One

'Fuck your water!' The girl again, stabbing her head into his airspace like a weapon. 'What are you doing here? This is our sweetshop. You been stealing sweets?'

Jane licked his lips. Carefully he said: 'We took some painkillers. Some inhalers. That's all.'

'That's all?' asked the man who had injured himself. He hobbled around them, each stamp of his foot on the ground pumping fresh blood up around the blade embedded in his thigh. 'The fact is, you set foot in our sweetshop. Without express permission.'

Another of the men ducked towards them, squat, boxheaded, his teeth bared, gums bleeding a scarlet wash across them. 'Shoplifters,' he said, 'will be prosecuted.'

'We didn't know,' Jane said. 'You can have it all back. We'll go somewhere else.'

'No. You won't,' said the girl, her words turning to ash. Her eyes were on Jane's throat. She was unhooking her axe; they all were.

Jane could see what was coming. He drove his fist into box-head's face and shouted 'Run.'

He saw Becky drag Aidan away. Brendan was flapping at the girl's hands, trying to get her to drop the axe. Chris's hands were up in an appeal. Nance had ducked behind him, her hands holding on to the waistband of his jeans. Angela was leaning over her knees, praying or crying or trying to catch her breath.

Jane heard movement behind him and turned to keep it in front. As he circled he saw Angela lift her head, concern folding into her features. She raised a hand. He didn't realise she was reaching for him until he felt the blow on the back of his head. Suddenly he was on his knees, warmth trickling down his nape. He tried to stand but he couldn't feel his legs. Cold filled them. He vomited, put out a hand, but his eyes couldn't measure how far he had left to fall. He heard someone shout, 'No, Chris,' and then a cry: avian, shrill.

And then blackness.

9. THE PLUCKING POSTS

Blue sky. Such a searing science-fiction blue that he thought it must be a screen and looked to the horizon in case he could see its edge. He was lying on his back in a field. His arms were outstretched. Stanley's hands were touching his. They wrestled with each other lightly, fingers interlacing, interlocking, prodding, stroking. Jane turned his hand into a claw and froze it in mid-air. He began to move it jerkily, like a crippled crab:

Chum-chiggle-iggle-um-ching-cha . . .

No, Daddy, Stanley cried out, his voice a mash of giggles and pretend fright. No.

Jane moved his hand closer to where he imagined Stanley lay, looking up in gleeful terror as the probing fingers drew nearer. There was a tickle at the end of it all, when the suspense became so great that he was convinced Stanley would come apart at the seams with unbearable pleasure.

A shadow flitted across the rearing perfection of sky. A jet, Jane thought. But it returned, or was followed by another.

Dad?

Jane was twelve when he went fishing for mirror carp with his best friend at the time, a boy called Carl from his class at school. They'd cycled to the gravel pit, mist-covered and grey this particular winter morning, with rods already set up and baited, pieces of corn infused with vanilla extract speared on their hooks. Jane had told Carl that vanilla extract was a bit gay, but Carl said the fish liked it, that they wouldn't spit the corn out because of it.

They ditched their bikes next to the pit and pitched a tent. They made their casts and sat watching the tips of their rods. Soon Jane dug into his rucksack and started divvying up their breakfast. Morning rolls spread with peanut butter and mashed bananas, cold crispy bacon wrapped in kitchen paper, a flask of hot chocolate. Jane was bored after a couple of hours. He wasn't the fishing nut; he'd simply agreed to come along with Carl who had a passion for carp. It had sounded like an adventure. It was just cold and dull.

He told his friend he was going to do a round of the pit on his bike, maybe see if there was anywhere to do some jumps. Carl waved him off. Something made Jane turn to look back at his friend when he was on the opposite side of the pit. A figure, slight and pale, wearing a Lord Anthony covered in Star Trek badges and jeans so faded they were almost white.

Almost immediately he heard the sound of cows lowing. He turned toward the noise, nervous. He didn't like cows. He didn't like their thick pink tongues licking at too-wet nostrils. He didn't like their swollen udders and the caking of shit around their tails. They stank. They attracted flies. He drove his mother berserk because she was worried he wasn't getting enough calcium inside him.

There were no cows in the field. He could hear the groan of morning traffic rising from the main road, a couple of hundred yards away. And this lowing.

He scrambled through the sludge of rotten leaves and mud, splashing cold, dirty water all up the back of his cords – his mother was going to clear his lugholes out over that when he got home – and found his way barred by a fence. Behind that were a couple of parked cars and an open door to the building beyond. The sound was coming from that.

Jane thought to go back to Carl and ask him about it – he knew this area better – but instead he dumped his bike and climbed over the fence. He went to the door and peeked inside. There were five men in white gowns and helmets, like a team of weird construction workers dressed up as ghosts. One of them turned around and Jane was aghast to see an apron slicked with blood. He stepped back out into the cold air, glad of it in his lungs, smacking him in the face. He thought about getting back on his bike and cycling to a phone booth, calling the police. There was murder going on here.

He had to make sure. He ran around the back of the building, where lorries were backed up against open bays. He heard the cows again. And other noises. Screams and squeals. This sounded nothing like the deaths that occurred on Kojak. Through a window he saw cows being led to pens. A man with what looked like a large black wand bent over them and pressed it to their heads. There was a hiss, a deep ka-chunk sound, and the animals dropped.

He didn't know whether what he felt then was relief or sickness. It was another kind of murder, after all.

He was thinking of bacon sandwiches, and whether he would miss them if he decided to become a vegetarian, when he heard another scream. This one was altogether different. It was high-pitched. Somehow wetter. It suggested a knowledge of what was happening to its owner.

He ran back to the windows, thinking of intelligent animals, wondering crazily when the British public had developed a taste for dolphins or octopi, and saw a long steel trench with lots of metal teeth turning within it. Someone had been piling indeterminate cuts and wobbling, shiny bits of offal from a plastic chute into one end but had got his arm trapped. His mates were running towards him and the man was screaming Shut it off, shut it off. Thankfully, Jane couldn't see his face. He didn't say anything else after that, because the auger ground him into the trench and he was killed. Jane heard the scream cut out as if the man had flicked off his own power switch. He'd heard, even at this distance, through the glass, the pulverisation of thick bone. He'd seen the teeth of the machine impacted with flesh and torn clothes. The man's face had risen from the trench, scooped up by a blade, like a bad horror mask on a pound-shop hook.

Jane was sick where he stood, violent and without warning. It was as if someone had punched it out of him from within.

He didn't remember climbing back over the fence, collecting his bike, or returning to Carl.

'Where have you been, you bone-on?' Carl demanded. 'You nearly missed this.'

He stood back to allow Jane a look at the mirror carp lying in the grass. It was enormous. It seemed deformed. Its skin was olive-coloured, there were maybe four or five scales, dotted near the tail and the dorsal fin. Its eyes protruded, its huge mouth gawped, gasping in the air. Jane felt suddenly detached from nature. Atrocity was in front of his face and at his heels. He couldn't understand how this thing could still be living, how it could have come into being in the first place. There was this sudden impact in his mind about the outrageousness of animals. He had sucked up science-fiction films since the age of five and stared out at the night sky wondering if aliens truly existed without giving any thought whatsoever to the bizarre creatures that lived on his own planet. Elephants. Rhinoceros. Squid. Mirror carp. Here was as weird as you could get. He saw Carl for what he really was,