The Toyminator

by Robert Rankin

  ‘Listen,’ said Jack, ‘I can’t lose this job. It’s really important to me. But then so is a smart turn-out. I’ll soon be done washing the trenchcoat. Then we can dry it in the chicken rotisserie.’

  Joe-Bob shook his head and did that manic cackling laughter that backwoods fellows are so noted for. ‘That’s even worse,’ said he. ‘I’ll want a big favour.’

  Jack sighed deeply and wrung out his trenchcoat. ‘You won’t get it,’ said Jack.

  ‘Then I’ll just mosey off and speak with the manager.’

  ‘All right,’ said Jack. And he sighed once more. ‘Tell me what favour you want.’

  ‘Well,’ said Joe-Bob, ‘you’ve got a real perty mouth and—’

  Joe-Bob’s head went into the washing-up water and then Joe-Bob, held by the scruff of the neck by Jack, was soundly thrashed and flung through the rear kitchen door into the alleyway beyond.

  ‘And don’t come back!’ called Jack.

  The head chef, who had been in the toilet doing whatever it is that head chefs do in the toilet – going to the toilet, probably, but neglecting to wash their hands afterwards – returned from the toilet. He was a big, fat, rosy-faced man who hailed from Oregon (where the vortex is)* and walked with a pronounced limp due to an encounter in Korea with a sleeping policeman.

  ‘Where is Joe-Bob?’ asked the head chef.

  ‘He quit,’ said Jack. ‘Walked off the job. I tried to stop him.’

  The head chef nodded thoughtfully. ‘Tried to stop him, eh? Well, young fella, I like the way you think. You have the right stuff – you’ll go far in this organisation.’

  Jack did further trenchcoat wringings, but behind his back.

  ‘I’m going to promote you,’ said the head chef, ‘to head dryer-up.’

  ‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘thank you very much.’

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ said the head chef. ‘Loyalty is always rewarded. It’s the American Dream.’

  By lunchtime Jack had gained the post of assistant to the head chef. He had risen rapidly through the ranks, from dishwasher to dryer-up to plate stacker to kitchen porter (general) to kitchen porter (specific) to head kitchen porter to rotisserie loader to supervising rotisserie loader to assistant to the head chef.

  There had been some unpleasantness involved.

  There had in fact been considerable unpleasantness involved and no small degree of violence, threats and menace. And a few knocks to himself. Jack sported a shiner in the right-eye department; the kitchen porter (general) was beginning a course of Dimac.

  Jack’s role as assistant to the head chef gave him a degree of authority over the lower orders of kitchen staff. Who were now a group of boisterous Puerto Ricans whom Jack had seen dealing in certain restricted substances outside the kitchen in the alleyway and asked in with the promise of cash in hand and free chicken for lunch.

  Jack stood next to the head chef, decapitating chickens.

  The chickens, all plucked and pink and all but ready, barring the decerebration, came out of a little hatch in the wall, plopped onto a conveyor belt and were delivered at regulated intervals to the chopping table for head-removal and skewering for the rotisserie.

  Jack put a certain vigour into his work.

  ‘You go at those chickens as one possessed,’ the head chef observed after lunch (of chicken).

  ‘What do you do with all the heads?’ Jack asked as he tossed yet another into a swelling bin.

  ‘They go back to the chicken factory,’ said the head chef. ‘They get ground up and fed to more chickens.’

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ said Jack, parting another head from its scrawny neck.

  ‘It’s called recycling,’ said the head chef. ‘It’s ecologically sound. I’d liken it to the nearest thing to perpetual motion that you can imagine.’

  ‘Chickens fed on chicken heads,’ said Jack, shaking his.

  ‘Well, think about it,’ said the head chef. ‘If you want a chicken to taste really chickeny, then the best thing to feed that chicken on would have to be another chicken. It makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?’

  Jack looked up from his chopping and said, ‘I can’t argue with that.’

  ‘Mind you,’ said the head chef as he drizzled a little oil of chicken over a headless chicken and poked a rotisserie skewer up its backside, ‘chickens are a bit of a mystery to me.’

  ‘Really?’ Jack nodded and chopped.

  ‘I don’t know where they all come from,’ said the head chef.

  ‘They come out of eggs,’ said Jack. ‘Of this I am reasonably sure.’

  ‘Do they?’ said the head chef. ‘Of that I’m not too sure.’

  ‘I think it’s an established fact,’ said Jack.

  ‘Oh really?’ said the head chef. ‘Well, then you explain this to me. Every day, in Los Angeles alone, in the Golden Chicken Diners, we sell about ten thousand chickens.’

  ‘Ten thousand?’ said Jack.

  ‘Easily,’ said the head chef. ‘We’ll do five hundred here every day and there’s twenty Golden Chicken Diners in Los Angeles.’

  Jack whistled.

  ‘And well may you whistle,’ said the head chef. ‘That’s ten thousand, but that’s only the tip of the chicken-berg. Every restaurant sells chicken, every supermarket sells chicken, every sandwich stall sells chicken, every hotel sells chicken. Do I need to continue?’

  ‘Can you?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Very much so,’ said the head chef. ‘It’s millions of chickens every day. And that’s only in Los Angeles. Not the rest of the USA. Not the rest of the whole wide world.’

  ‘That must add up to an awful lot of chickens,’ said Jack, shuddering at the thought.

  ‘I think it’s beyond counting,’ said the head chef. ‘I don’t think they have a name for such a number.’

  ‘It’s possibly a google,’ said Jack.

  The head chef looked at Jack and coughed. ‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘But where do they all come from?’

  ‘Out of eggs,’ said Jack. ‘That’s where.’

  ‘But the eggs are for sale,’ said the head chef. ‘We do eggs here. Again, at least five hundred a day. And that’s just here, there’s—’

  ‘I see where you’re heading,’ said Jack. ‘Googles of eggs everyday.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said the head chef.

  ‘Well, the way I see it,’ said Jack, ‘or at least what I’ve always been led to believe, is that fertilised eggs, that is those that come from a chicken that has been shagged by a cockerel, become chickens. Unfertilised eggs, which won’t hatch, are sold as eggs.’

  ‘You are wise beyond your years,’ said the head chef, ‘but it won’t work. The numbers don’t tie up. Unfertilised eggs, fine – battery chickens will turn those out every day for years. Until they’re too old to reproduce, then they get ground up and become chicken feed. But think about this – to produce the fertilised eggs you’d need an awful lot of randy roosters. Billions and googles of them, shagging away day and night, endlessly.’

  ‘Nice work if you can get it,’ said Jack.

  ‘What, you’d like a job shagging chickens?’

  ‘I would if I were a rooster. And it’s probably the only job they can get.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t pan out,’ said the head chef. ‘I’ve never heard of any chicken stud farms where millions of roosters shag billions of chickens every day. There’s no such place.’

  ‘There must be,’ said Jack.

  ‘Then tell me where.’

  ‘I’m new to these parts.’

  ‘Well, don’t they have chickens where you come from?’

  Jack remembered certain anal-probings. ‘Well, they do …’ he said.

  ‘It doesn’t work,’ said the head chef, oiling up another chicken and giving it a little flick with his fat forefinger. ‘Doesn’t work. There’s simply too many chickens being eaten every day. You’d need a stud farm the size of Kansas. It just doesn’t work.’

  ‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘I have to agree
that you’ve given me food for thought.’ And he laughed.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’ asked the head chef.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Jack. ‘So what is your theory? I suspect that you do have a theory.’

  ‘Actually I do,’ said the head chef, ‘but I’m not going to tell you because you wouldn’t believe it. You’d laugh.’

  ‘You’d be surprised at what I believe,’ said Jack. ‘And what I’ve seen. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.’ Which rang a bell somewhere.*

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t believe this.’

  ‘I’ll just bet you I would. Trust me, I’m an assistant chef.’

  ‘Well, fair enough,’ said the head chef. ‘After all, you are in the trade, and clearly destined for great things. But don’t pass on what I say to those Puerto Rican wetbacks – they’ll only go selling it to the Weekly World News.’

  Jack raised his cleaver and prepared to bring it down.

  ‘They are not of this world,’ said the head chef.

  Jack brought his cleaver down and only just missed taking his finger off.

  ‘What?’ said Jack. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Have you heard of Area Fifty-Two?’ asked the head chef.

  Jack shook his head.

  ‘Well,’ said the head chef, ‘ten years ago, in nineteen forty-seven,† a flying saucer crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. The Air Force covered it up, gave out this story that it was a secret military balloon experiment, or some such nonsense. But it wasn’t. It was a UFO.’

  ‘And a UFO is a flying saucer?’

  ‘Of course it is. And they say that the occupants on board were still alive and the American government has done a deal with them – in exchange for advanced technology they let the aliens abduct a few Americans every year for experimentation, to cross-breed a new race.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Jack, his cleaver hovering.

  ‘Half-man, half-chicken. Those aliens are chickens, sure as sure.’

  Jack scratched his head with his cleaver and nearly took his left eye out.

  ‘And I’ll tell you how I figured it out,’ said the head chef. ‘Ten years ago there were no chicken diners, no fast-food restaurants. Chickens came from local farms. Shucks, where I grew up there were chicken farms, and they could supply just enough chickens and eggs to the local community. Like I said, the numbers are now impossible.’

  ‘But hold on there,’ said Jack. ‘Are you saying that all these google billions of chickens are coming from Area Fifty-Two? What are you saying – that they’re being imported by the billion from some chicken planet in outer space?’

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ said the head chef, oiling up another bird. ‘Well, not the last bit. These chickens here are being produced at Area Fifty-Two. The alien chickens would hardly import millions of their own kind to be eaten by our kind every day, would they?’

  Jack shook his head.

  ‘When I say that they’re being produced, that’s what I mean. Look at these chickens – they’re all the same. All the same size, all the same weight. Check them out in the supermarket. Rows of them, all the same size, all the same weight. They’re all one chicken.’

  Jack shook his head once more and made a face of puzzlement.

  ‘They’re artificial,’ said the head chef. ‘I’m not looking now, but I’ll bet you that each of those chickens has a little brown freckle on the left side of its beak.’

  Jack fished a couple of chicken heads from the bin and examined each in turn.

  They both had identical freckles.

  Jack flung the chicken heads down, dug into the swelling head bin, brought out a handful, gazed at them.

  And said, ‘Identical.’

  ‘Sure enough,’ said the head chef.

  ‘This is incredible,’ said Jack. ‘But why hasn’t anyone other than you noticed this?’

  ‘It’s only at the Golden Chicken chain that the chickens arrive with their heads on. They don’t have their heads on in supermarkets.’

  ‘Whoa!’ said Jack. ‘This is deep.’

  ‘Do you believe what I’m telling you?’

  ‘I do,’ said Jack. ‘I do.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad that you do. You’re the first assistant chef I’ve had who did. Mostly they just quit when I tell them. They panic and run. They think I’m mad.’

  ‘Well, I don’t,’ said Jack. ‘But what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘Do?’ asked the head chef. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean,’ said Jack, ‘that you know a terrible secret. You have exposed a dreadful conspiracy. It is your duty to pursue this to its source and expose the perpetrator. All of America should know the truth about this.’

  ‘Well,’ said the head chef, ‘I’d never thought of it that way.’

  ‘Well, think about it now. Surely as head chef you could follow this up the chain of command. Identify the single individual behind it.’

  ‘Well, I suppose I could. We head chefs are being invited to head office tomorrow. I could make subtle enquiries there.’

  ‘It is your duty as an American to do so.’

  ‘My duty.’ The head chef shook his head. It had a chef’s hat on it. The chef’s hat wobbled about. And now much of the head chef began to wobble about.

  ‘Your duty,’ Jack continued, ‘even if it costs you your life.’

  ‘My life?’ The head chef’s hands began to shake.

  ‘Well, obviously they’ll seek to kill you because of what you know. You are a threat to these alien chicken invaders. They’ll probably want to kill you and grind you up and feed you to the artificial chickens that are coming off the production line.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said the head chef. ‘Oh my, oh my.’

  ‘You’ll need to disguise the shaking,’ said Jack, ‘when you’re at the meeting tomorrow with all those agents of the chicken invaders. I’ve heard that chickens can smell fear. They’ll certainly be able to smell yours.’

  ‘Oh dear, oh my, oh my,’ said the head chef once more, and now he shook from his hat to his shiny shoes.

  ‘If you don’t come back,’ said Jack, ‘I will continue with your cause. You will not have died, horribly, in vain.’

  The head chef fled the kitchen of the Golden Chicken Diner upon wobbly shaking legs and Jack found himself promoted once again.

  17

  By the time Jack clocked off from his first day at the Golden Chicken Diner, it had to be said that he was a firm believer in the power of the American Dream.

  ‘Head chef?’ said Dorothy as she clocked off in a likewise manner.

  ‘Hard work, ambition and faithfulness to the company’s ethic,’ said Jack, and almost without laughing.

  Although Jack didn’t feel much like laughing. Jack felt anxious and all knotted up inside. Jack worried for Eddie. Feared for his bestest friend.

  Jack’s bestest friend was more than a little afeared himself. He was afeared and he was hungry, too. Eddie had spent a most uncomfortable day travelling third class in the luggage compartment of a long black automobile.

  There had been some stops for petrol, which Eddie had at first assumed were stops for winding of the key. Until he recalled that the cars of this world were not at all powered by clockwork. And there had been lots of hurlings to the left and the right, which Eddie correctly assumed were from the car turning corners. And there had been slowings down and speedings up and too many hours had passed for Eddie Bear. For as Eddie knew all too well, with each passing hour, indeed with each passing minute, the car was taking him further away, away from his bestest friend Jack.

  ‘I can see that look on your face again,’ said Dorothy to Jack. ‘You are worrying about Eddie.’

  ‘How can I do anything else?’ Jack asked outside the diner as he slipped on his nice clean trenchcoat.

  Dorothy shrugged and said, ‘You’re doing all you can. And my, that trenchcoat smells of chicken.’

  Jack made that face yet again.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,�
�� said Dorothy. ‘I’ll take you out tonight, to a club – how would you like that?’

  ‘If it’s a drinking club,’ said Jack. Hopefully.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘Dorothy,’ said Jack, and he looked into the green eyes of the beautiful woman. ‘Dorothy, one thing. You only had enough money to pay for a couple of cups of coffee earlier. How come you can now afford to take me out to a club?’

  ‘I stole money out of the cash register,’ said Dorothy.

  ‘Oh, that’s all right then,’ said Jack. ‘I thought you might have done something dishonest.’

  No further words were exchanged upon this matter and Jack and Dorothy walked arm in arm down Hollywood Boulevard.

  Dorothy pointed out places of interest and Jack looked on in considerable awe, whilst wishing that Eddie was with him to see them.

  ‘That’s where the Academy Awards ceremony is held each year to honour the achievements of movie stars,’ said Dorothy. ‘One day I will go onto the stage there and receive my award for Best Actress.’

  ‘I thought you were going into producing,’ said Jack.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dorothy. ‘Best Actress and Best Producer and I hope you’ll be there, too. You’d look wonderful in a black tuxedo and dicky bow. Very dashing, very romantic.’

  At length they reached the Hollywood Wax Museum.

  ‘Would you like to see the movie stars?’ asked Dorothy. ‘They are here in effigy.’

  Jack shrugged. ‘About this drinking club. I’ve had a hard day and I do like to unwind over a dozen or so beers.’

  ‘All in good time, come on.’

  Now wax museums are very much like Marmite.

  In that you either love ’em or hate ’em. There’s no in between. No, ‘I think I fancy a visit to the wax museum today, sort of.’ It’s either yes indeedy-do, or no siree.

  At the door to the wax museum stood the effigy of a golden woman in a white dress, the skirt of which periodically rose through the medium of air-jets beneath to reveal her underwear.

  ‘I like wax museums,’ said Jack. ‘Yes indeedy-do.’

  ‘That’s Marilyn Monroe,’ said Dorothy as she purchased the tickets from a man in the ticket booth who looked like a cross between Bella Lugosi and Rin Tin Tin. ‘She’s the most famous actress in the world.’