The cattle turned their heads to Gem, some seeing, some listening. Half of them had pearlescent balls for eyes, or pus-filled orbs, with red sores for pupils. When they turned and ran, the blind animals used the bodies of their herd mates to orient themselves and ran as though sighted. Those that lost contact ran by ear, and those a little distance away or anchored to equally blind animals faltered and wove as though drunk. She watched the warped and uncoordinated movement of the herd as it rolled and spread with an unnatural, curtailed flow. Like a diseased river. A dying pattern. You can see disease in patterns, she thought. Wrong patterns. She had seen something off in the stills her drone had sent her.
A heifer ran headlong into a tree in its panic. It crumpled, then rolled down the hill. It struggled to rise repeatedly, disabled and bellowing.
They had purulent pinkeye, likely the new strain. They were feral and she was alone. She walked up to the blind calf struggling on the ground. It was leaner than it should be. The shoulder was broken, and one eyeball had burst. She shot it and stood over its body, crying in frustration.
The others scattered bizarrely.
In the ute, Tinker and Zora began barking, and she turned.
Somewhat theatrically camouflaged with uprooted shrubs, a group of young people were filming her, the dead calf and the herd.
She strode towards them, at first beside herself with rage, then dismayed at their youth, then frustrated that she would have to talk to them, then in the grip of inspiration. The small crowd stood defiant. Righteous, frightened. She had forgotten she was holding a gun. She laid it gently on the ground with the hand-out gesture made universal in cinema.
No one spoke. They were a lean and very young bunch, with nice hair. Quite beautiful, really, with their pale fervour. One girl with grapes hanging from her ears and a camera in her hand was crying, and after a while Gem realised it was the shock of the killing she had filmed.
Her rage was gone, but she wasn’t sure how to get what she wanted from them. Everyone said you couldn’t reason with them, or get past their hatred. Most people she knew responded with disgust and hatred in return.
‘You are trespassing,’ she said, more harshly than she intended. She hadn’t used her voice for a while.
A tawny Pan-like youth stepped forward, his voice defensive and his stance aggressive. ‘We don’t recognise property rights. This is a site of atrocity, that you oversee.’ He waved at the now-grazing herd, and then he raised his phone and clicked a picture of her.
The others clapped and, strengthened, cohered into a mob. ‘Each life is as precious as yours or mine!’ a voice from the back shouted.
‘You are a killer, a murderer!’
‘Name and shame!’
She laughed but felt a flicker of fear. She was alone, her dogs were pets, and there were eleven of these beautiful bitter young things. She stood quietly, noting the reach she would have to make for the gun. She kept her voice quiet. ‘You seem pretty sure of yourselves. Yes, I am alone here, and I need help. I know what you want. If you help me treat these calves, I will give you the one that most needs nursing, provided you show me pictures of where you will keep it and with what other cattle. I can’t give you a crash course in anything, nor will you listen to me, but I need help, today, right now, and for some reason that seems to me to be what you are here for.’
The eleven huddled, whispering, arguing.
Pan stepped forward. ‘We won’t do anything cruel for you.’
She wondered how to put it to them, how they would go. She checked footwear: mostly boots. She remembered wearing boots when it was cool to wear boots. Cherry-red Doc Martens, her pride and joy, once.
She eyed them, waiting for the cohesion to melt a little. ‘You choose. I have to do things that they won’t understand, and that will frighten them and will briefly hurt them, but will heal their disease. Left untreated, they will go blind.’ She gestured at the dead calf.
The collective argument raged in an undertone. A boy with an unusually flourishing beard for a youth was jabbing his finger in her direction while speaking to the huddle. She casually picked up her gun and walked away. A girl went and photographed the dead calf’s bloody face and ulcerated eye. Gem sighed. No matter what, some nasty stuff was going to be fuelled on both sides by all this. She began setting up the yards, race and crush.
Pan appeared beside her. ‘They don’t believe you. They think you are lying. They think you’ll film them, and then discredit them. You have a drone. We found the coordinate posts.’
‘Quid pro quo,’ she said, but he looked blank. She sighed. ‘Really, I’m not interested. How about none of us film stuff until we are done. I only want to exploit you lot to treat this mob for pinkeye. I’ll feed you afterwards.’
‘We have our own food,’ he said stiffly, then softened. ‘We can share it with you, though.’
‘Deal,’ she said.
How was she going to herd these young beings into herding calves?
They were like a mixed bag of cattle-dog puppies, some scared, some eager, some senseless and a couple talented.
‘Move towards them slowly, side on,’ she said. ‘Run parallel to block their path, not towards them, and only if they start running, not before. Keep your…spirit…calm and peaceful. Keep them together, if you can, but by staying wide.’
Kids and cattle scattered, and for a while the notion of calm and peaceful was altogether lost. Bewildered calves ran, and her well-meaning young cubs chased them. She called them in and regrouped, while letting the calves find each other again.
‘Watch each other, watch me, keep a line, as though a string joins us all, spread or contract along the string. You know, it isn’t this bit I needed your help with!’
Somehow, following her hand signals and calm step, they got it, and the calves trickled into the yards. She told the group to sit quietly and let the calves settle, while she went with the ute to get the meds. She half expected to find no vegans and the calves all let out when she got back, as they were a rather silent and uneasy crowd now, but they were there when she returned.
She picked the two talented pups. ‘You, and you, in the yards with me. You, open that gate, and close it once we have one in the chute. You, jump through the rails and shut the crush gate once we have one in the crush. You, crush-arm closer and opener, you crush-gate opener. And you two, meds. I need 10ml of the brown bottle in that syringe, fresh needle each time, then that spray, then that shot unpacked and ready.’
‘What are the meds? Growth hormones? I won’t help you prepare them to be meat.’
She was irritated. ‘The meds are for their disease. If preventing them suffering here and now is against your beliefs, then fucking go home.’
‘It’s okay, we don’t think they should be suffering, right, guys?’ An uneasy mutter swelled through the group.
‘They will be sent off to be killed in the end,’ someone said.
‘And, until then, they live on my watch, and will live as healthy happy beasts with their needs provided for and the minimum of pain and stress.’ This earned her some filthy looks, and she felt for the first time that she really could not understand them.
The cows themselves won the argument. Their eyes and their plight had an immediate appeal, a compulsion. They lowed and swung blind heads, trying to hear, trying to see.
‘No one knows their future,’ Pan said suddenly. ‘Not really. The climate apocalypse is all but here. We all can see it.’ There were murmurs, happier ones. ‘So let’s help them now. Look at them. They might be running wild over these hills in the future. Or their kids might be. The First Free Ones. They need to be able to see.’
Everyone pitched in with a better spirit. They were surprisingly gutsy in the pens. Maybe just innocent, unaware of the strength of these half-grown heifers and steers. They were also surprisingly good with syringes, but the two girls helping her with meds were horrified at the corneal jab.
‘They will be all but healed in a week,’ she said gently. ‘But if we left them, the eyeball can burst. Like the one I shot, they may have to have the eyeball out and be one-eyed, or worse, completely blind and liable to serious injury.’
She could sense that there was not much she could say that wasn’t seen as issuing from the mouth of evil, so she stopped talking. She felt sorry for them, their boots all muddy, their faces hot and dishevelled, but she admired them too. None of them drifted into casual cruelty the way farm kids often did. Some of them stroked the frightened beasts and whispered to them, some were sentimental for show or by habit, but they worked hard nonetheless.
‘When they are not so scared and in pain,’ she said, ‘they learn to love being scratched. They are not all that wild and unhandled.’
The girl beside her looked at her haughtily. ‘We know. We don’t do this without studying bovines.’
But she saw the stroking hands turn into tentative scratches.
‘Fill your heart with love,’ grape girl said to the others, ‘and it will take away their stress.’
There was that much love beamed down on those calves from the rails. They began singing. Sad, militant songs. But they all sang, and worked and got more and more filthy, and the pen of treated calves grew, and the pen of untreated shrank. She eyed them sidelong. At uni she remembered feeling like punching men who acted out patriarchal rituals and courtesies, especially when she was attractively dressed. What had happened to young women? These girls all deferred to the louder males, beard boy and Pan. Those two just naturally rose to be her foremen, and from her vantage point she could see that both they and the girls subconsciously colluded to put them there. She suddenly felt bitterly sorry for the girls. Footsoldiers, simply because society still didn’t hand them reins unless they seized them, and of an age now for their insecurities to be absolved by sexual success alone.
‘This one’ll be yours,’ she said, and they all stopped singing and crowded around to see. Someone sobbed, then caught her breath. Glowing faces, and bright glances were exchanged. In their strange world, this was it. The ultimate. This was the hard-won success of a mission.
It was a G5 calf, smallish for its age, a little underweight. Both eyes were ulcerated, pus-filled. But somehow she could still see, or had excellent hearing. Fingers reached and stroked her possessively.
‘You are giving us a little one because she has no monetary value to you,’ beard boy accused her, and many eyes swung her way.
Gem was tired. She stood up, hands in the small of her back. ‘No, young man. I am giving you one I might have had to shoot because both eyes are maybe gone, and with you lot I know she will be looked after. I thought saving a life was what you wanted. Does it matter that she might never have made it as far as the abattoir?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You are right. We have a deal.’
She sighed and bent to the work. At some point she was going to have to explain to their untrusting little faces that the heifer was quarantined and couldn’t leave for a week, and then would have to have biosecurity transit papers and a trailer.
The herd was out, grazing. She sat on the verandah with her eleven puppies, eating their food, which was odd but not all bad. They looked contented, in the main, and filthy. They had washed their hands and faces, but that and the sweat and the cowshit and her lack of a mirror had done things to their makeup. They looked quite changed. Grape girl had either lost her grapes, or removed them. Pan’s name was Benjamin, an old-style name.
‘They look more comfortable, not moving so funny,’ he said, gazing out at the herd.
She looked at him in surprise.
‘Yes, the eye spray was anti-inflammatory, and soothing.’
‘Frightening to be unable to see.’
‘Yes, very. More so for them than us.’
‘Thank you for letting us help, and helping us save one,’ he said quietly.
What a natural gent, she thought, and sipped her soy tea.
‘What’s with your dogs?’ he asked, stroking them. ‘I thought such dogs were conditioned to herd cattle, enslaved in the same system.’
‘Tell Tinker and Zora that. It would make my life much easier. I’d also like to enslave them to chase trespassers, but they have other ideas.’ Zora the adorer was licking him with a besotted look on her face.
She went inside and wrote up their contract on the heifer, still expecting trouble. But it turned out they knew all about transit docs and transport vehicles.
‘She’s yours,’ Gem said. ‘It states so clearly here. But she has to stay in the yards and be treated here for at least a week. Quarantine on purulent pinkeye. Look it up.’ A chorus of voices stirred from their sleeping rage.
‘What if you kill her? What then?’ ‘You’ll just say she died.’ ‘If she’s ours, we get to say how and where she is treated.’
Benjamin stood up.
‘I’ll stay here for the week, if Gem will have me, work for board, and I’ll treat Celeste and look after her.’
Gem looked at him, astonished. No. Just no! A pet vegan for a week? Then she laughed. Well, why not? He was after all a talented puppy. Celeste?
The crowd settled, their frowns cleared, they sniffed their clothes, and, as if by unspoken decision, got up, wrapped their tiffins and pots, and strode down the drive, whooping and slapping hands high in the air. Benjamin waved and Gem watched.
He looked very young, all alone. Too thin. She wished she could make him something with lots of cream. He looked about twenty, stood taller than her, and was wiry and agile. He had very long lashes and a pleasing face, softer than his words made him seem.
‘Wash up, and I’ll put the kettle on,’ she said. ‘Your room is off the verandah to the side.’
She went down with the ute to retrieve the dead calf. She assumed he wouldn’t want to be involved but as she was hitching the chain to the ute towbar he appeared at her side.
‘Will we bury it?’
‘Some of it.’ She didn’t want to butcher it with his help or with him watching, given how naïve he seemed and how strongly he felt about meat, but he hung around, and she wasn’t going to waste all of it for the sake of his feelings. The dogs needed a supply.
They dragged it up to the sheds. She went and got her butcher’s knives, power saw and apron. She severed everything down to the bone at its neck, strung it up behind the shed and worked quickly with knives and saw, dropping head, skin and offal into a tub. She gave half each of the heart and liver to the dogs so they would wander off and leave her alone, and then dropped the carcass onto a tarp and with blade, saw and hatchet separated haunches, shoulders and elbows, knees and fetlocks, then sawed through the spine in several places.
It was a very rough job, but all she needed for dogfood. Benjamin offered to help now and then, but she waved him back. But now that it was more meat than calf, she pointed, and he gingerly picked up a haunch, she a piece of rib cage and a knee, and he followed her into the shed. She had one freezer unmarked, and one spray-painted DOGS. Benjamin went and gathered the smaller pieces and helped her pack everything into the dogs’ freezer. It had only half a road-kill kangaroo left, so surely he could see that fresh supply was needed. Surely he could see that such a resource shouldn’t be wasted, especially as it cost a life. She felt unsettled, ill at ease. At least he hadn’t tried to film her. She washed, sharpened and oiled her knives, hosed down the tarp, folded the apron and tossed it into the laundry, and gestured to Benjamin to wash up.
‘Now we bury the rest,’ she said quietly.
‘I’ll do it,’ he said, looking around for tools.
She pointed out the spade and pick. ‘Quite deep. Over there where the soil is less rocky. But put rocks on top.’
Celeste and the three other nearly blind heifers down in the yards needed to be fed. She waited: he might benefit from something that was about life after being part of something so much about raw death. One must be gentle with the young. She watched through the kitchen window as he bent his back over the pickaxe, buried the remains, and then gathered rocks. It wasn’t easy work, now, near the end of a dry summer, but probably some physical exertion was good for processing his experiences of the day. She waited till he washed up at the basin outside the shed, then went up to him.
‘Come on, we have to feed up the calves. I’ll show you. The more time you can spend with Celeste getting her used to you and to being handled the less stressful next week will be for her.’ She showed him the hay stack, told him the amounts and left him to it.
He didn’t come in until on dusk. She had made a lentil soup and felt better, now, watching him. His face was calm and thoughtful, not defensive, not disgusted. She found she didn’t want to know what he thought of it all.
Their meal was peaceable, with sated dogs at their feet.
The very language she spoke labelled her. She caught him out mentally belittling her even when he was polite. She asked him about his group, seeking how to label him, whether he aligned himself with known extremists, or simply campus-based movements. He said she could study their social media, were she inclined, and gave her the address.
This brought on their first row.
‘I read your page,’ she said coolly. ‘I don’t think our efforts the other day warranted the schlock images, misquotes and general little-mindedness. And errors of fact really let you down.’
‘It’s for a purpose,’ he said calmly. ‘Don’t take it personally.’
‘You believe that? You think keeping it sensationalist, incorrect, and downright wrong serves anyone? It’s fucking immoral!’
‘Not for me to judge,’ he said, unruffled. ‘The organisers believe in mobilising people. You people always erode, nitpick, cry your own self-interest, claim you know more about animals, and this leads to self-doubt in the ranks, because many of them know only principles and outrage. But principles matter!’ His eyes shone. ‘Look where we are, what people have become, just following the so-called animal experts! You can’t tell me that the films and images on our site didn’t happen!’
She was furious. ‘They bloody well didn’t happen here. Nor are they all evil acts. That beheaded calf? The one that was supposed to be chainsawed by some sadistic, life-hating evil incarnate?’ Her voice rose. ‘That was a fetotomy! F-E-T-O-T-O-M-Y. Look it up, if you are inclined.’
He looked offended.
‘And,’ she said, pushing her chair back and standing. ‘Your organisers know it. They deleted my comment for letting them know. Call me archaic, but I think it is wrong, always wrong, to mobilise people with misinformation and lies.’
She was shaking. He was standing too, white with anger. She turned and stalked to her room, calling Tinker and Zora with her. There would be no vegan cuddling of her dogs!
She felt ashamed in the morning. Being young and stupid and passionate about changing the world was an essential stage of life. It was not as though the suffragettes or the feminists could have changed anything without the voices of blind outrage, the monolithic clarity of the blockheaded young. The revolting stuff on his site, some of it happened. She knew. It was not as though any reasonable person would like such things to happen. But he was right: unreasonable people could push reasonable people to stop ignoring bad things.
He was up before her and had filled the woodbox. He was, it seemed, one of those people who make you feel bad by being nobler in adversity. She could see him down in the yards, brushing Celeste. Petting animals, he had told her, was something we do for ourselves only, without regard to the animals’ permissions, but she had seen he couldn’t keep himself from the dogs, or the heifer. And he was unusually good with animals.
That alone made her trust him.
He came in for coffee and breakfast rather than avoiding her. He was courageous, somewhat adult after all.
He sat down. ‘Sorry about last night,’ he said. A deck clearer. He was stroking Zora behind the ears. Zora had found an easy target and extorted his attentions at every chance.
‘Yep, me too.’
‘We will never agree,’ he said, telling her not to try again to shake him, but politely.
‘We won’t,’ she said, and smiled. ‘But we can respect each other.’
‘We can,’ he said, firmly, like a five year old.
She had made him soy porridge with nuts and sultanas. He wouldn’t have honey, but she did. Peace settled between them.
‘I looked up fetotomy,’ he said, after a while. ‘You are certain that is what it is?’
She nodded.
‘Well, I do agree with you that we damage the cause with stuff like that.’
She said nothing, just patted Tinker.
‘I like it here,’ he said. ‘Peaceful. Even if you have animals enslaved.’
He walked out, and she couldn’t tell whether he had been serious, or if some levity was creeping into his demeanour.
The website changed that night. Not the fetotomy: that was clearly too powerful a mobiliser. But the portrayal of her farm and herself. Zelinda, who she now knew was grape girl, wrote that Gem was ‘welcoming’, ‘ignorant but willing to listen’, ‘grateful’ and that ‘not all farmers are wilfully sadistic’. She didn’t mention it but thought Benjamin must be more involved in the organisation than he had let on.
‘Careful!’ her voice was sharp, a slap. He recoiled. Celeste struggled in the crush.
‘You can burst her eyeball, quite easily,’ she said quietly and held out her hand for the ointment. ‘Hold her head still.’ She slid the ointment between lid and eyeball, with the nozzle pointed away from the ulcer. He looked sick and she realised how much it would have upset him to have harmed the heifer.
‘How did they go all zombie on you, if you are so caring?’ he said accusingly.
She sighed. ‘It’s a pretty awful disease. It’s quick. It comes in with a carrier, and spreads like hot margarine. I bought this herd when my neighbour killed himself, and, well, I don’t know how they got it. Pinkeye used to be easy. But this strain is new and really vicious.’
He thought for a moment. ‘Why did he kill himself?’
‘His cattle had pinkeye,’ she said, deadpan. She wasn’t going to share the Jaegers’ suffering with a tough little farmer-hater.
It was a tumultuous week and she was glad when it was over. A reduced set of the eleven came with a hire trailer and their docs in order. A very tame Celeste was led up to the makeshift ramp by Benjamin and then pulled and pushed into the trailer by them all and bedded down on the bale of hay she gave them. Benjamin thanked her, and then they all left. Her drone blipped her an image of Celeste bellowing at the bottom gate.
They must have come while she was out, yarded the calves, stolen two, and all the ear tags. The earth was trodden and mashed with fresh manure. She was sure it was Benjamin’s group. They knew her yards, and she had taught them herself how to move her beasts about. Some few beasts still had their tags, and she guessed these had been too difficult for them. But she hadn’t even bred these animals and didn’t know each from the other. She hadn’t even completed half of the transfer papers. She didn’t know how she was going to re-establish their identities so they could ever even leave the farm.
After anger came sadness. In her own way, she had liked them and had forced herself to try to see their ways. She had bought vegan food. Somehow she had expected liking in return and with it that odd social contract that makes you aware of and considerate towards another’s feelings. She had underestimated how negligible she in herself was compared with the opportunity for glory she had given them. Opportunity to serve their mission in a clever, clandestine way: to gloat inviolable.
She was going to have it out with Benjamin, that was for sure. Little Bull, with his long lashes and winning ways. And they wouldn’t get a chance to come back. She ramped up vigilance on the drone, activated the alerts and sirens she had never used before, buried an electronic caller near the yards so the drone checked in there more often; and then spent half the day getting annoyed with the pictures of hares and kangaroos the drone kept blipping to her phone.
She lay in bed feeling her cold hands and feet warm up under her layers of wool blankets. Beloved blankets, some nearly a hundred years old, probably. Wilgapila Mill 100% Pure Wool. She had collected as many as she could when they were a few dollars in op shops in the early years of the century. They were all checked, with pink, pastel, orange, blue, green, yellow themes. As a student she had had two, a gift from Aunt Verity who knew a thing or two. Now she had a stack of more than twenty and even Benjamin had slept in their cosy enduring warmth without noticing their labels. They were the best thing left of a time long gone, and essential in a bushfire. On a freezing night they kept you warm; and then when your house was burning down around you, soaked in water, they could keep you protected from radiant heat enough to survive. They were the epitome of shelter, she thought. An unsung wonder.
She was warm but sleepless. They had taken unpapered heifers. They had taken the tags. They had stolen her animals’ identities. She had made some calls and could apply and get her cattle retagged, and to do so she would have to prosecute the little shits. She knew more about them than they might guess, as she was thorough in her own way. But what if one of her tags appeared on an export heifer? Appeared in abattoirs around the country on a sick animal? They could at the least disrupt and embarrass the trade. It was audacious, if they had thought of all they could do.
In the morning she awoke to the feeling that owning land was not all that wonderful and that the surveillance was as unwelcome to her as it would be to any intruder. Images of human evil came unsought into her mind, most of them from the videos on Benjamin’s site, but some from her own life. Things she had chosen to forget. What was it about the orphans, the unloved, the motherless, human and animal, that licensed such horrors as were inflicted upon them?
The drone sent her some images of herself. She looked old and sad, a little frail even. Not up to a fight, any fight, anymore. She was an intruder too, with a senseless bit of paper and some overconfident assumptions.
She wound the drone back to random butterflies and orchids but was still determined to have it out with Little Bull, if she could find him, even if she had to go down to Toggenberg and stalk their lairs for a day.
She didn’t have to. Benjamin appeared at her door the next day.
‘You’ve got a nerve,’ she said through the screen door, although she found herself thoroughly pleased to see him.
‘May I come in?’ he asked, his face miserable.
She opened the door, turned her back on him and walked to the kitchen to put the kettle on. She still had soy milk in the fridge. The stuff never seemed to go off. Like plastic.
He sat down, shoulders slightly slumped. ‘They banned me from the Coactive.’
She placed his cup in his hands and sat down, waiting.
‘I am corrupted,’ he said. ‘And they are right: in a way, or in their way, I am.’
Poor Little Bull. Cast out from his herd for seeing the complexity and mire of things for a moment. She wasn’t going to make it easy for him, or comfort him. She still wanted to know how he could have done it.
‘Human identifying with human gets in the way of change a lot,’ he said, warming to his subject. ‘It’s like if someone you liked was a Nazi, and you felt you couldn’t fight them because of that.’
For a moment she had been ridiculously pleased by his confession of liking and identifying and now was irritated in the extreme by his analogy and annoyed with herself. What was this craving the old had to be seen by the young? ‘Really? You actually let yourself think that?’
‘We fight atrocity,’ he said. ‘Should we have exempted you because we liked you? Maybe we would like a lot of people if we got to know them. What then? NOTHING CHANGES!’
He was almost crying. She waited a little. The silence lengthened and he looked away.
‘Just one question: were you here? With them?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said.
He hadn’t been able to wrong her. She felt a strange delight, as though she had captured and tamed him, somehow. Corrupted him, yes.
She said mildly, ‘Well, that explains why they didn’t manage to get some of the tags: I trained you for a week longer than them.’
He laughed, a little wanly.
‘How’s Celeste?’
His face lit up. ‘Oh she’s great! She has a scar in the centre of each eye, but she can see a bit and her hearing is amazing. She is pretty playful.’ His face fell again. ‘I’m going to miss her.’
He stood up. ‘I came to apologise.’ He was stiff and formal again. ‘Gem, you were decent to us. And you wept when you shot the calf. But they believe very strongly that kindred behaviours weaken us, and that the cause was more important than any obligation to you. They had to be bigger than that. They have to, even with their own families.’
A cult. That’s what it sounded like. A pinkeyed bloody bunch. Without warning an image of a man punching and then hurling a newborn calf into its hutch rose in her mind. Okay, she told her subconscious, pacifying it. Okay. A twisted-up cult for fighting atrocities because no one else would, not really.
‘And you?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said miserably. ‘I thought I did, but I can’t see anything clearly anymore. I want to stop thinking.’
He walked down the drive, and the drone blipped her a couple of pictures of his face. He certainly hadn’t stopped thinking.
Did he have a place to be? Girlfriend? Parents? Money? A job? He looked if anything thinner than the fortnight before.
‘Little Bull!’ she shouted. ‘Benjamin!’