Muck (6 page)

He runs water over his finger until the cold stream steams that it’s hot. He waters the candle-flame. It drips open into a greasy brush again, a paintbrush to smear the white lather.

He taps me on the shoulder to lean back into his front. I do. Our breathing presses on each other. My stone-figure twin has paralysed me once more. He reaches across my right shoulder for me to take the candle-brush in my fingers and let his own fingers guide the way to make the circular rhythm as if mixing a spittle-froth on my jawline, throat, jaw again, chin, jaw.

Bubbles burst and tingle on my skin.

“Bite your lips back into your mouth,” he instructs, demonstrating the liplessness himself and watching me copy in the mirror.

I’m to paint over the no-mouth three times; five times across my Adam’s apple so as not to take the top of it off with the blade, only whisker slime.

Now grip the Safety’s handle, pinched between fingers limply, not as tight as I do. Again his hand guides mine. He repeats the word “limply”. Most things you never grip in a way you’d call limply—a handshake for instance—but this is one time the word is most suitably applied. He says it quietly as a whisper, and with sweet-tea breath. “The blade must glide your stubble away, not dig in and draw blood. Glide, not stiffly, not deeply.”

I can hear the scratching carry faintly in my head. The almost-pain of cutting. The Duke reminds me that if I go too fast I’ll be wounded. If I go too slow the blade will tug instead of shave.

He tells me to extend my middle finger and trace over the shaving path to feel for misses. You don’t need strong bulb light to check for misses. You just need a follow-up with your fingers. “Feel it?” he breathes. “Need another swipe for good measure?”

“No,” I breathe back. “We got it all.”

I’m to puff out my cheeks now, one cheek at a time. This is to get access to cheek whiskers which need to be coaxed from hiding in cheek softness. He peers into the mirror, his cheeks puffed out in leadership of mine.

Now stick out the chin and screw the mouth up to push the chin forward further. The top lip should be stretched over top teeth. Now the feel-test. Then a final trim near the ears, squaring the sideburns with a firmer flicking downwards motion.

“Rinse your face off,” he says.

Foam smears the bottom lip of my ears. The Safety has left a peel of lather behind the lobes. My sideburn fringes wear a straight milk moustache. I’m to rinse it all off with warm water, one rinse. Then a rinse with cold to close the whisker holes.

Pat the whole works dry with the towel. “How does that feel?”

“Tight,” I reply. My face-skin is itchy.

I’m to hold out my palm for a squirt of Q-Tol, its menthol, cough-lolly smell.

“There you go,” The Duke declares. “Finished. Done.

You’re a new man.”

Feet insists we come out into the kitchen sunlight so she can look at her new man herself. “Where’s my handsome man?” she fusses, leading the way to the sun. “Stand there so I can see.”

Her hands are clasped in front of her. She blinks and smiles. She touches my face to feel for smoothness. “Look at you. You’ve gone from scraggly to feeling all womany. You’re exactly like me when I was younger. It’s like I’ve been given the gift of a daughter.” She sighs and shakes her head. “You’ve got my face. Look at you. Those cheekbones, they’re not your father’s features. I’ll give him your nose. He can have that, It’s a bit too biggish. He can also have your ears. But those cheekbones,
I’ll
have those. And those eyes, and that brow. And as for your mouth—they’re my lips to perfection, that lovely zig-zag they do. A mother knows her child is herself, and here’s the proof: your face in mine, and me in you.”

I
F
I
LIVED IN BETTER
times, there’d be a war to go to.

Instead there are the Churchills of this world to put up with. And workers of such low rank they work in stink. They wear gumboots because of cow muck where they walk. Green porridges of it, watery and arcing out of cow backsides as if from a hose.

History does not happen here.

In grander times I wasn’t needed. The Napoleonic Wars did fine without me. The birth of England. Men had the plain names we still have now but in
1066
a William was a conqueror. A Norman was a state.

There once was a Troy, a Troy that was a poem for the great Greeks, not a flash name for boys because the Johns and Marks and Josephs became too usual. A Helen was a sacred face. History does not happen to me. I wasn’t needed to be alive in Mycenaean places.

So why now, why put me here in this time and place where the Normans and Williams merely milk cows and my duke thinks it’s wise if I do too. We have a manager called a share- milker who is meant to hire and fire staff, but this is
our
land not some sharemilker’s. We trust family but no-one else: “I want you to be my eyes and ears among the workers,” winks The Duke. “You can learn what’s good for business. You can tip me off to any laziness or graft.”

I am considered no better than a milker of cows. What an insult to me! Whatever power or fate or science decides who drops to earth, in what place, what era, it considered me fit only for this—for milkings.

The power-fate-science decided a long-bow was too difficult for me. This boy couldn’t lower a gun-sight. No shield or mallet for him. No cannon to scream, “Fire!” Not even defeat, not even the
Last Post
and Gallipoli.

My armour is a Swanndri—a black and red check bush coat to keep out rain and wind, the piss-splashes on concrete from a simpleton cow.

Is this why we study history, to envy the dead as if they were our betters?

Well Betters, let me dig you up in your millions, there in your unmarked graves in the earth’s layers. Let me stick you back together and be treated to these three square meals a day I have. Have my soft bed, my electric blanket, my idle evenings with a book, and
you
go into that milking shed.
You
touch those simpleton cows.

There they stand against the steel, jagged rails called the herringbone, concertinaed side by side in the spaces the jagging makes. Forty-eight at a time, half to the left, half to the right.
You
touch their bony backs. You watch their arm-long tongues lick snot from their nostrils.

They are patients having their bodies drained like an illness. Those hairy, scabby udders between their legs. Men’s genitals of sorts—a scrotum and four fat penises. They have penis tails where their real tails were lopped. These lift up exposing pink-inside vaginas, hairless except for a wispy spout at the end. A deformed man and woman in one, that’s a cow.

Friesians are black and white at once. Two pigeon-toes for each foot; heads de-horned to horn stumps. They are taller than Jerseys, whom the staff call better natured with their eyelashes much longer to be “the more feminine of the girls.” Weaker too for yanking into place in the jaggings. You grab a knob of their spine and just pull. They obey. If they don’t, their penis-tails are easier to lift erect so that their backs sink down and they surrender as if in a wrestling hold, powerless, anus contorting like a puckered-shut mouth.

Friesian penis-tails are more difficult to lift. They lock against their vaginas and it takes two hands to lever off.

“They all kick,” says Norman with a crackly cough-up of words and smoke. “Your quiet Jersey. Your mad Friesian. They all kick.”

He keeps his tobacco in a round tin like a culture. It could be cuttings of his ginger beard and chest hairs. He smokes it to the dark-brown last of the rolling paper which sticks to his bottom lip like the top off a sore. What a low rank he must be. So old—at least sixty if a day, and still only milking cows for his wage.

He wears short pants for this warmer afternoon weather. Just below his knees the tops of his gumboots have worn hair away to a permanent ring. A watermark from standing so long in the world. This wet world in a pit where we stand with cow feet at eye level.

He doesn’t smile or laugh. He only talks because he has to, because he’s been told to instruct me about cows kicking your arms away when you reach in with milking cups. About using the spray-guns hanging from the rafters, a quick squirt of water at the udders and a massage-wipe to tease the milk down. When you transfer the cups from one cow to the next you must dip them in a bucket of green iodophor disinfectant. This way mastitis, if there’s any, isn’t spread among the herd.

You test for mastitis with your forefinger and thumb. Norman pulls on a teat for a squirt of milk to come. He’s not embarrassed doing this, to masturbate this teat-penis. He caresses it, then masturbates all four on the cow. He does this in front of me, so casually, this most intimate of things. If the milk turns blue on contact with concrete, the cow is pure and uninfected. A cloud or clot, a greyness of impurity, means a red cross must be sprayed on the udder, the mark for medicine.

Norman’s son is a William. Not even that—a Bill. He wears a flannel hat, the kind his father wears, pale-blue and frayed from many washings. His yellow hair hangs from it to his shoulders, half a dozen main shreds hardly worth keeping. He works at the other end of the pit attaching cups to penis-teats as if holding apart a cat’s-cradle of rubber. He flicks his wrist and the cups suck their way on. A white gush pulses inside the cup’s spyglass window.

Surely his father is a disappointed man. His son, a grown man himself, follows in his footsteps, but what legacy is this? It’s not the same as mine. Theirs is a man–cow intimacy, an unembarrassed touching between legs.

Mine has no intimacy at all. I am a businessman. An educated man in the making. I have been given a job by The Duke, an eyes and ears responsibility. I should be friendly to this man and son couple, this Norman and his Bill. But that’s not the same as being one of them. They themselves will realise I’m not of them, and never will be. Just as the cows will sense I am not the usual rough toucher between legs, but someone respectful enough to turn his head away and not watch where my hands go. Even whispering an apology when my fingers make contact with the dangle of skin.

“I have a duty to learn the business,” I think, eyes squeezed shut as if the cow will absorb the gist of my thinking, my head being so close to its heart.

Any reasonable cow would forgive me this physical contact and apologise back for my being placed in this demeaning position. She would chew the cud lump at the side of her mouth and shift her hind leg for my better access without me needing to tap it and ask.

With the cat’s-cradling of cups it is impossible for me to keep my hands behind my back in my Duke’s-son stance. But at least that exposes my fingers to these two rough touchers, fingers so obviously different from theirs, not scarred and red and wrinkly as the teats they handle. My nails have no dirty ends beneath them. I clip dirty ends off, scrape the quick clean in the bath.

Norman and Bill may have knowledge, but it’s cow knowledge, hardly knowledge in the real sense, the book and history sense. Let them have their knowledge and consider they’ve got that over me if that’s what they are thinking in their frayed flannel heads. I couldn’t care less. It’s not Napole-onic knowledge. It’s not the Magna Carta, it’s not
Paradise
Lost
, it’s cows. It’s manual work and habit and the drudgery of years. Of making milk come from the mud and grass of paddocks that just as easily ends as dung. It’s knowledge of no importance except that mastitis causes “gradings” which means this day’s harvest of milk is poisoned.

Just to be sure they’re aware I have a superior knowledge level, I pat my rubber milker’s apron which hangs from my throat to my ankles. I say, “It’s hardly chain-mail is it?” But I must curb my tongue. “The Normans would never have attacked Saxony in
this
.” That’s enough. I mustn’t say another word. “I suppose they had their milkers in Saxony.” I don’t want to humiliate these rough touchers. They might walk off Tudor Park. I’d be blamed for there being no touchers. “I suppose they had them at the Battle of Hastings, bringing up the rear without swords.”

Norman licks his paper sore to the other side of his lip. He keeps silent except to say “Settle” to a Friesian who has been sucked dry and needs her cups removed. He kinks a rubber air-hose across his fingers to cut off the suction, pulls the cups from the udder and dunks them in iodophor. Two foamy thrusts. The cups are ready for cat’s-cradling to another cow, for milk to spin through the cups’ spyglass in time with the machine’s suck-pulsing.