CONTENT NOTE
Indigo Bailey’s ‘Nina’s Career’ makes mention of death, and animal death, and features depictions of blood and flesh.
Gathering it into a thin membrane, I weigh the flesh, then wrap it, mimicking Nina’s cautious swaddling motions. Some blood escapes, and I watch it blot the paper pink. The customer tosses the parcel into her basket, lightly bruising a plum, and leaves us alone.
‘These are my favourite,’ says Nina. She’s stroking the surface of a cow tongue, feeling for its pimples with gloved fingers. Her mother is Czech, she tells me, her father was a butcher from Manchester who died under the knife. After this, Nina’s maminka lost faith in our systems, returning to a home country which had renamed itself in her absence. The landlord tried to keep their bond, under the pretence that the place had a smell—the salted meats, the goulash, the grief.
When Nina asks me what my favourite is, I tell her the truth: I haven’t eaten meat since I was ten, when I had my first dream of being a calf—compressed by a herd, moans echoing in the thicket of bodies, suede taut over bone, no escape, whiteness. She asks me why I’d want to work here.
‘I thought it’d be interesting,’ I reply, not wanting to admit that I’d meant to apply for the supermarket itself—the innocent side, with the year-round hot cross buns gently conjoined in twelves, and the cabbages laid on beds of ice. Nina laughs. Braids circle her forehead, pressing limply against her hairnet.
‘Any more questions?’ she says, when we reach the end of my training shift.
Do you ever get used to touching flesh, so that it feels just like paper or cotton? How long is your hair when it’s loose? ‘Why are the lights pink?’ I ask.
‘Because, otherwise, the meat looks grey.’
On our second shift together, I watch Nina tie lamb loins in string. I imagine them feeling choked in their harnesses. Then, I imagine them feeling held.
Between loins, Nina tells me about her first job—fryer oil whistling, a second-degree burn from transferring an apple pie to its cardboard sheath. Two nights after her eighteenth birthday, Nina’s first time making adult pay, someone held up the place with a knife. Nina had to hide in the turret of the playground because a drunk couple had taken up the bathroom, rocking, unknowing, against the sink. In that moment, Nina had felt her adulthood slip. Or rather, settle.
Nina tells me about eleven houses, eight housemates, and a mandarin tree she prunes though she knows she’ll never see its fruit. She tells me about the tiny marks etched on a floorboard under her bed and about the dirt bike her parents bought her as a child, after selling the goats mid-drought, so that Nina could burn her looping presence into the grass.
At nine o’clock I peel off my gloves, wash away the talc pooling my fingerprints, and hover my hand below the pink LEDs, silently commanding it: Look alive!
Two more shifts with Nina, seven unapproved smoke breaks. She returns with hot breath, apologetic: ‘I know it stinks.’ I stick close by because I’m cold. ‘How does it make you feel?’ she asks me, layering leaves of prosciutto. ‘Thinking about the animals.’
‘Cold,’ I say.
Soon, I start noticing. First, the tail of a silver wire poking through a turkey’s skin. Curved around the wing’s armature like spare scaffolding, it resists when I tug it. Eventually, I feel it pop. ‘What’s this?’ I ask Nina, while our manager, Julia, visits the baker’s apprentice with a smuggled bundle of smiley-faced ham. ‘I pulled it from that turkey.’
‘Maybe he had a run-in with a barbed fence.’ Nina twirls the wire loosely around her finger, then tosses the spiral in the bin. ‘Turkeys are so nimble. Always trying to escape,’ she adds, with a tone that means: I am the authority on wildness.
Tonight, I dream of the wing being punctured by an endless needle, which passes through it in silky slow motion. At first I am watching. Then, I’m the one piercing it. Then, I’m a winged creature writhing at a bush rave. Finally, just for a second, I perch on the back of Nina’s motorcycle. Yesterday, Nina told me that she was fired from her last job for saving stiff croissants—peeling off shards for the seagulls till there was nothing left, without realising that her boss watched the carnage from the window of her beachside villa.
Glowing specks start to appear beneath the jellied flesh.
‘Is that mould?’ I whisper.
‘It couldn’t be,’ says Nina, shifting the chops and cutlets from the counter to the display case, where the splotches disappear in the pink glow. Still, when she goes out for another cigarette, I throw them away.
On our sixth shift together, Nina notices something herself. When no one else is watching, she makes a tiny incision. ‘Watch closely—you’ve never done a dissection before, have you?’ From it, she pulls a small object, now golden, in the shape of a mottled coin. It resists, but Nina bursts the sheet of flesh, slicing away the sinews like a bushwalker cutting back brambles.
Hypnotised by the clinging meat, I say: ‘It’s contaminated. It has to be taken from the shelves, right? We’ll tell Julia.’
‘Of course,’ says Nina, but she’s focussed on wrapping the object tightly in her palm. ‘Except… the whole shipment? Everything would go to waste.’ Nina grabs a Ziplock bag from her pocket, still laced with dust from the biscuits we’d shared in the carpark. ‘Let’s see if there’s anything else. We can look for a pattern, find the source before we tell anyone.’
All week we inspect the meat under white light. We notice flesh risen in bulbs. I learn to use a scalpel—Nina’s hand on my hand—so that the removal is barely visible. Often, metallic clumps are embedded at the core, almost fused with the bone. It’s as if they’ve been formed inside the animals’ bodies, like shimmering clots. We slip each object inside the Ziplock bag, conceal it under the knife block, and note the corresponding shipment. Despite our diligence, sometimes I can’t remember whether we are collecting evidence, or just collecting.
At lunch, our backs against cement, we tip the bag’s contents onto the ground. We hold things up, one at a time, doing lazy impressions of Antiques Roadshow presenters. ‘Now, I’ve never seen anything so precious in my life. You see these corners? It must be a crucifix… three hundred years old, Tsarist Russia,’ jokes Nina, her accent tilting Northern. She reaches for her lighter. In the pile is a little gold tooth. A lump with a hole in it is a wedding band. Nina slips it onto my finger, laughing, her smoke streaming into my eye, her embers dripping onto my knee.
I show Nina websites where normal people—potato farmers, maths teachers—archive the important relics they’ve discovered while digging up their flowerbeds or roaming construction sites with shitty metal detectors. We make some decisions. First, Nina will take the bag home, sliding it into her underwear drawer for safekeeping. Second, we will verify what we already know, that the gold is gold, Nina taking a hunk to an old neighbour who spent years prospecting on the mainland, telling him she found it by a gutter, even if he bribes her with rarebit and her father’s voice.
All the ‘contaminated’ meat, we discover, has come from the same location, for which we have an address but no business name. It’s on the border of an abandoned town called Etoile. The town’s Wikipedia entry is a ‘stub’, reading:
Etoile is the site of a French-colonised ghost town in the state’s North-West. It received its name, the French word for star, due to abundant mica stores and early gold discoveries, which led to rapid population growth throughout the 1860s. In response to the 1893 mining disaster, the climate’s inhospitality for crops and livestock, and claims that the majority of gold mined in the vicinity was actually iron pyrite, Etoile’s population has since dissipated.
According to its official website, whose interface hasn’t been updated since 2003, Etoile’s six residents double as newsagent proprietors and tour guides, leading visitors around an umber lake. ‘Two hours and forty-four minutes by motorcycle,’ says Nina, her phone in my face. By midday Saturday we are halfway there, buying warm Coke from the petrol station’s broken fridge in exchange for the bathroom key, Nina eating smoked sprats and Ritz crackers, oil congealing on the concrete.
Furrowed dirt flashes. Stakes drive into the air, quickly becoming gums, blackened and reaching. We lean around the curves, Nina’s movements somehow fluid even in her stiffest leather. My fingers dig into her waist, searching for her softness. A horse float passes and I try to see him but find only shadow. I imagine the horse doing the same, watching my head bob in its black dome, watching my body haunt Nina’s.
Eucalypts become hay bales become nothing. There are no more animals, though wool clumps white on wire fences, and soon, the blur begins to slow. Finally, the engine carks it completely. I recall the ute that passed us, its tarp rippled like loose skin. We pray for another one, kneeling on the gravel, because Nina doesn’t have any insurance. When I check our location, I realise we’ve arrived at our destination, but all we see beyond the fence is a thick dirt crust, darkening as we pace back and forth, swearing at the cold.
We wait on the other side, settling into a divot. Nina tries to stretch her jacket over the both of us as we shiver in bursts. The earth churns below, beginning to heat itself. We stay in the volcanic wound, yawning. Soon, Nina sleeps. Feathered from her helmet already, her braids fray—further, further—in the crest of my armpit. Her jacket is buzzing now, the bike’s motor breathing in the distance, the earth stilling again. I tease Nina’s phone from her pocket and a text message slices the dark: Nina, in hospital, they say sickness but just bad dreams, wish you come, maminka.
Then, a notification: You’ve received a review for your product: ‘24 karat gold ring’. Another: You’ve received a review for your product: ‘silver amulet for love, financial security, and healing trauma’.
Nina is melding into the ground now. In a second, I’ll be able to pick up her fossil, hold it in my palm and stroke its indent.