Chapter Four

4


London calling

At 12.03pm England time I called Gabriel on my mobile.

‘Hi, it’s me,’ I said.

‘Hi Monkey!’ she said with her usual exuberance. ‘Are you getting close?’

‘Well, I don’t know about close.’

‘Where are you?’

‘In England.’

‘Whereabouts in England, monkey?’ she said, exuberance on the wane.

‘Well, is it raining where you are?’

‘No. It’s sunny.’

‘Well, it’s safe to say I’m not there then because it’s fucking pissing down here. Could you check the local forecasts across England and find out which places it’s raining in? That might help us narrow it down a bit.’

‘You’re not funny, Bailey.’

It paid to be serious when she called me Bailey. Even with her charred remains of a Yorkshire accent yet to be scattered in a field, Bailey still sounded like ‘Barely’ to me and ‘barely’ worked well with ‘coping’ when you weren’t.

‘I think I might still be in London, Gabriel. It’s very hard to tell, but the area I’m in is quite grey and urban. I think I might be on the set of East Enders and I can’t see anything vaguely resembling the M1.’

‘Have you thought of asking someone for directions?’

‘Yes, I have thought of that.’

‘And have you?’

‘No. I like the way you think though. I might try that.’

‘Are you going to be here by four or not?’

‘Your time or Brisbane time?’

‘The whole family’s going to be here. Mum’s putting on afternoon tea for you.’

‘Who’s going to be torturing the chickens in their absence?’

‘Ha ha. That’s my family you’re talking about.’

‘A family we have both decided are morally depraved. Don’t start siding with them five hours before I get there.’

‘Five hours!’

‘Well, I don’t know, Gabriel. Four probably. Three if I’ve been getting hopelessly lost in the right direction. I don’t live here, remember?’

‘That’s why I should have come down to meet you!’

‘Gabriel, we’re going into a tunnel.’

‘Which tunnel? Where are you?’’

‘Okay, not a tunnel. A lift. We’re going into a lift and the signal might cut out at any—’

I switched off the mobile. She was just a bit too frantic. And not a single enquiry about the also recently landed jet setting dogs she supposedly adored. Understood, she was up there with an expectant family of backward chicken farmers who may not know what dogs were. I had little knowledge of North Yorkshire aside from what I’d been able to glean from All creatures great and small – the sun never shone, there was mud everywhere, the farmers were all backward incoherent buffoons – and I was fully aware what an insular life-style could do: A recent poll of Americans showed that many thought New Zealand was a disease. Surely grounds for an invasion.

Anyway, there we were lost and alone in a faceless urban landscape somewhere in England. Thank all dodgy deities I was in a nice warm Audi with my two best mates from Brisbane. Otherwise I might have done something seriously rash like get out of the car and kick an old lady in the shins. Instead I got out and asked for directions at a servo. After a bewildering exchange of lefts and rights with Alexei Sayle, I headed for the door more lost than when I came in. As I opened this door I spotted a solution…

Ten minutes and three hundred pounds later, I had a brand new satellite navigation system out of its box and plugged into the cigarette lighter. Half an hour and much cursing at an illegible manual after that, I had Skipton-le-Beans punched (almost literally) into it as my destination. This destination duly calculated, I received my first robotic direction – ‘Take.The.Next.Right.’ – delivered in a clipped, blandly stern manner by (and I suspect intentional ironic humour on the part of the manufacturer) a woman.

A zombie woman, admittedly. Dawn of the Dead Navigator. But we’ll just call her Dawn for short.

As it transpired I had, by fluke rather than formula, been headed roughly north. Very roughly: According to the Audi odometer, I’d covered a hundred miles since Heathrow. I was twenty miles north in a place called Henley-on-Thames. Exactly what I’d been doing for the other eighty miles and in which direction I’d been trav-elling, I can’t begin to imagine. And I didn’t care. With Dawn here to guide me I was now officially on my way to Skipton-le-Beans, my trip time calculated at four and a half hours (presumably at pensioner pace as all these things are, so I could expect to arrive quicker than that). I was going to be late for my rendezvous with Family Hogg. But not wedding-consent-threateningly late. I could now just sit back and enjoy the sights and sounds of my virgin drive into the Mother Country. I was free to soak up England like a wide-eyed Kiwi sponge. Or at least the northern bit. The bit above London no one Down Under knew existed…

When I announced to friends in Australia that I was moving to England with Gabriel, they were unanimous in their envy, not just because I was going with Gabriel, a girl who had won over all my male friends in ways they could never hope to fulfil, but because they were in awe of London. When I embellished this announcement by saying that we weren’t actually going to live in London but in a place called North Yorkshire, they were unanimous in their oblivion. I explained that this North Yorkshire was a good four hours drive north of London, at which point oblivion turned to contempt.

‘Oh, so you’re going to England and you’re not going to live in London? Are you mad? Or just far more te-dious than I ever realised?’ seemed to encapsulate unspoken truths. The fact was that most Australians had no concept of England outside London. They assumed everyone in England lived in a terrace house within walking distance of ninety corner pubs, Oxford Street, Buckingham Palace, Madame Tussauds, Big Ben, the Tower of London, Wimbledon, Twickenham, Lords, a geezer selling genuine Rolex watches, the neon sign in Piccadilly Circus, Stringfellows, a Beefeater, some ravens, Marks and Spencers, Selfridges, Stonehenge, the White Cliffs of Dover and a theatre playing Cats. Most seemed to accept that it might be a short Tube ride to Liverpool and the basement bar where The Beatles first hung out, but this was the extent of their latitude.

What you have to understand is that few Australians acquired an education before they were sent out to shoot and stuff koalas for the Australian Tourist Board. Even fewer opened an atlas as most atlases dispensed with Australia in a single page.

Also to blame for perpetuating this geographical myth was the 1981 John Landis movie An American Werewolf in London. There isn’t an Australian alive who hasn’t seen this callously erroneous film at least twice. Here are the facts (fallacies) from that movie: Two wisecracking American backpackers named Jack and David get lost on the North Yorkshire Moors, hang out with some tight-lipped Yorkshire locals in an isolated inn called The Slaughtered Lamb, said locals then depositing them back on the dark and threatening moors with such helpful instructions as ‘Keep to the road’ and ‘Beware the moon’. Moments later the wisecracking Ameri-can named Jack is eaten alive by a werewolf. David is attacked as well, receives multiple deep werewolf-type lacerations about his person and falls unconscious as drinkers from The Slaughtered Lamb materialise out of the mist with shotguns and proceed to blow the werewolf’s head off. Cut to the lacerated David waking in a LONDON hospital…having been rushed there at death’s door in an ambulance. From North Yorkshire.

Then mid-movie, David’s doctor finds time in his busy schedule to drive a small, underpowered European convertible from his hospital in London to the Slaughtered Lamb in deepest, darkest North Yorkshire, have a pint with the locals, NO LUNCH, and drive back the same day, reappearing as fresh as a daisy beside Jack’s hospital bed. In the early evening...
‘Prepare.To.Exit.At.The.Third.Exit.’

The M1 had long since become the A1. Such unknown quantities as Leeds, York, Thirsk were mere ripples in our wake.

We were damn close.

And I was dangerously tired. I kept myself awake by telling Kurt and Courtney a story.

‘Pups? I said to the rear view mirror. ‘Here’s a tale titled Bob the Battery Hen Farmer meets Clark the Chick. By Bailey Harland…Clark the Chick was a chick. Like half the chicks born at Bob the Battery Hen Farmer’s lovely big egg factory, Clark was born male. Which meant his egg laying abilities were a bit crap. So, minutes into his exciting new life, Clark was killed. Unfortunately the carbon dioxide Bob usually used for gassing chicks like Clark had run out that day so Clark and all his new male friends were tossed alive into a grinding machine. The end.’

I looked in the rear view mirror. ‘Bit of a short story that one. I’ve got a longer one if you’d like to hear it…’ Snoring from the back. ‘More of a bedtime story this one.’

‘Prepare.To.Exit.At.The.Second.Exit.’

I pulled in behind a slow moving truck.

‘Bob the Battery Hen Farmer meets Cassandra the Chick…Cassandra the Chick was also a chick. She was Clark the Chick’s younger sister by a Parson’s nose. Cassandra, by fate or misfortune, had been born female. While Bob tossed Clark into the grinder, he tossed Cassandra into a deep litter pit where she spent the first two days of her life with all the other chicks (pullets as Bob liked to call them) tootling about and cheeping and doing whatever else chicks liked to do.

‘Around the middle of her third day on the planet (by which time she’d pretty much mastered tootling about and cheeping and had struck up some promising but formative relationships with Catherine, Claire and Candice, three other pretty decent chicks in the deep litter pit, Bob reached in, whisked Cassandra out and cut off half her upper beak with a red hot wire.’

I looked in the rear view mirror.

‘Cassandra screamed a baby chick scream. Her legs shot out. Bob then cut off a third of her lower beak and chucked her back in the deep litter pit. There she didn’t so much tootle about as stumble about, raw exposed nerve endings across much of her face having suddenly taken much of the fun out of being a newborn chick.

‘Catherine, Claire and…whatever the other chick’s name was, weren’t sure whether to laugh or cry at their grotesquely disfigured and frantic friend as she ran boggle eyed around them clearly unhappy with her new look. She was beside herself and they didn’t know why.

‘They soon found out.’

‘Prepare.To.Exit.At.The.Next.Exit.’

‘One by one Bob whisked them away. One by one he returned them to the deep litter pit – now a shrill, seething mass of disfigured orphans screaming for their mums. All except Catherine who, like many others in the deep litter pit, lay very still. The hot wire had simply been too much.

‘Then, at the tender age of four months, Catherine and her surviving friends reached sexual maturity and, as any parent knows, that’s when things can really turn to shit.

‘Bob appeared over the deep litter pit with a sadistic grin on his face. Nerve endings still jangling, tootling down to a stumbling gait, all the girls could do was look up.

‘‘Come on, girls,’ said Bob. ‘I’m taking you to your new home.’

‘Well, pups, now the girls found out why they’d had most of their faces cut off soon after they were born. Their new home wasn’t really a home. It was a tiny wire cage the size of a filing cabinet draw and it had a sloping wire mesh floor so their eggs would run down. And the worst bit? It wouldn’t just be them in there. There would be seven others packed in with them. They couldn’t build nests. They couldn’t flap their wings. They couldn’t even turn around. No wonder they had their beaks cut off – Cassandra and Claire were fighting each other now. Pecking at each other and squabbling and hating their lives.

‘Over time they lost most of their feathers from rubbing on the wire. Their bones became brittle from a life of hardly moving. Their claws sometimes got trapped in the wire.

‘A year after they were born, Bob decided the girls weren’t producing enough eggs—’

‘Prepare.To.Exit.’

‘Spent hens’ he liked to call them. He dragged them from their cages (breaking many of Cassandra’s brittle, idle bones), crammed them into a crate and loaded them onto a truck. The truck drove for nine hours. When it stopped, the girls were ripped from their crate and thrown into an electrified water bath. Candice and Claire didn’t know what happened next – they’d both been electrocuted and knocked senseless. Sadly Cassandra did. As happens a lot, she was still conscious when her head was cut off. The end. Sleep well, kiddies. It’s those nice cheap eggs for breakfast.’