Cows (10 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

E
verything was perfect, clean and warm and bright. Lucy cooked for him and held him and they sat together through the long nights. The days were ordered and serene. He woke and they drank coffee together and breakfasted on fruit. Lucy, in a fresh toweling robe, raised up on tiptoe to kiss him each morning as he left for the plant. She gave him his lunch and waved goodbye and waited for his return. And when he came home the kitchen was wrapped in the welcoming smell of baking.

He was safe. He had succeeded. And it lasted a long time.

But safety brought about change. Initially, the drudgery of grinding meat at the plant had been lost in the excitement of exploring his creation—living as a man with Lucy was a buffer against its detrition. But the day came when Steven saw that he was better than the job. And from this day the idea of time spent at the plant became repellent.

The endless procession of lumps of beef disgusted him, the swinging carcasses on their hooks were odious pendulums that marked out wasted time. A man who could find it in himself to murder his mother and Cripps was surely meant for better things than the ass end of a production line.

When the monotony reached a point where Steven thought he could no longer contain his rage the cows, absent since Cripps, came again. The Guernsey gave instructions through the ventilator at lunchtime, and dusk in the dead plant found Steven in the duct, climbing onto the animal’s back.

They were alone and the warmth of the beast was welcoming—a blanket of comforting memories. And more than that—as they raced through tunnels, Steven felt a resurgence of energy, a freshening of the excitement that had coursed through him with the killing of Cripps and which the dragging hours grinding meat had dulled. The breeze and the movement of the Guernsey under him sloughed away the scab of forgetfulness that had grown over his sense of greatness.

“Ain’t this just like I said? That you’d be down here again?”

“You came for me. What do you want?”

“Not me, man, I don’t need anything from you. The others do, though. Or think they do. They changed after you did Cripps. Like his death started something that’d been waiting to happen since we came down here. They’re fucked up good now.”

They moved through a dried-up water main and the Guernsey’s hooves clattered hollowly ahead and behind. Steven took a deep breath of the musty air and stretched his arms wide until they almost touched the old brick walls.

“You sound happy about it.”

“I just got a little more distance on things, that’s all. I evolved faster down here than they did”

“Why do they want me back?”

“Anxiety, man. That and some sort of misguided faith in you. After Cripps there was like this massive upsurge of energy in the herd. They knew they’d changed, but they didn’t know how. Everyone stayed close, they couldn’t handle being alone. See, what scared them was they didn’t have an identity anymore. They’d spent so long hating Cripps and wanting him dead, they were lost when it actually happened.”

“What did they do?”

“Stampede. Only way to burn off that energy. Whole herd, kids and all, running under the city until they’re too tired to move. But it don’t really work ’cause when they get back they sit around and start thinking and get fucked up all over again. We should be spreading out through the city, expanding the herd, but they won’t do it, they won’t split up and leave each other.”

The Guernsey looked quickly back over its shoulder.

“They’re expecting answers, man.”

Steven was silent, but the feeling of imminence that had risen within him at the start of this ride grew stronger. Grew from a soft-edged augury into a certainty.

He smiled and settled back on the cow, he felt like laughing. Crazy Cripps. Mad fuck-up blood-bathed torturer, dead by Steven’s own hand, had seen the routes and the systems of life with X-ray eyes. He knew how the game was played but thought the slaughter room was the whole world and so had never directed his incandescent amorality beyond it.

Despite this, he’d taught Steven that things exist to be taken by man, that a free man lives as the center of his universe, directing all things to his ends, totally.

And if the Guernsey didn’t lie, Cripps, by his death, had provided one more thing to take. He’d opened the cows to exploitation.

The chamber had deteriorated. The vital parochialisms of a community safe in its own territory were gone. No lounging, no playing, no joy in association. Piles of dung, scuffed and trodden, littered the open floor. Neglect hung heavy in the air and mixed with the stale ammoniac tang of urine.

At the center the herd was a steaming, hoarse-bellowing conglomerate, tight packed in violent motion around something torn and rotten propped against a pillar. Sweating cow heads pointed into the heart of the vortex, going round and round and round.

The tumbling, end-over-end impact of hooves rolled through the chamber, bouncing off walls, folding in on itself, returning to the center, only to be thrown out again louder and more dense with frustration. Steven, on the Guernsey at the entrance, sat straight and breathed it in, let it wash about him and thrill him with the electricity of its abandonment.

“Told you, man. They’re going to be plenty pleased to see you.”

The Guernsey walked slowly toward the spinning cows and Steven went looking inside himself for streams of words, the exact right ones that would thud into empty bovine heads and lodge there, barbed and solid, so that when he hauled back on them he could be sure the cows would follow. He found a surface blankness, but he did not give up. Somewhere below consciousness the cows must know what they wanted. His voice would reveal it to them, it would give them a flag they could recognize and follow.

The herd saw him coming and slowed. Dust settled. Steven rode through them to the pillar and saw with no surprise Cripps’s tattered skeleton.

Sound of cow-panting all around him, great chests heaving. Ripples of excitement as they waited, tractoring in on beams from their eyes. And something else. Relief at his presence, the shedding of a burden.

Silence. Silence and open mouths and long lolling tongues thirsty for direction.

What he said could make them his. He looked at what was left of Cripps. Even stripped of flesh the face held the haughty half-smile of vindication it had died with.

Then there were words, hot words, filling him, breathed into his blankness through the cracked bone of a dead man. They came to him free of the worrying filter of the brain, straight up from the gut, instinctive and unexamined, like Cripps’s shotgun execution of the fleeing cow.

Beneath him the Guernsey stood proud and still, he could feel its weight pressing against the earth. He scanned the herd and raised his voice.

“What do you want?”

The cows stayed silent.

“What do you want? You thought you wanted peace. You thought with Cripps dead you could live down here, free at last of man and the horror of your beginnings. But you spent too long waiting for him, you hated him too much. You should have let him live.”

The cows rumbled angrily, but the Guernsey trumpeted and they fell grudgingly quiet again.

“You thought he was your problem, but he wasn’t. How could his living affect you? You were down here. He didn’t hunt you, he only killed what was left behind. You should have watched him more closely, you could have learned from him … You thought you wanted your memories—fields of grass, space to chew cud, time for contemplation, all the things every cow before you ever dreamed of. And you could have had it, it’s all here—food, safety, silence. But Cripps’s death didn’t give it to you, did it? It didn’t work like you thought because you aren’t the same as your memories. You are the first generation of urban cows, different from all others. You were bred for death but you lived, and the old pleasures no longer satisfy. Cripps could have shown you this, he could have helped, he could have made you aware of what you are.”

A cow in the crowd shouted: “Well, the fucker’s dead!”

Steven climbed to his feet on the back of the Guernsey and spread his arms like Christ. “But I am here. I have gone beyond him and I will lead you. I will show you where to find the strength to free yourselves of the past. I will show you your nature.”

Around him the cows exploded into movement, pushing against each other, butting, colliding, kicking—sides of beef slamming together, spraying wide arcs of foamy sweat. A mad maggot-writhing circle battling against itself.

Steven called down to the Guernsey: “What’s happening?”

“They’re trying to understand what you said, see if they’re going to accept it. Sit down, man, we might as well split till it’s over.”

They waited for a break in the churning bodies then raced to dusty calm at the edge of the chamber. Steven dismounted and watched cow madness. He felt strong. His groin burned, the violence his words had sparked excited him—power was so new an experience his brain interpreted the overflow physically.

The Guernsey smirked at him. “Wild, huh?”

“Does this always happen?”

“Started after Cripps, like everything else. It’s sort of a stampede that goes nowhere. They do it when they think about the future too hard, like it’s too much uncertainty for them to handle.”

“What happens after?”

“Nothing much.”

“Why aren’t you with them?”

“I don’t need to be.”

The Guernsey’s eyes were deep and brown and Steven knew that the curl of its lips was a small cow smile.

“Like I said, man, I developed faster. I know some things better than they do. Maybe some things better than you.”

“Like?”

“I knew all that killing would change you.”

“You said it would fuck me up.”

“Well you ain’t dead yet, so there’s still time. And I knew when you cut Cripps to pieces they wouldn’t be able to let you go.” The smile left the animal’s face. “And I know you want something out of it, man. I know you ain’t back here ’cause you love us cows so much.”

Steven nodded at the herd. “They’re slowing down. How will it go?”

“Don’t have much choice, do they? If things carry on like they have been, the herd’ll burn itself out.”

“They’ll let me lead them?”

The Guernsey gave a cow shrug.

“Give ’em what they want and they’ll follow. We ain’t so different from humans.”

The cow leaned against the wall and small flakes of rotten brick fell within a slower shower of dust to the floor.

“But what I was saying, man. What’s in it for you?”

Steven felt his confidence waver just the slightest bit. This animal could make things difficult.

The Guernsey saw his hesitation. “Don’t worry. They ain’t dumb, but they ain’t as smart as me either. They won’t see it so easily. Come on, man, I’ll keep your secret.”

“Sounds like you want something out of it too.”

“Leaders mean hierarchies, and I sure as shit ain’t aiming for a place at the bottom. Surprised? Don’t tell me it conflicts with this new nature you’re about to bestow on us.” The tone was sarcastic and it moved the Guernsey from difficult to dangerous. “Now, what do you fucking want?”

Steven looked off across the chamber. Most of the cows were still now, slick with their exertions. “Have you ever seen TV?”

“Jesus, of course.”

“Have you ever noticed how perfect life is there? That’s what I want.”

“All looks the same to me, on TV and off.”

“For other people, not for me. But I’m working on it, and wasting time at the plant every day isn’t part of my plan.”

“You want money … It could be worse.”

The cows were trooping tiredly toward the edge of the chamber. Steven left the Guernsey smiling to itself and walked out to meet them. While they gathered he searched their faces, and the unease the Guernsey’s probing had sparked vanished. These bovine heads were soft and waiting to be molded.

A small roan female stepped forward. “Can you help us?”

“I can teach you to live with what you have become.” He shouted so they could all hear: “You have become territorial and aggressive but you refuse to accept it! This is the source of your pain. You need challenge, you need to assert yourselves over others, you need to free what lies within you. I can teach you to do this!”

He lifted his arms and the cows knelt before him.

“I can save you.”

Later the Guernsey took him to the storm drain.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

L
ucy was washing clothes in the kitchen sink when he got home. She had become adept at finding and performing chores, endless small charades of domesticity to fill up the hours and rock her brain to sleep. She never left the flat, the horror of other people was too easy to see—the way their faces twisted, the way their backs bent, the uncounted ways of holding themselves and moving and looking at you like they were peeling their heads open to show some pornographic shot of pain. If a woman in a shop ran her hand through her hair in a particular way, Lucy would know the agony of her childhood, the terror of her parents, the loneliness and the fear that were now the territories of her existence. So she stayed inside and didn’t look and avoided the reminders of what she knew herself still to be.

Sometimes when Steven was at the plant, she went out on the roof and watched the city, but it was meaningless to her. The shapes of the buildings were difficult to focus on, they slipped anonymously away from her gaze into a two-dimensional scene that was alien and impossible to interpret and, worse, held no reward for any struggle of understanding. All the buildings were empty.

So she’d go back downstairs and wipe the windows and scrub the concrete in the bathroom, trying to choke back the brainfilth that boiled up against this bland canvas. The time with Steven, with the baby growing slowly in her belly, had been a clamping-down on the constant awareness of the damage she carried within her. The decision to allow the tangling of their lives had provided a veneer of distraction with which she could lightly cover the knowledge that all the systems of her soul and body, progressively corrupted since birth, were still degenerating unstoppably. Before, when she was alone, the dripping accretion of neuroses in the deep pools of her guts was a rain sound across all of life. Steven did not bring the sun, a clearing away of this daily torment—his own goals consumed him too entirely—but he was a separate flow of life, a flow into which she could jump and be carried away from her own, thudding back to shore only when she was too tired to stay away from herself.

In rare, flaring moments of introspection, she toyed with questions of love. But it was a pointless game, made redundant by the need to survive. What did it matter if they loved each other or not as long as each could be used as a screen against the world?

“You’re late. I was worried.”

“Overtime at the plant.”

“Oh.”

Lucy served him dinner on the new kitchen table in the freshly painted kitchen. She ate with him. This was all part of it—family, closeness, normality. Eating together, pet names, passing caresses. An illusion of happiness they were both eager to accept and which Steven called real.

“I felt the baby move today.”

Steven smiled and got up and put his arms around her from behind, palms flat on her belly, feeling for flutters of the life that would be such an important piece of the future.

“A kid. I can’t believe it.”

“What’s so good about it?”

Steven was a little shocked and went and sat down again. “What do you mean, what’s good about it? If you’ve got a kid you’ve got a family like everyone else in the world. You’re living like they are.”

“It’s just another thing to fuck up.”

“Don’t say that.”

“As soon as it’s born the poison will start building up in it. Parents destroy their children simply by their presence. And we won’t be any different. Shit gets passed on. You can’t stop the infection. It seeps through your skin and builds up until it triggers your own shit and pus and then there’s no room left inside you for anything else.”

Steven reached across the table and held her hand, it felt cold.

“Lucy, you don’t have to be like that now. We’re in here, we’re protected. Poison doesn’t grow in this world. I love you …”

He had used the words many times in the past weeks to brace her, and he had been sure they were working. But now, for a second, he felt a cold tremor of doubt. Perhaps Lucy was just too far gone.

Then he blinked and breathed and shook himself and the world got itself back in place. He relaxed.

“A child will be good for us, you’ll see.”

Lucy nodded bravely and tried to smile.

That night he fucked her from behind like she was an animal. Fucked her and imagined he was riding a cow. After, between the clean sheets of their wide double bed, he held her and they watched neon through a gap in the curtains.

“What happens after?”

“After what?”

“In a year, when we have the kid and there isn’t any more to do to this place. When we’re just living and nothing is new.”

“What do you mean? We just keep living. What’s wrong with that?”

“It won’t be enough. After a while it won’t be enough, and we’ll have to start moving in the world with everyone else.”

“We’re happy now and we’ll stay happy. The child will make us the same as everyone on TV. It will be enough, believe me.”

Lucy pretended to sleep. Steven lay awake, thinking about tunnels under the city, making plans to finance the future.

In the morning, when he rose, Lucy was still asleep. He watched her breathe for a moment, and the doubt from the previous evening returned to hover about him.

He ate in the kitchen then left to meet the Guernsey.