Hanging Carcasses
She stands among hanging carcasses. Each pig has its own meat hook and is wrapped in plastic. The heads have been removed and taken to a different part of the kitchen, where they will be boiled and stripped and turned into sausages and terrines. Beneath the plastic, the pigs appear white, pallid. Their legs are splayed. The posture looks uncomfortable but then she remembers the pigs are dead. She is to chop them into sections, trim the skin and sinew. A few still have their heads attached. These animals are to be spit-roasted. It is one of Cheryl’s jobs to take the long, thin spit and thrust it the length of the animal.
Cheryl is stronger than she looks. Though small and wiry, she is able to carry objects that are up to four times as large as her. She lifts the pigs so easily that the burly men with whom she works feel a kind of strange jealousy, but also a deep-seated revulsion. Cheryl is hyper-productive. Her productivity alarms her colleagues.
“Stop,” her supervisor said to her one day. “You’ve butchered too many pigs. We don’t need this many.”
She got the job through her social worker. The restaurant is committed to “turning people’s lives around” so they give apprenticeships to people who’ve just got out of prison, got clean, or have otherwise been down and out. The restaurant sources its meat from the local, pop-up farm that has been set up in Soho Square. It’s currently full of pigs that are slaughtered and then brought to this restaurant for butchering.
That’s Cheryl’s job. She has begun an NVQ in butchery. She is learning to hack and carve and mince. She is learning about the qualities of different cuts, the texture, the cooking time, the price. She is learning how to saw through bone; how to cure. She enjoys using the cleaver best of all. She likes the weight of it in her right hand, and the way the weight shifts as she lifts it up to shoulder height then throws the steel onto the chopping block, right through whatever lies on top.
She and Richard Scarcroft are getting a flat together. The council are helping them. After everything that happened with her disappearance, she’s been pushed to the top of the waiting list.
Cheryl finishes with her allotted quota of pig carcasses and goes to another part of the kitchen to help peel potatoes. Strictly speaking, this isn’t part of her job, but her social worker is always going on about how good it is to learn new skills.
When Cheryl was underground, she read all about how important it was to have a diverse employment portfolio. Cheryl is a productive member of society now. She keeps telling Richard how to become a productive member of society too, and then he says something back about the capitalist-military machine, and about how they should move to the countryside and grow their own vegetables, and then Cheryl says something back about compound interest, and then the conversation is over.
Cheryl has regular appointments with her social worker, whose name is Miriam. Miriam asks Cheryl questions about her life, about what things were like for her growing up, and about her emotions. She also gives her practical advice, and showed her how to register for a doctor, and how to fill out online forms.
After she came back, the police kept asking her strange questions about where she’d been. They all seemed kind of angry that she had come back, as if it was really important to them all that she stayed missing. In fairness, they had lost many of their colleagues the night she returned, so their upset was understandable. Though Kevin (aka Paul Daniels) died too, and the Archbishop, so it’s not as if all the losses were on their side. Cheryl had to go and identify the bodies. It was horrible. They were both covered in bruises, and there were cuts everywhere. The Archbishop had had half his face smashed in and all of Kevin’s teeth had been knocked out.
One police officer, called Jackie, seemed nice enough, and came to see her afterwards. She brought a box of items that had been found on Kevin’s person. “He had no next of kin,” Jackie explained, “but I thought a couple of these things might have, I don’t know, sentimental value for you, and there would be no harm in seeing if you wanted any of them.” From the box, Jackie pulled old packs of cards, handkerchiefs and magic wands. Cheryl shook her head at the sight of each item, until Jackie pulled out the crown, and Cheryl reached out and took it from her.
“This was mine anyway,” she said.
Jackie smiled. “I’d assumed it was part of his costume. For when he did his performances.”
“No,” Cheryl replied. “I found it in the ground.”
“Well, anyway, forensics reckoned it might be over fifty years old. You should see if it was worn by anyone famous. You know, Laurence Olivier or someone. There are so many theaters around here, you never know. That kind of memorabilia can be worth something.”
Packing
Agatha packs her things into a matching set of suitcases. Roster is already waiting by the car, which is parked on the street. Fedor is sitting up on his haunches on the back seat with his long head hanging out the open window. He watches as she comes down the steps with her largest suitcase and runs back up for the second and the third while Roster lifts them into the boot. The sun is bright. There is morning dew on everything that is cold: the iron railings outside Agatha’s house, the windowpanes, the chrome hubcaps of the large, expensive cars parked all along the street. There are a few people around—a postman across the road; a man hoisted into the air by an elaborate apparatus to clean the top floor windows of the house a couple of doors along. He spills soapy water from his bucket onto
