Green (7 page)

And he paces up and down, squirting drops into his eyes as though he drinks through his corneas, burping big, salty, lemon-lime burps and turning them into words. Frank Green has reached the edge and travelled beyond it. Frank Green is maxed-out on Gatorade. Frank Green has a Daniel Boone hat.

He is coping very badly with our end of fourth year exams. And I'm not looking good, but Frank is in a state of raging, open disrepair.

‘But don't let me get in the way,' he says, and blows in my ear when I get back to my desk.

Gently, admittedly, but it's still blowing in my goddamn ear, and I already had a bit of a concentration problem. He unravels a paper clip and pokes my ear lobes with it.

‘Big lobes, big lobes,' he says. ‘Hey, is that a savoury-mince jaffle?'

‘And it's all yours,' I tell him. ‘But only as a present for quietly fucking off. Baby.'

And he dances behind me, as though there's a special dance you do when you get a jaffle and I've just never known it. And he dances out of the room, with only two brief curtain calls to mark his departure.

I hear a splash and he's in our pool. In our pool, wading up and down, arms above his head para-military style and chanting, ‘I'm mad as hell and I just can't take it any more.'

And I want to tell him, no, it wasn't that kind of mad, but it wouldn't seem right. And besides, I'm studying, that's what this book's for. This book I'm gazing at. This book that refuses to infiltrate my resolutely unthinking brain.

And Frank's wading and chanting, wading and chanting, and my mother brings him a pile of savoury-mince jaffles on a plate, and a milkshake. With a cocktail umbrella bobbing around on top, pinned to a maraschino cherry. And then, a separate appearance to give him a broad-brimmed hat, and I think he sings her something from
The Gondoliers
. She applauds, but that's only politeness. He's doing a shocking job of it.

Meanwhile, I have an appointment with a trance to get to, and I only come back when I lean forward onto the unravelled paperclip, which I'm now holding in my hand.

And there's less noise outside, and I look out again and Frank's still wading. Still with one arm above his head, clicking his fingers, but he's got the kitchen phone in his other hand, dragged out the full length of its extension cord.

I don't know what's going on. I don't want to.

So back to the books. Back to the gazing and achievement of little. Back to the menace of the paperclip, held in front of my forehead in case I drift again. And I do drift, of course I drift, but this time into a dream involving a sharp stabbing pain that just gets worse and worse.

Then Frank's in my room. In my room with my sister's towel around his waist (which will, in time, mean trouble) and a beer in one hand.

‘I've been putting in some calls,' he says, like a man with better options than he actually has.

‘And drinking my beer, too.'

‘Yeah, yeah. They come in sixes. You're supposed to share them. Anyway, stop the study for a sec. You'll want to hear this.'

And he tells me about the calls. Tells me Jenny Blair's bought four tubes of toothpaste and she's already onto the second. Tells me Slats is crying so much his nose is running. Tells me Oscar Wong told him to fuck off cause he'd never had a day like this with his Pac Man before.

‘Oscar Wong,' he tells me, ‘is in awe of himself, and that's a quote.'

‘Yeah, a Greg Norman quote.'

‘Yeah, but you get it, don't you?'

‘What?'

‘They're gone, aren't they? I've got this exam pretty much pissed in if I can keep my cool. I made ten calls out there, and I can name three people I've got beaten already.'

‘Biased sample. You picked them deliberately.'

‘It'll still stack up. What do you want, a metanalysis? Slats is so gone he's losing snot over it. I've got a four sewn up unless I cop some serious sunburn. P less than point-o-five, no worries. So I only came in to borrow some suncream.'

‘So what do you know about variance?' I ask him.

‘Nothing,' he says.

So we split the beers and drink three each, and for hours at least it won't matter that they were my father's.

I've got four people beaten now, four out of eleven, and even though the methods are questionable, it should extrapolate just enough.

 

 

 

WORLD OF CHICKENS—1985

 

 

1

 

 

H
ere
goes
: ‘Shouldst thou perchance purchase this mighty fowl, all will be well, and well for all.'

Done with flourish, as it should be. With a flouncing and flapping of wings, and with the usual outcome. Taringa's most stylish fast-food selling, but not a word of the spruiking part reaching anyone beyond the moulded plastic chicken head it started in. To the traffic, it's all a big wasted mime.

The lights change and the Leyland P76 at the front drives by, with the children in the back clearly having been instructed not to look at the chicken.

Problem is, I'm the chicken. Me and seven tall feet of costume, from my orange rubber toes to my orange rubber comb, with my broad white rooster body in between. And, sure, it's the chicken they're ignoring, but it's hard not to take these things personally—at least to some degree.

‘Sirrah, thou art nought but a beef-witted bum bailey,' I say rather too loudly, denouncing the driver, while giving an energetic flap of my right wing towards the World. Towards Ron Todd's World of Chickens. And anyone who thinks that, after weeks of this, I'm in some kind of rut out here should be aware that I saw it that way first, so that's why I turned things Elizabethan. I got in early, before all this bored me stupid and I gave it away and went looking for some other part-time job.

Not that this is exactly the job I thought I applied for. On the student union noticeboard it offered the anticipated shit pay, included meals and required ‘some experience in the food-service industry' and ‘good people skills'.

Now here I am, by the road—in the lonely world well beyond people skills—because I happen to fit the chicken costume, almost, and it's definitely one of those jobs when almost is more than good enough. If you almost fit the chicken costume you only spend half your time making burgers and the other half kerbside, attracting attention if not custom, swinging your arms around in mad-winged mime, saying whatever you want since they're all in their cars with the windows up.

But this time it turns out that Ron Todd is right next to me. This time, as I swivel enticingly—swivel and wave—there's a thump and my wing takes Ron in the chest.

‘Whoa there,' he says, and takes a step backwards. ‘Love the enthusiasm, Philip, but pedestrian traffic isn't out of the question. Remember that. We don't want to have me sued when one of you chickens decks someone.'

‘Sorry. But there is a bit of a visibility issue when you're looking at the world through a chicken's beak.'

‘Yes. I suppose we could open it a bit more, but then people'd be able to see you in there.'

‘And that'd completely spoil the illusion, wouldn't it?'

‘True, true.' Ron looks thoughtful, the cars cruise past. A chicken in conversation with a middle-aged man, maybe we should offer the traffic more of that—it's surreal enough that I'd look at it. ‘Quite a brain for a chicken,' he says. ‘I like that.'

‘Thanks.'

‘Now, what was that you were saying when I came out here?'

‘When exactly did you come out here?' Okay, this is a cause of at least some concern. I did most of Hamlet's soliloquy before the lights turned red and any self-respecting chicken where I come from would view that as, to say the least, a little passé.

‘You were talking about beef. And we don't do beef.'

‘No. Exactly. Beef-witted. That's what I was saying. As in, none too bright because they're passing up the pleasures of the World.'

‘Beef-witted,' he says, trying it out for size.

‘Yeah. It's Shakespearean. I do a bit of Shakespeare out here.' He gives me a look that says there has to be more to it. ‘It helps,' I tell him, and I shrug the wings and turn them to him palms upwards. (Do wings have palms? Perhaps not.)

‘Good, Philip. Good.' His look sidles from thoughtful to puzzled. ‘You'd be up for a swap soon, wouldn't you? How about we see you inside in five, back on the counter with Frank, and we'll send Sophie out here?'

‘Sure.'

He walks away. I resume my courting of the traffic.

And, all right, maybe he wasn't expecting Shakespeare, but what am I supposed to do? The chicken thing, certainly, but a person's brain does wander. Sometimes to old monologues or Elizabethan insults, sometimes to a list of the branches of the external carotid artery (superior thyroid, ascending pharyngeal, lingual, facial, occipital, posterior auricular, maxillary, superficial temporal), frequently to a catalogue of personal incidents that would be better off forgotten, sometimes to a few opening lines of autobiography, which might go like this:

 

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.'