Deep Fried: A Novel

by Beckett, Bernard

  I browse the racks of a clothing store. Upmarket, fashionable. A chance to wear your income on your sleeve. I take a 200 dollar shirt off the rack, hold it against me in front of a mirror. It makes me look pale and frightened. Why not just get a ten dollar T-shirt and pin the change to your chest? At least that would be original.

  An appliance store. A 23-year-old with the mistake named moustache curling above his top lip and a label named Anton pinned to his shirt (not as impressive as 190 dollars but serving its purpose) rushes forward to serve me. I lie, tell him I’m after some sounds, look interested as he explains sub-woofers and dynamic bass and graphic equalisers, and other things neither of us understand. I ask him if it’s true that the hi-fi advantage of spending an extra 2000 dollars couldn’t be cancelled out by too-thick carpet or crap taste in music, so why would you bother? and he shrugs and gives me his card, just in case I ever end up with more money than I need.

  A man in a sports store videos me running on a treadmill and analyses my gait. Tells me I tend to over-pronate, which makes my day, and that I will need a particular kind of shoe when I run, as in a particularly expensive kind of shoe. I thank him for his time, and tell him I will add it to my list of reasons not to run. He takes that well enough. It’s mid-morning and not so busy.

  I walk into PBs, order a small fries, take the entire scoop in my hand and squeeze it until the oil drips through my fingers and spatters onto the counter. Then I leave.

  A hairdresser is sorry that she has no appointments free, because her apprentice, who just between me and her, has a bit of a problem with the drink, is away sick again. But if I come back tomorrow, she’s sure she would be able to do something for me. ‘Make me more popular?’ I ask. She smiles, and tells me she’ll do her best.

  Further down the road the bottle store is still closed, but a poster in its window shows a young couple in summer, picnicking on the banks of a slow moving river, smiling as they swallow down love and chardonnay. I wonder which one of them will drown that afternoon, after one too many, or if instead this will be a pregnancy they haven’t planned for. Or another man will arrive, some time into the second bottle, and look at the woman the wrong way, and a fight will start. Perhaps I should be in advertising.

  There are other stores; a place specialising in ties and boxer shorts, more electronics, food places, lots of food places, but you get the idea. I get the idea.

  Perhaps I should try shoplifting. Stealing one useless item from every store, plus a very useful litre of white spirits, and making a bonfire of it in Civic Square. That would bring them running. That would make the news. That would keep Rob interested.

  Except I’m a crap shoplifter, and even worse at lighting fires. It looks like rain.

  I keep walking. Through town, out round the bays, up Mt Vic for the view. By the end of it my feet are killing me, which serves me right for over-pronating I suppose. I come back down through the mall just as the day turns dusky and the commuters began to clump about their bus stops. I sit on a bench to take a rest before the final push back to the station, and watch the first of the Friday night teenagers emerge.

  His name is Harry. Harry Oswald Duncan. Not everybody does that, uses all three names for an introduction, but then Harry isn’t normal. Harry is stuffed in the head, sent my way from above, to serve as a warning. The introduction comes later, shaking my hand, and my world too, a little. First there is me, tired of foot and empty of plan, and there is a gathering storm of adolescence, and there is him, a stranger, with an easel, and a book, and a pile of placards made to measure, and a sad, sad job that needs doing.

  Harry is a thin man, which hides the fact that he is not tall. His eyebrows have grown unruly over dark, uncertain eyes. His suit, and it is fair to assume he has only one, is brown. A special sort of brown; shiny, polyester, briefly fashionable, not lasting long enough for the language to bother with a word for it.

  Harry has bony wrists. It takes a short suit to be too short for Harry but he has managed to find one. He has thick black hair that creeps past his shirt cuffs and makes plans to annex the backs of his hands. The shirt is lemon, his shoes are black and his socks are green with red embroidered designs. The world saves no effort making crap clothes. No resources are spared. Does a whole industry simply exist to warn us of people like Harry, to mark them out, and help us pass on our way?

  Harry has nostril hair which has escaped his nostrils, and skin which once was a battlefield and now struggles to conceal its history. His head has grown tired of growing hair, but the remnants have been carefully combed over and lacquered down. His head shines like an oil slick, and the hair dances delighted in the wind.

  Harry has a routine. He sets up his easel, he paces nervously. He checks his placards. He grips his book. He waits. He launches. He must know, even he must know, that it is futile. That stepping in front of a bus may stop the bus, but not for long.

  ‘Today,’ Harry shouts, ‘today there is a judgement coming. You walk past me, empty, hungry, dissatisfied, but it doesn’t have to be that way…’

  It would be cruel to continue. Harry continues. And as he speaks a small miracle occurs. The sea of commuters part around him. Heads drop. Ears close. People hurry by. You can’t say he isn’t having an impact. It’s like walking past an appliance store and seeing the news on a TV in the window. Carnage without connection, disaster through two panes of glass. And twisted metal or twisted minds, either way you stop and watch. You’re still a person. You still do the things a person does.

  Jesus is introduced on five painted pieces of card. His love, his forgiveness, his wisdom, his words and his promise. And I shouldn’t laugh. It isn’t funny. It’s sad. In the way a drunk in the street, who we can ignore because everybody else ignores them, is sad. I’ve got nothing against alcohol, and I’ve nothing against religion, but Harry is sad. He must have family somewhere. A brother maybe, a mother and a father, he’s not that old. I wonder what they think. I wonder how his story twisted, to bring him here. And as I sit watching it, this car crash of testimony he lays bare to the world, while the cold parallel bars of the wooden seat chill my arse, and the possibility of sex with strangers warms up the crowd on the steps outside PBs, I wonder something else. I wonder what it would take to put me there. I wonder how many supports would have to be unbolted, how many guy ropes cut free, before a sudden wind could take me and all my Sadness, and all my Pissed Off, to a place like that. A place called desperate, and stupid and lonely.

  He finishes and walks towards me, because nobody else has stayed. I stare at him like you stare down a nightmare. You are not me, I want to say. I’m empty and scared and one day soon what’s left of my world will realise what a fraud I am, but I am not you. He shakes my hand, and gives me his name in three installments, and I stand and run, in a manner he must be used to, leaving him standing there, with only Jesus and an easel for company. Which is rude. At the very least I should have thanked him first, thanked him for the warning.

  I live in a world of shifting shapes. That’s the only way I have of explaining it. Knowledge scrapes away at the tips of bottomless mysteries.

  ‘How was your day?’ Mum asks at dinner. I knew she would. Knew. Notice that. Dad says nothing, doesn’t appear to be too interested in my answer. I knew that would happen too.

  ‘It was sort of nothing.’

  ‘You were gone a long time, for nothing,’ she pries. ‘What did you do?’

  She’s been thinking about this all day. About my next move. The wonderful course I will get into. The way I will finally blossom, once my interest has been primed. The changes everybody will notice. The comments they will make. So that finally, she will be able to stop her worrying.

  Well mother dear, I went to school, but I’m no longer welcome there. I sought help from somebody I thought might care, and his phone was off. I went into the city, where people spend their days serving those who have money. I had no money. I over-pronated my way to the top of a hill, so that I could walk back down a
gain, and I sat and listened to Jesus, a man of infinite wisdom and power, who somehow decided to talk to me through the mouth of a man in a dandruff-flecked suit, and to be honest it left me cold, and frightened, and if tomorrow’s like today, then I’m not much looking forward to it, and it’s not that I’m not asking for help, it’s just nobody who’s listening understands. So there you are. Nothing takes a long time. Nothing is boundless, in its capacity to waste us away.

  But you don’t say that sort of thing to your mother. Not at dinner time, when she’s gone to all that effort. It would be ungrateful. So instead I say,

  ‘Nothing. Just a lot of pointless shit really.’

  Actually, don’t even say it. Mumble it. Down into my plate, where a sucked-white bone of lamb sits and pays me no attention.

  And then the world changes shape. I don’t see it coming.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Dad’s angry voice. Only, until this precise moment, I am unaware he has an angry voice. I know his other voices well enough; false cheer, disappointment, distraction and disinterest. I’ve seen pride, enthusiasm even, confusion and, to be fair, caring. But not angry. Dad doesn’t do angry. He swallows his frustration whole, lets the acid of restraint break it down into tiny parts, sweats them out at night, when the world is asleep. The world has to change shape before Dad does angry.

  ‘Oh.’ The sound of Mum’s fork hitting the floor.

  ‘Thunk.’ The sound of my jaw dropping low as the table. Open-mouthed, pupil-dilated, disbelief. Forty-three years of looking on the funny side, and all of it undone with four simple words. He teeters, a car on a cliff, driver too terrified to move. Maybe, if I just edge carefully back towards the rear seat and reach out for the … but the gravity of the situation is too much for him. New words lurch forward, and there he is, free-falling, freeforming, tumbling through the air, down to this new place of abuse and self-expression. The place the rest of us call home.

  ‘Do you think you’re the only one who ever finds their life to be a bit of a pain in the arse? I mean, I know teenagers are supposed to be a little on the self-absorbed side, I had a moment or two myself, believe it or not, but I did not, you selfish little bastard, ever contemplate making it a fucken lifestyle choice.’

  ‘No you didn’t,’ I reply. ‘And look at you now.’

  That’s a reflex. We are animals, when the blood samples have been taken and the diagrams are drawn. Instincts get us through.

  Our kitchen, as luck would have it, has two doors. So father and son are able to storm out of the room simultaneously. I storm upstairs to my room and my computer, and he storms down the hall to his study, and I would guess, his computer. And Mum? Well perhaps she simply helps herself to our shares of the dessert. After all, the world had changed its shape.

  8 April

  You don’t believe things like this. They do not exist. Too farfetched, too conspiracy theorist to be anything other than an urban myth: have you heard about the fast food company that’s studying eating disorders to sell more burgers? No, I swear it’s true, my friend knows someone…

  You don’t believe unless you have it sitting on your computer screen, dragged from a guilty man’s deleted files. Circumstance conspiring with us, with me, so I have something to hold out to Pete and say Look. This is what I can do. I am worth it. So we can finish each other’s half typed sentences of disgust and awe.

  This is big. So big that it’s hard to think of whole. It’s not a game any more. I’ve found something deeply sick. Sick and manipulative and perfect. The email’s not enough by itself, I can see that. But if they are capable of this then there will be more. And PBs will have nowhere to hide.

  A very slick production, their website. Pity the security isn’t up to the graphics. Happy smiling children everywhere. Our most valued customers. The small print:

  Prince of Burgers will not be liable for injuries or damage relating to the accessing of this site even if there has been negligence. Total liability will not be greater than the amount paid to access this site.

  Comforting. They’ve had a make-over. No longer the 42 ingredients in your white/red sauce of choice, just watered down ‘nutritional information’. The Prince contains 170 per cent of the recommended daily saturated fat intake, and over half the recommended calories. The values do not include condiments.

  There are little dancing icons with crowns. They list the community initiatives, the recycling programme, the environmental clean up. Underneath is says at the discretion of the local franchisee. But not in very big letters.

  I found the remote access under the corporate banner. Attempting to increase worker productivity. What are they thinking? Don’t they know about people like me? People who live online. They’re just tourists, asking to get lost and have their pockets picked.

  He’s not a particularly well organised man. No order to the filing. Sixty-three emails still in the inbox. But I had time.

  A new fast food restaurant opens somewhere in the world every two hours. Fifty million people a day make the decision to contribute to PBs’ annual 18 billion dollar US profit. But still it is dying. In one model the universe keeps racing outwards, desperately trying to stay ahead of its own gravity. But it can’t keep it up. One day it’ll start to slow, stop, teeter, turn, get sucked back faster and faster to the place it all began. Santa Claus will once again be more recognisable than the grinning prince.

  The average PB executive earns 25 times the income of the workers in their restaurants. They are still trying to lower the minimum wage.

  Me, at my computer. This, an innocuously titled email. Only Confidential marked it as worth a look. Yes he deleted it, the stupid little man. Even conscientiously emptied the recycling bin. But did he really think that would make it disappear forever, the guilty email shredded, burned, out of reach? Yes. He probably did. But of course it hasn’t. Nothing is really lost. Nothing can be hidden forever. They’re called tombstones. Quite appropriate really.

  PBs is not a family-friendly restaurant. It is a parasite that doesn’t know when to stop its feeding. They have studied us like lab rats in a maze. Brand loyalty begins at two. Babies can recognise a logo before their own name. And now this: the adolescent connection. Making us fat so our bodies and our minds actually need the shit they’re holding out. PBs is a drug.

  They give us bright colours at three, playgrounds at six, additives at 13. The fries used to be cooked in beef tallow. PBs switched to vegetable oil to keep the vegetarians and health conscious happy. But something wasn’t right. Now a ‘natural’ flavour is added. It’s derived from beef extract. We just keep on coming back.

  But not often enough. They can feel the sinking.

  The marketplace is a joke. Competition is non-existent. Price fixing is rife. Landowners are bought out to be replaced by huge Prince subsidiaries. It’s either take their money or starve. The suicide rate of farmers and ranchers in the US is three times the national average.

  Grain-fattened, anabolic steroid-implanted cows stunned, sometimes; hung upside down by chains, carotid artery slit so they die ‘humanely’, sometimes. Sawed in half and scraped clean of every last profit producing scrap. The fries 0.29 inches thick. The no-experience-needed-so-we-can-fire-you-whenever-we-want-so-don’t-even-think-about-joining-a-union kitchens. And we keep going back. It’s our fear of the unknown. No need to face frightening difference here. Homogeneity is unthreatening.

  When Pete sees this he’ll know there is no other way to go. We belong together. Together, we can win.

  5

  It’s the day after the night before. The night of Dad’s explosion. Okay, that’s an overstatement. Nothing was broken. He didn’t hit me. It wasn’t Once Were Warriors. But there’s the smell of change in the air, and new sounds inside my head. Tiny sounds. Offstage footsteps, furniture rearranged in the night, people I haven’t met yet, collecting their complications in their arms and making their way towards my life.

  I expected a knock on my bedroom door this morning. Dad saying
sorry, or Mum saying goodbye, or either of them coming in and saying nothing, as a way of saying nothing will be said. Some sign that during the night, while we slept, normal had scabbed back over. But there has been no knock. I hear them down the hall, moving about in the kitchen, making their breakfasts, the low rumbling bass of just between you and I. Then doors close, cars start and I am left alone. I get up straight away, part of a half-arsed plan I’m working with. I make myself breakfast, eat it quickly as if I have somewhere I need to be. I get in the shower, try to concentrate on the routine of it all. But The Sadness comes in through the nozzle. I wasn’t expecting that. I drop to the ground and feel the water swirling beneath me. I feel hot and I feel cold. I feel as if there is no one else in the world. I cry, and wonder where my guardian angel has got to. Then I do what I have to do. I get up. Dry myself. Get on with it.

  I go walking, like an old person might, to pass the time. Up into the hills behind my house. I am gone two hours. Back for lunch. I hire a video and watch it through. Then a documentary, on the History channel, about Galileo. After that a computer game and I am done. Tired, but the day is beaten. Twice I think of Rob, and start electronic conversations in my head, but I have nothing to tell him. I’ll wait a while yet. Something will come.

  Mum and Dad come home and we eat dinner together. Not much is said. There’s no argument. Later, the same evening, Jennifer rings. We talk, about her life, uni, all the things she is doing. It lifts me enough that when she asks ‘And how are you?’ I tell her ‘Fine’, and it’s only a little lie, the sort that squeezes itself down a telephone line without a second thought. I’m not fine, but I’m okay. I’m getting there.