They were young too, none of them over nineteen and they would, in time, come to understand and appreciate the importance of the job they were doing. They didn’t know it but they were privileged and, unlike most jobs in the town, working in the milking parlour actually meant something. They were helping to provide for others.
Once the equipment was attached, the milking session was brief; only twenty minutes to harvest half of the day’s yield. Then Snipe’s lads passed through the parlour a second time removing teat cups and collecting them for sterilisation. Collected raw milk was then pumped into vats for pasteurisation and homogenisation. As those processes were fully automated, his boys could take a long break.
He then had a solid hour to pass through the milking parlour checking every cow in the herd. This was what raised his pulse.
There were four rows of forty individual milking stalls, the two centre rows were back to back. Between rows one and two and rows three and four were two broad concrete lanes with a gutter that ran down the centre of each. Many of the cows would urinate or defecate during milking. After they’d returned to pasture, the whole parlour would be hosed down a stall at a time. Snipe was used to the smell but his four lads wore their masks for the whole shift.
During his hour alone with the herd, Snipe inspected every cow in every stall. In a herd, they all looked alike, but it was possible to pick up on little distinguishing marks and individual behaviours. Snipe knew every cow by sight and number. He passed along the stalls, hands behind his back like a general inspecting his troops. In turn, every eye in the parlour watched his progress. As a dairyman, Snipe’s interest was in a good milk yield and a healthy herd. He felt obliged to check the udders and teats of every cow.
In most cases, the initial check was a glance. Deflated udders with a ruddy rim around elongated teats was what he wanted to see. Healthy, spent udder tissue with a suction mark in the right place. But where he found the red rim too close to or overlapping the teat, he would pause to see if the suction had caused any damage. He would note the stall number and the number of the cow in a small white notebook that he carried in the outer pocket of his white cow-gown. Later he would have words with whichever team member possessed careless, rushed hands.
Officially, mastitis went untreated, excepting the antibiotic shots that every animal in every herd regularly received to keep them infection free. But Snipe ran a proud unit and he liked to do a little more for his milkers. Whenever he saw damaged, cracked or sore teats on his cows, he attended to them. In his trouser pocket at all times was a small jar of cream that his mother had used on his dry skin when he was a child. It smelled of honey and old leather and was called Beauty Balm. In reality, it was a product aimed at women to keep their hands soft and smooth. Snipe had learned to use it for other things before he realised it could help soothe the udders of his milkers.
It caused him a very complicated feeling when he stopped to rub the Beauty Balm into the sore udders of one of the herd. His eyes would defocus a little and he would enter a righteous, delightful, guilty trance. He would look away from the face of the cow and concentrate on the feeling of the swollen udder beneath his gentle fingers. Sometimes a final dribble of milk would exude from the affected teat and Snipe would pause and look at the cow’s face. Suffused with temptation, his penis painfully rigid and his testicles sharply aching, he would continue down the rows.
Four
Hema and Harsha were sick the next day.
Richard had left while it was still dark, every muscle on his emaciated frame standing proud as he hoisted the pack of bricks and sand onto his back. Maya watched him with anticipation, knowing that by the evening the pack would be full of something other than her husband’s misplaced burden of guilt. She ate an apple for breakfast, not resenting it for once, and she sang a song she’d learned as a child while she prepared chopped fruit and porridge for the girls.
When she went upstairs to rouse them, she found them both in Harsha’s bed, clinging to each other and shivering in their sleep. Sweat blackened their already dark hair. It made her think of Richard, his temples dripping each night at the dinner table. She felt their brows. Her girls were burning up. Damn you, Richard, she thought. Their sweat was his sweat. Somehow he had passed his craziness into them. The craziness was damp on their foreheads.
She ran downstairs, pulled on a heavy coat and rushed out the door. She’d be exhausted by running for the Doctor. Why couldn’t they have lived nearer the town?
Snipe noticed the condition of WHITE-047’s teats immediately. There was no broken skin and no cracking of the aureoles but they were too swollen – even minutes after milking – to be healthy. If he didn’t do something about it now, it was almost a certainty that an infection would set in.
Snipe noticed certain cows in the dairy herd more than others but he had never been sure why that was. The ones he noticed were the ones he gave most care to. WHITE-047 was one of those cows and, as he looked at her now, he tried, as he often did, to work out why it was that some milkers were easier to look at than others.
She had the same stumps of fingers as all the others. Her big toes were missing like the rest of them. She made the same sighs and hisses. She limped because of her heel tag, but so did every Chosen in every herd. She was toothless and hairless and had the same hunched, weighed down posture that all the Chosen displayed. She was big in the hips – not all were shaped that way but most of them were – but there was something different about her shoulders. They were delicate somehow. Not the heavy-boned shoulders that milkers usually possessed. Ordinarily, weaker-looking stock was culled out of the herds to keep the offspring strong. WHITE-047 was slender at the top and that ought to have been noticed and taken care of. Perhaps it was the eyes that had saved her from a premature visit to the slaughterhouse. Her eyes were strong and, unlike almost every other cow in the herd, she risked making eye contact from time to time. That must have taken other stockmen’s attention from her finely boned shoulders. She was a lucky one. Or she had been until now.
Snipe approached the stall she was in but she didn’t try to step away. Like many of them, she had come to trust him. Instead, she looked at him for a split second and then turned her head away. She tried to stamp one of her feet but all it did was clank the shackles.
‘Easy there,’ he said. ‘Mr. Snipe’s not going to hurt you.’
He stepped into the stall with her as slowly and smoothly as he could. Cows were skittish and liable to hurt themselves if they felt threatened. He didn’t need a damaged milker on his shift.
‘Steady, girl. Steady now,’ he breathed.
He was right beside her now. Even after the milking her udders were round and plump. She was younger than a lot of the others. It was another thing he often noticed, the ones with the fuller udders. His pulse pumped in his neck and a flush of heat rose to his cheeks. He reached for the Beauty Balm in his cow-gown pocket with trembling fingers.
The population was hungry. But that was no excuse.
And the ones that were starving – the ones that might really have needed the protein to survive – they rarely got it. Meat went to those who could afford it. Life went to those who could afford it and so it had always been.