He was turning to Roach to tell him it was his round when a hand rested on his shoulder.
Turning he saw the well-built hulk that was Bob Torrance, his eyes watery with vodka and laughs.
‘This way lads. Come and join us.’
John Collins ran naked from shadow to shadow through the streets of the town and gave thanks for the darkness. There wasn’t enough gas in Abyrne to provide street lighting for all the districts and once he was away from the Magnus mansion it was easy to cling to walls, to pad silently down narrow alleys, to be part of the darkness. He was calm. He’d slipped past Magnus’s guards without any need for conflict. They were brutish and insensitive to the subtleties of movement and though he’d passed within a metre of some of them, they never knew he was there.
He’d been ready to die in Magnus’s study. Ready to let the Meat Baron do worse to him than he did to any of the Chosen. The fight. What had been the point of that? Somewhere along the way Collins had changed his mind. He needed to get the measure of Magnus and survive a little longer. His message had not yet been fully received and there was so much more he believed he could do. Had he become fearful in that study? Allowed the thought of his public dismemberment and humiliation to extend his mission – his life? He believed he’d acted for the good of all but he doubted himself too.
This was new terrain. He’d been so sure of everything for so long and now this. Maybe he’d needed to place himself in such danger to force the next part of his mission up from his subconscious. After all, none of his activities had ever been planned. They began as promptings that became inner commands he could not ignore; notions that became inspirations that became obsessions.
It was cold out on Abyrne’s streets but he didn’t feel it the way others in the town would. He merely released some of the light concentrated inside him.
Each dwelling he passed was old and in need of repair, even in the wealthier quarters. There weren’t enough materials to fix everything. Slowly the town was dying but no one realised it. Even the Welfare, even Magnus and the grain bosses that supplied him believed Abyrne would continue forever and that there would always be enough for everyone to eat. But the wasteland was growing, or to put it more realistically, the town was shrinking. Every year the wasteland encroached a little further into the arable acreage of the grain bosses and every year they pushed their fields a little further into the Derelict Quarter and ploughed up land that had once supported tower blocks and houses. The Derelict Quarter was huge but the encroachment couldn’t go on forever. Townsfolk needed to realise that there had to be another way. The words in the Book of Giving and the Gut Psalter were not only wrong and evil. They were suicidal.
Collins’s job wasn’t finished. That was why he’d challenged Magnus. He had more to tell his followers, more folk yet to convert. He couldn’t just tell them; he needed to steer them away from the warped traditions of the town. They needed to know what to do for the future and he was the only one who could educate them. So, no, it was not cowardice that had made him fight to survive the encounter with the Meat Baron. It was sacrifice. It was necessity.
Every house exuded the smell of grilled, fried, roasted or boiled meat. Cuts of the Chosen on every table in every household that could afford it. All the money went back to Magnus or the Welfare. The only other players in the game were the grain bosses that farmed cereals on the north west perimeter of the town. Magnus bought almost all the grain they produced to feed the Chosen. To this basic ingredient he added a mush of ground bone and unusable off cuts. Collins wasn’t sure but he felt the Chosen must have known they daily ate the flesh of their own brothers and sisters as part of their raising for slaughter. To Collins this was one of the worst evils of the town.
Trucks filled with spare bone meal from the Chosen travelled daily out to the grain bosses who stored it until it was time to fertilise their fields. Without the nitrogenous material, the crops would fail and the Chosen would starve. Meat production would cease. This put the grain bosses in a strong position; if they wanted to squeeze Magnus for the price of grain, they could do it by threatening to reduce supply. Magnus, on the other hand, could not bargain with his truck loads of waste because, by not supplying them, he would only hurt himself in the long run. By the same token, the grain bosses would never squeeze Magnus too hard; if they did, the whole town would be in danger of starvation and the cyclical economy between meat and cereals would collapse. So Magnus and the grain bosses waltzed with each other year in, year out, never completely trusting, never completely ruthless.
Now that Collins had escaped, Magnus would send his men out into the Derelict Quarter to look for him. He had to warn everyone that they would be in danger. Humiliated and furious by now, the Meat Baron would go to any lengths to find Collins and bring him in. There was no one he wouldn’t hurt to achieve it. But Collins would get the word out that night. And there were many places he could go where Magnus would never know to look.
Torrance had a tray of drinks and he led the boys, the crowd opening miraculously for him, to a table away from the small stage where the band were playing. The music and shouting was less of a roar but the floor still shook with the impacts of hundreds of drunken boots.
They recognised some of the other men at the table but didn’t know their names. Torrance introduced the dairy boys to his coterie but didn’t introduce them back. Parfitt assumed this was all part of some unspoken hierarchy that they would, by osmosis, come to understand. Also at the table were a few women – definitely not girls, some of them looked old enough to have been mothers to all the dairy boys – not the most attractive in the room but not the worst looking either. Parfitt decided after another vodka that he didn’t much care what they looked like. He and his mates were out for the night and they had ladies with them. The possibilities multiplied accordingly.
The older stockmen ignored the dairy boys and even Torrance paid them only a few passing words when he wasn’t busy laughing with his crew or slapping one of the women on the arse. More rounds arrived and the detached sense of freedom that had first hit Parfitt deepened along with his sense of well-being. Harrison, Roach and Maidwell were all laughing now, shouting along with every other stockman in the room as though they’d been regulars at Dino’s for years. Parfitt felt melancholic suddenly to discover this spectator inside him. He wanted to laugh along with the rest of them, slap a backside if the impulse took him, tell a joke or dance in the sawdust.
‘Boys,’ shouted Torrance. ‘Time we were moving.’
Parfitt, snatched from his mental balcony, blinked. His ears filled with sound again.
‘What?’ he shouted. ‘Where are we going?’
He wanted to stay. Of all the things the evening might offer he realised it was the ladies he was interested in. He didn’t care how old they were.
‘You’ll see,’ shouted Torrance. ‘The night is yet young in Abyrne and plentiful the sights for its eyes. Even young eyes like yours. Come on.’
Torrance’s crew stood and Parfitt and his friends followed. He was surprised that he was unsteady on his feet but it didn’t worry him. He felt elated. As they walked out to the back entrance, he staggered into several stockmen. No one gave him a second glance. Outside, the night air was chill. It didn’t stop him reeling.
Everyone piled into one of the MMP buses that took workers to and from the plant.