Green

by Nick Earls

  You know the sign of the neon chicken. You’ve driven past it countless times, heading west. As you come over that hill, the lights of Ron Todd’s World of Chickens are like a beacon on the western horizon. A complicated multi-coloured beacon, announcing chickens in large numbers. Indeed, a world of them. And now it’s your world, too.

  I think that’s the most recent draft. In the film version it’s prologue, with a hand-held shot from a car. It’s voiceover, then there’s something from INXS’s The Swing and the opening credits.

  But it’s on hold. In film language, it’s in turnaround. Very early turnaround, since it didn’t move anywhere to start with. The draft script put me off. There wasn’t a voice in which it sounded close to cool. Not even Bogart and, after all these years, that’s still the ultimate test. Not that it doesn’t have its limits (for example, Peter Brady and his attempt to go suave with pork chops and apple sauce), but I went out once with a girl last year and she took me to see The Maltese Falcon, and those things stick in your head. Bogart’s voice makes a lot of mundane shit sound cool, but he met his match with my life.

  I thought telling it in the second person would help, but it didn’t help much. I thought it would at least sound better. I don’t know if it would have been autobiography any more or not, but that’s a technicality. I figured it’d make it a better story. It worked for Jay McInerney in Bright Lights, Big City.

  I’d like to believe it’s the chicken suit that’s the problem with this job. I’d like to believe it’s the problem with the second-person narrative of my life as well, but that’s putting a lot down to a chicken suit.

  The other problem with the job is that Ron Todd expects a lot from his chickens. We’re his best and so far only promotional strategy, and he had the suit specially made. He said it took four attempts to get a moulded plastic chicken face you could trust—‘trust like a newsreader’, was how he put it. Not that Frank and I could see the link between newsreaders and chicken burgers, but from day one we knew better than to ask. I knew better than to ask, and I told Frank that applied to both of us.

  But Frank doesn’t have to worry about that, anyway. Frank does not have the shoulders of a chicken, and spends the whole shift at the counter while Sophie and I alternate in the suit. Sophie’s too small to fit it and I’m a little too tall, but if I crouch slightly and she walks with her feet well apart we can each chicken without falling over.

  The three of us are often on together. Frank told Ron at the job interview that he and I were a package deal, and Ron said he usually did his own rostering but he’d bear that in mind.

  ‘What Frank means is . . . ’ I remember saying.

  And that’s something I get to say quite a lot. In this case what Frank meant was that it’d be practical for us to work the same shifts. We’d be coming from the hospital together, and only Frank has a car. At least that was much easier to explain than most times when Frank says something and means something a little different (or more complicated, or more reasonable, or less annoying).

  Frank’s talk is content-driven, and there’s not much thought given to conversational niceties. Actually, that’s flattering him. Ideas trip out of Frank’s mouth and pick fights when they don’t even mean to. Frank calls any other approach to conversation ‘pretty much bullshit’. Frank had his nose broken twice at school, and it didn’t take me long to work out why when we met at uni.

  And that’s five minutes.

  I head for the door and Ron comes out to meet me. No surprise. I’d expected that our conversation was only Part A of a two-parter.

  ‘Is it the rhythm you’re going for with the Shakespeare?’ he asks me, in a way that’s too earnest for anyone’s good. ‘Shakespeare lends himself to a bit of rhythm, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Good. Rhythm’s good. But I was wondering—and it’s not a criticism, just an observation—I was wondering if it might be even better if you made it a bit more chickeny? I’m not sure.’

  ‘It’s a tough choice, that one. You’re talking about getting into the chicken head space.’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘And that means you’ve got to look at how to get there. It’s a question of technique. It’s not just being that chicken. It’s how to be that chicken. It’s System chicken versus Method chicken, Stanislavski chicken versus Strasberg chicken.’

  ‘So, um, rhythm then,’ he says after a long pause. ‘Maybe we start with rhythm, work on that aspect first. So here’s a thought. Now, don’t get me wrong, Shakespeare’s great. But I just thought I’d put another name in your head as well. Gene Kelly.’

  ‘Gene Kelly.’

  ‘When I think of rhythm, I tend to think of Gene Kelly. What do you reckon? I’ve always found him very . . . ’

  ‘Persuasive?’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, good word. Maybe you could talk that one through with Sophie when you’re changing. Don’t tell her this, but I’m not always sure her heart’s in it and a new slant on it all couldn’t hurt.’

  He swings the door open for me, and Sophie comes out from behind the counter. She looks at Ron—in the way you can’t help but look at parents when you’re sure they’ve been boring people—she puts her tongs down, and we walk out the back to the toilet.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, once we’re in the corridor and I’m walking along behind her, looking out through the beak slot at the back of her head. ‘Bloody Dad.’

  ‘It’s fine. If he wants to pay me to chat, who am I to complain?’

  ‘How were the surgery exams?’

  ‘Don’t know. Done, mainly. Okay, I think. The written was okay, then we had the clinical exam on Wednesday and you usually leave those feeling pretty strange about it all. Or maybe that’s just me.’

  ‘So, holidays now?’

  ‘Yeah. Three glorious days, and one of them already gone. We start obstetrics on Monday.’

  ‘Three days? Ripped off. You’ve got to love an arts degree,’ she says as I walk into the toilet cubicle and start undoing the costume.

  Sophie’s doing a BA. Or, as Frank has been known to refer to it on days of overstudy or brutal timetabling, a BJA. Bachelor of Just Arts. A term I’ve persuaded him not to use in front of Sophie. He maintains he’s never met an Arts student who had to get out of bed on a Monday or a Friday, and he’s happy to tell them he thinks their lives are ‘just one bloody Easter after another’.

  I open the door and hand her the costume as she goes in.

  ‘So, obstetrics,’ she says as she’s changing. ‘What’ll that be like?’

  ‘I don’t really know yet. There are parts of the term when we have to live in, I think. When we’re on Labour Ward. That’ll be different.’

  ‘So you actually get to deliver babies?’

  ‘That’s the plan.’

  ‘Well, that’ll be interesting.’ Then she’s out again and now it’s my turn to see her eyes in there, in the beak slot looking out at me. ‘Here goes nothing.’

  ‘Go, be that chicken. And tonight’s theme, should you be struggling for motivation: An American in Paris. Imagine plummeting pretend rain, an umbrella, an amazing lightness of foot.’

  ‘Dad. Bloody Dad. Gene Kelly. Is that really what he was talking to you about?’

  ‘You mean Gene Kelly’s come up before?’

  ‘I’m chiiiicken in the rain,’ she sings in a wobbly way that may or may not be put on. ‘Just chiiiicken in the rain. What a glorious feeling to be chick-chick-chicken again.’

  ‘Sure, but it’s nothing without the footwork.’

  She kicks the door open and swaggers into the food-service area with a gait that always suggests she might be in a shoot-out and about to draw. Sophie knows better than to try Gene Kelly out there, but Ron goes outside with her so I expect the topic will come up.

  And that leaves me with Frank, and Frank has been in a shitty mood all day. I’m guessing it’s down to something that didn’t go well in his clinical exam yesterday, but with him you have to pick your time to
bring it up.

  ‘Thought he’d never fucking go,’ Frank says as he scrapes some grungy bits off the cooking plate and watches Ron walk away into the darkness doing all the talking, one arm waving with each bit of good advice, the other trapping Sophie’s shoulders so she won’t miss a word.

  *

  Ron says it’s all about the illusion. That’s why we change out the back and use the toilet to do it. It’s not as though you have to get anywhere close to nude to don the chicken, but Ron said at the start that we needed to get a routine going, and it should be about No one ever seeing the chicken costume as a costume. So what they get to see instead is a big chicken that appears to have a bladder problem, and that’s an image that’s yet to ignite any kind of burger frenzy. Not that Ron isn’t prepared to work at it. He told me a week or two ago that he used to call himself a battler but he’d recently upped that to self-made man.

  Ron Todd wears a chunky gold bracelet, but he says he wears it for his rheumatism. He has a dark toupee, though the hair that grows at the back and sides of his head is grey. He wears a seemingly endless range of body shirts with yellow-brown armpits, but that’s only because some of the synthetics from the seventies are proving to last a long time, even when they discolour early. And shorts. He wears semi-formal walk shorts every day, regardless of circumstances, and thick socks held just below the knee with the aid of the inevitable never-slip strategy of a couple of pieces of customised elastic. I haven’t seen them, but I know they’re there. I had maths teachers in the seventies who could have shared a wardrobe with Ron, and one of them used to sit twanging his home-made garters against his calf while we were doing geometry.

  And a glass eye. Ron Todd also has a glass eye, courtesy of his Vietnam service as far as we know. A glass left eye with an iris that’s a richer shade of brown than the right—a jersey-cow brown eye, and you’d think they could have done a better job than that. He limps as well, when his hip plays up, and we’ve assumed that that dates back to Vietnam too. And I always thought it was copper bracelets for rheumatism, not gold, but there never seems to be a good time to get into that.

  We’ve been working here only five weeks and already we know far more than we need to about Ron Todd. But, as the sign says, it is his world here.

  The Todds have the entrepreneurial spirit that runs in some families but doesn’t run in mine—the spirit that says there’s no better way to be made than to be self-made, and to show it. Zel Todd—never Zelda, though I think that’s what it’s short for—is Ron’s wife and Sophie’s mother and one of her main jobs in the Todds’ world is to take their success and show it. She wears lots of white, only white, always set off by the uncompromising whiteness of her thrashed-blonde hair, one of a range of gold fob chains and gold sandals. She carries herself in a way that, I think, tries to be statuesque, but ends up as an unearned kind of aloof at best.

  While Ron and Sophie are inconspicuous shades of pale, Zel Todd is deeply tanned, but not in a kind way. Tanned like a saddle, not like a person. And her crow’s feet look almost like crow’s feet and her pastel lips almost shimmer. She has a background in hairdressing and, I’m sure, believes you never go out without looking your best.

  But maybe I’m not being fair. I have a tendency to be silently critical of people. A girl once told me that, and it’s not one of my better features. Perhaps I could be nicer about Zel, though it’d take some effort.

  The way Frank sees it, Zel should ‘produce daughters who are absolute spunks, but somehow she ended up with Sophie, and she’s much more your type’.

  There’s so much there not to argue with, since every bit of it could do with several kinds of contradicting.

  I’m out at the road again and, without Shakespeare, I’m losing focus. There’s no Gene Kelly in me, and we’re all simply going to have to accept that.

  With Ron on his way home it’s back to the three of us again and, when I turn around and look into the bright lights of the shop, I can see Frank with his lips set up for whistling. Behind the counter, I’m sure his foot is tapping away. Sophie is staring grimly into the distance, looking like someone trying not to think about a dental abscess. That pretty much confirms that Frank’s making some attempt at music.

  Frank thinks there’s melody involved—he really does—but the tunes get lodged in his deep, troubled sinuses and the words come out with round about the same lilt as morse code. The last few shifts he seems to have slipped into a Jackson Browne phase. Sometimes, when Sophie’s chickening and we’re in one of those stretches between customers, he makes me do backing vocals to ‘Running on Empty’. Mainly oooos.

  Frank’s often said he wouldn’t mind being in a band, and the only thing standing in the way is his singing. And the fact that he keeps forgetting to learn an instrument. He has the charisma angle covered, but a very narrow skill base. Plus, it’s covers bands that get all the work and—Jackson Browne phase aside—Frank’s more an originals man. He spends a lot of the time here gazing into the distance inventing song fragments with some poorly focused aim on glory. He gets pissed off when they all start sounding country. It could be the material. Frank’s Greatest Hit: the mournful couplet, ‘It’s too late to fight and it’s too late to run, I sold my ammo when I sold my gun’. He can make it sound quite heart-wrenching, while at the same time being almost meaningless. Narrative, Frank, I’ve told him. Give it some narrative. Make us care.

  Sure enough, there’s some sad tale unwinding under a big country sky when I walk in to change.

  ‘One day,’ I tell him, ‘you’ve just got to take those Kenny Rogers albums and snap them over your knee.’

  ‘I can’t. They’re my mother’s.’

  ‘You are so the coward of the county. She doesn’t force you to play them, does she?’

  ‘No, they’re just . . . kind of contagious. You don’t think they’ve sold millions by chance?’

  Sophie and I head out to the toilet. ‘It’s good you came in,’ she says. ‘I was about ready to shoot him, and his fucking horse. Sorry, but I was.’

  What Sophie never factors in is that Frank, contrary to appearances, has to carry the weight of being the family genius. That’s a view held by four members of Frank’s family, with his big brother probably the only exception. So, when it comes to things like medicine and songwriting, Frank admits he lacks benchmarks. ‘We don’t do creative, and we don’t do tertiary,’ he told me once when giving me his views on the differences in our backgrounds. ‘I’m the first generation of my family that’s come down from the trees, you know.’ His family has a tree-lopping business, but they’d probably prefer him to find another way of putting it.

  *

  We call Sophie in when it’s time to close. She goes out the back to take the costume off, and Frank and I start cleaning up.

  Over the last couple of weeks, Frank has developed a routine for this. He gets most of the cleaning done before we shut and then, the moment ten o’clock comes around, he makes himself at least a couple of burgers. Which he justifies by saying we aren’t doing enough business to turn the meat over effectively anyway, and a lot of it should really be chucked out.

  ‘Chicken: the most dangerous meat in catering.’ That’s what he said when the plan first occurred to him. Said through a brave mouthful of burger, like a man sacrificing himself to save others from possible contagion. ‘Remember micro? Never mix your cooked chicken with your raw. Never let your chicken get close to room temperature. It’s either in the fridge, or on the hotplate. Never keep your chicken a moment too long. Or Ron Todd’s World of Salmonella is only one ugly blunder away.’

  The best part of it is that he got me to talk it through with Ron—my job, since I got a significantly higher mark in microbiology—and Ron is therefore now grateful for Frank eating a lot of his food.

  ‘We run a low-risk operation here,’ Ron said, proud and totally sucked in at the one time. ‘We’ve got to stand by our hygiene. I know I can trust you two. You’re practically doctors. And I like
that. I value your input,’ he said, like a book.

  But Frank couldn’t leave it there. He turned the sudden availability of chicken into the challenge of making progressively bigger burgers and fitting them into his mouth in one go. And Frank’s mouth, I have to say, is awesome.

  Sophie comes back from hanging the costume on its hook in the stock room and she says, ‘Dad left your pay cheques in there. Here you go.’

  ‘Just in my pocket, thanks,’ Frank says. ‘I’ve got gunk on my hands.’ Burger one is coming together.

  Sophie looks suspicious, as though Frank’s pockets aren’t to be trusted, and she puts his envelope down next to him on the bench.

  Mine goes directly into my gunk-free hand and she says, ‘You guys right to lock up?’

  ‘No problem. If you do the till business, we’ll sort out the rest. Most of it’s done, anyway. And Frank’s snack won’t take long.’

  I put the lids on the tomatoes, lettuce and onion and carry them out the back. I can hear coins falling into the bag as I’m putting the containers away. Frank’s whistling again, through his teeth this time. It’s a different sound, but it’s still not pretty. Kind of like wind passing through an old house.

  ‘Walk me to my car, Phil?’ Sophie says when I get back out there with a box for the sauce bottles. ‘Keep the robbers at bay.’

  ‘They’ll never get past me.’ It’s a bold claim, but I think it was called for. Frank laughs into a mouthful of burger. ‘Yeah, right. Go ahead and make a smart-arse remark. It won’t be me we’re laughing at when lettuce comes out your nose.’

  I’m not the most obvious of unarmed guards. What would I use if someone went to rob Sophie? Negotiation? A good, shrill girly scream? A really tough sonnet? We’d give them the money. Walking Sophie to the car is procedure, something we’ve agreed to do. It simply didn’t seem like a good idea to send her (or anyone) out alone into the night with a cash bag.

  There’s a train pushing past on the line behind the shops, accelerating out of Taringa station and heading west out of town, only three carriages lit and all of them mostly empty.