SHOVEL DUDS

I’ll be honest. I’m telling you this now from the interrogation room, and I’m in a fair amount of hassle. Be careful who you confide in online, because they will rat you out.

This is the craic. I can’t stop looking at the videos. I watch them on the bus on the way into work, underneath my jacket so no one else sees. I watch them on my little cousin’s Asus tablet when I’m over in Aunt Maeve’s for Sunday dinner. I tell the family I’m going for a big long shit, and then I take Jack’s tablet and watch them in the bathroom on earphones. I never logged out the last time, and Jack couldn’t sleep right for months after I handed his tablet back. Aunt Maeve knew it was me, but never said nothing.

I watch them on LiveLeak, like. Sometimes you’ll get the really new ones on Twitter before the accounts get deleted. It looks so fake when you watch it. It looks like Terminator or Alien, but the thing is, I know it’s real. I’m looking at a photograph right now. I saved it, because they get deleted pure quick. Yellow desert sand, the same colour as the shit part of a sponge cake. And this lad in a blue shirt lying on his back, wearing this normal blue shirt like my da would wear, like the ones the boys from Scoil Íde wear under their jumpers. He’s got one hand on his stomach, the hand kind of twisted into this claw shape and looking stiff. His foot is resting on another lad’s head. The other lad is dead too. Around his body is this dark black pattern that fades into red. The spill of blood. When I see them on my screen, they don’t look like pools of gore. They look like the outlines of countries that haven’t been discovered yet, that’s what they’re the bulb off. This lad here on my phone lying in the sand in his blue shirt, not sure if he’s in Syria, could be a Coptic Christian from Egypt too, he has that big forehead, but he’s surrounded by an irregular blood pattern, darkening as it soaks deeper. It’s so red you could paint a door with it, and not a soul would notice.

You know the videos are real when the lad’s head peels. In the cinema, when someone is shot, they crack their head, like an egg. If you watch it, the bullet goes in the front, makes a little hole, and then the back cracks open and squirts the blood on a wall behind them, like water pistols. But in real life, on the internet, when a person is shot, their head peels open, like the skin of an orange opening up or a fist turning to a palm. When lads get shot in the face on the internet, with a big gun, like an AK, their face opens up into this rose blossoming in fast-forward. These lads are fucking deadly. They truly don’t give a fuck. I watch all their videos.

Most days in work it’s quiet. I burn off the hairs with a torch, but after ten months I’m ready for cutting throats. Hair-burning is no craic, their hair fat and bristly like strands of bail twine. It melts down to the skin, like the fuse on a firework, then lots of little strands of the acrid bone-smoke flake up my nostrils and my eyes go dry. Pádraig lances throats. He feeked Eileen McQuinlan on lunch-break and got me to smell his finger. It smelled like the bottle-cap of a BPM energy drink or a comfy bra after wearing it three days straight, pure grapefruit. Not sure I’d be too happy if some lad went around getting his friends to smell his fingers after me. But that’s the game here. Pádraig thinks I’m some sort of eejit coz I’m a girl, reckons I wouldn’t have it in me to cut the throats, thinks he can shock me by making me smell his fingers. If he only knew how much I wanted to slit the throats.

We work in an old hangar that used to be for small aircraft. But Mr Bradley converted it into an abattoir. Bradley’s alright, one of those ex-Brit hippies, small bit soft from acid, but old money. Now he runs an organic miniature beef farm. Royal beef, fancy beef, tiny beef. Free to roam 23 acres of alfalfa and vetch, loaded with ‘assorted victuals to game the meat’, Bradley says. There’s short black-and-white Belted Galloways, who only dine on acorns and hazelnuts for six months of the year. Their shit smells like Nutella. They get cured into beef ibérico. We’ve Zebu lads from Zimbabwe, who are gorged on apples and corn for sausage meat. Pear-sucking Dexters, with long ears like old man’s balls and double-chin goitres. Holsteins on molasses and buckwheat, with a type of malted weak beer for their sups. The lot. Bradley has the best organic bull meat in Ireland. I burn their hairs and Pádraig slits their throats. Bradley does the butchering by his own blade. Traditional slaughtering too, not the machinated way. We kill by hand, to protect the meat, make sure it’s bled and hung right. Any machinery we do have is hand-operated. Cast-iron crank elevating hoist mounted on a trolley for transport to the bleeding zone. Rolling hooks that clank on the wire. Induction-hardened pneumatic working platform for eviscerating, with a small conveyor for red and white offal. Brisket saw. Hot skinning knife with galvanised edge. Two-hand splitting saw. Hot galvanised steel non-mechanised tubular rails with detachable chassis. And a ten-foot blood-bath. We’re well equipped, boy. I wash it all down every evening when the two gombeens go off to tea.

The bones of my day is on the hanging floor. It’s down at the end, behind the partition. Pádraig kills, I burn, Bradley cuts, in that order. When I hear the screams next door, I actually shiver, like I’m on the bottom end of a rollercoaster going down. It does this thing, this vibration thing in my head that travels all down to my limbs and flutters my tummy, like shrinking white suds in a sink of dishes, and it’s the most real feeling. Say that out loud and they’d think I’m a looper. The calves scream because they know what’s happening next. Dangling upside-down with the hook through their hooves. That’s the scream that gives me the tingle. If Bradley or Pádraig knew, they’d go apeshit, but sometimes I frighten the bullocks before they get cut. I go to the pen, and bang their cage with my house-keys. Once I flashed the flame of the torch at them, enough to burn their arses. When they get excited like that, their heart beats heavy. Then when Pádraig slits the throat, the blood gushes out with the pump, splashes out over the bleeding tray, onto the floor and through the partition. Where I watch it rolling in burgundy, boy. Pádraig gets the raw blood pumped into his mouth and has to gawk like a baba. Tastes like bad coins, he says. The terror leaping out of a cow’s jaws to me is like a feed of Ben & Jerry’s to someone else, how it changes in tone and pitch when the blade goes into the windpipe. It’s my one criticism of the ISIS boys. They gag the lads during beheadings. You need to hear how the scream changes from high to low to gurgly. That’s the master stroke.

I saw a video last week, I watched it in the bathroom of Hook & Ladder in Limerick. Aoife’s boyfriend was being difficult, and I’d to listen to her shite on about him choosing five-a-side over her. Anyway, I sat down in the cubicle and opened up LiveLeak with the headphones on. It was this lad in a cage, like in the zoo, like where you’d have an aardvark or something, that sized cage. Miles out in the desert. He was Arab-looking, and they had him wearing a bright orange play-suit. He must have done something horrifying coz the ISIS boys were having none of him. But he was wearing this suit like a big orange pyjamas. And at the start of the video, he was telling some story to the camera, and then they had squiggly writing on the screen and it cut to shots of green fields with loads of bombs going off in the mountains. And bodies, bodies, bodies. A montage of bodies lying on the ground. I’m telling you. When it’s real bodies, they always look fake. I can’t explain it proper. Then a hospital with children wearing masks. Then a beardy lad with a beard talking to the camera, he was holding a big gun and had on a green military-looking vest.

I fast-forwarded most of the shite talk, to get to the end. So beard lad was roaring to the camera, and then yurt, that’s when it cut back to the orange play-suit man in the cage. They dragged the chains, pure fucking with him. The camera looked like the films, slow motion, like The Fast and the Furious. Unbelievable detail. You could make out the hairs on his nose, like. They obviously had the jumpsuit doused in petrol anyway. Because Beardy lit the chain, and yellow flames trailed up the lad’s back. And they hugged him, I swear, the flames came over his back like he grew them as wings and they hugged his chest. His eyes had a quare expression. He looked more irritated than anything else, but his hands seized with the agony of the fire. Couldn’t bat it away. Closest thing I could compare him to is when you’re sleeping, and you wake up frozen, and you want to move and scream, but you can’t, coz you’re stiff. I think that’s what a person being burnt alive must feel. After a while, lad was charred. Then the sick cunt on the camera zoomed into his burnt black face, coz his tongue was sticking out and bubbling. The air and fluid in his lungs and body were boiling, and escaping all bubbly out the mouth. I felt empty and helpless, like nothing is real. Then my mouth started to water when his tongue bubbled, and I said to myself, ‘Ciara, you’re one fucked-up bitch.’

I knew then I’d have to head to Syria. That’s the only place for me. It’s not that I want to hurt anyone, I’m not angry. But the vulnerability of any creature when it knows it’s going to die is fucking beautiful. That look they give you. Where they are gone beyond fighting, and just have this stare of handing all their power to you. It’s the same look a baby gives the first set of eyes it sees when it comes out. That’s how it was when my cousin Jack was born, and he looked at Aunt Maeve. It’s the look the frogs gave me when I’d chop them up with the sharp knives when I was nine. But by Christ, I need to see that look in an adult man. I want that powerless look behind the eyes of something that’s capable of complex emotions. That’s my buzz. Fuck slitting bullocks. I’m not thick either, so I’m hardly chancing that shit in Nenagh, I’d get caught rotten. And also their families would miss them, and I wouldn’t like to be disturbing the town like that. I’m not an asshole. But I need to get as far as Syria, and have ISIS take me in and let me cut lads up and set them on fire. That’s my vocation.

I’ve been chatting to a feen who’s calling himself Malik on WhatsApp for three weeks. Found him through one of the Twitter accounts that uploads the videos. WhatsApp is safe enough because it’s encrypted. But Jaysus, Malik doesn’t trust me at all. He thinks I’m a police who’s pretending to be a girl from Tipp. And when he does infer that I might be legit, he asks if I’ve a brother who’d be interested instead. I’ve made it fair clear that I’ve no interest in religion at all. I haven’t the first clue about their religion, or what they believe, that’s their business. I skip past all that in the videos, and they’re in fucking Arabic anyway. I can’t even be arsed checking Wikipedia, reading isn’t my thing at all at all. Malik says that bit is grand, they don’t care what my beliefs are. I reckon those ISIS lads don’t believe anything either. Deep down, they’re into feeling that power of killing, same as myself. They have that addiction too. Abu says I’d have to leg it to Jordan or Turkey, and snake across into Syria, and that I wouldn’t have a hope of making it as an unattended woman. Fucking gobshite. Freckly red-haired girl from Tipp offering to join them, and he trying to talk me out of it? I’ll cut my hair and pretend I’m a lad if I have to. Snort a load of burning bull’s hair and make my voice hoarse and deep for the trip. Be like that wan Grace O’Malley, the Pirate Queen from Junior Cert History. Wear a big stupid GAA jersey and shorts with piss stains on ’em. Whatever. They’d get all the publicity in the world off me, imagine me slicing throats and talking English into cameras for them? Sure that’s ideal. He’s a coward. Same balls craic as Pádraig with the blade, doesn’t believe I have it in me because I’m a girl.

Typical shit. I knew if I was to get what I wanted, I’d have to work harder, waste my time putting in a load of extra effort, just to prove to stupid fucking lads that I’m right for the job.

So the day in question, I battled on after a long ould stint in Bradley’s hangar. We’d done a load of the Zimbabwe Zebus, the small bulls. They’re like little balls of muscle when they dangle and thrash around by the trotters. Pádraig gets freaked out that the knife will go through his wrist, so then Bradley has to come in and steady their legs when the puncture is made. Pair of fools, pure thrilled with themselves when they need the two of ’em to do a one-man job. Then sticking their heads in over the partition, telling me to be careful with the torch, when I can blast a full hide in under two minutes. I have it down, lads, relax. So we finished up anyway, and Bradley and Pádraig went up to the house for jars of the homemade pressed cider, flat shite. I stayed behind, washing down the killing floors with borax. Normally I’d hop for the bus straight after, but that night I stayed around. I’d say I was realigning the bone-saw blades if they asked. After three jars of pressed cider, the two apeshits would always get pathetic, and order a taxi into town to stare at seventeen-year-olds in tight tops above in Neary’s Lounge, arriving in with hangovers the next day and acting like they’re doing a great job.

After two hours, I stuck a head out the hanger and saw the lights of a taxi up the drive of the main house like clockwork. When it fucked off, I got to work. Dusk was bothering me so I’d to act fair quick. There were too many Dexter calves birthed last season, and they hadn’t been inventoried properly by Bradley. He’d never know if one went missing. Lazy prick. They’re worth about 800 quid in meat. The evening had nice warmth to it, and the coconut smell of new gorse flower came down off the hill on a breeze, settling the tang of sour cow-shit. So I rocked on over to the Dexter pen with a bucket of grain and started shaking it over the fence. They all came over. They’re the ones that only get fed pears, so they were gagging for a bit of grain. I spied one of the untagged calves, ushered her over to the gate and unlatched it. Had the wire noose ready and placed it around her neck, but she was a calm ould bint, in fairness to her.

The sun was low, but clear. It nearly had that desert quality, could have been in Jordan. I had an area prepared against a gravel pile, and a load of bright orange curtains that my nan threw out. I tied up the cow with a chain so that she hadn’t much movement, and secured her good to the inside window of an old Ford Cortina carcass that was scrapping in the dirt. I was using the camera on my iPhone 6, which was full HD. I had it on a selfie stick, to get that professional feel that ISIS had. Nice and steady, no shaky wrist shite distracting from the action. I was going to use my arm to steady it and pull it back and forth like a pool cue. I’d spent the last week fitting out my nan’s curtains into a basic cow-suit shape, with a few stitches on the sewing machine. I wrapped this over the chains on the calf, who was calmed by the pile of grain in front of her. She was looking great. Full orange jumpsuit. I had an ould brown wig too that I got in the joke shop, lobbed that on her head.

The sun was at a slanty angle, giving a nice mood to it. Then I lashed on the petrol and lit her up. I had the microphone up full to catch her screams, bawling and howling she was. She was tied down good, trying to run from the fire, but she could only thrash on the spot. Rearing her front legs up like cattle don’t, jocking like a mare. The flames ripped through the orange curtains, and I was getting right up close with the camera to capture her eyes. She was only a suckling, but she still knew when she was being ended and couldn’t escape. She gave all her power into that camera lens. Perfect stuff, it had that passion. I hadn’t the memory on the phone to capture the full char. But I got the best bits. Stink of Sunday roast and petrol off my hair. I covered over the black pile of bones with the gravel and disturbed the earth. Bradley wouldn’t miss her and he wouldn’t check either.

After I washed the evening out of my hair, I sent the file to Malik on WhatsApp. Let’s see the fucker turn this down, I thought. This is art. This will show him that I’m ready for Syria. As good as any lad. I watched the screen for three minutes while it uploaded. Malik was online. I waited more for him to watch the six-minute video. I was sick of his shit at this stage, and felt smug as fuck.

Malik: What is the meaning of this? I don’t know what this is? Why would you send this?

Me: It’s me showing you I’m serious you apeshit. I’m ready for Syria. Make arrangements because I’m booking flights to Jordan as soon as I get offline. You get me hun?

Malik: Please don’t. Please leave us alone.

Me: ...

Dickhead fucking blocked me. ISIS fucking blocked me on WhatsApp? Is he for real? What did I do, like?

I didn’t sleep a wink with the fury. If I was a lad, they wouldn’t give a roaring shit. Why would he block me? I was almost drifting off at about half five, when there was a loud kick on the downstairs door and my room lit up with blue. Malik, you fucking rat.