Meat

by Ian Watson

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

When Saul and Diane save a wild rabbit from a hungry weasel in a quiet country lane, they inadvertently unleash the vengeance of a bloodthirsty, carnivorous force. Soon their sanity and their lives are at risk - as are the young people of a cell of the Animal Liberation Front with whom they join forces to learn the terrible secrets of their rural village. A visit to a battery chicken shed turns into an animal Auschwitz, where Saul is held prisoner. And a raid on a butcher's shop brings to murderous life a full size model of the meatman which, armed with a butcher's cleaver, goes hunting for blood and MEAT!

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 246

Sample

The day they set Tim’s rabbit free was meant to be a celebration, though it didn’t quite work out that way.

Diane was sure she had at last hit on the ideal spot: a wild wood of hawthorn and hazel bordering a twisty, uphill lane. Over the way, a wheat-field. The closest human habitation was a farmhouse a good half-mile away, isolated by another half-mile from the dozen-cottage hamlet of Denham. Of an evening many buns bobbed across the by-way from wood to field and back again.

So, on a Sunday evening in June the Cobbett family – Diane and Saul with their two youngsters Tim and Josh – set out for a picnic supper. Squeezed between the boys on the back seat of the aging Renault, a stout cardboard box held Teddybun.

The soon-to-be ex-pet was a burly grey Chinchilla, now three years old, in his prime. On a good diet of pellets, muesli, sultanas, apple leaves (which he loved), cabbage and carrots julienne, Teddybun was in fine fettle. Moreover, he was muscular. He’d never been confined in cramped quarters. Diane had built him a generous run as well as extending the original hutch into a multi-chambered rabbit mansion with ever-open door.

In fact, Teddybun’s only blemish was that his bob-tail was clotted with droppings. The bun had always protested whenever Saul shovelled up the growing heap of dung marbles. A full latrine was a buck rabbit’s treasure hoard. Teddybun would tug at Saul’s shoelaces, and twice the rabbit bit Saul on the knuckle. On the last occasion, Saul cleared the earthen toilet far too thoroughly. Rebelliously, Teddybun relocated his latrine to the top of his hutch extension, which was a converted cupboard weatherproofed with roofing felt. Hot sunshine softened the tar in the mineralised felt; droppings began to glue themselves. That was the final straw which liberated Teddybun.

‘He’s halfway through his life,’ Diane explained for the umpteenth time as Saul steered the Renault along a narrow, winding road between corn and cow pastures. A rainbow sticker in the rear window announced: Ecology is our only hope. A red decal stated more bluntly: Meat is Murder.

‘He’s never met another rabbit since we bought him.’ Bought him obscenely, like a slave. ‘Now he can live a real life. He can mate. Even if he doesn’t last the winter, though I’m sure he will, it’ll be better than another three years in solitary. Right?’

Tim, who had recently started school, wanted to know, ‘Won’t the other rabbits gang up on him?’

‘Teddybun’s twice their size,’ said Saul. Yes, he ought to be able to kick shit out of other bucks. ‘And he’s clever too.’

‘Is that because of his muesli?’ asked the boy. ‘How will he get his muesli?’

‘There’ll be berries. Grain. Grass.’ Saul tried to convince himself.

‘So long as he doesn’t bloat on the grass.’

‘Next year we’ll see lots of superbuns bobbing about. That’ll please the farmers!’ Saul didn’t much like farmers; nor did Diane. All those nitrates. Packed cattle trucks careering on their way to market, beasts lowing with fear.

‘We’ll come back and see if he’s all right?’ Tim asked. ‘What if he isn’t?’

‘We aren’t going to be silly cowards,’ said Diane.

Arriving, Saul nosed the Renault into a gateway leading to the wheat-field. Almost immediately another car drove by. Two minutes afterwards, a Land Rover. Once you stopped for a while, the least of lanes seemed a highway.

‘You two stay here,’ Diane told the boys. ‘Your Dad’ll carry the box over the road. We don’t want to be seen.’

‘But Mum, he’s mine.’

‘Not any more.’

‘It’s not fair, I want to see him go.’

‘Let him, Di.’

‘Stay by your Dad, then. Be careful of cars!’

‘Will Teddybun be careful?’

‘He’s clever,’ Saul repeated.

‘Isn’t scared of people, though.’

Access to the wood was more difficult than Saul supposed. Beyond the verge, a steep clogged ditch. Brambles plucked at him. A nettle stung his hand. He swore, and gripped a spar of fence embedded in raggy hedgerow to haul him up. His shoes tried to slide. The upset rabbit scrabbled and thumped inside the box.

‘Help me, Dad.’

‘How can I? Shhh, don’t look at me!’ Another vehicle approaching. Stooping, lodging box between knees and hedge, Saul hung on. His legs ached. As soon as the coast was clear, he tore open the cardboard flaps. Teddybun blinked up at him.

Tangled copse, maze of undergrowth, some open spaces. Lifting Teddybun out, almost overbalancing, Saul managed to toss the rabbit through a gap. Bun sat bewildered, sniffing. Far from running off to explore, the bun didn’t move an inch.

‘Shoo! Scat!’ Saul clapped his hands, windmilled an arm. Teddybun flinched but didn’t budge. With empty box, Saul renegotiated the ditch and shepherded Tim back over the road.

‘I want to see, Dad.’

They could see from the car. Long ears, grey fur, same place.

Diane dispensed salad rolls and pure apple juice.

‘What if someone sees him and takes him home?’ wondered Tim. ‘They’ll lock him in a tiny hutch.’

‘Isn’t it disgraceful?’ said Diane. ‘Two square feet, same pellets day after day, not enough water. The idea that buns like eating dry hay and their own droppings!’

‘But what –?’

‘He’ll be off as soon as he spots other rabbits,’ Saul reassured. ‘They’re all hiding because we’re here. So we’d better go as soon as we’ve eaten.’

‘Can I leave this lettuce for him?’

‘No.’

That had been four months previously, and in spite of Tim’s wistful hints the Cobbetts hadn’t been back along that lane, which was off their usual routes. Saul thought that their older boy appreciated the moral strength they’d shown. Personally, Saul had experienced pangs of empty grief for several days after Teddybun’s departure. His heart had gone out to the rabbit, wishing it well. In bed the first night he had even prayed silently, after a fashion, to the God of Rabbits, the Great Rabbit Spirit, not that there was one, but just in case there might be.

One Saturday afternoon in October they were driving along a different minor road back home to Woodburn. They’d been to the new health food shop in Uppington run by the Jesus Children. Uppington was a much larger village than Woodburn, on the ‘A’ road leading to the county town of Blanchester twelve miles south. The shop was still a commercial risk, confided Mary who served there, the first branch the Jay-Cees had opened outside of a town. Though Diane didn’t care for the Jay-Cees – Baptist ravers who wore battledress at rallies – she felt this venture deserved support. Here was one in the eye to all the local nature rapists.

‘Mary said those nuns at Minch Abbey keep battery hens,’ Diane told Saul. She was at the wheel. Saul was balancing a pile of school exercise books on his knees, busy marking maps of imaginary nature reserves concocted by his class of twelve-year-olds. He taught geography at the large comprehensive in Kingsford just outside Blanchester on the ‘B’ road.

That’s what funds those bloody nuns, Saul – thousands of poor hens in cages!’

‘Bloody,’ Tim echoed from the back, distracted from his Beano comic. Brother Josh steered a model harvester round the upholstery as if it was a racing car. ‘Whee-eee. Rum-rum. Vroom.’

‘Yes, they’re bloody. So is everyone who exploits animals. But don’t use that word.’

‘You did.’

‘That’s different.’

Saul’s mind wandered from his exercise books. In another year [Josh would follow his brother to school – they’d both be bussed to the primary school in Brendon Regis. Then Diane could go back to teaching Craft and Design, preferably in the same school as him; otherwise they would need two aging cars. The family income would rise; lean times would be over.

Several years of belt-tightening had fully justified themselves in the production of Tim and Josh. Yet in other respects … Saul stared at the bare, October-sodden, misted fields and hummed a low dirge-like noise of displaced complaint which the car engine mostly drowned.

Stuck on her own in a small village with two nippers, energetic Diane had become – what was the diplomatic word? – obsessive. Maybe it had been a mistake moving to a village so as to live in the countryside amongst nature? It wasn’t that Saul jibbed at their totally vegetarian diet. That made financial as well as moral sense. Besides, Di was a wizard with spinach quiches, vegetable curries, spiced rice, thick pea soup. It wasn’t just that nowadays she would shake her fist and shout abuse at passing fox-hunters, any of whom might easily be school governors who could interview her in future and remember her bouncy chestnut hair, her Rubens milkmaid looks.

It wasn’t just that the boys had certain toys taken away from them, others denied to them. Obviously kids oughtn’t to play with imitation guns. And Josh had hardly brooded when his model farm was culled of its four plastic pigs and two plastic turkeys – since pigs and turkeys were reared for one reason only: slaughter. Nor was it just the matter of Teddybun.!

It was … the mood of extremism, the loss of joy, the bleakness of fanaticism; a sense almost of madness caused by pressure, as when a skull fracture squeezes the brain. Life was pressure, unless you pressured other living things to make you prosperous. Pressured people, pressured poultry. Life was a crumbling cottage; life was a clapped-out car. Oh, he saw the pressures at school, to become victim or exploiter. Twelve-year-olds worrying about the dole, crazy property prices, the packed, poisoned, poor-prospect future. He felt all the pressures himself. What had Diane once said? An unemployed family eating a dinner of fatty sausages are victims, but they’re victimisers too – of pigs, of other living creatures. They’re joining in the tyranny in turn. Break that link, and people might be enlightened. She was right, though probably it wasn’t so simple.

The Renault rounded a bend. On the crown of the road ahead a creature thrashed about in broken agony. Despite the boys loose in the back, Diane instantly stamped on the brakes.

‘Something’s been run over! The bastards didn’t stop!’

With the rubbery resilience of kids, Tim and Josh had survived the abrupt stop, though Josh was now bleating, ‘Me howitzer! Me howitzer’s lost!’

‘Harvester,’ Saul corrected automatically.

Tim was more interested in the spectacle ahead and in the word ‘bastard! which he repeated as though this was the name of the afflicted animal. As soon as Diane opened her door and leapt out, the writhing creature promptly disentangled. A sleek, russet-furred worm on legs raced for sanctuary in the grass verge; a grey rabbit lurched, staggered, and fell over.

No road casualty, this. A weasel had been clinging to the frantic rabbit’s back about to kill it. Thrusting the school books onto Diane’s seat, Saul climbed out; Tim came also.

The assaulted rabbit lay panting in shock, making no effort to escape the approaching giants.

‘I don’t see any blood,’ Saul said.

‘Mum!’ Tim pointed at the verge. Amid the long grass a lithe little body reared, exposing its white fur underparts. Up on its hind legs the weasel was staring at them with beady malevolence – outright hatred.

Saul clapped his hands. ‘Shoo! Buzz off!’

The weasel quivered with intensity, its only concession to movement.

Saul gathered the rabbit carefully into his arms since it couldn’t stay in the middle of the road. The scrappy, skinny beast only weighed a fraction of what Teddybun had massed. (Four months later, was Teddybun also a wretched starveling?) Mud immediately smeared any part of Saul’s anorak touched by the rabbit, which was damp and filthy. Yet it kicked its powerful hind legs a couple of times.

There, there, poor little thing,’ he crooned to calm it. ‘Seems in working order. At least the weasel didn’t have time to snap its spine.’

He walked to the nearer verge and deposited the rabbit, which scrambled a very short distance before flopping. The weasel watched all this alertly.

‘We can’t leave it here, Saul. The moment we’re gone the weasel will nip across. It’s just waiting.’

He gathered the rabbit up again. ‘I’ll carry it a hundred yards down the road. You drive after me. It’s half paralysed with shock. Maybe it can’t survive.’

‘Do you suggest putting it out of its misery? With a rabbit punch, or a rock?’

‘I’d probably bungle it.’ Oh, he’d clapped mosquitoes between his hands and squashed woodworm with his fingertip, but never killed anything bigger in his life. Where was the sense in saving the rabbit from a quick murder to give it a messy ‘humane’ execution? Accompanied by Tim, Saul walked on. The Renault chugged slowly after.

When he next laid the rabbit on the grass it was no more energetic. Across the way the thin body reared again, glaring inflexibly. Its mouth opened; it seemed to hiss through tiny sharp teeth, though the sound was inaudible.

‘What a damn cheek! I suppose this was its supper. Look at my coat, all filthy from it.’

‘Why don’t we take it home, Dad? Nurse it, and bring it back here when it’s better? We still have Teddybun’s run and food.’

‘We just got rid of one captive animal.’

‘It’s unfair. It’ll die.’

‘We’re responsible,’ Diane called intensely from the car.

‘For everything in the world?’

'For this little bit of everything, where we interfered.’

Sighing, Saul peeled off his soiled anorak. He wrapped the bunny securely, head and ears protruding, then climbed back into the car where the exercise books had been swept onto the floor. Tim scrambled in beside his brother, quietly triumphant. As Diane engaged gear and pulled away, the weasel darted along the further verge, rearing to gaze vindictively. Quickly the Renault outdistanced the brown and white smudge.

Saul stroked the bunny’s head, then desisted. Maybe he was terrifying the limp animal rather than comforting it. Instead he stroked his own beard – that of a young Solzhenitsyn, said Di – without which his face might have looked morose and undistinguished. Those whiskers lent a puddingy countenance and his gimlet eyes a certain messianic nobility.

Terrifying the animal? He remembered …

After Saul and Diane were married during their teacher training at Loughborough, they lived in a tiny flat there. The first time Saul walked round that Midland town he had the impression that the centre was all butchers’ shops with two main items on display: huge meat pies and slabs of marzipan. Could this really be the local diet, meat pies and marzipan? Not yet vegetarian, he bought a wedge of pie and a slice of marzipan to test the combination – and felt sick.

Saul was from Nottingham, only child of a meter reader for the Electricity Board, whose wife had worked in the lace industry and who carried on making fine needlepoint at home. When he was small, since he noticed that his mother was paid money when people took her work away, Saul had believed that, she was creating strange treasure maps. He began drawing maps himself and became fascinated by maps of all kinds. Amazing how many different maps there could be of the same place! Maps of the minerals and rocks, of the rainfall, the soil, the vegetation, the towns and transport networks.

In his mind hid a secret map which he dreamt about but could never draw convincingly. This showed the route to paradise, to happiness, to Avalon and Robin Hood’s greenwood rolled into one, to a jewelled grail and wild deer and Maid Marian … but most of Sherwood Forest had long since been axed and these days Marian was working in a service station on the Ml motorway. So he studied geography and met Diane, who seemed to him like his image of Maid Marian. She too was from a city, Northampton, second daughter of a leather worker thrown out of work from the dying boot and shoe trade carried on in dingy Victorian premises, cramped by cheaper foreign imports. She too had rural dreams.

How they’d both laughed when she showed him Northampton’s art gallery. The ground floor was devoted to footwear of all kinds, even including glass slippers and a snow-boot worn by an elephant crossing the Alps for a movie about Hannibal. The picture gallery upstairs pursued the same theme fetishistically. Madonna with Boot. Still Life with Sandal. Christ Shoeing the Money Lenders out of the Temple – that was a joke; Di had a rich sense of humour then, and a sensuality. He imagined the two of them in a thatched cottage in his secret forest, her tiny flower water-colours hanging on the walls, she cuddling him before the log fire while the snow fell deep after they’d stuffed themselves with mushrooms and pheasant and venison and home-baked bread. Perhaps only mushrooms and bread; already she was unhappy about meat.

Just outside Loughborough stood a tiny place named Nanpantan which sounded as though it ought to have been a Vietnamese village. Intrigued, they caught a bus to it one day and had lunch in one of the few buildings, a huge roadhouse. The empty bar was as big as a ballroom, hung with Corot prints and other French impressionist landscapes. The only food on offer was beef curry: undercooked rice with crude gobbets of meat in curried gravy as laced with salt as the sea. They quit after a few mouthfuls, and swore off meat forever.

In nearby Leicester they acquired a pair of chipmunks, in a large cage with an exercise wheel. That was because they loved animals. Out all day at college, it would be cruel to keep a cat or dog. Besides, chipmunks only ate sunflower seeds.

Every time they returned to the flat one of the chipmunks would at once leap into the wheel and rotate it vigorously (be-dum, be-dum) as if in glad greeting. The other would scrabble up one side of the cage, over the roof, and down the other side (be-doom, be-doom). Up, and over, and down.

Only after some months did it occur to Saul that the chipmunks ran because they were terrified, but there was hardly anywhere to run to. One day he and Diane decided to let Ben and Babs out for an exploration of the living room. Lifting the cage down from its table and opening the wire door, they sat back with quiet pleasure to watch adventures.

The chipmunks’ twitching noses tested the open gap many times before they dared venture further. Ten minutes went by before Ben and Babs at last tumbled out and began to move around the floor. They didn’t exactly run, or walk. Instead they plucked themselves along at considerable speed like absurd clockwork toys with wheels in their bellies. They seemed to have no idea how to use their legs normally. After a whole lifetime spent caged they possessed the wrong muscles. Their mode of locomotion was disgusting as though Ben and Babs weren’t furry little pets at all but semi-mechanical hairy bags of entrails. Saul bent to pick them up and put them pack.

Both chipmunks evaded him. Running flat out on their bellies, claws scrabbling, however ungracefully, they escaped him time and again. Finally he snatched at a passing pet. His hand closed not on its body but on its tail – and that tail came off in his fingers.

He clutched, in horror, a twitching bottle brush; dropped it immediately in disgust. Ben – or was it Babs? – ran on, a long thin spike sticking out from the animal’s rump, the inner core of the tail flicking one drop of blood from the tip then another.

At last he trapped each chipmunk under a cane wastepaper basket and restored them to the cage. Ben – or Babs – sat beady-eyed, flanks heaving, seemingly oblivious to the loss of its bushy tail.

Over the next few days the raw spike had dried up, withered, and fallen off. A week later Saul and Diane carried the cage down into the shared, wild patch of garden out back to set the pets free. Although so much like squirrels in appearance, Ben and Babs didn’t flee to the nearest leafy tree. They scrambled into an open drain and vanished down it like two sewer rats.

In retrospect that had been the real beginning of the liberation of Teddybun, and of Diane’s protestations that all pet shops should be banned, likewise sideshows at fairs which dangled prizes of goldfish in asphyxiating plastic bags, likewise circuses and zoos.

The episode of Ben and Babs had elements of farce – farce for humans; horror for the animals. Or was the horror only in the human mind? And had that horror now bur rowed so deep into Di (much as he agreed with her, a hundred per cent) that it was like a tumour of the brain, deranging her behaviour? She too had been shut in a cage, of sorts, for the past few years along with two monkeys called Tim and Josh.

If only they were free to find the greenwood. Free of replacement window offers they couldn’t afford, free of parent-teacher meetings about discipline and the new exams and raising money through car. . .