Horseflesh Read online



  Horseflesh

  By Alexander Turnbull

  Horseflesh

  By Alexander Turnbull

  Copyright Alexander Turnbull, 2013

  v2 Feb 2013

  1.

  I need to write fast as I haven’t much time, so forgive the spelling and the grammar. Actually that’s a cover-all excuse as I’m rubbish at both – English was never my strong point.

  Where to start? There’s a question – where does anything really start? Everything has a before, and there are no ‘Happy Ever Afters’, just happy ‘middles’ if you’re lucky. What I do know is that start, middle or end this definitely isn’t happy.

  I feel I should start with something dramatic – as I sit here, finally taking stock of all that has happened, unsure who will read this in the days, the months and the years to come, I feel the weight of history. And yet as I look around me I see normal everyday objects and surroundings. Is history always so humdrum?

  I suppose I should begin with the Bolognese, as that’s where it started for most people. A Findus Bolognese, of all things. Who’d have ever dreamt the beginning of the end would be a value ready-meal? Although the poetry of the justice does make you laugh. Not me, you; you whoever you are and whenever you are.

  But I won’t start there – not yet. I have a little time, if not enough.

  2.

  My name is Craig Kennedy and I was that fat, pasty kid at school with the unhealthy interest in science. I was born in Wolverhampton, which is in England for anyone of a foreign persuasion, into lower-middle class suburbia. Two brothers, both older, so I was the spoilt one, or at least as spoiled as you can be when your Dad gets laid off from Rover when you’re only eight. I remember that because it was just before Christmas – wonderful sense of timing – and I’d wanted a microscope, my first proper one. Only Santa sent his apologies and a Subbuteo set. And it was Birmingham-bloody-City versus Manchester-sodding-United.

  You’ll be glad to hear I did get the microscope, three Christmases later – Dad was working at a garage and Mum had gone part-time at the local Comp. The hand-me-downs I could handle: you don’t miss what you’ve never known after all. But I still remember opening the box and touching that cold metal. I can feel it now as I write, actually feel the weight as I lifted it out of the box – cloth-lined, not polystyrene – and placed it on the dining-room table.

  “Make sure it doesn’t scratch!” Mum shouted – as if I would be anything other than careful with the most fabulous, fantastical object in the whole wide world. I was fascinated by anything small – especially anything small and alive.

  Forgive my getting carried away: would you believe I actually have a tear in my eye? I do, honest. It’s been happening a lot – this sort of thing does that to you. Been thinking too much, that’s the problem. Not much else to do. If I do go off on a tangent please bear with me – I usually overcompensate with humour, so they tell me, but I’m not sure I’ve got much of that left.

  3.

  I studied biology at Nottingham Uni. – I was never the adventurous type – and got a Desmond (that’s a Desmond Tutu – a 2:2, lower second. Think of it as a grade ‘C’). Mum was chuffed to little mint balls. It was difficult to tell what Dad was thinking – he was a quiet, buttoned-up working-class bloke – but I like to think he was proud. I was the first in the family to get a degree: they stood in Sunday best in the cathedral for graduation looking as uncomfortable as I did in that stupid gown and hat. We ate at a local Harvester to celebrate. I had gammon and chips. Mum’s happiness was notable because she was usually the one full of doom and gloom – nowadays she’d probably be diagnosed as bipolar or something. Then it was just ‘moody’. When this all started it was her who first decided it was the end of the world, her who’d read the prophecies in the Daily Mail. ‘Mayan’ this, and ‘cataclysm’ that. ‘Dear God!’ I thought then. Dear God, I think now.

  What do you want to be when you grow up? They always ask kids. Why? What do kids know? By the time the kid knows they’ve stopped asking, probably because the answers aren’t as interesting. Everyone wants to talk about being a spaceman or a footballer; few are interested in bank clerks, telesales operators or research analysts.

  That last one? Yes, that’s where I drifted. Went through a few other things first – and a couple which clearly weren’t my size – but eventually all became clear. Funny, they also say you should do for a living whatever it is you enjoy. And my case they were right: I like studying small stuff – simple as that.

  Won’t bore you with the details but I wound up with a largish company which does research contracted out by others. So one day I’ll be researching drugs for some pharmaceutical giant, the next I can be testing it for the Government body charged with regulating them. Or even some protest group determined to prove that the same drug causes death and deformity. Ah, the irony! But I’ll come to that – you’ve read this far, surely you’ll stick with me a little longer?

  4.

  Mum phoned the day the news broke – I’m back at the start now, back with Findus. You’ll have heard about this part – the rest was backstory. Seems they’d found horsemeat in some Findus cheapy value-meal. Was she surprised?

  “I’ve been saying this for years!” she triumphed down the phone. “You can never tell what’s in some of that stuff! They use all sorts…” and proceeded to tell me all about it. The irony of that exchange being, of course, that in my line of work I regularly tested all kinds of foodstuffs, though not at that point Findus Spaghetti Bolognese which was I think the product in question.

  “And have you eaten any?” I asked innocently, rolling an Embassy Regal between my fingers. (Okay, okay: so I smoke. I’m not proud of it but after all that’s happened I deserve some pleasure. And they said that would kill me – ha-ha!)

  She said something like:

  “Cheeky sod! You saying I’m a horse?” How on earth she got from A to B I’m not sure but she took umbrage – sorry, she took offence, I don’t want to assume you know what ‘umbrage’ means. Once she’d calmed down it turned out that she had, and there was more in the freezer.

  “But I’m not wasting them – I bet there’s ten pounds worth in there!” she exclaimed. Actually that’s the wrong word – people never ‘exclaim’ in real life, they just say stuff – but they always told me at school to vary the words to make it interesting. Well balls to that for a game of soldiers!

  Of course that was just the start – of the horsemeat saga, not my argument with Mum. First it was Tesco then Aldi; a few days later Sainsbury’s and Asda admitted it too. Government and the Food Standards Agency were on the news from day one pointing the finger at anyone who wasn’t themselves: first it was organised crime syndicates then, even better, it was foreign organised crime syndicates. Romanians! Great: we’d got a downer on them in the UK being, according to the Daily Mail, the latest immigration epidemic. The fact they were chopping up horses and infiltrating our food chain was further reason to despise people who Weren’t Our Sort. Then it was local councils demanding cheaper meat for schools! How great is that? Blame people wanting cheap stuff for the fact you’re conning them into buying cheap shit! Sorry for the expletive but sometimes a word just fits – and the word to use there was definitely ‘shit’. But maybe that’s the definition of consumerism? Who knows – I’m not here to pontificate. All I know is it was brewing nicely.

  And speaking of pontification, it was then that the Pope resigned.

  5.

  Now you might not see a connection – I certainly didn’t at the time – and in one sense, the obvious causality sense, there wasn’t one. And yet strangely it turned out that there was.

  “End of the world,” said Mum matter-of-factly a few days later. I’d been hard at it all week – mu
st have been a Friday come to think of it – with all the testing. We had the contract, or a contract, from the FSA. They’d shipped shed-loads of processed meat into out fridges and it was like a production line. Apparently the balloon had gone up big-time. There’d been meetings of all the retailer’s top brass and government ministers and all that and the result was ‘test the hell out of whatever you can’. Of course they expected to find most stuff okay, that the horsemeat was only in certain products from certain (foreign!) locations. But of course what happened was that they found it absolutely everywhere. Me and Tony (Oates) found it hugely amusing, as did quite a few people. I mean don’t get me wrong, an utter crime for which heads should roll, but it’s only horsemeat, right? And more importantly having worked at the job we have for what, eight or nine years I have seen a lot worse. Well, I had up till that point.

  Anyway, the point is this scandal suddenly got huge, I’d been run off my feet, worked till midnight three nights running, got home with my takeaway curry and there’s Mum with news of The Apocalypse.

  “The prophecies say the end will come two Popes after John Paul the