“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, andwalk 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.
“Terrydidwalk 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 ofhim.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?Youdo though, Mina. You’ve been standing here for half an hour like it’s nothing. What does that tell you about yourself?”
NINETEEN
Sam is agitated, bouncing on the balls of his feet. He’d found a phone box and, after being passed around the switchboards of the hospital, he finally spoke to the ward Vicky had been placed on.
“I told them I was her cousin,” he says. “She’s in a coma. They’re treating her for anaphylactic shock. Some insect crawled into her mouth, they think. Probably got right to the back of her throat before it stung her.”
I think of the wasp that crawled over Alice’s fingers. There is a deep feeling of menace, sleek and slippery, uncoiling inside me. Sam shakes his head, as if in wonder.
“It’s taken me fifteen minutes to walk back here on account of every bugger stopping me and asking what’s going on. All asking if I thought Alice did it on purpose.”
“‘On purpose’? How could she have done that?”
Sam shrugs. “I don’t know, Mina, I’m just telling you what they told me.”
“You sound like you’re starting to believe it yourself.”
My voice is firm, and I’m surprised how angry I feel when Sam hesitates, looking down at his hands.
“Do you remember, Mina, what I told you about desperate people? How they’re driven to do desperate things? Mothers finding the strength to lift cars away from trapped infants, the Donner Party eating their own in the snow to survive—climbing into the attic for your dead daughter’s clothes in the hope that a psychic might somehow be able to reach her.”
He gulps, as if he is suppressing a laugh but it’s a bitter, icy sound loaded with grief, and I wish I hadn’t heard it. I nod.