Chapter five:

 

 

The day passes in a blur of disinfectant and bloody carcasses. I buckle down and work, as always, refusing to think about the images that haunt me. The things that crawl just below the surface, nibbling away under my skin.

Memories?

Thoughts?

Or delusions?

Who the fuck knows anymore?

Hours later and it’s raining again, and there’s a leak in the roof. When I look closer I see it’s actually a hole and not just a leak. The carcasses are going to get contaminated if Charlie doesn’t get it fixed soon. Things won’t be sterile. I can’t disinfect properly with a hole in the roof.

I tell him so, and he doesn’t look happy about it. But he just sits there at his computer, drinking coffee and pressing buttons. I press the urgency of the matter and then he tells me to ‘get on with what you’re fucking paid for and mind your own damn business’ and I know he must have lost some money again. He leaves to go “somewhere: to do “something,” and he doesn’t tell anyone what or where. We’re all just expected to get on with our jobs.

I wonder if we’ll be paid this week, I think as I sweep the blood to the drain. And I wonder how angry everyone will be if we’re not. I want to tell Charlie that if Health and Safety comes down and sees the hole in the roof they’ll close this place down, and then he’ll have no money at all for gambling and we’ll all be out of work. But I don’t say that, because I know there’s no point when he’s in this sort of mood. It’s the trouble with this type of sickness.

You can’t see the problem because of the problem.

I lean my brush up against the wall and I drag over the mop and bucket. The scent of the disinfectant is strong and I swish it around to get more of the smell to come up into my nose.

I’m not allowed to touch the knives in the slaughterhouse, not allowed near the blades at all. And that’s okay by me because I don’t like blood. Which is weird really if I think about it. Because everyone is made up of blood. The average human body holds between six to eight pints of blood. We can’t live without it. It’s the one thing that binds every human on the planet.

Blood. So much blood.

And it all holds such a strong link to my past.

So I don’t go near the knives or any of the equipment here—not unless I’m cleaning it. That’s my job. I’m the cleaner. I shovel animal leftovers. Sweep the blood spills. I disinfect everything. And when I leave here, it’s always clean. Spic-and-span, some would say. I’m good at my job, because I like making things clean and I like my routine.

I have a routine for cleaning. First I sweep the spills away, and shovel anything too big to go down the drain into the incinerator. Then I mop and wipe everything with industrial-strength cleaner. Most people skip parts. Like cleaning the parts of the machine that are hard to get to. Or shoveling the bigger parts into the bin instead of putting them in the incinerator where they should go.

But I don’t.

I’m thorough in my job. And in my life. I’ve lived with my routines for too many years to break the rituals now. And I wouldn’t want to break them anyway. I don’t want to be that moth that flits from light to light, unsure of what’s happening or where it’s going.

I like a plan. I like strategy. I like to be in the know.

And I know where I stand with my days; I know what to expect. I guess it’s the difference between my life now and my life then. It’s the difference between the past and the present. I wasn’t in control then, but I am now.

The funny thing is, I like my days now, but I would still go back to the past if I could.

Because she was always there, right where I least expected her.

I’d eat my dinner and head upstairs to my room, and she’d be sitting on the middle of my bed reading one of my comics like it was normal for a girl to sneak into a boy’s bedroom.

“Don’t you ever use a door?” I would ask, and she’d laugh at me. But she never replied.

I learned a lot about Carrie very quickly. I watched her when she wasn’t aware I was there. I was behind every corner, and every door, waiting for her. Learning her ways, her nuances.

She hated boiled potatoes, but she loved them mashed. She loved Marvel, but not DC. She liked watching me play computer games, but she never wanted to play them herself. She liked to play in the mud, and she was always catching head lice. My mom said that her mom never cleared them away properly, and that was why.

But the biggest thing I knew about her was that she was beautiful.

Not pretty.

But beautiful.

Her hair was a golden yellow, and when the sun shone on it it looked like hair spun from pure gold. It was long, but it was always tied back. She never let me touch it, and that was okay because it always had bugs in it, but I knew that if I would have touched it, it would have been soft.

I didn’t mind it when she turned up without me knowing.

I liked her unpredictability.

And that wasn’t something I normally liked.

I couldn’t tell you why I fell in love with Carrie Brown. It could have been because she was beautiful and broken. Or it could have been that she knew I was weird but told me it was okay to be so. Carrie made me feel accepted and understood. She made me feel both normal and weird. And she made me feel that either was okay.

Love is a strange thing. You don’t even know that it’s happening until it’s happened, and you’re ten feet deep in a puddle of love that makes you smile for the first time in a long time.

I think it was the only reason my mom let us be friends: Carrie broke me out of my shell. She made me leave the carefully guarded world I had built for myself. She made me leave my sanctuary.

She was fascinating and beguiling and she was all mine.

Only mine.

We shared our first kiss on her eighth birthday.

I had bought her a sparkly headband. I’d worked all month doing jobs for my mom and dad so I could get it for her. She looked confused when I gave it to her. And then she cried when she opened it.

I told her not to cry and that I was sorry. My present was supposed to make her happy, not even sadder, and I wouldn’t have bought it if I had known what her mom had planned to do.

And then she said sorry to me. She put the headband on and then she leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. Her lips were warm, but not as warm as her tears on my cheek. And then she turned and left because her dad was calling her from the front step.

I felt bad because her mom had finally gotten sick of the head lice and had shaved Carrie’s head completely bald.

Every inch of gold was gone.

But I still thought she was beautiful.

With or without her hair.

I didn’t see Carrie for a month after that.