The war began on
his seventieth birthday. The children and their families had gathered along
with friends. Bob had celebrated by drinking more than he was used to. He downed
ten or more stubbies in the course of the day and night. It was late when he
joined Merle in bed but he didn’t stay. Sometime in the early hours of
the morning he left the bed and the room. Merle started but drifted back to
sleep only to be woken again when the first mango crashed into the tin. But
this was not mangoes falling onto the tin roof as sometimes happened. These
crashing sounds were coming from down the slope, down at the Bradshaw’s chicken
run.
The situation
called for Merle’s curse.
‘Bugger. You
silly old bugger,’ she said stumbling from bed. She found him at the top of the
slope below the veranda. He was lobbing
mangoes high into the air above the chicken run. Merle could see the fist sized
bombs tumbling end over end in the moonlight. She had to admit that Bob was
still a good shot. The mangoes rained down into the chicken enclosure: some
fruit shredded as they crashed through the chook wire, others exploded in the
water and food bowls or bang-dented the iron roof of the coop. The chickens
went berserk. Cackling and flapping and dashing about in mindless riotous noise
and movement. Mad cacophony. Feathers flew. It was mayhem.
Merle took her
husband by the arm and led him up the back steps to the veranda. She sat him
down in a cane chair. Soon torchlight appeared at the neighbour’s house. It
swept across the scene of devastation and flashed up the slope towards where
Bob and Merle had been in the garden.
‘No more,’ Merle
hissed at her husband. Bob faced his wife when she spoke but it was as if he
could not see her, as if he was staring through her and out into the night. It
unsettled her.
‘No more,’ she
said again.
‘But there are
more down there, hundreds more. They come at night.’
‘What on earth
are you going on about Bob. I don’t think being 70 years old agrees with you.’
‘They come at
night,’ he repeated.
‘What do?’
‘The enemy. The
Nips.’
‘They’re
chickens Bob.’
‘They’re Japs,’
he persisted, ‘I saw them in the scrub, moving about behind the wire’.
‘They are
chickens Bob.’
‘They move like
Japs. Sneaky little bastards. Hard to pick them in the scrub.’
‘Bob, you are
drunk and it seems being 70 really does not agree with you. You will have to
trust me on this. They are the Bradshaw’s chickens.’
He looked at her
and perhaps now he actually saw her there in front of him.
‘They jabber
like Japs. How do you explain that jabberin’. That’s not the Queen’s bloody
English they’re going on with.’
‘It’s chicken
dear. They’re speaking chicken. It’s called clucking.’
‘Clucking?’ He
looked at her as if she had uttering something utterly unfathomable - in
Swahili. (Later, she would realise it was the first word he ever lost.)
‘Yes. Clucking,’
she persisted. ‘Think about it: they are as big as a football, have no arms,
are covered in feathers and cluck. They are chickens.’
‘Chickens,’ he
repeated shaking his head. She stroked his hair, concerned and touched by his
confusion. It was a moment before his understanding returned. ‘Some may be
chickens Merle. But not all of them. They know how to blend in.’
‘And how do you
explain that.’
‘Camouflage.’
Merle ‘huffed’
then dragged him up from the cane chair and led him back to bed. When he awoke
later that day, Bob had no recollection of what had transpired. He stubbornly
refused to accept what he had done. Merle tired of arguing with him. Later she
called the Bradshaws, themselves in their seventies, and discreetly enquired
about the damage.
There had been
three casualties that night. One chicken suffered a direct hit and died
instantly, a second flew the coop and was killed by a van and a third appeared
unharmed but had keeled over just as dead as if it had been beheaded. Those
that survived didn’t lay for a week. Merle put things right by having her son
deliver a dozen eggs and a half dozen chicks to her neighbours.
To be continued:
Next time, Bob’s mind deserts him and Merle’s war begins.
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