To their right there were more tyre marks. Torrance stopped the truck and reversed it into these tracks.
‘Better get out and guide me in,’ he said.
Parfitt waited for one of the men that knew what they were doing to climb over him to the door.
‘I’m talking to you, Parfitt. Get a bloody move on. I don’t want to be out here a second longer than necessary.’
Parfitt opened the door and jumped to the ground. He walked to the back of the truck where he could see tracks continuing. At the end of the tracks the ground fell away. He stood on the rear driver’s side corner and signalled for Torrance to reverse. As the truck came towards him, he stepped back too. The tracks ended. Beyond them was a precipice deep enough to lose a truck in forever.
He held up both hands.
‘Whoa!’
The truck’s brakes whined and it juddered to a stop.
Torrance shouted out from the cab:
‘Spring those catches and stand clear, Parfitt.’
Parfitt did as he was told. The back panel of the truck, hinged at the top, was now free to open. Hydraulics hissed and the bed of the truck began to rise. Parfitt looked into the crater-like abyss falling away behind the truck but he already knew what it contained. The smell, a hundred times more rank than any smell in the slaughterhouse, rose up all around them. In the belly of the pit, rotted the butchered remains of thousands of the Chosen.
The truckload they’d taken from the slaughterhouse slid down the steep incline to join its own kind in jumbled decomposition.
‘Make sure it’s empty, son.’
Parfitt reached into the back of the truck to clear the flesh that had lodged in corners or stuck to the panels. Not all of it was within reach. He walked back to the cab as Torrance let the truck’s bed descend to the horizontal.
‘I’m going to need a—’
Before he reached the cab a broom was passed out. He took it, leapt up and swept out the final obstinate cuts. Torrance revved the engine, impatient to leave. For once Parfitt felt the same eagerness. He ran to his door and climbed up. The broom was deposited behind the seat. They drove back to the plant in silence.
Torrance parked up.
‘Get changed and I’ll give you a lift into town,’ he said.
It was dark by then and a long walk. Parfitt didn’t have much choice.
He met them by the gate, this time Torrance was driving a smaller shuttle bus. Parfitt sat at the back. It was no surprise that Torrance drove them straight to Dino’s.
‘Quick cleansing of the palate,’ said Torrance.
‘I’d better get home for my dinner,’ said Parfitt.
‘You’ll have a drink first, son.’
Being a weeknight, it was quieter in Dino’s but there were still plenty of stockmen drinking up their high wages.
Torrance bought the round. The barman nodded his recognition to Parfitt and the four of them went to sit at the same table they’d used the first time.
‘Parfitt, this is Stonebank and Haynes.’
They shook hands.
Torrance:
‘To the blood of the Chosen. Long may it nourish the town.’
Everyone raised their glasses and drank acid.
There was an expectant silence. Parfitt knew they were waiting for his questions.
‘What have we just done?’
‘We’ve done two things. We’ve cleared the surplus and we’ve followed orders.’
Parfitt was incredulous.
‘Surplus?’
‘Keep your voice down,’ snapped Torrance. ‘You work for a very efficient organisation. MMP are so good at what they do,’ he gestured around the table. ‘We are so good at what we do, that the Chosen are breeding at peak rates and production is the highest it’s ever been. In order to stop the price of meat going down, we have to dispose of some of it from time to time.’
Parfitt tried to take it in. As far as he knew, there were plenty of townsfolk on the verge of starvation precisely because meat was at such a premium. Torrance had to be wrong. Or lying.
‘There’s a meat shortage, Mr. Torrance. We’re struggling to provide enough.’
‘Not true,’ said Torrance. ‘Not true at all. We’re talking about economics. We’re talking about business. People may not be able to buy meat but that’s not because we can’t provide it. MMP thrives – our wages are so good – because of the price of meat.’
Haynes, who, Parfitt realised, must have heard this very conversation a hundred times, left the table to buy another round.
‘But, surely if Magnus dropped the price of meat then more people would buy it, therefore increasing turnover.’
Torrance nodded.
‘You’re a smart lad, Parfitt. In a way, you’re right. That probably would be the outcome of a drop in prices. However, the whole situation turns on people’s attitudes. If people think that meat is costly, they respect it and those who can afford it. If anyone could buy it, it wouldn’t have the same perceived value even if Magnus could still turn the same profit. Do you see?’
Parfitt nodded. He did understand. He just didn’t understand the point of it.
‘What have the Welfare to say about this? Surely God’s word is that the Chosen are here for all of us, not just those wealthy enough to afford their flesh.’
‘Abyrne’s business and its religion, as you’ll discover, are strange bedfellows. They tolerate each other because without each other neither would survive.’
Haynes returned with vodka. They swallowed once. It wasn’t worth sipping.
‘I think we all need some dinner. Want a ride home, Parfitt?’
‘No thanks, sir. I can walk it from here.’
‘Fine. You’d better come out to the shuttle and collect your pay first, though. After which, you’ll be well worth robbing.’
Fifteen
‘Once upon a time,’ said Shanti, ‘there were two brothers named Peter and James.
‘Peter and James were the poorest children in the whole town and they lived in a place where all the houses were smashed and broken with no doors or windows to keep out the cold and no roof to keep out the rain. They were very thin because there was so little to eat. Sometimes they ate the weeds that grew through the cracks in the broken pavements. Sometimes they ate the leaves and nuts from the few trees that grew in their district. Sometimes, if they were feeling brave, they sneaked into the wealthy districts and found bread that had been thrown away by folks that were already full up. Sometimes they stole apples from rich people’s trees.
‘Peter and James had no mother and no father and no friends. They’d lived alone for as long as they could remember and all they had in the world was each other. At night, especially in the winter, Peter and James snuggled up close together to stay warm and keep from feeling lonely.
‘One day Peter said to James, “I’m tired of being lonely and hungry and having no friends.”
“Me too,” said James. “Why don’t we see if we can find somewhere better to live?”
‘So, the two of them decided to explore the broken down district where they had lived all their lives. They couldn’t go into the nice parts of town because the people there, even though they were rich and fat, would have tried to catch them and eat them. Instead they searched through the tumbled down old houses and empty streets for something better than they had.
‘They searched for a week and found nothing but more deserted, wrecked places.
‘They searched for two weeks and found no more food than they already had.
‘They searched for three weeks and found no one else they could talk to.
‘Then they sat down beside a ruined road and cried, holding on to each other because they were so, so sad, so, so hungry and so, so lonely that they didn’t think they could go on.