Madness Read online

  VIII

  The packing-house was a big four-storey brick building, and the air around it smelled sweet and heavy, like musk. At the main entrance gates, there was a large notice which said VISITORS WELCOME AT ANY TIME, and thus encouraged, Lexington walked through the gates and entered a cobbled yard which surrounded the building itself. He then followed a series of signposts (THIS WAY FOR THE GUIDED TOURS), and came eventually to a small corrugated-iron shed set well apart from the main building (VISITORS WAITING-ROOM). After knocking politely on the door, he went in.

  There were six other people ahead of him in the waiting-room. There was a fat mother with her two little boys aged about nine and eleven. There was a bright-eyed young couple who looked as though they might be on their honeymoon. And there was a pale woman with long white gloves, who sat very upright, looking straight ahead with her hands folded on her lap. Nobody spoke. Lexington wondered whether they were all writing cooking-books, like himself, but when he put this question to them aloud, he got no answer. The grown-ups merely smiled mysteriously to themselves and shook their heads, and the two children stared at him as though they were seeing a lunatic.

  Soon, the door opened and a man with a merry pink face popped his head into the room and said, ‘Next, please.’ The mother and the two boys got up and went out.

  About ten minutes later, the same man returned. ‘Next, please,’ he said again, and the honeymoon couple jumped up and followed him outside.

  Two new visitors came in and sat down – a middle-aged husband and a middle-aged wife, the wife carrying a wicker shopping-basket containing groceries.

  ‘Next, please,’ said the guide, and the woman with the long white gloves got up and left.

  Several more people came in and took their places on the stiff-backed wooden chairs.

  Soon the guide returned for the third time, and now it was Lexington’s turn to go outside.

  ‘Follow me, please,’ the guide said, leading the youth across the yard towards the main building.

  ‘How exciting this is!’ Lexington cried, hopping from one foot to the other. ‘I only wish that my dear Aunt Glosspan could be with me now to see what I am going to see.’

  ‘I myself only do the preliminaries,’ the guide said. ‘Then I shall hand you over to someone else.’

  ‘Anything you say,’ cried the ecstatic youth.

  First they visited a large penned-in area at the back of the building where several hundred pigs were wandering around. ‘Here’s where they start,’ the guide said. ‘And over there’s where they go in.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Right there.’ The guide pointed to a long wooden shed that stood against the outside wall of the factory. ‘We call it the shackling-pen. This way, please.’

  Three men wearing long rubber boots were driving a dozen pigs into the shackling-pen just as Lexington and the guide approached, so they all went in together.

  ‘Now,’ the guide said, ‘watch how they shackle them.’

  Inside, the shed was simply a bare wooden room with no roof, but there was a steel cable with hooks on it that kept moving slowly along the length of one wall, parallel with the ground, about three feet up. When it reached the end of the shed, this cable suddenly changed direction and climbed vertically upwards through the open roof towards the top floor of the main building.

  The twelve pigs were huddled together at the far end of the pen, standing quietly, looking apprehensive. One of the men in rubber boots pulled a length of metal chain down from the wall and advanced upon the nearest animal, approaching it from the rear. Then he bent down and quickly looped one end of the chain around one of the animal’s hind legs. The other end he attached to a hook on the moving cable as it went by. The cable kept moving. The chain tightened. The pig’s leg was pulled up and back, and then the pig itself began to be dragged backwards. But it didn’t fall down. It was rather a nimble pig, and somehow it managed to keep its balance on three legs, hopping from foot to foot and struggling against the pull of the chain, but going back and back all the time until at the end of the pen where the cable changed direction and went vertically upwards, the creature was suddenly jerked off its feet and borne aloft. Shrill protests filled the air.

  ‘Truly a fascinating process,’ Lexington said. ‘But what was that funny cracking noise it made as it went up?’

  ‘Probably the leg,’ the guide answered. ‘Either that or the pelvis.’

  ‘But doesn’t that matter?’

  ‘Why should it matter?’ the guide asked. ‘You don’t eat the bones.’

  The rubber-booted men were busy shackling the rest of the pigs, and one after another they were hooked to the moving cable and hoisted up through the roof, protesting loudly as they went.

  ‘There’s a good deal more to this recipe than just picking herbs,’ Lexington said. ‘Aunt Glosspan would never have made it.’

  At this point, while Lexington was gazing skyward at the last pig to go up, a man in rubber boots approached him quietly from behind and looped one end of a chain round the youth’s own left ankle, hooking the other end to the moving belt. The next moment, before he had time to realize what was happening, our hero was jerked off his feet and dragged backwards along the concrete floor of the shackling-pen.

  ‘Stop!’ he cried. ‘Hold everything! My leg is caught!’

  But nobody seemed to hear him, and five seconds later, the unhappy young man was jerked off the floor and hoisted vertically upwards through the open roof of the pen, dangling upside down by one ankle, and wriggling like a fish.

  ‘Help!’ he shouted. ‘Help! There’s been a frightful mistake! Stop the engines! Let me down!’

  The guide removed a cigar from his mouth and looked up serenely at the rapidly ascending youth, but he said nothing. The men in rubber boots were already on their way out to collect the next batch of pigs.

  ‘Oh save me!’ our hero cried. ‘Let me down! Please let me down!’ But he was now approaching the top floor of the building where the moving belt curled over like a snake and entered a large hole in the wall, a kind of doorway without a door; and there, on the threshold, waiting to greet him, clothed in a dark-stained yellow rubber apron, and looking for all the world like Saint Peter at the Gates of Heaven, the sticker stood.

  Lexington saw him only from upside down, and very briefly at that, but even so he noticed at once the expression of absolute peace and benevolence on the man’s face, the cheerful twinkle in the eyes, the little wistful smile, and the dimples in his cheeks – and all this gave him hope.

  ‘Hi there,’ the sticker said, smiling.

  ‘Quick! Save me!’ our hero cried.

  ‘With pleasure,’ the sticker said, and taking Lexington gently by one ear with his left hand, he raised his right hand and deftly slit open the boy’s jugular vein with a knife.

  The belt moved on. Lexington went with it. Everything was still upside down and the blood was pouring out of his throat and getting into his eyes, but he could still see after a fashion, and he had a blurred impression of being in an enormously long room, and at the far end of the room there was a great smoking cauldron of water, and there were dark figures, half hidden in the steam, dancing round the edge of it, brandishing long poles. The conveyor-belt seemed to be travelling right over the top of the cauldron, and the pigs seemed to be dropping down one by one into the boiling water, and one of the pigs seemed to be wearing long white gloves on its front feet.

  Suddenly our hero started to feel very sleepy, but it wasn’t until his good strong heart had pumped the last drop of blood from his body that he passed on out of this, the best of all possible worlds, into the next.

  The Boy Who Talked with Animals

  First published in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (1977)

  Not so long ago, I decided to spend a few days in the West Indies. I was to go there for a short holiday. Friends had told me it was marvellous. I would laze around all day, they said, sunning myself on the silver beaches and swimming in