Other Facts of Life, Page 5

‘I’m ignoring you,’ she muttered through clenched teeth.

  ‘I’m ignoring you.’

  Cripes, thought Ben, sweating inside his rubber mask, I think she is.

  ‘Don’t eat it all at once.’

  Wal handed the parcel of meat over the counter to the customer with a forced smile.

  ‘I won’t,’ said the customer, giving Wal a forced smile back.

  They were both trying to pretend that there wasn’t a bald twelve-year-old boy in a loincloth sitting in the shop window in the centre of a display of chops and sausages.

  But there was.

  Ben stared past Wal and the customer to where his parents stood in the doorway of Ron’s office pretending not to look at him.

  He took the string of sausages from round his neck. Perhaps he was too camouflaged. Perhaps they couldn’t see him.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ said Di, turning away and biting her car keys.

  ‘If the health inspector sees this he’ll throw the book at me,’ said Ron. His face was grey with fatigue. He glanced over his shoulder at Ben and saw a tall, angular woman of about fifty wearing a black coat come into the shop.

  ‘Oh no, that’s all I need,’ he said. ‘Mad Esmé.’

  They’re looking at her, thought Ben, why aren’t they looking at me?

  The woman started handing out leaflets to the customers waiting to be served. The customers, who normally ran a mile from women in black coats handing out leaflets, grabbed them voraciously.

  Any reading matter to get their eyes off that mad kid in the window doing the pot roast impersonation.

  Esmé went over to Ben, gave him a leaflet and a clenched fist salute of solidarity, and left the shop.

  Ben looked at the leaflet. ‘Save Their Skins’ it said across the top in neat hand-lettering. And underneath, ‘Anti Fur Slaughter Demo. Feldman Furs. Sat. 2pm’.

  Ben folded the leaflet and tucked it inside his loincloth. He had his own problems.

  He continued his unwavering stare at Ron and Di.

  Di lay awake, staring into the darkness of the bedroom. Next to her Ron lay motionless, his eyes closed.

  ‘I can’t take much more of this,’ said Di.

  Silence. Except for Ron’s deep, slow breathing. Di gave him a nudge.

  ‘I’m thirty-seven and I’ve got a bald son.’

  Silence. She gave Ron another nudge.

  ‘Ignore him,’ said Ron without opening his eyes.

  ‘You can’t ignore something like that,’ said Di, hearing a tiny note of hysteria creeping into her voice.

  Ron opened his eyes and put his hand on Di’s.

  ‘Just hang on till next week,’ he said. ‘Once the bulkstore’s open I’ll have more time.’

  Di felt anger tear through her like a fingernail through a pair of tights.

  ‘For us or for the four more shops you’re planning to open?’ she snapped.

  Then all she felt was limp and guilty.

  ‘Why do you have to push yourself so hard Ron?’ she said wearily. ‘We’ve got everything we need. I don’t even know why you’re opening a wholesale bulkstore.’

  Ron struggled up onto one elbow, incredulous.

  ‘Half the world starving and she doesn’t know why I want to provide for my family.’

  He took his hand from hers, flopped back down and rolled over.

  Di looked at his back. On the sheet covering him, faintly where it didn’t quite wash out, was the word ‘Madness’. Di nodded in agreement.

  Ron lay with his eyes open, muttering through clenched teeth.

  ‘I’m ignoring you. I’m ignoring you.’

  He didn’t mean Di.

  He meant the brown figure hanging outside the bedroom window, the one with the noose round its neck and the sign clutched to its chest. ‘Victims of Racism.’

  Outside Ben tried to ignore the chill night air and the hang-gliding harness cutting into him in forty-seven different places.

  He opened his eyes and saw Dad looking at him.

  He snapped his torch on and shone it on the sign.

  He saw Dad close his eyes.

  He saw the tiny, rhythmic movement of Dad’s lips and knew what they were saying.

  ‘I’m ignoring you … I’m ignoring you …’

  Poop, thought Ben, he is.

  10

  Veal Meat Again

  The first day of the Subtle Method was Saturday.

  Ben sauntered into the kitchen wearing jeans and a T-shirt and leafing idly through a World Health Organization Interim Report On Infant Mortality In The Third World.

  He strolled over to Di, who was crouched by the microwave oven staring intently into it. Casually he allowed the report to fall open on the work bench.

  ‘What’s for lunch, Mum?’ he asked brightly.

  Di didn’t take her eyes off the interior of the oven.

  ‘Nothing if this thing doesn’t go round,’ she snapped. ‘Grey pork.’

  She thumped the side of the microwave.

  Di wasn’t the only thing about to blow a fuse in the kitchen that morning. Everything that plugged in was plugged in and whirring, blending, juicing, toasting, percolating, mixing and waffling fit to explode.

  Ben slid the report closer to Di. She didn’t look up. Ben stood and watched her.

  The Subtle Method had come to Ben the night before in the tree outside his parents’ room.

  As he’d hung there watching his father’s lips move, he’d asked himself for the ninety-four millionth time How Can They Ignore What’s Happening In The World?

  Sure there was sex, and work, and tennis, but not day and night, twenty-four hours a day, week in week out, year after year.

  Which was the amount of time they spent ignoring what was happening in the world.

  Then an awful thought had struck him.

  What if he was helping them to ignore it all?

  By giving them something to take their minds off it?

  Him?

  Ben pushed the report closer to Di, who was still scowling into the microwave.

  ‘Go round!’ she yelled, giving the oven another thump. ‘Go round!’

  The Subtle Method was hitting them with hard, detailed information with no distracting factors like women with bare boobs or him in painted sheets.

  He pushed the report still closer to Di, who had pulled open the microwave oven door and was trying to rotate the rotisserie by hand.

  The Subtle Method had one drawback.

  It was easy to miss.

  Di burnt her hand on the roasting dish, swore and became aware of a huge bushfly crawling across the cupboard door in front of her.

  She grabbed the report, rolled it up and whacked it against the cupboard door.

  The rotisserie started to slowly revolve.

  Di dropped the fly-spattered report back onto the bench.

  Ben abandoned the Subtle Method.

  Di closed the microwave oven door and the rotisserie stopped revolving.

  Ben looked at Di.

  Di looked at the microwave.

  They stayed that way for a while.

  Then Di swung round to face Ben in anger and exasperation.

  ‘Okay! You win!’ She snatched up the report and read from it in a loud garbled monotone. ‘ “… four out of five babies born in the Third World will suffer from malnutrition. Two out of five babies die before reaching their fifth birthday …” Okay? Satisfied?’ She flung down the report. ‘Now for God’s sake go out and get some exercise.’

  For a few seconds Ben thought about how much exercise he’d get kicking the microwave round the block.

  Then suddenly he remembered something.

  ‘Can I go with Claire?’ he asked.

  Di saw Claire heading for the door with Amanda, both in their Saturday afternoon best.

  ‘Claire, where are you going?’ asked Di.

  ‘I told you,’ said Claire. ‘Into the city. To the er …’ She reddened and glanced at Amanda, who had just at that moment got s
omething in her eye.

  ‘… art gallery,’ said Claire.

  Di was in no mood for playing detective.

  ‘Take Ben with you,’ she said.

  Claire looked horrified.

  ‘Into the city?’ she wailed. ‘Oh no Mum, we can’t take him into the city.’ She pointed behind her cupped hand at Ben’s bald head, pleading. ‘Not like that.’

  Di was unmoved.

  ‘He goes or you stay.’

  They went.

  Although as they hurried along the crowded city street trying to keep a couple of steps in front of Ben they wished desperately they hadn’t.

  They just knew that once the big city sophisticates noticed Ben’s head, all would be lost.

  ‘Hey Julian, check the bald kid.’

  ‘Strewth Jonathan, there’s no way chicks from The City would hang around with a younger brother that looked like that. They must be from one of those daggy bush suburbs that hasn’t even got its own record shop. Ho ho ho.’

  Claire and Amanda needn’t have worried. The shoppers trudged along with their eyes to the ground, concerned only with shopping and the likelihood of getting AIDS from contact with shop door handles.

  No one poured ridicule on them.

  What did happen was worse.

  Claire and Amanda, with Ben close behind them, turned a corner and found themselves surrounded by leaping, chanting, drumming, robed, painted, shaven-headed Hare Krishnas.

  The girls backed away, half-remembered Sunday paper headlines flashing through their heads.

  ‘White Slave Drug Cult’ … ‘Moonie Kidnap Horror’ … ‘Does Meditation Cause Migraine?’

  But the Hare Krishnas didn’t carry them off for the white slave trade. Instead they saw Ben’s bald head and gave him a cheerful thumbs up as they danced past.

  Bit frivolous, thought Ben, all this dancing in the street. But as he turned to look again at the shaven-headed men in their robes his heart pounded and he felt he could soar up to the very tops of the tall buildings all around him. And poop on everyone.

  Claire and Amanda wanted to sink into the pavement.

  Failing that, they frogmarched Ben into the nearest chemist and emerged a few seconds later with him wearing a large straw hat.

  ‘We could take him,’ said Claire, racked with guilt. ‘It’ll be dark.’

  ‘It’s an R-rated movie,’ said Amanda long-sufferingly. ‘They won’t let him in.’

  Ben sat in his booth in the video arcade and pulled his straw hat down over his ears so he wouldn’t have to listen to the girls arguing over him. Surely Claire wasn’t going to stuff it up now?

  In the booths on either side, intergalactic wars were being won and lost. Ben looked at the screen in front of him. Armies of spaceships and monsters waited to be hurled into frenzied conflict by a dollar coin.

  Ben wondered if anyone had invented a Big Sister video game.

  Mascara, Big Sister From The Slimy Deep, Locked In Mortal Combat With Amanda, Mutant Best Friend From A Lost Galaxy …

  ‘It’s only two hours and we’ll be back …’

  Claire was leaning over him, loading a milkshake, a packet of chips, an icecream and a bag of lollies into his lap.

  ‘… When I was your age I’d have killed for all this.’ She swept her arm around the arcade. ‘Okay?’

  She took three steps away and three steps back.

  ‘You’ll be okay?’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ said Ben. ‘Go on, hurry up, you’ll miss it. Bye.’ Phew, close escape.

  He grasped the video controls like a boy about to do battle in farthest reaches of deepest space. Until, glancing out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Amanda had dragged Claire away.

  Then he took off his straw hat, dumped the chips and stuff into it and pulled from his pocket the leaflet he’d been given in the butcher’s shop window.

  ‘Save Their Skins. Anti Fur Slaughter Demo. Feldman Furs. Sat. 2pm.’

  As he read the address pencilled across the bottom he tingled with excitement. Then he climbed out of the booth and headed for the exit, dropping the goody-filled hat into the arms of a startled ten-year-old Space Mercenary.

  11

  Mutton and Lamb

  Ben heard the chanting even before the fur shop was in sight.

  ‘Out! Out! Out! Out!’

  By now the tingle was a cold sweat. His first demonstration. He’d seen old news film of the Anti-Vietnam demos of the seventies, tens of thousands of people thronging the streets, arms linked, chanting, singing. A sea of humanity surging with a shared cause.

  Ben turned the corner.

  In the doorway of the fur shop stood two people.

  One was Esmé, the tall woman in the black coat who’d given him the leaflet in his father’s shop. She was trying to reason in a clear, calm voice with the furious manager of the fur shop, who was pointing to the deserted street and shouting.

  ‘… Out! Out! Out! …’

  ‘… but nylon fur is just as warm,’ Esmé was saying. ‘You could at least give your customers the choice …’

  For a moment Ben thought the veins in the fur shop manager’s neck would burst clean through his starched white collar and pink bow tie.

  ‘That’s obscene,’ he grimaced.

  As Ben got closer he could hear the tinkle of glasses and the chatter of voices coming from inside the shop. A couple of hawk-faced women with ski tans peered out through the door, saw Esmé, smirked to each other and disappeared back inside.

  A sign in the shop window announced ‘New Season Parade – 2pm’.

  ‘Look, you old ratbag,’ yelled the manager at Esmé, pointing back at the shop, ‘one foot in there again and I’m calling the police.’

  He stormed back into the shop and shut the door.

  Ben watched as Esmé pulled a roll of tape and a large sign from her cane shopping bag and stuck it over the one in the window. The new sign read ‘Their Deaths Are On Your Shoulders’.

  As she smoothed down the tape, she noticed Ben standing watching her. She looked at him for a moment thoughtfully.

  ‘I remember you. Six fifty a kilo.’

  For some reason her voice reminded Ben of their family doctor. Perhaps she smoked a pipe as well.

  ‘Is it over?’ asked Ben.

  Esmé rattled the locked shop door, picked up her bag and signalled for Ben to walk with her.

  ‘Saturdays are never much good,’ she said ruefully.

  ‘Were you the only one who turned up?’ said Ben. He couldn’t believe it. There wasn’t a train strike or anything.

  Esmé, who’d been looking at him with amused interest, transferred her gaze to the pavement for a few seconds.

  ‘What have you done to your head?’ she asked.

  They walked in silence for a few more seconds.

  ‘It’s to remind people that if you don’t have enough to eat your hair falls out,’ said Ben.

  He’d hesitated because everyone else he’d said that to had taken it the wrong way. Claire had thought he was having a go at her diet. Ron had taken it as a dig at his thinning scalp.

  Esmé was impressed.

  ‘I see,’ she said in a way that showed she realised this was no ordinary run-of-the-mill bald twelve year old.

  She touched her own thick grey hair, cut into a rough pageboy style around her long face.

  ‘I think I’ll stick to posters,’ she said. ‘Won’t be a minute.’

  And with that she darted into a milkbar. Ben followed her in.

  On the counter was a hot food bar with three chickens turning slowly on a spit and several more already roasted sitting under hot lamps.

  Esmé pulled a poster out of her bag, unrolled it and stuck it to the counter below the hot glass.

  It was a photo of a fridge with a trickle of blood coming from the freezer compartment.

  Ben read the caption.

  ‘That Chicken In Your Freezer Has More Room Now Than It Did When It Was Alive.’

  Good on
e, he thought. People have much bigger freezers than they really need.

  The milkbar proprietor, a middle-aged Italian man, put down his newspaper.

  ‘Yes?’

  From behind the counter he couldn’t see the poster. Esmé pointed to one of the roast chickens.

  ‘Do you know,’ she said softly, ‘that that chicken has more room now than it did when it was alive?’

  The proprietor frowned. He wasn’t quite sure if he’d heard right.

  ‘You want a chicken? Six ninety-nine.’

  ‘Have you ever thought,’ said Esmé, ‘about what those chickens suffered?’

  The proprietor caught her drift, or thought he did.

  ‘They’re not stuffered,’ he said patiently, ‘they’re barbeque. Six ninety-nine.’

  Esmé continued with quiet determination.

  ‘About the misery they suffered in the horrible confinement of the battery farm …’

  Ben saw it dawn on the proprietor that something was going on.

  ‘Six ninety-nine or nick off,’ said the proprietor with a suspicious frown.

  ‘You don’t have to buy chickens that have been tortured in tiny cages,’ continued Esmé in her quiet, forceful voice. ‘You can buy free-range chickens that have roamed around …’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Ben, trying to work out what all this had to do with big freezers.

  The proprietor looked over the counter, saw the poster, dashed round from behind the counter and grabbed Esmé by her coat collar.

  ‘That’s it,’ he shouted, ‘I’m calling the cops. You want a free chicken, you’ll get one in jail.’

  Ben realised Esmé was in trouble.

  He began to cough and wheeze and make himself go red in the face. He tugged at Esmé’s coat.

  ‘Mum,’ he croaked, ‘I’m having another asthma attack.’ And he turned on a fit of hissing and wheezing that made the espresso machine on the counter feel quite inferior.

  Now that Esmé had been elevated to the sacred ranks of motherhood, the proprietor let go of her collar and backed away.

  Ben grabbed her hand and pulled her out of the shop and into the street.

  Esmé fired a parting salvo over her shoulder.

  ‘Be careful, my son’s a solicitor.’

  The proprietor was having second thoughts about Esmé as a mama. He made a traditional Sicilian gesture beseeching her to stick a sheep’s head up her bum.