Bad Cow Read online

  Bad Cow

  Andrew Hindle

  Copyright © 2017 Andrew Hindle

  All rights reserved.

  For my nieces, Lily and Ruby.

  I wish this world were a little smaller, so you could

  spend more time with your funny Finnish relatives.

  PART ONE: THE ARCHANGEL BARRY

  - - - South of the river - - -

  - - - Bad Cow - - -

  - - - Dwamps - - -

  PROLOGUE

  This is the story of Oræl, and of the end of the world.

  But before Oræl, and before the world’s end, there is a lot that needs to be told. Between here and there, between a world teeming with life and a world burning alone and abandoned under uncaring stars, between me and Oræl the Vengeful … ah, well, there are a lot of steps to be taken.

  A lot of it won’t make sense. I’m going to explain things as best I can, but I can’t promise it’s going to be perfect. Some of the steps we need to take may seem perplexing, nonsensical at the start – and at the end, it’s possible you’ll find that hasn’t changed.

  Even worse, I’m afraid, are the steps that make all too much sense. Those are the ones that break your heart.

  But we have to start somewhere. Might as well be here.

  It was the crest of the wave, the last great golden age of human unity. It was an age before which scattered tribes wandered and did war, and after which bickering nations became snarling junkyard dogs for the profit of their bet-laying masters. Population, technology, attitudes and historical impetus coincided in a way they never would again. Never could, until another great and terrible slaying swept away the chaff of the world.

  Perhaps not even then, it has to be said.

  It was still a dark time for many. Wars, injustice were rife … but there was also optimism. The more fortunate human cultures made great advances, learned and shared. And more important than that, they played. It was a time of joy, of games and innocence for the general population of the Earth’s great nations.

  The dominant communicating cultures labelled the march of centuries AD, marking the years since a mythical saviour-figure – by no means a universal one, but a popular one nevertheless – had allegedly reshaped the world with a message of peace that humanity had been striving to live up to ever since. Anno Domini. The Year of Our Lord. It might as easily have meant the year of our dominion. The year we ruled the land and the sea and the beasts of the field. A golden age in truth.

  The great unions of nation and politics, of commerce and enterprise, swept across the face of the Earth. And – for a time – it almost seemed as though the shattered remnants who had survived the Fall of Rome and the rise and fall of the great empires that followed might become a single species, a unified race surpassing the illusory boundaries of mutable environment, conquerable geography, laughable cultural legacy. Surpassing, even, the limitations of their own brutal primate physiology and chemistry.

  They didn’t, of course. It was the crest of the wave, not the pinnacle of the mountain. The fall, the roar, the churn, these were inevitable. It was a golden time, but it was a gleaming and tragically brief one. The end was already on its way, and when it came, it would be awful.

  The human condition was a boiling, seething ocean of fiery sewage. For a moment something, something that might have been beautiful, clawed its way to the surface and gasped for air and blinked in the light of an unattainable sun. And when it sank once again beneath the noisome breakers, it would never return. And the toxic formlessness that it left behind would seem all the more shameful for its fleeting presence.

  But just for a moment – for a stretch of years, for a decade or two, for a mere blink in the eye of the vast spinning urverse – it looked as though humanity could succeed. It seemed the human race might be destined to climb to its feet, to stand tall, and turn the crest of that wave into a bright and permanent mountaintop of diamond by sheer strength of will. The same indomitable spirit that had straightened their sloping backs and turned their muddy eyes towards the stars would carry them, bold and noble and glorious, into eternity as a grown-up and enlightened species.

  I am Oræl the Vengeful, and this is my story … but back then, during that fleeting golden age, I was known by another name. And Oræl might never have come to be.

  The year was 1990 AD.

  THE ORDINARY DEATH AND OTHERWISE UNREMARKABLE GLORIFICATION OF BARRY “NAILS” DELL

  When you’re talking about Angels and other supernatural beings, it sounds good to start with a nice sweeping, fantastical narrative hook, a line full of grandiosity and portent. A line like for years without number, the Angels at work upon the Earth something something. But the whole construct falls on its face a bit, because the years did sort of have a number. It was one thousand, nine hundred and ninety, give or take a few decades due to the general mess involved. The number was mentioned in the Prologue already, so we can’t use the whole years without number thing.

  It’s also stretching the truth a little bit to say that the Angels were at work upon the Earth. Angels work upon the Earth in much the same way humans work upon a road repair project. They put up a sign saying Angels at Work, then – due to scheduling conflicts and a shortage of materials and a lack of approval forms and instructions – they just sort of sit around drinking coffee and looking morosely at a big hole in the ground, at the bottom of which can be found an exposed pipe and a strong smell of poo. This describes the terrestrial condition with such depressing accuracy, it barely even qualifies as an analogy anymore.

  On top of this, the next part we have to talk about mentions a guy called Barry Dell, and you can’t go from a nice sweeping, fantastical line full of grandiosity and portent to a line including the name Barry Dell. The two lines would cancel each other out and you’d wind up with a narrative hook consisting of a blank first page. And while this might appeal to nihilists and people who thought they were actually buying a notepad, on the whole it’s just … no. No, no, no.

  So instead we shall say this. Barry Dell, of Fremantle, Western Australia, died as he lived: in a horribly confined and overcrowded space, going nowhere.

  Perhaps his eulogy, delivered by his workplace’s Assistant Public Relations Officer, says it better and more concisely than any other words that might be assembled and lined up in service of the man. Indeed, the fact that his eulogy was delivered by his workplace’s Assistant Public Relations Officer says quite a lot all on its own.

  “Hello. Um. I’m not usually, um. As PR Assistant for Cullem’s Nails, it is my sad duty to be here today, talking to you all. We’re all here to say goodbye to Barry Dell, who was family, co-worker, friend. He was a great bloke, Barry. Bazza. Um, I have a long list of nicknames here, uh, Baz. D-Man. Heh, and Nails, apparently, to some of you, heh, cheeky cunts – oh, I’m sorry Padre, I didn’t mean … I’m just an assistant, Julie would be better at this but she’s in Bali, not that we do funerals that often so I don’t know that she’d be much better but you know, she has the experience, she did all the interviews and things, you know, over the phone, um. Actually come to mention it I don’t even know if I should call you Padre, I’m sorry.

  “Look, we’re all very upset, which is what I’m trying and failing to say here. We’re here to say goodbye to our dear friend and respected colleague, and it hurts. Barry was taken from us before his time, which – I never really thought about it before, but when do you stop saying that anyway? ‘Before his time’? Um. I’m sorry. Barry was a lovely bloke, and now he’s gone, and we’re left to remember him, and pay our respects. And here we are. Um.”

  To extend the ‘died as he lived’ imagery somewhat without losing any of its appropriateness,1 Barry did start going somewhere in the final moments of his life, but it was all in one dir
ection, it was all downwards, and it was over very quickly. Which, when you think about it, could be worse. In fact, when it comes to deaths, he actually got one of the higher-shelf offerings. There was some boredom and slow-mounting tension for the final half-hour or so, about two seconds of adrenaline-fuelled euphoric terror at the very end, and then instantaneous and arguably painless transference to the proverbial hereafter. All mortals should be so lucky, really.

  “On behalf of Cullem’s Nails, and all of Barry’s family and friends, co-workers and fellow academicals, I want to wish him well for whatever awaits him in the hereafter, if that’s the sort of thing you believe in. And to share with you a few, um, a few memories and, well, you know, um, just so we can share and let each other know that we’ll go on thinking about him, because he really was a top bloke. The toppest, really.

  “Um.”

  Barry Dell had worked in a nail factory. This is worth mentioning purely because it lends further perspective to his death. Specifically, how much more painful, drawn-out and horrible it could have been. Cullem’s Nails hadn’t had a work-related fatality in thirteen years – there was a grimy plastic-mounted adjustable counter underneath the memorial plaque that said April 1977, and it had never been adjusted – but that fatality had been bad. It had been so bad, it was still referred to as ‘The Tack-o-Matic Accident of Easter ‘77’, or ‘Tack-o-Matic Tuesday’,2 or – by some of the older and even less reverent workers, including the erstwhile PR officer Julie who was in Bali at the time of Barry’s accident and subsequent funeral – ‘The Tacksident’. Cullem’s Nails had stopped trying to break into the lucrative thumb-tack market and stuck to what they were good at following the incident, and nobody else had to die screaming with red-hot tacks embedded in horrible sizzling rows across their skulls and upper bodies.

  Anyway, the point was that there were far worse ways to die, involving nails, than the way Barry Dell died. Particularly at Easter. If you ever need more proof of that, try asking an Angel. Just keep in mind it’s a sensitive subject to some of them.

  Barry’s death did technically classify as a work-related fatality, since he was delivering a box of nails to a customer and was officially on company time. It wasn’t Easter, though. He was also not on Cullem’s Nails property at the time and his task had technically been completed, it was a Friday night and from the moment he put the box down he was for all legal purposes on his way home, so it wasn’t enough to warrant turning the grimy counter over from April 1977 all the way to June 1990. And it would have been depressing to do so anyway. Instead, Barry’s employers sent their Assistant PR Officer to deliver his eulogy, and Barry’s foreman led the workers in a minute’s silence during coffee break the Tuesday following the accident.

  Oh, it had to be Tuesday. Monday was the Queen’s Birthday, which was a public holiday in most parts of Australia even if it wasn’t Easter. So nobody was in the factory that day, and any minutes of silence were strictly hangover-related. That, indeed, was part of the reason Barry had been working late on Friday in the first place.

  “Bazza came to us as a fresh-faced lad of eighteen, way back in 1983. This was only a year or two after his own parents were taken from him, mind you, and he was just finishing school and making up his mind about the future. He was only with us as a summer worker at first, and he spent most of ’84 and some of ’85 travelling, I understand … a bit before my time, but you know. I got it all written down here on these notes, but I’m trying not to read directly off them, you know. Uh, he’s been with us for a long time, anyway. And he’s always been a popular guy. Top bloke. Um.

  “Um. Right. Right you are. Reading directly off the notes now.

  “Whether it was working down in clipping and measuring, or making and tracking deliveries on that bloody computer – his words, Padre, heh, sorry – or any of a dozen other things Bazza did in his years with us, he always took it on without complaint, with a top attitude and, and he made the rest of us feel good about what we did too, you know? He had a way of rubbing off on you. Not like that, you dirty bugger, heh…

  “Sorry. That wasn’t on the notes, I just. Um.

  “He brightened up our workday, and he brightened up our lives. I guess that’s what most of us will say about Bazza. Um, and to lose him in such an unexpected and, well, so before his time, it’s just tragic. Just tragic.”

  Barry had been making a delivery of special-order nails to a hotel on a Friday afternoon – Friday, the 8th of June, to be precise. Having delivered the nails to the roof repair crew up on the topmost floor of the old Duxworth, he boarded the elevator with five other people, bound for the lobby and the carpark and his car and the long weekend. When the cable snapped and the emergency brakes failed they were all killed, along with a janitor down in the hotel basement who was struck by flying debris. Since the Duxworth Hotel was already under repair – that was why Barry was bringing the nails – there wasn’t much investigation into the incident. Negligence and poor maintenance and general misfortune was blamed, and the Duxworth was held accountable for a sum it technically did not possess. The repairs, needless to say, were not made under the current ownership.

  It didn’t matter to anyone in Barry’s immediate circle, and it certainly didn’t matter to Barry. His parents were dead, and his aunt – his legal guardian until he’d turned eighteen – had succumbed to dementia and had been in a well-appointed private facility since Barry’s twenty-third birthday two years previously.3 There was no next of kin to pay off. The Duxworth Hotel, with its dying breath, bequeathed Barry’s share of its largely hypothetical economic carcass to the Cullem’s Nails lawyers on the understanding that they create a trust for young orphans.

  It was by a wide margin the most noble, generous and socially constructive act Barry Dell had ever performed.

  “Sometimes we try to make sense of an accident like this, or to find someone to blame, but in the end, sometimes the best thing we can do is make peace with what’s happened, and say our goodbyes to a good friend, a top co-worker, a great student, a – just, you know, a really great bloke. It’s like, would Bazza want us to be angry? I don’t reckon he would. And I reckon he’d be proud that something like the Cullem’s Foundation came from his death.

  “In a sense, it’s like there’s a, there’s something left of him, watching over us, helping young kiddies like himself when they end up with nobody. But I don’t want to turn this into a PR spiel. This is about Bazza, and his legacy – with all of us. It’s just that the Cullem’s Foundation is a big part of that, you know?”

  Still, the victims’ next of kin were compensated, as if any amount of money could make up for such a loss, and the responsible parties were held responsible, although how people who had lethally failed to fix a building could ever be punished in such a way as to atone for their crime was anyone’s guess. The matter was closed, and those affected went on with their lives.

  This, with a sort of inexorable cosmic irony, also turned out to be true of Barry Dell.

  “It’s like he’s a kind of a guardian Angel, looking after orphans and seeing to it that they get on-the-job training and all the chances everyone else gets, at least as much as the Foundation’s funds will allow, and that’s, well, it’s still something pretty special.

  “Although if any of you can imagine a less likely guardian Angel than Bazza, heh, well, you let me know because I sure can’t. Top bloke – top bloke – but, heh, yeah, no Angel.

  “Anyway, that’s the man we’re here to pay our respects to today. And with that I’m going to finally get away from this podium before I manage to get both my feet in my mouth at once. Thank you all for your patience and understanding, I think it’s a great testament to Barry himself that he’s brought such a great crowd together and you’re all so laidback about it all and everything.”

  And so it was that for years numbering one thousand, nine hundred and ninety, give or take a few decades, the Angels standing around upon the Earth with their thumbs up their arses had been but six. />
  And so it was that on the evening of Thursday the 21st of June, in the Year of Our Lord 1990, thirteen days after his untimely death and five days after his well-intentioned but hopelessly comical funeral, lo, Barry Dell was glorified with necessarily minimal fanfare, and did become the seventh.

  LIFE AFTER BARRY

  Barry’s life may have been somewhat uneventful, but it had been far from empty. What he’d lacked in family he’d made up for in friends and those sorts of almost-friend co-worker and fellow-student types who are close enough that you feel like a jerk calling them my co-worker or this bloke in my uni class, but feel that to call them my friend would dilute the category in some small but tangible way.

  Oh yes, Barry was enrolled at the University of Western Australia, where he had been drifting carelessly towards a journalism-or-possibly-filmmaking degree for the past eight years, give or take the odd travel-break. The academic adventure had taken a few detours along the way, resulting in his already technically having at least one bachelor’s degree in something or other and dropping out of psychology or sociology or something or other else, but none of his friends could seem to agree on what the accidental degree was in, any more than they could agree on what his actual intended final academic goal had been. Some of them suggested that his only goal had been to stay at university and have a good time for as long as possible, while working a low-pay and low-effort job at Cullem’s Nails for beer money. They were probably pretty close to the truth of the matter.

  In fact, the prevailing opinion was that Barry hadn’t been entirely sure himself what his final academic goal had been, and this dovetailed nicely with the theory of his intention to be a perpetual student, and as such was probably also pretty accurate. Barry had fetched up with his unidentified in-between degree as a result of an unintentional credits-miscount at sign-up time, and had then signed up for something else after thinking he was going to be finished by 1987, 1988 at the latest … but then he’d had enough money in his little trust fund to pay his university fees for the foreseeable future. Moreover, getting a job in an actually competitive field like journalism or filmmaking had seemed like a lot of hard work when he already had a job in a field where the only secret to success was not putting any part of your body near anything covered in black and yellow tape.