It was half-past five in the morning: dark, and bitterly cold. Under
the thin blanket, Victoria shivered, and curled more tightly into
herself, but her warmth wouldn't reach her toes and she drifted out of
restless sleep and into wakefulness.
"I'm twelve today," she thought, and then pushed that thought away
where it wouldn't make the day any more miserable than it was going to
be already.
The square of the window was pale against the misty dawn and she
knew that it was time to get up. That blanket had hardly kept the cold
at bay and she hopped from foot to foot on the bare boards as she
struggled out of her mother's old nightdress and into her clothes. She
put on both her pairs of knickers and all three of her t-shirts before
slipping on her shorts and then her jeans; and then she pulled her two
sweatshirts, one already inside the other, over her head. She was
already wearing three pairs of socks, and she sat down on the edge of
the sofa to pull her mother's boots on.
The others were asleep upstairs. She hated them.
Victoria's footsteps made hardly any sound on the kitchen's big
stone slabs as she stumbled sleepily from the settee to the sink by the
door. There was a faint gleam from the stove, but Turnip had banked it
up and tamped it down so well before he'd gone to bed that not the
slightest bit of heat leaked out to warm the freezing air. The tap
snorted, belched air, and spat out a mouthful of icy water. Then it
settled to a trickle. Victoria tied back her blonde hair with an
elastic band and splashed water quickly onto her face. She gasped. Now
she was awake! She crossed the wide room to the great oak door and
turned the big old key in the lock. It made a grinding noise and
squealed as the bolt shot back. Victoria looked anxiously up at the dim
rafters, but there was only a creak and a cough from Turnip, and a
cross, sleepy moan from The Hag.
Outside, the farmyard was white with frost and moonlight, and long
black shadows spread inky fingers from the fence almost to the barn.
Across the fields, the long sheds of Mr Slaughter's Fur Farm lay low
against the earth's curve, and beyond that, in the distance, the tops
of the huge cooling towers of the nuclear power station drifted white
smoke against the black horizon. The paddock next to the farmyard was
empty, overgrown and abandoned: Victoria had a faint memory of horses,
Sam and King, and her mother smelling of saddle and sweat while the
horses steamed. She sniffed, and brushed a strand of hair out of her
eyes with her mittened hand. The farmyard pond was covered in ice.
There was a barrel there, half-submerged, and Victoria half remembered
winters when, wrapped warm against the cold, she'd run across the ice
and slid on her bum through the barrel's arch while her mother laughed
with anxious pleasure. The tractor slept against its trailer, wheels
caked in mud. As she walked across the farmyard towards the enormous
henhouse, the loud crunch of frost and gravel under her feet made
Victoria feel like a thief. She hated it; hated it. This was her own
farm, hers by right, and here she was, tiptoeing across her own yard to
do the morning chores while Turnip and The Hag snored under the thick
feathers of their quilt.
The sky behind the henhouse was brightening: she'd better hurry, or
they'd be up and snarling, and then there would be hell to pay. "Hell
to pay" - there was always hell to pay when Turnip woke up, however
hard she'd tried to do things right.
First she had to start up the conveyor belts: there were twelve of
them, each eight feet wide, running from the farm end of the henhouse
down to the enormous pit where all the night's mess was stored until
the sludge truck came. And then she had to go into the henhouse and
switch on just enough of the lights to see the eggs. She flicked each
of the switches on the outside wall, and the conveyor belts started
their grumble.
Now she was by the door. Victoria hated chickens and she hated eggs.
She hated the smell of feathers and of chicken shit; she hated the way
the chickens' sleeping mutter became a roar as she opened the door and
switched on those bright lights in pools all down the darkness of the
henhouse aisles; she hated their pathetic excitement as she opened the
grain chute and pressed the button that would send their gritty
breakfast down along the rows of cages into the distance. It would all
end up as sludge and eggs.
Victoria reached into the shadow where she knew the lever for the
sliding door ought to be. But it wasn't there. Her heart thumped as she
realised that the door must be open. "But how could it be?" she
wondered, and she stepped inside and reached around, to where the light
switches were.
But then she stopped. The door was open, but the silence inside was
all wrong. She listened, and her hand found the first familiar switch
in the dark. Still she hesitated, straining to hear the rustling and
the muttering of all those restless, sleeping chickens. But there was
silence, and a strange, heavy smell in the cold morning air. Victoria
pressed down on the light switch and blinked at the glare, half turning
her head away. And then, as her eyes became accustomed to the light,
she looked into the enormous henhouse. Her jaw dropped like a cartoon
character's, and if she'd not been so shocked and surprised she would
have smiled at the thought of her jaw hitting the floor and bouncing
back up again. But her mouth stayed open.
There was a terrible mess everywhere. Every cage, as far down the
aisles as she could see, was open: there was blood and feathers
everywhere, and the carcases of hundreds of slaughtered chickens were
slumped in messy piles of feathers and other bits she tried not to look
at.
"There'll be hell to pay!" she thought miserably, and she stepped
into the strangely unfamiliar henhouse. The conveyor belts rumbled,
eerily loud, making the silence of the hens echo unnaturally in her
ears. Victoria picked her way around the rumpled piles and down the
main aisle of the henhouse. Nothing moved except for the sludge on the
conveyor belts, but in her head the thoughts and questions were
bouncing round her skull like dizzy balls in some mad computer game.
What had made this terrible mess? What monster had come in here,
pressed the button on the wall that opened all the cages, one by one,
and then dragged out the chickens, one by one, each to its dreadful
doom? She almost felt sorry for the horrid things. She wasn't afraid,
as you or I might have been, that some terrible beast lurked like
something out of a movie, waiting for her to step into its jaws. For a
start, it was almost day; secondly, she knew she wasn't in a movie;
and, most important of all, she had quite enough terrible monsters in
Turnip and The Hag, who still snored, oblivious, under their duvet in
the farmhouse. But she didn't think of this - she just walked slowly
down that aisle, trying to take it all in, blinking hard, as though if
she blinked hard enough the henhouse would return to its familiar
squawking roar and the eggs would roll down their chutes and into the
baskets that she had to drag onto the trolley and wheel down to the egg
store at the far end of the henhouse.
And then, right down at that far end of the henhouse, she saw
something move. It was a silvery flash; a sort of dog; a bushy tail;
and then it was gone. More cautiously, Victoria came to the end of the
cages and peered round at the entrance to the egg store. The wooden
walls of the henhouse were dark, but the light from outside was
beginning to come in through the spider-webbed windows, brighter than
the bulbs that hung from the rafters. The door of the egg store gaped
black and menacing, and to her surprise, she saw the gleam of slanted
eyes glowing in the darkness of the doorway.
She faltered, not knowing quite what to do, pulled towards that door
by a curiosity that only just outweighed her fear. She took a step
across the concrete floor, and the eyes moved slightly, as if
retreating. And then she heard a voice, low and rough-edged. At first
she couldn't work out what it was, because it seemed to be inside her
head, and yet, somehow, she knew that it came from behind those slanted
eyes.
"It's a human. A small one. It doesn't look dangerous." And then a
little louder, as if it were talking to her now, "We have been greedy,
but we're going to leave. Please let us by."
Victoria took another step, and the eyes moved too, towards her this
time, low down, out of the darkness of the doorway and into the
gathering light. A black button of a nose, and then silver whiskers; a
silver muzzle, black eyes and sharp ears pricked straight up.
"It is a dog!" she thought, and then, as the animal's body came
carefully out into the main part of the henhouse and into the light,
bringing its big bushy tail too, Victoria realised: it wasn't a dog,
but something she'd never seen before - a silver fox. And behind it,
filling the gap of the doorway, what seemed like dozens more pairs of
eyes, keeping back, out of the light, waiting.
"Hello!" said Victoria aloud, and then she felt stupid, talking to a
fox not as she would normally speak to an animal, but as though she was
expecting it to reply. And, not entirely to her surprise, it did.