When she turned fourteen her father handed her the meat cleaver and said “Cut” and she did.
Photograph: © Tobias Fäldth from the forthcoming book Year One published by SteidlGUN
Menzies Meat by Evie Wyld
Elaine jointed the beef and made piles of chuck and blade, silver-side, brisket and tenderloin. It felt good to put things in order. At seven years old, she couldn't remember the months of the year correctly, but she could name the seventeen main cuts of beef and could search through the intestines and viscera of a cow and name each organ - and even put a price to them. She knew about hanging, preserving and cleaning. When she was thirteen her dad had taken her along to a local abattoir, so she could learn about the whole 'journey'. It hadn't taken long for her to forget about the softness of the cows and look wide-eyed at the warm carcasses with a similar attachment.
When she turned fourteen her father handed her the meat cleaver and said "Cut" and she did. She picked it up easily, which meant her dad felt free to leave her on her own for a few hours a day while he had a break in the pub or ran errands. It was a good feeling to send the blade through flesh and bone and into the butcher's block. She liked to have to yank the cleaver from the wood; she liked the physical strain of the work. She enjoyed taking her frustrations out on a carcass, jointing it, sectioning the tail for soup, or cracking open the ribs with the back of her cleaver. Elaine had a few small nicks from that first year of cutting, but nothing serious. Her dad had once broken a table with the force of his cleaving (or so he liked to say) but apart from that, his hands remained unscarred.
Driving out to the tip after closing time with a load of bones (splintery, and so no good for dogs) Elaine squinted at the long stretch of road in front of her. You could look down the Goldfields Highway for as far as your eyes could reach, either side of the town. It was so long and straight that most days mirages blotted out the horizon. A rare truck would appear from the watery heat and speed through the town, not slowing to peer at the wide main street with its shop windows papered over and blank.
The tip was down a dirt track just past the sign, which on one side welcomed you to Menzies and on the other lamented your departure. It was fairly new and had caused much discussion around town concerning its cheery 'Menzies est. 1894 - built on a Goldmine!' (The other contender for the slogan had been 'Menzies - a tidy town!' which was true but, it was thought, less exciting.)
The side you read as you left Menzies had recently been vandalised in two different ways. Someone had scoured the word FUCK in neat caps in the bottom left hand corner. Some so-and-so had also peeled off a word so that were it once read 'Come back soon!' it now read, desperately, 'Come back !' Looking at it made Elaine feel like Menzies was a small knot in a big length of rope getting smaller and tighter the harder the rope was pulled.
The highway ran right through the town spreading red dust and moving the air every time a truck came through.
Elaine's father owned the butcher's shop. The sign above the galvanised shack was hand-painted in sloping chirpy letters; blue on white, with an exclamation mark and a cartoon of a cow's face, all loopy with its tongue rolling out of its mouth. Menzies Meat only sold beef and eggs.
A short drive behind the town, down another dirt track and on slightly lower ground, was the salt lake. It was big enough that mirages kept its full size a secret, like the highway. A great white disc surrounded by arid scrub. When you walked on the lake in the dry season, if you were careful, you could stay on the top crust of salt, but if you went too quickly or heavily your foot would go through, and open the viscid red mud to the air. The lake bled if you trod too hard.
On the lake at night you could see the dome of the top of the world. Keena, who had aboriginal blood, liked to ham up her accent and say things like "It de big country. See dat star? Dat de king of de goannas dere!" Sometimes Elaine would join in; playing the redneck, talking about fucking her father or shootin' up signposts. Usually their fun would peter out with comments to each other like "Fackin aboes" and "Kill whitey", and they'd be left, smoke rising from their cigarettes, looking at the sky, and the biggness of it, amid the sound of cicadas and the vacant hoot of an owl.
The moon reflected in the lake, regardless of whether or not there was water there. When it was dry the salt glowed in its light.
As the sun was setting, Elaine and Keena were sat on the lake getting stoned.
"Fuckin', I don't give a fart in lemonade if those kids don't turn up." Keena glanced around herself and pulled a thick hand through her wedge-shaped hair. "You an me we got the mull and the beer to have us an okay nite without those scrawny rednecks." She looked across the lake and squinted at a twiggy bottle brush shrub. "Wonder if they're in that, watchin'. Fuckin' rednecks."
"Keena, we're rednecks" Elaine said, her eyes closed on the evening sun.
"Fuckin' speak for you self girlie girl, I'm a fuckin black, me. Fuckin' black gin." Elaine kept her eyes closed and smiled. They were sat on the seats of two orange plastic chairs - the legs torn off so that they wouldn't sink into the mud. Back in her normal voice Keena asked "You 'right Elaine?"
"Fine - pass the bong?" Something rustled in the scrub to their left - more than likely a bandicoot or a rat - and they ignored it.
"Nah, serious, you got all quiet recently. An' you look different. You losing weight?" Keena handed Elaine the apparatus, a Fanta bottle with a bit of hose pipe sticking from it, some dirty smelling water and a lighter. Keena was always asking how Elaine had stayed thin while she had, in the last three years, grown breasts and a bottom and a belly. Elaine kept on telling her "It's just I have a bad diet, Keena, I eat beef for pretty much every meal," which was true. But lately, Elaine had noticed a change in her appearance. When she looked at herself naked in the bathroom mirror she felt made of ash. There was something dry and grey and insubstantial about her body now. Her hair was almost green when it was wet, and almost grey when dry. She was beyond dreary.
Sitting up, Elaine placed her middle finger over the air hole of the bong and chipped the lighter into flame with her other thumb. Holding it to the little pocket of mull, she sucked at the top of the bottle and felt it bubble and fill up with smoke. After drawing it in, she lent back in the orange cup chair and let the smoke float out of her.
"It's this shitty town," she croaked, with the last of her breath.
"Tell me `bout it," Keena agreed. "The men in this town don't know their dicks from their elbows."
"Nah, it's not that." The distant noise of a road train drowned out the crack of the cicadas. "I feel like I'm sat `round here waiting for my dad to die, so I can have babies and work in his shop and die, and then my kids can die in it too." Elaine frowned as she tried to find the words which would make sense of what she wanted to say. "I go to school; work in the shop; then I come out here and get ripped with you. That's what I do - for ever." There was a silence in which cicadas took back the noise again. Keena was looking away across the lake and Elaine could see her jaw set. The air was thick and still and Elaine could feel the blood pumping in her lips. She worried that her stomach might growl loudly in the silence. A gang of white cockatiels whirred and screamed by in the gloaming.
Once, Elaine's dad had seen a Jabiru set down right in the middle of the lake, where there was still some pinkish water left. He reckoned it was taller than a tall man, and that when it flew away after a brief sift through the salty water, you could feel the air around your face moving from its wings. Elaine's dad was a good exaggerator, but Elaine always hoped to catch sight of a dinosaur bird like that. It'd be good to feel the fan of its wings; get the air moving again.
Keena busted open with a laugh that sounded like a bang :
"Jesus, you got me all fuckin' sad with you for a sec there!" and then, in a voice that implied some deeper kind of hurt, "Fuckin' hell Elaine! We're sixteen! That's what all sixteen-year-olds do! What d'ya think you gonna get suited up and join some big lawyer's firm or something if you didn't work at the butchers?! Fuckin' hell, just have a bit of fun will ya? An' eat somethin' green."
Elaine felt like she'd been caught doing something dirty, and looked at her hands. Her fingernails had blood under them.
When she looked up Elaine could make out the shapes of the boys looming at the edge of the lake. Keena saw them too and ran a hand through her hair. "Fuckit', here they come," she said, and stood up. "Reckon I'm for that Jimmy Colerain tonight." Digging around in her backpack she found a compact mirror and an orangey lipstick. The conversation was off. Elaine felt like she hadn't said exactly what she meant. There was something more that needed to come out of her. She wondered if she even knew what she wanted to say; what it was that was slowly turning her to ash.
The next day, there was meat work to do. A thick plastic fly curtain in the butcher shop's doorway kept out the red dust, the breeze and most flies. The luckless few who got through generally headed straight for the zapper, where they quickly became crisp black dots on its undercarriage. It was like the crumb tray of a toaster. One or two became sloppy from the smell of meat and flew endlessly in a square shape around the ceiling fan. Unfortunately the fly curtain didn't keep out Tom Rydding. Tom had been the talk of Menzies five years before when he had come back from holiday in Perth with a mail-order bride. This little Malaysian woman - Dee Dee - had quietly watched life in Menzies for seven months and then left. Tom never said very much on the subject, but what he thought about her departure was evident from his attitude towards women from then on. Not that his attitude had been particularly admirable before Dee Dee left him, but there was a definite lean towards nastiness now. He liked to stare women out, stroking his crumb-bum beard and not blinking. There'd been a bit of trouble with the police, when he drank too much and got mouthy in the pub.
Elaine would daydream about Tom becoming a serial killer. He came into the shop every Wednesday for tripe and dog bones. Once he ordered some ground steak as well. His teeth weren't up to chewing it himself, he told Elaine.
"Right," said Elaine.
She imagined him waiting out on the lake with a hook or an axe, sometimes just a length of wire rope. She could see him gashing open bellies, chopping off limbs and relishing the struggle of a suffocating body. Sometimes she thought about what he did with the bodies - whether he fucked them before, after, during? Did he insert anything other than himself? A beer bottle? The end of a hammer? Sometimes, probably. Of one thing Elaine was completely convinced - he'd keep the hair; keep it in a little wooden box under his bed, and when the police finally caught up with him, they'd find this little nest of colours; the dead bits of dead women.
This afternoon, Tom Rydding was leant forward on the counter, his gaze resting between her legs while she parcelled up his tripe. His eyelids were sunburned. He didn't pretend he wasn't looking - and why should he? Elaine, when she was younger, had been made uneasy by his leering; but now she just thought 'go ahead - it's what eyes are for isn't it?' Recently, especially the last two months, she hadn't even registered Tom's swarthy presence as anything different from Mrs Salisbury and her bi-weekly order of rissoles.
Elaine's dad came back from his break chipper and smelling of fried onions and beer. He always had some snippet of information for Elaine that frankly disappeared right out of her mind as soon as he'd said it; - there were thirteen budgerigars on the back fence at tea time, or Mackenzie's son on the east coast had been bass fishing and caught a two-footer. That was the outside world as far as Elaine's dad saw it - there was the wildlife and then there was people's relatives who caught fish. This life here in Menzies was about producing decent cuts of powerful meat.
Sometimes Elaine looked at her dad and wondered what was in the butcher's shop that kept him going. What it was that made him think it was where they ought to be.
Elaine's dad liked to think he remembered Menzies before all the people moved out.
"Used to be thirteen hotels here - two breweries - there was over 10,000 people all living here - that was a bit before your grandpa moved here though. It was a grouse place to live." And he'd go quiet and stand at the door looking out at the highway.
Prospectors and fossikers had filled the town with miners. "The miners ate chicken an' fish an' beef an' ham, lamb an' pies an' sausages. People came to stay, an' went to restaurants. Things were greener an' there was more of everything. 'Cept space, an' you can't beat a bit of space." He'd turn round, ever enthusiastic about the ghost town, and Elaine would have to smile back to stop him from feeling hurt. Then he'd stretch his arms out to emphasise the space and go for a stroll around his town.
The gold went and so did the people. Locals still spent time scouting around in the scrub with a metal detector or just a bucket of dust and a sieve. It was gold fever, as far Elaine could see - 'cept there was no gold to be had. Not for the last hundred years.
The butcher's grass that trimmed the window of the shop had been green when Elaine was little. Now it was white, like Christmas tinsel. Everything in town was either red from the earth or white from the sun. Elaine didn't know if it was depressing or not. Looking at it seemed to bleach out any feeling in her stomach, stretch it out and burn it away until there was just nothing.
Jimmy Colerain and his three friends had left with a plan to go shooting and smoke most of the mull. Keena had made sure she and Elaine had enough for one more hit, but neither of them approached the bong. It sat just out of their reach, looking more and more to Elaine like an old Fanta bottle with grubby water in it. Before they left Jimmy and his friends had made a small fire.
"That Jimmy's alright," Keena started and then lit a cigarette. "Didja' have a go?"
"Yep."
Elaine had found Jimmy Colerain an exact match to the other boys that regularly came out on the lake.
Keena let out a high growl of laughter. "Jesus, d'ya know what he said? We were just finishing up and that, an' he goes, 'Reckon I'd like to make a girl pregnant - Reckon it'd feel good'!" they both laughed shrilly and then let it fade into silence again.
"It's not a bad idea, ay?"
Elaine looked at Keena to see if she was joking.
"What you getting at?"
"Well - lookit - I get sprogged up, and go ta hospital; maybe Perth or somewhere like that - Darwin even - either way it means a trip to the hospital - meetin' a nice doc and all that. It'd be one hellava way out!" Keena laughed again, this time on her own.
"Way out?"
The silence was back and Keena turned her face away from the fire.
As Elaine washed blood off of her butcher's block, Tom showed up. There was a smell of beer about him. He was earlier than usual. He pushed through the fly curtain and stood solidly in the middle of the shop, looking Elaine straight in the eye. Elaine looked back, and stood equally unmoving. She wondered if something was going to happen. A full minute they stood there looking at each other, Tom swaying ever so slightly. Elaine noticed he was gripping something in his hand, which could have been a knife. She thought about the cleaver on the counter behind her. Tom Rydding took a step forward and opened his mouth to speak. A fly flew in a square above him and to the north a distant road train blasted its horn. He took a breath to say something, but thought better of it, and the hand that held what looked like a knife slackened. He lowered his gaze and walked right out of the shop, forgetting his tripe and dog bones. Elaine didn't move, but watched him through the fly curtain as he threw himself into his Ute and sped away to do something else.
What was that? thought Elaine.
With a sad lurch like a stone being dropped into her stomach, she realised that it was nothing at all.
"Start of a whole new week!" Elaine's dad chirruped. "What you going to do today?" Elaine shrugged.
"We'll see," she said, but by four o'clock she was back in her apron and knew that there'd be no waiting and seeing today.
The fly curtain kept everything inside, and Elaine wished someone would come in and bring some fresh flies with them. Even Tom Rydding would be a burst of fresh air. Elaine went to the freezer to bare her face at the cold, and blink at the frozen calf head they kept aside for Mrs Delray, who had an enthusiasm for soups whatever the weather.
She spent the afternoon jointing a couple of carcasses, making neat mounds of legs and flanks. They always had a lot of work on a Monday night, as the delivery came in the morning, and most of the town came for their orders on a Tuesday. Elaine's dad came back from his break, whistling.
"Old Pagey reckons there'll be some rain about this time next week," he started in, as he took up a butcher's block facing away from Elaine. "Reckon the lake's about due for a bit of a drink - be nice to let this dust be mud for a bit." Elaine nodded in time with the thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk of her cleaver. She wanted someone to open the fly curtain and let everything in, the air; the flies; the dust, Tom Rydding; the boys from the salt lake. She breathed through her mouth because her chest felt tight, and she tasted the fatty pong of raw beef. Something inside her felt clammy.
Her dad went on, "I reckon we'll get at least half the orders ready tonight - Coley's havin' a do Thursday so he wants a side to spit roast. I told him, beef's not real good for that - you'd want a pig or at least a lamb, but he's dead set - likes ta think of himself as a bit of a chef I reckon. Alice wasn't too keen when...." thunk, thunk, thunk.
Elaine felt the clamminess swimming in her, trying to get to the surface. Things were tightening inside, closing up and gasping. She felt as though she was mid-way through standing up too quickly and all the blood was rushing away from her head. She felt like she might keep on going upwards. Her muscles ached like they wanted to get out. She watched a truck haring past - the fourth that morning - and itched as she saw the dust settling back on the road. She wanted to throw things - anything - the cleaver, the butcher's block; she wanted to break the windows and let in the flies. Thunk, thunk.
"But I told him, I said, if you want to pay the extra eighty dollars and have it shipped on up here, go ahead, it's no skin off my nose..." THUNK.
Elaine's dad seemed to find her quietness unnerving suddenly, and in an attempt to be her father, mother and friend said, " You right 'laine? Getting' ya period or something?"
By the time Elaine understood what she'd really and actually done, it was too late, and either way she wasn't sure that if given the chance she would've undone it.
Getting no response and wondering at the noise of something dripping on to the lino, Elaine's dad turned to face his ashen daughter.
Elaine wondered at the frailty of fingers and, not for the first time, at the ease of chopping though flesh and bone.
"What the fuck ya gone and done ya silly idiot?" Elaine's dad whispered slowly as a bluebottle fried itself to death in the zapper.
"A Hospital in Western Australia was surprised to have admitted on to their children's ward a sixteen-year-old girl who had cut off her own finger with a butcher's cleaver. While this is an unusual injury, bearing in mind the age and sex of the patient, more surprising still was the father, who arrived holding a thawing cow's head with his daughter's index finger pointing out of the cow's left nostril, having been unable to find any ice to pack the finger in."
Australian Medical Periodical October 1994 ·
Monday, 20 July, 2009
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