Chapter Five

5


Chicken Colditz

‘Follow.The.Road.For.Nine.Miles.’

I could see from my Sat Nav screen that, unless my input and Dawn’s resultant output had conspired to guide me to Skipton-le-Hole, our journey was nearly over. Skipton-le-Beans and Gabriel’s dysfunctional, dismembering family waited for me somewhere just ahead, only a few more corners to turn before I turned a very large one of my own and became an avid supporter of prominent local business Windy Dale Eggs.

I had heard the stories of tyranny, parental drunkenness and verbal abuse that had led to Gabriel’s mutiny at age sixteen. I’d heard how Papa Hogg ruled the roost with an unyielding authoritarian intolerance to insubordination and an equal and opposite tolerance to alcohol and how Family Hogg simpered meekly along pandering to his every unreasonable demand because, as Gabriel put it ‘they all knew he was going to die soon and they didn’t want to be cut from the will.’ I had heard all this from an admittedly disillusioned source and even allowing for bitter excess on Gabriel’s part, the picture painted was not of people I would either like or respect.

Yet, as someone about to marry into this motley lot, I needed to appear to do both. We needed these people. Most importantly we needed Papa Hogg to like me, grant permission for me to marry his daughter, pay for our outrageously expensive dual weddings in North Yorkshire and New Zealand and, most importantly, cut us into the will. For the moment, Papa Hogg and I needed to be best buddies. For the moment extorting eggs from debeaked and desperate battery hens was the most honourable career imaginable and would remain so until the old bugger clutched at his chest one last time. Then and only then would Family Hogg find out just what I thought of their barbaric business.

‘You.Have.Reached.Your.Destination,’ Dawn intoned, voice devoid of the celebration the end of such a marathon warranted. However, I wasn’t quite at my destination. I was in Skipton-le-Beans, nearest and dearest village to Chicken Colditz, which, from all accounts, lay a mere mile out the other end. Skipton-le-Beans was a pleasant enough little hamlet comprising a U-bend of ancient brick houses bordering a village green dotted with oak trees, wooden park benches and a duck pond. The name Skipton-le-Beans, by the way, had nothing to do with line dancing in flageolets. Skipton was a Viking word for sheep farm. The French definite article ‘le’ was added sometime later by Norman aristocracy to distinguish the various Skiptons from each other so they could be terrorized in order. The ‘le’ allowed them to attach a local feature, such as Spring or Hole or Hill. In this instance it was Beans, simply because beans were once grown here. Recent consideration may have been given to bringing the name more into line with contemporary local produce, but neither Skipton-le-Pigs nor Skipton-le-Tormented Bird had apparently passed muster.

Dawn took her leave. I was on my own from here. Wipers and enthusiasm on intermittent (I was dying to see Gabriel, Family Hogg was an unfortunate co-requisite), I left Skipton-le-Beans behind and swept the Audi through the remaining bends, eyes peeled for the high, multiple chimney-topped roofline I was told would ap-pear above the trees.

‘Nearly there, guys,’ I said to the two dogs now sitting up expectantly in the back, no doubt having sensed a sudden edge to my mood. Kurt yawned. Courtney yawned. Both knew something was about to happen. Three sweeping bends later, it did.

The trees lining the road were perhaps twenty feet tall. Yet the roofline towered over them as if the whole house was nestled in the upper branches. It wasn’t. The house was a three storey, white-walled monster, or manor as they called them here. What’s more, when I arrived in front of it, I discovered that it and its nasty little industry were locked away behind eight feet of impenetrable stone wall topped with barbed wire – Chicken Colditz indeed. I had to wonder whether this wall was designed to keep chickens in, or vegans out.

Continuing the general Avian Auschwitz theme, a ten foot gap in the stone wall contained a matching pair of spiked, solid wood gates, which, of course, were shut. Mounted in the right wall was an intercom. I nudged the Audi up to these gates to get clear of the road and was about to press this intercom when the gates opened inwards. Another inspection of the wall revealed a high mounted surveillance camera.

‘Thank you, Big Brother-in-law,’ I muttered to no one in particular, then ‘And so it begins,’ to my furry passengers.

After the obligatory game of chicken with the slowly opening gates, I was in. And they were out. Out of the house. First Gabriel – who was sprinting for the car, a teeny whir of hair and arms and legs – then, less hurried, the rabble that was Family Hogg.

The next few minutes were magnificent.

I opened the car door. Gabriel – looking sensational in jeans and bare feet and a flowery little sleeveless v-neck blouse as sweet and pink as the tattooed band around her left bicep was rebellious and green – dived in on my lap with a shriek and we kissed long and hard, banging teeth as we did so. In a brief blur of tongues and gasped greetings we discovered we were both pleased to see each other, both happy I was here and both gagging for sex. We ran to the back of the car and I opened the boot. ‘Kurtley bear! Courtney love!’ Gabriel cried throwing herself in and disappearing beneath a frenzy of wagging tongues and tails.

The next two hours were abysmal.

Greetings were exchanged by the car.

First up was Mama Hogg, Papa Hogg’s third wife Mariabella, an Oxford-born Italian Pomeranian who was also Gabriel’s mother.

‘Mum runs the office,’ Gabrielle had said circa two weeks ago as I got my final briefings slash warnings on Family Hogg prior to departure. ‘Inwards, outwards, financials, bills, letters, all that sort of thing. She won’t go into the sheds. She never goes into the sheds. Not because of the chickens. She just thinks it stinks. What else? She’s an alcoholic as you know. She’s a chain smoker. She’s two-faced, nosey, has no friends and sits around the house waiting for my father to die.’

Mariabella Hogg breezed in with a wide-armed ‘Welcome, Bailey,’ and kissed me a bit wrong on the mouth. She tasted like she’d already had a few. She was a hard faced bitch whose deeply furrowed, mud coloured face looked like it had been the victim of a pissed farmer on a plough. Even in an ill-fitting brown leisure suit, I could tell she was wafer thin. I could also tell she had once perhaps been as pretty as her daughter.

Not so Gabriel’s half sister from Papa Hogg’s second marriage, Melissa Joubert.

‘I don’t know what to say about Melissa really because there’s not a lot to say. She’s rural. And a bit steady. She’s twenty-nine and she’s lived in Skipton-le-Beans all her life. She’s coped with the drinking and shouting better than Simon. As for what she does on the farm, I don’t really know. I think Dad’s just got her sitting around watching what mum does in case mum chokes to death on her own vomit.’

Melissa Joubert stepped forward and offered a hand. A very podgy hand. Joubert is pronounced You Bear and, rather tragically for Melissa, this wasn’t far from the truth. She was as fat as butter in a roly poly panda sort of way and, aside from red flushes on her cheeks, as white as double cream. A pretty face was buried alive beneath an inch of lard. Otherwise dowdy, she looked like she cut her own hair and made her own clothes. From old flannelette sheets. She didn’t kiss me, opting for a limp handshake and ‘Nice to meet you, Bailey,’ a sentiment I found it within me to echo.

‘Gidday Melissa. ‘Nice to meet you too.’

Next up was Attie Joubert, Melissa’s husband, who was something of a surprise in that he was tall and blonde and, I’d have to say, handsome in a balding, middle-aged, South African sort of way.

‘Ugh,’ had been Gabriel’s opening descriptor on Attie Joubert. ‘Attie is a slug. He thinks he’s going to take over the farm when Dad dies because Simon’s a bit…y’know. He’s a sleaze and an arrogant jerk. He’s tried to come onto me more than once. Just be wary of him would be my advice. He’s not a very nice man.’

Which was all very well, but I wanted to form my own opinion of the haughty Afrikaans slug. His welcome had all the warmth of Josef Mengele greeting twins, a single hard flick of a handshake like wringing a chicken’s neck and a gruff ‘Bailey’, and his eyes seemed to be permanently squinted as if peering into bright sunlight, which he definitely wasn’t. There was an unsmiling coldness about him and something else…Suspicion? Distrust? Jealousy? On the evidence immediately available, I concluded it was the latter – his wife was a fat cow and my wife-to-be wasn’t. I welcomed this with an appositely cheery greeting of my own. Fuck him. If he chose to batter hens for a living, he deserved no sympathy.

There was another possible reason for Attie Joubert’s dour manner: a small bundle of blue clad flesh in his arms, a four month old baby boy which I was informed went by the name of Jacques, although currently not very far. A hideously ugly thing, it looked more like a baby baboon. What hope for the poor child growing into this vicious cycle of abuse? What hope for the chickens? This monkey baby just represented the next generation at Windy Dale Eggs. It wasn’t a monkey baby. It was a devil monkey baby. I waved at it and moved quickly on.

There were only two people left to meet. I may as well not have bothered.

Simon Hogg, the only offspring from Papa Hogg’s first marriage was up first of these two and, as my only brother-in-law to be – not to mention of a similar age – he was a major disappointment.

‘There’s nothing to say about Simon apart from that I feel really, really sorry for him. He’s lived in that house all his life.’

At about six foot three, he was a few inches my senior, but for a tall reed of a man he carried himself small, making only fleeting eye contact in furtive little bursts and offering nothing but a grunted ‘Hi’ as a greeting. He was either handicapped or seriously shy. He had a great hooked Roman nose that almost required refocussing from his eyes. His face was eagle-like, long and thin and meek, his hand loose in mine and, I swear to God, he wiped it on his overalls after shaking.

There was only one person left.

The only person who hadn’t bothered to come to the car to greet me. Instead he’d stood in the door of the house away in the distance across a sweep of gravel drive, hands clasped tightly behind his back, waiting for me to come to him.

Papa ‘Austin’ Hogg.

I made him wait while I unloaded suitcases. While doing this I heard barking from behind the house, not Kurt and Courtney, another dog.

‘What’s that?’ I said eyes to the source.

‘Ahm,’ said Gabriel. ‘I think Kurt and Courtney might have found Danby.’

‘Danby?’

‘Danby the dog. Don’t worry, they can’t get at him. They keep him in a barn.’

‘A barn? Why isn’t he out in the garden?’

‘Don’t ask,’ said Gabriel.

Samsonites on wheels, I called Kurt and Courtney to me and walked slowly towards the house, Gabriel on my arm, Family Hogg strewn out behind like unruly disciples. I kept looking back at that barn and that barking, shrill, forlorn and something else…pleading.

Austin Hogg stood in the door and watched me come, raising and lowering himself on his toes in that sort of military way officious people do, short arms still firmly clasped behind his back. And now I could see where Gabriel got her height from, or her complete lack of it: Austin Hogg was a right little shorty, almost dwarf like. And stout with it. Short and stout and unsightly with a chrome dome you could see from space. His eyes had the dead defiance of a murderer’s mugshot, his nose was a bulbous, pitted mass of misadventure and his lower lip and jutting jaw were set in a permanent crooked scowl as if heavy lead sinkers had been attached to the corners of his mouth at birth. He looked like he hadn’t laughed in a lifetime. Austin Hogg was a mini Mussolini waiting for the chickens to revolt.

‘Dad?’ Gabriel said. ‘I’d like you to meet Bailey.’

I stuck out my hand but his hands remained firmly out of sight.

‘Cold ena for ye?’ he said. Not welcome or nice to meet you. Cold ena for ye?

‘The weather?’ I said before I could stop myself. ‘It’s rubbish, isn’t it? I think I lost about thirty degrees in transit.’

Lesson #1 for foreigners: Never criticise the English weather, particularly to a died-in-the-wool North Yorkshireman.

It was meant to be an ice breaker, a joke of sorts. To be honest I inwardly winced the moment I said it. It set the tone for an extremely awkward afternoon. An afternoon of tea and biscuits and small talk with Mariabella and Gabriel and Melissa while Austin sat wordlessly in a big leather chair in the corner of a large, overcrowded antique shop of a lounge like an old wary, watchful owl, Attie Joubert sat wordlessly with Melissa on a couch opposite and Simon sat wordlessly on a foot stool gnawing his fingernails to the quicks. Attie Joubert lasted ten minutes before excusing himself back to work with a ‘Nice to meet you, young fella.’ Mariabella then drank wine and offered me none and Gabriel didn’t either and I desperately needed some kind of stimulation as the jet lag was setting in and Kurt and Courtney were locked in the utility room because they wouldn’t stay away from the caged dog, Danby. And Danby wasn’t allowed out to meet them because he’d only ever seen one other dog in his ten years in the barn (the one that had run away) and he’d probably savage them both; this information imparted by Mama Hogg as if Danby was nothing more than a spell of particularly bad weather.

On the dot of six-thirty, just as I’d plucked up enough courage to ask permission to take my jet lag to bed, Austin piped up for the first time since ‘Cold ena for ye?’

‘Right then, Simon lad,’ he said sliding off his seat like Humpty Dumpty off his wall. ‘Fetch ye jacket.’

Simon leapt obediently to his feet.

‘Are you going to take Bailey?’ Gabriel said and I wished she hadn’t.

‘Take Bailey where?” I said.

She put a hand on my leg. ‘Do you want to go for a beer with Dad and Simon at the Pig in Muck?’

No, I’d rather stay here and masturbate all over your mother.

‘Um,’ I said.

‘Come on then, lad,’ said Austin. ‘Fetch ye jacket.’