Her eyes flashed excitement. They signalled astonishment. A kind of hunger and recognition. And a softness that no one had noticed but Shanti and BLUE-792. It was as though the pair had known each other for years and were reuniting after too long apart. Then the young cow noticed how Shanti was observing her and her expression became guarded. BLUE-792 tensed in response to her lead and his face hardened into simple determination – down to business.
The bull advanced. The heifer, playing a role now, retreated to the far wall and lost her confident posture.
‘Guess the fight’s off, sir,’ said one of the younger stockmen. ‘I should have put money on it.’
Freeman grunted, unhappy to be wrong in front of his crew.
‘Not over yet, boy.’
But Shanti could see the man knew there wouldn’t be any fight. He glanced over at the younger stockman, a new man he didn’t recognise, and wondered if he was the kind that watched the illegal bullfights in the town. He was a small man but he wore his mean streak like a tattoo across his forehead.
In the mating pen, the bull reached the cow. She put her right hand up to his face and touched his neck. BLUE-792 recoiled microscopically. Shanti doubted anyone else would have seen it. The outreached finger stumps tapped and stroked from the bull’s neck to his shoulder. To anyone who didn’t know how the Chosen communicated, it would have looked like she was shaking with fear. Shanti saw the gooseflesh rise in a wave all the way down the bull’s left side.
Usually, the bulls turned their cow brides away from themselves and entered them from behind. It was quick and required less effort, leaving them more energy for the many other cows they would have to service during the brief mating season. WHITE-047 remained facing BLUE-792. They achieved something approaching an embrace, with the bull burying its face in the cow’s neck. Shanti saw it’s pizzle, monstrously swollen and already dripping seed onto the straw, just before the bull lifted her up, pressed her back against the cold panels and did what he’d been bred to do. Shanti turned away, squeezing back tears, and left the barn.
Now, WHITE-047 was alone with her pain. It struck him both how human and how animal Maya had seemed in the same situation. WHITE-047 was sweating and panting, interspersing her breathing with longer, angrier sighs that had come out of Maya as grunts of frustration and screams of pain. He was glad not to have to hear those sounds again but he could tell from its expression what the cow was going through. There was nothing he could do to help the agonised creature he saw in the calving pen. She would be left to die if her birthing was unsuccessful. All expense was spared when it came to cattle; when they died, their flesh became profit.
The stockmen around WHITE-047’s pen, seeing that she was still a long way from giving birth, moved on to check other cows in other pens in the barn. Shanti stayed. When the stockmen were out of sight in a parallel run of pens, he tapped his fingers on the horizontal bars of the calving pen. WHITE-047’s head snapped around at him, eyes wide and disbelieving. Another spasm hit her. She crushed her eyes shut against the pain.
Shanti took hold of one of the lower bars and used it to steady himself while he squatted on his haunches. When her contraction had passed and WHITE-047 opened her eyes, he tapped his fingertips on the bar again to get her attention. He looked from side to side, checking for the roving stockmen. The passages were clear.
‘Like this,’ he said, and bounced slightly on his heels before standing up and stepping well back from the bars. ‘Understand?’
Another cramp coursed through her, eliciting more silent screams. When she’d recovered she rolled onto her knees and crawled to the bars of the calving pen gate and used them to help her stand. Shanti could see it was a struggle for her. She was no longer able to stand upright. She hooked her palms over a low bar, just as he had, and lowered herself into a deep squat with a hushed grunt of relief. Between her legs, her vulva swelled open. Moments later, the top of the calf’s head began to appear.
Shanti nodded to himself. WHITE-047 was giving birth now; far too focussed to register him standing there. He walked away down the gritty passage between the calving pens and back towards the huge barn doors. Moments later he heard the only scream of the Chosen that was ever heard by MMP employees, that of a newborn calf. The stockmen would be coming now, coming to WHITE-047’s pen to silence her calf for the rest of its life. He wondered whether it would be male or female.
Three
At ten to five in the morning, Greville Snipe stood in his crisp white cow-gown at the back entrance to the milking parlour waiting for his four dairy boys; Harrison, Maidwell, Roach and Parfitt. They must have hated their job at the dairy to turn up so close to clocking on time and to leave so soon after their duties were complete. They spent as little time in the milking parlour as they could and only ever did the bare minimum to keep the place running the way he wanted it.
He tapped his watch as if it would make his absent crew arrive more quickly. The MMP buses for the early shift arrived well in advance of start time, but he knew they’d be off in a crowd by the gates smoking and laughing with their mates from other parts of the plant. Maybe they were laughing at him. He was fairly sure they joked about him behind his back but what could he do?
Youngsters and the majority of low-level workers were lazy. Snipe had known this long before he was promoted to Dairy Supervisor. Subsequently, he’d devised standards well above what was required by management. When any of the dairy boys fell short of those standards, he knew that his procedures were still good enough to pass any inspection. Even so, he let them know how he felt about their shortcomings, sometimes threatening them with their jobs. They may have hated the Dairy but they’d never find as well paid a job anywhere else in the town and they all knew it.
He didn’t believe he was a harsh supervisor. He’d known far worse in his early days at MMP. He liked to think that Greville Snipe wasn’t just about threats and bollockings; he was a man who tried to instil a sense of pride in the work that went on in the dairy. When he thought the Dairy boys had done well, and admittedly that was a rare occurrence indeed, he arranged bonuses for them in the form of extra milk, yoghurt, butter or cheese rations – things he knew they’d be thanked for again when they arrived home.
It was dark outside and the gas lamps were on. They illuminated circles of dirt all the way around the perimeter of the Magnus Meat Processing plant; all along the wide spaces between the pastures, the corrals, the barns, the outbuildings, the slaughterhouse and the dairy. He watched a couple of desultory moths circle and connect with the hot yellow bulbs again and again, believing that the light was a way out to somewhere when, in reality they were already free. Just like the Chosen, insects had stupid built into them. Nevertheless, Snipe felt a brief stab of melancholy at the futility of their attempts. When their wings were singed beyond usefulness, the moths would fall to the damp dirt and die, their efforts purposeless and suicidal.
Footsteps thumped in the grimy soil, approaching. He checked his watch again. Three minutes to go. They were pushing it – hardly enough time to change and get out to the parlour before five.
‘Come on, you bloody shirkers,’ he shouted. ‘Don’t piss me about.’ They skidded past him to the punch-card machine, clocked in and scrambled for the changing room. Red-faced, half giggling, half panicking. ‘If any of you are even a fraction of a minute late onto the parlour floor, I’ll take half an hour out of every wage packet. We’re a team. We do not let the side down.’