After a while, workers began to notice that Wheelie Patterson’s smile had changed. He wore it like a mask that was too small and hurt his face. They noticed he wasn’t as professional and committed as he had been when he first arrived. He deliberately aimed his prod or ‘hotshot’ at the genitals of the cattle in the holding pens, sought to shock the sagging udders of the spent dairy cows. Torrance saw him corner a bull from time to time and torment it with repeated electrocutions. Bulls were the ones that fought back hardest.
Wheelie lost his position as stun man the day they found him using the captive bolt gun on every part of a bull he could reach through the access panel except the designated stun point. Torrance had been the one to pull the pneumatic weapon from his hands and end the bull’s life with a single, correctly positioned shot. By that time the bull’s slaughter had already begun. The bolt gun had split its jaw and broken both cheekbones. Blood drained from the fat round holes the bolt gun created. Wheelie had also managed to shoot through the bull’s windpipe and down into the lungs through the tops of both shoulders. The bull could barely sigh its pleas for release by the time Torrance got to it.
But stockmen and slaughtermen were a valuable commodity and Wheelie’s behaviour, from the management’s point of view, had done nothing worse than retard the factory’s chain speed and cost them money. His mismanagement of cattle during the time they spent in the crowd pens and runs had caused some of the meat produced to be affected by PSE. This described a condition in meat cuts that were ‘pale, soft and exudative’. The sort of meat people didn’t want to buy because it tasted bad and the texture was all wrong. PSE was known beyond any doubt to be caused by increased stress in cattle during the hours and minutes prior to slaughter. Wheelie’s games with the hotshot hadn’t done anything for the quality of Magnus Meat products.
He’d been fined, sent for guidance and put back on a distant chain position where it was too late to torment the animals or spoil the meat – removing limb ends with bone shears.
Even after the ‘one week on, three weeks off’ statute had been brought into effect by Rory Magnus, the job still got to a few of them. Torrance remembered one stunner opening the access panel, locking eyes with the cow in the restraining box and then shooting himself in the head with the bolt gun. Other stunners over the years had been affected in different ways. Some hurt themselves off duty and bore the scars to work. Others merely went a little nutty and that was fine – plenty of the men in Magnus’s employ were a rib shy of a rack.
But these were exceptions to the generally smooth running of the MMP chain. Torrance didn’t dwell on the exceptions because he liked things smooth. Smooth and cool like Richard Shanti.
Like an ice pick.
Maya Shanti had the evening meal prepared by the time he arrived home.
She worked in the well-windowed kitchen and glanced up often from her cooking in case he came early. He never did. When they were first married, he had often taken the MMP bus home, only running to work with his work clothes and lunch in a small pack a few times a week. Over the years, his running had become an obsession. She was certain it would kill him.
She brought three pans of water to the boil ready to cook the green beans, broccoli and spinach as soon as she saw his gaunt, hunched silhouette plodding up the lane. The rice was already done and warm in the oven. She made a lot of rice and forced both Harsha and Hema to eat at least three full bowls before leaving the table.
Still, the twins looked thin to her.
He would wash with cold water from the steel tub outside using soap as old and hard as a stone, then he would put on a brown body-length tunic of rough material, something he had demanded she make for him, and sit without speaking for five minutes in the bedroom while his breathing returned to normal. He came quietly to the table, not joking or laughing like he used to, and he would make them all sit in silence before eating. When he reached for his cutlery the girls would begin to chatter and giggle and only then did things in the Shanti household appear normal.
MMP workers were privileged and protected. They could have picked a larger house nearer the town or the whole floor of a tower block if he’d wanted. There was plenty of space and choice. But they had both agreed they wanted to see a little greenery each day and Richard had always wanted to grow his own fruit and vegetables – another pastime that had become a fixation. It would have been dangerous to live in such isolation but MMP employees were safe almost anywhere they went and Richard Shanti’s family, because of the important job he did, were untouchables, protected forever in the shadow of Rory Magnus, the Meat Baron.
Maya wanted to smile at their good fortune and shower her husband with love. She wanted to enjoy their status in the town and be carefree like the other MMP wives. But when she served the meal each evening and looked at the tiny streams of sweat that still slipped from Richard’s temples, she felt a weight across her shoulders like the one he carried on his back twice a day.
Dessert was fresh fruit from the trees, canes or vines at the rear of the house. Richard would eat his fruit, chewing each bite so long that the twins would laugh as they counted each movement of his jaw. He would reach a bony hand out to each of them and touch their faces and their hair. Then he would retire to the bedroom and prepare to sleep. Recently, he had been having problems keeping his eyes open for the whole meal and Maya knew that he was using himself up, burning himself to a useless stump of a man with all his cruel self-punishment.
Something had to be done.
Richard Shanti ran every day.
On the Sunday run, his corporal mortification was so severe and sustained he could almost believe he might one day be free of his deeds. On Sundays, he ran only once but he ran further and harder. The route was different to his workday route. It started out the same but once he was on the main road out of the town, he veered onto a path that was kept open only by the passage of his own heavy footsteps once a week.
The path he took led through overgrown hedges, no longer cared for or trimmed. The entrance was marked by a few broken bricks that had once been the wall on one side of a bridge. The only vehicles that came out this way or this far from the town were the MMP buses taking employees to and from work, and trucks transporting meat. No one ever came this way on foot except for him. It was too far from the town to be safe. The bridge was still there, but the walls separating it from the drop on either side were long gone. It spanned a cut that stretched towards town. In the opposite direction, it ran towards the wasteland.
It was five miles to the bricks. That was the first landmark he ran to every Sunday. When he reached them, he turned off the main road and the path took him through brambles, nettles and spiky hawthorn down below the road level. He welcomed the scratches on the skin of his legs. So overgrown was the sunken path that it was like running through a jungle at the bottom of a giant gutter. The growth of plant life was dense on all sides. He had to duck and dodge low strands of needle-lined creepers and the outreaching branches of small trees that had been growing ever since the mysterious byway was abandoned.
He turned left from the bridge taking him away from civilisation. Had he turned right, the disused tracks would have taken him to the very centre of Abyrne, a place he had no desire to visit. Twigs whipped at his face and arms. Fallen branches and roots threatened to trip him. The constant minor damage and the threat of worse if he fell made the Sunday run the hardest and most rewarding of all.