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their bodies drained like an illness. Those hairy, scabby udders between their legs. Men’s genitals of sorts—a scrotum and four fat penises. They have penis tails where their real tails were lopped. These lift up exposing pink-inside vaginas, hairless except for a wispy spout at the end. A deformed man and woman in one, that’s a cow.
    Friesians are black and white at once. Two pigeon-toes for each foot; heads de-horned to horn stumps. They are taller than Jerseys, whom the staff call better natured with their eyelashes much longer to be “the more feminine of the girls.” Weaker too for yanking into place in the jaggings. You grab a knob of their spine and just pull. They obey. If they don’t, their penis-tails are easier to lift erect so that their backs sink down and they surrender as if in a wrestling hold, powerless, anus contorting like a puckered-shut mouth.
    Friesian penis-tails are more difficult to lift. They lock against their vaginas and it takes two hands to lever off.
    “They all kick,” says Norman with a crackly cough-up of words and smoke. “Your quiet Jersey. Your mad Friesian. They all kick.”
    He keeps his tobacco in a round tin like a culture. It could be cuttings of his ginger beard and chest hairs. He smokes it to the dark-brown last of the rolling paper which sticks to his bottom lip like the top off a sore. What a low rank he must be. So old—at least sixty if a day, and still only milking cows for his wage.
    He wears short pants for this warmer afternoon weather. Just below his knees the tops of his gumboots have worn hair away to a permanent ring. A watermark from standing so long in the world. This wet world in a pit where we stand with cow feet at eye level.
    He doesn’t smile or laugh. He only talks because he has to, because he’s been told to instruct me about cows kicking your arms away when you reach in with milking cups. About using the spray-guns hanging from the rafters, a quick squirt of water at the udders and a massage-wipe to tease the milk down. When you transfer the cups from one cow to the next you must dip them in a bucket of green iodophor disinfectant. This way mastitis, if there’s any, isn’t spread among the herd.
    You test for mastitis with your forefinger and thumb. Norman pulls on a teat for a squirt of milk to come. He’s not embarrassed doing this, to masturbate this teat-penis. He caresses it, then masturbates all four on the cow. He does this in front of me, so casually, this most intimate of things. If the milk turns blue on contact with concrete, the cow is pure and uninfected. A cloud or clot, a greyness of impurity, means a red cross must be sprayed on the udder, the mark for medicine.
    Norman’s son is a William. Not even that—a Bill. He wears a flannel hat, the kind his father wears, pale-blue and frayed from many washings. His yellow hair hangs from it to his shoulders, half a dozen main shreds hardly worth keeping. He works at the other end of the pit attaching cups to penis-teats as if holding apart a cat’s-cradle of rubber. He flicks his wrist and the cups suck their way on. A white gush pulses inside the cup’s spyglass window.
    Surely his father is a disappointed man. His son, a grown man himself, follows in his footsteps, but what legacy is this? It’s not the same as mine. Theirs is a man–cow intimacy, an unembarrassed touching between legs.
    Mine has no intimacy at all. I am a businessman. An educated man in the making. I have been given a job by The Duke, an eyes and ears responsibility. I should be friendly to this man and son couple, this Norman and his Bill. But that’s not the same as being one of them. They themselves will realise I’m not of them, and never will be. Just as the cows will sense I am not the usual rough toucher between legs, but someone respectful enough to turn his head away and not watch where my hands go. Even whispering an apology when my fingers make contact with the dangle of skin.
    “I have a duty