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left a peel of lather behind the lobes. My sideburn fringes wear a straight milk moustache. I’m to rinse it all off with warm water, one rinse. Then a rinse with cold to close the whisker holes.
    Pat the whole works dry with the towel. “How does that feel?”
    “Tight,” I reply. My face-skin is itchy.
    I’m to hold out my palm for a squirt of Q-Tol, its menthol, cough-lolly smell.
    “There you go,” The Duke declares. “Finished. Done.
    You’re a new man.”
    Feet insists we come out into the kitchen sunlight so she can look at her new man herself. “Where’s my handsome man?” she fusses, leading the way to the sun. “Stand there so I can see.”
    Her hands are clasped in front of her. She blinks and smiles. She touches my face to feel for smoothness. “Look at you. You’ve gone from scraggly to feeling all womany. You’re exactly like me when I was younger. It’s like I’ve been given the gift of a daughter.” She sighs and shakes her head. “You’ve got my face. Look at you. Those cheekbones, they’re not your father’s features. I’ll give him your nose. He can have that, It’s a bit too biggish. He can also have your ears. But those cheekbones, I’ll have those. And those eyes, and that brow. And as for your mouth—they’re my lips to perfection, that lovely zig-zag they do. A mother knows her child is herself, and here’s the proof: your face in mine, and me in you.”

I F I LIVED IN BETTER times, there’d be a war to go to.
    Instead there are the Churchills of this world to put up with. And workers of such low rank they work in stink. They wear gumboots because of cow muck where they walk. Green porridges of it, watery and arcing out of cow backsides as if from a hose.
    History does not happen here.
    In grander times I wasn’t needed. The Napoleonic Wars did fine without me. The birth of England. Men had the plain names we still have now but in 1066 a William was a conqueror. A Norman was a state.
    There once was a Troy, a Troy that was a poem for the great Greeks, not a flash name for boys because the Johns and Marks and Josephs became too usual. A Helen was a sacred face. History does not happen to me. I wasn’t needed to be alive in Mycenaean places.
    So why now, why put me here in this time and place where the Normans and Williams merely milk cows and my duke thinks it’s wise if I do too. We have a manager called a share- milker who is meant to hire and fire staff, but this is our land not some sharemilker’s. We trust family but no-one else: “I want you to be my eyes and ears among the workers,” winks The Duke. “You can learn what’s good for business. You can tip me off to any laziness or graft.”
    I am considered no better than a milker of cows. What an insult to me! Whatever power or fate or science decides who drops to earth, in what place, what era, it considered me fit only for this—for milkings.
    The power-fate-science decided a long-bow was too difficult for me. This boy couldn’t lower a gun-sight. No shield or mallet for him. No cannon to scream, “Fire!” Not even defeat, not even the Last Post and Gallipoli.
    My armour is a Swanndri—a black and red check bush coat to keep out rain and wind, the piss-splashes on concrete from a simpleton cow.
    Is this why we study history, to envy the dead as if they were our betters?
    Well Betters, let me dig you up in your millions, there in your unmarked graves in the earth’s layers. Let me stick you back together and be treated to these three square meals a day I have. Have my soft bed, my electric blanket, my idle evenings with a book, and you go into that milking shed. You touch those simpleton cows.
    There they stand against the steel, jagged rails called the herringbone, concertinaed side by side in the spaces the jagging makes. Forty-eight at a time, half to the left, half to the right. You touch their bony backs. You watch their arm-long tongues lick snot from their nostrils.
    They are patients having