Sorcery of Genes

Chapter 1

Genes were the future. Genes. Genes and hormones. Genetic and hormonal manipulation. That was the key. Make a good brew of those and you could guarantee all manner of nice unpredictable results; chuck in a bit of gender-bending for fun, see what happens. What’s wrong with that? Nothing barring the unwanted appearance of a few freaks - and sterilities of course. Or worse: something, someone or some gender becoming so violently, so unreasonably aggressive as to be completely uncontrollable: a kind of a indestructible megabug, or triple-gendered man or some savagely aggressive self-fertilising female maybe, a modern-day harpie. You might scoff now but one day it will come true, mark my words, he said, wagging his finger. This thing, he said, looking out over the misty grey light of the city, this thing, whatever it may be, this force might just be unharnessable. There was no way you could predict what it might do, or what it might be. It might be anything. She recalled the look in his eyes: the wild, fevered look, illuminated by internal frenzy, eyes flickering from side to side, seeing but not apprehending the jagged horizon in the not-so-far distance, seeing something greater, wider, striding irrevocably toward him, toward her, toward them, toward us - the look of a madman or of a genius: a terrified, inspired genius who had seen past the high dark walls into a blazing future and knew what was coming. There was definitely an environmental cue that would trigger it, he said, nodding, as though acknowledging an inner tip from some personal stone-faced, brooding Oracle. And that was likely to be a hormone. Oestrogen.Why oestrogen? Simple: there are more females than males. A lot more. Oh? News to you? Ever stopped to ask what happens in agriculture? Only females produce. If you’ve got a dairy herd of thirty dairy cows how many bulls do you need? Shall I tell you? None. Or one per hundred thousand at the most. Multiply that up by a few million and you’ll spot the divergent exponentiality. And that’s just the cows. And that’s without adding the genetic trick. And all the other stuff that gets packed full of oestrogen and its mimics which were linking into the chain so fast you couldn’t count them, believe me. Hormones are benign, I hear you croon. No problem. Oh? Really? We’ll see about that. Besides, he said, it was already happening. Take a good look around, he said: the signs were already there. We were going to need to think a lot more closely about animals, how we dealt with them, that was all. That was all? I mean that was everything, he shouted banging the table with the flat of his hand. For certain there would be a reaction. Some weird, huge, unpredictable reaction. It was the invisible step science had unwittingly already taken. It had already crossed the threshold unnoticed, the uncarried-bride. Something would emerge from the bowels of the earth: some ghoul, some creature, some demon, some energy: something spontaneously created by the geno-hormonal chemical cocktail we were rapaciously inseminating into the receptive womb of the world. Maybe it was already here?

Some day, in the not too-distant future anyone with a microscope and half a test-tube was going to be able to play around with genes. Like children modelling in plasticene. And they’d start flicking hormones about in growth promoters and growth inhibitors, jamming them in growth expanders, growth shrinkers, expanding giantisers, shrinking miniaturisers – you name it – and no-one would be any the wiser – except the unlucky ones that got palmed the final account, and boy, you wouldn’t want that gender, with that mental fabric in that size, oh no. You wouldn’t know who was doing it, where, when, why or to what end. You could only hope that nature grappled it all back in some almighty, unexpected stroke, but right now, even at its very beginnings, he knew it was going to happen. Knew it. Could see it coming. If mankind could do something, it would do it, that’s how it was. You could forget about ethics. You couldn’t abandon ethics to science to adjudicate, sit back and smoke a quiet pipe of peaceful, oh no. Science’s ability to regulate itself would have long been highjacked by a Mephistopholian pact between politics and commerce and then you’d have a formidable machine fit to deliver every shocking thing you could dream of. Be certain of it. Commerce would goad science closer and closer to the abyss: overwhelm it: hold it to ransom and then you’d see some pretty things. The trick was, you see, to disassociate science so completely from all and any human reaction that you could let it do what it might with outright impunity. Besides, it had already done it, it just needed tweaking. Time would come when you could pedal any and every state-of-the-untested-art ‘advance’ for obscene profits and to blazes with the consequences, that would all be wrapped up in schmoozy advertising double-speak – lies in other words - just watch.

She’d begged him to be quiet, not to to shout about it, no-one would understand: not then, not when all the sabres were rattling. He couldn’t go on like this: he wasn’t a member of the Academy anyway. The best he could expect, if he wasn’t very careful, or plain dead lucky, was to be hauled out, lined up against a length of indifferent brickwork and vigorously aerated with lots of little pieces of flying metal, courtesy of Messrs Krupps and Co’ down the road. The number of times she’d had to beat the air, hushing him to stop his shouting and spitting, his mad gesticulating, his frantic arm wagging and bawling as he got more and more excited about his prognostications, what these were going to mean to the future of mankind – it sent prickles all over her – but oh, that was such a long, short time ago now. All this elusive living, hiding, pretending not to be, at least they shared the same concrete tower now even if their flats were stacked one on top of the other, they were together, inseparable as sauerkraut and sausage, even although, in the eyes of a prying, sinister, sly-eyed, pie-eyed world, they were very definitely unattached.

It was the thump on the floor above that had woken her.

It had a finality to it.

It had been a heavy sound; like a body falling. Falling over: collapsing. It was definitely a fall, not a push; there was no essence of aggression about it.

Bumps in the night did not normally waken Frau Winkler - she slept soundly: she needed to. The house on Keil Strasse was not far the from the railway station and the trains ran all night.

No: this was something else.

She had been disturbed, psychically.

She had not been able to go back to sleep. The sound persisted in her mind. She ran over it again and again. Was it perhaps a box that had fallen? Or a chair? No: definitely not: knocked over furniture made quite a different sound altogether. No, this was someone falling: Otto falling. Was it? Had the noise come from upstairs? Or had it actually come from downstairs? Was it outside? Was it a dream? Did she hear someone cry out? Was it in her head? It was in her head. She had not heard it. Otto was very quiet these days, he never made a sound. It can’t possibly have been Otto.

It was agony to lie there, wondering.

Yet she knew she must.

That she had not heard the heavy shuffling footsteps coming down early in the morning told Frau Winkler that something was definitely not right and had brought her out of her room on the third floor, onto the landing on Thursday morning at seven thirty.

`Otto!’ she called in the gloom of the stairwell.

`Otto! Are you alright?’

Outside her door she gazed upward into the grey light.

The staircase was dirty, the stairs uncarpeted, paint was peeling off the walls. The whole building was a ghetto. Otto lived in the top room, in the attic: one squalid room with a lavatory and a sink. His bedroom was his sitting room, the place where he cooked and ate.

There was bad smell coming from Otto’s room.

Not that she could actually smell it.

This was a smell you sensed.

`Otto!’ she called again, louder.

Frau Winkler waited for the reply, or a sound at least, suggesting something.

`Otto? Are you alright?’

She was frightened to stretch out her left hand and take hold that unsteady banister, feel the cold wood beneath it, the polish from years of Otto’s grip, sliding up and down as he shuffled his unshaven way up, down, past her room, past her door - putting one foot in front of the other, she was frightened to put out her hand, to touch it.

`Otto!’

She could not bear to find what she knew she would find. Otto was older than her by seven years. He’d aged badly. Maybe she had too. Unsurprising, considering what they’d been through. He had been living on black bread, pig fat, pickled cabbage and beetroot since the lights went out. He had not been well, and it was cold.

`Otto!’ she shouted.

She looked anxiously downstairs, down the winding staircase to someone – anyone – somewhere below.

It was strange how looking down took her back to the sound of the men and machines grinding through the cobbles and rubble outside: one set of marching feet replaced by another. Nazi. Soviet. Stase. Or was it just different legs in the same boots? She didn’t want to think about it.

`Willem!’ she called down.

Of all the buildings in this once glorious town this old ruin in Keil Strasse had managed to survive. Twenty years had passed since the tanks drove the sounds of Bavarian voices out and yet the paint – or what was left of it – on the walls was still the same smudged, peeling green.

`Willem! Come! Something’s wrong!’

Then, as now, no sound came.

Just the sound of steel tank tracks slapping over the cobbles of Leipzig-Hauptbahnhof. Sleet on the cobwebbed, wire-meshed skylight: her breath billowing in the cold, dark interior.

`Otto!’

Patiently she waited for a reply from the grey above.

If only she could help him – go up and help him. But what he had said had been final. `If in doubt, go back into your room. The risks are too great.’

Wrapping her shawl round her, shivering lightly, quietly, she withdrew into the warmth of her room, closing the door on the third floor landing and leaving the staircase to slide into the musty, creaking, grimy silence that inhabited it.

Chapter 2

With an armful of books, Leila Cathcart walked purposefully down the long corridor to the computer labs. Leila stood five feet eight inches tall and carried herself well, with a straight back, like a big ballet dancer. She had fine mahogany eyes, with a deep tint about the iris, which, when she looked into light was readily distinguishable and against the colour of her golden skin, shone with a rich brown-red, like betel-nut. Her hair was long and black and glistened with the iridescent blue of the true raven-head. Leila walked with conscious ease, gliding along under the assurance of her classically contoured figure nipped in at the waist by a thigh hugging black skirt, plain cream Egyptian cotton shirt, dark tights and flat, black, sensible shoes. She wore no make-up and had no adornments: no earrings, no finger rings, no body piercers, no tattoos – anywhere.

Leila was older than the average student – she was 30 - being in the last throes of mopping up her PhD in animal behaviour. Not that she was a fanatic. It was an intellectual choice: animal behaviour and welfare jobs were on the increase, the EU laws were changing, the voice that demanded higher standards of welfare was screaming from the roof tops, burning issues – of hunting origin usually - were being debated – hacked about – in Strasbourg. And here was Leila, articulate, country bred, an Honours degree in animal husbandry – a first from Reading – with an eye to politics, a brain that could pop the balloon on most of this stuff, with a background that knew the story from both ends. Arguably, she could claim knock-on interest from her background embracing both the practical and the academic. Her father was a scientist and had worked at ministry level on live animal transport for as long as she could remember. From childhood the family home had been a menagerie of animals: foals, heifers, piglets, puppies, kittens, fledglings – usually the orphaned variety that somehow fell into her hands: young owls, pigeons, jackdaws and the like – and other animals: ferrets, ponies, frogs, mice, bees and a few young stock – mostly of mixed breed. Although her family did not hunt, but because they lived in the country – or what passes for the country in Berkshire these days – she knew all about it.

If she chose – and she had yet to reveal her mind – she could be the voice of the hunter and the hunted – at once – and win hands down.

Leila breezed into the computer labs to look up some CAB Abstracts on behavioural aberrations in horses, slammed her books down on a table and flicked on the grey screen. She had come in to research Abstracts in a field in which she had become increasingly interested: orchestrated animal reaction. She’d spotted a pattern.

Jasper Willoughby, a bespectacled research biologist, a bright young man with a quick mind, floppy blonde hair and pale blue eyes, researching xeno-transplantation in mice was tapping the keys on a computer opposite surrounded by six nice looking youngsters of varying background gazing into the flickering light.

`What a weird looking thing,’ Jasper snorted chuckling: `Let’s give him some bigger gnashers.’

Jasper was something of an aberration in this circle. Strictly speaking he was a landed toff, with acres to his name and a stately home in Derbyshire. He had read a first degree in Oxford, an MPhil in Cambridge and was now at The Royal Agricultural Institute topping up on a PhD, and all within a family intensely suspicious of anything that smacked of the intellectual. Alienating himself from his hunting and deerstalking siblings, Jasper had found himself embracing instead the greater, and just as wonderful landscape of the electron microscope and countless solitary hours trawling through specimen slides.

This, today, was a welcome diversion.

`It looks like ET,’ Rosemary Pattens laughed, `it’s adorable!’

Ignoring them Leila sat down and punched in her CAB code. The laughter around Jasper’s screen increased. `Now it looks like a harpie!’ Rosemary cried out.

Leila got up and crossed the floor to the little knot tightening around Jasper.

Jasper was colouring in childish depiction, a creature crossed between someone’s idea of an extra terrestrial with a lemur, giving the image on the screen long, prehensile fingers with absurdly overlong claws, huge red eyes, a lizard-like skin, enormous fangs and all painted green. Leila frowned: `what on earth is that?’

Jasper looked up and smiled: `hi Leila: meet the chupacabra.’

She looked more closely.

Co-incidentally, she knew about the chupacabra and the various theories and claims surrounding them and had been interested to read about it in connection with sightings and alleged attacks on animals in Puerto Rico. The report had gone on to say that the chupacabra – or goat-sucker – had been freely killing animals in the area and was now taken so seriously that the mayor of a local town had ordered the local police to trap it – or them. Another reference to it had said that no such animal existed, whereas another had said that not only did it exist, but that it had been sighted all round the world: that is was a new species and was probably the result of genetic experimentation that had gone wrong.

Alarm bells had started to ring in her ears when someone mentioned genetic experiments and whereas the Loch Ness monster and Yeti syndrome she might have regarded as populist, sensationalist stuff, she took this more seriously, and read around the subject as far as it would allow.

Besides, whatever this thing was or was not, did not the integrity of science demand that she examine the subject as far as possible? Following the dicta that if all possibilities were exhausted then only impossibilities could remain, but that those, although they might fall outside the normal measures of scientific enquiry, were still worth considering, if only to disprove them?

She watched as Jasper gave the computer animal life: he animated it: made it walk – a curious, comical strutting gait.

`Does it have a family?’ she enquired.

`Good point,’ Jasper said: `let’s give it one.

Dr.Binding, who had been Chair of the Faculty of Animal Genetics for the last twenty-three years before appointing himself Dean, had slipped into the labs like an experimental rat at exactly this moment. The one remarkable thing about Dr. Binding was his singular unimpressiveness: how it shone in him! No-one noticed him enter, initially, although Leila clocked him but didn’t look up. That anyone could sustain such absence of personal aura or presence was remarkable, she mused: it could only have come about through sustained effort. She wondered if he stood in front of the mirror in his bathroom practising being seen and yet conjuring up in the dark glass instead, no reflection every time. She almost laughed. It was as though he entirely lacked any electrical impulses somehow, or that his synapses had fused and emitted no signal. He’d make a damn good burglar, she thought: he could probably walk straight through infrared beams.

The thought twisted her mouth into a suppressed grin.

To this battery of observation, Dr. Binding walked with an imperceptible limp as though someone once, in some faculty somewhere, long ago, had shot him in the ego and having never fully recovered, he spent his life barracking people, attempting a mortgage on their souls in order to compensate for the accuracy of the aim.

His hawk-eye had flown straight across to the computer to find out the source of the knot of interest – suspecting it to be a porn site – but was even more appalled to find these students engaged in what he described as `immeasurably stupid antics’, adding: `I suppose you think we are still surrounded by mythical green seas of darkness as well, harbouring leviathans that swallow up biblical celebrities?’ and snorted: `have you people nothing better to do?’

`We were only messing about,’ Jasper said.

`Well, if you have nothing more productive to do,’ the Doctor had snapped, turning on his heel. To which Leila replied: `other than to listen to you, of course.’

Dr Binding stopped dead in the doorway and hesitated with his arms held out from his sides having been taken completely aback by this remark, quite unsure what it was supposed to mean.

Leila continued: `before we dismiss it for being something which we don’t know about, we might just bother to find out if it is something which we ought to know about, if only to dismiss it, once we do know.’

Unaccustomed to have a student, even a PhD – and such an overwhelmingly gorgeous and profoundly fecund female, whose personal aura smothered his own even from this distance - address him so directly, Dr. Binding turned, withdrew his acid thoughts from his mental fuzz and hissed steadily: `if you wish to waste your time on meaningless rubbish, do so. It is you who will fail your doctorate, not I,’ turned on his heel and stalked off.

Leaving a frisson of petulance behind him, most of the students who had been gazing at the computer with Jasper and Leila drifted away, back to their own consoles, leaving Leila and Jasper alone: `right,’ said Leila: `where were we? Ah yes: a family. Our chupacabra has to belong somewhere, doesn’t he, so let’s think.’

By the time Leila had got up from the computer, she and Jasper had given the chupacabra a family: it read: Chupacabra cabaris, kingdom: animalia; phylum: chordata; subphylum: Verbrata. Order lemuridae x reptilia (egg-laying mammal)

Habitat: sylvan, peri-urban.

Feeding habits: kills its prey by unknown method. Extracts internal organs by unknown methods.

Drains victims of blood.

`There,’ she said triumphantly: `Now it has scientific classification it becomes real. It has a family. Ah. The maternal elegance of science. Proof of existence.’

Chapter 3

The sound of boots thumping up and downstairs kept Frau Winkler bolted in her room.

When you heard that noise you stayed where you were, staring down into your hands, into the dirt and did nothing: thought nothing: knew nothing.

There had been talk – the streets had been alive with it - American aggression in Cuba and terrible threats coming from Kennedy: America was the evil empire, there was no doubt about it: they were being intimidated. What madness was this? All this talk of war and why? What for?

And were the American just like the communists at heart, in any case? Were they?

If she lacked butter Frau Winkler at least had bread. She wondered what an American widow like her, living like her, at her age might have in her cupboard in a provincial town in America. About the same, she reasoned: men and their propaganda machines. Why didn’t they leave the world to be run by women?

It did not do to think things like that.

You couldn’t help it here.

To think.

Leipzig was a book town: there were millions of books: every street corner had its book seller and once, she’d even managed to buy Dudintsev’s Not By Bread Alone from a known black marketeer – it had been sheer lunacy to do it – but she and Otto had read it with enormous pleasure and much fear, by candlelight. Then Otto read it again alone and how he used to come tip-toeing down the stairs in his socks to discuss it night after night; how much of what it contained was directly relevant to him. It could have been written about him. How ideas were stolen and crushed, how vital research suppressed. How the Academy was filled with strutting, posturing, incompetents while good, honest men with good honest brains rotted in gulags in Belene, Kamchatka and Siberia. How Otto’s work had been brought to an abrupt end, how he had been discredited, not only in the east but in the west as well - yet still he continued, working alone on theories he felt one day, one day, might be heard outside these steel walls and bruited aloud to a wider world.

When Otto finished reading the book a second time, he returned it to her and she sold it to Willem downstairs for a three bottles of Altai vodka, one jar of French mustard and six night’s worth of potatoes, cabbage and two Mannheim frankfurters. How they had laughed. Good old Dudintsev! What a gem that book was and how apposite the title to them, then. But then Dudintsev had been through it too, hadn’t he? They locked him up as well.

Finally came the thundering on the door. `Frau Winkler?’ A sharp, Slavic

voice.

She gulped. Maybe they knew about the book after all. And Otto.

Now comes the bill.

Sliding the bolt on the door, she opened it a fraction. A strong hand pushed it wider. Blonde hair across the back of the hand.

`Frau Winkler?’ Steel voice, steel eyes, steel man. One of these Northern cold -bloods: from Archangel or somewhere, she thought.

`Yes.’

`You were a friend of Dr. Schweitz?’

`Dr. Schweitz?’

`Dr Otto Schweitz - the room above yours.’

`Oh, Otto. Yes I know Otto.’

Cerulean, lash-less eyes sought the lie: Stase eyes. `You are aware that he has died.’

She frowned: above all she knew not to show emotion: not a flicker: `Otto? Died?’ as though he were discussing the demise of a mosquito.

Steel eyes. `Did you not notice he had not come up and down stairs lately – you must have.’

`Oh but, he came down just yesterday, Sunday.’

`It was Wednesday yesterday, Frau Winkler.’

`Ohhh.’

`Have you known him long?’

`Oh yes, I have know Otto for a long time. Let me see, I think he came here in 1946, or before? Maybe it was 1942? I can’t remember. He comes down past my door every day. All the time. Always in a rush: I don’t know which hospital he worked in.’

The ice in the officer’s eyes hardened. Stupid old bitch: `he wasn’t that sort of doctor.’

`Ohhh.’

A moment skipped by. The young man shifted his weight: `Someone said they heard you call him yesterday.’

`Did I?’

Silence. Leather gloves in his right hand. The ice.

`Did you suspect something was wrong?’

`Well; you never know with Otto when he’s going to be in or out.’

Another moment passes. The young officer takes out a cigarette, and lights it, which flares almost half way down: most of the tobacco has been left behind in the box. Breathing out a plume of Balkan home-grown, the officer pushes Frau Winkler aside and looks round the door into her room: small, hot, smelly: acrid stink of ammonia: human or cat: or both. Vile. He wasn’t going in there. What was there to be gained from some filthy old cow who didn’t even know what day of the week it was?

`Did you have anything to do with Otto?’

`Well, I knew him.’

`How well did you know him?’

`He used to day hello – good morning and things like that – he was always very polite. Oh dear. Is he really dead?’

The young man clenched his jaw. This was beneath his pay-scale.

`Go and tidy up his room. It will be re-let. We have taken what we need.‘

The young officer released the door, shouted up the stairs to the men in Otto’s room then jogged noisily down and out into the street.

Three plain-clothes Stase operatives ferrying books and bundles of paperwork followed him the three floors down to the door, dumped their loads into the back of a green militia van, swaggered to the doors, clambered heavily in in their great coats and grey hats, fired up the van, which took three attempts to start, then rattled off in a trail of blue exhaust fumes.

Frau Winkler stood on the landing waiting for the people downstairs to melt back into their rooms.

She had to hold the bannister to prevent herself from collapsing.

Only Willem knew and he would keep his mouth shut. She had too much on him.

She knew Otto had died. That sound had been unmistakable. It was having it confirmed that nearly killed her.

The stase officer had been right of course. There would be nothing in the room barring the bed, light, table and chair – and the old rug. They would have taken everything: all his papers.

They would find nothing of value in them. She was certain of that. Any documents they will have found will have been run-of-the-mill genetic stuff, well out of date by now. Irrelevant stuff.

No, she knew they would find nothing of importance in Dr. Otto Schweitz’s room.

It was in hers.

Behind the closing door, real tears flowed.

Chapter 4

Peter Grimes stared. He stared into the thousands of minutely moving little brown orbs that radiated back a flashing intensity, myopically focussed on him or some middle distance between him and them. Their restricted ciliary muscles precluded them from shifting the bandwidth of their movement so that instead they moved their heads in peculiar little flicks that sent a shimmer across them like shock-waves, like ripples in a pond. What was it they saw, he wondered? What exactly was the image they beheld? Was it him, in his dust-coated khaki hat and faded blue dungarees? Him, Peter Grimes? Or was it just a man: any man?

No, he reasoned: it was him. They recognised him because when they saw him they were unafraid.

And they recognised him because he had moved into their world, into their being, was part of it, was It: was their God, their Provider, they Guardian, their Lawmaker and Keeper of the Peace. He did not feel like a god, although it seemed to him after the many years he had been walking through this living carpet of warm little bodies, on two legs, like them, that a resemblance must have occurred to them – as it had to him. And as he towered over them, picking up the ungainly and setting them back on their feet, healed; removed the dead, brought them food, water, warmth – what must they comprehend? That he was some Great Being, working in their interests, and loving them like a god, irrespective of what they did to him or to one another? Whatever they did to one another did not alter his opinion of them.

And like a god, he exercised the power of life and death over them: power to feed, to nurture and ultimately to destroy. Although that part of it always caused him pain. Maybe, he thought, it caused God pain too. Yet it was all part of the great cycle, and had to be done, there was no other way.

But how did they view him, he wondered. Was it him? With his head? Peter Grimes? His face? Did they understand a flat visage? Or did they interpret it as they must have interpreted their own low-level world, as one of them, complete with beak, wattle and unfathomable brooding mind?

He turned his milky grey eyes to the conveyor belt running out of the warmth of the house, watching the little strips of metal picking up the feed and running it back round the edges to the far side of the feed room, under the big hoppers and back into the free rangers.

Everyday he watched it, standing there in his boiler suit, whistling, bending to check the consistency of the feed, to ensure that the little waves rippled along the metal flights smoothly and evenly.

An engine hummed quietly and Peter whistled tunelessly to its drone, stopping to clear his nostrils, which, of others around him was an irritating habit he had picked up over the years as though ridding them of bits of feather that lodged in them.

In the background the low, constant, clucking of the many thousands of hens in the long shed behind gave depth and a tonality to Peter’s whistling and the soft hum of the electric motor. The air was heavy with the sickly-sweet scent of their feather-coated, warm bodies, mingled with the bitter stench of ammonia.

As he walked through them he bent down occasionally to pick the little hens up and examine them and as he did they squatted beneath his outstretched hand, heads ducked and in total submission to his will, to his almighty understanding of them and of their needs, of their want to be free of infestation, of hunger and pain and of thirst.

Yet he knew only too well, that if he fell; if for some reason he fainted in there: if he collapsed amongst them, these benign, clucking little fluffy brown balls would gather about his prostrate body and would peck. They would start with the buttons on his dungarees: they would peck the cloth, the edges of the cloth, they would peck at his fingers, at the skin between his fingers and around his nails. He knew they would do that. Finally they would peck at his face and would swiftly have his eyes.

He knew this: it was their ultimate deterrent: if you fell in amongst a big flock of birds like this, no matter how familiar they were with you, or how seemingly unafraid, how trusting of you, how confident, if you fell in amongst them, they would eat you alive.

They had to be prevented from eating one another anyway, which was why he went to such lengths when they were small to de-beak them, to slice of a tiny sliver of their beaks in order to stop them pecking one another, and continue to peck one another until the hole was deep and gory and to go until the victim died. Oh yes, they would do that to him.

He smiled.

`Clever little ‘ickens,’ he said, and the thought, somehow gave him satisfaction: that if anyone came in here who they did not know and for some reason stumbled and fell – if they out a foot wrong, that is what they would do.

Peter: he never put a foot wrong.

Peter was extremely careful.

Peter loved these birds.

But did the birds love Peter?

He bent to stroke one. `Do you love me, little ’icken?’ he whispered.

Peter kept records of how many tons of feed were consumed by the birds daily, how many gallons of water and how many kilos of antibiotic. He kept these in two places: in his own little blue notebook and on a blackboard in the feed shed. He was as meticulous about this as he was about the general hygiene and management of the flock in his charge.

The hens laid their eggs in nesting cages that stood above the slowly shifting conveyor belt that subtly bore their little ova away, to the egg-packing shed. And in the egg packing shed, Jean graded, candled and packed the clean brown eggs into egg trays and made the tea and told jokes, smoked cigarettes, and discussed last night’s television programmes with Vince and Peter, at tea time, during their lunch break and then in the afternoon, when the three of them packed the egg trays into cardboard boxes and put them in the loading bay, ready for the van, which came at 3.30 and took them away.

Every day was the same.

Jean brought the lardy cakes, Peter did the chickens, Vince did the pigs and then they all had tea.

Today, as every day, Peter drank his mid-morning tea in silence, in the packing shed, ate the piece of lardy cake Jean had brought and glanced at Vince’s Daily Mirror.

While he was occupied gazing at the pictures, Vince and Jean chatted.

They chatted about their homes and hopes and holidays: they chatted about football and car boot sales, they chatted about the television, the programmes they watched and about the army major who was accused of cheating on Who Wants to be a Millionaire: typical wasn’t it? As if he didn’t have everything anyway. (Just another man trying to get something for nothing again, Jean thought: but she didn’t say.) If Vince had been observant she would have seen her pupils narrow, see her throw her head back and her lips tighten through the cigarette smoke, but he didn’t. He gazed myopically down into his brown tea as he stood there in his pig-feed dusted dungarees, stirring and smiling like Father Christmas.

Their break lasted fifteen minutes exactly every day. They clattered their cups and clanged their spoons back into the tin sink for Jean to wash up and Vince and Peter strolled out hands in pockets, one man to the pigs and the other to the chickens.

Before entering the free rangers’ house Peter always went though a particular little routine: he always stopped to peer through the little spy-hole before going in.

Swinging the steel cap of the spy-hole to the right, Peter put his eye to it and beheld what he always beheld: an inner dim, red sanctum of many thousands of murmuring voices; flickering red wattles, preened wings, chickens picking through the wood shavings, the whole floor a seething morass of feather, limb and wattle and wing. To those who had not witnessed such a sight it might appear obscene, that such vast numbers of birds were crowded together in such a way: yet this was by now means a large scale unit: this, by many standards, was small.

All was calm. 24,000 Red Warrens were moving around quietly, as he might expect.

He smiled as the ones who noticed when the tiny spyglass window opened into their world.

`Clever ickle ‘ickens,’ Peter whispered, and watched them. Perhaps it was because he recognised that he shared something with them that they made him feel comfortable to be with them. He sought only peace and quiet, to do the things he needed to do. To be