‘What clothes?’
‘The er—suit. Everything. Sorry. Regulations.’
‘Aye,’ muttered Grey distractedly, walking politely around him.
Having offered Charlie his help, and been greatly relieved when it was rejected, Grey had intended to play as supportive a role as he could in the proceedings, but from inside the house, as far away from the smell of blood as was supportively possible. Looking at the carnage, the rows of bodies, the white-suited men with their disinfectant sprays and bloodstains, the sound of the gun, he was finding it very hard to stay focused. He wished he could turn back, but a crisis was developing and he needed Charlie’s help. He took a deep swig at the gin to stop himself from vomiting. He looked back at the Ministry man. ‘Where is he, then?’
‘Who?’
‘Where’s Charlie?’
‘Charlie?’
‘Charlie,’ he said coldly, ‘is the man whose animals you’re in the process of exterminatin’. Charlie Maxwell McDonald.’ Grey glanced disconsolately around the field. ‘Where the fuck is he?’
‘He’s round the corner, by the stocks. But you really can’t—I must insist—’
Grey, thirty-eight years old that summer, had been quite famous once, when he was thirty-seven. Like his friend Jo, he was a refugee from London, from the successful people’s party circuit, but unlike Jo, who’d thrived in it for ten years or more before she pressed the ejector button, Grey McShane had lasted only a matter of weeks. An enormous, miraculously handsome Scottish ex-jailbird, alcoholic and former tramp, he was ‘discovered’ by a handful of fashionable opinion makers, drunkenly reciting his own poetry outside a well-known theatre in Islington. Not long afterwards, Phonix Records had hitched itself onto the McShane bandwagon and offered him an unheard of £1 million contract to make an album of his poetry. The marketing people proclaimed him a genius, a voice for a disenfranchised generation, a living embodiment of a modern generation’s pain. And Grey was one of the few people who had never believed them. Anyway the contract was withdrawn soon afterwards, when Grey was wrongly denounced as a paedophile, at which point (for about a week) he became the nation’s most hated figure, hounded and jeered at on the front of every newspaper. Nobody was surprised when, a week or so after that, the geniuses at Phonix suddenly came to the conclusion that Grey wasn’t a genius after all.
That was back in October. He’d been hiding out with his friends at Fiddleford ever since, the living inspiration for Charlie and Jo’s new business venture, a lonely, private figure who insisted on paying over the odds for his board and lodging, and who so far displayed no signs of ever planning to leave. He was bad-tempered, lazy, reckless, argumentative, funny, brave and, when he thought someone deserved it, heroically loyal. The General adored him. Charlie and Jo, both several years his junior, often suggested that he find somewhere else to live, but they no longer expected it and in fact they would have been quite sorry to see him go. He had been instrumental in bringing the two of them together, and now, as he picked his way through the carcasses, swallowing his own bile and dodging the bossy men in suits, he was about to fight for their interests once again.
‘Ah. There you are, Charlie,’ he said. ‘At last. How’s it goin’?’
‘Hi Grey,’ muttered Charlie, without looking up. There was a cow’s head lodged between his forearms. He was watching intently while a vet emptied his syringe into the vein beneath her tail. A moment later Charlie released the cow and stood back, patting its fat, healthy rump for the last time as it was ushered away. Grey leant towards Charlie. ‘Something’s come up,’ he whispered. ‘You’re needed at the house.’
‘Is it Jo?’
‘Excuse me,’ interrupted the vet, ‘but you need to be wearing one of the suits down here. Someone should have told you.’
‘I know that already,’ said Grey helpfully. ‘I’ve come to fetch Charlie.’ He looked back at the space where Charlie had been standing. ‘…Charlie?’
Grey didn’t catch up with him until they reached the boot room door. ‘It’s nothing to do with Jo, you silly sod,’ he panted irritably. ‘Calm down. It’s yer bloody cows.’
‘Cows? What cows?’
‘Och, for God’s sake! You woke the whole bloody house last night. What bloody cows do you think?’
Just then, from almost directly beneath them, came an unmistakable, ground-shaking bellow. Charlie removed his cap and tugged with embarrassment at his dark hair. ‘Oh. Those cows,’ he said feebly. ‘Has anyone else heard, do you think?’
Grey chuckled. ‘The General and me have bin ignorin’ it all morning, shouting at each other to pass the marmalade, pretending there’s always cows bellyaching through the kitchen floor at us. I swear they’ve been making the fuckin’ windows rattle…I don’t know about Jo, though. I haven’t seen her.’ Grey looked as tactful as he could, but he, like Charlie, had known Jo in the olden days, when she was as priggish as all her fashionable friends. Ex-friends. She was much more laid-back recently, but there were times when she still reverted – especially when she was under pressure.
‘Oh. No. Don’t worry about Jo. She helped me,’ said Charlie. He looked at Grey and smiled slightly. ‘Jo’s fine. Has anyone else heard?’
‘I don’t think so, no. Mrs Webber’s not in today. I checked. Anyway she’s totally deaf. Have you noticed? She can’t hear a bloody word.’
‘What about Les?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Mr Tarr?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Have any of the MAFF people used the lavatory?’
‘Fuck, I don’t know. What do you think? I’ve been standing guard here all mornin’? If they had they would have said something. So I suppose not.’
There came another earth-shattering groan from beneath them. ‘Aye,’ said Grey matter-of-factly. ‘It’s happenin’ about every couple a’ minutes. It’s pretty constant. Sometimes they just keep goin’ on. Did you not think about the soundproofing? What were you bloody doing down there all night?’
Neither of them had the faintest idea how many sleeping pills each cow needed but since Grey had only twenty left, they gave ten to each. They ground them into bowls of warm milk and Charlie took them down to the cellar while Grey and Jo – whom they’d found wandering the boot room with her notebook – kept guard and each other company at the back door.
The cows looked resentful, bewildered and slightly mad when Charlie found them. They were covered in sweat and a thick layer of ceiling plaster, which rained onto them every time their vast horns knocked against any of the walls. But they drank the milk without any trouble and Charlie stayed with them talking, reminiscing. They seemed to draw comfort from the familiar sound of his voice.
After a while Jo grew worried that the MAFF people would be missing him, and decided to go down and fetch him out. She found him sitting on one of the straw bales they had carried down together the previous night. He was leaning his long legs against the rump of one of the animals, holding his dark head in his hands, deep in thought. He looked so sad it stopped her in her tracks. She watched him for a moment, unsure how to break the silence. She felt like an intruder.
‘Which one was yours, Charlie?’
He looked up slowly, with a faint smile of welcome. ‘This one,’ he said, nodding at his feet. ‘Jasonette. At least, I wanted to call her Jason. But Georgie said…you know…Jason was a boy’s name…’ He fell silent.
‘Jasonette…’ Jo smiled. ‘You know you should probably get back out there, Charlie,’ she added gently. ‘They’ll be wondering where you are.’
‘I