Bog Myrtle & Peat

It was a nasty morning on the hill. The cows bore a blue blear in their pens, and their backs were humped against the wind. When it was light enough to work, I found them standing in a group at the gateback. I threw them some hay, but there was little enthusiasm for it. Then I had to shed them off by hand until the right ones were finally standing nose-to-tail in the race so I could run for the trailer and press them inside it. Water coursed from my jacket and soaked the paperwork so that later when I handed their passports over to the woman in the slaughterhouse, I found that my signatures had exploded. 

I remember when one of these bullocks was born. He’d been laid like an egg in its nest in the heart of a birchwood, and I crawled on all fours to reach him. Seeing that he was a bull, I knew that his life would be short, but after three years, the truth of that fact was suddenly real. Although to be honest, I never liked him much. He was beautiful like his mother, but he lacked her comfort or charm. At times he would seem vacant, and when I came upon him without warning, I found him strangely inactive. Cows are always doing something, so he struck me as weird. But you might have liked him if you’d known him – these things are a matter of taste. 

The woman at the office gave me a line, saying that I was to “Go and see Hamish”. So I walked along a brick-built side-alley in the rain, feeling overlooked by high-rise-housing and the humm of heavy traffic on an A-road. Children laughed, and somebody’s washing had been left to get wetter on a line on a balcony a hundred feet above me. A Royal Standard of Scotland sprawled beneath it, more green with mould than yellow. I found a plate-steel door into the shambles, then realised that my hand came up waxy from the latch.

Inside, discoloured water ran from the gutters. Peering through plastic slats, I saw a room full of salt and a man shovelling slush onto heavy heaps of hides. He squatted down and lifted the corner of one thick skin and I saw red hair of the kind you’d find on salers or a limousine. The back of his t-shirt had ridden up and the crack of his arse winked at me like a cat’s pupil in the sun. After a moment or two, I noticed that he was wearing headphones. That’s why he couldn’t hear me shouting for help or directions. 

I walked on to find another doorway. There were people moving behind a screen of semi-transparent plastic curtains. I stepped through the divide into a bloom of steam; a sound of dribbling and the hiss of hydraulic arms. Two skinned beasts had been hung at full length from a gantry, and a third had the grassbag spilling from it. A man leaned into the gap as if he’d been in there too.

I said “Where’s Hamish?” to the nearest man and the question took him by surprise. He hadn’t seen me coming, so he shouted “Fuck off, you’re not allowed in here”. I moved to ask somebody else, but then he was coming for me to be sure that I would go. He wore a voluminous hairnet beneath his helmet. It looked like the top and bottom halves of his head had been pressed together and the creamy filling was coming out.

I said “Where’s Hamish?” again, feeling frightened into anger and confident that I wouldn’t just be smashed into pulp for no reason. That confidence evaporated. He grabbed me by the shoulder and shouted “Can you no’ read the sign, you fuckin prick”, and he turned me to face a panel on the wall. It said “NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS”, but distantly through many lacquered layers of tallow. I swore and shook his hand off, making to go as if it were my decision. Then I saw a heap of things like heads through an unmasked doorway; beyond them, another man stood with his legs apart and rubbed at something. I stepped back into the rain and the steel door was slammed behind me.

I’d gripped my line and a printed receipt into a bunch, as if I was about to cry and needed something to dry my eyes. It seems like paper’s all I ever have, but even with Hamish found and the beasts pressed into lairage, the rage and embarrassment of it boiled. I said “That’s a right bastard you’ve got working in there”, and Hamish said “Be fair to him though, you shouldn’t have been in there”.