The Couple In The Window

Dr. Morgan would take the cow’s legs out, first. It would be quick, not slaughter-quick, but not slough-slow, either. We’d already made a divot in the field-earth for her to lie in, and she will fit into like luggage; that way it would be easier to cut into her. She was nearly as tall as a supermarket shelf when on her side, a big girl who had still-born eighteen times in four bad autumns and similarly high moons. I will wonder whether she would write books if she hadn’t walked on all fours. Books about her children, and what she kept looking for under the juniper down by the river, chasing the dead faecals of the sowing bully-pigs that had lived there before her, until they were struck by chain-lightning and we had hot bacon stuck in brambles thick like the spokes of Mama’s mug tree the next morning, shears of big gammon, shears of bully-pig.

“Eliot, it’s done.”

He wouldn’t not do anything, this doctor! He had lain her down on her side all by himself. She had such creamy thighs, big knees that spent much of their day locked like Morgan’s big car that he wouldn’t drive past the cattle grid. I thought about trotting in to fetch him a beer, but I knew he would refuse because I kept the fridge next to the paint stripper, which was really my favourite. I wondered if he had some local lads help him, that were asleep under her tight belly, waiting like he was Will Robinson and they just had to extend their calves and she would be back up on her feet. The big brownies of tractor churnings that ran from the gate to the sheep-pens looked good enough to eat. I could hear teenagers slapping at each other having parties in that old holloway, where Dad had grown radish.

“Eliot?”

I would have to write down later on (as the magazine Mama had left had told me to write down everything I did in a day) that I liked his shirt. It was the colour of the skin behind my ear, and he knew that because he could see back there and I had shown him that mirror that I had made that made it easier to see the back of my own head, and cut my own hair. He wasn’t wearing a tie, but there as little plastic shell necklace that had dyed his skin there a little. I had asked him not to wear it on the farm, that it might get caught in something with blades and what would I do with a headless doctor, but I think he only hears a little bit of what I say. Time to take the cap off. He likes it when I do that, I read that is what rich people like. Hats are for poor people, or at least taking them off is. I will also wonder where Barbour is, and why they put their name on his wellies. And thank him. That might make him leave. I do that now.

“Thanks awful, Mr. Morgan.”

“I told you, Eliot, it’s just Morgan. You can call me Dr. Willetts if you like.”

But I know that he isn’t a doctor and that he only does beasts, as when I need.

“Yessum, Morgan. You do that now?”

“What? The cannula?”

“Yessum, the tummy door.”

“Yes. I’ve got to check for gas first. But she’s big, Eliot, and she’s in a lot of pain. I think I will have to operate.”

I see that he is wearing one earphone, and I can only hear the s’ses of what they are saying, and I wonder if it’s a radio discussion by lisping Gila monsters like they have in the Galapagos, or a Gila monster punk band. I have known for days that the old cow would need a cannula. But I have never liked cutting my own flock. He thinks that she’s been eating rotten vegetables, but I have told him that I don’t let anything rot. But, nevertheless, we’ve got to fit a cannula – and it is a tummy door, I’m not foolish for calling it such, I’ve seen them on pigs and oxen. A big hole in their sides, so you can see what the food is doing. Though a stomach is a stomach is a stomach, if you ask me. Once those big teeth, like a Jew’s I told him but it made him pale, get going it all looks the same by the time it gets down there.

He bent down and ran a hand along her desire line, where the fur parts. She isn’t mooing anymore, just looking up at me with an eye like the ball in the bottom of the old computer mouse at the library. I see her side churning, and I want to shout at Morgan’s helpers to stop kicking her underneaths, but if they are down there I guess that it must be good science and I don’t. He starts tapping her and it makes brass band sounds, a big dense clarinet near the hock, and then a whole drum orchestra over the tummy, and she is bellowing now, there are tears in her eyes. She’s got a terrified throat the colour of smoked milk. He’s hushing her. I know that he wants to calm her down, but she probably thinks she’s sprung a leak as he’s hushing down by her tummy, and it just makes her worse, but I can’t say anything as he is the vet. As Dad said, always trust the wind and vets, and Morgan’s been good to me so far, apart from when I heard him in the pub with his step-sister, the one that only wears stiff bras in front of him, and he started talking badly of my Mama. Maybe he thinks I can’t afford drinks. I should sell all the paint from his car, though the gold of it is just chemicals, most likely. He’s too tight to have a real gold car.

He will step up now, and tell me that she needs a tummy door.

He steps up.

“There’s a lot of trapped wind there, Eliot. Dangerous bloat. Where does she graze? Any alfalfa around, or clover?”

It takes me a minute to figure him out. Breastmilk Petal and Drunk’s Folly. Three-Leaf and Three-Leaf. I let the names go, as I did know of some living up in the hills, but I don’t know where she goes of a day. She came back with a football shirt wrapped around her snout once, another time with a baby’s milk bottle on a hoof. In fact, that was the last time I saw her blood, and the last time that Morgan was at the farm.

“No, Dr. Morgan.”

He sighs, and walks to his car. From here it looks like the useless spare button at the bottom of shirt. When he comes back he is in what looks like a baby romper, orange-yellow and crinkled plastic, and carrying what looks like a doctor’s bag with steel handles poking from it. He draws a little hood over his head and he looks a little like a Wotsit, though he leaves no dust in his wake.

“I’ve got to operate, Eliot. I don’t have any anaesthetic but she should be OK. Just watch her head, make sure she’s comfortable, talk to her.”

Talk to a cow! The prick! I look at her. Now, I hate her. I hope this kills her and she deflates in front of him. He is now making a Star of Saul with a little knife right below her ribs.

“Sssh, girl.”

She is a woman, I want to tell him. I let her become one.

He has scooped a little from her, and now he gets out a big silver drill, and he slings it onto his shoulder like he’s an American, and then it slips and falls, digging into her a little. I pretend not to see and I look at her ruddy great useless head and all I want to do is cook it.

He starts to drill into her properly, and at some point he must have reached inside her and there is a great hiss and he tries not to lean away and vomit but it smells of womb and a certain winter. She is still quiet. I want her to say “aaaaah” in a deep, long, satisfied voice, like a cartoon cow, but she looks nothing like a cow, and will not speak at all.

He takes out a long sliver of skin trailing a fish-grey cylinder of meat, and gluey tendrils that seem to grab at her as it leaves. He reaches in and pulls – he brings up fistfuls of green globes, like full stops that are too large. Though, perhaps the ones in books are shrunk to a more manageable size. I miss the start of what he is saying.

“Peas, Eliot. You didn’t tell me that you planted peas.”

“Yessum, Mr. Morgan.”

“These could kill her, you know. I’ll put the cannula in and you’ll need to watch her, over the next few days. See what goes on when you feed her, make a note for me. Only give her clean water and a bit of grass, mind. Anything else will just fall out.”

There is a sort of bear trap that he hinges open around the wound. I can see a tall wall of red, like a cinema curtain, inside her that moves when she breathes and shudders as she defecates into the divot that I, in fact, we made for her, while he stood around finishing his breakfast that he kept in his car; something with more butter than flour. I think he really wanted to be sick, then.

“Right, let’s get her up.”

There is nobody underneath her, just steam. She seems lighter and the day is finally ending, and she can go back to the woods or wherever she wishes. I will not watch her for him.

“Yessum. Dr. Morgan. Most kind. Speak soon on the tellyphone.”

I think he really hates that. But talk is talk. I talk as I talk.

“No vegetables. Just grass. She’ll die otherwise, and watch the cannula. Make sure it doesn’t weep.”

The hole in her side is shunted open, wearing her blood like a beard, the purple port around its edge straining to be seen. What would happen if it slipped? It would certainly slip if she ran. I’ll take a torch to her tomorrow.

“Will you give her a name yet, Eliot?”

“Yessum, Mr. Morgan.”

It’s dark night and the foxes are coming on the steps. It’s dark night and I can hear raised voices from the woods. I’m not sure what they are, ground’s too hard for tents, and no-one goes stalking any more, not since the woman got her head caught in the storm drain and they had to wrench it off just to get her out. It’s dark night, and I’m thinking of Dr. Morgan and his sister, having a sleepover, him planting his bottom in the divot just above hers, lying entwined together like the symbol on the side of ambulances. Like two snakes. One of them would be smiling. I reach down and almost slip.

It’s past lunchtime by the time I see her lumber out of the forest up in the top field. Something she ate, sap maybe, has bloomed out of the hole and looks like a crusty rosette on some present. There are odd sounds coming from her.

As she gets closer I hear the clitter of train tracks, getting louder as she moves towards me. It is indistinct, and it seems to pull away from the station, that rising whine as it gets its act together and makes itself move, but then she reaches me, nuzzling into my crotch with her head like a black flagstone. It dies and I hear only the bowels of her gurgling, and then a holler, as if of gentlemen grousing, as granddad used to say, up where the old estate is. I can only see the threshing sheds and the ribbing barn, and no-one goes there. I had told everyone in the pub that the government had buried barrels from the Long Sands Plant there, and that was that. Everyone wrapped their kitchens in baking foil.

I forget, and try to wipe the crust on her side away, but it is attached to something still working in her belly and she groans at me, eyes rolling to moisten their orbit. I give her arse a quick slap to move her forward and lean into her, my ear and dry skin sealing the wound. There is a hum, but it is probably the afternote of a moo playing tennis with itself throughout her intestines. Maybe she met a bull from the pedigree farm up top, and didn’t clench but let him rub her against a hawthorn. Maybe this one will deliver the goods this time, not leave her popping out sticky little envelopes that I can’t sell.

Our meeting is done. She’ll be off down to the river next, where the power station wall is broken, and try to lick the big batteries. What does he want me to do? Only grass. A cow should eat what she likes. Meat, even. Life is hard enough.

I’ll cook something stupid, tonight, I think. Something old. I go down into Dad’s bunker, under the old shower curtain, and take the last tin from the shelf. The old wolf spider has eaten some of her children again, and there is a coup going on, the utter terrifying speed of warring insects, up there in the light bracket. I bring it up, pulling off the label before I can see it, and tipping it straight onto the skillet. There’s something sweet. I mark it in the journal.

Not many people know that you can eat cat-food without feeling ill, but it is sweet and soft like pulled pork and you can pretend that you are a cat whilst you do it. I eat on the floor in this way, as I broke the last chair, and the saw is still hard with dog blood and is no good for repairs. From where I sit I can only see the roof of the stables, and the security light comes on, and the stars disappear. And then I hear a bus, come here, far from any road.

I had only been on a bus the once. I remembered what it sounded like; the whine as it pulled away from the station. The chatter of old men. The driver coughing into a hanky clutched against the wheel. And even the little trill when someone pulled the big cord at the end of every row of seats.

There is a shadow, square and brutal, parked outside the house; it rose onto the stable roof. I hear someone step out, and the sound of their farewells fade away. I manage to stand, and put my bowl to my face, finishing it off, pulling a crunchy scrap down from my septum where food sometimes sits, keeping an eye on the courtyard.

It is just her, foraging for hay. Her feet echo like corned stilettos around the brick outbuildings, and looking up she greets me with a snuffle. There’s stuff around her mouth, what looks like cobweb. I step outside, kicking at icy dog urine, splitting it like cooked dessert.The air is thick with something. It’s a holder for cans of drink, caught around her flat tooth. I hook it off, and I notice that there is fresh blood running down her side. The rosette is gone, and I go to make my inspection. I find a biro behind my ear, though the last time I had seen it had been a month ago when I had to sign for the guns. I write my findings on my hand.

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Coulish. Nice puckering but bloom is gone. Carrots? No sign of grass – not her favourite. Thought I saw sunlight down her throat. Defecate clear against skin.

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I note the date and turn for the outside tap, and when I do there is the orange security light that splashes its way up the house, that Morgan’s friend had fitted two years before, and it lights the red curtain inside her stomach like an overhead projector that they use at school to explain the war.

And there are people inside it, drinking.

I can only see their shadows, their silhouettes, and they seem to be sitting inside her stomach like it is a restaurant. They are about as tall each as a cola bottle, and have tiny wine glasses that they lift to their lips and bring together silently, though there is no clink. There is a flickering, dim but persistent, that runs along above them from right to left and disappears, only to be replaced by another entering the frame of the wound from the left. And I hear that clittering again, and I know now that they are on a train, and they are eating dinner.

All I can think of then is coming back from market with Dad as a little boy, the market they held behind the Corn Exchange in the NCP car park. I had wandered behind Land Rovers and trestle tables towards the lifts and stairs, and into the culling sheds, or what passed for them on market day, because they were men’s bogs the rest of the week, and seeing these tall men in white coats holding live pigs over the urinals and the sinks and letting the blood down all over those things they call cakes that they leave in there. There was a funny blue light, as well, that made everyone look like they were carved from rock, though Dad had bought me scratchings and told me it was to stop people taking drugs. Do drugs disappear in blue light?, I remember thinking, and I lay down across the back of the truck with all of what we bought, and there were streetlights half the way home. I remember that they stopped at the first gate, though that was still half an hour from our front door. And as Dad and Muma started to argue and we got faster and faster, I half-closed my eyes and pinched my own cheek to make the tears come, and through the water the lights looked just like this, a winking great log of light that passed across the lip of my face.

I must have been standing still for a long time, just looking at them as the light switches off and as I go to wave to turn it back on I catch Dad’s ring on the purple bear-trap around the wound, and she makes the worst noise. As the light comes back on, my hand is aching and there is her blood all over me and the people have gone, her sloping painfully across to the stables, to sleep in Bruiser’s cell.

I spend much of that night thinking of her as a train conductor, in a blue cotton uniform with golden buttons, collecting change from this man and woman, just shadows that sit in their seats, and placing the coins in her cheek whilst she chews on something she found in the woods.

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Brutish. Bleeding has slowed but still no clotting. She’s been towards town; there’s old burger wrappings in there, along with yucca and palm. There is a bit of cutting. They ate at 18.00, and then apparently took a tram uphill; they disappeared back up her throat. Won’t stand for long.

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Hidden. A large clot and threaded intestine, had to unknot it myself. A normal day in the woods; acorns building up and had to remove them. She is complaining, today, but no-one appeared at dinner, or suppertime.

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Grim. She hasn’t left the field today, staying near where Morgan left the divot. No food either. Keeps it clear for them, apparently, as two of them are sitting there, one arm pointed at the roof of her stomach, star-gazing. Will not stand in the light for long; eyes very dark, her tongue sallow.

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My journal has run out of feet and hands.

I didn’t want to tie her down, at first; but I kept trying to hear what they were saying, and she would wander off to find squash in the autumn beds. I guess that she is tired, maybe pregnant after all.. I worry that her passengers will be cramped with any new arrivals, but they are still there. I have mounted some of Dad’s torches on the wall behind us with scotch tape, The bungee cord lets her move a little, she can lick at her haunch, but the red curtain is still enough to watch. The purple bear-trap looks a little crinkled; a wet crocus of bile keeps it moist., but I don’t think that Morgan said to change it. He hasn’t even been around to see if she is alive.

I fed her grass myself, today, but I hate the feel of the big tongue, like American meat, heavy on my palm, warm and with a tendency to move. I am glad I never have to do it again. She is sweating profusely, in what passes for her armpits, and I am sorry for her, but it is time to watch. They are eating somewhere new, the outline of the waiter is fatter, and he dips a little lower when he puts the bread, or poppadoms, or meatballs or whatever they are on the tables. The animal is mooing and burping, and the tables wobble, the diners grasping at them and laughing nervously, or perhaps crying. I consider cutting the curtain to let the sound out. The chandelier still shakes for a time after she has settled down under the cord; I get the broken chair from upstairs and prop it against the house wall. I lift my hands to rinse them under the outside tap. They eat, for nearly an hour, but what they say, as always, is on the edge of hearing, but I hope they are happy. The man points with his fork, away from the meal, and there is a little bulge in her stomach wall, three tines almost perforating. She makes a mournful little squelch deep in her throat, that backblasts down and out of the wound at me. Her eyes are swivelling not like mouse balls anymore but like a globe spun at the start of a television programme, as she tries to see what I am doing. I am thinking of Morgan and his sister now, and I reach down. Their shadows, the shadows of the diners, stand from the table, the male one leading the way. And now there is nothing but ranked seats, or the backs of heads in lines. And I reach further down, and I feel warmth there. It’s getting cold, it is winter, I think, and I am hungry, and I want to lean in and take the meatballs from the plate, but of course they are already gone, this is a movie, anyway, a movie like a John Wayne would be in. And John Wayne leads his wife down the aisles of seats and moves his hand forward, letting her sit in one before he joins.

And the ladyis Lois Lane, I think. This may not be right, but it rhymes, and all couples should rhyme. Lois Lane is there now, facing towards the animal’s head, and her throat, and her lungs and her heart, and her husband sits between them, and I hear coughing, and the tinkling of changed, and I know that the bus is pulling away. They sit very separately, I can see her jewellery giving her hands the outline of swollen feet. My animal swallows something that has been sitting in her throat, and the peristalsis, as Morgan calls it, hits Lois Lane in the face and her head flies back and her neck is arched, and I reach down even further and I find the real heat, the real heart of the matter, and I move a little further up, and then down, and then they are gone, but I don’t like it and my hand comes back out into the cold.

But her husband is slumped forward now, his neck crooked like a gate half-open, and she begins to get bigger, coming closer to me and the curtain. As she gets bigger I reach down again, and I’m not certain that it’s her anymore, she might have changed, and the lights go out, the batteries fail all at once, but the blackness, or rather the redness, the raw red and the veins on the red curtain that are where her face must be, that blackness let’s me know she’s there.

And then she starts to knock for me, her knuckles showing in the vellum, and I wonder if it is a door, or a window that she taps.