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 beappeased.” 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.