‘What did you mean about chickens being tortured?’ asked Ben as they walked away.
Esmé looked at him in surprise.
‘In battery farms, crammed into tiny cages from birth, filled with chemicals … you know,’ she said.
‘No,’ said Ben.
Esmé stopped.
‘Where did you think chickens came from?’ she asked.
‘The supermarket,’ said Ben.
She strode off down the street, leaving Ben standing bewildered.
She beckoned him to follow her.
12
Ham and Eggs
Ben hobbled off the bus on the balls of his feet, legs numb after sitting in the same position for an hour and a half. He tried to look ready to spring into action.
But there wasn’t a tortured chicken in sight.
Just scrappy paddocks on both sides of the road behind carbon-monoxide choked trees. There was a cow. But it was on a hoarding advertising hamburgers.
The bus growled away leaving a haze of foul smelling exhaust.
Esmé started climbing over a rusty wire fence.
‘Like all prisons,’ she said, ‘they always stick chicken farms miles from the nearest bus stop. Come on.’
Ben and Esmé trudged across a paddock whose occupants were a couple of lethargic horses, contemplating their futures on the backs of stamps, and a few rusting car bodies.
Ben had always liked the country, that big, clean place at the end of the expressway. Dad had taken a weekend off once and they’d gone in the car.
Must have been counting motorbikes while we were passing this bit, thought Ben. Even the Australia II Memorial Reserve at home leaves this for dead and it’s got drinking fountains in the shape of winged keels.
After more trudging they reached a huge corrugated iron shed. Esmé swung herself over another fence and pulled Ben over. She crept towards the door of the shed.
Ben followed, realising he didn’t have a clue what they were actually going to do.
He saw that the door was chained and padlocked shut. His pulse dropped to very high. It couldn’t be anything too drastic.
Yes it could. Esmé took a pair of boltcutters from her cane shopping bag and sliced through the chain with a practised grunt.
She turned to Ben.
‘Okay, we free as many of the poor blighters as we can.’
She pushed the door open. What had been merely the sound of several thousand chickens muffled by corrugated iron now became a roar of clucking.
Ben found his legs wouldn’t move.
Esmé saw him hesitating.
‘Look,’ she said gently, ‘just pretend this is the first day you walked into class with that hairdo.’
Ben followed her inside.
It took his eyes a while to get used to the gloom, so for the first few seconds he was blinded and deafened. Then he found himself looking at thousands and thousands of chickens in tiny wire cages, stacked from floor to roof, stretching away into the distance.
He remembered the Old MacDonald’s Farm picture book he’d had as a kid. One page sprang to mind, a farmyard filled with fat white hens pecking the earth.
These miserable creatures were from a different planet.
He walked down an aisle, horrified. The lank, greasy feathers. The deformed beaks. The sores. The dull, hormone-bloated eyes. And the deafening noise of misery.
Under each cage was a chute leading to a conveyor belt which in turn led to big egg-sorting machines. Next to one of these Ben picked up an egg box from a stack waiting to be filled. On the lid were the words ‘Fresh Farm Eggs’ with a drawing of a traditional farmyard.
Suddenly the squawks near Ben got even louder. He spun round.
Esmé had opened a cage door and hauled out a chicken, which was trying for the first time in its life to walk.
‘Come on,’ she yelled, ‘pull your finger out.’
Ben watched the chicken stagger on its knees for a bit more, then realised Esmé was talking to him.
He pulled open the door of a cage and thrust his hands in, trying to get a grip on the scrawny, flapping bird inside.
The cage wasn’t any bigger than the average KFC box but he couldn’t get hold of anything solid to hang onto.
As the chicken scrabbled in a frenzy and feathers dropped out of its already patchy wings, Ben felt he was going to be sick.
Esmé, who had a dozen cages open, the squawking birds fluttering and limping around her, came over and took him by the arm.
‘Go and keep a look out,’ she said.
Ben ran out into the sunlight and leant against the hot corrugated iron wall of the shed, gasping in huge lungfuls of air.
After being in there, out here was paradise. He looked across the green fields and trees.
And saw a white car hurtling along the dusty approach road. A white car with a badge on the door!
He banged frantically on the wall and yelled in through the doorway.
‘Someone’s coming!’
All Ben could see was a mass of chickens hysterical with freedom. Esmé’s voice echoed out.
‘About time. I rang them an hour ago.’
Ben couldn’t believe it. Rang the police? He’d heard of police informers but never one who’d dobbed herself.
Ben turned as the car skidded to a stop and two men leapt out, one wearing a brown suit and carrying a microphone, the other in a T-Shirt with a portable camera on his shoulder.
Ben looked again at the badge on the car door. It was the logo of a TV station.
‘Why do we always get the animal stories?’ muttered the cameraman.
‘Don’t knock it,’ said the reporter, checking his hair in the wing mirror, ‘she’s good value.’
Several chickens fluttered out of the shed door and Esmé appeared with several more in her arms. She waited till the red light went on on the camera, then threw the chickens into the air with a dramatic gesture.
The cameraman zoomed into her. Her hair was full of feathers and her face and coat were streaked with droppings.
Then Ben heard a siren.
Another car hurtled round the bend in the approach road, this time with a blue light flashing on the roof.
‘Run for it!’ yelled Ben. ‘The cops!’
‘You buggers,’ Esmé said to the reporter and cameraman. ‘You promised.’
She ran back inside the shed.
Ben followed her. Behind him he heard the reporter calling them back out, pleading that the video camera wouldn’t work in the dark.
Ben ducked down behind a row of cages as the police car screeched to a halt outside.
Esmé was flinging open cage doors as fast as she could, leaving the chickens to find their own way out.
Two burly cops stepped into the shed and went for Esmé.
‘Okay, you’ve got no right to be here, lady,’ announced one of them.
An egg splattered onto his chest.
‘I’m here in the name of humanity,’ shouted Esmé and hurled another egg. The policeman whipped his cap off and used it as a shield. Or omelette bowl.
He advanced on Esmé through a barrage of eggs and grabbed her in a bear hug.
Ben stood up.
‘Leave her alone,’ he yelled.
The other policeman sprinted towards him. Ben looked around frantically. No eggs! A million egg-laying chooks and he chooses constipation row.
He turned and sprinted down the aisle.
‘Come here, Grandad,’ said a gruff voice close behind him.
The young constable peered through the gloom at the small, bald figure running in front of him.
He threw himself into a flying tackle and the two of them crashed onto a pile of bulging, revolting-smelling sacks.
‘Got you, you old ratbag,’ grunted the constable.
He turned Ben over and his policemanly face crumpled with surprise.
Then it went very stern again.
13
Chilled Pork
Di and Ron sat
in the living-room, their faces taut with worry, trying not to look at the pine clock on the wall.
Five minutes to seven.
Ron picked up some papers and ran his eyes down the columns but ‘lamb’ and ‘beef’ might have been messages from some distant galaxy for all the sense they made to him.
Di tried to run through in her mind the angry scene they’d had when Claire arrived home alone, the accusations, the tears, Claire’s vow to stay on a hunger strike till Ben turned up … Di couldn’t concentrate.
Four minutes to seven.
At seven o’clock they were going to have to accept that their twelve-year-old son was missing, that something terrible might have happened to him, and that they were going to have to ask the authorities to supply them with the awful details.
Di tried to count the number of years she’d lived in fear of that, the ring at the door, the two grim-faced figures in blue, ‘Mrs Guthrie?’, caps in hand as if already at a funeral …
The door-bell rang.
They leapt up and flung themselves into the hallway. Ron got the front door open.
Ben stood there, the porch light shining on his dirt-streaked face. Mud stuck to his jeans and T-shirt. A chicken feather floated down onto the tiles.
Di and Ron buckled with relief.
‘Where have you been?’
‘Claire’s been home for hours.’
‘Why didn’t you ring?’
‘Another five minutes and we were going to call the police.’
The police, in the form of two muddy constables, stepped forward out of the shadows and stood, grim-faced, on either side of Ben.
Ron and Di stared at them in alarm.
‘Mr and Mrs Guthrie?’ said one of the policemen. ‘I’m Constable Mulock and this is Constable Harris. We’d like to come in to investigate some serious allegations that have been brought to our notice.’
They took Ben’s arms and guided him past his horrified parents into the house.
‘Cripes, Wayne, he’s right. The nuclear equivalent of forty-seven tonnes of TNT for every man, woman and child on Earth.’
The two policemen stood in Ben’s room, poring over the magazine Ben held open for them on his desk. They looked deeply worried.
‘I thought he was exaggerating,’ said Constable Harris.
‘It gets worse,’ said Ben. He turned the page gravely. Inside he was jumping for joy. What a day. First Esmé, now the cops. People who cared.
He looked at Ron and Di, who were standing open-mouthed in the doorway, their horror mingled with utter amazement.
They’re not bad people, he thought. If the cops can do it, they can. They just need time.
Constable Mulock picked the magazine up and read from it, his flat courtroom voice tinged with alarm.
‘ “If just twenty per cent of known nuclear weapons were detonated, human life would cease to exist in the northern hemisphere …” ’
The two policemen looked at each other.
Constable Harris’ voice wavered as he spoke.
‘Makes parking in a bus zone seem a bit irrelevant, doesn’t it?’
Wal swept his arm expansively around the truck loading bay.
‘… and this is where the meat’ll be loaded for the shops.’
Jean and Barry stared intently at the truck loading bay, nodding thoughtfully. The trouble with guided tours of wholesale meat bulkstores was that there wasn’t much you could say. ‘I like the colours’ worked well in art galleries but the bulkstore was basically grey. ‘It doesn’t look six hundred years old’ was great in museums but the bulkstore had only been finished on Tuesday. Bulkstores sort of restricted you to things like ‘it’s very nice’.
‘It’s very nice,’ said Jean.
Barry kept nodding. He wasn’t really sure why they were there. Sure it was Ron’s pride and joy but they’d be at the official opening on Monday. He had better things to do than traipse through freezers and cool rooms while a fat butcher waffled on about thermostats and offal chillers and Ron and Di tagged along behind looking glum.
‘That’s it,’ said Wal proudly. He turned to Ron. ‘Well mate, couple of days and you’ll be up there with the big boys.’
Ron didn’t look as though this prospect set his major organs a quiver, in fact he didn’t look as though he’d even heard what Wal had said.
Ron glanced at Di, who was looking similarly dour. He cleared his throat.
‘Actually … Di and I didn’t ask you here just for the tour.’
‘It’s Ben,’ said Di.
‘We’ve tried everything,’ said Ron. ‘Discipline, psychiatry, ignoring him … and he ends up on TV being chased by the police.’
‘Terrible.’ Wal shook his head, his normally jolly face grieving. ‘I was watching “The Simpsons” and I missed it.’
‘You’re our best friends,’ said Di, ‘and we need your advice about what to do next.’
She looked imploringly at Wal, Jean and Barry.
‘Electric shock treatment,’ said Barry.
Jean glared at him.
‘I’ve seen it all before,’ he continued, ‘young blokes shave their heads, next thing they’ve got tattoos …’
Jean stepped forward, grinding her heel into Barry’s foot and laying her hand on Di’s arm.
‘Perhaps he just needs something to take his mind off this obsession with major world problems,’ she said. ‘Something closer to home.’
‘When Daryl was picking his spots,’ said Wal, ‘we bought him boxing gloves.’
Di looked intently at Jean.
‘You mean a problem closer to home for him to worry about?’ she asked.
‘Plummeting property values,’ said Barry, massaging his foot.
Ron took Jean’s arm urgently.
‘You mean a problem within the family?’
‘I don’t just mean a problem,’ said Jean, ‘I mean a disaster.’
Ron and Di stared at her.
14
Mincing Words
Ben was glad to see Dad had dressed for the occasion this time.
He remembered the last time they’d sat together on his floor for a chat. The sight of the seams in Ron’s safari suit stressed beyond the previously known tolerance for poly-cotton weave had made it hard to concentrate on the matter in hand.
This time Dad was much more sensibly dressed in a loose-fitting tracksuit with plenty of give in it. Its seams were in the peak of condition, this being only the second time Dad had worn it since Mum gave it to him for Christmas four years ago.
But he still didn’t seem to be comfortable. In fact while Ben spoke, Dad wriggled and writhed and looked like a man who wished he was somewhere else.
‘… so after nuclear war in the northern hemisphere thirty per cent of the ozone layer in the southern hemisphere would be destroyed.’
‘Um … Ben …’
Ben saw that his father was trying to interrupt him. Here we go, he thought. The Birds And The Bushflies Episode Two. Well, I’m going to get this out. Some things are more important than what mummies and daddies do together when they love each other very much.
‘It’s the ozone that protects us from the sun,’ he continued urgently, stressing the words with his hands.
‘Ben …’ said Ron.
‘Everyone in Australia would be blinded,’ shouted Ben.
‘Ben … um … look mate, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news too.’
My God, thought Ben, this man’s capacity for evading the obvious is without limit. Is there anything he wouldn’t do to avoid having to face facts?
Ben wondered why cross thoughts always came out in headmaster talk.
‘It’s … er … your mother,’ said Ron.
‘Mum?’
‘It’s just been discovered that …’ Ron swallowed. ‘She’s not well, Ben.’
Ben felt a flicker of panic dancing around inside him.
‘Not well?’
‘It’s a rare neuro-metabolic condition.’ Ron was star
ing hard at the carpet. He looked up at Ben.
‘It’s not serious so long as she has plenty of rest and doesn’t have to worry about things.’
He lifted his hand to ruffle Ben’s hair, realised you can’t ruffle a smooth dome, and patted Ben awkwardly on the shoulder instead.
Ben didn’t notice.
‘Can’t they cure it?’ he demanded, panic creeping up his throat. ‘Those vast, highly trained organisations you’re always on about. Hospitals … specialists …’
Ron squirmed unhappily.
‘Er … they haven’t seen anything like it before.’ He took a deep breath. ‘All they know is she’s very fragile and if she has too much stress or worry about … well, chicken farms or … or ozone levels …’
Ron took another deep breath.
‘… Well, she didn’t want me to tell you this but she could … she could …’
Ben saw from the misery on Ron’s face what he was trying to say.
He leapt to his feet, his heart pounding, the room behaving like something out of a bad rock clip.
‘Mum!’
He had to find her. He ran out of the room.
Ron dragged himself painfully to his feet, calling after his distraught son.
‘Ben, she’s very fragile.’
Di thundered across the court and smashed a high-velocity return over the net and past her bewildered opponent.
Jean, sitting on the sideline, applauded and went back to fiddling with her sunglasses.
Di skipped back to the base line to receive the next serve, continuing her conversation with Jean as she went.
‘It’ll have to be me,’ she called out, ‘if we want to get it done this year.’
The woman at the other end served and Di hammered the ball back.
‘You know where Ron’s mind is most of the time,’ she continued, ‘if I leave it up to him …’
Jean signalled frantically to Di to be quiet because running towards them, his face heavy with concern, was Ben.
But Di was away, sprinting across the court to fling herself at a backhand return.
Ben stopped and gripped onto the wire safety fence, panting hard. He stared at his mother as she leapt around lunging and volleying, his concern gradually giving way to amazement. Fragile? She was leaping around like an Olympic gold medal winner.