Packaging, boxes, trash… Nele only had a vague sense of what she’d landed on. In any case it was soft and brittle, luckily, otherwise she would’ve broken her back – and not just sprained her foot.
‘Fuuuuh…’ She screamed her birth battle war cry into this pit, sewer, drainage or whatever it was.
She sat with her legs bent atop the garbage, on some kind of slatted frame that had been dumped here at some point. On the leaves and old blankets wedged between the one box that must have split open on landing. Her left foot and tailbone had nasty bruises, but that didn’t exactly matter considering all her other pain.
Nele smelled blood and excrement and heard herself screaming and couldn’t think of anything but—
‘Fuuuuh!!!’
The word didn’t mean anything, wasn’t cursing or pleading, was simply just a scream. Forcing out that long drawn-out vowel provided her with some relief, however fleeting.
The intensity of her contractions had changed again. She propped her elbows on the metal slats, no longer fighting the waves of cramps running through her body. It was likely instinct that kept her trying all she could to somehow prevent the birth from happening up there in those stalls, in the presence of that madman. Now she accepted it, breathing along with and not against the cramps anymore. She could feel it. Her munchkin didn’t want to stay inside her any longer. Wanted out of the safety of her stomach and into this world that had never shown itself to be as grim as it did to Nele right at this moment.
‘Fuuuuuhuhuu!’ Her scream tore into the darkness, and then it was over. For the moment. The flood had reached its peak. The contractions pulled back. For now. Left Nele trembling and panting and whimpering, all alone with her wounded body. For the moment.
‘Are you doing all right?’
Nele looked up, to the edge of the pit.
She couldn’t see Franz. Just a shadow, leaning over the opening. ‘Just what have you done?’
Exactly. Just have I done to deserve this?
‘My God. Do you know where you are? You’ve jumped into the latrine. They used to dispose of the cadavers down there. Those poor cows, after they’d been milked to death and weren’t even good enough for the slaughterhouse. Stillbirths. Scraps of meat.’
That’s exactly where I’m at, thought Nele with a tinge of infinite sorrow.
She was lost. Abducted by a pervert, she had reached the very spot that matched her current emotional state. She was just a scrap of meat. Capable of little more than producing a stillborn baby. Even if she was able to get it out somehow down here, now injured, her crotch torn open and body bruised, she was sure to have infected her child with her own blood.
‘Listen, this won’t do, this wasn’t the plan,’ the psycho explained to her in all seriousness.
‘You think? You sick motherfucker?’ Nele couldn’t hold back anymore. She screamed out all her built-up rage at him. ‘So sorry to make things unpleasant for you.’
‘You don’t understand. I already told you, this isn’t against you or your baby. I don’t want anything to happen to you.’
‘Then let me go,’ Nele screamed back, well knowing how even more impossible her demand was now. The pit was narrow; there was, as far as she could make out in the darkness, no ladder or other way of climbing up. And even so, she’d hardly be able to use it in her condition.
‘I can’t leave you down there like that. That won’t do. I can’t document it like that!’
‘Document what, for fuck’s sake? This get you off, filming women having birth?’
‘No, no, no,’ echoed down on her. ‘It does not. Please, don’t say things like that.’
Again such sincerity in his voice. Attempting to make himself understood.
‘I’m only doing this to demonstrate to the world how cruel milk production is.’
‘You’ve lost your mind!’
‘I have?’ His voice squeaked. ‘People have lost theirs. I’m the only one who appears to be in full possession of their mental faculties.’
Yeah, right.
‘I ask you, Nele. Have you ever given thought to the fact that milk is the only product that isn’t produced in a species-appropriate manner?’
No. And there’s nothing I could care less about at the moment, Nele thought.
‘You can let animals run free in the wild and kill them at the end of a long life. You can give chickens and cattle full access to pasture grasses. It’s more than possible for us humans to provide our livestock with a happy life. I myself don’t eat meat, but I do acknowledge those few farmers who do strive to provide animals with a meaningful existence before they die. No one, and I mean truly NO ONE in this country gives any thought to the fact that milk can only be produced with such unbelievable lifelong suffering.’
Death. Lifelong suffering.
Those were the only two possibilities Nele was seeing for herself at the moment.
She pushed a plastic bag and an empty beer can to the side and lay on her back as flat as she could so she could better relax her pelvis. The baby had slid further down, she was sure of it, the contractions having shifted it into a new position, yet it wasn’t feeling right somehow. Not right at all.
Though she definitely couldn’t say whether this was just her imagination, never having given birth before and with an insane animal rights activist for a midwife.
‘Cows are highly sensitive and intelligent creatures,’ Franz said. ‘Equipped with the same motherly instincts that you’re now feeling, Nele. So. What do you think has to happen for these emotional animals to produce milk?’
They have to have children, Nele thought and stroked her belly, which she’d been rubbing with marigold oil daily over the last few weeks to fight the stretch marks.
‘Exactly,’ Franz yelled as if Nele had said something. ‘Cows have to become pregnant. And then, so that they’ll give milk all the time, we have to take their calves away from them. It’s double the crime, you see what I’m saying? We snatch the baby from this highly sensitive mammal right after birth! And we steal the baby’s milk, which we shouldn’t even be drinking because our bodies can’t tolerate it.’
‘But what does that have to do with me?’ Nele yelled back, though she didn’t want an answer. Or any conversation. She only wanted this madness to finally stop. ‘You want to punish me because I drink milk?’
‘No. I want to show you what it means when a mother loses their child after a birth. It’s drastic, I know. But I don’t see any other way. I’ve tried it all. Petitions, protests, spoken up on YouTube and Facebook. But in this loud world of ours you only hear the one who yells the loudest. You know how many videos I’ve uploaded already? Of cows crying for the calves, for days on end? Those poor little creatures, crying for their mothers, tied up inside a tiny box. Only so that their mother can eke out a wretched existence clamped to milking machines her whole life before that final miserable shadow of herself is driven into the livestock truck with stun guns. That is, unless her open wounds and ruptured intestines are so obvious that not even the most money-hungry meat baron would want to convert this still-breathing cadaver into discount sausage. In which case the animal gets dumped into this pit.’
During Franz’s outburst, Nele had nearly forgotten about the pain in her stomach. Her fear that his underlying threat had unleashed now dominated all her worries.
‘You want to take away my baby?’
After the birth?
‘I have to,’ he yelled, sounding as sad as he was committed. ‘A video of your pain when experiencing such a loss would bring a million times more attention than the millions of videos that PETA and other animal rights organisations have already put out about the wretched conditions of milk production. You need to understand! Hardly anyone knows how the milk is made that we dump in our coffee and pour over our corn flakes. Many even believe the advertised lie that calves are allowed to stay in their mothers’ stables. But that’s not possible. A nursing cow would never let anyone get close to milking her, not with her little one next to her. She’d protect it, start kicking around. That’s why it’s taken away from her. Which is why I’m doing all this. After this video, everyone will know what it means for a mother to be separated from her baby, all for a drink of milk. All for our enjoyment.’
At the start of his speech, Nele was still burying her face in her hands in shock and assuming that reason could never appeal to this lunatic. But an idea came to her during his monologue. She let Franz’s words hang in the air for a while, without comment. Only when he asked whether she’d understood it all did she, now true to her newly adopted survival strategy, softly tell him: ‘I’ve never actually thought about it like that. But I think—’
‘What?’
‘Yes, I think I do understand you,’ Nele said, and it wasn’t even a lie.
In his delusion, and this was a good thing, Franz was still following his own inner logic. This meant he was acting rationally and not unpredictably. Plus he actually did seem to loathe what he was doing to her, even if he did consider it necessary and unavoidable. That made him the opposite of a psychopath. He experienced feelings, not only for those animals he loved so much, but also for her, the victim. The fact that he’d cried was evidence of empathy, and thus a certain accessibility – which might just be something she could exploit.
‘I still don’t quite understand fully,’ she said, opening up to him, her words bouncing dully off the walls of the pit as she raised her voice. ‘But we can definitely talk about it once you get me out of here.’
‘Good, right. Happy to.’
Franz sounded truly thrilled. His reaction was like a toddler that had been crying because it had fallen but the next second was back up running around laughing after the father had promised him ice cream. ‘I need to see if there’s a hardware store somewhere around here. I’ll get a little cable winch and a carrying strap or something so I can pull you out. Okay?’
He’d apparently stood up from the edge of the abyss, as his voice sounded more distant.
‘Yes, that’s fine. But please hurry,’ Nele said, already panting again. It wasn’t quite there yet but it might only be a matter of minutes before the flood returned to try pressing something far too big out of something far too narrow.
Her little munchkin, who was hopefully now in the right position. Even if this nearly literal gut feeling growing inside her was saying the exact opposite.