Girl on the Block Page 12

  This might sound like a normal manager-assistant relationship, but I assure you that it wasn’t. Sophie did her best to belittle me at every opportunity, took work away from me that she thought I might be good at or find interesting, and made sure that I was out and about doing her bidding among the shops as much as possible. But, like a dog with its tail between its legs, I found it difficult to speak up since I’d gone after the job so hard. There was plenty that I did like about working in the office. I had my own email address and my own computer, and I could wear normal clothes to work. Because I knew how the shops were run, sometimes I would get called in to fix things—perhaps when the fuse blew on a vacuum-packing machine or the blade from the grinder got lost. I loved that part of the job. To Sophie’s dismay, Tim began to invite me to company meetings and managers’ meetings, too. Dealing with her was difficult, but it was nothing I couldn’t survive by moaning to my mother on the phone about it.

  Not long after I graduated, in July of 2014, things began to deteriorate. My two best friends, Hattie and Jamie, with whom I’d lived for the last year of school, moved back home to take a break from London life. I was on my own in the house we’d rented until the end of our tenancy, and once our lease was up I hastily moved in with five strangers on the top floor of a terraced house in Whitechapel, in East London. Renting in London is stressful, and I had taken the room in a last-minute panic after deciding that the kitchen looked alright.

  This would turn out to be the worst year of my life. My roommates were a stripper from Australia and her deadbeat boyfriend, two graphic designers, and a media student. The five of them had already built up a relationship by the time I moved in. They went out clubbing and drinking together almost every night, and although I got along with the graphic designers and the media student, the stripper and I were not a match. She was a vegan, very spiritual, and would knock on my door on Saturday mornings with a smoking clump of sage, asking if I wanted her to cleanse my room. She and her boyfriend brought along bedbugs from their year of traveling, which subsequently spread to my room, and then throughout the rest of the flat. A few months in, we noticed a couple of cockroaches crawling up the walls, and those cockroaches soon numbered in the hundreds. We’d often open a cupboard to find one crawling up the inside door, and at night we’d see their dark shapes scuttling across the ceiling. Pest control was useless, as was our landlord, a fair-skinned man of Indian descent who wore Rolex watches and Gucci sliders and constantly argued with all of us on the house group chat. Mice were an issue, too, often scurrying across the countertops or squeezing under my door at night to eat any dried meat left on the soles of my work boots.

  I rarely spoke to anyone in the house because I threw myself into work, and the reason I threw myself into work was because I hated my living situation. I quite quickly became depressed. I upped my days at the Ginger Pig to five a week—two in the office with Sophie and three moving between Borough Market, Hackney, and Marylebone. The more Sophie and I worked together, the less friendly we became. The only relief came from Lynsey, who had begun as a manager in Clapham and soon worked her way up to run operations for all of London after Naomi left (or was sacked; no one knows). Lynsey was from Dublin, and despite living in Australia for ten years and being out of her home country for fifteen, her accent was still thick and friendly. We first met when she asked me to cover a shift in Clapham, and we quickly bonded over the fact that we’d both met our then partners on Tinder. Lynsey knew the ins and outs of the company, and she soon had it working like a well-oiled machine, while still managing to show her face among the shops. Everyone loved her.

  Things came to a head after six months of working for Sophie. I had started a part-time master’s degree in creative writing, four hours per week at a campus that was a fifteen-minute walk from the Ginger Pig office. Every Tuesday, I left at three o’clock, and every Thursday I got in at twelve. The company was flexible about allowing me to study while working, but Sophie seemed unhappy that I was missing an hour and a half of her working day on Tuesdays, also known as the hour and a half when I would update her Excel document of journalists and edit her emails. Three weeks after I began the master’s program, she advertised for a full-time PR assistant to replace my part-time role, claiming that she needed more help than I was able to give.

  I wasn’t especially worried about my prospects at this point, thinking that with my experience I was a shoo-in for the full-time job. I applied, sent her a resume and a cover letter, and explained to her that an hour and half of university a week wouldn’t affect my performance at all. I knew that she was interviewing other people, but in spite of the fact that we clearly didn’t work well together, I saw the full-time position as my chance to get away from the shops for good and to finally take on some real responsibility in the office in a grown-up job. I’d also started to get more interested in farming and slaughter, and I was really hoping for the opportunity to do a farm visit or two, as I knew Sophie had done every month since she’d started working for the company.

  What I hadn’t expected was that Sophie would make me formally interview for the position. We’d been working together for almost a year, and I naively assumed that my past performance would speak for itself. Hiring me would also save the Ginger Pig the costs of having to pay to bring on a new staff member. Nonetheless, Sophie emailed me over the weekend asking that I bring in a physical copy of my CV on Monday and that I dress for an interview.

  I showed up in business attire on Monday morning: a knee-length skirt and a smart-looking blue blouse. Sophie took ten minutes away from our morning routine of trawling through the newspapers to change into a two-piece suit. It was the height of summer, with no air-con and the windows shut to keep out the heat that rose from the London pavement up to our third-floor office. But Sophie kept her composure and called me in to the dining room, where she sat across from me with a thick folder in her hand and a clipboard.

  I tried to answer her questions thoroughly and professionally, but she had clearly spent her entire weekend thinking about what I might say, and she went after every answer I had with a comment on what she would have preferred to have heard. What if she needed something to be done at five minutes to five on a Friday afternoon and I wasn’t around because I was off at university? What if a journalist needed a piece on a Tuesday morning? She had a point, but it was pedantic and she was putting me in an impossible position. Leaving our “interview,” I knew that there was no chance I would get the job. Whether I was qualified or not, she had already made her decision. The new girl, Georgia, started a few weeks later. She was trendy: long brown, thick hair and a fringe that stood two inches above her eyebrows, stylish, put together, and pretty, with a slim figure and understated clothes that fit her like they were on a clothes hanger in a shop, the way that I always wanted clothes to fit me.

  Lynsey saw my frustration and set me on the task of writing a training document for staff about farming, procurement, feeding, and slaughter. She outlined the piece and guessed that it would take me four weeks to complete, and after that it would be time for me to return to the shops full-time as a butcher. Now that Georgia was assisting Sophie, there wasn’t a need for me in the office. Looking back, I doubt that the training document was needed. Lynsey had clearly seen the situation and taken pity on me. The thing took me two weeks to write, with the rest of my days in the office spent going over the writing again and again and fact-checking the tiniest details.

  What I did discover, however, was that I loved writing about the farming and procurement process. The journey that an animal undertakes from field to fork fascinated me, from the feeding practices to the labor involved to the various professionals who make sure that our meat gets to our plates. I developed a fascination with the slaughtering process, and I researched and watched countless videos, as though I was trying to come to grips with the grisly reality of it all. So began an interesting relationship with the most taboo part of butchery, and one that still terrifies and fascinates me to this
day.

  Slaughter is and will always be an uncomfortable subject for me, and talking about it openly makes me feel like a hypocrite. The thought of taking a life, and the knowledge that we do it so regularly in butchery, is something that has taken me years to come to terms with. It’s a terrible and necessary reality of the meat industry. Even butchers don’t particularly like to equate the end product with the living thing that produced it. Considering the origins of your meat when butchering it on the block is one thing. Visiting an abattoir and viewing the slaughter for yourself is another.

  There is something almost spiritual about watching slaughter, a feeling that transcends fear to become something much more intense. The first time I saw a death was fairly late in my career, on a strange field trip with a group of other butchers to a slaughterhouse just outside of Essex, meant to teach us about where our meat was coming from. From the outside, it looked very much like a working farm, with a dirt track, rusted gates, and heavy, unused trucks lined up around the back near a few empty fields. Workers in blue jumpsuits pulled down to their waists stood outside smoking beneath a makeshift tin cover, while through a large hatch around the side of the building another group loaded boxes onto a refrigerated van that was still running, the exhaust billowing out and up into the cold air. Once inside, we witnessed butchery on a scale unlike anything we’d seen before. The abattoir butchers worked in a line of one hundred, breaking down carcasses and passing the meat on to a packing team to wrap and pack into cardboard boxes. On the side of the wall opposite to where they worked was the slaughter floor, and then a huge fridge for cooling the bodies before they were brought out for cutting. Meat factory workers are almost completely desensitized to the work they’re doing and will ask if you’d like to see the kill room as if it’s nothing.

  The slaughter room had a peculiar smell, metallic and bloody but also of bleach and disinfectant. It was potent, burning the inside of my nostrils. All the way to the right of the room was a cage restraint with a hole at one end and two horizontal bars at either side. Running above our heads a rail with hooks disappeared around the corner of the vast room, which was kept at a low temperature to cool down the still-warm bodies to a safe degree. The floors were coated in a light red vinyl, covered in the dilute remains of a darker red—blood that had splashed over from a long, deep white tank that hung directly below the metal railings of the cage restraint.

  Beyond the slaughter room we could hear the muffled ruckus of cattle waiting in a holding pen, the clink of their horns hitting the bars, and the shuffle as the next lot came down the curved race that led to the holding pen. After seconds that turned into minutes, spurred on by someone outside rattling the side of the race, a small, brown, shaggy-haired cow wandered in and put her head through the hole at the end of the pen. Behind her, an iron door slid shut and she was locked in. She seemed so willing, with the pen designed to mimic the feedlots where she was so used to receiving her daily grub. Wide eyes, glassy and dark, looked up expectantly.

  What happened next took maybe five seconds in total, but watching it felt like an eternity. Standing over her in a thick white hairnet and surgical gloves and wearing white rubber boots, a man leaned forward and placed a stun gun between her eyes. The shot made me jump—I’d expected the stunner to have a silencer like in the movies, but it sounded off with a blast that echoed around the chamber; so methodical, so quick. The heifer lost consciousness and slid backward slightly in the hold as her body gave way beneath her, legs limp and eyes glazed over. The holding pen opened, and a group of workers came in to hook her hind legs to the overhead machinery, which pulled her body upward until she was hanging down, at what seemed like a colossal height above them all. The belt began to move, and the limp body was pulled down the line.

  At the next station, another worker took hold of her head, the eyes still open. Two knives were used to make one long incision toward the animal’s jowls, an area known as the “clod and sticking,” to draw out all of the blood. This turned out to be more violent to watch than the initial shot, as with two swishes blood came tumbling from a large open wound that exposed her neck and insides, the broken white trachea and esophagus. Blood poured out in waves, at first in a violent waterfall before it began to slow down into heavy drips, and then lighter ones. The weight of the droplets caused the blood to ripple in the tank and threw spatter patterns up the side and over onto the floor, as heavy white boots trudged across, smearing blood across the linoleum. The high-pitched sound of the blood being sucked down the drain made my throat start to close and I felt panic. I’m not sure how many of us had intended to look away when they began to bleed the body, but no one had managed it. Only one of the other butchers, Luke, who stood at the front of the group, was a normal color. The rest of us were pallid and hunched over, squeamish at the sight.

  Tom, the abattoir manager, motioned for us to follow him down the production line. The blood tanks below the hanging bodies had been removed and swapped for clean ones, and as we walked through into the skinning room I tried to imagine what they might be doing with all that blood. My question was answered later when a forklift truck with a giant vat full to the brim zipped past us on the way to the landfill behind the site.

  The skinning was less difficult to watch. The damage had already been done, the worst of it over. We were more familiar with this type of operation, and it was more comfortable than watching a fresh kill. The incisions were made by men on platforms, working in twos and threes to peel back the hide and separate it from the thin film of pure white fat beneath. They made it look simple with their sharp knives, and when the hide was almost totally gone, a man with a long electric saw quickly removed the bottom part of the legs where the shins met the hooves. These were tossed to the side in a crate, and then the heads came off. After this last step in the process, the animals finally became what we were used to dealing with: lifeless carcasses. The heads, limp tongues, and glassy eyes had changed everything.

  Evisceration, which involved the removal of the cow’s internal organs, was the step that came next. Tom explained to us that this was the most delicate and important part of the process. He insinuated that it might even be more critical than stunning. If evisceration goes wrong at any stage, the carcass will almost certainly be considered contaminated and exposed to harmful bacteria from the cattle’s stomach and digestive tract. According to Tom, the cow’s three stomachs were removed by the person in the abattoir with the most training. This made me uncomfortable, the idea that kill after kill in the room behind us was being made with care, but not with as much care as this step, which made all the money.

  The innards didn’t look the way I had expected them to. The cows’ stomachs were bulbous and glistening and white, and they fell out through a cut made down the carcass under their own weight and into the arms of the men waiting, who caught them and cradled them away gently into a stainless steel crate on wheels. The heart, Tom explained, as well as some of the other fat around the body, is left in to help grade the cattle, as it is the best way to tell if the meat itself will be marbled or lean. It’ll still be warm, he joked. My eyes began to water.

  Then, the splitting. Whole deadweight carcasses of beef can weigh 770 pounds (350 kg), sometimes even more. They need to be broken down into quarters so that they can be hoisted onto a butcher’s block for further breakdown. The next room, where the splitting happened, was filled with the buzz of heavy machinery. The workers in this room held what were essentially heavy-duty chain saws. Tom shouted over the noise, and we got the general gist; the cutting room, very dangerous, was the final stage. On platforms a little above us, the saws glided easily through the flesh and bone of each carcass, still hanging on its hook, from the back, right between the legs, down to the base of the neck. The legs splayed as the two halves began to separate, and the carcass gently fell apart and swung with the movement of its own weight, before another couple of men pushed it onward and into the huge fridges. And with that, the process was complete. It couldn’t
have been more than five or six minutes from kill to cool.

  We walked out, past lines of butchers removing muscles from already broken-down beef. They stared at us as we walked past. Every abattoir butcher had to put in at least a month on the kill house floor, so they knew exactly what we had experienced. Tom ushered us away into the storage room where our tour would end, with boxes of vacuum-packed beef stacked high on shelves to the ceiling and mini forklifts zipping past like in the stockroom of an IKEA. We tried to look interested as he talked us through stock rotation, through the grading of the meat and where it ended up, but we were all desperate get out, to remove the white overalls and the hard hats, wash our hands of the experience altogether, and walk back out into the sun.

  One of the workers, getting ready to go out onto the next tour, helped me to pull off the white rubber boots that had become stuck to my feet and calves from sweat. I sat down, and he put my foot in between his legs and yanked. I giggled, quietly at first, and then before I knew it, I had tears streaming down my face, mascara running across my nose and onto the white cotton of my shirt. He finally managed to pull my second boot off, but I was laughing too hard to thank him. Back in our normal clothes, the group filed out and through reception, and then into the car park. Abattoir workers were milling around outside, eating their lunch or smoking cigarettes, watching us intently as we thanked Tom and got into our cars. The drive back to London was strange. Everything was a little blurry, and my reaction time was slow. I missed my turn twice. I was on autopilot while my brain replayed the limpness of the cattle’s body after stunning and the rush of blood that followed. On that car ride home, I vowed that I would never eat meat again.