The Chicken Gave It To Me (4 page)

‘What's going to happen to us?'

‘Let me out!'

‘Oooooh!'

‘Help us,
please
!'

Oh, it was pitiful. But they were one up on us poor chickens. They could at least argue with their jailors.

‘Why are you keeping us in here? Are you planning to
eat
us?'

‘'Fraid so.'

‘But that's
outrageous
.'

The little green man busy filling their water troughs was clearly a bit put out to hear this.

‘What's so outrageous about it? You taste
good
.'

‘You can't just eat us because we taste good!'

‘Why not?'

‘Because we're
people
, that's why.'

The little green man shrugged.

‘Pigs. Chickens. People. What's the difference?'

‘Pigs and chickens are only animals.'

‘So? You're only people.'

‘But we're
superior
.'

‘Not to me, Buster,' said the little green man. And scowling horribly, he left the shed. When he came back, he brought a mate with him, to give him a hand with the water troughs.

‘These people here,' he said, pointing to the inmates of the cages. ‘They say they're superior.'

‘Not to me, they're not,' his friend scoffed.

‘That's what I told 'em!' laughed the first little green man.

The people were rattling their cage bars in a fury.

‘We are! We are!'

‘Superior? Come off it!' The little green man lifted his hand and ticked his points off, one by one, on some of his willowy green fingers.

‘Horses are stronger. Swans are more loyal. Chimps live more peaceably. Seahorses have more babies. Dogs follow a scent better. Giraffes are taller. Squids have better eyesight. Camels go longer without water. Jaguars run faster. And little green men know more languages.'

He had plenty of fingers left, but he'd got bored.

‘I could go on and on,' he said, picking up the last bucket and tipping the water smoothly into the last trough. ‘In fact, I could be quite rude, and say that the only thing you lot really had going for you was that you ran the whole planet.'

Just before he slammed the shed door behind him, he added as an afterthought:

‘Oh, yes! And you taste better than chicken!'

‘I won't have the chicken, thank you,' Gemma said to the dinner lady. ‘Not today. Can I have what Vinit is having?'

The dinner lady made her usual joke.

‘If Vinit doesn't eat up his meat, he won't grow.'

Vinit gave his usual polite chuckle. He was the tallest boy in the class, and had never eaten meat in his whole life. Today, Gemma and Andrew sat down on either side of him. Gemma seemed to have
chicken on her mind, even if she had none on her plate.

‘You've never eaten it
ever
?'

‘No.'

‘What about lamb?'

‘No.'

‘Pork?'

‘No. We don't eat meat at all. No one in my family does. We never have.'

He watched as Gemma peeled open her sandwich hopefully, to see if the peanut butter was any thicker in the middle.

Across the table, Leila finished her mouthful and spoke up.

‘My mum says that if we didn't eat animals, there would soon be hardly any of them about.'

Simon looked round in surprise when he heard this.

‘My dad says if we didn't eat them, they'd overrun us in no time.'

‘They can't both be right.'

‘Maybe they're both wrong.'

The whole table fell quiet, thinking about people and animals. Whales. Dolphins. Elephants. Gorillas. Hard to believe that any animal in the world would be all that much worse off left alone.

Moodily, Andrew poked at the lump of chicken on his plate. He was hungry, but he couldn't quite bring himself to eat it. Gemma felt sorry for him. She didn't feel like swapping plates, but she did try to encourage him.

‘I don't see why you shouldn't eat it if you want. That chicken was keen enough to gobble up the grub. And that was still alive.'

Vinit was staring now.

‘What are you two on about? What chicken? What grub?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Doesn't matter.'

Andrew made another stab at eating his lunch. This time the fork got as far as his mouth before he had to put it down again.

Vinit was still staring at him.

‘What's the matter?'

Andrew laid down his fork.

‘I just can't eat it.'

‘Why not?'

‘I don't know. I think it's because I'm not sure where it comes from. I don't know how it fetched up on my plate. I don't know anything at all about it. I don't even know what sort of life it led.'

He looked gravely at Gemma.

‘Maybe it even came out of one of those long brown sheds . . .'

Vinit was grinning now.

‘If you can't eat it because you didn't know it personally,' he said, ‘then you'd better have some of my sandwich.'

Gratefully, Andrew took what he was
offered. Silently, Gemma handed him some more. While he was chewing, he eyed the slab of chicken cooling on his plate.

‘I'd eat it,' he told Gemma and Vinit, ‘I'd eat it with no trouble if I knew for certain that all its life it had been –'

He broke off. It sounded so silly that he couldn't say it.

‘Yes?' Vinit prompted him. ‘You'd eat it if you knew that all its life it had been –?'

Andrew blushed.

‘Happy as a grub.'

‘A
grub
? You mean, like a
maggot
?'

Andrew nodded.

Vinit laid down what was left of his sandwich, and pushed back his chair.

‘Excuse me,' he said politely, and got up and left.

Without even thinking, Andrew snatched up the remains of Vinit's sandwich, and gobbled it.

‘Hungry work, all this reading,' he explained to Gemma.

Chicken no longer!

I stuck my beady eye to a knothole. Inside the shed, an argument was raging.

‘Listen, you don't
need
to eat us. You got on perfectly well before you landed here. None of you look starved. None of you even look hungry. Why pick on us?'

‘I
told
you. You
taste
good. After a long, hard day taking over a new planet, there's absolutely nothing to beat the smell of a nice, roasting –'

‘Shut up! Shut up!'

All the cage bars were rattled frantically.

‘Stop saying that!'

‘Not in front of the children!'

The little green man
tried to be reasonable.

‘Look,' he said. ‘I grant you it isn't the world's best life, being stuck in a cage till you're eaten. And maybe we were a bit rough with one or two of you. I'm sorry about that.' He spread his green hands. ‘There. I've said it. I'm sorry. I can't say fairer than that, can I?'

He waited for his apology to be accepted as generously and graciously as he had made it.

There was a stony silence. Then, from the back row of cages came the word:

‘X!*&@/%!'

Language a chicken wouldn't dream of repeating.

The little green man's mood turned a shade on the ugly side.

‘I'll tell you what gets me,' he said. ‘The sheer hypocrisy of it! Who built these sheds without any windows or fresh air? You
lot did! Who put up the cages? You did! And who locked those poor stupid little chickens up in them?'

(‘Poor stupid little chickens'? I didn't care much for his attitude. But I kept watching.)

He was swinging around now, pointing a green finger at cage after cage.

‘And who kept them in here, not just day after day, or week after week, but for
lifetimes
?' His green lip curled with scorn. ‘Now look at you! The tables are turned,
and do any of you have the guts to face the fact you're getting no worse than you gave out? No. It's moan, moan, moan! Weep, weep, weep! Whine, whine, whine! You
disgust
me!'

He glowered round the shed.