At the moment the nets landed Prior had looked across the heaving backs and seen a boy, about his own age, standing pressed back against the wall, his white, still face half hidden by a mass of cottery black hair. Mac.
The sight of the cow in the net stayed with him. Many a night he dreamt about her and woke to lie staring into the swirling darkness. Sometimes when he woke it was already light, and then, afraid to go back to sleep, he would creep downstairs, open the door quietly and slip out into the empty, dawn-smelling streets. The only other person about at that hour was the knocker-up, an old woman with bent back and wisps of white hair escaping from a black woollen shawl, who went from house to house, tapping on the upper windows with her long pole, waiting for the drowsy or bad-tempered answer, and moving on. Drifting along behind her, he’d found his way to the cattle pens, and to the deepest friendship of his childhood.
He left the pens now and walked into the high shed, which was as vast as a cathedral, and echoing. He walked up and down, dwarfed by the height, imagining the place as it used to be and presumably still was, if you came at the right time of week. He remembered the rattle of rain on the corrugated iron roof, imagined it pouring down as it had on the night he first stayed here with Mac. He looked round, and the empty stalls filled with terrified cattle, huge shadows of tossing horns leapt across the ceiling as the guards moved up and down with lanterns, checking that the overcrowded animals were not suffocating to death. If they suffocated before they could be slaughtered, their meat was unfit for human consumption, though it found its way on to the market as ‘braxy’, in shops patronized only by the very poor. There was no profit to be had from braxy, so if an animal was distressed and appeared to be near death the guards would rouse the slaughterman to come and dispatch it. These guards were supposed to be on duty all night, but since they’d been away for long stretches on the drovers’ road they naturally wanted to sleep with their wives or girlfriends, and that was where Mac came in. The job was subcontracted to him at a penny a night, and he was good at it. He could calm a cow, even a cow who’d already scented blood, to the point where she would yield milk into a lemonade bottle. Prior could almost see him now, wedged into a wall of sweating flesh, slithering on the green shit that always had about it the smell of terror, coaxing, whispering, stroking, burrowing his head into the cow’s side, and then coming back in triumph with the warm milk. They’d swigged it from the bottle, sitting side by side on the bales of straw that stood in one corner of the shed, and then, slowly and luxuriously, like businessmen savouring particularly fine cigars, they smoked the tab ends Mac had picked up from the streets.
Prior wandered across to the bales of straw and sat down, his cigarette a small planet shining in the darkness, for the night was closing in fast. He could just see the nail in the wall which had always been their target in peeing competitions, and from the nail he moved in imagination to the school playground. He had a lot of playground memories of Mac, and classroom memories too, though few of these were happy. Mac was dirty and his hair was lousy. He wore men’s shoes, and a jacket whose sleeves came to the tips of his fingers, and he was always being beaten. As children do, Prior supposed, he’d started by assuming that Mac was beaten more often than anybody else because he was naughtier than anybody else. He was inclined to believe now that the only valuable part of his education at that abysmal school had been learning that this was not true. Lizzie’s profession was well known. On the one occasion she’d come to school, her speech had been slurred and she’d raised her voice in the corridor; they’d all watched her through the classroom windows, every varied pitch of her indignation expressed in the jiggling of the feather on her hat. No doubt she’d come down to protest because they’d beaten Mac too hard. If so, the visit did no good: he was beaten again as soon as she left. Prior remembered those beatings. He remembered the painful pressure of emotions he’d felt: fear, pity, anger, excitement, pleasure. He wondered now whether the pleasure could possibly have been as sexual as he remembered it. Probably not.
After one such occasion Prior had sat with his back to the railings that divided the boys’ playground from the girls’, munching a sandwich and watching Mac. Mac was running up and down the playground with Joe Smailes on his back, staggering beneath the weight, his grubby hands with their scabbed knuckles clasping Joe Smailes’s podgy pink thighs. Mac was a bread horse: he gave other boys rides on his back in exchange for the crust from their bread or the core of their apple. Lizzie had not been poor, as the neighbourhood understood poverty, but she was too disorganized by drink to provide regular meals. What disturbed Prior this time, what ensured that his eyes never left Mac’s face as he staggered up and down, was the knowledge that he’d deserved a beating every bit as much as Mac, but because he was clean, tidy, well turned out, likely to win a scholarship and bring desperately needed credit to the school, he’d been spared. He bit into his second sandwich, thought, munched, choked. Suddenly he ran across the playground, thrust what was left of the sandwich into Mac’s hands, burst into tears, and ran away.
Who needed Marx when they had Tite Street Board School, Prior thought, stubbing out his cigarette carefully between strips of golden straw. Still absorbed in memories of the past, he got to his feet and started to walk up and down. The moon had risen; its light was bright enough to cast his shadow across the floor. His-first awareness of Mac was of a shadow growing beside his own, then the touch of a hand on his shoulder, and a light amused voice asking, ‘Am I to understand you’ve been up my mother?’
Prior turned. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘All that stuff about “Thank God for an honest man”, I don’t know what else it could mean.’
‘Now would I do that?’
‘I don’t know. Before the war you’d’ve fucked a cow in a field if you could’ve found one to stand still for you.’
And the bull. ‘Mac, I swear —’
‘Aw, forget it. If I was sensitive about that I’d’ve croaked years ago.’ Mac was smiling. This was almost, but not quite, a joke.
Prior said, ‘Shall we sit down?’
They sat on bales of straw a few feet apart, united and divided by the rush of memory. They could see clearly enough, by moonlight and the intermittent glow of cigarettes, to be able to judge each other’s expression.
‘It was you in the kitchen, then,’ Prior said. ‘I thought it was.’
‘Why, who’d you think it might be?’
Prior hesitated. ‘I was afraid it might be some poor frightened little sod of a deserter, I was afraid he’d —’
‘What would you have done?’
‘Turned him in.’
Mac looked at him curiously. ‘Even though he’s “a poor frightened little sod”?’
‘Yes. What about the poor frightened little sods who don’t desert?’