No Good Reason to be Chicken

Madame Cheekie was a hen’s kind of hen, no clucking about, her hooded eyes darkened and she’d just tell you how it was, or should be, which was the same thing. She wasn’t any old bird, but a French broiler with a certain glamorous mystique. And part of her mystique was she had a hidden eye. Some hens argued the hidden eye was in her tail feathers, or it was an invisible stoolie pigeon. Others that it was in her talons, but that was just stupid. But nobody was chicken-brained enough to question it.  All the best grain went her way and left the rest of us scratching. Nature’s pecking order, clucking it all away.  She was lying low under a boulder reading the runes of a chicken’s entrails. ‘It’s not good,’ Madame Cheekie advised her client, ‘you’re dead and you don’t even know it—yet’. 

Grandmother did a lot of tricks too when she was younger, but not at the same time and not the same kind of tricks as Madame Cheekie. It was a bird eat bird world and nobody knew that better than her. Her father was an old cock, much giving to fashionable dandyism, pacing and charging, and crowing about his achievements but it never got further than the chopping block either.

Mother was an old egg with a unique pedigree, much giving to brooding, settling down and having a family. But it wasn’t all bad, this was the swingegg sixties when they could scratch a living without shitting on each other’s heads, and an egg could be an egg, without fear of contradiction.

She took off went to discover herself outside the common hen run. She liked to re-pluck and imagine herself as a young chick studying henopology, and how the poultry world worked, with a scatter-brained curiosity. Her thesis was well received—to be or not to be; flesh was to be a half-chewed thing that was shat out. At times she recalled the glamour of feathers in a spin. The mealy confidence she did have was undermined by a belief she had not gone far enough, nor being chicken-brained enough to make a difference. Roosters in the know advised her to trust her own judgement, which worried her more. Self-doubt left her scarred with mottled pigments on her whattle. It also left her feeding mixed up and alone as a depressive duck with a lifejacket and a hen with no inner cluck.  A total confidence in her own uncluckitability. That’s when she had me.

By then she was living off scraps—other hen’s scraps, mostly dust and stones—and so frightened of failure she just kept running helter skelter. A scarecrow with a rattle attached. Her constant clucking refrain was not to make things too fancy, just make them as they are. A brilliant representation of a henhouse that gets so far inside, it’s so here, that you immediately move in and start living in it. The thing we find inside it are important, she’d blabbed, but we can’t cling to them because they are easily lost.  Her ramblings made her first in line for the grossing columns of our local rag and for the chop. But she claimed she wouldn’t die without a fight because it was so inconvenient. She had fancy notions of becoming a background hum vibrating through the ether.

‘Get ready,’ mother said to me. I was a chip off the old block, liked to run through puddles and imagine being able to take off like a seagull and fly across fields of water until the world ended, and then come back again to tell everybody what it was like, and start again. But being a chicken meant that I was already ready, all I had to do was dry my toes in the dust of the chicken run and strut after her.

Mother, like most of the other hens, had a tendency to ramble. ‘When I turn the volume up others begin to notice. I do wish chickens would talk more, shape up more and we listened to what I’m telling them for their own good.’  

That was the theory. Mother never listened to anything I said. Home was a little sealed off country. Everyone told the same stories every day, made the same jokes, pulled the same faces at the punch line and wandered away to peck at their own business. That suited me just fine. I was thought a little strange and mostly left alone.  But mother pecked at me a little and shoved me a little until I was orphaned from the crowd, pushed in front and there was Madame Cheekie clucking her tongue and waiting by her blood-stained boulder to deliver judgement.

Time stopped. Madame Cheekie peered at us, a mass of hen feathers creating a dust cloud rolling in behind, squawking and pushing to the front to get the best view.

Mother could never let a sighting go by without commenting plucked a few titbits out of the air to start me off. ‘There’s our cage. Yonder lies the world. It if ain’t broke don’t fix it.’

Vague hopes of adventure were replaced by a dread that I’d throw up, something chickens never did. A prickling started in my bones, worked its way into my feathers.

‘Go on,’ Mother said, ‘tell them who was the original king of the eggs and who was the queens, start with granddad’s granddad’s, granddad and work your way down the royal line, working your way down to yours truly.’

She waited. They waited. Madame Cheeky waited.

‘She’s just a little embarrassed,’ Mother explained. ‘Self-consciousness, that old killer of dreams.’     

Madame Cheekie was a game old bird. Squawking she abandoned common-senses to find perfect sense by attacking first and boring folk later about what had happened. Madame Cheekie blooded mother about the crown of her head, and she had a lot to say about mother, telling her she was running after autonomy with her two feet tied together for security. Living like a parrot, saying the same things over and over again, and the other hens were waving their fan feathers and playing along. She was endlessly talking herself into being somebody and hoping that somebody was going to be herself. That when she got to the end of the joke and others were clucking and laughing only to find she was the joke.  ‘Cluck off,’ said Madame Cheekie, ‘I can’t stand the smell of old bird shit and even older jokes.’

Madame Cheekie advanced on me with hooked beak, and I scrambled to get away from breath baited with clichés that should never be spoken and no young bird could escape.