Commissioned for Estuary Festival / METAL in partnership with Essex Book Festival.
Limited printed booklets available from Estuary Fest.
Photo of Suttons Manor by Jonathan Juniper
Badly Chopped Meat
What is the question on everyone’s lips because I would like to ask it too.
I suppose I had thought 32 would hold something different - something separate from the previous years. Instead of turning a crisp corner, the line has simply taken a feeble curve. Which is fine. Which is completely fine, if you’re content with that.
When we first arrived,
I’d wondered how Suttons Manor had managed to remain unmarred for 339 years.
‘Was it care? Was it care so uncompromising it harnessed age?’ I had asked the estate agent.
I imagined each owner having meticulously cleaned, polished, loved each fixture and knew it was my turn to step up to the mark.
He did not answer.
‘Care? Was it care?’ I repeated.
‘No. A refusal to change I suppose’.
Initially my husband, Mike, had wanted to sell the insides, fill it with contemporary furnishings,
‘more becoming of who we are’.
I looked at him and desperately wanted to know who he was and what I was becoming.
That was two years ago. Now he makes meek suggestions and I humour him by leaving ultramodern homeware catalogues open about the place. There is familiarity in the woodwork that you simply do not get with Ikea’s ‘MALM’.
Suttons’ furniture has an appeased and practiced elegance; it speaks for itself.
Small Spanish walnut coffer.
Yorkshire oak wainscot armchair. I adore each remarkable piece.
The way the course grain feels warm upon touch and the proximity leaves
a pleasant, bitter taste under my tongue.
When you walk through the door, you are immediately greeted by a magnificent array of oak - stairs run upwards to the right and three formidable doors invite you into other rooms. If you move into the adjacent room, there’s a portrait of a woman with a distinct air of Shoeburyness about her. Powder blue and dusty pink material, draped, elbow length puff sleeves, middle parting, tight ringlets, and a touch of her bosom on show. Countess of Nottingham. 25 pregnancies and twelve babies I’m told. She put in a good shift.
I reach up and rest my cheek on her knee.
Immediately I regret this. My foundation has transferred onto her dress and as I attempt to wipe it off it smudges more, layering over the oil paint. The whole thing looks disrupted now.
I spend most of my time here in the lounge. I do not have agoraphobia, as some suggest. I just have very little reason to leave the manor. I have become so used to this place that I cannot imagine living anywhere else.
'If life has existed here before, then let it remain in the past my love - live for today.’
Mike is constantly seizing everything. The day, the now, an opportunity, handfuls of pork scratchings. I am fond of his frenzied enthusiasm - it’s how I first loved him.
Mike works in trade. Transports goods via ship - a sea merchant. When we first met he used to meet me stinking of salt and fish and stamina and we would spend hours kissing at the bay until my hair was tangled chaos. We’d go straight to our local pub and I’d scrape the dry salt right off his arm and onto our steaks at the table. Sometimes he would hide prawns up his sleeves and they’d fall to the floor as we scrambled to take our clothes off later. We were radiant.
***
I think one of the hardest jobs in the world is a chef so that is why I am training to be a butcher. I have paid for an online course and I watch YouTube tutorials too. I have set up my own workshop in the basement. Now half a pig carcass hangs from a hook behind me. In front, the rest is laid out on the butcher’s block - a reliable hunk of furniture with deliberate corners.
I load the video:
‘How To Butcher an Entire Pig - Every Cut of Pork Explained
- Handcrafted
- Bon Appetit’.
I remove the leaf lard and the kidney.
Follow along the lumbar vertebrae.
Sever and pull off
the tenderloin
shoulder,
Awkwardly cut off the ham
firm bone and moist meat.
We had lived in the manor for barely a week when I decided on a career change. It came to me suddenly and it is best to not argue with those things that appear and ignite without reason. Now I practice with meat every day. Continuous rehearsals. Blood on oak. My butchery work is still somewhat messy but Mike fully supports me. He’s the type of person who believes amateur activities legitimise our authentic selves - and that’s what gives us real meaning in life.
On screen I watch men teach other men and those men listen and ask questions and those questions are answered by the loudest man, who possibly knows stuff.
I watch man after man carve and saw and section. Work his way under the bones.
Some hack it, and some glide their knives over the flesh with delicacy.
I like those ones best. Animal feet.
I make an initial cut with
a knife and dutifully
saw through the tendon.
Briefly let the saw teeth graze against
the block.
Off with his trotter.
It is full of gelatin and marrow and I’m told this will eventually improve the stock pot taste. I have a morbid fascination with how every single piece of pig can be used - even the kidney can be ground into a sausage. So much of me is wasted. I can think of at least four bits of me that have never been put to good use. If I competed with this pig in death, it would undoubtedly win.
I have stored all the cuts apart from a pork loin again. Propping the boneless meat up on my hip, I rest the loin’s sagging head on my shoulder. The thick fat feels silky and creamy in my embrace. It slides lower and my fingers manoeuvre quickly, trying to find the right grip to stop it slipping.
My cuticles are creeping up. More excess skin.
From time to time I sit in the bedroom cupboard with the pork loin. I’m not hiding, it’s a choice. I’ve spent so much time in the lounge and the basement that eventually they both became too expansive. In here, it is just the right size. With my free hand I open the cupboard door a fraction, reach to feel the carvings on the outside:
Medieval characters fight and leaves elope.
I imagine someone carving each detail
- they don’t have a garden, so engrave one on their wardrobe.
Had several miscarriages? Don’t worry about it:
carve something on here and your pain will be kept alive for years after you’ve gone.
Need to write down your Christmas big shop shopping list but can’t find paper fast enough? Write it here on this 17th century oak.
Feel passively angry at trees for living a calm life with their ability
to withstand most weather conditions?
Let this part-enamel coated oak know that you would like to stand in the rain for hours without getting ill. It’s strengthening.
My husband would say ‘it is an invaluable wealth of history!’
I would say it confirms we’ve all just been getting by and getting on with it from the very start.
***
The loin is crying again. Its juices sticky against me.
How comforting to be reduced to merely meat. I have always had tense shoulders, knots in my back that even the sturdiest of knuckles couldn’t alleviate. What a relief to carry nothing on your shoulders. To have no shoulders.
I look to my husband. He is
lying under the bed doing something with an elastic band and some tweezers and
he is livestreaming it.
I place my hands on my hips,
just a few centimetres away from
my stomach.
From across the manor I hear the smoke alarm going off. I place the pork loin on the trestle table and walk down to the kitchen, where I see no smoke but the washing machine has finished its cycle. As I pull the washing out, peppercorns fall out amongst the wet clothes and scatter across the floorboards. I must have forgotten to take them out of my pockets.
I take deep
measured
breaths,
in
an attempt
to calm myself
Practicing things was necessary. Even now, over 30 years into the world, I was having to bring it back to basics. It was trendy to be aware of your breath. It was trendy to be aware of your thought patterns. I wondered when it would be trendy to scream on public transport or smash car windows. What other primitive things do I need to re-learn.
I look to my husband for an answer.
He is wiping down the surfaces
and livestreaming it.
I exonerate him.
***
Outside, I compile all 107 pieces of furniture onto a heavy-duty dolly. Ideally this would be a quick job, but there’s quite a lot so it actually takes me several hours.
Surrounded by a landscape of mixed oak, I release the dolly and scramble aboard. I feel like I’m on a self-made parade float. A sense of pride and embarrassment wash over me simultaneously. I hold hands with a drawer pull to my right, whilst my left clutches my pork loin. I can’t be sure if the warmth is radiating from me or from the fat in my palm.
I trundle across the grass and onto Suttons road, vibrating for short intervals as the wheels go over chunky gravel. Objects rattle in the drawers that have never rattled before. I am inadvertently introducing new sensations to those beyond me. This is a combined trip with willing participants.
339 years is enough time for anything to exist anywhere.
We are now moving with such speed and dexterity, it could be the first time we have all moved forwards. Even as I stare ahead, it is hard to make sense of what is coming next. I exchange nods of recognition with the crucial sections of hedges.
We head onto east beach;
we don’t stop until we are delivered
into the mouth of the estuary.
It swallows us smoothly and,
for a single second,
we are still.
The current is so slow.
My insides momentarily swept of yearning.
We pass through the saltwater and the freshwater.
We decide to just baptise it: ‘water’.
Drifting north now.
I pick up a floating broom and use it as an oar.
It glides easily through the ripples and I glide
and glide
and glide
and glide
until I am grinning
until
this stretch of space
is filled.
I suppose I could question the logistics of all my furniture staying afloat on the dolly. Perhaps there are cod and turbot and swimmer crabs pushing us along. A swimmer crab holding us up using its pincers. I know my husband would have said something more solid and scientific. My imagination sometimes betrays me but how awful to only live in reality, how utterly harrowing to only see things as they exist.
The meat is lighter in my hand now, discoloured. Open air hitting the decaying surface. I cradle my tiny pork loin before placing it into the ridges of a precariously balanced baroque frame. The gilded coat ornate and complex, asking a question.
I know that motherhood would mean introducing myself
to you, and then myself to myself all over again. You would come out
looking like badly chopped meat and we would go from there.
I would enclose you in such a comprehensive love, that
even time wouldn’t matter anymore.
I would not need to practice anything,
I would simply be in
innate awe.