As he followed the farmer from the brilliant sunshine of the yard into the dingy breeze-block cow-shed, Loofah was enveloped in sudden darkness and damp air, heavy with fermented grass and manure. Slowly, though, as his eyes adapted, the lights went up. He was standing on a concrete floor, running with urine and green slurry. Down one wall of the shed was a row of cracked windows, these heavily curtained with four decades of cobwebs and hay dust, and reluctantly permitting the ingress of light only at the absolute minimum level commensurate with their status as windows. Up against the opposite wall, away from this feeble source of illumination, was a grunting heaving mass, hardly visible in the deep shadow.
'Here at bloody last,' grunted the mass, its voice bubbling up from the drains.
As the light grew stronger, the mass differentiated, separating into man and beast.
The beast part was bovine, a black and white cow. Transparent membranes and clots of blood hung from her bruised vulva and her slurry crusted thighs were slippery with mucous. She stood quietly, staring at the wall in front of her, suffering without comprehension or complaint.
'Come on, get a hold of her!' gurgled the man part of the heaving mass.
Although was "man" the right word for this quivering pyramid of flesh, draped from the bulging folds of its neck to the slurry-wet floor in a sleeveless green oilskin parturition gown, with its bare arms—each the size of a Rubens thigh, dark smeared with blood and faeces—squeezed absurdly through the tight rubber portholes?
'Are you with us on this, or not?' it barked, its irritation clearly aimed at Loofah.
The farmer was now other side of the cow, leaning his massive shoulder into her belly. Worrying about muck on his slip-ons, Loofah stepped forward gingerly and put his hand delicately on her other hot flank. He touched something slimy and the cow bellowed as if he had just run her through with a sword—Loofah pulled back with a squeak of horror.
'Bloody hell fire,' snarled the vet, 'What a useless fucking pansy!'
The insult hit home. And so, gritting his teeth and trying to ignore the nameless filth with which the poor animal was plastered, Loofah mirrored the farmer and leaned his shoulder into the heaving flank to form a human buttress against her swaying bovine masonry.
'Hold tight then, lads—I'm going in again.' And with this, the vet lifted the cow's tail and forced a flab-massive arm into her vagina, a grim reversal of the process of birth. She groaned and strained against him, her hooves slipping on the wet floor. The vet swore and pushed harder, his face purple and shiny with grease.
It was man versus beast in a titanic duel, with Loofah and the farmer struggling to prevent the cow from going down in submission. Cascades of viscous liquid and curtains of mucous and membrane slithered around her thighs and hocks, while green slop was squeezed over the rubberised pyramid as if from a cracked toothpaste tube. The cow's groans were of unthinking blind pain, shuddering up from the depths of her massive being as if from the bowels of the earth itself. Her opponent echoed her with gurgling grunts of effort, the great pyramid's folds of flesh juddering and quaking with a life of their own as it braced against her.
After an era of struggle, the pyramid slackened and pulled back. It was panting hard, with whole landslides of faeces running over its rubberised skin and globs of mixed mucous and sweat hanging from its arms and face.
'No good, Jethro,' it gasped between puffs, 'Bloody thing won't budge.'
'Seize 'er hair, Ian?' suggested the farmer. Whilst Loofah did not see how this would help, the peak of the mountain nodded in affirmation.
'Nothing else for it,' it gurgled, and waddled up the side of the cow, moving like a Dalek without any apparent legs.
'Grab 'old of 'er 'ead, zun,' said the farmer. And so Loofah took hold of a wagging ear in one hand and, reaching over her head, slid the other into the lathered saliva that coated the cow's snout. She tossed and twisted in his grip, pushing him against the wall and smearing his jacket and tee-shirt with nasal mucous.
Something flashed in the corner of his eye and Loofah turned. Silhouetted against the brown window, the vet's thigh-arm was raised over the cow's flank and in the sausage fingers was a huge triangular kitchen knife, half a metre long, its cutting edge glinting in the muck-filtered sunlight.
'What about the anaes—?' squealed Loofah as the blade fell. But his words were muffled by a bestial grunt from the pyramid as, with a soft chuff, the cold metal carved into the heaving flank. The cow bellowed and surged against the farmer, twisting her head and throwing Loofah against the rough breeze-blocks. The vet clutched the handle in both hands and began sawing the blade down through skin and abdominal muscle.
'Hold 'er toit thar, moi zun,' said the farmer, 'Master Abbott needs 'er roit still for this bit.'
Viscous yellow fluid streaked with bright blood flowed over the black and white jigsaw of the cow's coat. Then steaming loops of intestine emerged from the gaping gash, writhing like tormented snakes, their pale bodies steaming in the cool air. The cow groaned and Loofah tightened his grip, as if by stilling her thrashing he could staunch the agony that was its cause.
An obese arm now groped into the steaming wound, pulling out coils of intestine and slippery sheets of abdominal fat, and sending cascades of yellow peritoneal fluid onto the concrete. Then it pulled back, gripping a thick fold of shapeless pink organ. Sweeping intestine and fat out of the way, the surgeon then drew the knife across the twitching uterus, slicing it open like a ripe fruit. Curtains of white foetal membrane spewed out of the gash, with great globs of clear mucous and black, black blood. Despite his very best efforts, Loofah failed to suppress a whimper of horror.
With another spasm of grunting—echoed by its patient—the pyramid reached into the uterus and heaved a football-sized pearl to the incision: the foetal head in its envelope of white membrane. The vet heaved again and the membranes burst and slipped away.
What was revealed, though, was not a calf's pink nostriled snout—but a face, an adult human face.
Or a least a nearly-human face. For there were no eyes, just depressions where eyes should have been, with the skin darkened as if pupils and irises were in the process of forming, and a circle traced around each orbit, like the beginnings of spectacles. Its mouth and nostrils were also imperforate, sealed with a tough skin, and its ears were no more than spiral folds on each smooth side of the skull.
As Loofah stared at the half-formed face, something cold slithered around his bowels. Then the thing began to quiver and shake, emitting a series of high-pitched squeaks. The vet pulled again and shoulders appeared, then the whole torso, shaking and twitching as it hung down its mother's flank. Finally, with one last wrench from the obstetrician, it slid onto the concrete with a wet thud, where it began flapping like a landed fish, glistening in the dull light.
'Don't look too good, do it, vit'n'ry?'
'Bugger it to hell,' gurgled the vet, 'A fucking freemartin.'
What had emerged seemed to be an unfinished facsimile of a small adult man. The body was covered in a smooth, silvery membrane, imprinted with the beginnings of the features that would eventually differentiate out of it: limbs, skin, even clothes. Its arms were still sealed to its side and its legs and feet were fused together. The skin of its torso was silvery-black, with a green band down the front, and its legs had a bluish tinge. The feet were a pale fleshy beige, sealed in flipper-like embryo shoes.
The three midwives now watched silently as the squeaking neonate slapped itself across the concrete under its mother's feet. Drowning fish, epileptic human, or embryo vegetable—it was difficult to say which it most resembled.
The farmer moved first: snatching up a rusty shovel that was leaning against the wall, he positioned himself astride the flapping fish-man and raised his weapon. Loofah opened his mouth to cry out but it was too late; a hollow thwack—as of cricket bat against water melon—echoed through the dingy air as the shovel came down on the neonatal head. The doomed creature now shrieked and thrashed frantically, skidding around madly between the legs of its terminator, and again the shovel came down, splitting the strange skull and splattering green jelly and white liquid onto the black rubber of the farmer's wellingtons.
'Good work, Jethro,' gurgled the blubbery obstetrician, with obvious satisfaction.
Two more strokes of the shovel finished the job. Then the farmer stopped, puffing with exertion as the last twitchings of his victim faded to nothing and the contents of its crushed skull slithered away towards the slurry clogged drain.
Loofah breathed again. The cow's head pushed into his belly and she lowed sadly, mourning her slaughtered infant, her long lashed eyes filled with the bottomless sorrow of eons of blind existence. Only then did Loofah notice the white-knuckle grip he had on her ear and her jaw; loosening his knotted fingers, he slumped back against the wall, panting in time with the cow.
Their joint reprieve from the ordeal, however, was short-lived.
'Not done yet,' gurgled the pyramid, 'Looks like it's twins.'
The bloated surgeon was still holding the womb out of the cow's flank, gripping each cut edge of the organ with a shapeless hand as he peered into its depths. It was then that Loofah noticed that the front slope of the rubber mountain was lit by an eerie glow that seemed to be coming from the incision. Strangely, the light had a strangely mesmeric effect and the horrors of seconds before seemed to slip away towards insignificance. Craning around the upper slopes of the pyramid, Loofah peered into the womb: it was filled with a pale bluish light and was emitting a faint electric hum, as if the next foetus was a fluorescent bulb.
'Go on then, get in there and fetch it.'
'Sorry?' said Loofah—he had surely misheard.
'Christ-all-fucking-Mighty, deaf as well,' grunted the vet, 'I said "get in there and bastard-well fetch the bloody thing out"—we haven't got all day, you know.'
'You mean me?'
'Of course you. Who the fuck else?'
'Can't you just reach inside and pull it out, like the last one.'
The mountain of lard rolled its eyes heavenward, but did not reply. Loofah turned to the farmer, who smiled sympathetically but nevertheless nodded his agreement with the other's professional opinion.
'Master Abbott be right, zun,' he said gently, 'It be your pigeon.'
And so, leaning on the quivering folds of the pyramid, Loofah stepped into the proffered stirrup of the farmer's hands and hauled himself up. The open womb gaped under him like a hungry mouth, though with a throat filled, not with darkness, but a humming white light. He stepped down into it, feeling for something solid with his foot but meeting nothing but space and light. The cow was now quiet and did not stir as, like huge pink lips, the rubbery edges of the incision slipped up his jeans and over his jacket. Still there was nothing under his feet, nothing but the cold light glowing up around him from below. But somehow he knew what he must do; with only the faintest quiver of apprehension, he lifted his arms over his head and slid down into the radiant void.
He slides into the light as into a cool pool. It slips over his body then closes over his head, and instantly the cow-shed is far away, a world of darkness he can no longer even imagine. He floats in the light, suspended in it. It washes over him, it washes through him. He turns his head and sees nothing but whiteness, he reaches out and feels nothing but whiteness, pure and unalloyed.
The pureness is around him and inside him, he is drifting in pureness. He holds his hand to his face but sees nothing—he has become the light, he has become the pureness. There is nothing else now, nothing but the light, nothing but the pureness. He hears the light, he feels the light, he smells and tastes the light, he breathes the gently humming, cold light. Even in his brain, there is nothing but the light, his thoughts themselves are light.
Again, he holds his hand to his face—but he doesn't, because he has no hand, he has no face. He has nothing, he is nothing, nothing but the light.
After what could been a few seconds or a several millennia, he felt something different—something under his feet, something hard.
Which meant he probably had feet. He did something with his brain and sensed something in his body: a leg moving, a foot stepping forward. He did something else: an object swam out of the light in front of him, a lurid blue fish with five stubby fins. He raised his other arm and a second fish joined the first.
He lowered the fish and ran them over his body, feeling hips and legs. He blinked and for a moment saw orange darkness. There seemed to be something in front of him now, something solid in the whiteness. A fish swam forward and met cold hardness. It swam up, then down, finding a flat wall of solidness. The other fish joined it and the two swam against the wall, as against the side of the aquarium. His fingers brushed against something in the wall, a curved projection. He bent to look—it was a brushed aluminium door handle.
Pulling the door closed behind him, Loofah found himself in a tiny room with white tiled walls, a marble-patterned vinyl floor and a door at either end. A small washbasin pressed against his hip, and the air was stale and humid, sickly with the scent of cheap soap. He now saw that the door through which he had just come was labelled 'WC' in block capitals—this puzzled him slightly, as he hadn't noticed a toilet in the cow's uterus. But then, judging by his recent experience, cows in these parts did seem to be strange creatures. In any case, any animal with four stomachs would surely have room for sanitary facilities in at least one of her abdominal organs.
Just as he was beginning to ponder the knotty issues of water supply and soil pipe outflow for such a facility, his attention was diverted by a peeling sticker on the paper towel dispenser—'Now wash your hands' it instructed, in no uncertain terms. He looked at the offending articles and winced with shame; they were indeed in a disgraceful state, plastered with dried cow snot and worse. And so, leaning over the basin, he began to lather his hands under the tap, whilst his mind wandered back to the plumbing problems of a bovine abdominal lavatory.
Suddenly he stopped dead and a wave of ice-water washed over his entire pelt. For staring straight at him through a hatchway above the basin was another man, a man he recognised.
There was absolute stillness; somewhere, at the far edge of infinity, warm water trickled over his wrist. The other one watched him, peering out through his computer geek spectacles with an expression of unmitigated horror. His tee-shirt and jacket were covered in dried mud and something green was smeared across one cheek.
A series of emotions came galloping through Loofah like a herd of wild buffalo: terror led the charge, followed quickly by a wave of unalloyed loathing—the other's face tensed with sudden hatred. Then, however, at the point at which the super-heated steam of detestation was about to burst his skull, came something else, something that was neither fear nor loathing. The steam pressure eased and a strange feeling crept over him, as though warm olive oil was flooding through his veins. As this was happening, the face of the other softened and slowly, very slowly, began to smile. Loofah exhaled deeply, and sighed—he could feel the oil, like the Balm of Gilead, healing the festering wound of his abhorrence. A dizzy sensation that could have been happiness begin to bubble up his spine and he had to lean against the basin to keep his balance. It was as if tight bands of steel that had been locked around his chest for as long he could remember had at last been loosened. At this juncture, from the very edge of time itself, came a distant voice: Where once there was one, it said, now there are two. But the two shall again become one, Loofah replied, as if chanting a mantra. Suffused with an almost mystical ecstasy, he then reached out with his right hand, this still dripping with muddy soap suds—at the same time the other did the same, though with his equally soapy left hand.
It was only as palm met palm that an image of two beige shoes coming into explosive apposition shattered his trance. With a cry of terror, Loofah snatched his hand away and shielded his face with both arms.
The fatal detonation, however, had not been triggered. A tiny seed of realisation began to germinate in his awareness and he peeped out from behind his shield. The other was looking at him over a pair of leather-clad arms—and suspended in the air between them was a single soapy hand-print.
Cringing with embarrassment, Loofah saw his error in all its mortifying glory, and his reflection grinned back at him from the mirror, equally embarrassed. For a few seconds he leaned against the sink, recovering his composure, then began to rinse his hands under the still running tap.
'Kilroy woz here,' he read, pulling a towel from the dispenser. He began rubbing his hands on the abrasive, non-absorbent paper. What a fool, he thought.
'United for the Cup,' said another little message scrawled in felt-tip on a tile beside the mirror. Still, you had to laugh, didn't you? 'Terry is a wanker,' said the next tile, followed by 'Sharon Williams sucks cocks', with a small diagram by way of illustration. He giggled to himself, shaking his head in disbelief at his own folly, and dabbed absently at his fingers.
Beside Sharon's portrait was a little poem in spidery green script, presumably elaborating further on her womanly attributes. Dropping the wet towel into the plastic waste bin, Loofah bent forward to read it.
But the poem wasn't about the lovely Ms Williams at all. Loofah's levity came firmly to earth and he read it again.
'To go from here to there,
The both of you must be aware,
You can't go alone,
On the journey home:
One really must go as a pair.'
Staring at his freshly washed hands, he tried to wring the meaning from the enigmatic words. But, just as comprehension seemed within his grasp, the tiny spaced suddenly thundered around him—and the wisp was gone, scuttling away like a frightened animal into the safety of his impenetrable mental undergrowth.
'Are you going to be long?' shouted a muffled voice, and its owner again banged on the outer door.
Jolted out of his reverie, Loofah saw there was more graffiti. 'Kevin loves Sandra,' he read, and then 'The circle of slime—slugs are cool—magic!' He naturally wished young Kevin all the best with his love life, but it was the other piece of scrawl that caught him, resonating eerily around his skull. And there something else still, on the paper dispenser, just below the hand-washing instruction.
'Hurry up, will you?' shouted the voice, after another volley of bangs.
'THE PUZZLE OF MARY FOUR-TITS', written in careful capitals—Loofah gasped audibly and an electric tingle rushed up his spinal canal. Underneath the title was a series of questions, their answers underlined:
'What is she? Nothing.
Who is she? Nobody.
Where is she? Nowhere.
When will she be something—somebody—somewhere?
When she's found—and not a moment before!'
So the cow had been an official after all—who would have thought it?
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Unfortunately—although as per usual for the Secretariat—her input seemed to be more hindrance than help; for if the double woman wasn't going to exist until she was found, how could he possibly find her?
'For Chri'sakes hurry up!'
'Um, sorry,' mumbled Loofah, 'Nearly finished.'
But as he went to unbolt the door, he hesitated. For, among all the mysterious messages, there was nothing about where to go next—the cow hadn't given him any directions.
'Please hurry,' begged the voice, its tone now pitiful, 'please!'
Squirming with sudden panic, Loofah quickly scanned the tiled walls—but there didn't seem to be any more graffiti.
'I can't wait any longer!' sobbed the voice, accompanied by a now desperate thundering on the door.
'Be right with you,' Loofah called out, staring at his unhappy reflection and praying for some sort of inspiration. But when the reflection spoke, silently mouthing two words, he nearly jumped out of his skin.