Best Australian Yarn: The Bleeding Station by Sam Cecins

Afterwards, I always find a little blood somewhere. Beneath a fingernail or crusted to my cuticles. Sometimes scaled in my hair, like dry paint. At the end of my shift, when I peel off the rubber gloves and the plastic apron, I check every part of my body. Both sides of my hands. The back of my neck in the mirror. A speckle or droplet always gets through the protective gear. On occasions, I find a stain even after showering. Some pit I failed to scrub clean. With me always, even if hidden. It’s just part of the job. Second on the processing line. The bleeding station. The pigs come to me upside down. Hanging from the conveyor by their hind legs. Already made limp and docile by the stun guns. Above on the mezzanine the supervisor watches. Leaning over the steel railing in his collared shirt. Not a blemish to be seen. Must be nice. I cut the pigs’ throat and step back and watch as its life pours down onto the concrete and washes into the grilled drain. The apron and the wellington boots take most of the splatter. But I know some will have found a way in. After a couple of minutes, I rinse down the concrete with the hose. The water is hot and the steam smells of disinfectant. The iron taste of blood there too. I hit the button on the control panel and the conveyor hums to life. The exsanguinated carcass glides down the rail to the scalding tank. Soon it will be scrubbed of hair and then vivisected and eventually packaged for display in supermarket fridges. I once dreamed of saving lives. It seems funny now. How dreams rarely survive contact with reality. I guess that’s what it means to wake up. * It never felt like we were poor. Not to me. Not back then. Our home was one of four townhouses on the block. The grass out the front was always overgrown and in the summer it would dry out and turn yellow like a bed of reeds. Nobody knew who was supposed to water it. Everything we owned was just a little broken. The stovetop refused to ignite, clicking away with that same electric snap until we lit it by match. The rusty showerhead would sputter and surge on its own whim. At night, we’d gather on the couch that was missing one leg. That corner propped up by a stack of bricks. Mum would rise early in the morning and head out to the docks in her highvis coveralls. A piece of toast clenched between her teeth. I would stay to look after Kelsey. My makeshift study was the lounge room. Scribbling notes on the wobbly coffee table while she rattled her toys and babbled to herself on the carpet. My study breaks were spent changing her or warming a bottle of formula. At sundown Mum would come home and we would switch. She would smell of grease as she hugged me goodbye. I’d walk to the medical campus beneath the dull orange street lamps. The lecture halls and common rooms mostly dark and abandoned but for a few other night-class spectres. The little pockets of time when we were all home, we made sure to spend together. Spaghetti dinners in front of the old, boxy TV with the bent aerial. The image would sometimes crackle away into static and Mum would slap the side until it snapped back into focus. Mum and I would play gin rummy at the kitchen table. We’d give Kelsey a little deck of her own play cards so she could pretend to join in. It was enough. To be warm and fed and together once in a while. In those days, we paid no heed to the sheen of wet roads or the wail of ambulance sirens. Of unpaid bills. The exchange of pig’s blood for payslips. For these were things yet to come. * I have never gotten used to the slaughterhouse smell. Pungent and fetid like a cattle farm. With a hint of spoiling offal. A whiff of death. It is inescapable, even when I leave. Following me through the corridors and out into the carpark. People drive the roads around here with their windows wound up. The stench wafting over the entire coastland like a poisonous fume. The only refuge is the ocean and so that is where I go. I hike up the road and past the tannery shed where they have left skins out to dry on the racks. A plague of flies drawn to them. The buzzing like radio static in the air. When I arrive at the base of the dunes the sun has already begun to flatten against the horizon. I vault over the logpost fence and trudge up the sand and take a seat amongst the scrub and the bleached driftwood. The water is pastel hued beneath the sunset. Pink and orange and shifting gently with the swell. There are silhouettes of sail boats out there. The distant rumble of waves breaking beyond the reef. The sea breeze tousles through my hair. It carries the sharp tang of salt and rotting weed. A cleansing tonic. I cup my hands to light a cigarette and when I take a puff, the smoke feathers away in the wind. It was the accident that changed everything. I remember that night so clearly. When I returned home there had been a uniformed police officer slouched in the wicker chair by the front door. Straightening his back as I came up the steps. He held his hat in his hand as he explained what had happened. A slippery road and a turn taken too quickly. An incoming truck. I felt bad for him. The proverbial bringer of bad news. I rode in the back of his patrol car to the hospital. Watching the reflection of the lights on the wet blacktop. By the time I arrived, Mum had already been to surgery and was recuperating in a room. Kelsey was there too, mewling in a nurse’s lap. When I picked her up, she buried her face in the hollow of my shoulder and we sat together by the bedside. Beneath the blankets and the bandages, the vague shape of a person. A plastic mask over her mouth. Tubes poking out of her here and there. Oxygen. Fluids. The cable of a heartrate monitor. Her eyes were open and watching us. There was no pain, but a sadness beneath the morphine glaze. Like in that moment, she could see the future. The wind drops a little and there it is again. That smell. Even the ocean is not free from it. Up the coast from where I sit, there is a concrete pipe bulging from the dunes and snaking down to the shore. Ribbed with rusty iron rings like some great industrial serpent. A tendril of the abattoir reaching out. A churn of blood and offal has started to flow from its mouth into the shallows. I can see the colour of it blooming in the water. The break rolling in and frothing up the sand and then sucking back out to sea. Drawing the fifth with it. A brown slick upon the water. There is a fishing dinghy out there, dropping lines straight into the muck. I suppose it makes for good berley. I quench my cigarette in the sand and dust off my pants. Time to go home and face what waits for me there. * When I get back to the house, I find a bottle of gin out on the coffee table. Mum’s anaesthetic of choice. I give it a shake and listen to the final dreg swishing about. Kelsey is by herself, playing with her toys in front of the television. I pick her up and I can feel that her nappy is swollen. That familiar sour smell. I carry her over to the changing table and tear open the velcro tabs. The sliding door rasps open and the wheelchair clatters over the wedeboard ramp. Mum rolls around the corner with a cigarette hanging out the side of her mouth. “Oh sorry, honey,” she says to me sluggishly. “Is she wet already? I swear I checked her five minutes ago.” “It’s no problem,” I say. “Some leftovers in the fridge for tea,” she says. “Great.” She drums her fingers on the arms of her chair for a moment. “Got a visit from welfare today,” she says eventually. I give her a long sideways glance. “Talking nonsense about unpaid bills. Reckon they are going to take Kelsey someplace while I sort it out. Told them to get stuffed.” “I’ll see if I can get a few extra shifts,” I say. “Tide us over.” She nods and smiles, but her eyes are so sad. Ashamed. Not even the gin can numb that. I finish changing Kelsey and put her down for the night. When I come back into the living room, Mum is just sitting there with her face lowered into her hands. Shoulders shuddering gently. It takes me a while to realise she is crying. “It’s alright Mum,” I say. “You’ve just had a bit too much to drink.” “It shouldn’t be this way,” she says through her fingers. “We’re a family,” I say. “We have to support each other.” “It would have been better if I’d died,” she says. I don’t know what to say to that. * A new knocker started on the line today. He is young like me, but the horror is still bright in his eyes and he is skittish to the pigs’ screaming. He does okay on the first couple of animals, but the third he fails to stun properly. Zapping it in the neck instead of the temple. Halfway down the conveyor, the pig wakes and starts to thrash and squeal. One of the shackles pops open and it dangles by the remaining leg, sawing back and forth before slipping loose and bellyflopping to the concrete. A few of the men converge, trying to corral the pig back to the knocker’s pen. But panic has made it wild and nimble. It charges over a butcher’s trolley, sending knives and bonesaws skittering. I manage to circle behind the pig and hook an arm around its neck. As it tries to buck free, I slip my bleeding knife in behind its ear and slice down and out through its throat. The pig screeches and there is a spray of blood. I loosen my hold and it stumbles forward and then collapses against the railing. The blood is glugging from its neck and pooling on the floor. It lurches back up and staggers the other way. I know that the pig is dead already. Its carotid artery severed. But with the adrenaline it could take anywhere from seconds to minutes. It slips on the concrete, wet with its own blood, and this time it stays down. The bawling weakens and then falls silent. Its trotters scratch against the floor in a final spasm. After a minute of stillness, a few of the others hoist the dead pig back up on the conveyor. I get the hose and start to sluice the blood over to the drain. As I work, I notice the new knocker staring at me. There is something akin to fear in his eyes and I wonder how he must see me. Bloodstained and emotionless. Like some villain from an old slasher film. Before I leave, the supervisor stops me to shake my hand. “You handled that well,” he says. “Just trying to help,” I say. “You’ve been working hard,” he says. “And I’ve noticed.” “Thanks.” “We might have some extra work coming up. New opportunities,” he paused. “I heard you have some sort of background with animal anatomy. Is that right?” “I studied medicine for a bit,” I say. “Medicine?” “Pigs aren’t human obviously, but you know…” I trail off. “It helps to know a bit,” he says. “Yeah.” “Have you got an office shirt?” “Office shirt?” “Collared. Button up. Like mine.” “I think I do, yeah.” “Wear that tomorrow, okay?” “Okay.” It’s not until the busride home that I realise I’ve been offered a promotion. * For the next few weeks, I shadow the supervisor. Watching the production line from the mezzanine, away from the knives and the blood. From up here the whole thing looks like one great machine. Live pigs are unloaded from the trucks and funnelled into the knocker’s pen to be stunned, hoisted along to the bleeding station for slaughter, then scalded, skinned and deboned before the butchers carve them up for packaging. A terrible kind of clockwork. Each man on the line a flywheel or piston in the larger automaton. The supervisor, Norman is his name, is a good teacher. He shows me how the swill-fed livestock are fatter and take more time to bleed and so we open a second bleeding station to prevent a bottleneck. He points out to me how a trainee is cutting too wide an angle. Leaving valuable meat on the bone. So he sends over an experienced butcher to provide instruction. A tweak here and there to the machine’s calculus. Optimised slaughter. The first supervisor’s payslip covers the unpaid bills and the rent. A little left over for groceries. After the second, I actually have savings. A little stash of numbers. A combination of possibilities. Perhaps I’ll get the stovetop fixed? Or replace the three-legged couch? That new kid, the knocker, he has taken my place on the bleeding station. Now the blood cakes to his fingers. Scabs in his hair. He’s improving every day. Getting numb to the violence. It is strange. Perhaps the smell is a little stronger up here. Despite the sterility and the cleanliness I feel sick at the end of every shift. * I drink a beer in front of the television and it takes me several minutes to realise it isn’t even switched on. I’m just staring into the blank screen. I had been imagining the future. My future. A slaughter not of dozens, but thousands. Wielding a hundred knives through other men’s hands. Finding ways to kill faster. Kill more. When Kelsey gets old enough to ask questions and understand the answers, what will I tell her? I take another sip of beer. It has gone warm. Mum has been watching me from the kitchen. She rolls over to my side and leans forward from the wheelchair and puts her arms around my neck. Smooths my hair, the way she used to when I was a child. “You don’t have to do it anymore,” she says in my ear. I am crying into her sweater. I’m not sure why. “I’ll find work. I can still answer phones. Something,” she continues. “We’ll find another way.” I want to believe her. More than anything, I want to believe.