LITMIR.BIZ

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feet. She straightened up, wiped her mouth and, before she could change her mind yet again, headed over to the wardrobe and pulled out the testing kit which had been languishing there, driving her crazy, since the day before the MAFF people first called.

      Afterwards she didn’t quite know what to do. Call her mother? No. Anyway she was away in El Salvador, taking artistic holiday snaps. Burst in on Charlie – and Grey and the General – in that freezing cold dining room? Definitely not. Have a bath?

      There was no hot water for a bath. She decided to go straight to bed. She took off her uncomfortable urban clothes (skintight jeans @ £125, stripy cashmere jersey with pointless zip and hood), which were so incredibly ineffective in her new rural life, and replaced them with a pair of pyjamas and every jersey she could find in Charlie’s cupboard.

      She lay awake for what felt like hours after that, trying to persuade herself it was real, trying to feel what she was meant to feel – fulfilled and magical and womanly and blessed, trying not to feel terrified of how her life, which until she met Charlie had always been so painstakingly well structured, seemed so quickly to be slipping out of her control. But then somehow she must have fallen asleep because she woke with a start at about three o’clock to discover that Charlie still hadn’t joined her.

      Out on the icy landing she could find no sign of him either. The house was quiet. The vast, stone-floored entrance hall beneath her was shrouded in black. She bent over the banister and thought she saw a faint crack of light coming from beyond the back lobby, and then suddenly, from the same direction, she heard the muffled sound of something large crashing to the ground.

      ‘…Charlie?’

      The house was old – especially the back part, the part where the noise was coming from. Among her many strengths (her warmth, her determination, her well maintained contacts book and, though she felt far from beautiful that night, her delicate elfin good looks), Jo was a practical woman, not remotely given to superstitious anxieties. But she was terrified.

      ‘…Charlie?’

      No response, just a distant shuffling, followed by a long, low moan.

      ‘…Charlie!’

      Slowly, carefully, in almost total darkness, she followed the sound as far as the back lobby, where she paused for a moment. She could hear breathing very clearly now: heavy, quick-fire, phlegmy breathing, like a sleeping giant. The back lobby led on to the kitchen, and beyond that to the pantry and the boot room, and from there to the stairs which went down to the cellars. The thin stream of light was coming from the cellars, somewhere Jo and her notebook had not bothered to venture before.

      Tentatively, she walked down the steps and found herself in a large, dank room cluttered with what looked like pieces of rotting furniture. There was a room on either side of her, both of them in darkness, and in front of her, a miserable, decaying corridor. She could hear the noises coming from beyond it: the breathing, someone hammering and then Charlie, ‘It’s OK, girl. It’s OK. Take it easy. Just a bit of noise. I’ll be done in a sec.’

      Which was when she finally saw them. Dwarfing the corridor and the small room at the end of it, dwarfing Charlie: two old Highland cows, covered in cobwebs and flakes of rotting paint, puffing after their strange exertions.

      Charlie looked up. ‘Jo!’ he said. ‘It’s—How are you? I thought you were asleep.’

      ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ she asked.

      ‘What? Me? Nothing.’

       ‘Nothing?’

      ‘Shh! You’ll frighten the girls.’

      ‘The girls?’ Gingerly, to ensure that she wasn’t dreaming, she edged forward and put out a finger to touch one of them. It responded with a friendly grunt and by wiping its damp nose on the sleeve of her outer jersey. She snatched her hand away quickly. ‘Charlie, they’re not girls, they’re cows. What are they doing in the cellar?’

      ‘Jo…You’re wonderful.’

       ‘What?’

      ‘I’m just saying—’ He hesitated. ‘This has nothing to do with you.’

      ‘Are you hiding them?’

      ‘Please. Mind your own business.’

      ‘What if they’re infected?’

      ‘They’re not infected. They’ve been nowhere near any other farm animals for almost twenty-five years. But I’m going to let them work out their quarantine down here, just to be sure.’

      ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Charlie. We’ve got to get these cows back in the shed where they belong—’

      ‘They’re not going anywhere.’

      ‘Apart from anything else it’s not—I mean they’re probably not going to make it through the winter anyway. It’s not worth it.’ Charlie glared at her and, without another word, turned back to his hammering. He was trying to fix a plank over a large air vent, but every time he hit the nail, chunks of wall fell out. She watched him for a while. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be—’ She paused to think of the right word, but all she could come up with was ‘realistic’. She decided not to fill the gap.

      ‘You must be freezing,’ he said over his shoulder.

      ‘I’m fine, Charlie, my darling. That’s not really the point.’

      ‘I know it isn’t.’ He turned back to face her. ‘The point is I’ve got to get this place soundproofed before morning. So please. Seriously. I love you and everything. But either give me a hand, or – go away.’

      She looked at the old cows, so gentle and decrepit, their heads and necks still bobbing rhythmically from the trouble of getting down the cellar stairs, flakes of paint the size of saucers hanging off their enormous horns. She looked at Charlie, so utterly in earnest. A year ago, in her more black-and-white days, she might easily, at this point, have decided to bring in the police. That night she didn’t know what to do. The cows couldn’t do any harm, working out their quarantine down here in the cellar, and the idea of getting them out again, and then tomorrow of watching Charlie lining them up for the stocks…

      ‘By the way, Charlie,’ Jo said sulkily about a minute later, sounding absurdly, self-consciously casual. They were squeezed between the cows and the decaying wall, trying together to fix the soundproofing plank without causing the whole rotten cellar to disintegrate. ‘I’m pregnant. Already. OK?’ (She was embarrassed; it was embarrassingly quick.) ‘I only mention it because we’d better not get caught. I mean I’m definitely not going to prison over this.’

      The extermination process was a long and horrible one, beginning before dawn had properly broken, and not ending until dusk on the following day. First to be slaughtered was the dairy herd. It took seven men five hours to dispatch them. Les, the Fiddleford farm hand, would set each one on her journey, steering her the hundred-odd yards through the snow, down the steep path, to the makeshift stall where Charlie stood ready to slip her head into a brace. She would be injected with sedative and then led from the stocks to the land in front of the pyre, as close as possible to the body of the cow which had preceded her, where she would be shot in the head.

      Nobody spoke much. The animals rolled in, the animals rolled out, the bodies piled up. The Ministry people had seen it all before. They’d been doing it every day for weeks, which isn’t to suggest that they were enjoying themselves. But it was a job with an hourly rate. It wasn’t their twin sister’s billy goat who was waiting in the yard to have its brain scrambled.

      Grey McShane shuffled out to the killing fields just before noon, by which time the slaughterer’s regulation white body suits were soaked in blood. He should have been wearing one himself. One had been left by the back door for him. But Grey was not fond of orders.

      In fact he was wearing a Prada suit which had lost its buttons and a pair of the General’s old gumboots. He was carrying

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