Hamish X and the Cheese Pirates Read online

  Sour-faced guards marched the new orphans off the boat and through the deserted town, clinging to the guide rope. It was an eerie trek through the empty streets and derelict buildings. The wind howled through the eaves, moaning sorrowfully. The factory loomed over the tilted town, lit up with searchlights and strung with razor wire.

  An electrified fence surrounded the building, sparking ominously as bits of loose debris rolled against the chain links.

  The new children marched through the front gate, through the service doors, and into the processing room. Each was given a breathing mask, a pair of overalls, a toothbrush, and a towel. Thus equipped, the miserable new conscripts trudged into the dormitory.

  The children all slept in one huge room in row after row of lumpy cots. They all shared one bathtub, taking turns having baths once a week. The lights in the dormitory ran on a timer. They came on for two hours between shifts in the factory, while one crew was waking up and the other was going to bed. The lights were fluorescent, cold, and stark and throwing into relief the dormitory’s dreary misery.

  The hundred children were divided into two shifts of fifty. One shift worked from nine in the morning to seven at night. Then both shifts ate breakfast/supper, which consisted of oatmeal porridge and whey. The breakfast/supper lasted one hour, after which the first shift had an hour of free time and then went to bed while the second shift worked from eight in the evening to seven in the morning. Then came the meal of whey and oatmeal porridge and the working day started all over again, with the night shift sleeping and the day shift working. The day and night shift children hardly knew each other, and that was the way Viggo liked it. Friendships could only distract the children from their work.

  To administer to the orphans’ day-to-day needs, Viggo hired the aforementioned local widow, Mrs. Francis. Her husband had died many years before in a rabid owl attack,12 leaving her to fend for herself. She was a shy, chubby woman who was often pink in the face from exertion. Viggo suspected she was too kind to her charges (Viggo believed in beatings and harsh discipline), but since the choices were limited in Windcity13 he suffered her bouts of affection for the children and her requests for better food and warmer clothes.

  Viggo’s grand scheme seemed to be coming together just fine. He had installed the specialized equipment. He had trained the children. He had negotiated with the native people,14 whom he trained in the milking technique, for a steady supply of the caribou milk essential to the cheese-making process. Finally, the operation was up and running.

  Caribou Blue became an overnight critical success with cheese connoisseurs around the world. The Sydney Herald called it “a delightful assault on the nostrils and the palette.” The New York Times food critic wrote, “Caribou Blue is a wake-up call. In his laboratory Viggo Schmatz has created the Frankenstein’s monster of cheeses! Let it terrorize the village of your taste buds!” The London Times said simply, “Caribooya! What a cheese.”

  Viggo was riding high. Orders were pouring in. He could charge what he wanted for his product and everyone would pay. And no one questioned his methods (apart from Mrs. Francis) as long as he continued to produce the fabulous cheese. He even had his picture on the cover of Fortune and Cheesers Monthly. The world was in the palm of his hand.

  And so Viggo leaned back and imagined what the Golden Wedge might look like on the shelf above his desk. He could envision the cheering crowds as he accepted the award. He could see himself stepping to the podium, taking the shining prize from the hands of the chairman of the Cheese Board …

  A rap on the door of his office jarred him out of his daydream. Viggo started, almost falling over backwards in his chair. At the door, one of the guard foremen stood waiting. All the guards came from the same agency, and were chosen for the ugliness of their facial features.15 The man at the door had a face that looked as if someone had dropped a bag of hammers onto it from a great height. Viggo stood up and stalked across to the door, flinging it open on the cringing guard. Immediately, the powerful smell of the cheesing floor wafted over him.

  “Well?” barked Viggo.

  “Uh, sorry, sir,” Hammerface stammered. He held his stocking cap in his hands and wrung it nervously. “They’re here.”

  Chapter 2

  “Follow me,” Viggo demanded. He snatched a breathing mask from a hook on the wall by the door. Pulling it over his face, he started down the stairs to the factory floor with Hammerface trailing after him.

  Everyone had to wear a mask on the factory floor. Without protection, the fumes generated by the maturing cheese could overwhelm a person in seconds. The masks sealed tight all around, with a window of clear plastic framing the wearer’s face. Viggo tightened the straps on his mask as he descended.

  Viggo was an extremely knobbly individual. When he walked, it seemed as if all the bones in his body were straining to leap out of his skin and escape. His hair was greasy. He never washed it, and so it stood up on end most of the time, like a ghastly albino hedgehog. His nose was long and pointy, almost touching the inside surface of the face mask he wore. His mouth was drawn in a perpetual scowl.

  Hammerface was in every way the physical opposite of Viggo. He was loutish and large, a shambling, scruffy ogre of a man. At his belt hung a Ticklestick. Long and black with a bulging knob at the end, it delivered a powerful jolt of energy to the central nervous system, flooding the brain with a tickle reflex so profound that it reduced a person to a giggling, helpless blob in an instant.16 The weapon slapped against Hammerface’s wide buttocks as he shambled after Viggo.

  As Viggo approached the factory floor the children avoided his watery grey eyes. One didn’t look at Viggo directly for fear of bringing down some punishment.

  Viggo reached the bottom of the stairs and looked with satisfaction at the cheesing floor. He felt a swell of pride at the grim efficiency displayed before him. For he had integrated all the children according to their ages and abilities into the cheese-making process. First, the caribou milk was fed into a large vat about the size of an above-ground swimming pool. In a sense, it was a swimming pool. For this first stage of the process, all the toddlers aged three to five were tossed into the milk vat wearing water wings. The toddlers would thrash and tread water, their water wings excreting rennet17 and causing the milk to thicken until they could no longer move. When the milk was thick enough, the children were extracted by robotic crane arms attached to the ceiling, scraped off, and prepared for the next batch. The vat was then upended and the thickening milk poured into a pressing chamber.

  The pressing chamber was the province of the children aged six to ten. First the mixture was trowelled out onto a large, flat, perforated floor. The children wore huge paddles like snowshoes on their feet. Hour after hour they trudged ’round and ’round, pressing down with their foot paddles and forcing the liquid out of the thickening curds.18 The liquid, whey, is a watery but nutritious byproduct of the cheesing process. Viggo designed the floor with perforations so that the whey was channelled into a vat near the kitchen, where Mrs. Francis could use it in preparing her bland but nourishing meals for the orphans. Nothing was wasted in Viggo’s operation. The children also carried baskets filled with salt and tossed handfuls of it over the curds to preserve the cheese.

  When the cheese was pressed and free of liquid, the children aged eleven to fourteen came with picks and saws. They sawed the cheese into blocks a metre square and fifty centimetres deep. Using their picks, they flung the slabs onto a conveyor belt that ran along the wall of the factory. The work was back-breakingly difficult, and so the children took turns cutting and heaving.

  The cheese chunks travelled along the conveyor belt to a hole in the floor where they fell into darkness. Below, the cheese was stacked in the dank, musty vault. The walls of the vault grew thick with a greenish-blue mould that impregnated the cheese and provided its distinctive marbling and aroma.

  The finished cheese was then shipped throughout the world on freighters to markets hungry for the delicacy. An o
unce of Caribou Blue sold for twenty-seven dollars. Viggo was quickly becoming a very rich man. Unfortunately, very little of the wealth trickled down to the orphan workers at the factory. They received the bare minimum necessary to keep them alive. Their clothes were bought second-hand by the pound. Viggo made sure the children were strong enough to work, but nothing more. Their diet consisted principally of oatmeal porridge and the whey recovered from the pressing process.

  Viggo was very, very strict in his accounting practices. He always kept track of every ounce of cheese. No one could have pilfered and gotten away with it. Not that anyone really wanted to—the smell of the cheese factory floor was enough to put a child off cheese for life.

  Viggo smiled as he surveyed the children at work. The grey and lifeless faces pinched behind the masks pleased him. They looked defeated, and a defeated child was a productive child.

  Just as he turned towards the big doors that led to the cafeteria section of the complex, he felt a tug at his trouser leg. He turned and looked down to find a little brown face with large eyes blinking up at him. The face belonged to Parveen, an eight-year-old, feet laced into his curd-pressing shoes.

  “What?” Viggo groaned. “Speak up!”

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” Parveen said in his flat, emotionless voice, “I was wondering if I could speak to you about possible improvements to the assembly line.”

  He was a small boy with brown skin that bespoke his South Asian origin. He wore spectacles that made his eyes owl-like and wide behind his breathing mask. Parveen was quiet and didn’t really mix with the other kids, preferring to spend his off-duty time in the orphanage’s meagre library reading anything he could get his hands on. He amused himself (though no one had ever seen him smile) by devising machines and gadgets and drawing blueprints and plans, even though he’d never had the opportunity to put his ideas into practice in the Spartan19 world of the Windcity Orphanage and Cheese Factory. Still, at eight years old, he was clever enough to make most adults uncomfortable, and Viggo, who despised cleverness in anyone but himself, particularly so.

  “Improvements?” Viggo said through gritted teeth. “Improvements?”

  Parveen was unaware of the menace in Viggo’s voice. He wasn’t a very empathetic boy; that is to say, he couldn’t read people’s emotions. The other children moved away to distance themselves from the coming storm. Parveen rummaged in the pocket of his overalls, digging out a small pad of paper. From behind his right ear, he pulled a stub of a pencil.

  “I’ve drawn up a couple of schematics that would definitely cut down on the number of hands on the floor at any given shift.” Parveen pointed with his pencil at the figures on the paper. “According to my calculating, we could cut down the workday for each shift by three hours and still maintain the same level of production.” He looked up at Viggo expectantly.

  Viggo glared down at Parveen. Suddenly he grabbed him by the front of his overalls, lifting the boy up to eye level. Viggo pressed his face into Parveen’s until their masks clicked together. “Why would I want to shorten the shifts? Why should I make anything easier for you lazy little children?” he shrieked, spraying spittle onto the inside of his mask. “You orphans are lazy enough as it is without my giving you opportunities to slack off any further.”

  Parveen dangled in Viggo’s grip, calm and emotionless, blinking mildly, foot paddles flapping. His passivity enraged Viggo even more. He shook Parveen, making the little boy’s feet jig in the air.

  “Don’t waste my time with your stupid ideas. The only thing I want you to do is get back in that chamber and stamp those curds.” With that, Viggo hurled Parveen into the pressing chamber, where he skidded across the greasy surface of the curds and bounced to a halt against the far side.

  Two guards stepped towards the fallen boy, grinning foully and hefting their Ticklesticks. They advanced on Parveen, but before they could reach him one of the children stepped in to bar their way.

  “Back off, ya big galoots!” The girl stood with her hands on her hips, defying the guards to make a move. She was one of the older orphans. Although tall and thin, she was strong and wiry, with a fierce light in her eyes that let the two men know she wasn’t scared of anything. The guards faltered and looked to Viggo for guidance.

  Viggo knew the girl only too well. Her name was Mimi and she was one of his rare failures. He had managed to completely destroy the spirit of all the children in the Windcity Orphanage and Cheese Factory, but in all the seven years Mimi had been there he’d never managed to break her completely. She got into fights, sassed back to the guards, and generally made a nuisance of herself. The Ticklesticks were useless against Mimi. She laughed when they used them on her. And somehow she managed to laugh defiantly rather than helplessly, which was the real point of the Ticklestick.

  Mimi had adopted little Parveen as her personal project. Viggo often toyed with the idea of asking the ODA to take her back, but he didn’t want the grey-suited agents to think he couldn’t handle himself. In two years she’d be carted off anyway to wherever the grey agents took the fourteen-year-olds, so he tried to be patient and endure her annoying behaviour.

  Right now, he didn’t have time to deal with her antics. Viggo sneered and waved his arm dismissively. “Back to work!” he shouted at the children.

  “Back to work!” the guards parroted.

  All the other children instantly turned to their tasks. He watched for a moment to make sure they were doing as they were told. Viggo smiled in satisfaction, but when he remembered the waiting visitors, his happiness evaporated. He spun on his heel and stalked off through the big double doors.

  Parveen slowly raised himself to the sitting position. He tucked away his little pad and stuck the pencil back behind his ear. Mimi hauled the little boy to his feet.

  “You gotta keep yer mouth shut, bub!” she said. Her voice had a flat Texan drawl. “It’ll only get ya into trouble around here.”

  “I merely wished to improve production quotas,” Parveen answered, rubbing his sore shoulder.

  “Whatever!” the girl said. “Just keep yer head down.” Her green eyes narrowed as she glared at the doors Viggo had just exited. “He’ll get his one day and I hope I’ll be givin’ him some of it.”

  A guard stepped up. In his hand he held a long black club with a bulb on the end: a Ticklestick. He menaced Mimi and Parveen.

  “Stop talking!” he shouted. “Back to work!”

  Mimi flexed her fists, glaring at the man. Finally, she turned back to her task of slicing up the cheese.

  VIGGO STRODE BETWEEN THE TABLES of the cafeteria, empty at this time of day, and came to a locked metal door. He pulled a card out of his pocket and held it up to a small pad on the door’s right side. A tiny light went from red to green. He pulled on the door and it opened easily, admitting him to the hall that led to the processing area.

  He collided with Mrs. Francis, who was hurrying from a side corridor. Hammerface, right at Viggo’s heels, then ran into Viggo.

  “Watch where you’re going!” Viggo snapped at the flustered woman.

  Mrs. Francis was just about as wide as she was tall. Everything about her was round. She had a round white face and round little sausage fingers. A scarf over her head failed to deter strands of grey hair from escaping at all angles. She lived in a tiny apartment attached to the kitchens. Of course, Viggo deducted room and board from her minuscule salary, but she didn’t complain, couldn’t complain for fear of losing her job. Jobs were scarce in Windcity these days. Never mind that the only other person who actually still lived there was that crazy Mr. Nieuwendyke who thought he was a cat, Viggo wouldn’t hesitate to hire him despite all his meowing and licking his hands. Ever since Mr. Francis had been attacked by that rabid owl twenty years before, Mrs. Francis had had to look out for herself. And since there wasn’t a lot to spend money on in Windcity she bought the children little treats, careful to hide her philanthropy from Viggo.

  “I-I-I’m sorry, Master Viggo. It’s hard
to keep track of everything, what with one hundred children to feed and clean up after every day. I’m run off my feet.”

  Viggo towered over her, leaning in like a rickety scaffold. “Are you suggesting that you can’t handle the workload, Mrs. Francis?”

  Mrs. Francis threw up her hands in dismay, “Never, Master Viggo! I can manage!”

  “I hope so,” Viggo smiled sweetly, “because I’m sure there are many who would be glad of the work should I advertise for a new Chief Domestic Supervisor!”

  “Of course, Master Viggo. I appreciate that.” The bell rang again, more insistently, and Mrs. Francis hurried off down the hall past the kitchens (her tiny domain). Satisfied that he’d struck fear into her heart, Viggo strolled after her through the hall that led to the processing room. Hammerface puffed after him.

  The Orphan Processing Room (the OPR for short) was a large warehouse space where children fresh off the boat were processed. A huge door slid up on rails to admit fresh arrivals. When new children arrived, they stood in lines to be sprayed with delousing agent and receive their uniforms. Then they watched a video telling them about what they were expected to do and what punishments they could expect if they failed. Finally, they stepped through a metal detector to ensure they carried nothing dangerous into the factory. When all these processes had been executed, the thoroughly depressed children were marched off to their assigned cots in the dormitory to prepare for their lives as cheese factory workers.