Jugged Hare

The house is in disarray. It has been two days since she

came back from the hospital. Following the black lines

through the dirty snow, the taxi had delivered her,

exhausted and shaky to a freezing house in the dark. The

curtains upstairs were still open as she had left them

that morning; two empty eyes that watched as she was

swallowed by the front door. She had been alone but that

meant everything was just as she’d planned it. Two days.

And still she can’t face the monumental task of putting

her home in order. She is cramping badly now. They told

her to expect some light spotting and pelvic discomfort

afterwards. Less than a period, nothing to worry about.

She is lucky; she caught it early enough. No messy D&E

for her. But this isn’t less than a period for she has

left behind the slippery thing that sluiced and sloshed

into a little glass vial. Ten minutes in all but time had

been askew. Bright, fine steel emptying its icy contents

into the cannula taped to the back of her hand,

submerging her in tarry blackness, stars bursting from a

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pinpoint of light, wheeling instantly overhead in milky

constellations. Then came a voice and a burning urge to

urinate. Now time is blurred and sharpens only when

children swerve into view. Two days. Time enough to pull

herself together. She sits at the kitchen table and tries

not to think of the skilled hands of the masked man in

the rubber apron who had inserted the thin metal rods

into her cervix to let the whirring machine pass through

to her uterus and peel her like an apple from the inside

out.

The more pressing concern of food needs to be

addressed but fatigue closes in on her again. She is in

stasis; stiff hands support a wearied head. Haunches and

elbows have quietly grown roots, wrapping themselves

around the chair. Spiralling downwards, they spread out

across the floor, pulling the morning along as they

disappear through the cracks in the floorboards. Placed

beside her is a porcelain mug of tea, its steam pushing

against the cold air. So much needs attending to.

Eyelines are broken by clutter. A knife-skewered block of

butter lies next to an empty milk bottle. Cereal bowls

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and jammy plates press school letters into the scrubbed

wood table. It had come to her in the cull from her

grandmother’s possessions. Her grandfather had lovingly

painted the pine a cornflower blue for a green bride in

an unchildrened life. Across decades of scrubbing down to

clean over and over, the paint had been rubbed away

leaving only tiny flecks of washed-out colour in marks

and dints embedded in the wood. She had never seen the

table painted, had only known her grandmother as an old

woman that had been squeezed out of life. And now it is

hers. Underneath, the crumbs of a hurried breakfast have

joined the hardened peas and clumps of drying mince stuck

in splashes of congealed gravy from last night’s dinner.

Bits wedge themselves between floorboards that run

straight across the kitchen. Clean lines join cooker to

cupboards to sink to fridge to table, ending abruptly at

the wide back doors that lead to the garden. Six chairs

cut across the symmetry, scattered where the children had

left them that morning as each were cajoled into the

daily race not to be late for school. Every chair is

painted a different colour and every child has its

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favourite. No matter how late they are, they battle to

sit in the seat they have claimed for their own.

On a chopping board at one end of the table a hare

lies waiting to be skinned and prepared. It has hung in

the scullery for three days above a bowl to catch the

blood. She had unhooked it in the crush of the morning to

laughing whoops of disgust. On their way to dress, four

children had trooped past it in single-filed mock

solemnity to tickle under its chin or shake a paw for

luck before taking the stairs and each other at a run.

Peter shot it the day before he left for London, the day

before she checked into the hospital. In the stillness of

the kitchen, she imagines its path intersecting with the

men who had gathered silently in the woods on a cold

Sunday morning, mouths wrapped in soft woollen scarves

against the cold, hats jammed down over their pink ears

and guns crooked over their camouflaged arms. A picture

is forming.

Frozen dawn in King’s Lynn. A hazy landscape absorbs

the muffled men and dampens their steps. They make their

way across fields splayed out under a dense, grey-bellied

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sky, heading for the cover of the woods beyond St Anne’s

smockmill. Hares are ground game, protected at night and

on Sundays so they tread carefully. Skeletal trees mark

the moorland boundary; icicles hang in glassy strips from

their flayed branches. The ground’s progress through the

trees is blocked by heavy mist. The pack of hunters moves

in quiet unison through the wood. Snowfall has

crystallised over night. Boots splinter the membrane of

ice and compact the snow. Breaths blow. Peter stops dead,

twists his trunk and raises a gloved finger to his masked

mouth. The hare doesn’t sense the danger. Using the

woodland to rest it has scraped its shallow form in a

snowless patch between hedgerow and ash trees. Lying

sleeping with ears pressed flat, it is almost

indistinguishable from the earth around it. Two soft

clicks at close range make it skitter across the snowy

ground. A flash of brown on white makes an easy target.

Just one shot needed with time to aim. The men’s

movements are unhurried. Cupped hands pass round a match.

Words bleed into the silence. Splashes of crimson show

the animal’s trajectory. Fragments of snow liquefy in the

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diminishing heat where it fell moulding an eerie parody

of its form. But now that life has been shaken out of the

hare, the trickle of water reforms quickly into ice.

She thinks that Peter would not register what she

can so vividly imagine: the tiny crunches of a thousand

fine hairs torn away from their ice shell as her husband

stoops to pick up dead meat. But his expert eye, she

knows, would see that it was female. His practiced hands

would feel along the abdomen; it is smooth, empty. Good.

It is January and mating season has just begun. She knows

that pregnant hares make Peter feel uneasy the way they

can endlessly reproduce, sometimes conceiving again

before the first leveret hit the ground with eyes open

and muscles taut. A litter every forty days from spring

to autumn. Superconception. Tied to the moon’s cycle.

Well, almost. She thinks of the time he’d had silently

come upon her, preparing the first hare he’d brought

home. Fingers snaking across her belly from behind,

pulling her gently backward. Heavy lips pressed to the

back of her neck, an ear keen to the hiss of breath

across teeth. Blood smeared on the back of his hand, then

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on his cheeks. They’d made love, right there, pushed up

against the kitchen table; a trace of the dead smell

rising up from the board, stitching itself to the scent

of her damp skin. Jugged hare; just what the doctor

ordered.

The memory brings her back to task. There is no fire

in the grate. The children had been dismayed to wake to a

cold kitchen, refusing to go back for jumpers and socks

until they’d got her voice to go scratchy. Sleep has lain

heavily on her for the last two nights, sludging her

through the earliest hours. She looks around at the

debris and wonders where to begin. The sink is full of

dirty dishes, the washing is piled high in the scullery

that doubles up as a laundry room, the bread and milk

need stowing so as not to spoil and that bloody hare

needs preparing. Stasis. Before anything else comes the

fire. The house is coffin cold and draughts are sneaking

in through every rickety sash window. Building a fire is

a much-loved ritual. First comes the grate. Dead charcoal

and ash are spilling out onto the black granite hearth.

The worst job. The sooty mess is scraped into a plastic

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bag then the hearth is washed and the grate reassembled,

emptied and clean. Now it gets good. Now she can build.

Now comes the yellowing paper; old news is never thrown

away. Now comes the kindling she had chopped up that

morning.

She had stolen out in the bitter silence of pre-dawn

to do it, moving quietly through the frozen garden,

Peter’s old greatcoat over her nightdress, oversized

socks stuffed into cold Wellingtons, an unlit cigarette

jutting from her mouth and a freshly made coffee burning

her knuckles and thumb, leaving a tiny trail in her wake,

like a toy train, a weak ghost. It is a job she loves.

But rituals had to be observed and the cigarette came

first. Shivering on the old chopping stool with her back

curled over her legs, arms jammed between thighs and

breasts, she had lit it, inhaled deeply and immediately

felt the familiar rush to her head. Fingertips tingled as

the sick feeling reached her cramping stomach. The

expelled smoke had fired onto the frosted grass and

lingered about her, keeping low to the ground. No one

knows she smokes. She thinks perhaps Peter might suspect

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but he doesn’t chide her, and out there, in the darkness,

she had lifted the cigarette in salute to his complicity.

She doesn’t smoke much these days but kindling, coffee

and a cigarette is a holy triptych. As the coffee had

cooled, she thought about the children, sleeping heavily

in their beds behind the drawn curtains, unaware that

their mother was partially obscured by a toxic mist just

five hundred yards or so from where they lay. Cigarette

finished too quickly, she had picked up the axe. The cold

handle was smooth and familiar under her touch. Hard,

echoing sounds had darted from the deep within the wood

as blows were struck on thick stumps. It had taken four

thumps on the ground with the blade wedged firmly inside

before she had heard splintering. Now she had mastered

the branch. Now it would be easy to transform into fine

slivers that will ignite like hair on the fire.

Now comes the coal. Her mother would arrange the

coals around the kindling, tonging one chunk after

another into the gaps between the sticks. For years she

has done the same. It is only lately she understands that

if she’s done good enough job with the paper and

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kindling, the coal will smoulder and smoke and catch

anyway. It doesn’t stand a chance on such a well-arranged

stack. So these days she dumps a whole load of it on the

fire, two or three pieces bouncing out of the grate.

Today, though, the scuttle is too heavy so she packs the

grate with kindling, lights the paper and goes to the

dusty vegetable dish high on the kitchen shelf to get her

cache of cigarettes. Kneeling down close to the flames

that are beginning to grow, she lights one, sucking the

tip with eyes closed. Her smoke tendrils over and around

the icy white smoke from the freshly cut kindling before

vanishing, pulled up by the wind blowing faintly across

the chimney pot. Without the coals to weight it down, the

fire is too hot too quickly. She can’t get near enough to

draw the cigarette smoke up and away. She wants more

minutes to think of other things than the daily chores

that have to be done and done again. The half-smoked

cigarette is flung into the fire.

It ignites almost instantaneously in the white heat.

In a few seconds all that is left is an ashy imprint

still holding its shape, two thin green bands still

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discernible on the filter. Snatching up the scuttle, she

empties half of it over the remains of the cigarette and

immediately feels the chill from the fire. The heat won’t

come back until the coals are puffing their greasy yellow

smoke. She looks again at the hare on the board. Peter

has already left the first of the blood in a small

Tupperware pot in the fridge. There is a smear of brown

near the hinge and a thumbprint on the top. It would

finish the dish. The blood made the sauce richer, gave it

a deep colour and left its mark in a gravy that would be

mopped up with great swipes of bread crammed between the

fists of ravenous children. Not today, though. Today she

had dumped the whole lot into the sink. The sticky mess

had pooled around the drain, rising for a moment before

being belched away; a splatter of water to help it go

down. She means to get up and start skinning the hare but

another contraction jags as she half-stands. Its

immediacy makes her gasp. Her body freezes for just a

second, knees bent like a diver, hands bearing down on

her thighs, and then sags, reaching instead for the

cigarette packet on the hearth. The coal will take ten

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minutes to get going, more than enough time to smoke a

couple.

She thinks again about the meaty thing that is no

longer any part of her where only two days ago it had

been living inside of her, feeding off her body, swelling

her breasts and belly. ‘Do you want to know the sex in

case you feel a bit … afterwards, you know?’ a middle-

aged nurse had asked her on Monday. ‘You’ll be all right

love,’ she said as she whooshed the needle full of

clonidine into the vein on her outstretched arm. ‘It’ll

be over in a jiffy. Helps the general go better.

Certainly helps with post-op shivering and you won’t feel

so sick.’ She had felt sick, though, not for a dead thing

but the live ones she couldn’t be late back for. She had

planned it; planned a house that was lit from within, a

fire in the grate, a tired ear to half-listen to their

chatter of different dinners and other routines. The dark

that made the house melt into the night had been

banished. As a child she had always been scared of empty

black houses. They were like dead things trapping lonely

ghosts in their rooms. She had turned on the lamps, the

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overhead lights too harsh, too much of a reminder of

another room with lights like little moons in the shape

of petals or a plug hole beaming down a too-clean light

on her. She can feel the soft throbs from deep within her

as she pulls on the cigarette. It feels as though her

vagina seems to open, to bend around tiny bloody

jellyfish that need to be pushed through and out, getting

snagged on the sanitary pad. But they are ghost fish; the

pad is clean. The pulsing sensation ends in nothing. She

feels like she is haemorrhaging: lightheaded and fevery.

She felt like this after all the other pregnancies. Post-

partum bleeding. Breastfeeding made it worse. Sticky,

serrated contractions. Nothing to worry about. Post-op

cramping. Nothing. Squatting there in the silence, she is

accompanied only by the soft rhythm of her movements.

Pull on the cigarette, pumping womb, in and out, in and

out, ebb and flow, except there is no flow. What is that

old proverb? Tide and Time. Seasons not the sea. The

coals are growing too hot to smoke anymore. She’ll look

at the pad in a minute. The stairs are too heavy just

now.

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She thinks again about Peter leaving two days ago

for London in the dark. A chemical sleepiness had netted

her in heaviness, closing her inward. He had kissed her

softly in the silence and she’d struggled to wake up. One

hand had brushed strands of hair from her sticky face;

tender fingers had tidied the tangles behind her ear.

‘See you Friday. Try to rest,’ he’d breathed into her

neck. Then he was gone. Swallowed by the taxi blinking

its hazards in the street. She is sure that he’d felt sad

to leave her like this and would have gone through it

again in his mind as he stood waiting in the dark on the

station platform wondering if it was something he had

done. But this Monday was different; she had other things

on her mind and had to steel herself to what lay ahead of

her. It would take a special kind of courage to do what

she had to do. She had told no one. She was booked in

straight after the school run. Logistics had been worked

out. The children were all at play dates and would be

getting dropped off later that evening. Everything

depended on her not having any complications or

hysterics. She couldn’t afford to be late home for the

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children. She needed to get over the anaesthetic quickly.

Being kept under observation was out of the question. Her

whole story would unravel if she weren’t there when the

children came home. She’d had to lie to the hospital to

tell them that a friend was coming over to see her

through the night or she would never have been allowed to

go home. The anaesthetic might have some effects

throughout the evening. She might hallucinate, might be

nauseous, certainly she would be sleepy they had told her

and couldn’t be trusted on her own.

A school clock ticks into the silence. The hare

needs attention. Time to stand up. White circles of dust

are printed on her knees as she walks to the table where

it lies on its side, paws crossed one over the other,

head back and ears up. For a moment she can’t face doing

it. It has a flattened look, like it is slowly dissolving

into the board. With one hand on the scruff of the neck

and the other cupping its rump, she lays it on its back

and the legs fall open. Immediately, the old feelings

kick in. It is just a hare. She has done this a thousand

times before. The utensils needed to do the job lie

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readied: one heavy black-handled carving knife, a

smaller, lighter pairing knife and a clean cloth to wipe

her hands are all lined up in a row next to the carcass.

Feeling her way up from the flanks to the ribcage, across

chest and down to the belly, her cold fingers are warmed

with the first contact but it is a false warmth of fur

that comes from a dead thing. Pinching the skin at the

loose part low down on the belly she makes the first

incision. This will get her inside, under the furry

wrapping. It is a clean cut done with precision. There is

no shitty smell. Peter has managed to avoid a gutshot.

Good. She takes extra care not to puncture the stomach

lining. The intestines need to come in one gulping part,

not in bits and pieces of shit and undigested food. Now

the belly meat is exposed; ropey, grey muscles she can

trace with her fingertips. She knows just by touch the

difference between the muscles and the more yielding

intestines. So familiar is the feeling that she can shut

her eyes and know exactly what is under her hand. Her

grandmother had shown her how. She was ten the first

time. Under the old woman’s watchful eye, she slipped her

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hand into the gap between skin and meat, her little

fingers sliding over unfamiliar knots and curves. She

gently pulls apart the skin all around the belly, fingers

easing it softly from the meat, until she has enough in

her grasp to pull. One hard tug up and down and it is

off. Easy, like pulling off a sock. Ping. The effort

makes her womb contract. Hot shards snake through her

abdomen.

The pain has come back in radiating waves that for a

moment defeats her into a childhood where she’d fallen

short between back step and wall and collided shin to

brick. Cutting off the head and legs will have to wait

until she can check. She can do it right here, standing

next to the table. Less bother than a period. No climbing

the stairs to deal with warm seepages in freezing

bathrooms. No leaking pads and pubic hair encrusted with

dried blood. No hoisting up her skirt and mounting the

bath. No crouching down and splaying her legs to cup

tepid water to herself. No stained towel and tights and

pants to soak. No extra washing to be done. Cold seeps

onto her belly as she lifts her skirt and bunches the

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tights forward in her fist. Spotting. Nothing more.

Middle and ring fingers slide down to her vagina and

press lightly around. She doesn’t like touching herself

there. In her mind it feels raw, damaged. She needs to

pee now but is scared to do it because of the feeling she

has had since she woke up from the anaesthetic, like

she’s been mangled and wants to keep things inside, not

let them drain away.

A snap of elastic brings her back to the board.

Washed hands are dried on the clean white cloth. The hare

lies there in its furry hat and boots. Picking up the

heavy kitchen knife she severs the head in one go. The

blow ends in a dull crack that she feels through her

tendons. Sometimes she will use the head in the stock but

she doesn’t feel like cutting it in half today and

fishing it boiled and stringy from the pot later so she

leaves it gazing up at her through clouded eyes on the

chopping board. The feet don’t need either knife. A quick

snap, like twigs, and they are free. She discards the

skin and throws it in the grate. The orange coals devour

the skin whole in one greedy bite. The smell of singeing

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hair is instantly carried away up the flue. Her

grandmother used to keep the skins, drying them until she

had enough for a blanket. It took about fifty skins to

make the blankets that covered their beds as children.

Squabbling siblings were pressed to sleep by the squashy

weight of warm fur.

She makes a start on the intestines. First she has

to cut through the groin in order to reach them.

Concentration is needed to rip through the lining of the

stomach without piercing its contents. Skilled hands

guide the smaller paring knife to prick the fragile

membrane and the first puncture mark shows everything in

order below, nothing leaking, no unpleasant smell, just

good clean meat. By the age of eleven, she was receiving

her grandmother’s praise for her attention to detail and

control with a knife. The old woman’s hands had succumbed

to arthritis and she was told that her delicate fingers

could do the job much better. Peeling back the stomach

lining she feels her way to the innards and begins the

paunching. Pulling gently, the stomach sac comes out in

one smooth fluid motion. Time is moving quickly now. A

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neat ‘v’ incision to the groin and the tail comes away.

The dark red organs are next. The liver and kidneys are

slippery under her fingers; the hardness of the heart

always surprises her, so hard for something so small. A

chipped white bowl catches the blood that seeps from the

hole that housed the liver. Cold blood, leaking out on

its own with no pulse to pump things along. She carefully

checks over the organs. Any white spots or lumps will

show that the animal is spoiled and will have to be

thrown away but everything is in order, dark red and

clean. A good eating hare.

Nearly there. Just a rinse under cold water to wash

everything clean and it will be ready to joint. She makes

an effort to find the metal shot that has killed the hare

but it is buried too deeply in the muscle tissue. No

matter, she will tell the children to watch out as they

eat. As a child she loved to find the hard metal pellets

in the stew. Her grandmother had closed in on her,

brittle fingers indenting white circles on her soft

forearm, whispering that they’d come to her bowl as a

present for doing such a good job cleaning the hare. She

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wanted to keep the little balls but her mother had made

her throw them away, ignoring her protests. The viscera

are wrapped tight as a mummy in newspaper and thrown

straight into the bin so no foxes will come sneaking in

the night driven mad by the smell of fresh meat.

The last bit. Jointing. The hind legs are first. She

caresses the body until she finds the place where the

hind legs balled into sockets and feels for the hard

pelvic bone joined to the groin. Denting the meat with

her finger to mark the spot, she stands on tiptoes to

make sure her weight will bring the carving knife down in

one clean snap. The crunch and soft thump on the board

tells her that she has done it. The legs are detached

with ease, popping easily from their sockets, sliced

through and placed side by side on the board. Peter’s

hunter eye had aimed forward and the meat is undamaged.

Hind leg meat is the money cut, he would say. She turns

her attention to the pelvis, which is chopped up and put

next to the legs. The saddle is always difficult and

requires concentration. It is encased in layers of thin

membrane and they will have to be removed delicately, in

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strips so as not to damage the meat underneath. That

takes time. With the point of the paring knife she lifts

up little flaps until she can nip them between her

fingers. Slowly, each strip is pulled back. A quick

twitch and the sinewy ribbons are pulled free. Once,

twice, three times, all in mechanical order. The last

layer of silver skin is the toughest and her womb spasms

as it is pared away. The pain snags across her middle. No

matter. Nearly done. The peeled saddle is sliced deftly

in two. Finished. Now on her board are two shoulders, two

legs and the chopped up saddle. Time lurches forward and

her kitchen clicks into gear with a cold January

afternoon in King’s Lynn. The rest is a cinch. Onions,

carrots, potatoes – skinned and peeled, chopped and

thrown into her round-bellied metal pot along with a

fistful of rosemary and sage. Splash in some water, set

it to simmer. Easy. Not jugged hare, exactly, but still.

And there it is, done. Just one more cigarette

before she starts clearing away the mess. Then out into

the icy twilight to bring them all home. The house will

soon expand as children run in from the cold: bright hats

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bobbling, blood-flushed cheeks, snotty noses, frozen

fingers, bags on the floor, coats on top, shouting for

the meat they will smell on the stove.

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