Bête Read online

  ‘Victim,’ I scowled. ‘Vacca-tim.’

  This got nothing from him. ‘Where is the cranium of the animal you murdered, Mr Penhaligon?’

  ‘A cow-farmer butchering a cow is not murder, Ploddo. A cow-farmer butchering a cow is a fucking tautology.’

  He winced a little at my swearing. ‘We require the head to establish whether a crime has been committed. Tell us what you have done with it.’

  I clammed up at this. It wasn’t a strategic decision on my part, although I accept it might have looked as if it was. I was just too furious to engage with these people. After repeating the question eight or nine times to my blank scowl they put me back in my cell. I got food. I had a little sleep. When I woke up I felt a little less possessed by my anger. A lawyer came to say hello. ‘They’ll bail you,’ she told me, ‘if you tell them where the head is. The Supreme Court judgment won’t be retroactive, whatever it is, so they won’t be able to charge you with murder. It’ll be a fine for breaking the terms of the act.’

  ‘Well that’s a relief,’ I snarled. ‘I’ll still be charged for doing my fucking job.’

  ‘Please, Mr Penhaligon, I’m here to help. The charge will be breaching the terms of the Canny Cow Stay of Execution Order; a fine, if you’re cooperative, but two months in prison if you’re not. Tell them where the head is, and I’ll work out a deal.’

  I crossed my arms and humpfed and grumped. ‘Peachy,’ I said. ‘Humans have been farmers for hundreds of thousands of years. The emergence of farming is what marks humanity off from apes. And now some carbuncular eco-activist invents this fucking chip, and the whole thing is over? We can’t let them hold us hostage like this. Somebody has to make a stand!’

  ‘Mr Penhaligon,’ said the lawyer. ‘I’m a legal professional. I’m not an ecological activist.’ She took a breath and let it out, slowly. ‘Speaking for myself and on behalf of my own personal non-legal-professional stomach, I hope, earnestly, that the Green groups don’t drive meat production out of business. But the law is the law, and we have to work within it.’

  She persuaded me. I spoke again to the moustachioed fellow, and told him where I’d put the head. Then they escorted me back to my cell. Ten minutes later, they brought me out again and into a different interview room, where Rosemary was sitting, having finally – hours late! – got my message. They gave us twenty minutes together, with a constable slumped in a chair in the corner of the room doing a pretty good impression of being asleep. Then they put me back in my cell, and ten minutes later brought me out again.

  ‘It’s not there,’ said Moustache. ‘The head.’

  ‘I put it where I told you I put it,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t play games with us, Mr Penhaligon. If we have to obtain a warrant to search your premises, it won’t help your case.’

  ‘It’s the truth,’ I said. ‘That’s where I put it! Search all you like – I give you permission. You don’t need a warrant.’ They made me sign a form to that effect. They put me back in the cell.

  Later that evening they let me go. ‘I don’t know how you managed to spirit that head away, Penhaligon,’ said Moustache, narrowing his eyes at me. I didn’t know either, but it was a fortunate turn of events. Without the skull they couldn’t prove the carcass was from a canny bête, and no charges could be brought.

  My case had generated some media interest. A picket of Radical Vegetarians booed me as I left the police station. At least I think they were booing me. They may have been mooing at me. My phone, when the Law returned it to me, was clogged with messages from papers and iZines keen for a soundbite or an interview. It was a hot-button issue, I suppose. I was in no mood to talk to anybody; I got into the car too furious to drive, and Rosemary steered us both home.

  I went home, and drank Scotch like it was apple juice. I fell asleep.

  Starting the next day, I got on with my life. I was even able to finishing butchering the carcass and sell the meat to a West Reading restaurant called Best Bistro.

  Well, you already know which way the Supreme Court jumped. Since the slaughter of non-upgraded cows was still legal, some of my friends attempted to safeguard their business by investing in security – electric fences, guard-bots and so on. This was an attempt to keep eco-activists and Rad-Veg insurgents out, although in retrospect it was, of course, a pointless one. The chips began spreading in other ways. And they always got in, anyway: they were determined, and they had the computer smarts to override most security systems. The price of real beef went up, it’s true, but not to such an extent as to defray the sorts of costs entailed by keeping our butchery legal. Other farmers I know sold up; some farms were amalgamated to make arable concerns. If my kids had been younger I might have stuck it out; but my son was fourteen and my daughter sixteen, and they would soon be flying the nest anyway. Neither of them wanted to follow the family business. Why keep the nest at all? I sold the farm for about 40 per cent of its pre canny cow value, and moved away. I sued DBDG for loss of earnings, but I was not the only person who tried to pursue them through the courts and a bankruptcy declaration sublimed any prospect of fiduciary restitution into the ether.

  I got a job with Findus as a compliance officer. Three years, travelling all over, as far south as Basingstoke and as far north as Lincoln. Then I was made redundant. It’s the same story a hundred thousand middle-aged countrymen could tell.

  The landscape of my farm made it hard to amalgamate into a larger concern. The woman who bought it from me – Murray was her name – hoped to continue raising cows. I wished her all the luck of the brave, although with a degree of bitterness at the absurdly low price I had had to settle for. Three months later Murray was dead, lying on her back in the yard with what looks like a computer mouse sitting on the ground next to her. I’ve seen the security camera footage – we’ve all seen it. The security cameras were hers, bought as part of her attempt to keep the Greens from upgrading her livestock. The image quality is extraordinary. I sound like a dinosaur when I say that, but the way modern digital images can be enlarged and enlarged and enlarged seemingly for ever without becoming grainy is genuinely amazing to me. That’s not a computer mouse, lying next to her corpse, though. It’s a curved section of her skull, knocked from her head by the passage of the bolt in and through and out again. The projectile passed in a rising trajectory because the shooter was low down. You can see on the images; you can watch the whole grisly moment. She is kneeling down, but the momentum of the shot puts her on her feet. The fragment of skull pops off and lands behind her. For a long moment she simply stands, and a long gout of blood pours out and dribbles down. Then she falls straight back and lies still. We all of us lie that still, sooner or later.

  I know what the press say: that it was these same rats that dragged the head from my loquacious cow away to devour in their own time and place. They grow long and broad, do rattus-rattus, in the countryside; seventy centimetres long, not including tail, are common. So I have heard it said that one of these rodents ingested the chip during this meal and the chip, somehow, perhaps becoming lodged in its throat, connected with its nervous system. But here’s the thing: rats are great chewers. They don’t swallow things whole and hope for the best. They gnaw and gnaw and gnaw. Believe me, no rat accidentally ingested the missing chip, whatever the iTabloids are telling you. Maybe this rat got canny because some ultra-Green chipped him and released him on purpose. If they’ve done one, they’ve done a hundred. And if they’ve done rats, they’ve done wolves, foxes, crows, you name it. The only difference is that rats have clever little hands, and devious little minds. A bolt-gun, being a heavy piece of kit and tiring to carry about with you, might be carelessly laid on the ground beside you. Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t put such a thing on the ground of the yard, where the cowshit and straw is. Where a devious mind and clever fingers can get at them. But it seems that Ms Murray didn’t think like that.

  2

  Anne

  Five years. For some breeds of animal that’s a whole life
time.

  I’m some breed of animal.

  There is a riddle here, but it’ll take me a while to explain it – to set it up, I mean. There’s an answer too; that’s the least you can expect. You might think that, having been a farmer, I’d been closer to nature than most of the folk who spend their lives in the cities. Stepping across frosted grass stiff as cardboard before a December sun-up, my fingers singing with pain at the cold, even in their gloves. The air so cold it shrieks in your lungs. Great steam-train puffs of white breath. Forcing the cows to do the things they capriciously didn’t wish to do, even though those things would keep them alive, and my farm in business. You don’t get closer to nature that way. You exist in proximity to it, but between you and it lies an impermeable layer of hostility. And believe me, the hostility exists on both sides. A friendship is an emotionally intimate thing, though you and your friend meet only rarely. A marriage, where you wake up together every morning of the year, can be wholly without that kind of closeness.

  Yeah. My marriage.

  A winter’s morning, having worked from half four until seven; sitting at the wooden table in my own kitchen with my naked hands pressed into the curve of my coffee mug to warm them. My brain still sluggish with the residual cold. There was a red notebook on the table, and a pen beside it; and I was thinking of writing something in it, and then I looked up. Rose with her back to me, frying eggs at the stove. Her back was more expressive than her front. The texture of a towelling dressing gown. Shoulders hunched, looking down at the pan. Every curve of her curvaceous body pointing away from me. The insight a farmer gets is different to the insight a quicker-silver mind might get. It comes slowly out of the depths, as a recognition that has eluded you for a long time, but which – you see then, at that point – cannot elude you for ever.

  Rose had a way of not looking at me that was astonishingly forceful and eloquent.

  There was a company called Aitken Enhanced Animals. Back in the day. It chipped monkeys and tried to sell them to companies as factory workers – dextrous hands, you see. But the monkeys were expensive to buy, and had to be fed on a special diet, and the company had to house them and so on. This was before there were any legal challenges or rulings as to the rights to citizenship, or otherwise, of the bêtes. The monkeys didn’t catch on commercially, because they weren’t cost-effective. But there was another company, called Cassidy Solutions, and they chipped rats, and sold them to office blocks and residential areas. The idea was: a rat can make its way easily along ventilation shafts, through wall cavities, into crawl spaces – and can mend, or check, or fetch, or carry whatever you might need it to. Lots of companies bought these rats, because they were cheap and useful. But the chips had to have AI properties, because only then could they take charge of the rat, override its ratty grey matter. How many such corporate tools were sold? When the law changed, and selling the rats might have been construed as slavery, Cassidy Solutions changed its name to Cassidy Agency. It continued fitting rats with the chips, and taking the money, although this time it claimed to be only a facilitator, putting bêtes citizens who were looking for work in touch with possible employers, for a fee. The question is: why did the rats go along with it?

  Rosemary and I divorced. Rose married again. As far as I know, she is happy now. We’re no longer in touch. It is logical to infer that she is at least happier, because I’m sure she was miserable being married to me.

  What about me? I underwent a form of marriage, more binding and intimate than the state sanctioned kind. You ask: Is that the riddle? What’s a marriage that’s not a marriage? Context, context.

  First things first. After I lost my farm, I worked at Findus for three years. When they laid me off I worked at a dozen jobs in quick succession. For a time, before the big changes in our world became apparent, I was briefly a spokesperson for the Pro-Hunt. There were two general elections in one month, and the Middle Greens held the sway, so there was no parliamentary will to overturn the Supreme Court judgment regarding the legal status of bêtes. A third of constituencies became swing seats once you took account of the owners of talking dogs and all those tinnily loquacious cats, not to mention sentimental teens and hard-core Greens, and the general Middle England sense that the environment had been fucked over for long enough. In those electoral circumstances it was a rare MP who had the balls, or the ovaries, to stand up in the House and cry ‘I urge us to return to exterminating the beasts!’ It already felt like a different world.

  Anyhow, I needed money to fight the divorce. ‘And why did you fight it?’ you ask me, which is a good question, and a very good question, and a question wholly to the point. There were precious few material resources to be divided between us, after all. Jen was (just) over eighteen and living her own life – getting married, moving away, the whole shebang. Albie, our son, lacked only a few months of his majority, and was certainly old enough to choose for himself. But I fought nonetheless. I am a stubborn soul, is the truth of it. See! There I am (look! quick! before I stomp away) in my old farmer’s jacket of herringbone – a thousand corporal stripes stacked in columns. My graph-paper shirt and maroon cords. A cross-section of that chest would uncover a circle wide and dense as a manhole cover. That torso is long and no part of it is skinny. That nose is large and straight and subtends the full ninety degrees as it goes round the corner from bridge to underside. Those nostrils look like torpedo portholes in the side of a submarine. That chin juts. Hair boils up that chest and throat like Wells’s red weed. Howsoever assiduously I shave, howsoever carefully I trim and comb my hair, there is an unruly vibe of hairiness about me. I grow angry, often. Temper easily deserts me: fucking traitor temper. I should tie my temper to a pole and execute it by firing squad for desertion. Only, then I’d have no temper at all. It would be permanently lost. I’d turn into a Tasmanian devil, full-time.

  The specific sticking points as far as the divorce settlement went were: Bert (Jen being over eighteen) and money. ‘You have no money,’ said Fatima-my-attorney. ‘Tell the court as much and we can resolve that.’

  ‘No,’ I said. Too proud to take the escape route of DBDG-style ‘bankruptcy’. Hating the mendacity of it.

  ‘She wants the farm.’

  ‘I no longer own the farm.’

  ‘She wants,’ said Fatima, with that frayed patience of manner she so often exhibited when she spoke with me, ‘the monetary worth of the farm, Graham.’

  ‘I got much less for it than she thinks,’ I said, growing choleric. ‘And some of that has gone on living expenses she herself and her kids have incurred.’

  ‘Graham, as your lawyer I have to tell you,’ Fatima said, rubbing a knuckle into her right eye, ‘if you refer to Albert as her kid rather than my kid or our kid, then the court is liable to assume you have already conceded the custody issue.’

  I was not well suited to the filigree social codes of the law court. I stomped and huffed and lurched my metaphorical weight about like an unhappy cow in its stall. I swore. I lost the suit.

  I needed money. I found a job as a driver, but it paid little. I wrote Eclogues and Georgics. They were savage and uncomfortable reading. I wrote them in pen, rather than with a screen, and declined to put them online. Selections appeared in PN Review, and hardly anybody read them. When Pro-Hunt got in touch it had nothing to do with my poetry. Rather it was my minuscule celebrity as a farmer who had killed a canny cow – had been driven out of business by these crazy new laws – who had been to prison – this petty notoriety persuaded Pro-Hunt that I could be useful as a spokesperson. So I took their shilling. They were a bunch of wankers, to be honest; not a true countrywoman or – man amongst them. I can’t speak for the whole organization, I suppose; but the ones I met were posh hippies, or trust-fund throwbacks or weird Godbotherers who thought the deity best worshipped by riding horses across a few soggy fields and the tearing of a red fox into redder chunks. I didn’t warm to them, shall we say. But they paid my salary. They put my face all over the media for a month, and
they dropped me again.

  A kind of Rubicon was crossed, I suppose, nationally. If Vitameat hadn’t come on the market at exactly this time, I genuinely believe people would have grown tired of steaks costing forty pounds and making do with Quorn, and popular opinion would have shifted back against the Canny Beast Legislation. But over a period of only a few months Vitameat started appearing, cut and shaped, perfectly legal, in supermarkets all over Europe; and the pressure for reform never materialized. The Green Alliance took heart. Animal speakers appeared with increasing frequency. A thousand blogs have made this point.

  And there’s another perspective. The move to grant animals ‘rights’ had been building for decades. Not all animals: not the cholera bacillus, or the hagworm or the mosquito of course. But the fluffy ones. The pretty ones. Kittens and baby seals and the like. Pro-Hunt fell apart in a welter of trivial bickering. The money dried up. I got work checking the legal status of partridges for a Highland shooting company. Then I worked in a bookshop. Then I worked in the sewers of Manchester – a six-month stint of that, jabbing pressure-water-poles at fatbergs, tonnes of used kebab grease and congealed sump oil, woven together with thousands of used wet wipes. After that I went back to delivery driving for a time. And, in parallel with the last three jobs I worked on the side as a butcher.

  The one thing I took away from Pro-Hunt, qua organization, is that it was through them I became friendly with Preacherman. The other thing was a tendency for one random stranger in twenty to look at me with that scrunched-eye I recognize you from somewhere, but where? manner.