‘With me not around, you’d shite on an egg less...’

This was a favoured riposte to any expression of ingratitude, even any subtle change in the countenance: the bridge of the nose crinkling, prelude to a frown...the mouth curling at the corners, prelude to a coolly disdainful dismissal of the subject or object at hand.

‘With me not around, you’d shite on an egg less. Me not here, you’d not know your arse from your elbow, and that’s a fact, Jack.’

And this latter expression, being unable to distinguish between the posterior and the mid-arm area, without her being around to show me, I fully understood. But it wasn’t until our getting in the chickens a year or so later, (one of those initially barmy ideas that I’d cook up, only to turn out a great success) did it start to coalesce in my understanding what she meant by the lack of an egg to defecate upon in the event of her absence.

It was one of my great joys that Spring, perhaps my only joy, going out to collect the chickens’ eggs those nearly-warm, foggy mornings, with the sun beyond it all glowing like an oil lamp enveloped in smoke.

She would stay in bed well after I got up in those days. Then always, as noon approached, her rising, like clockwork, coincided precisely with her favourite television programme: a hideous festival of half mad monsters paraded across her viewing under the pretence of ‘Talk Show’. A procession of sub-human never-could’ve-beens, sleekitly goaded by the polished, sharp-featured host into confessing their own sins and the sins committed against themselves in a daily indictment of the lives lived in the modern world today.

And while watching she’d mutter ‘...cosmic...’ in a faux-opiated way whenever one of the show’s contestants (and I use that word in its strictest sense) would admit to incest or bestiality or some other act of Satanic depravity beyond the imaginings of civilised man.

She’d take on this doped up turn as I say, as if mimicking an unfazed, amateur nihilist, letting the sticky-fingered gutturally convey their grotesque tapestry and it would all wash over her to ‘Cosmic’...’Cosmic’...’Cosmic’, which she’d repeat in response, like some half-baked mantra she used to deliver herself from the disgusting reality of what passed for televisual entertainment these days.

So I suggested chickens. Chickens, in maintaining and looking after them, struck me as the best solution. Their coop, right at the bottom of the garden, as far away as I could get, on foot, from her and, more to the point, her watching that show.

‘No! I’m putting the foot down on this one. No! No chickens.’

And I nearly acquiesced, until something she said a moment later made me realise I would have to explain to her that we weren’t going to keep them inside the house.

 ‘Oh well in that case, then,’ she said, ‘knock yourself out.’

A week and a half later I had constructed what looked like a sturdy and reliable chicken coop, with 3 tautly strung tiers of wire mesh protecting them from the elements and all that might harm them. In time I would add ramps and mirrors, tiny troughs for their water and some type of hi-tech grain dispenser, set to automatically scatter their staple about the place for them. For now though, until they settled in, security was the priority. We didn’t own a cat, can’t abide them myself, like snakes with fur I always thought, but the neighbourhood cats it seemed were all around, and would be no doubt delighted in being gifted the prize of a bunch of flightless chickens with no chance of escaping their indiscriminate claws.

‘How’s your little chicken house coming along, love-chop?’ she’d ask those mornings when the contestants were not pressing any of her buttons and she hadn’t given herself, body & soul, to the tube.

 Fine, good, I’d say, keeping it brief, bereft of detail. Which wasn’t to say, when I was putting it together, I didn’t try to include her, get her excited about what I was doing in a vain attempt to get her up off that sofa and out into God’s good air. But all was in vain: waxing lyrical over the wood, how I’d varnished it and how that would keep it in good stead in all weathers. The type of hay I was using; the type of grain – how the latter would help in my endeavouring that they be wholesome and happy and, in time, laying great big healthy eggs for us to eat. Then I’d describe how during their albeit short days, they would be running about the place, staying healthy, like she should’ve been doing, out in God’s good air, as I say.

                                                                                *

I’d lost my job at the bank 6 months previous, and it was her money, her dead parents’ money to be exact (went over a cliff in Bulgaria in their hire car), that we were living off till I found something new.

What had happened at the bank was...very, very unfortunate...I’d been on to a good thing there.

It was a Monday morning, busiest time. I’m filing statements, tabulating exchange rates, cross checking standing orders, all at the same time it felt like, and the telephone goes. It’s the Regional Chief Executive of the bank, the Big Chief, Head Whip Cracker.

 ‘Put me through to Bryans,’ he wheezes.

 ‘Certainly,’ I say...I say just at the very moment a milky-pale face appears at my cage, lips pursed with agitation.

 ‘I need you to tell me why I’ve been charged £7.50 on the 3rd of July, a bank charge it states here, and I want to know why, also, why there’s...’ and on she went, this anaemic, fuming woman spouting this, no doubt, well-rehearsed tirade and distracting me, no, not distracting, but causing in myself to suffer, for the entire time it took for her to finish, complete amnesia of the specific fact the Regional Head Executive was on the phone waiting...and waiting...for Bryans, him up the rung from me, who’d’ve just eaten this up, for sure.

Eventually, mustering all the diplomacy and fanciful number wizardry I could, offhand, I convinced the woman that her reasons for anger were completely unfounded. And as she turned and left, approaching the automatic doors and the sunny, bright pedestrianised shopping area beyond, a great and happy relief washed over the landscape of my inner-mind and I smiled. And nor was this a smile that would lift, even as the distant though loud ‘Hellos!’ became more and more apparent. If memory serves, that big happy grin was still on my face as I took up the receiver, and just at that moment it all came rushing back, of course, that those ‘Hellos!’ were the Hellos! of the Regional Chief Executive, who’d been waiting, waiting, waiting, on the other end.

 ‘Young man, that is past 25 minutes I’ve been waiting on this line. Do you know who I am?’

 I told him who he was: I told him he was the Regional Head Executive.

 ‘But I do not know who you are,’ he replied. ‘Who are you?’

 And I repeated to him, the throbbing in my temples beginning to abate, slightly: ‘“Who are you?”...Who am I?...Thank Fuck is who I am...’ and put the phone down, my toes already curled, my eyes closed tight.

It didn’t take them too long in whittling down who it was told the Regional Head Executive he was Thank Fuck. Actually, a process of whittling wasn’t even required. They just got the time the phone call was made, traced it to the extension that picked it up (my extension) and there you had it. Bryans told me to get my stuff and vamoose. Ate it right up, as I knew he would.

Anyway it was the dead parents’ house we’d been living in ever since we couldn’t make the mortgage on our old place and had to move out. But she didn’t want to live there permanent; it made her sad, heavy memories etc., the thought of staying there for good. So we hung around there, waiting till we could get it sold. Living between all our boxed up belongings stacked high and pushed behind doors or under tables or between the many wardrobes that were to be found all about the place. So many wardrobes that it seemed her mother had collected them like some other ladies of a certain age and place do ornaments or shoes. But hiding the boxes like this was so prospective buyers wouldn’t be put off when they came to view the place, as half-heartedly hidden as they were anyway – I don’t know why we bothered.

When it came to the expected squawking recriminations over my farcical dismissal from the bank I was indebted to who knows what that from her, gem that she is, the little earth angel that she will forever be, they were not forthcoming. Actually when she did refer to it, it was in a way that was beyond trivial, like she was recalling the time, say a fortnight ago, I’d overcooked the casserole slightly.

                                                                                 *

Sometime around the start of May a freak storm engulfed the county and three months’ worth of rain poured from the heavens in a matter of days. Generators in many neighbourhoods were swamped and the electric went out for a week. The chickens I got inside, save for one, who was swept up and over the low bit of the fence down in the corner of the garden and carried away by the floodwater. When that happened I decided I would individualise the remaining chickens, that is to say dye a small portion of their feathers a particular colour so as to identify each one separately. This would allow me to spot the subtleties in each one’s behaviour: who was the boss of the bus, who was the recluse, who was the brainiest, etc. And then there was of course naming them – I would give them all names. Five chickens left, five names to dream up.

I came to realise that as well as this being a fanciful and cute idea, perhaps brought on by the trauma of our downstairs being completely submerged, it was also, subconsciously (then consciously), a contingency against her going completely mad-as-a-barrel-of-bats while she didn’t have her TV.

Her viewing in the weeks before the flood had branched out some and had come to include cartoons before the Talk Show, then, afterward, some sort of soft-soap-satire late-afternoon politics show, covering in a seemingly, somehow televisual, bullet-point way, the notable legislative manoeuvrings of the day. Added to that, it was fronted by former Children’s Show Presenters. This programme disturbed me on a much deeper level than the Talk Show did.

But she’d been taken away from all this now, and she was very, very quiet, sitting at her vanity table in the master bedroom as she was, sipping water and waiting until we could return back downstairs again. In the meantime I was beginning to feel like one of those Religious Cult deprogrammers, hired by the family of a cult member to get them back home, but not before emptying their head of all the nonsense put in there by said cult. Trouble was that it seemed I was the sort of deprogrammer who, while knowing how to deliver them from the cult (or in my case, having an act of God deliver them for me), I was not au-fait, not in the slightest, in how to go about de-programming my wife, how to break the trance of that glass-faced sorcerer, Mister TV.

 ‘Do you think people in other counties, in neighbouring counties, are able to watch their TV?’ she asked in an almost girlish way as she attempted to determinedly (but in vain) tune the Digibox on the little portable flatscreen - the ‘Bedroom TV’, as she affectionately referred to it. ‘When will this fucking water go down? Were mum & dad insured? Did they have flood insurance? If they weren’t and if they didn’t, how will we be able to afford new stuff? Downstairs will never be the same again. We may as well stay up here.’

 ‘There’s a man in a bright orange kayak,’ I said on seeing him float by outside the window. ‘He’s rowing up Finton Mews.’

 ‘What about my questions?’

 ‘That is my answer. There’s a man on a kayak rowing up Finton Mews. I don’t know, is what I mean.’

 ‘...Dickhead. Dickhead that he is, anyway. He probably never uses that kayak. Has probably only bought it so that if the floods ever came to this county he’d get in it and row down somewhere like Finton Mews in front of the news cameras. And all to get his gub on the television.’

 ‘Dickheads like him wouldn’t do things like that if there weren’t people like you watching the TV all day though, eh? You think Evel Knievel ever pulled a stunt jump without an audience there watching him, eh?’

 To this she said nothing, and she went back to sipping her water.

 ‘Reckon that’s the longest back-and-forth we’ve had in a long time,’ I said, smug.

 To that she came over and stood by me in my chair next to the big window. ‘Let’s play I-spy,’ she said, pulling roughly on my earlobe.

Meanwhile, the chickens were being kept in the spare room where most of the mother’s old decommissioned wardrobes where. In the most luxurious looking of all these wardrobes (what she said was called a Kas wardrobe), is where I housed them. There were four compartments for shoes in the interior, two on either side, perfect little boxes, just the right size for them. The fifth one I put on the shelf at the top of the wardrobe, where I imagined the linens or towels were kept traditionally. I worried this would give her an unfair advantage being up top like that, that it would automatically grant her superiority.  

‘Right...names,’ I said to her on the third day marooned upstairs. ‘Let’s think of five names for our five chickens.’

 ‘There’s one less chicken...one less egg to shit upon...remember I used to say that to you?...’

 ‘“Without me around you’d have one less egg to shite upon.”’

 ‘‘Without me around, you’d shite on an egg less,’ is what it was. And I don’t talk like that.’

 ‘You do,’ I said, adopting her regional patois again, ‘“Tout me round, yid shite in’t ugg-luss.”’

 ‘“Ugluss?”’ she squealed. ‘Least I’m not referring to my Art of Pronunciation guidebook, adopting the Queen’s English, every time I get on the phone to pay the ‘leccy bill: “Oh, hellllooo...I’m ringing to inquire, would it be possible to pay one’s electricity bill this afternoon, perchance?”’

 ‘Speeds things along. Imparting information plainly and just loud enough so as not to be misunderstood. Some information however, no matter how well conveyed, you just simply can’t get a handle on...“...shite on an egg less”? Does it mean...in the absence of a contingent part the whole can be lessened, weakened...causing a potential schism, altogether?’

 ‘It means anything you want it to mean,’ she said absentmindedly, having turned to stare at herself in the vanity again. ‘That’s what you don’t get.’

 ‘You don’t know what it means either, is what you mean. Where’d you hear it anyway?’

 ‘I don’t know...on the back of a matchbox, maybe? Came out of a Christmas cracker, perhaps? My people said it all the time.’

 Outside, the man in the bright orange kayak floated past again, going in the opposite direction, coming back. He was paddling quicker now, rushing home to catch himself on the television news, I thought to myself. Anyway, I didn’t bother telling her about his return journey.

                                                                           *

By week’s end we’d come up with 5 perfectly delightful names for our chicken children; come to be surrogates for real children, I liked to imagine.

They were called Beryl, Cindy, Gertrude, Perpetua and Wilma. My first suggestions, a result of which, I admit, was my complete takeover of the naming process, had them called Rachel, Ruby, Roxanne, Ruth and Rhiannon, all rejected, both individually and collectively, - rejected especially in the latter sense due to the tongue-twisting alliterative hurdles all those R’s presented.

After their naming came their marking, and for that we used cheapo shop watercolour paints which we’d hoked out of the attic, along with a lot of other junk we soon discovered was no use for anything – headless dolls, around two hundred felt tips with a big elastic band round them, all gone dry, things like that.

Firstly Beryl, we coloured her purple, for her mellow nature.

Next came Cindy, yellow for her faraway daydreams, during which she didn’t move.

Then there was Gertrude, red for her angry constant clucking, she was the one most put out by the mandatory grain rationing I had to effect while we were trapped up there.

Second from last, dear Perpetua, fresh-bruise-blue was her colour, she being still as fat as before the flood hit, sitting all day, never moving, preserving her bulk till things were back to the way they were, the sly chuck, and so fresh-bruise-blue denoting her wisdom.

And then lastly Wilma, green for confusion, not knowing whether to run around or sit down, wasn’t long until she started plucking her feathers out, especially those we’d coloured. But replace the green we did elsewhere, always that green for her confusion.

                                                                           *

It was a Sunday when at last, - after the council had stopped dragging their heels and got the finger out, - the waters abated, slunk back down the drains or pumped into some river by the firemen.

A religious bod took it upon himself to stomp around the neighbourhood, through the mud and mass of faecal sewerage left behind by the water, positing loudly through a megaphone the significance, in a biblical, divine sense, of the waters going away on a Sunday. A wink and a nod from Father, Son and the Holy Ghost, and all that. 

 ‘The High Un has sent us Low Un’s a reminder that our tenuous faith and our complacent reliance on the playthings of Lucifer’s Kingdom can only result in our doom! High Un watch over us, your pitiful misguided children. This day last week, on your day High Un, the Sabbath day, you sent from the sky a deluge, such rains that gave measure to the tears you’d cried, up there in your heavenly home, over us, your earthbound progeny! Well the High Un has sent us a paternal missive in the shape of these floods, in order that we try and reverse our folly and see at last the glory of his love...Amen!’

He went on like this, sending his entreaties heavenward with his very animated body and his googly bloodshot eyes. I imagined as well that he most likely had an acutely terrible case of halitosis. I turned to her, to make a joke, and discovered she’d gone. I listened a moment and could hear her squelch through the muddy front hall downstairs, toward the front door, opening it when she got there. I went to the window and watched her walk down the path to the front gate. She was carrying two chickens, Perpetua and Beryl, one under each arm. She said, ‘Here...here are chickens; an offering to the High Un.’

The Holy Joe stopped in his tracks, his body and beseechments ceasing, taken in by her and our - my - chickens.

 ‘Bring ‘em to me, daughter of the High Un,’ he said in some Dark Ages accent identical to hers.

I got myself down the stairs, through the mud and out the front door. By this point she’d approached Holy Joe and placed Beryl and Perpetua at his feet. And by the time I got myself to the front gate, hands out, waving STOP, everything in slow-motion in my head, (I’m the perennial mother in a horror picture, running toward her limp, dead-for-sure child) shouting, ‘NO! YOU CUNTS!’, up went Beryl first, then Perpetua, up into Holy Joe’s mud flecked, coarse hands, and with those hands he wrung their necks, and the two chucks, God love and keep them, fell lifelessly down, plopping into the morass of filth we all stood in, their colourful feathers browned beyond all recognition with it.

I ran at them, slapping their heads and their bodies like a middle-class mother afraid of getting her expensive jewelry scratched in the fray; that is to say I slapped at them with a modicum of caution. The last thing I needed on her was visible bruising around the facial area.

 ‘Unhand us, proud heathen!’ screamed Holy Joe.

 At this aggressive though righteous request, around half a dozen folk all came up out of nowhere, just appeared from behind trees or emerged from their houses. I assumed they were neighbours that hitherto I’d paid no heed to, explaining my not recognizing them...but anyway, they descended upon me. Kicks and punches. Beat the living fuck out of me.

                                                                           *

I awoke on our once beautiful, now putrid-smelling and all around disgusting, Parker Knowles sofa, which had been dragged from the drawing room and placed, haphazardly, in the front garden. It felt like days had passed, and I wasn’t thoroughly convinced this wasn’t the case.

The windows to the drawing room were open wide. From indoors came the unmistakable, highly delicious smell of frying chicken.

I hobbled into the kitchen, timid, eyes pointed downward. Holy Joe sat at the table, her sitting opposite him. Milling around were 3 or 4 others that’d put the beat down on me. On the table were 3 chicken carcasses, 2 picked clean and one halfway there.

 ‘Come brother; come under the eyes of the High Un. Come sit and rap with us, son,’ said Holy Joe, now calm and languid, sated by a bellyful of my chicken children.

 ‘I’ll stand,’ I said.

 I noticed she was counting money, notes and coins, the notes going in a big padded envelope, the coins into bags. ‘I have given our chickens so that they may feed us stricken children of the High Un,’ she said, all the way along the Yellow Brick Road. ‘And in return all these good people have raised money for us, to clear things up. It turns out our house was the worst hit on the street, being in a dip in the land here, as we are. We’ll bypass the council, bring in a company to pump all this filth out. And with all this,’ she said, fanning herself with the bulging padded envelope, ‘we’ll still have enough afterward for new furniture, new carpets...A NEW TV,’ she squealed.

 ‘High Un be praised,’ exclaimed Holy Joe.

 ‘High Un be praised!’ went everyone else, bar me.

Holy Joe and the rest of them stayed the night then went home the following morning.

 ‘Have you lost your mind, you fucking mad cunt?’ I hissed, kicking half-congealed mud and shite up the back of her raincoat.

 ‘Not at all, love-chop,’ she replied. ‘It’s you that’s lost your mind if you think for one second that I’ve lost mine. Now, observe...’ she said, winking, and looking to me sexier than she had looked in a long time.

                                                                              *

Over the course of the next 6 weeks, things in the neighbourhood returned to normal.

We got a private company in that specialized in cleaning lakes and clearing floodwater, things like that. These men were wizards, geniuses, when it came to pneumatic technology, generally.

 ‘Thing is,’ she said one morning eating cereal and watching the men at work, ‘that that line I fed ‘em about this house being in a dip in the land? All tommyrot. I fed ‘em a line, they ate it up, shit it out, no complaints. And I don’t know what it is, what that flood’s done on folks’ minds, but they’re really taking to that Holy Joe. Goes by everything he says. And he’s got a hard-on for me, I’ll say. I go to him with this sob story: “my house in a dip, practically a lake now,” then he tells the flock “bring this sister money, for look, not only is she in dire need of financial help, but she offers us her chickens so that her brothers and sisters in the High Un’s family can eat off them.” And that’s practically what he said to them, word for word. And they brought us their money -’

 ‘And you gave them my chickens.’

 ‘And I gave them your chickens.’

 ‘Cunt.’

 ‘You should see the inside of most of their houses. They’re as bad as here. Worse, some. But we, sweetheart, now me and you, we’ve hit the jackpot. Going to be the first house round here to get fixed up. And as long as Holy Joe’s got everybody under his spell, isn’t nobody going to wonder why that is, either.’

 ‘He’s some type of mesmerist, him,’ I said, getting irritated at her creaming herself over those men. ‘Let’s go down the garden a bit and see if we can find anything left of the coop,’ I said.

 ‘I checked, it’s all gone. You go if you like, but. I’ll stay here,’ she replied. Then she said, ‘5 less chickens -’

 ‘6. One got swept away,’ I corrected.

 ‘6 less chickens, 6 less eggs to shit upon. But 6 less eggs to shit upon, 1 more carpet to walk upon, seat to sit upon, TV to watch.’

 ‘What are you talking about? What are you trying to say?’

 ‘These silly sayings...some make sense, a lot are nonsense. But people say them all the same. People say them in television shows. Probably in a round about way how all these specimens round here are so easily put under Holy Joe’s spell. The power of nonsense...it’s how despots get people to bend to their will...baffle ‘em with bullshit, but garnish it with...no it doesn’t have to be truth...more a plotted logic, that’s it. And when you got ‘em under that spell? You enact the clincher – you sacrifice something: give something of yourself away – shed your own blood, if needs be. When you do that, when you put something so important to you on the altar of your own lies, and kill it in the name of those lies, then they will give away everything they have to those lies, too.’

 ‘My, my...and none bullshit better than you, eh?’

 ‘You got it,’ she said, turning to watch the men again, to watch one man in particular squat and quiver a little as he laid down the big pump, an action which caused her to smirk, ever so slightly. ‘You go on, now,’ she said.

And so go on I did, down into the muddy garden, to look for something I knew was not going to be there.