by Nick Earls
‘So, you’re another pay cheque closer to the video camera then?’ Sophie says when the noise drops.
‘Yeah. Still a few to go, though. But I’m really here for the love of it, of course. The money’s just a bonus.’
She laughs, and our feet clang on the metal steps down to the car park. ‘So what do you love most, do you reckon? Would it be the customers? Or do you just love chicken? The suit. I bet it’s the suit.’
‘The suit is liberating, I’ll admit that. It’s pretty special. I do love just about every minute I spend as the chicken. Plus, the counter part of the job lets me put in some quality time with Frank and that’s a highlight.’
‘Don’t get me started.’
‘How do you think it’s going? The business side of it? I’m probably not supposed to ask, but I thought there’d be more customers. We seem to be doing a lot of flapping and not selling a whole lot of burgers.’
‘Yeah, I know. I think dad thinks it’s okay. For a new place. Quiet, but you have to expect that when a place is new, or when it’s changed hands and had a totally new fit-out and got a new name.’ She takes her keys from her pocket and opens her car door. ‘I think it’s okay.’
‘Good.’
She gets into the car, shuts the door and winds the window down. ‘All clear,’ she says. ‘Well escorted.’ There’s a pause that perhaps borders on awkward. ‘Well, I’ll see you. Monday, I think.’
‘Yeah, Monday.’
She turns the key, starts the engine and the talking is done. She waves and drives the car up the concrete ramp, turns left into the traffic and she’s gone.
The pause—or at least its borderline awkwardness—is a definitional thing, nothing more. It comes about because I am only there as some hopeless kind of protection, and neither of us has really adjusted to the concept. We can be workmates who share a chicken costume, I think we’re becoming friends as well, but in those seconds out of the light and away from Frank and away from all that poultry we’re more like two people saying goodbye at the end of an evening. I think that’s what it is. I’m not used to being an escort, she’s not used to having one.
Back upstairs, Frank is already slipping burger number two into his mouth, about a third at a time. I pull a couple of large cups out of the dispenser at the drink machine, and I ask him if he might be interested in a beverage.
‘Please.’
‘And would that be a regular Sprite, no ice?’
‘Mmmm.’ There’s more burger in his mouth now. The mmmm is a yes. Frank thinks ice is a waste of space in a bought beverage, and he can’t break the habit when he isn’t paying.
I squirt us each a Sprite and take Frank’s over to the counter. I walk around drinking mine, checking that the front door’s locked, turning the sign to ‘closed’. Next on my list: the food preparation area.
‘Benches?’
‘Check.’
‘Hotplate scraped and oiled?’
‘Check.’
‘Have you mopped the floor?’
‘Check.’
‘Are you lying to me?’
‘Check.’
‘You weren’t even paying attention, were you?’
I fetch the mop and bucket and give the floor a cursory going over. It’s only behind the counter, where I’ve shed my usual substantial amount of lettuce, that any real work is needed. Soon the job’s done. The food is all away, the place is tidy and Frank is eating a handful of grated carrot and watching me do the unnecessary final walk around that I can’t stop myself doing.
‘Check already,’ he says.
‘Yeah, okay.’ I join him at the counter and take my last mouthful of Sprite. He lets rip with a big gassy burp and goes back to chewing. ‘With all the elegance of a cow at a fence . . . ’
‘No worries. Now let’s get out of here. The last twenty-four hours have not been my finest.’
‘This evening . . . ?’ He doesn’t mean this evening. ‘Oh, last night. How was it?’
He swallows, raises his eyebrows. ‘Patchy, to be honest. Pretty bloody patchy.’
‘I did tell you that, without even seeing it, I was pretty sure The Killing Fields wasn’t a going-out-type movie.’
‘That was the least of my worries. She’s, like, a talker, okay?’
‘In movies? I hate that.’
‘No, on the nest, mate. Stick with me here. This is back at her place after the movie. And I don’t mind a talker, obviously, but then she starts going “Fuck me, fuck me . . . ”’
‘It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me all of it.’
‘No, it’s germane to the matter under discussion. Okay, she’s going “Fuck me, fuck me,” right? And I said, “I thought I was fucking you.” Like, just for a second, I thought she was telling me I’d gone up the wrong way. You know . . . slipped it up the unintended orifice. And she thought I was taking the piss about her being a talker. And then it was on for young and old. It was like I’d never done a thing right in my whole life. She went on and on about me looking at other women all the time.’
‘Which you do.’
‘Looking. Looking.’ There’s indignation in the way he says it. ‘What’s the big deal? I’m only looking at bits of them anyway.’ He starts to smirk. ‘I mean, be fair. We live in a very visual world. What’s a man to do? Obviously there was something wrong about it though, as far as she was concerned. In about five seconds I was out in the street with my clothes coming out the window. It turned out there was a bit she’d been bottling up.’
*
It’s twenty minutes later, when we’re halfway back to my place in Frank’s purple Valiant, that we hit the usual blaming phase.
‘Mate, I blew it,’ he says. ‘Blew it like a nose.’
‘Self-loathing, Frank. They told us in psych it wasn’t pretty.’
His grip on the wheel tightens. He brakes as the lights ahead of us change, and the two pine-tree air fresheners swinging from the rear-view mirror slap into the windscreen. Frank’s proud of his car, with that pride taking a particular emphasis on odours and squeaks. His little sister, Vanessa, idolises him and he’s not afraid to use that. He lets her clean the interior sometimes, to practise her car detailing skills, and she painted rally stripes down the sides for his last birthday. Because of them, Frank now refers to the car as ‘a bit of a sports job’.
‘Look,’ he says, recovering some of that old fighting spirit, ‘this isn’t easy. Jesus, she was quite a package. And she spelt her name Cyndi too, like, with an “I” at the end. That’s porn-star spelling. It kind of got my hopes up, you know? I know I’ve got to face it. I know it’s a quandary. Shit, she had pink lipstick. Do you get what I’m saying?’ He pauses, steadies. ‘I know what people think about me, but I’m a relationship man at heart. I hate being single. I hated today.’
‘Well, welcome to my 1985. Enjoy your stay.’
2
You’ve driven past it on the way to the coast, the sign of the neon mower. One by one, Ron Todd is claiming the city’s arterial roads, putting some new world there, and the name Ron Todd in lights.
That was another line of bio, I think.
*
Ron Todd set up World of Chickens because Ron Todd’s World of Mowers at Kedron was a success and he wanted to diversify.
In our early days, ambition got the better of him. We had four or five people on each shift, including some of the Mowers part-timers. Who never actually said it, but often gave the impression they were lowering themselves. They dealt with chicken like people doing the best they could with the wrong tools—they tried to get out of putting marg on the burger buns and they didn’t even start to comprehend the importance of adequate refrigeration.
Now the standard staffing level is three: two at the counter and cooking, and one chicken. There’s marg on every bun unless specifically requested otherwise, we treat the fillets with close to the respect you’d give a vaccine, and anything that might be past its prime we feed to Frank. We, the Chickens crowd, think thing
s are much improved now that the Mowers crowd has gone.
Three hours into obstetrics, and already my attention level isn’t what it should be. We’ve had our introduction to the term, and the rest of the morning is a tutorial called ‘Taking an Obstetric History’. It comes with an uncommonly good handout, so the usual frenzy of note-taking isn’t necessary. Isn’t allowed even. The tutor began by saying, ‘I’d rather you listened and thought about this than had your heads down writing notes. So it’s all in the handout.’
First day of term, Mater Mothers Hospital. We’ve turned up with our white coats in our bags, the free stethoscopes a drug company gave us last year and our yet-to-be-opened copies of Beischer and Mackay’s Obstetrics and the Newborn. Those of us who have them, anyway. I’ve had mine since January. Frank, who denies most realities as long as he can, tends to hold off until scrounging each book from somewhere mid-term.
For me, the year begins and the summer holidays end when a parental credit card turns the book list into two box-loads of reality—a year of text books to be shelved and wait their turn.
We’re already at least two thirds of a box into the year, now that we’ve put psychiatry and surgery behind us. Though not far behind us when it comes to surgery. At the end of ‘Taking an Obstetric History’, the tutor tells us that our long cases from last term are marked and can be picked up at the office.
‘Some of us had been thinking coffee wouldn’t go astray,’ Franks says to me on the way to the door.
‘It’s a hospital. Don’t think about the coffee. It’ll only disappoint you.’
We leave as a group, and the curve of the drive leads us up the hill to the stately old Mater Private Hospital and the office of the Clinical Sub-Dean.
‘I hate this bit. I just want to get it over with.’ It’s meant to be said in my head, but it comes out before I can stop it.
‘It’s only ten per cent.’
‘Ten per cent where you’ve still got to get at least five or you do it again.’
‘Yeah, whatever. It’s just a case. As if you’ll have any problem. As if any of us should have any problem. It’s the other ninety per cent that’s the big deal. This is the easy part—pick a patient, go through everything, write it up. You even know what happens to them in the end, before you hand it in.’
‘It’s O’Hare who’s marking them,’ one of the others says. ‘Don’t forget that.’
Charles O’Hare—apparently Charlie to his friends, not that we’re aware of any—has been a surgical registrar at the Royal too long, and it’s turned him mean. He keeps not quite passing his final exams and not quite making the consultants happy, but somehow he stays part of the system. This year, for the first time, his unit had a new consultant who was younger than him. We could have done without that.
‘O’Hare and his bloody Tim Tams,’ Frank says as we go up the steps. ‘I’m so glad that’s over. The bastard totally put me off chocolate biscuits.’
I’d rather not be reminded. O’Hare would sit on the edge of his desk eating biscuits in every tute, as though we were a waste of his time, a bunch of people who had turned up to annoy him while he was eating. But it was his learn-by-scorn approach that had least appeal. He’d sit there and fire badly-worded questions at his victim, he’d trick them into giving the wrong answer or freeze them into giving no answer, and then would come the scorn. The ‘exactly what makes you think you might pass this term?’ scorn.
My case report is near the top of the pile, which is starting to spread messily across the table outside the Sub-Dean’s office. On other people’s front pages I can see marks ranging between four and eight out of ten, maybe one eight and a half. I’ve got seven. I’ll settle for that.
I walk back outside, into the clump of people who are flicking through their cases page by page. I’ve earned a few ticks, a few ‘goods’ and one ‘unlikely’. On page five O’Hare has written ‘An ultrasound would have been a cheap, quick and non-invasive way of getting the same information’ and on page six, next to the last disease listed in my differential diagnosis, he’s put ‘maybe once in 100 years’. In tutes, that would have been one of his friendlier remarks. I’ve done pretty well. He even finishes with ‘Good work overall. A bit too reliant on textbooks and not enough on judgement in parts.’
Frank’s has no mark written on the front page.
‘He must have put it somewhere,’ he says. ‘Maybe the thought of a ten embarrassed him, so he had to write it inside.’
Page one has a couple of ticks, pages two and three some circling and the next four pages have nothing. At the bottom of an otherwise untouched page eight it says, ‘Mostly mindless copying of the patient’s file. Do you even know what the abbreviations mean? I thought I’d made my dislike of them clear. RESUBMIT. Please see me.’
‘Arsehole,’ Frank says. He wasn’t expecting a ten, but he wasn’t expecting this. ‘What an arsehole. Resubmit. Jesus.’
To O’Hare’s credit, he was never anything but clear about his dislike of abbreviations. In our trial case write-ups we all used them, because that’s what the residents did in the files in the wards. The afternoon he handed the write-ups back, he called abbreviations ‘an evil kind of shorthand’. He even said they were ‘festering’. And, if that wasn’t clear enough, Greg Schmidt played into his hands when O’Hare went for the ‘making an example of someone’ part of the learn-by-scorn technique.
‘SOBOE,’ O’Hare said, one mean and dangerous letter after another. ‘Is it a kind of musical instrument, and is it so important that you want to put it in capitals? Was the patient a very good soboe player? What are you saying when you put SOBOE?’
And the answer, we all knew, was shortness of breath on exertion. But that wasn’t the point. We were about to get a lesson in thinking things through rather than copying, a lesson in spelling things out. A lesson in not being lazy.
Right up until Greg Schmidt said, with a tremor in his voice that we’d never heard before, ‘Swelling of back on exertion.’ Rising at the end like a sad lonely question and, even as we laughed, we all knew what we were up for. And that we’d never be using abbreviations again.
‘He never liked me,’ Frank’s saying.
‘He never liked anyone.’
‘Yeah, he never liked anyone, but he knew my name. You kept a low profile. Smart bastard. “RESUBMIT. Please see me.” I’m going to use that word Cyndi hated, and it starts with a C.’
‘It’s the Mater, Frank, and you’re shouting. Use it quietly. It’s not a nun-friendly word.’
‘Mindless copying. Are you telling me you didn’t copy from the patient’s file? Are you telling me you made it up?’
‘No. Not at all. You’d be mad to make it up. Copying’s inevitable, it’s the mindlessness he took offence to. The visible display of copying.’
‘I’ve got to resubmit. Have you worked that out? At the end of this term, in the mid-year break, I’ve got to go to a hospital, attach myself to some poor sick bastard, write it all down and resubmit. And, even if I’ve passed the rest of the term, if it doesn’t work out when I resubmit I get to do surgery again at the end of the year when you’re all off doing an elective somewhere.’
‘It won’t happen that way. You’ll pick a good case, and it won’t be a patient of O’Hare’s and you won’t use abbreviations and you’ll be fine.’
‘Could I just copy yours, maybe?’
‘Do you want to think that through? You might as well go and find a few nuns now and shout that word Cyndi didn’t like right at them. And I could probably come along and do it with you, since I reckon O’Hare would be gunning for both of us. You could find a case that was like mine, and that might make it easier.’
‘Ah, like yours,’ he says, smiling, nodding, putting the emphasis on like. As if things are looking up, but now being conducted in code. ‘I get it. So should I take yours with me now?’
‘We’ll talk in the mid-year break.’
*
Frank tosses me the keys when we
get to his car at the end of the day.
‘You take the wheel, Mister Seven out of Ten,’ he says, and we drive.
Mister Seven out of Ten, as though it ranks me among the big over-achievers.
As we loop around onto the freeway from the Mater the sun is low in the west, easing down towards Mount Coot-tha, eye level and in front of us as we merge with the traffic. We’re on our way to World of Chickens.
Frank opens the glove box. He takes out the jar of Staminade, sucks his finger and swirls it around among the clumps of crystals. He rubs the finger on his gums and works his tongue and saliva vigorously like ‘Lancelot Link Secret Chimp’, that is, like a lower primate battling with a mouthful of toffee to create whimsical dubbing opportunities, and a kind of sixties TV I’m glad I can only vaguely remember.
Staminade, for Frank, isn’t merely a green salty sports drink. It’s become a habit, and not a simple one. If he’s not driving, and if work is done for the day, he’ll have a mouthful of vodka too. It’s reminiscent of the best of his invented cocktails, the brizgarita—the hometown Brisbane version of a more famous salty cocktail from somewhere else. But the complex formula of Staminade means that the hard work’s already done with the brizgarita, already in the jar. And all you have to do is mix yourself a strong, cold glass of it and toss in a shot of vodka and a shot of tequila. Perhaps with a slice of lemon and some Staminade powder crusting around the rim, if it’s an occasion.
As Frank sees it, with that cunning electrolyte balance it’s got its own built-in hangover cure. And if you don’t get the ratios quite right you can always have a couple in the morning, with a raw egg and some B vitamins substituted for the vodka. The tequila, he says, isn’t really negotiable.
‘The brizgarita’s day will come,’ he claims, though it hasn’t come yet. But right now, that kind of glory isn’t on his mind. That’s the ambitious Frank, the other Frank. This afternoon we have the Frank who is concentrating on being loudly shitty about his surgery long case mark and being dumped.
