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‘I won’t bite you,’ I said, but he muttered an excuse and left.
I did not cry. I would not shed tears. I took myself back home bent double with my shawl tied round my head. Mama did not say a word, but she smiled for the first time in many months.
Donkey-Skin was my only comfort. She called me all the names they shouted; all the cruelties made of words. Hours and hours we played the game; for days, for weeks, for years; until the words were mine again, and I was not just bitch, but the queen of all the bitches: not just freak, but empress of all the freakish, with a dazzling crown.
She told me new stories: of a prince clever enough to spot a princess through her wrapper of dirt, who would kiss the beast to make it beautiful. A fearless man who would fight through the bramble forest a hundred years’ thick, past the wolf at the door and the witch at the gate. My fur was my protection. Only the most true of heart would find their way through.
There is a man for you with knife in hand to cut through the world’s binding. A man of blood and flesh and bone and strange in all of them.
Keep an eye out for him. Watch carefully. You may not know him when he appears.
I am Donkey-Skin. Peel away this fur and I am as pink as you. The blood in my veins is as crimson. If you flay me, we stand equal. Beauty is truly skin-deep. We are all horrors under the skin.
ABEL
London, January 1857
It’s not like waking up. I’m awake already. I have been somewhere. Like sleep, but not. My body rocks backwards and forwards. Something has hold of my shoulder and is shaking it, vigorously.
‘Wake up, Abel,’ a voice whispers. ‘It is time.’
‘Time?’ I ask, and forget everything.
I open my eyes. The first things I see are blocks of grey. They move: to and fro, up and down, side to side. A dark column hovers before me and I hold my breath. It leans over my bed, a swirl of mixed brightnesses. It touches my arm, and speaks.
‘Wake up. Are you awake?’
With the words, the ghost becomes a man.
I answer, ‘Yes.’
The smell of dried blood is on his shirt, under his fingernails, on the soles of his boots. I know this smell, for I have it on myself.
‘It is time for work. Come now.’
I look about me, and see blotched and crumbling plaster above my head. Narrow slots pierce one wall close to the ceiling, letting in a dribble of pale light. I am surrounded by a multitude of pallets, packed close together. The spectres rising from them become other men. I inhale the comforting stink of my own body and the warm reek of the others crowded into this place; a morning chorus of belching, hacking, spitting and farting giddies me with happiness. I remember: I sleep here. It is my home.
‘Shift yourself, Abel. You’re like this every morning.’
His name will come to me in a moment. The man waking me works with blood. I sniff again: animal blood. Meat. A butcher? No, a butcher has his own business, and does not need to sleep in a cellar. Then I know: he is a slaughter-man. We work together. This reasoning takes very little time, but he is impatient.
‘Abel, get bloody moving.’
It is my name. This man is my friend.
‘Yes, yes,’ I say cheerfully.
‘You’re in a good mood. Move, you old bastard.’
I am already dressed in most of my clothes. All I need do is put on my cap and boots. I get them from under my head, where I have been using them as a pillow. My friend pats me on the shoulder and smiles. We climb the grimy steps out of our cellar and join the troop of men lining up to pay the tally-man, who leans against the door-jamb, book in one hand, pint bottle of tea in the other, and a stub of a pencil behind his ear. Many of our companions thumb their caps and promise to cough up that evening. But we pay our sixpence on the spot for the next night’s lodging as we leave, and I recall that we do this each morning, at my friend’s insistence.
‘We must pay one night at a time. A man never knows what might happen,’ he says.
The moment the words come out of his mouth his name comes back to me, making me suddenly joyful at the gift of remembrance, at the realisation that he returns me to myself thus every day.
‘Alfred,’ I say. ‘You are my friend.’
He laughs and calls me an old bastard once more.
We step out on to the street and my breath catches at each new sight, which stops being new the moment I look at it. I wonder how I would find myself in this blur of grey and brown if it were not for Alfred, shaking me into wakefulness, striding at my side, half a pace in front, urging me on, drawing me out of my drowse and into a beginning of myself.
The world reveals itself to me piecemeal: the flat surface at my side becomes a long terrace of filthy brickwork interrupted by black holes, which resolve themselves into doors and windows. One of these doors leads to my cellar. I gape at how similar it is to all the others, how simple a thing it would be to confuse one door with another. I lose myself in the contemplation of this wondrous revelation and Alfred grasps my elbow, steering me away from the ordure running down the middle of the street.
‘What would you do without me?’ he says.
‘I do not know.’
I blink at this new world, which of course is the same world as yesterday, only somehow mislaid by me overnight.
‘You’d walk through shit the whole time, that’s for sure!’ He laughs, and I understand that it is a joke, and that he does not realise what he means to me. I feel an urge to thank him, but I do not.
At this early hour the rough sleepers are still piled up in doorways, wrapped around each together against the chill. But Alfred and I are different: we are men of purpose. Men like us stride swiftly to a rightful place of employment. We have work to attend to, work that directs our hands and steers our feet, that fills our bellies with food and drink, that shakes us awake and tires us so we sleep deeply; work that gives us the money to pay for a place that is warm and comradely, a place where one man shares his good fortune with another, and where Alfred and I are often the men with that good fortune, for the pieces of meat that we bring.
Work prompts me with a purpose, with something to remember every morning. Without work I would be empty. I shake my head, and with it that unpleasant notion; I am not empty. I have work, I have food, I have lodging, I have Alfred. I am a happy man. There is no more contentment for which I could ask.
A coal-train heaves itself across the viaduct and we pass beneath, the vaulted arches shuddering a rain of soot on our heads, which Alfred dusts from my shoulders with many jokes about how I look even more like a gyppo when I’m blackened with smuts. The first criers are about, shouting, ‘Milk! Watercress! Hot bread!’ Carts jolt past, the iron clanging of their wheels dinning in my ears, bringing me further back into the glove of my senses. We cross over a stream of raw sewage.
‘I don’t know how you manage it. The smell,’ says Alfred, voice muffled by the kerchief he has clapped over his mouth. ‘What are you about? Make haste.’
I pause and look down at the mess. Not a whit of movement.
‘It does not trouble me,’ I say.
‘Now I know you are lying,’ he replies, uncovering his mouth when we are clear of the sewer.
But I am not. It is an aroma, that is all. I stand a while longer, but then realise that Alfred is no longer by my side. I glance down to see what my feet are about, and they are still when they should be moving. I have been looking down too long; when I look up Alfred has drawn some distance away. I command my feet to pick up their pace and keep up with him, for his legs are transporting him very swiftly, his body slipping neatly between the other men passing to and fro along the thoroughfare. I quicken my pace and after some shoving I draw level.
‘You not awake yet, Abel?’ he says. ‘Come now, buck up, or there’ll be no time to eat.’
My mouth waters at the thought of food.
‘Ha! That’s put a spring in your step! Sprightly, now.’
We bound forward. With each stride, I am bolder and the world takes on more solid form. Each step breathes fire into my legs; the flagstones thump back at my heels, prickling my skin with wakefulness; my liver and lights quiver with the blood pumping around my veins. The jostling and jarring of the passers-by returns the awareness of my arms and ribs; the screaming of this waking city brings back my ears. I smile at every assault, for each serves to remind me of my flesh, my meat, my muscle, bone and blood. I am a man again, not the phantom I was upon waking.
A boy passing to my right shrieks the news so piercingly I clench my teeth: ‘Savage Murder! Shocking Discovery!’Alfred sees my grimace.
‘You all right?’
I nod.
‘Loud, isn’t he?’
I nod again. ‘I am very hungry,’ I say.
‘Ah! A fine suggestion.’
He claps his hands together in the cold. We stop at a stall, which I know is the place we usually take our breakfast, and the man shouts his halloa, handing us fat bacon wrapped in a square of dirty bread; a pint of tea each. I shove all into my mouth, and Alfred laughs.
‘Your stomach, the great pit!’
The vendor roars at the joke. I smile through my bread, spilling some, filling them with even more merriment.
‘You will make yourself sick, you silly bastard,’ says Alfred. ‘Yes, we must hurry, but not that much.’
It occurs to me that I am never sick, but I do not say as much. It comes to me that I have tried to explain this before; but such things confuse him, and confusion takes away his cheerfulness. So I continue to play the fool, and he is happy. The grease sticks to my chin and I wipe it off, licking my fingers.
‘Good stuff?’ says Alfred through his bread.
‘Good stuff,’ I reply.
‘That’s you fixed up.’
Right away I know he is speaking the plain truth. The sticky bacon weighs me down into the earth. I pat my chest, feeling the smoke of the chimneys clogging each breath; rub my belly, testing the ballast of the half-loaf within.
‘Thank you,’ I say to him. ‘You are my friend.’
For a moment, his face changes, and I recognise the look. Suddenly I am aware that I have seen it before, over and over. How I know this I do not recall, nor who has looked at me thus: only that many have. I search for names and faces, but find none. It is most confusing. Alfred pushes the last of his bacon between his lips and is once again my gruff companion.
‘It’s only breakfast,’ he grunts. ‘Any pal would do the same.’
The day is no warmer when we hand back the tin mugs; indeed, it is still dark, but I no longer care for I am hot inside. We bow into the wind and head past the tannery and turn left. As we walk through the gate a church clock somewhere begins to strike the hour. I count five.
‘It is the best part of the day,’ Alfred says. ‘And winter too: the best time of year for men like ourselves.’
We strap on our leather aprons, and are ready. I know why I am here. I am a slaughter-man.
The first bullock of the morning is brought in. It is barely through the rectangle of the door before Alfred lifts his hammer and strikes the blow. The eyes roll and it falls forward on to its chin, grey tongue flopping between its teeth, gentle eye dim between the stiff, gummed lashes. Alfred shouts a brief huzzah at such a clean start and grins.
‘Barely twitching!’ he exclaims.
Two fellows hook the hind legs and winch the carcase upwards. Their names have not yet returned to my recollection, though I should have them before another hour has passed. I grasp the soft, warm ear and strike the knife beneath it; blood pours.
‘He never misses,’ mumbles one of the winchers, still chewing on his breakfast, a piece of bread clamped between his teeth.
His name surfaces in the mud of my mind.
‘Yes, William,’ I agree, pleased with myself.
‘There is a man at peace with his labour,’ says Alfred, and smiles. ‘I can see William snoring in long, untroubled sleep. Can’t you?’ He looks slantwise at me. A blade scrapes against bone. ‘Just like us, eh, Abel? You’re not disturbed by what you see here. Are you?’
‘Me? No.’
‘Good. Me neither. Steady hands and a steady stomach. That’s the two of us.’
The beast starts to kick, and Alfred frowns, but it is only a brief show. I raise the blade and watch it fall, guided by a precision I possess without knowing how as it strikes the exact midline of the belly and splits it open; the insides begin to cascade out in a sodden fall.
William and his companion heave out the innards, briefly sorting through the coils for any obvious signs of sickness. They are quickly satisfied, and I slice away the heart, liver and lights, giving a final grunt of exertion as my blade breaks through the cartilage between the vertebrae. The skinners set to work straight away. Three lads carry away the pluck; four others slop the black waters away continuously, bent into their work, never looking up to see whence comes the thick dark stuff they push into the grille of the drain.
I delight in the handsome geometry of the beast: the soft handshake of the intestines coiling about my arms, humid from the belly, delicate green and blue; the perfect smoothness of the liver; the pink and grey lungs, matched in wonderful symmetry and nesting the heart between. There is no time to ponder each marvel, for we have many beeves to work through.
‘This is a hungry city,’ says Alfred.
Each carcase I split open reveals the same beautiful workings, each with their particular differences: a larger pair of lungs; a surprisingly violet twist of gut. But these small variations only seem to further underline the natural majesty of them all; I cannot avoid the sensation that I am close to some revelation about myself. Why the mysterious insides of beasts should make me feel thus I do not know, but they draw me with an uncanny power that here I might solve some riddle. I push towards the answer: I am a man who knows the mystery of beasts.
I see the way they come in after hours of stamping down a hard road: their ankles gone, hooves raw; driven, beaten, thrashed and pushed towards their deaths – and any man who says a beast doesn’t know it is a fool. No fellow-beast comes back from the killing to tell them, but they guess it true enough.
They smell it on the road. Keeping their heads low: not sniffing for grass to chew, but getting a sniff of those who passed before, the excruciating spoor of that last drive, the screaming muscle, the aching bones. Most of all they smell the fear.
And if they are bad on the road in, that is nothing to how they are when they get to the yard and are left standing, listening to the sharpening of blades. They smell death before it happens; hear the thump of the stunning blow before it cracks the first skull of the day; taste the blood of their brothers misting the air from the day before, when their guts spilled out of the bag of their bellies.
The fear of beasts. It is a fire that runs between them dry as tinder. When they get it in them the worst things happen. So I strive to make it quick. Today, we are unlucky.
Alfred raises his hammer with a good will, but when it falls some agency turns it awry and it falls to one side, a feather’s width only, but enough to inflict pain without release. The bullock rears up, its skull caved in. How can a dead animal leap up? When they are hammered, that should be an end to it. But I’ve seen what I’ve seen. Slaughter-men know these things.
It pauses, hanging in the air. We are fixed also, though we must clear out of its way for the plunge that will follow: it wants to take us into that animal darkness, and Heaven help anyone in the way when it comes crashing down. I have seen a man lose an arm, torn off at the shoulder by those fiendish hooves, and heard the beast give a last moan of delight to hear its murderer scream.
It falls, staggering. Alfred tries a second blow, but it swings its head despite our attempts to hold it steady, and this blow is worse than the first, breaking the bone beneath the eyes. The screaming starts: a sound no-one would believe who had not heard it. Women have it when they push a child out of them; beasts have it when we push the life out of them, and do it badly.
It is dead enough to fall to its knees, undead enough to thrash out when the hooks dig through its tendons and the hauling starts, so it takes four men to get it up there, the four who should be mopping the floor, so now we are slipping in the bile it has spewed up. I cut its throat right across, more than is needed, to sever the windpipe as well as the vein, and air whistles out, but at least it is a hiss and not the awful keening.
Finally, we tie it off: heels up, head down, tongue licking the floor; and still struggling. The blade is in my hand. My fellows are getting angrier, and I am the only one who can do a thing about it. I lift my hand; the blade falls and I have some comfort that this stroke at least is deep and true. I lose myself in the sight of its guts, gushing out in a smooth clean tumble. I do not let myself see its juddering terror as I kill it for the last time. I will not let myself think of that at all.
The hauliers are bringing up the next beast, shouting, ‘Get a move on, you fuckers. How long does it take to kill a bullock, for Christ’s sake?’Their charge is restless: it can smell and hear and taste and see what is before it, and knows its share. Then it is in, stamping out its complaint, and we must continue. I look at Alfred: he is sweating, his hand unsteady. The haulers hate him, the winch-men hate him, the sweepers hate him, the animals hate him. His day is already bad, and the only direction it can go is to the worse.
‘Alfred,’ I say.
I hold out my hand and he places the hammer into my grasp. The bullock looks at me with wet brown eyes, and I look back; I lay my hand on its flank until it grows still. Then it happens: it stumbles forwards, as though kneeling in prayer. I am to be its killer, but I am kind, each blow struck by me being on the mark. It knows it will be fully dead when it is split open. I am the only one it can be certain of. Other men try but I succeed, every time. It closes its eyes, knowing I will be quick and sure. It is my nature.
I do not disappoint: neither the beast nor my companions. They see my kindness, and each of them pauses, even the most brutish of the hauliers, and breathe out their relief.
‘You’re a good man,’ says Alfred, and rubs my shoulder, swabbing it with blood.
His voice snaps in the middle, dry and thin. I return the hammer to him.
The day swims past, and I drift upon its languorous current. My arm continues to rise and fall and I am drawn into a drowse by the movement, by the length and silkiness of black hair flowing in a stream from wrist to elbow, the veins standing out along the length.
With each fall of the blade the muscles of my hand and thumb stiffen and relax, and I find myself thinking how simple a thing it would be to make a vertical incision upwards from the wrist; how soft the curtains of skin as I part them, warm as the inside of a mouth, revealing the workings of the body within.
