Cows Read Free Page A

been complete. It never was, his body never managed to get rid of all its poison in one go. He wondered if this was what Lucy meant.
    He used a lot of newspaper wiping himself.

CHAPTER SIX

    I n his bedroom. Dog scraped across floorboards to snuffle hello. Steven patted him sadly. A dog was such a symbol, it meant so much on TV and in the world outside. It was connected with rambles through sunlit meadows, carefree and laughing, arm in arm with a loosely dressed woman, throwing a ball for a delightfully squealing child to chase. But Dog knew little of sunlight. This wreck of an animal had lived out its life without ever once having escaped the shadows of the flat.
    Something heavy lumbered along the passage outside—the Hagbeast emerging from the rear of the flat, snorting her way to the kitchen like a pig rooting its way through a dung heap. He could picture her exactly—head lowered and forward, nostrils wide, spit stranding from her chin to the filthy floral-print material of her breast. And the rear view—a blot of wet menstrual blood sticking the dress to her rolling ass and the backs of her thighs, hunched shoulders, bare mottled calves, swollen like the rest of her. Even through the closed door and the peeling walls he could feel the effluvium of her hate. He wondered if she could feel his, it was just as strong.
    It had never been different. From the second she had squirted him from her cunt they had loathed each other. In the littered kitchen, on the table they ate from still, she had pulled him out of the mess between her legs and cursed him. And he, sensing a lifetime of worse to come, had pissed in her eyes.
    Steven did not step outside the flat until he was five. By then, though the swelling of his heart at the unimagined largeness of the world told him to run as far and as fast as his little legs would carry him, he was enough aware to understand that he could not survive alone. The Hagbeast was, for the time being, necessary to his existence. But from that moment of glimpsed possibility his child brain started to count the months to maturity and escape. For each year that passed afterward, there was a year just coming that would carry him into self-sufficiency and freedom.
    But it didn’t happen like that. By the time thirteen and fourteen and fifteen came (and all the others), even though his hate for the Beast and for his squalid, closeted life had in no way diminished, he found he had somehow left things too late. His five-year-old fearlessness had atrophied to a point where it was impossible for him to contemplate extended periods beyond the walls of the flat. Through the years of his growing the Hagbeast had so leached him of those identifying marks by which the world might possibly have recognized him that escape by simply leaving this place had become a laughable notion.
    Steven stayed in his room as long as he could, sitting on the bed, idly stroking Dog while TV images fluttered into the room like whores’ promises. But eventually it came, as he knew it would—the double-tracked horror-movie screech that drew tight the reigns of her proprietorship.
    “Steven!”
    His skin crawled.
    “Steven, dinner’s ready.”
    If he waited any longer she would come for him, so he stepped into the hall and trudged to the kitchen. Dog grunted along behind him.
    He knew immediately that things had changed, that there had been a shift in attitude. Small things—the way she stood and looked at him, a subtle rearrangement of her fat, even the shape of the blood on the back of her dress—a thousand hints that marked the beginning of a new phase of misery. Steven moved warily to the table and sat down, keeping his eyes on her.
    “You didn’t want to keep Mama waiting, did you?”
    “I was tired.”
    “Of course you were. There.”
    She put something in front of him. Steven looked at it in disbelief—part of a sheep’s stomach, steaming in folds that hung over the edge of the plate. It had not been cleaned