But the time came when he could not ignore the difference in himself and he began to take the exercises more seriously.
Maya was occasionally feeding meat to the girls, sometimes in front of him and other times not, depending on her mood. Generally, though, since the Parson’s visit, she had been more easy-going about things and less accusatory about his way of life. He didn’t want the girls eating flesh but he knew that if he tried to prevent it, Maya would leave him and take the girls with her. He had no doubt that she would do it. Her singleness of purpose frightened him at times. She was like a wild animal protecting her offspring, fighting for them, hunting for them, defending the lair. He tried not to think about what Maya might be capable of if pushed to her limits. Since she had found a way of procuring meat for Hema and Harsha – no doubt wasting his wages in one of Abyrne’s butchers – she no longer used her body to inveigle him. Now that he had a tiny reserve of energy, he wished that she would. He wished, simply, that she would love him.
With work taking up so much of his thoughts and the running off of his misdeeds filling most of his free time, it was easy not to think about how things were at home. Sometimes, though, he couldn’t stop himself wondering about the ‘life’ he had outside Magnus Meat Processing. He worked and he punished himself and he slept. He hardly saw his wife or his daughters and when he did, they treated him as an outsider in their home; a tolerated stranger.
However, it was the thing he tried hardest not to think about and endeavoured most seriously to atone for that most haunted Shanti’s waking and sleeping hours: the lives of the Chosen. Abyrne was an aberration, he was certain of it. Somewhere along its history, the town had lost its way. The Book of Giving, the Gut Psalter, the control of the town by the Welfare and Rory Magnus – all this was a sinister misunderstanding of how things ought to be. What the alternative was, he didn’t know. He only knew that the town and everything about it was wrong.
But there was nowhere else to go. The wasteland surrounded the town and there was nothing out there. It stretched uncharted miles in every direction. Nothing could survive except within the confines of Abyrne. Hardest of all for Shanti, harder to bear than the misguided respect he was shown at work because of his skills, was the knowledge that there was no one he could talk to about how he felt. Maya would report him and make good on her promise to separate him from his family forever. To her it would be crazy talk to question a single aspect of how the town was run; the kind of talk that would put them all at risk of the might of the Welfare. She was right to fear them. The Welfare had the power to revoke status. When you ceased to be ‘townsfolk’ you became meat. The only possibility left to you was to run to the Derelict Quarter and hide. But out there, there was nothing. Nothing to eat, no running water or sewers, no power lines. Just blocks and blocks of crumbling, abandoned buildings and heaps of rubble. The Derelict Quarter was as unforgiving as the wasteland.
It was no secret that starving vagrants lived in the Derelict Quarter – people who had run there from the Welfare or from Rory Magnus. Were they fortunate to have made it to a place where they would die slowly of disease and malnourishment? Shanti didn’t think so. Better to meet the quick fate on the other end of his bolt gun and be released. He’d seen them fed into the crowd pens a hundred times or more, faced them through the access panel when he stunned them. Without exception they’d been begging for the end by then. He had faith that, with him dispatching them, his compassionate eyes would be the last thing they ever saw. The Derelict Quarter was no option for anyone. Besides, even if it came to that, Maya would never agree to go with him. He’d be cut off from his family and the loneliness would probably be enough to kill him.
No way out of his life that he could see. Sentenced to murder or dismember the Chosen every day of his life; that was his fate. No other way forward.
Except for the teachings of John Collins Shanti’s life was empty of hope. And so, before the sun rose each morning, he did as the quiet man had shown him.
Day by day, he changed.
‘Don’t hurt him, Bruno, you bloody lout. I don’t want him distracted. I want him focussed on what’s going to happen when he gets downstairs.’
Rory Magnus sat back in his swivelling, reclining chair and lit a small black cheroot. The links of gold on his broad wrist reflected yellow firelight, as did the gold lighter when he snapped it shut and dropped it onto his desk. He was freckled and massive. His mane was ginger, white at the temples and sideburns, his beard overgrown. There was a constant tension in his face and the tendons of his neck, a barely contained urge to leap forwards, to be first out of the blocks, to hammer someone with his fists, to place a kiss or clap a shoulder. No one could predict what the tension implied, only that it implied action.
Ten feet away on an intricately woven rug were two younger men. One wore a long black coat over the machinery of his muscles. He was the size of a door. His dark hair was permanently greasy and dandruff salted his parting and shoulders. The other man was naked and kneeling on the rug. His hands were secured behind his back with a leather strap, his head forced down by his captor.
Magnus looked at him in silence for a long time. Then he took another puff on his cheroot and exhaled two streams of smoke from his nose.
‘How long have you been preaching your bullshit now, Collins? A year? Two?’
The kneeling man didn’t respond.
‘What’s it achieved, eh? Anybody really listened to you in that time? Anybody “changed their ways”?’ He made more smoke. ‘Let go of him, will you, Bruno? I can’t see his bloody face.’
Bruno released his grip. The naked man’s eyes met his and held the connection. The look took his attention from the scar above Collins’s weedy sternum. The eyes of a man with nothing left to lose. Magnus had seen this kind of bravado before.
It never lasted.
‘Didn’t your parents teach you any manners, son? It’s rude to stare.’
Collins, kneeling exposed and helpless, didn’t speak. He didn’t look away.
Rory Magnus inspected his cheroot, rolled it between thick fingers and nodded to himself at the quality. Perhaps the nod signalled some inner decision. He let a thin stream of ochre mist exude from the corner of his mouth.
‘I’m going to let you keep your eyes, Collins. Until you’ve watched everything we do.’ He paused to lend his words weight. ‘Then I’ll have them cut from your head and pickled. I’ll keep the jar right here on my desk. That way you can give me your lover’s gaze forever.’
Words were the first weapons for breaking a man. Sometimes they did the job long before the knives. He watched Collins’s face for traces of fear. A flicker of his attention, tremors around the eye muscles and lips. Tears. Sweat. There was nothing. He shrugged inwardly.
First there would be reasoning, man to man: slow-down-and-let’s-be-sensible-here bargaining. Magnus didn’t make deals when deals were already done. Pleading then: mentions of the widowed wife and orphaned children, all the things left undone in life, just one more sunrise with the loved ones. Rory Magnus’s fatherly response: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of them’, was never misinterpreted. Tears then: ‘Please, Mr. Magnus, please. I know I made a mistake – a huge mistake – but I don’t deserve this. Not this.’ A shrug in response, an I-don’t-give-a-rancid-kidney-about-you shrug. Followed by his businesslike defence: ‘I can’t be seen to let people mess with Rory Magnus. I can’t afford to look weak.’ Anger of course: ‘Fuck you, Magnus, and fuck your children forever. I’ll see you in hell, I swear it. I’ll come back and haunt you to your dying day.’ Blah-de-blah. But Magnus would end up fucking their children if the mood took him, saw his victims in hell long before they died and had never seen a single ghost. When the anger was all gone, they wept and blubbered like children. Hot-faced, red-cheeked, snotty-lipped babies.