin in the milking parlour. There was an unreliability in his bowels and bladder and in his knees. He could feel his patellae jumping like bait jerked on a line.
It had all happened so quickly that he couldn’t make space for it in his mind. And yet, his body knew what was coming. It was preparing. He felt the cold in his feet and hands as his blood flow restricted itself to his core. His face felt cold and wet and there was a torsion of the muscles in his stomach. His thoughts fled wildly within the confines of his mind as his eyes fluttered across each of the areas in the room.
It was not clean. There were black, flaky areas on the floor that he knew could only be one thing. Similar stains covered the various straps, restraints and crude, slablike tables. The air in the room was stuck somehow. It smelled of animals and chemicals. The odour stung his eyes and nose.
Uppermost in his mind was the knowledge that this was a room where he would not die.
The clenching of his stomach became irresistible – his body still preparing itself – and he vomited a tubelike spray of greenish fluid. At this, Bruno kicked him away and he fell hard on his knees, unable to break his fall with his tied hands.
‘Keep your filth away from me.’
Bruno kicked him again in the back of the thigh drawing a cry this time.
‘Fucking useless piece of meat.’
A door opened at one end of the dim room and a switch was flicked. The place was filled with a cold, hard glare. Every piece of equipment seemed to become either black, white or silver. There was more to be seen too. Snipe saw the banks of instruments that no one had bothered to clean other than with the swipe of a rag. They hung from racks and lay in untidy rows on a bench; like tools in an uncared-for workshop. He heard Cleaver approach before he saw him through the stab of harsh light – steel-cleated boots on concrete – the sound of the slaughterhouse man arriving for work.
Cleaver stepped into view and wiped his hand down the front of his dark beard trying to remove the remains of his lunch. Snipe saw very clearly the scraps of grey meat and gelatine from a savoury pie. Cleaver looked right through him to Bruno.
‘You hanging around for this or what?’
Bruno shrugged.
‘Do you need me?’
‘Not unless you want to get that nice overcoat dirty.’
‘Fine. The beast’s all yours.’
‘He’s not a beast yet. He’s still a man. Aren’t you?’
He looked at Snipe for the first time. Appraising him as though he were already no more than a hindquarter.
‘Not exactly a quality item, though, are you?’
Snipe was unable to speak.
‘Better leave us to it, Bruno. I’ll have him ready in an hour or so.’
Bruno sauntered to the door without looking back. Snipe was a forgotten man and he knew it.
‘Right you. Here’s how we’re going to do it. First, you need to void your tanks. That means number ones and twos – I don’t want you messing on me when we’re halfway through.’
While he talked, Cleaver prepared a long pole with a noose at the end of it and before Snipe could register what it was, the loop was around his neck. Cleaver pulled it tight then released Snipe’s wrist shackles.
‘Come on, this way.’
He hauled Snipe to a corner of the room where there was a rough hole in the concrete and told him to squat.
‘Make it quick, I’ve got plenty more jobs to do before the day’s out.’
Snipe couldn’t have held it in if he’d tried. When he finished he felt empty not only of waste but of his organs. He was a hollow man.
Cleaver yanked him away from the latrine without letting him clean himself. That was when Snipe began to cry. His whole solar plexus shuddered until he couldn’t tell if he was breathing in or out and the snot dribbled from his nose in bubbling rivulets. Cleaver didn’t appear to notice.
On the far side of the room he kicked open a panel on the floor to reveal what looked like a giant sunken bath. It was filled with a thin white fluid. This was where the chemical smell originated. Without any kind of warning, Cleaver pulled Snipe into the bath. It was deep and though Snipe didn’t sink naturally, he felt the pole forcing him down to the bottom of the trough. Within seconds, a burning began all over his body. He opened his mouth to scream and the chemical dip flooded in. He choked. Before he could take another breath, the noose was lifting him out at the other end of the trough and he was lying on the cold floor heaving and coughing. The noose loosened a little – Cleaver giving him a moment to recover.
It didn’t last.
The pole hauled him to his feet. Though his stomach was empty he retched and retched trying to clear the fluid from his throat. When he opened his eyes he was half-blinded. A white haze lay over everything. Even through this he could see the hair sliding off his body. Then the high-pressure hose was on him, its freezing jet welcome, at least for the first few seconds as it washed away the burn. But soon enough the jet was painful. Cleaver aimed it at every part of him, jerked him around to get the desired angles. Snipe shivered.
His hair, all of it, was gone.
Shanti watched the bull through a crack between the gate and hinge. It was on its side and curled tight like a giant baby. Amazing, he thought, how different they are asleep and awake. The bull’s number was 792, stencilled onto a blue tag that pierced the flattened area of flesh between its Achilles tendon and anklebone. The tag bolts were made of stainless steel about half a centimetre thick. Removing them was impossible for the Chosen but a stockman could do it with a specially made pair of pliers. The tags were attached to newborns around the time many of the other rituals were performed, whilst they were young enough to forget the pain. Once the piercing had healed, new numbers and colour codes could be attached as necessary depending on the animal’s ultimate purpose.