Pigswill

A Story by Flora L

The first time I met Natalia Schtum was tough. I had been escorted into a bare room, and left there on my own for a short time, alert with nerves. Without warning, the only door in the enclosed space swung open and the prisoner came into view, her bald scalp reflecting the cheap, fluorescent lighting. She was sat down on the chair opposite me by two guards who promptly left. Her three-fingered left hand drummed a pattern on the greasy table between us. I had been warned about the hand, but I wished someone had told me a bit about the nature of the character before me. Her eyes flickered as she took me in.

“Natalia”, I said. My voice cracked in the quiet room. I was just about to introduce myself when she held up a hand to silence me.

“I know why you’re here”. Her voice was accented and she sounded tired. There were bruise-like bags under her eyes.

“You know the deal I offered you? That I would tell you my whole story for you to publish in your paper? Well, these are my terms. You shut up, you write exactly what I say, no embellishing, no nothing”, Natalia looked at me pointedly. “I have no problem with you, let’s keep that way”.

Like I’d do anything to upset her. This woman was, for my little corner of the failing paper industry, a gold mine, a previously unopened treasure chest to which my newspaper was suddenly, without explanation or warning, given the key. The speculations surrounding this notorious, drug-busting journalist’s recent arrest had spread like wildfire, making it to all the major news networks. An infamous criminal had been involved, and fact that it was the journalist who ended up behind bars rather than the high profile smuggler had caused it to become a very sought-after story. After staying silent for a couple of weeks, she gave her old agency one chance to tell her story. That one chance was me.

I nodded with such fervour that she rolled her eyes.

“I was like you once, a wide-eyed bambi of a girl entering the big, bad world with the intent to change it. After graduating I picked up my journalist pen and started my work on an obsession that had started to form inside me ever since I was 8 and old Mr Muller from next door died very suddenly in the night. It was unexpected, something exciting and different in my young mind, the finality of death yet undiscovered at my age. What bugged this particular little girl was that she got no explanation for his death, no explanation for the smell of rotting meat that had decided to cling to the flat next door or the flies that plagued it after the removal of the corpse.

“Nowaday, we both know what kind of drug caused his untimely death, but my parents, rightfully so, had decided to protect me from what Mr Muller was doing next door. I guess it would be hard to explain to a little girl that some humans, devoid of any morality at all, would slaughter pregnant cattle and dry out their carcasses just for the most risky and ethically wrong high of their lives. The gentle Mr Muller took Swill, the most disgusting substance you could abuse on the face of this earth. Once I learned about the cause of his death, many years later, I became obsessed with Swill, what it was made from, and what kind of person it attracted. I was told countless horror stories about addicts by my peers that dripped gore; the reality being poor bloated b******s who would wander around abattoirs to hide their stink of raw meat, attracting bluebottles and craving cow gristle.

The horror of the whole idea still makes me want to retch. You can only imagine how my revulsion grew when I learned of the people making millions pounds off of this, the large drug groups that managed to monopolise this violation of order, of nature, among the consuming humans and the consumed livestock stolen in the dead of night. It became my calling in life to stop this drug once and for all.”

Natalia took a long breath, and was silent for a moment. Her brown, heavy lidded eyes met mine for a moment, then darted away to focus on the drab, tiled floor.

“Pah, how could I think for one moment that I could change the world so drastically? These people didn’t, don’t want to be helped. They are too busy with their snouts buried in the trough, oblivious to anything but their desire to consume. And the conscience of the people running the whole operation? They are the ones that make me the sickest. The suppliers are happy enough to give the fattened pigs their Swill, to them their human market is one and the same as the livestock they slaughter; as long as they have money in their pocket at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how many human or animal lives are affected!”

Natalia wiped a fleck of spit from the corner of her mouth and blinked rapidly. It moved me to see all that fury and aggression, her face a canvas of pent up anger. She slammed her right fist onto the table, and then, quite suddenly, before my eyes, seemed to melt into a heavy fatigue.

“Where was I, anyway? Ah yes, a social justice warrior with big dreams of toppling the Swill empire. I am getting tired now, so let’s make this brief. Through blood, sweat, and networking, I managed to find a hook up into one of the major groups, cartels, whatever. It was run by a man who called himself Cesare, one of the big names in the whole operation. He was an incredibly clever man, always a step ahead. He found me trying to break into one of the warehouses I had been tipped off about, and overpowered me, just him and some other guy. What chance did I have? He took me inside one of the warehouses, showed me his empire. Millions of animal carcasses strung up on hooks, a smell that you couldn’t imagine in your wildest dreams, flies everywhere. He showed me every nook and cranny of the place, took me to see the deepest secrets of the cartel Cesare, then took me to a place known only by Swill Suppliers, deep underground, and broke my soul.”

My hands were trembling. The last sentence was spoken lightly, like something that had happened a long time ago, but Natalia’s expression was closed. Each of her pupils seemed to me to be a full stop, punctuating the silence. After the longest pause so far, Natalia started talking again in a matter of fact fashion.

“I went back to live with my parents in the country for a while, but nothing felt the same. I rested, recovered, and then was between jobs, but whatever I did, I still felt empty. My obsession had gone, you see, fled in the warehouse along with my motivation to live. Life went on, and on, and nothing interested me. In the end I was left with no morals, a thing both good and bad. I needed something, anything, to fill the hole left in me. In the end…”

With a small, sad, smile, Natalia rolled up her sleeves to reveal a large amount of small, pinprick like scars on her upper arms.

“It was the heroin that helped me cope.”

As the shock of her words reverberated in the air around me, I tried regain control of my body, which seemed to have tensed up during her last sentence, as if recoiling from a blow. Natalia nodded, eyes flickering over my features, satisfied that she had made an impact. Here was an example of someone’s life so completely turned around that they had become a slave of what they were fighting against; one of the innumerable prisoners of war, against a truly vicious cycle, that were forced to eat their own words.

“Once I was jailed for heroin possession I had a lot of time to think. It’s a much easier way to live, you know, without rules of your own”.

I had taken the silence as a good-bye, and was just about halfway to the door when she spoke again. Her voice was low, almost alluring, and she was leaning back in her plastic chair, rolling her sleeves down slowly and methodically. You could almost collect the room’s atmosphere in a bucket; carefully calculated ease coating a small, hard gem of… What was it? Desperation, greed, a hate formed by seeing someone else in your place, seeing what you really are from their eyes?

I shook myself, judging it better not to reply. I met those unreadable eyes one last time, which held me in a breathless suspension for what seemed like a lifetime, before I left to tell her story.