Primeval queen

Before I kill him, I hold him.  I am careful not to squeeze him too hard. I don't want to harm him, or worse, scare him. 

I can feel his heart beating.  I like the warm weight. 

His feathers are soft and glossy, fading from  deep, terracotta red to iridescent green-black.  Beautiful.  I think about the earrings I am going to make with them later.

I stroke his back and look into his yellow, darting eyes.  I project calm.  Although my heart beats hard, I do not want him to feel my nervousness. 

We hang him up from a tree by his feet and leave him there for the blood to drain to his head.  I apologise to him for the situation.

I put my hand over his chin and beak, covering his eyes.  I don't want him to see the knife.  Hanging upside down, wings open out like an inverted umbrella, he is so helpless that I have a sudden urge to save him. 

I feel a pulse in the artery underneath my thumb.  I think about how he is alive.

I slice the knife across his neck. Warm blood spills over my hand and drips onto the grass.  I don't know why, but the temperature surprises me.

For a moment, the chicken is still and I am left with a brief silence, during which I can almost hear the liquid falling from the knife and my hand.  Then he starts moving again and Jimmy takes the knife from my hand, hacking his head completely off.  It falls to the ground like a discarded toy.

The headless body starts to flap its twisted wings and cluck, as if the soul of the bird is echoing its life as it leaves the body.  On the floor, the head twitches.  The movement of the body is so violent that I stand bewitched, watching the blood fall to the floor as the carcass tugs and swings on the rope.  After two minutes it falls still. 

"Ya," says Erica.  Enough.

We pull feathers from the body to save for jewellery.  If I pull too hard, skin comes off with them.  I will need to wash these.  When I've taken what I want she dips the whole thing in boiling water, loosening the cuticles and enabling us to pull the remaining feathers out in wet handfuls.  They lie on the compost heap in soggy balls. 

She toasts the naked body on the fire to burn off any last hairs.  I scrub it all over with a soapy scourer.

I tell them I would like to butcher as well.  The family gather around the stone sink to watch.  I think they find it hard to believe that this twenty-six year old girl is not only unmarried but has never killed or butchered a chicken.  I am not sure what to tell them, other than, "things are different in England."

But I want to do this.  For years I have wanted to do this.  I have always felt very uncomfortable about the fact I had never killed anything.  How could I be happy eating meat when I was not happy to kill it myself?  The food we buy in Tesco is so far removed from its origin that it is hard, sometimes, to remember that it was once a living, breathing thing.  In some twisted way this process is a token of respect to the animals I have eaten.

Erica holds the legs apart as I cut around the anus. 

I must be careful not to contaminate the meat with the intestinal contents. I slice down the left hand side of the spine, opening a cavity through which I carefully pull the innards.   I wonder how machines carry out such a delicate job.

When I chop the feet off at the lower joint, I am left with something barely resembling the chickens I'm used to buying at home.  I wonder what they must pump them with to make them so rounded and white.  This one is wrinkled, thin and bright yellow.  The flavour will be impeccable.

The whole job has taken almost an hour.  I have turned a bright-eyed, beautiful creature into food.  I am hugely aware of the significance of what I've just done, and the inappropriateness of the usual indifference we have for meat.  But I feel relieved. 

I hadn't realised how much it bothered me that I had eaten meat most of my life and yet never killed an animal with my own hands. I feel slightly less of a fraud. 

I whisper a promise to the chicken soul; to always be thankful for the life of the animal that I'm eating.  I am a strange, yet conscientious cross of a primeval hunter and a privileged hippy.

I sit at home, cadaver in the fridge, and twirl silver wire into earring springs.  Time to adorn myself with my kill.

Nos sentamos en la calle

I turn twenty six on the twenty seventh of July. It is raining in San Cristobal de las Casas. At 6200 feet the drops fall cold and the ancient rocks of the pavement seem slicker than normal.



Michael and I spend all day looking for plush hotels and decide at the end that we'd rather spend the money on food.


Eva is here; my long-lost buddy with whom I spent December. It is wonderful to have a friend, although I've spent enough time here now that I recognise faces on the andador. We pass the evening on the slick streets, drinking maiz spirit and coconut juice out of plastic bottles and hula hooping through the puddles alongside la banda.


La banda. What a wonderful phenomenon to be part of during my travels here in Mexico.


It literally means the band, and is a term used to describe Mexico's hobos: a network of young pirates, dreadlocked, pierced, dressed in an assortment of rags. They travel their country in the back of pick up trucks, conjuring pennies to live by working the streets, the restaurants and the buses.


You're not banda unless you have a prop - a tambor drum, a fire stick, a roll of macrame bracelets. I have a hula hoop, therefore I am accepted as one of them. Whenever I travel with Eva, we listen for the sound of drums.


Like a subtle web of entertainers for the nation, these kids are always present, always audible. Their tambors sing the same rhythms in every town. Their jewellery glitters under streetlights. Traffic light junctions are fought over as the best location for fire spinning, where the perpetrators spend hours in exhaust fumes and whirls of flame, paid five pesos each by the most generous drivers.


Tonight my attention is caught by a pair of girls. Their collar bones show sharply under stained t shirts. One of them has shaved the sides of her hair and allowed the rest of it to dreadlock in a kind of parrot's tuft. The other wears a coloured scarf round her head and has eyes that move too fast. They pass a stolen cigarette between them and try to blend in. They are only seventeen.


I've seen them on the semaphoros, one with poi and the other with a fire stick. They look like they might break. They sit in the puddles like scruffy dolls, seeking their adventure in dark streets, far away from any family they may have had.


They dance well and guzzle their beer with prowess. They have the urchin look down to a T. The only thing that belies them is the nervous darting of their eyes.


I wonder where they came from…where any of them came from.


Some run, bored, from families with big homes, rejecting the streamlined world of the rich mexican for the grit of the streets. Others have no relatives at all. Some just haven't come up with anything better to do yet. These details don't appear to matter because each is accepted within the greater family of la banda.


They are the people's army; the underbelly, proudly displaying the happiness that having nothing can bring. They proclaim the alternatives: that you do not have to have a regular job, a safe house and a non-descript image to be happy.

The conditions for the movement are perfect - anyone with a grain of sense can earn money in Mexico, albeit at different rates. There is no web of legislation to climb through -- if there is, no one cares. Hitchhiking is commonplace, and pick up trucks form the greater part of Mexico's fleet.


Life on the road is exhilarating. There is no purpose to it other than to live and continue to live.


I am happy to flit in and out of the situation. Their company is interesting for a while but as Eva points out, one can become bored easily when faced with too many nights of sharing caguamons and paying for things with handfuls of change.


A stranger might look at me, hair wraps, hula hoop and holes in my clothes, and place me in their box.


For me, the difference is subtle and comes in a cup.


I am happy to have included the luxury of coffee within my budget.


For la banda, the coffee shop is on the other side of their grimy viewing window. They peer through it with interest, knowing they would never choose to fritter away hard-earned beer money on a meaningless hot beverage.

Rain splats the glass as they sit, crouched, waiting for the customer who will whisk them away.