Who is suffering? No one.
Carol J. Adams, ‘The War on Compassion’
At fifteen, my daughter officially became what her grandfather called ‘a bloody vegetarian’. She was pretty militant about it. She started a subcommittee of the student council dedicated to making the canteen a meat-free zone, made loud pronouncements in restaurants, distributed animal rights pamphlets around the neighbourhood. ‘We’re murderers, Dad,’ she’d say, ‘we’re all murderers.’
I had nothing to say in response. I did what I could to avoid looking at the images on the pamphlets splayed on the hallway table. They’d always catch my eye. Broken wings tangled in cage wire; beaks gasping in an airless metal shed; steroid-altered torsos weighed down by disproportionate pendulous, ulcerated breasts; millions of dead eyes glaring amongst layers of sawdust, woodchips and excrement. I tried, too, not to take in the statistics she’d thrust at me over our evening meal, ‘Fifty billion chickens are slaughtered every year, Dad.’; ‘An industrial farm can hold a million or more birds, genetically altered to make flesh fast before the animal dies under her own weight.’
At fifteen, my daughter could see the truth of the world. But, in fact, the kernel of this knowledge was formed much earlier than that.
It happened in a supermarket. I’d say she was about six. (I measure time sometimes by determining which Charlotte was in the vestibule; this was definitely in the era of the second Charlotte.) We were shivering in the meat section, my daughter and I, mapping out the week’s dinners. Above us, suspended from the darkened ceiling, was a cardboard mobile of a red barn and cows and chickens, and the words Old MacDonald’s Farm. After she got bored with jumping up to try and grab one of the black and white cows, my daughter dashed over and started banging a big red button on the wall between the eggs and the meat fridges. She wouldn’t stop banging the button, which caused an artificial, strangulated buck-aaw to burst out of a speaker in the wall. I tried not to acknowledge the flicked irritated looks from the other shoppers. Next to the button was a childlike drawing of a white hen; between bangs, my daughter would trace the elongated S of the bird’s back, from beak to tail. In an effort to distract her, I asked my daughter to fetch one of the punnets from the meat-display shelves. Carting it back, she scrutinised the pink glistening pillow underneath the plastic film, tracing the words on the sticky label. She stared at the silhouette of the bird next to the button on the wall: sleek body; beak, comb and fluffy feathers.
At school, she’d been learning about homonyms. Around the rim of the classroom, the teacher had hung up rectangles of cardboard, with a different definition written in capital letters on each side. ‘There’s bark like a dog,’ she’d told me, ‘and bark of a tree.’ There’s left and left, pen and pen. Up to this moment—the moment poised between the eggs and the freezers, holding a plastic tub of flesh—I think my daughter thought that chicken was also a homonym. ‘There’s a chicken in the farmyard, Daddy,’ she might have said, ‘and there’s chicken you eat.’ The cardboard rectangle spinning slowly in the air.
That night, my daughter looked down at the fleshy pillow, now battered with breadcrumbs and laid out on her plate. She turned her plate so that the fillet was as far away from her as possible. When she finished eating her broccoli and carrots, she pushed the plate into the centre of the table.
My wife and I let her thoughts flutter for a few days. We would take turns offering phrases like ‘Just try a little tonight’ or ‘But that’s your favourite’. My daughter’s eyes would cloud and the food would congeal on the plate.
‘It’s not the end of the world,’ my wife would say later, when we’d scraped the uneaten food into the bin, or were lying in bed with the lights off, staring up at the shadowy ceiling. ‘There are plenty of vegetarian recipes and we can work out other ways for her to get the protein she needs and, really, it’s a good thing, it’s good to have a daughter who knows what she wants, who cares, who …’ The words trailed off into the darkness.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.
‘I just realised … we’ve got my parents’ barbecue on the weekend …’
‘Oh shit.’
My wife’s family was nothing like my own. We used to alternate Christmases: one year with my father; the next with my wife’s parents, and sisters, and brothers-in-law, and aunts, and uncles, and nephews and cousins. The overwhelming silence of my father’s barn of a house, the muted gift-giving ceremony, all over in five minutes. As opposed to the chintzy clutter of my mother-in-law’s lounge room: the raucous ritual underneath an enormous Christmas tree over-burdened with tinsel; the ritual starting before the crack of dawn, everyone dressed in elf caps or Mrs Claus wigs or ‘ho ho ho’ T-shirts or aprons that said ‘Kiss me, I’m Santa’. After the frenzied ripping and squealing and complaining, we’d struggle through the wrapping paper before going out onto the patio for the even more important event.
Each year’s fare would be grander than the last’s—one year a pig on a spit; another a surf-and-turf smorgasbord. Every weekend in the lead-up to Christmas, my father-in-law would hold rehearsal barbecues, testing out potential honey-glazes, perfecting the crackling. ‘How about that marinade,’ he’d say, wiping his brow with a beer. He liked to spice things up, offer a range of choices, the patio table ending up like an oversized meat-lover’s pizza. Legs and hocks and racks, barbecue sauce squirting over the potato (and bacon) salad. Pork and beef and venison. ‘Rudolf tastes great, Granddad!’ a nephew might say. We’d talk a lot about the meat. Was a steak better medium-rare or burnt within an inch of its life? Was a thermometer necessary to roast the perfect turkey, or was it just a piece of useless MasterChef paraphernalia? We were all required to provide detailed feedback, rate the quality of the rump over the one we’d chopped up at the previous week’s barbecue. Although the way my father-in-law would leer at you, tongs poised, ready to snap, there was really only one response you could give. ‘Top feed,’ one son-in-law would say. ‘Yep,’ the second would say, and then I’d murmur, ‘Yes, excellent.’
My wife was the middle of three daughters. On the drive to family barbecues, she’d itch in her seat as if transforming into her younger frizzy-haired self: a bodily return to a state of resentment, of long-lost feuds and teenage spats. The hierarchy between sisters was always shifting, dependent on some nuances of power that I could never quite identify. On the way home, she’d mutter about the appalling thing that one of her sisters had the hide to say: each journey home it would be a different sister. I’d watch my own daughter in the rear-view mirror. She’d be looking out the window, but I’d know she was listening.
‘Why do you bicker all the time?’ I once made the mistake of asking.
My wife sharpened in her seat. ‘We don’t,’ she snapped. Then, as the distance widened between the car and her old family home, she said, quietly, ‘It’s what we do in our family.’
The hierarchy of sons-in-law, on the other hand, was firmly fixed in place. The superior son-in-law always knew the football score, could keep up with the beer-tally set by his father-in-law, could do the biggest bomb in the pool. The second-seeded son-in-law was working hard to be noticed, had bought himself a Weber six-burner, made sure he knew the right stubby-holder to use, always began know-it-all sentences with: ‘I saw on TV that …’ or ‘Apparently …’ I could only say, ‘Yes, excellent.’ I think some of the nephews—scowling at their phones or Marco-Poloing in the pool—ranked higher than me. I think even my mother-in-law did. She was always on the edge of the conversation, clearing up the plastic plates and paper serviettes. Of course, the king of the heap was always the man who slapped a plate of chicken wings in front of you and waited, looming.
‘No,’ my daughter said.
The tongs snapped. The only sound was the hiss of the middle son-in-law’s beer. Even the splashing in the pool ceased.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ my father-in-law said.
My daughter’s face was blotching with pink. A droplet of marinade splatted from the tongs onto the patio table.
‘I’ll have some, Dad,’ my wife said.
My mother-in-law fluffed her tea towel.
I sat opposite my daughter, willing us both into oblivion. My daughter scrunched up her eyes. My body hummed.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ the lump of a man said.
‘Dad, it’s just—’ my wife said, ‘she’s just, we’re just—’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
And my daughter swept from the table, bolting away to the furthest reaches of the backyard.
‘There’s nothing wrong with it,’ another man said, many years before.
We were sitting, as we always did, opposite each other across the marble table in the kitchen. This was the beginning of it all. (I measure time sometimes by determining how frequently my mother was able to get out of bed; at this stage, she did occasionally emerge from behind the pale door and pad down the hallway. Once or twice she’d join us at the marble table; once, she came and read to me in bed.) In the middle of the table was a chicken casserole.
My father hadn’t made the casserole. It had been delivered by one of our well-meaning neighbours. There was a stack of chicken casseroles in the fridge supplied by other well-meaning neighbours, another stack in the freezer, ready to go when we needed them. In the afternoons after school, I’d have to open the front door and take the casserole from the neighbour from across the road or down the street. She’d occupy the doorstep, waiting for me to force the words ‘thank you’ from my mouth. They’d fall out, dry and hollow, meaning something different from the dictionary definition. It was better when I arrived home late, having planned a circuitous path home from school, and found another Pyrex dish laid out on the welcome mat.
The steam lingered between us. There was a fatty scent in the air. My father didn’t say anything else. He couldn’t bring himself to say ‘please’. I wouldn’t mouth the word ‘no’. My father’s fingers tapped the marble. We sat there in the absence of words, waiting.
I don’t remember what made me start eating it.
At school, I pretended everything was the same as it was for every other kid. I did my best to scrape my knees on the quadrangle; to tumble into the classroom over the frayed carpet. But kids worked it out. There was a gap in the way they talked about me. ‘He’s the one with the ______,’ they’d whisper. There was always an empty space around my body as I wandered across the playground, too, everyone repelled like the bad end of a magnet. I understood. There was a white humming in my mind that was palpably repellent, a rhythm that was beginning to form. The phrasing wasn’t there yet. It was still ______ ______ ______ ______, although sometimes it was turning into Please don’t ______ ______. At that point, my mother’s appearances on the hallway side of the door could stave off the humming. But little acts of control—like stepping over the lines on the quadrangle or crossing the road at exactly the same spot every day, or playing a record over and over—meant that everything was going to be ______ ______.
I didn’t tell anyone about these acts. There was no one to tell. If another kid was near me when it was time to cross the street, sometimes I’d walk a few steps along the footpath until I was alone and then double back, or I’d crouch and pretend to do up my shoelaces, just in case they worked it out. I’d watch the beak of the stylus slide down into the correct groove on the record, but the volume was so low that no one—not the body sleeping; not the body sitting waiting at the kitchen table—could hear. At night, in the dark, hemmed in by the blankets, that’s when the humming was at its worst. The only way to protect myself then was to accompany the rhythm. Arms straight, palms against thighs, tapping. Please don’t let 
. Please don’t let . Repeat until the grey shadows of morning stretch across the room.
One morning I was making my way across the chilly quadrangle, tracing a particularly complicated pattern to get me from library to classroom, when I noticed a different shape from the configuration of the bodies. There was another empty space forming around another figure in the playground. ‘He’s weird,’ I heard one kid say. ‘He stinks,’ hissed another. It was a new arrival at the school: the worst thing you could possibly have happen to you, coming in mid-term, when everything was already settled in its proper order. He had other marks against him, too. He wore a home-made knitted jumper, which wasn’t quite the same grey as the official uniform. As I shifted towards him I could see he had a vertical scar that sliced over his top lip. He also had a sneer on his face: I wasn’t sure if that was caused by the scar or by whatever he was thinking. He did smell, like he’d weed himself a few weeks before and never changed his shorts. I could feel my body veering away from him, like all the other magnets.
Eventually, though, he and I found ourselves alongside each other more often than not. We weren’t in the same class—he was in the year below me—but we’d see each other at playlunch. I’d watch the birds skipping along the edge of the quadrangle and he’d flick out some of his crumbly sandwich bread so the birds hopped closer. We’d sort-of talk: a bit about books we were reading or what was on telly last night. I told him that my favourite show was The Goodies; he agreed with me that the giant cat episode was the best one. We became almost-friends. He liked to look over at the other kids and make bitter comments, using words I’d never heard before.
‘They’re fascists,’ he’d sneer. ‘She’s so bourgeois.’
I didn’t ask what these words meant. I never asked, either, how he’d got the scar on his face, but he did tell me that his birthday was coming up and his mum had said he could have a sleepover if he wanted, if I wanted. He said this out of the corner of his mouth, so that the scar twitched in a strange way. I don’t remember saying yes, but I do remember walking to his house after school, pyjamas and toothbrush in my backpack. We left by the incorrect gate, the gate I never allowed myself to go out by, but I squeezed my elbows into my rib cage and kept my palms close to the sides of my legs. I gave my thighs four quick taps. I don’t think my almost-friend noticed.
It was a long walk to his house. He pointed out objects of interest in an off-hand way: the big gnarled tree, the lawnmower repair shop, the stormwater drain. I said something about The Goodies being on tonight, and he agreed that we’d watch it if we had time. The afternoon light was greying. We walked to the edge of town, out onto the floodplain. The streets here had big gaps between houses, as though there’d once been a house there but someone had erased it. In the spaces were rusted husks of cars growing in the long grass. We arrived at my almost-friend’s house. It was made up of horizontal strips of white wood; some strips were a grottier shade of white than others. Against the boards was a stack of bicycles. As we made our way up the cracked cement path, the screen door shrieked open and a midget child galloped out and tackled my almost-friend.
‘This is my fascist brother,’ my almost-friend sneered.
The rest of his family was in the kitchen. The room was cosy: a pot-belly stove was going and the mum was stirring something on the stove. It was the same smell that clung to my almost-friend, but in this room it smelled hearty, delicious. The mum was curly haired and eiderdowny, like the wife on All Creatures Great and Small. The dad had just come in from the backyard still wearing muddy gumboots over his corduroy trousers. In the corner was a crib with a baby in it, and the dad was cooing over it. I said a tentative hello and the family replied with some friendly welcoming words, the younger brother talking over the top of everyone else and then the mother telling him consolingly that he could tell me all about his toys later.
‘Come and see the chooks,’ my almost-friend said.
The chooks were kept at the far end of the muddy, knotty-grass backyard. The coop was tacked onto the side of a nearly-fallen-down shed: a wire caged-in area with a metal gate. Within the cage at least ten brown dishevelled birds strutted, pricking the soggy straw. My almost-friend strode over the puddles and the tufts of grass. I held back as he untangled the latch of the gate: a coathanger wound around the metal frame.
‘Are you scared?’ a voice behind me said. The younger brother was standing at the back door, clutching a knitted toy in the shape of a cow.
‘They’re only chooks,’ my almost-friend said as he stood amongst the terrifying creatures.
When I stepped into the coop—my hand getting stabbed by the end of the coathanger latch, the mud squelching under my school shoes—the birds flicked their heads and stared at me with their goggly eyes. I hoped they might scatter, but they started, instead, to advance on me. They clucked, loudly. One bird lifted her head and stretched her neck, Godzilla-like. Another lifted a talon. They twisted their heads, peering at me with one eye and then the other.
‘They’re only chooks,’ the younger brother said, clambering in after me.
‘Go back inside,’ my almost-friend sneered at his brother. ‘This coop is for intelligentsia only.’
The brother stayed where he was. ‘This is my cow,’ he said to me, sticking out the knitted black-and-white toy.
‘No one cares,’ said my almost-friend as he checked the plastic water bottles that were hanging from the top of the cage. Tubes protruded from the bottom of these, like you saw in the hospital wards on Trapper John, M.D. A little red plastic bowl sat underneath and some of the creatures were poking at the water. My almost-friend leaped over to the corner of the cage and ripped the lid off a large ice-cream container. He grabbed some pellets that looked like All-Bran and flung them across the straw. The birds’ clucking changed pitch, and they strutted towards the pellets, their heads pulsating forwards and back.
‘They’re tidbitting,’ my almost-friend said. ‘The weird thing they do with their neck, the weird noise they make, it’s called tidbitting.’
One of the birds tidbitted in my direction. Under the watchful eyes of my almost-friend and his younger brother, I kept as still as I possibly could, my hands by my sides. The bird plucked nearly-but-not-quite at my toes. Another bird high-stepped over and took a swipe, not at me, but at the other chicken. The first chicken scurried away.
‘We call that the pecking order,’ my friend sneered. ‘The one at your feet now, she’s the boss of the coop.’ The creature tilted her head at me, as if she was considering pecking me, too. ‘It can get pretty bloody, stabbing at the face and neck with their beaks. Sometimes they all gang up on one chook. They can peck it to death. They don’t peck at people, not very often. We had a rooster, it wanted to be the boss of Dad even and my dad had to wear these special gloves and then pin it to the ground whenever it got too cocky. It still wouldn’t submit so Dad said there was only one option …’
The chicken at my feet strutted away. ‘Which was …?’ I didn’t want to say.
‘The stew pot,’ my almost-friend sneered.
‘The stew pot,’ said his younger brother. ‘Do you want to play with my cow?’
There’s the word ‘chicken’: pecking at my feet, tilting her head to gaze at me; and there’s the word ‘chicken’: the stringy brown meat bubbling in the pot on the stove.
‘Are you sure you’re not hungry?’ the mum asked me, doling out a second helping to her son.
I smiled wanly but didn’t say anything.
‘That just means there’s plenty for the rest of us, eh boys?’ said the dad, then gave a big bear-laugh to show me he was being funny.
The brothers didn’t appear to be listening: my almost-friend had snatched the knitted cow away from his brother and was holding it aloft, just out of reach.
‘I’ll leave some in the pot in case,’ said the mum. ‘And there’s heaps of bread if you want it.’
The younger brother was struggling with my almost-friend, grabbing upwards. ‘Give me it!’
‘No!’
I nibbled at a corner of the crumbly, kibbly bread.
The mum had turned away to look at the baby in the crib. The dad was watching his sons squabble, amused.
‘Why do you want it? Why do you want it?’ my almost-friend was saying.
‘Because it’s mine!’
The older brother flicked it across the room and the boy scrambled after it. ‘You’re such a materialist,’ my almost-friend said.
The dad let out a massive hearty chuckle. ‘Now where’d you pick up words like that?’
‘Chip off the old block,’ the mum said, good-naturedly. ‘Who wants to wash up?’
The dad washed up and I helped my almost-friend dry. The younger brother wiped down the kitchen table, and the mum picked up the baby and held it in her arms. She undid a few buttons of her shirt and I looked into the sink at the suds draining down the plughole. The younger brother was jumping up at a high shelf in the corner of the room and the dad strode over and took down a pack of cards.
‘Do you know how to play Verbot?’ the younger brother asked.
I said to my almost-friend, ‘I thought we were going to watch The Goodies.’
‘Oh, luvvie,’ the mother said, ‘we don’t have a television.’
My almost-friend wasn’t looking at me. His face was humming.
We all sat down at the table and played cards. During the card game the dad told me about ethical farming and the principles of social equality before the mum told him to quieten down before he bored us all to death. My almost-friend, scowling next to me, didn’t say anything, and missed some crucial plays in the game. He didn’t even notice when his brother’s score surpassed his or when the mum deliberately let him win. And then we all went to bed.
It was strange looking up at a different ceiling in a different room. His brother was snoring in the corner.
‘I know my house is a bit weird,’ my almost-friend said.
‘It’s all right,’ I wanted to say.
‘My dad says that he made a choice, and it was the best choice, for all of us. He says we’re all caught up in the capitalist alienation machine, no, not machine, the industrial power complex. He didn’t want to be a corporate automaton. I don’t either, I s’pose, but I also don’t want to have to keep moving towns and I want to buy proper clothes and …’
His brother snuffled and rolled over.
‘I just want to watch telly,’ my friend whispered.
A car drove down the street. I watched the lights curve across the ceiling.
‘My family’s weird, too,’ I said.
And I told him everything. I told him about the silences in my house and the stilted conversations between me and my father. I told him about the daily visits from the nurse, and the buckets of vomit my father brings out from behind the closed door. And the times the doctor comes and spends forever in the closed-off room and then when he comes out he won’t look at me. And then my father is even more silent. I told him about going into the stifling room and not-talking to my fading-away mother.
And I told him the other stuff, too, the places where I can and can’t cross the street and the way I play my Hitwave ’81 record and the humming words forming in my brain and the way I have to tap tap tap tap. The words unfurled from my mouth and ascended to the ceiling. They curved through the air like light.
My friend didn’t say anything.
‘It’s all right,’ I said to myself.
‘It’s all right,’ my friend echoed.
In the morning, I ravenously ate four pieces of buttered toast.
‘I knew you’d get your appetite back,’ the mum said.
I avoided an invitation from the younger brother to visit the chooks again, thanked the parents for having me, and took the path past the empty spaces and the lawnmower shop and the gnarled tree back to school.
My friend didn’t say anything on the walk.
And then, at playlunch, when I looked for him in the quadrangle, I noticed that the atmosphere in the playground had changed, just a little. The figures were more clumped together than usual and they were buzzing with some new excitement. As I made my way over to the usual corner, a clump of students shadowed over to me. I drifted casually in another direction as if that had always been my intention. I didn’t normally like to go this way: the quadrangle here was a tangle of hopscotch lines, scrawled in red paint. The horde moved over with me. I tried to slip past, but one of the boys stuck out his leg and I tripped, slapping my palms hard on the cement, my hands and knees cutting into the red paint.
‘Made you step on the crack,’ the boy guffawed.
‘Tap tap tap tap,’ my almost-friend sneered behind him.
My father-in-law said, ‘What’s got her goat?’
My brothers-in-law snorted and one swigged at his beer. The patio roof thrummed in the summer heat.
‘Dad,’ my wife was still trying to finish her sentence. ‘It’s just—she’s just—it’s just something that—’
‘I’ll talk to her,’ I said.
She was still crouched in the far corner of the backyard, staring into the Colorbond fence. I sat down on the lawn next to her. She wouldn’t acknowledge my presence.
‘It’s all right,’ I wanted to say.
Her eyes were dry from staring.
‘Darling,’ I said.
‘I won’t, Daddy. I won’t.’
I tried to think of the right thing to say.
‘Darling, please,’ I said. I looked back at the patio and my relatives-in-law leaning over the platter, my still-wet-from-the-pool nephews licking their sticky fingers. ‘Darling, please. It’s what they do in this family.’
I thought of families—not just this family—gathering at Christmas time, celebrating together over roast chook, falling asleep together in front of the telly. I thought of the whole power complex.
‘There are two words,’ I wanted to say. ‘There’s “part”: the word you use when you’re included, when you’re in on the conversation. “I’m part of the whole,” you might want to say. And there’s “part”: when you leave the room, when you’re cut away from the rest of the group, when a quadrangle of children sneer at you, when you don’t know what happened on The Goodies last night, when someone catches you picking the bacon bits out of the potato salad.’
I thought of being on the outside looking in.
‘It’s what we do in our family,’ I said to my daughter.
Eventually, I was able to prise her away from the Colorbond and drag her back to the table. I had to use sterner words than ‘please’, harsher actions than a hand-hold. ‘But sometimes,’ I told myself, ‘it needs to be done, it’s for her own good, it’s what we have to do.’
She sat at the table; there were four pink marks on her upper arm where my fingers had been. ‘I’m sorry, Granddad,’ she said, the words falling out of her dry mouth.
Then I watched her from across the table, licking off the gluey marinade to reveal the chlorine-white meat underneath, forcing the stringy flesh into her mouth. Her eyes glinting blackly, looking at me murderously.
My father watched me from across the table, his nails tapping against the marble.
For the rest of primary school, I tried to make myself as normal as possible. I’d see my no-longer-friend in the quadrangle, playing handball with his mates, sneering together. Then one year—halfway through term—he wasn’t there any more. I’d walk home, taking a different route each time. I locked away the humming and the tapping for the times when no one was paying attention. When my father served up dinner, the plate clanking down on the marble table, I ate what was put in front of me.