Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik Page B

quality, it was intelligence.
    ‘We’ve got money,’ he told me. ‘Is that what you want?’
    ‘I don’t want any of your money,’ I told him in disgust. ‘I want you to help me.’
    There was a lot of work in the network of subway tunnels, but I wouldn’t tell him anything about it. If these two managed to return to their world, I didn’t want to find the authorities completely blocking up the subway system with concrete. That would mean we would be choked off.
    That network was my private world: I knew every inch of it, and I was a king down there.
    I handed Safiya a bottle containing a mixture of cough medicine and Parkinol with opium, and whispered, ‘As I told you, don’t use a lot of it, and don’t try it yourself.’
    I left the shack with the guy, walking among tons of refuse and sewage, among the young men who fight and hurl rubbish at each other. We walked for about fifteen minutes through this ruined city, and we finally reached El-Moallem Taha Square, which is fenced in. At the gate we were met by an enforcer whose job is not wholly clear to me. All he usually does is intimidate people as they arrive.
    He handed a knife to each of us. Within was an expanse of ground almost the size of a small city square, and there were around fifty people like us, constantly working.
    There was a pile of dead chickens in the corner. A pile almost five metres tall. There was no smell because they’d died that day on some farm outside Cairo.
    At the second pile stood a group of women plucking feathers. There were vats of hot water with steam rising from them. Youhad to be careful in this section because of the risk of getting burned.
    The third pile of bare chicken carcasses rose high. It grew higher with each moment. If people were chickens, then this place would be a mass grave.
    ‘Clean or de-bone?’ I asked the guy from Utopia, as I pulled out my knife.
    He looked at me in confusion, his face contorted with disgust, so I explained, ‘Are you going to cut the stomach and pull out the innards, or are you going to strip the bones from the meat?’
    ‘I can’t do either.’
    I looked around me to make sure no one would hear me. ‘No one lives here without working. Filthy work. Taboo work. Illegal work. It is what it is. The important thing is that you work. I won’t spend a single pound on you from now on.’
    ‘You’re talking about spending money on me as if we’re sleeping in a palace and bathing in rosewater and eating caviar,’ he said angrily. ‘How much do those sour beans and our sleeping in a chicken coop cost you?’
    ‘Quiet!’ I raised my finger to my lips in warning. ‘If they heard that spoiled tone of yours and the way you pronounce your letters, they’d skin you instead of the chickens. You’re giving yourself away all the time!’
    He shook his head with the stubbornness of a mule, and then headed to the nearby pile where four people were working: the ‘de-boning’ pile. They placed entire chickens on a smooth stone and, with their knives, tore the meat from the bones. Then they tossed the meat on a neighbouring pile and the bones on another pile.
    It was an assembly line that would have delighted Mr HenryFord, whose genius in inventing automobile assembly lines in the last century was endlessly praised.
    ‘Here,’ I told him as I grabbed the first chicken and cut open its stomach. ‘When we’re done, we’ll go out the back door and we’ll get our wages. About one chicken for each of us. Where do you think we get meat? This party isn’t held every day. There are days when they have enough people, and we aren’t allowed to work at all.’
    ‘Dead chickens?’ he asked in disgust.
    I let out an ugly snort and replied, ‘Do you people really care about animal slaughter according to Islamic law, you fraud?’
    Then I told myself they probably do care. They are very particular about slaughtering chickens but they aren’t so particular about slaughtering us. They don’t invoke