Chapter Eighteen
EIGHTEEN
The next morning I wake to bright sunlight, shrill as a scream. It’s late by my watch, just gone eleven. I’ve slept for nearly twelve hours. Downstairs the radio is playing and I can hear the clatter of cutlery. I take my contraceptive pill in the bathroom with a cupped handful of water, feeling tension knot my shoulders. I’m still shaken by what happened yesterday. The way Vicky fell, as if she’d been pushed by invisible hands right off that boy’s shoulders. I can’t get the images out of my mind—they rattle past like a slideshow: the wasp crawling over Alice’s fingers, the eggshell nestled in the curls of Vicky’s hair, the way Tuff Shit’s mouth curved down into a horrified, quivering rictus. Something about the whole thing feels volatile, like a stoked flame. Today though, the street outside is empty. No incense burning, no placards declaring GIVE THE DEAD THY TONGUE , no small huddle of afflicted-looking people. It’s a relief. I hope they stay away. Alice went silently to bed the previous evening even as the blue lights of the emergency vehicles had pulsed outside, the sickle moon bone-white in the sky. When I tapped on her bedroom door, Dictaphone in hand, she called out for me to leave her alone.
I open the front door gingerly and peer out into the white heat of late morning. The little shrine which had been building is cleared away but crusts of egg are still spattered across the downstairs windows, drying to a paste. In the kitchen, behind the closed door, I can hear a radio softly playing. Maybe it’s Sam, sitting with his cigarette burning the insides of his fingers yellow, tea stewing in the pot. I hope it is. I could do with someone to talk to. My mood lifts a little.
At first, I’m not sure what I’m looking at on the kitchen table. There are small mounds of pale flesh threaded with veins, slit open like crimson petals, deepening to purple. The newspaper beneath them is stained pink with blood.
“Rabbits,” Paul says, without looking up at me. He’s sharpening knives on the back step the same way I used to see my grandfather do, sweeping the blade along the stone. “I’ve skinned them and taken off the legs. The fur comes off clean, like peeling a banana.”
He stands and looks at me with his narrow, serious eyes. He is shirtless, the hair on his chest soft and dark like a pelt. He looks tired, and I wonder if he has just finished his shift. If he has, it looks as though he has brought his work home with him. I burp queasily.
“Where is everyone?”
“Lisa’s taken the little ones to her parents’. We thought it best to get them away for a while. Sam’s up at the Green trying to find a phone box that hasn’t been pissed in, I should think. He’s been trying to call the hospital.”
“About Vicky?”
“You know, we used to have her here for tea not so long ago? Vicky was a sweet kid, always polite. Please and thank you and she called us Mister and Missus Webber no matter how many times me and Lisa told her to just use our names. Her and Alice were born on the same ward just two days apart. Some girls just get the Devil in ’em.”
“What about Alice? Is she okay?”
“You tell me. You’re the expert.” He smiles tightly.
“I haven’t been here long enough to form an opinion, Paul.”
He snorts.
“You been here long enough to make a guess?”
I stare at him over the table, the smell of blood thick in the air. His voice sounds as if it is taunting me, somehow.
“Uh, okay, then. In my opinion I see a level of emotional disconnect in Alice. Certainly there’s a distorted perception of reality.” I think of the way Alice looked at Vicky the previous day, that bloodless smile. “I’d like to assess her properly though, before I say any more.”
“Can you give that to me in English?” He’s smiling but it’s taut and mean. He thinks I’m patronizing him.
“I mean she’s delusional.”
“Ah. The witch.”
A beat.
“That’s part of it, yes.”
“What’s the other part?”
I shift uncomfortably.
“Some of the symptoms I’m seeing in Alice—the withdrawal, the intrusive thoughts, even the hallucinations—can be traced to a trauma in childhood. Can you think of anything that may have affected her, Paul?”
He looks at me a long time, a drop of blood swelling and fattening on the knife tip. I watch it sway pendulously, hypnotized.
“What are you trying to say, Mina? That I can’t protect my own kids?”
His voice is very quiet, very measured. But there is a tremor in it, just enough for me to know how hard he is trying to control his anger.
“Of course not,” I say, thinking of the house on Tanner’s Row, Alice’s friends shrieking with laughter, hysteria. “But you can’t always know what your children are doing, especially teenagers.”
Paul considers this quietly before grunting and wiping the knife with a bloodied cloth.
“Huh. You don’t believe in witches, then, Mina?”
“No.”
My eyes return to the bloodied little cadavers on the table, smeared with fat. A fly lands on one and Paul swats it idly away.
“What was it you said your fella did again?”
“He’s a researcher.”
“What of?”
“Space.”
“Oh yeah? Can he skin a rabbit?”
I lick my lips nervously.
“No.”
“Lisa’s grandmother always told her to marry a practical man. She was teasy as an adder but that was one thing she got right.” He lifts up the hind leg of one of the skinned rabbits on the table. “You want me to save you a lucky rabbit’s foot?”
“That’s a misconception. In the old Celtic tradition it was a hare.”
“That right? Huh. My family were all hare coursers. All looked like the lurchers they used, too, all skin and teeth and bones like they hadn’t enough to eat. Them hares got so scared sometimes their hearts would just blow like a faulty gasket. Don’t sound very lucky to me.”
Sweat bites into my skin, stinging my eyes. The smell in here is clotting, turning greasy.
“I suppose not.”
“I remember hearing stories about hares. How they were witches who had shape-shifted and couldn’t change back. Maybe they’d forgotten how. Maybe they just liked living wild. Running fast, fighting, fucking in the moonlight. Ha! I wouldn’t mind.”
He looks up at me and I see a flash of something heady—lust maybe, or desire. His pupils look fat and swollen. I think of Alice saying “The killing floor does something to the brain… something bad,” and even though my pulse is fluttering like a trapped moth, teeth clenched, I hold his gaze fast.
“People ’round here Mina, they believe in witches. This town is built on their bones. If you reckon on the stories from back in the old days, witch’s blood ran through Banathel’s gutters and it was black as tar.” Paul lifts one of the small, headless bodies nearest to him and pushes his index and middle fingers into the bloodied slit in its stomach. I wince. “You know who Matthew Hopkins is?”
“The ‘witch finder general,’” I say. “We studied him briefly at university. He’s analogous with witch hunts and mass panic, although ‘witch finder’ is a euphemism really, isn’t it? He tortured women. Nothing more.”
“I suppose you could call it that. But he thought he was doing the right thing, didn’t he?”
“The right thing for who?”
“For the community. For God. He was frightened, lots of people were. Superstition ruled over religion and reason. These people needed to be appeased. ” He lifts the bloodied tip of the knife level with his lips and for a frightening moment I feel sure he is about to lick it.
“You saw yesterday what happens when fear gets out of control. People get hurt.”
“But all this superstition, it just feeds the myth. Surely you see that?”
Paul is silent a moment, working his fingers farther into the cavity with a meaty ripping sound, exposing a muddle of coiled intestines and a glimpse of bone, greasy and slick with fat. He tugs the innards from the body of the rabbit and my stomach turns slowly over.
“I taught my girls how to skin rabbits. When Billy’s old enough, I’ll teach him an’ all. They’ve got to learn. No point being squeamish. No point pissing about. If you can’t look an animal in the eye when you kill it n’ gut it n’ skin it, then you’ve no business eating them.”
A bead of sweat rolls down his temple.
“I learned that my first day on the job. On the second day I learned how they get the work done, day in, day out. Do you know what the secret to it is?”
I don’t, I tell him. I can’t imagine.
“We put our thoughts into boxes. We have to. It’s the only way. It’s serious work, hard on the hands, hard on the brain. Not everyone can do it. I’ve seen grown men—and it’s always men, believe me—just turn on their heels one day, no warning, and walk out the door. They get right in their cars and drive through the gates and they don’t look back, even though the blood is still dripping off their boots. Scared people do strange things. I had one kiddy, couldn’t have been more than seventeen, Terry, his name was. He drove a Ford Escort. That car was his pride and joy. Terry was always joking, always messing around. He put a cow’s tongue in my lunchbox once, just laying there on top of some iceberg lettuce like a big pink worm. Terry just about laughed himself stupid over that.”
I realize with sick dismay that I can see where this story is going but Paul has momentum now. He squeezes a glossy sac out from the inside of a rabbit—a liver maybe, or a kidney—and throws it into a bucket by his feet. It makes a wet slapping sound.
“Terry’s been working on the killing floor about a month when I find him in the office one morning. He’s white as a sheet. He’s wiping his mouth with the back of his hand again and again until I grab hold of him. His lips are raw and bleeding like he’s pulled all the skin off them. I ask him what’s wrong. He said, ‘It’s the smell, Paul, I can’t get rid of the smell.’ I knew what he meant of course. You work there for a while and you get used to it but it’s always there, spoiled and sweet, like—”
“Marzipan,” I say flatly. I’m thinking of the sickly odor I’d encountered when I’d first met Paul and again yesterday in Alice’s room. The chimney in the old house on Tanner’s Row had smelled like it, too, like hot iron and rotting pork. Sweet and coppery. It’s how true fear smells, close-up and visceral.
“Terry said he’d tried all sorts to get it off. He’d even bought some of that—what’s it called—carbolic soap, like they use in the hospitals. Scrubbing at his skin with a nailbrush till it bled. It was in his clothes, too, he said, even after they were washed. One morning he’d woken up and the whole room had smelled like it, as if it was just oozing out of him. But the worst thing, he said, the very worst, was that now his food was starting to taste like it, too. Like everything was too sweet and gone rotten. He’d bite into an apple and it was all he could taste, the killing floor. ‘It’s haunting me,’ he’d said, and I’ve never seen such a look of horror as I did that morning on Terry Jenkin’s face. I would’ve told him to go home but he did the job for me, handing in his notice on the spot. Good lad, I remember thinking. You got out before this job did for you what it does to the rest of us. Turns us numb.”
I watch as he uses the tip of the knife to lever out a tiny rabbit heart, dark as a bruise, and drop it onto a plate. Flies swarm over it with a low, somnolent buzzing.
“Terry did walk out and get right in his car. Only he didn’t leave. They didn’t find him until that evening, just before they locked the gates. He’d slit his wrists with the broken edges of a Coke can. There was so much blood it had pooled in the footwell by his feet. The car—Terry’s pride and joy, the one he’d saved and saved for—got towed away and crushed and that was the end of it. That was the end of him. The problem was, Mina, that Terry didn’t know how to compartmentalize. You heard of that before? ‘Compartmentalize’?”
“In psychology it’s described as a defense mechanism.”
Paul grunts again, shaking his head a little. He’s sweating, his voice hard and sharp-edged. Like I could cut myself on it.
“Well, I don’t know about that, but it sounds about right. For most of us in the abattoir, being able to compartmentalize means that we’re not all ending up rocking in a corner or turning the bolt gun on ourselves. Because it’s death we’re dealing with. Sure, there are standards and levels of care. But when it comes to the bones of it—heh—it’s death.”
“Why are you telling me all this, Paul?”
He looks at me, carefully holding my gaze. His eyes have lost that hazy, muddy look and there is a small, knowing smile hitched at the corners of his lips.
“Because you can’t predict what fear will do to people. You don’t know which way it will send ’em. Some people don’t have the stomach for it and it drives them mad.”
There’s something about the intensity of Paul, his steady, unflinching gaze, that casual butchery, that makes my nerves jump like oil on a skillet.
“Take Sam, for instance. He came in the kitchen earlier and when he saw me working here he turned around and walked straight back out again. Said looking at all this blood made him feel sick.”
His voice is rough and husky, eyes glinting beneath the dark overhang of his hair. Gently, he taps the knife against his temple.
“He doesn’t have the stomach for it, see? You do though, Mina. You’ve been standing here for half an hour like it’s nothing. What does that tell you about yourself?”