The China Factory Read Online Free PDF Page B

folding old fertiliser bags.
    â€”What happened? she asks her brother. The pen is filthy and wet from the sheep dirt, but it is not that. Where did all the blood come from? she asks. What were ye doing?
    â€”Squeezing the lambs, he says.
    â€”What’s that? she asks, pointing to the corner. There is a heap of blood and guts in the dirt, and little circles of grey wool. They are like woollen hats for tiny dolls.
    â€”That’s where he cut them underneath with the penknife. He cut them and squeezed out the little yokes. He had to pull out the guts with the pinchers.
    She cannot look at him. One day he hurt himself on the bar of his bicycle on the way home from school. Did you hurt yourself underneath? her grandmother asked him when they got home. Hecouldn’t talk with the pain. She remembers when her mother used to bath herself and her brother together on Saturday nights. She knows that the underneath in boys is soft and easily hurt.
    She is scraping the sole of her sandal on the edge of a brick. She is afraid to look, but still she turns her head a little towards the corner. The flies are swarming around. The guts are like short fat worms, creamy-pink and shiny, with little veins all over them. There are dozens of small pale balls, like raw meat, among them. And the little wool caps. She presses her hand on her belly button and for a second she cannot breathe.
    â€”They have to be castrated, her brother says, so they won’t grow into rams.
    She is running down the road to the Well Field, Captain running beside her. She stands outside, looking through the rungs of the gate. They are all lying down over by the ditch, the lambs pressed against their mothers’ bodies. She is thinking of their underneaths, open and sore, against the ground. As she watches a lamb rises slowly. The mother rises too and the lamb lowers his head under her, for milk. He pauses and stands there. Then his front legs fold at the knees and he is down again. The mother kneels too and the lamb lets out a thin feeble bleat. She has never heard such a sound.
    She finds her mother at the clothesline at the back of the house. The pine trees are leaning over them, making everything darker. As soon as she starts telling her mother, the tears come.
    â€”They have to do it, her mother says. It’s the way things are done. She is taking clothes off the line, shirts, pants, towels, and folding them into the laundry basket.
    â€”They weren’t dosing them at all this morning, she sobs. You said they were dosing.
    Her mother says nothing. She takes the clothes pegs off her father’s socks.
    â€”Don’t be thinking about it, she says then. Put it out of your mind.
    â€”They shouldn’t have cut them like that.
    Her mother moves along the line, drags a sheet off roughly, folds it from the corners.
    â€”They’re not able to stand up, she says.
    â€”They don’t feel anything, they’re only animals. Her mother is frowning. She kicks the laundry basket to move it along.
    â€”They’re bleeding, she cries. Below in the field now, they’re bleeding.
    â€”God Almighty, will you ever stop! Will you? Will you ever just leave me alone?
    The sun is setting. The little birds are sleeping in the trees. She stands at the gable end of the house, her head tilted, listening. Now and then she hears a single bleat in the distance. Soon it will be dark and everything will be silent. They will lie huddled against their mothers, all night long. She goes inside. They are all there, in the kitchen. The nine o’clock news is on. There’s a big search for a little girl who has gone missing on a bog. There are men out looking for her, beating down the heather with sticks.
    She is afraid her heart is turning. And that her mother will know this, and then her mother’s heart will turn too. She thinks there is no one in the whole world as lonely as her mother.

THINGS I SEE
    Outside my room the wind whistles. It