Green

by Nick Earls

  ‘So there we are,’ she says, ‘just like you wanted, I hope. And then there’s the one Frank got me to do, which goes ‘how good is slaw?’ And, finally, the one I did today, ‘famous hotplate chicken’. I didn’t know this place was famous until Mister Todd called about that sign. Maybe Sunnybank’s just too far away.’

  The chicken suit is waiting inside and, by the time I’m wearing it, she’s run an extension cord through the doorway and she’s plugged the strobe light in. She gives it a test flicker across the sign, then turns it off until we’re ready. The last thing she pulls out of her bag before we get started is a massive pair of pretend sunglasses.

  ‘I got these in a showbag last year,’ she says. ‘I just thought, there’d be all that strobe action, and you said you were changing the image, you know? I would have preferred Ray-Bans, but . . .’

  ‘But in the end you’re not going to find a two-foot pair of Ray-Bans, and a chicken’s never quite going to look like Tom Cruise. This . . . this is the look we need. Ness, things are about to change around here.’

  She’s gives a crumpled, embarrassed kind of smile. ‘Well, get ’em on then.’

  From there, the evening doesn’t look back. Ness tapes the sunglasses to my head, and turns the strobe on. Suddenly, movement comes more easily out here. The strobe is very forgiving of poor white-guy coordination and it makes the whole experience even more surreal than usual. Plus, I have signs. I have something to do. Signs to unveil—grandly, cheekily, flamboyantly and, sometimes, when people least expect it.

  Ness goes back to her bag, and this time she produces a tape recorder. She says she couldn’t find any Dylan at home, but would Boz Scaggs or Alice Cooper do? She plays Silk Degrees and I’m a dancing chicken in these wild flashing lights, flipping through signs with something that would approximate rhythm if the signs were any easier to handle.

  She tells me to do the windmill guitar thing, like Pete Townshend, and I figure she must have watched a lot of TV with her brothers over the years.

  I have no idea if this is getting us custom, but it must be getting noticed.

  *

  ‘It’s all in the lights,’ I tell Sophie when it’s her turn and she’s trying to persuade me that she might just do it the usual way. ‘Nothing hides dorkiness like a strobe. It’s a scientific fact, and I’ve put it to the test several times at the Underground myself.’

  She’s not convinced, so we go out to the road before she puts the suit on. I introduce her to Vanessa and we show her how the signs work. They’re not as heavy as she’d thought.

  ‘And,’ Vanessa says, ‘you can have either Boz Scaggs or Alice Cooper. Sometimes I have Christian tapes, but not today. Evie Tornquist, or that nun with the guitar.’

  ‘Boz Scaggs’ll be fine. Speaking of which—the radio station stuff we talked about last night, you and me and Dad. I called 4BB and something’s cancelled this Friday morning, so we can get a White Lightning car out here for breakfast.’

  ‘Seriously? I didn’t think you’d get it happening that quickly. That’s great. Great promotion.’

  ‘I’ve said we’d put something on. And I’ve lined up the Westside Chronicle for the same time.’

  ‘You are famous,’ Vanessa says. ‘You are the famous hotplate chicken place. 4BB—home of the classic rock double play. Live crosses to the Breakfast Bar, with traffic reports on the quarter hour, and on Fridays White Lightning strikes in your neighbourhood with Freebie Friday giveaways and stickers and Richie the Rat. You’ll be wanting another sign for Friday then, if you’ve got the Bs. “Freebie Fridays, seven to eight”.’

  That’s when Ron turns up, just as Sophie’s looking at Vanessa as if she’s wondering where the off switch is. He pulls in from the road and opens the car door, and he shouts out something about going shopping. But he’s reaching over to the passenger seat by then so most of it gets shouted in the wrong direction. He gets out of the car holding a cardboard box. He’s bought several large bags of mixed spices and wooden grinders, with the grinders for appearance since we’re repositioning ourselves as ‘gourmet but not flashy’.

  He pulls them out of the box one by one and shows us the spidery lettering burned into their midsections. He once did a course in poker-work, he tells us, and he’s only used it for sketching bareback riders until now. Ron’s excited.

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ he says. ‘Can’t leave Frank out of this. And I’ve got your pay cheques, too. And look at those signs. It’s a big night. A big night at the World.’

  I’m not going to be the one to tell him there are no Is in Cajun.

  *

  ‘Bloody excellent,’ Vanessa calls it in the truck on the way back to my place. ‘What a night. Twenty bucks cash, plus expenses. Cash and expenses—that’s the kind of deal Magnum PI would get. And twenty bucks. Who would have thought? I’m definitely coming back on Friday. Freebie Friday with my new sign and Double B and Richie the Rat.’

  ‘I don’t know if we’re definitely getting Richie the Rat.’ Not that I want to shatter the dream, but . . . ‘He might stay back at the Breakfast Bar and just cross to the White Lightning at Taringa.’

  ‘Nuh, I reckon he’ll be there. And I’ll be there, too. I’ll get Dad to drop me over. Richie goes out with the White Lightnings if there’s food on. Just wait. You should listen to Double B more.’

  ‘Well, I’ll get my chance on Friday.’

  Double B. Sophie has gone to takeaway-chicken heartland in snaring Double B, home of the classic rock double play and the enduringly awful Richie the Rat, radio prankster, unfunny crank caller, renowned over-the-airwaves burper of ‘Happy Birthday to You’. I don’t have to respect someone simply because they can control a gullet full of air. It’s not a skill, just a dumb misuse of an oesophagus.

  Vanessa sits between us eating her burger (oriental five-spice, with soy) and sucking on her large Sprite, high above the night-time traffic in the truck cab. And tonight she actually believes there’s a world beyond the florist shop. And I know that, having helped that belief along, I need to deliver more than the chance to make a few signs. I think I know what she really wants. But Big Artie has to work it out too.

  I’m surprised how much the signs and Ron’s boxful of innovations have changed World of Chickens already. By the time we closed, it smelled different in there with all the spices we’d fried. Frank was getting into it, giving people advice on spice and sauce combinations, as if we’d been running it that way all the time. He was even flipping the fillets with something that resembled enthusiasm. And the smell of tonight’s take-home burger box extinguishes the tree-lopping man-work odour in the cab. It’s almost a restaurant smell, and that’s a new thing for our burgers.

  Sophie seemed least comfortable of all of us, left behind a little by her father’s excitement, uncertain about the strobe in particular and only matter-of-fact about Double B even though it’s pretty big news. She’s not even planning to come on Friday.

  When I ask Frank what he thought of the way she was tonight, he says she seemed all right to him. ‘But you are always saying I’m not perceptive. She’s got a lot of assignment deadlines. That’s what she told me. It only really needs Ron and a chicken anyway, and Ness with the gear. But don’t worry, I’m sure she’ll be listening at home. I’m sure she’ll be able to tell you on Friday night just how clever you were.’

  Vanessa sucks her Sprite down to the ice and says to me, ‘Is she your girlfriend?’

  ‘Who? Sophie? No. We just go halves in a chicken suit.’

  ‘Phil actually goes out with Ron,’ Frank tells her. ‘You’ll probably see them turn up together on Friday morning. I keep saying it’s not always a wise move to go out with people connected with work—particularly the married ones—but if the two of them will keep going to the movies for their management retreats, what are people going to think?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No, not really. Frank’s kidding. Ron hasn’t been having the best time lately. There’s a few shitty thi
ngs happening in his life, and I think he deserves a better break. He’s got to have someone on his side. And if it’s not going to be anyone else, it might as well be me. So we went to the movies today. And I’m going along on Friday morning to be the chicken, even though I’m not rostered on. Ron specifically asked me. Anyway, I was part of the planning. It makes sense that I’d be there.’

  ‘Oh, righto. Had me going for a second. Hey, did you like the way I mentioned the Christian tapes to Sophie? I don’t have any. I just didn’t want her to feel left out. We get enough of that at the shop. Kerry—Kerry from the shop—says a lot of modern music’s offensive, so I wanted Sophie to know that I hadn’t meant to be offensive with the music I’d brought.’

  ‘That was good, Ness. I think it was pretty subtle, too. Natural.’

  Frank looks over Vanessa’s head at me, and I try to give him a signal that says it was no problem. Sophie was . . . well, she wasn’t her usual self, but Vanessa’s remark didn’t come close to giving anything away. If I’m the only one who’s noticed a change in her, it makes me wonder if it might be connected with something I’ve done. I can’t think what. But that’s paranoid. It’s exams, it might be Clinton, it might be plenty of things I don’t know her well enough to know. It shouldn’t, as far as I can tell, be Frank and Zel or the state of World of Chickens. When we last spoke about that she seemed sure her parents’ affluence wasn’t in question, and that her only problem with it was living up to her family’s self-made-man expectations. Perhaps all I’ve noticed is how her mood contrasted with Vanessa’s.

  The lights are still on when we pull up at my place. My parents haven’t gone to bed yet.

  ‘Go on,’ Frank says. ‘Get in there and break that good news. Tell them you’ve done your bit and they have to cough up. Hey, have you even thought about what we can do when you get this camera?’

  ‘No. Strangely, no. I think I’ve been too busy. It’ll be good in the break though, won’t it? When this term’s done in a few weeks’ time I can really get going. And, in case you’re wondering, we won’t be doing anything featuring your arse and biscuits. Ask him about that one the way home, Ness.’

  Frank, not a person given to shyness, needs no asking and happily starts telling Vanessa the story as I’m climbing down from the cab. For her, the night will continue to be amazing all the way to its end, and her hope for some dirty truck talk will now be realised.

  I pull my pay cheque out of my pocket on the way up the front steps, and the twenty dollars from earlier this afternoon comes out with it. There’s no doubting I’m there now.

  When I open the front door I can hear the TV. My mother is resting a mug of tea on the closed script in her lap and watching David Attenborough over the half-moons of her reading glasses, my father is sitting with a large novel and he’s halfway through a glass of everyday brandy. ‘It’s Your World’ one of those chicken signs said, and this is mine.

  ‘I’ve got some news,’ I tell them, and my mother looks over right away, as if it can only be bad.

  ‘What?’ she says, fiddling with the glasses as though she can’t find my range easily. ‘You can tell us.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the nature of news. You tell people. And sometimes it’s good. Sometimes, also, you’d like it if people didn’t assume it was bad, and let you tell them first.’

  ‘Yes, sorry.’ She corrects herself, starts again. ‘What’s your news?’

  She mutes David Attenborough, and my father places his bookmark neatly into his book and closes it.

  ‘This.’ Said with the enthusiasm befitting a low-key triumph as I hold the cheque up for them to see. ‘This is the pay cheque that pays for my half of the video camera.’

  Or, it turns out, buys a person a rather awkward silence around these parts.

  ‘Okay,’ I tell them, ‘we’re going again on this one. Are you ready? Be happy for me. This is the pay cheque that gets me my half of the video camera. This, and the adjacent twenty-dollar note that you might have noticed, get me over the line.’

  My father frowns, fiddles with his bookmark as if it’s a bother, something needing straightening before new information can be processed.

  ‘Tah dah,’ I say, presenting the cheque again, as emphatically as I can. ‘It’s what we call “a good thing”. Cheque, cash, many hours of noble toil. Equals video camera.’

  ‘Right, well done lad,’ my father says, staging a very average recovery from his state of complete non-excitement. ‘Well done. Caught us a little unawares, but well done. We weren’t thinking you’d get there quite this quickly. You are industrious, aren’t you?’

  ‘That’s what a dollar-for-dollar incentive scheme’ll do for a person.’

  ‘All right. Yes, good work. When would you be looking at getting the camera then?’

  ‘As soon as the cheques clear.’

  ‘Right, the cheques. This one and my one, that’d be?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Take a seat.’

  ‘A seat? I’d rather have a video camera.’ Boom boom.

  I hate the things I say sometimes when I sense something’s not right. But, no, perhaps I’m going to sit down and he’s going to get his chequebook, and he’s going to write the cheque for me now and hand it over here in the lounge room. He’s not against a sense of ceremony when it comes to big transactions.

  I sit. He doesn’t move.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’

  ‘No thanks.’ What am I supposed to say? The cash’ll be fine? Even I know that’s crass. Come on, come on. Make with the money.

  ‘I might not be able to get the cheque to you right away.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I was thinking it’d be taking you a bit longer.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘And we might not actually have the money at the moment. You’ve lived up to your part of the bargain and by rights there should be a video camera in your hands within days, but I’ve been putting my bit away at a slightly different rate . . .’

  ‘Oh. We sort of had a deal . . .’

  My mother smiles a kind of it’s-a-minor-hiccup smile, but they don’t stop there. Usually they would, this time they don’t.

  My father looks over her way and she nods and says, ‘Yes, Allan. It’s time.’

  He takes a deep breath—an unusually theatrical gesture for my father—and he says, ‘Right, lad, there are a few things you should know.’

  ‘Okay, first up . . .’ I’m feeling nauseated already, feeling that my moment of low-key triumph has ricocheted to a bad place, but I don’t know what kind of bad place. ‘You are my parents, aren’t you? Let’s get that one out of the way straight up.’

  ‘No, no. I mean, yes. We are your parents. Definitely. That’s not it.’

  ‘And No one’s really sick, or anything? Tell me No one’s really sick.’

  ‘No, that’s not it, either. Look, lad, it’s money. Plain and simple. Don’t worry.’

  He tells me he wouldn’t usually get to talking about the family finances, but I’m probably old enough to know and tonight seems as good a night as any. I’m twenty-one, and we did have a deal. He says he’s not a man to renege on a deal but the thing I should know is that we aren’t the kind of people who can just pull money out of nowhere. We’ve always been planners. Planners and, when we’ve needed to be, savers. And all that planning and saving should have things looking better than they do now, but there were a few investment decisions that went wrong in the seventies, and the mortgage had to take up the slack.

  ‘So, we’ve got quite a bit of debt to deal with,’ he says. ‘A lot, actually. And I always like these dollar-for-dollar schemes when it’s something important because it only happens if you really want it, and we’ve got time to get our half together. To get it together, without you having to worry. That’s what this has been about, keeping all the worry from you.’

  ‘But no, no it can’t be like that.’ Denial’s been working for me as a defence mechanism lately, and I migh
t as well get to it early in this conversation. ‘It can’t be.’

  The way I feel right now, I’m going to keep saying it can’t be until the problem goes away. Until he laughs and writes me the cheque. Until he tells me everything’s fine, always has been, and this is just a cruel joke. But I don’t let it end with denial. I have evidence, evidence in my favour that points out that we’re completely okay financially. And I’m going to let him have it.

  ‘But what about school? What about what that must have cost?’

  ‘You got that scholarship. Certainly there were other expenses, but . . .’

  ‘But you always said that the scholarship was a bonus. You said you were really glad I got it, but it was a bonus.’

  ‘Well, what can you say when you’re telling it to a young lad, when you’re sending your little eleven-year-old out to do a big weekend of exams? “Remember boy, your entire future’s riding on this”? Probably not a good idea. That’s not to say we wouldn’t have found the money somewhere. But we would have gone without other things.’

  ‘But we’ve never gone without anything. That’s not what we do. That’s not what we have to do. Stop talking like that. That’s other people.’ Sophisticated defence mechanisms a smouldering ruin, all I’ve got are mad denial and nausea. Hate that.

  ‘Well, there was that school trip to Africa that you wanted to go on.’

  ‘Yes, but I couldn’t go on that because I had to learn the value of money. It wasn’t that we couldn’t afford it. I just had to, you know, not take everything for granted.’

  ‘Well done Mother is all I can say to that.’

  ‘But that’s why we do that thing where I raise half. The dollar-for-dollar thing. It’s to teach me the value of money.’

  ‘Right . . .’

  ‘But I like taking things for granted. Some things, anyway. Or at least fifty per cent for granted. I’m always happy to raise half. I particularly want to take for granted ideas like us, you know, not being strapped for cash. I like that one a lot.’