Collins put his head down, chewed his words back.
‘Come on, Collins. Confess, old son. Tell your uncle Magnus everything.’
Collins looked up, crying.
‘When I was a kid, I ate meat all the time. My mother wanted me to grow up strong and healthy. Like everyone else she believed that meat was the only way to ensure that.’
‘Ah, well, if it was your mother that made you do it… I mean, you can’t possibly be held responsible. You were just a little boy, after all. Not old enough to know any better. I’m being unfair. I couldn’t possibly expect you to account for the fact that you willingly ate the flesh of the Chosen for several years of your life. Could I now? I could never expect you to take the burden upon your shoulders. All that suffering, the captivity, the squalor, the exploitation. You were just one of tens of thousands eating the meat, so of course it wasn’t down to you. I couldn’t blame a little innocent boy for all that. That would be… excessive. Don’t you agree?’
Collins’s tears seemed to have evaporated. The colour and equilibrium had returned to his face. Magnus was disappointed.
‘I’ll pay the price,’ said Collins. ‘And like I’ve said before to thousands of people, I’ll pay it gladly. I ate meat for decades, Mr. Magnus, if you really want to know. I ate it long after I left home. But I never stopped thinking about where it came from. At the back of my mind, the idea that there might be something wrong with the way we got our food never left me alone. We learnt about the Chosen, God’s sacred gift to us, when we were at school. The similarity between them and us seemed obvious but the teachers and the Parsons always played upon the differences – the lack of hair, the deformed hands and feet, the inability to communicate with us or each other. But I always had my doubts. I’m pretty sure that everyone does at some point before burying the doubts under the words of the Book forever. I started to think about what the fields and the processing plant must really be like. Of course, it’s hard; in fact it’s almost impossible to get any information about what really happens to the Chosen. No such information is available. To start with, I had to imagine everything.
‘The first thing I realised was that to make meat, you actually have to kill something. I can’t imagine why it took me so long to work that one simple thing out. You have to raise this living thing, feed it, breed it, fatten it. Then you have to find a way of killing it and cutting it up. I wondered about that for a long, long time. How do you kill something? Do you use a knife? Do you hit it with a club? Shoot it? All this I had to investigate purely in my imagination.
‘I took a job in the gas plant where excrement and intestines from the Chosen arrived by the truckload. After a few weeks I realised just how many living things must be dying each day to produce that volume of waste and off-cuts for conversion into usable methane. I tried to do the numbers in my head but I couldn’t. It made me sick, Mr. Magnus. It made me vomit to think of the amount of dead there must have been, and still are, whose shit and guts are powering parts of the town with electricity.
‘And then, one day, I got talking to a drunk in the Derelict Quarter. Turned out he was an ex-meatpacker. He told me what really happens at MMP. He told me everything there was to know about how you run your ‘business’, Mr. Magnus. That was the day I set out to find another way.’
Cheroot smoke drifted between the two men, connecting them somehow. Magnus listened without expression.
‘The first thing I did was stop eating meat. It wasn’t easy. There’s so little else to eat in the town. Most of the grain we produce goes to feed the Chosen. There are vegetables to be had, but the butchers sell them as decoration for meat. A couple of green beans and a small potato with your steak, a leaf of cabbage beside your chop, onions with your liver, some parsley to garnish a pie. Getting enough vegetables to make a meal was a struggle, especially with Parsons of the Welfare watching all the time. It took months to collect enough seeds and sets to start my own garden. But there are sources, places you can go. You’d be surprised just how many townsfolk enjoy vegetables more than they do meat, Mr. Magnus. Even though they would never admit it in polite company, possibly not even to members of their own family, but they are out there. And there are vegetarians too, people who have disappeared from the habitable quarters and gone to the derelict parts of the town to live out the rest of their lives without a single MMP item in their diet. They’re quiet, reclusive folk, Mr. Magnus, people like me. But they have a simple joy. You can see it in their eyes. It’s like they exude a sense of relief, as though the sacrifice they made in dropping out was worth it.
‘They welcomed me, those people. The real folk of this town. They’re the ones that have begun to see through the Book of Giving’s precepts.’
Hmm, thought Magnus. I’ll enjoy extracting the locations out of you before you die. A smile almost touched his lips but Collins didn’t seem to notice.
‘Among them was a very old man. There was no way to verify it but he told me he was a hundred and eleven years old. The average life expectancy of a male in Abyrne is, what, forty-five? Fifty?’
Magnus shrugged but said nothing.
‘I’ve never met anyone else, man or woman, that made it to sixty, have you? There’s one simple reason. Meat causes illness. Flesh of the Chosen is toxic. Removing it from the diet ensures a longer, healthier life. Imagine living twice as long as we do now, Mr. Magnus. Simply by removing one ingredient from our diets.’
Magnus blew smoke and replied:
‘Look, Collins, just tell the bloody story. Don’t try to give me your spooky sales pitch alongside it. I am the producer, the processor, the distributor and the salesman. You are merely the product. If there’s any selling to be done, I’ll do it. To put it another way, I’m the butcher and you’re the meat. You’d do well to remember that.’
‘You wanted to know the details and I’m giving them to you. Taking meat out of your diet is the most natural way to extend your life.’
‘It hasn’t extended yours,’ laughed Magnus.
Collins conceded the point with an inclination of his head and continued.
‘This old man had learned a lot over his years of exile. Trying to survive without meat was harder when he started out. He spent a lot of time close to starvation. The fasting was unintentional, but he found that it brought him a good deal of wisdom and knowledge. He discovered that refraining not only from eating meat, but from eating anything at all, changed the workings of his mind and gave him access to different levels of consciousness.’
‘You mean he went mad with hunger,’ said Magnus, enjoying each interruption.
‘Of course you’ll see it that way. You don’t know any better and how could you? But ignorance is no substitute for experience, Mr. Magnus. It’s no match for hard-won knowledge. I’m sure you’d agree with me on that.’
‘No one has ever spoken to me the way you have today, Collins. When I’ve finished with you, it’ll be a cast iron guarantee that no one ever does again. A little ‘history’ about you might actually serve my purposes. I’ll suggest to the Welfare that they write your story down in the Book of Giving so that no one ever forgets. Hell, they can put me in it too. I’ll be a ruthless king and you’ll be my flawed subject. The tale will exist forever more, as a parable for the foolish, explaining what happens when you disrespect those who hold the reins of power.’
‘It’ll make just as good fiction as the rest of the Book does.’
‘Finish your story, Collins, and make it quick. I’m getting restless.’
‘There’s not much more to tell. The old man—’
‘What was his name, this old man?’