Green

You’ve driven past it on the way to the coast, the sign of the neon mower. One by one, Ron Todd is claiming the city’s arterial roads, putting some new world there, and the name Ron Todd in lights.

That was another line of bio, I think.

Ron Todd set up World of Chickens because Ron Todd’s World of Mowers at Kedron was a success and he wanted to diversify.

In our early days, ambition got the better of him. We had four or five people on each shift, including some of the Mowers part-timers. Who never actually said it, but often gave the impression they were lowering themselves. They dealt with chicken like people doing the best they could with the wrong tools—they tried to get out of putting marg on the burger buns and they didn’t even start to comprehend the importance of adequate refrigeration.

Now the standard staffing level is three: two at the counter and cooking, and one chicken. There’s marg on every bun unless specifically requested otherwise, we treat the fillets with close to the respect you’d give a vaccine, and anything that might be past its prime we feed to Frank. We, the Chickens crowd, think things are much improved now that the Mowers crowd has gone.

Three hours into obstetrics, and already my attention level isn’t what it should be. We’ve had our introduction to the term, and the rest of the morning is a tutorial called ‘Taking an Obstetric History’. It comes with an uncommonly good handout, so the usual frenzy of note-taking isn’t necessary. Isn’t allowed even. The tutor began by saying, ‘I’d rather you listened and thought about this than had your heads down writing notes. So it’s all in the handout.’

First day of term, Mater Mothers Hospital. We’ve turned up with our white coats in our bags, the free stethoscopes a drug company gave us last year and our yet-to-be-opened copies of Beischer and Mackay’s Obstetrics and the Newborn. Those of us who have them, anyway. I’ve had mine since January. Frank, who denies most realities as long as he can, tends to hold off until scrounging each book from somewhere mid-term.

For me, the year begins and the summer holidays end when a parental credit card turns the book list into two box-loads of reality—a year of text books to be shelved and wait their turn.

We’re already at least two thirds of a box into the year, now that we’ve put psychiatry and surgery behind us. Though not far behind us when it comes to surgery. At the end of ‘Taking an Obstetric History’, the tutor tells us that our long cases from last term are marked and can be picked up at the office.

‘Some of us had been thinking coffee wouldn’t go astray,’ Franks says to me on the way to the door.

‘It’s a hospital. Don’t think about the coffee. It’ll only disappoint you.’

We leave as a group, and the curve of the drive leads us up the hill to the stately old Mater Private Hospital and the office of the Clinical Sub-Dean.

‘I hate this bit. I just want to get it over with.’ It’s meant to be said in my head, but it comes out before I can stop it.

‘It’s only ten per cent.’

‘Ten per cent where you’ve still got to get at least five or you do it again.’

‘Yeah, whatever. It’s just a case. As if you’ll have any problem. As if any of us should have any problem. It’s the other ninety per cent that’s the big deal. This is the easy part—pick a patient, go through everything, write it up. You even know what happens to them in the end, before you hand it in.’

‘It’s O’Hare who’s marking them,’ one of the others says. ‘Don’t forget that.’

Charles O’Hare—apparently Charlie to his friends, not that we’re aware of any—has been a surgical registrar at the Royal too long, and it’s turned him mean. He keeps not quite passing his final exams and not quite making the consultants happy, but somehow he stays part of the system. This year, for the first time, his unit had a new consultant who was younger than him. We could have done without that.

‘O’Hare and his bloody Tim Tams,’ Frank says as we go up the steps. ‘I’m so glad that’s over. The bastard totally put me off chocolate biscuits.’

I’d rather not be reminded. O’Hare would sit on the edge of his desk eating biscuits in every tute, as though we were a waste of his time, a bunch of people who had turned up to annoy him while he was eating. But it was his learn-by-scorn approach that had least appeal. He’d sit there and fire badly-worded questions at his victim, he’d trick them into giving the wrong answer or freeze them into giving no answer, and then would come the scorn. The ‘exactly what makes you think you might pass this term?’ scorn.

My case report is near the top of the pile, which is starting to spread messily across the table outside the Sub-Dean’s office. On other people’s front pages I can see marks ranging between four and eight out of ten, maybe one eight and a half. I’ve got seven. I’ll settle for that.

I walk back outside, into the clump of people who are flicking through their cases page by page. I’ve earned a few ticks, a few ‘goods’ and one ‘unlikely’. On page five O’Hare has written ‘An ultrasound would have been a cheap, quick and non-invasive way of getting the same information’ and on page six, next to the last disease listed in my differential diagnosis, he’s put ‘maybe once in 100 years’. In tutes, that would have been one of his friendlier remarks. I’ve done pretty well. He even finishes with ‘Good work overall. A bit too reliant on textbooks and not enough on judgement in parts.’

Frank’s has no mark written on the front page.

‘He must have put it somewhere,’ he says. ‘Maybe the thought of a ten embarrassed him, so he had to write it inside.’

Page one has a couple of ticks, pages two and three some circling and the next four pages have nothing. At the bottom of an otherwise untouched page eight it says, ‘Mostly mindless copying of the patient’s file. Do you even know what the abbreviations mean? I thought I’d made my dislike of them clear. RESUBMIT. Please see me.’

‘Arsehole,’ Frank says. He wasn’t expecting a ten, but he wasn’t expecting this. ‘What an arsehole. Resubmit. Jesus.’

To O’Hare’s credit, he was never anything but clear about his dislike of abbreviations. In our trial case write-ups we all used them, because that’s what the residents did in the files in the wards. The afternoon he handed the write-ups back, he called abbreviations ‘an evil kind of shorthand’. He even said they were ‘festering’. And, if that wasn’t clear enough, Greg Schmidt played into his hands when O’Hare went for the ‘making an example of someone’ part of the learn-by-scorn technique.

‘SOBOE,’ O’Hare said, one mean and dangerous letter after another. ‘Is it a kind of musical instrument, and is it so important that you want to put it in capitals? Was the patient a very good soboe player? What are you saying when you put SOBOE?’

And the answer, we all knew, was shortness of breath on exertion. But that wasn’t the point. We were about to get a lesson in thinking things through rather than copying, a lesson in spelling things out. A lesson in not being lazy.

Right up until Greg Schmidt said, with a tremor in his voice that we’d never heard before, ‘Swelling of back on exertion.’ Rising at the end like a sad lonely question and, even as we laughed, we all knew what we were up for. And that we’d never be using abbreviations again.

‘He never liked me,’ Frank’s saying.

‘He never liked anyone.’

‘Yeah, he never liked anyone, but he knew my name. You kept a low profile. Smart bastard. “RESUBMIT. Please see me.” I’m going to use that word Cyndi hated, and it starts with a C.’

‘It’s the Mater, Frank, and you’re shouting. Use it quietly. It’s not a nun-friendly word.’

‘Mindless copying. Are you telling me you didn’t copy from the patient’s file? Are you telling me you made it up?’

‘No. Not at all. You’d be mad to make it up. Copying’s inevitable, it’s the mindlessness he took offence to. The visible display of copying.’

‘I’ve got to resubmit. Have you worked that out? At the end of this term, in the mid-year break, I’ve got to go to a hospital, attach myself to some poor sick bastard, write it all down and resubmit. And, even if I’ve passed the rest of the term, if it doesn’t work out when I resubmit I get to do surgery again at the end of the year when you’re all off doing an elective somewhere.’

‘It won’t happen that way. You’ll pick a good case, and it won’t be a patient of O’Hare’s and you won’t use abbreviations and you’ll be fine.’

‘Could I just copy yours, maybe?’

‘Do you want to think that through? You might as well go and find a few nuns now and shout that word Cyndi didn’t like right at them. And I could probably come along and do it with you, since I reckon O’Hare would be gunning for both of us. You could find a case that was like mine, and that might make it easier.’

‘Ah, like yours,’ he says, smiling, nodding, putting the emphasis on like. As if things are looking up, but now being conducted in code. ‘I get it. So should I take yours with me now?’

‘We’ll talk in the mid-year break.’

Frank tosses me the keys when we get to his car at the end of the day.

‘You take the wheel, Mister Seven out of Ten,’ he says, and we drive.

Mister Seven out of Ten, as though it ranks me among the big over-achievers.

As we loop around onto the freeway from the Mater the sun is low in the west, easing down towards Mount Coot-tha, eye level and in front of us as we merge with the traffic. We’re on our way to World of Chickens.

Frank opens the glove box. He takes out the jar of Staminade, sucks his finger and swirls it around among the clumps of crystals. He rubs the finger on his gums and works his tongue and saliva vigorously like ‘Lancelot Link Secret Chimp’, that is, like a lower primate battling with a mouthful of toffee to create whimsical dubbing opportunities, and a kind of sixties TV I’m glad I can only vaguely remember.

Staminade, for Frank, isn’t merely a green salty sports drink. It’s become a habit, and not a simple one. If he’s not driving, and if work is done for the day, he’ll have a mouthful of vodka too. It’s reminiscent of the best of his invented cocktails, the brizgarita—the hometown Brisbane version of a more famous salty cocktail from somewhere else. But the complex formula of Staminade means that the hard work’s already done with the brizgarita, already in the jar. And all you have to do is mix yourself a strong, cold glass of it and toss in a shot of vodka and a shot of tequila. Perhaps with a slice of lemon and some Staminade powder crusting around the rim, if it’s an occasion.

As Frank sees it, with that cunning electrolyte balance it’s got its own built-in hangover cure. And if you don’t get the ratios quite right you can always have a couple in the morning, with a raw egg and some B vitamins substituted for the vodka. The tequila, he says, isn’t really negotiable.

‘The brizgarita’s day will come,’ he claims, though it hasn’t come yet. But right now, that kind of glory isn’t on his mind. That’s the ambitious Frank, the other Frank. This afternoon we have the Frank who is concentrating on being loudly shitty about his surgery long case mark and being dumped.

‘Seems like he’s got a lot of weekend jobs on at the moment,’ he says, moving comfortably into item three of his catalogue of complaint, the fact that his father made him work most of the weekend. ‘There’s a lot of people who really want to be home when you come over to their place and drop a tree. It’s lucky there were no heart murmurs today, since all I can hear is bloody chainsaws.’

He goes for some more Staminade, and he’s talking again before the finger’s out of his mouth.

I’ve known him long enough to know that this is one of those times when it’s best to sit there and let him rant, and offer those things the psych people call ‘minimal encouragers’ in reply, since that’s all he’s looking for. It does make me wonder if they’ve also got things called minimal discouragers. I could use a few of those sometimes.

Where are we going? What are we doing? And the answers aren’t: World of Chickens and making burgers. It’s bigger answers I’m looking for. Day One of a new term—the usual first-day scare job and a few lectures. About to be followed by several hours in and out of a chicken costume, because it’ll put me a few dollars closer to a video camera.

A few dollars closer to the video camera I didn’t get when I turned twenty-one late last year. It was always too much to expect, even for a twenty-first. My parents gave me a regular still camera without zoom and a copy of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. I know it’s ungrateful to think of that as anything less than a good result. Good photography isn’t about zoom and the novel was a hardback, and one I’d asked for. But it’s ungrateful to think of it in ‘result’ terms at all. So, call me ungrateful.

Technically, I’m well aware it’s the thought that counts. I also realise that, if parents get it close to right on birthdays, you’re not doing badly. It’s having the list that’s the problem, but my parents encourage it so how can they feel blameless when I have it in mind when birthdays finally arrive? It’s my mother who started it, her idea that a list cuts down the likelihood of unwanted presents while, if it’s long enough, still allowing the gift-buyer choice. And so what if my father’s list always goes no further than brandy and socks? It could, if he wanted it to.

Outside my family, choice was never a factor last year when it came to twenty-firsts. As far as the male members of the year went, it turned out by about April that it was your twenty-first that showed whether you were a pewter man or a crystal man. Frank was a pewter man. By my birthday in October, there was a new category: recycle man. I’m sure I ended up with some presents I’d seen earlier in the year, at the MarchApril twenty-firsts. Worse, I think I ended up with one or two I’d chipped in for the first time.

So, at my party I scored three mismatched pewter tankards, a set of tumblers etched with the university crest, cufflinks, a harshly ugly decanter, a cocktail shaker, six golf balls and a fart cushion. Plus, that butt of all bath-time jokes, soap on a rope.

And I have to admit, I don’t get it. Pewter surely had its day in the ale houses of the seventeenth century, I don’t understand cocktails, my cuffs—like absolutely everyone else’s—have at least as many buttons as you could need, I don’t play golf, and I’ve never in my life decanted. Where does that leave me? I suppose I shower, and I fart an average amount, but if that’s the only personal connection with my twenty-first haul that I can muster, it’s not good.

I remember looking over my collection at the end of the evening and thinking, since when did I become the man who has everything? The only thing missing was a ship in a bottle.

At least Frank’s gift was original, even if deeply pornographic. It’s the only hard-core wall clock I’ve ever seen. He said it was imported. ‘Good lord,’ my mother said, ‘I think it’s anatomically correct, Frank.’ Then she turned to me and told me she thought it’d look lovely anywhere in my room that can’t be seen from the door.

So, no video camera. My father offered me a deal, and one I’m familiar with: dollar-for-dollar matching on video camera purchase if I was prepared to get a part-time job to earn my share. With the stipulation that my share was not to include money made from reselling any of last year’s superfluous textbooks—since that’s my parents’ already—or unreasonable attempts to manipulate routine cost-of-living adjustments to my allowance.

My father’s an accountant. It’s not his fault.

My allowance stretches to fund the rudimentary lifestyle I seem to have fallen into—a reflection on the sadness of the lifestyle, rather than the abundance of the allowance—and it’s given to me conditional on continuing to pass all my exams. Which was always my plan, anyway.

If I want anything more, one of my options is negotiation. If what I want is seen as part of a long-term serious plan and doesn’t involve compromising my medical studies, I am occasionally awarded dollar-for-dollar matching.

Frank looks on these arrangements, complex though they are, with some envy. He gets no allowance and describes himself as ‘self-funded’. Of course, it’s not that simple and Frank can actually be quite a scam machine. It’s not uncommon for jobs to come his way out of nowhere, and to pay cash. World of Chickens is now the job Frank calls his ‘steady gig’, and he always likes to have one of those. But it was me who, through my negotiating experience hard won at home, got us the meal-plus-bottomless-soft-drink part of our arrangements.

I’d wanted to read Bright Lights, Big City since I’d read about it when it came out in America. I put it on my list thinking it’d be an easy purchase, but it wasn’t available here at the time so the book shop had to order it in.

I read it straight away, and told Frank to read it too. He didn’t, so I eventually had to read bits to him to make the point. He told me to bring it in the car and we’d read it on the way to and from World of Chickens, which made me motion sick but I wanted him to get it.

Bright Lights, Big City showed me—made it clearer to me than before—what a slow, safe hole this place is. ‘Don’t you get it?’ I said to him. ‘In comparison we’re living in Dim Lights, Big Town. Until about nine-thirty at night, when most of the dim lights go off. You see how far behind we are? How far off the pace? Even someone as old as Frank Sinatra gets to sing a song about New York as a city that doesn’t sleep. Imagine one old person here staying up past nine, or even starting dinner after six. Do you think Frank Sinatra ends the day with meat and three veg in front of ‘Wheel of Fortune’ at five o’clock? Don’t you get it?’

He didn’t get it.

Frank has no idea of the outside world at all. Frank thinks the book is cool, and he thinks it in an uncomplicated way. He really got into the second-person style because, with me reading it aloud, it made it as though the story was about him. I told him it was not choose-your-own-adventure format, and that the expression ‘insert your name here’ wouldn’t be occurring once in these pages.

I tried to explain what I thought second-person was about and he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I get it. You are obviously insufficiently acquainted with my literary masterpiece Bright Lights, Big Chicken. It’s about this chicken-selling med-student guy who’s a complete horn monger, but he’s got this dull mate who holds him back a bit.’ And he cleared his throat. ‘You are changing gear,’ he said as he changed gear. ‘You are pulling away from the lights.’

I told him not to spoil it, but maybe he already had.

‘You are, in the trouser, perhaps the largest and most gifted man in this town.’ Definitely spoiled now. ‘They want you, baby, they want you. Some of them will get you. It’ll be excellent. They will call you the Love Master. Behind your back, they already do.’

Jay McInerney turns thirty this year, and already Frank’s set him rolling in his grave.

The first reference to Bolivian Marching Powder occurs on page one, and it took us both a second to work out that it probably meant cocaine. At a better time than this, and during a better mood, Frank renamed Staminade Sunnybank Hills Marching Powder, after the suburb where he lives. And he did it without the aid of any irony at all.

We’ve talked more about New York since, enough that Frank now occasionally refers to Sunnybank as Brisbane’s SoHo, since it’s SOuth of HOlland Park. ‘Don’t you get it?’ he said. ‘Instead of SOuth of HOuston.’

‘We are so not Bright Lights, Big City,’ I remember telling him, to shut all this up. ‘We’re not even the fucking Breakfast Club.’ A reference that only let Frank segue effortlessly into some very sleazy arrangement he’d like to discuss with Molly Ringwald, but had previously been decent enough to keep to himself.

Today he sits with the half-full jar of Staminade open between his thighs, loads his wet finger again and rubs more crystals on his gums. It’s the dumping by Cyndi he’s taking hardest.

‘Is a bit of fucking respect too much to hope for?’ he says, green crystals flirting with the gaps between his teeth in the late afternoon light.

‘I’m sorry. When did it ever get round to respect?’

‘Exactly. Exactly. I get taken for granted, you know. I’m not just sex-on-tap.’

‘See, this is the problem. The emphasis there is on the “just”. You are sex-on-tap, but you aren’t just sex-on-tap. You and I can make that distinction, but there’d be a lot of people out there who can’t.’

‘Shit. That’s too subtle. Which means you’re right. Subtlety’s never worked for me. Subtlety’s what you go for if you’re the kind of loser who doesn’t have anything better. Present company excepted, of course.’

‘Of course.’

Okay, he’s on the brink of annoying me, and I’m too subtle to tell him so he’ll never know. Frank has now been single for almost four days. I’ve been single since September last year, or the preceding May, depending on how you look at it. I could be a whole lot more supportive if he could remember that sometimes.

I should’ve known he’d deal with Bright Lights, Big City the way he did. In first term this year we all started talking about the elective we have to do in December and January, between fifth year and sixth year. The faculty’s intention is that we travel, and experience something we mightn’t see here. I think it was in that context that I said something about really wanting to get out of Brisbane. Frank agreed. The next day he told me we could borrow his brother’s panel van, since his brother had done his licence for the moment, and that we should go to the coast. Which wasn’t exactly what I meant.

We drove north in the week between psych and surgery, Frank with his board shorts and his bare feet and his bad-boy attitude, singing along to his brother’s Dusty Springfield tapes. ‘Chick-pulling tapes,’ he called them. ‘AJ’s too smart to have a stack of guy music in the van.’ I was never too sure what ‘guy music’ meant, but I did admit I hadn’t been expecting Dusty Springfield.

Inspired by our chick-pulling potential, Frank made up ‘rules of the van’, most of which were needlessly ambitious and relied on the prospect of a sexual encounter before coming into play. The relationship man may, or may not, have been single at the time.

In the hour and a half it took to reach the Sunshine Coast, I’d picked up most of the words to ‘Son of a Preacher Man’ and I thought I’d probably be having sex that night, or within the next couple of days at the outside. If Frank took up with a weird religion, or Amway, he’d be trouble.

We agreed the van was sacrosanct. Rule One: No rooting in the van. If you score, you score on the beach.

So how close did we get? All we scored was the meat tray at a seriously tough Caloundra pub. It wasn’t even particularly near the beach.

We won the meat tray, and started playing pool with some locals. Which was fine while we were losing but then we hit a patch of form and, at the exact moment I was working out that winning mightn’t be a good idea, Frank addressed one of our opponent’s girlfriends as ‘babe’. Things didn’t go well from there.

‘Frank’s no good with names,’ I had to tell them. ‘And he’s not used to this kind of luck with pool either. I’d be very surprised if that blue went down. Very surprised.’

And at that even Frank noticed their unnecessarily firm grip on the cues, and the way one of them had moved to cover the door. And I talked amiably about nothing much, and then about sport, and he duly fucked up the shot. Our form fell away in a rush, he left the girls alone and the door was open for us when they sunk the black.

‘At least we’ve got something to eat,’ Frank said in the car park, when he found the bright side. ‘And you talked them out of hitting us. That was good.’

Then we had an argument about our meat and what to do with it, which became an argument about potato salad—and what the white ingredient might be—followed by one about who should have brought cooking utensils, and finally one about matches for the barbecue.

‘Why couldn’t you have been a boy scout?’ Frank said, the bright side now long gone. ‘You’re just the kind of person who should have been a boy scout. I should be able to hand you two sticks, and there should be nothing but friction between us and tea.’

We went to a takeaway place, and we asked the guy how much fish and chips he’d give us as a swap for the meat tray. We lay in the van that night, the wind picked up, the rain came in from the sea, we rooted nothing and the last thing Frank said was ‘Do you want to go home in the morning?’ and the last thing I said was ‘Yep’.

So that’s not what I mean by ‘away’. I’ve been looking at the possibility of doing my elective in New York. Naturally, I’ve thought about it enough that it now goes like this:

You are on your way again to Ron Todd’s World of Chickens, but you have a plan. A plan that means you are now only months away from the real world. Give or take ten thousand miles. It’s all a question of perspective. There’s distance to travel, and the rest of the year to endure. A year of ward rounds and exams, of fried fillets of chicken breast with a choice of five sauces. A year in which female company has proven elusive and in which you know—inside, you know—that you have missed the John Bostock Medal for Psychiatry by the narrowest of margins.

Okay, hyperbole with the last bit, since half of the people in the year haven’t even started psychiatry. But I still think I know.

There’s a line in Bright Lights, Big City about the central character meeting Amanda and coming to New York and beginning to feel that he was no longer on the outside looking in. That, perhaps, is the bit I get most.

Sometimes it feels like I live in such a shit town. It meets all reasonable definitions of a shit town. There are still men who put on hats to drive on these roads, our only celebrities are sports stars and newsreaders, and everyone you meet already knows your mother.

Okay, in my case some of the responsibility for the last one rests squarely with my mother, rather than Brisbane. My mother: uni lecturer, occasional political activist, rose fancier, theatre buff, person entirely unable to understand where her business ends and another person’s begins. Fluent in one language, shambolic in several but difficult to silence. Monty Python fan and, like most Monty Python fans, unable to understand people who don’t think every conversation can be improved by a quick reference to the Spanish Inquisition, and surprise. Etcetera. Nightmare. Worse when she’s excited. Otherwise far too British. Too bloody bloody British.

But I can’t blame it all on her. If the world was a human body, Brisbane would be the last sphincter things pass through on the way out. Nothing happens here. I want to be a film maker, but every week here is another week without narrative and that can’t be a good start. I’m not even on the outside looking in. I’m somewhere further away, and the people on the outside looking in seem pretty close to the action to me.

I’m out being the chicken, and all that’s still in my mind. There’s not as much Elizabethan material tonight, since Ron’s interest in exploring the chicken’s Gene Kelly side seems to have done something to my confidence.

Tonight, the theme is mime. Marcel Marceau chicken. Chicken walking against the wind, chicken doing things with silly (invisible) hat. Chicken doing a Michael Jackson moonwalk would be good, but the feet are too big. That’s the excuse. Chicken tripping up and falling to the pavement while failing to do a Michael Jackson moonwalk would be more embarrassment than I could handle.

It’s changeover time, and Frank is moving his ‘biggest burger in one bite’ challenge up a notch. He says he’s mastered the Chicken Little junior burger, and he’s on his way to the big time.

‘I’ve got a cut-down adult bun and two pec minor muscles, pickles and sauce,’ he tells me. ‘It’s a PB.’

‘Sure it is, if it goes in.’

‘How is it a personal best though,’ Sophie says, ‘if it’s not even an acknowledged product?’

‘Good point.’ I don’t know what kind of point it is, but this’ll be more interesting if I go with it. ‘Would you call that competition standard, Frank?’

‘No, I never said that. It’s more like heavy training.’

‘You’ve got two of the thin bits of chicken . . . ’ Sophie won’t let it go.

‘Pec minor muscles,’ Frank says, trying to reclaim some ground using science. ‘I know. Like two Chicken Littles, rather than the fully adult-burger pec major. Give me a break. I’ll get there. And I know it’s not the total complement of salad items, but I’m working up to it. And you’ve got to admit, it’s pretty bloody big.’

‘Yeah, okay. It’s big,’ Sophie says. ‘It’s a feat, even if it’s not the one the crowd was hoping for.’ She looks at me, as if I’m to speak for the crowd.

‘I think it’s all about creating a sense of anticipation. If he could just jam a whole burger in there right now, we wouldn’t be calling this a challenge.’

‘So, do it Frank,’ she says.

And he does. He takes a deep breath, opens his mouth wide and holds the modified burger up to it. His lips work their way along the bun, measuring it out and preparing to draw it in. His jaw moves forward, his eyes bulge, his hand pushes and the burger goes. There’s some very noisy nose breathing as he pauses between the engulf and the swallow, then he rolls his eyes back and tilts his head and takes it down his throat like a crocodile in a death roll.

He puts one hand onto the bench to steady himself, and raises the other in triumph. We applaud.

‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘Thank you. It was a bastard, but I couldn’t let you down.’

Once the two of us are out the door and in the corridor, Sophie says, ‘How big a burger do you reckon we can get him to swallow? Do you reckon we can get him to black out?’

‘Hey, on the first bad sinus day, anything’s possible.’

Zel tells Frank, ‘Just drizzle a little barbecue sauce across it,’ and I don’t like the way she says drizzle.

‘And a bit of mayo on the bun, spread with a knife?’

‘You remembered.’ Said in way that I’ve seen described as cooing. Then she turns to me. ‘Philip, is he this attentive to all the customers?’

‘Sure. He’s a professional.’ I’m hitting Ron for nausea loading to my pay if I cop much more of this, dammit. ‘Frank was born with great people skills, but I think he did invent the Big Chicken Little with you in mind.’

‘Test drove the first one myself earlier,’ he says, omitting to mention its ugly passage through his gullet.

She eats it in a way that’s presumably supposed to resemble dainty, with a paper serviette in both hands and a dab at her lips after each mouthful. There’s a gold trinkety rattle from her bracelets every time she does it, tiny horses and carriages and pineapples jangling into each other.

When a couple of students come in for burgers, I’m happy to take the work and leave Zel to Frank. The Todds, Sophie excepted, can be one of the downsides to working here. They turn up unannounced and need a lot of looking after. Sometimes Ron even tries to make a burger, but he treats it like celebrity day at McDonald’s. He makes bad burgers slowly, he gets in the way and the whole time he’s here he’s hanging out for any opportunity to tell the customer he owns the place. ‘I’m Ron Todd,’ he says, and so emphatically I think everyone’s expecting the next bit to go, ‘and I’m an alcoholic’. But it’s not his fault that everyone notices the big neon chicken and No one notices his small neon name.

Sophie comes in to change and Zel stays talking to Frank when we go out the back.

‘How’s obstetrics?’ she says from the toilet. ‘I didn’t ask you that yet.’

‘It’s fine. Not that we’ve done much so far.’

‘Would you do it, do you think? Would you go into that?’

‘Be an obstetrician, you mean? I don’t think so. I’ve got no idea what I’m going to do, really. In medicine, at least. I keep hoping I’ll work out how to be a film maker before I have to decide that.’

‘So you’re that serious about it?’

‘Yeah. Have you seen how much video cameras cost? That’s what I’m saving for. And I know it’s not the same as film, but I think I could learn a lot from it. At least it’d be something to start with. And I’ve done some film work, so . . . ’

‘Really? What have you done?’

‘Well, not much. I acted in a couple of alcohol-abuse films round about when I was finishing school. Educational films. I had a bit part in the first one and a bigger one in the second. It was the first time I ever got paid for anything.’

I don’t tell her the obvious part. Those films are always ‘cool crowd gone wrong’ versus ‘nerd made good’, and I was never going to be one of the slick people who drank themselves stupid and fell from grace by throwing up tomato peel into the toilet. I was the nice guy who didn’t drink and therefore, of course, got the girl. And that’s just like life, isn’t it?

‘So it’s a bit of a comedown to go from film actor to chicken then,’ Sophie’s saying, and sounding as though she’s genuinely sorry for me, like I’m a Hollywood Where Are They Now? story.

‘Yeah, it’s not really like that, though. There’s a few years in between. And I wasn’t exactly co-starring with De Niro.’

She opens the door and hands me the costume. It’s warm when I get into it. It always feels a little like sneaking into someone else’s bed, putting on the chicken, particularly on a cool evening like this. And Sophie makes it smell like green apple shampoo. I always get a blast of green apple when I pull the head down, and I do wonder what kinds of smells I’m giving her in return.

Film actor. It sounds like a lot more than it is. I signed up with a casting agent after I did my two alcohol films, but all she was interested in was making fifty bucks out of the portfolio photos. But it looked easy. A film career looked there for the taking, for weeks at least.

‘It’s not much of a place for film-makers,’ I say to Sophie as she’s zipping me up. ‘Brisbane, I mean. So I figure I’ve got to get out of here and see more of what’s going on out there, in the rest of the world. We get an elective at the end of fifth year. So I’ve been having a look at a few places in America. New York, New York, mainly. It’d be good to try New York. I’ve been reading some books lately, like Bright Lights, Big City. I’ve read it a couple of times. Have you read it?’

‘No.’

‘It’s about New York. It’s about this guy’s life in New York.’

‘Like a Simon and Garfunkel song. Did you see them at Lang Park last year? I went with Dad. Who would have preferred Neil Diamond, but you’ve got to take what’s on offer. Not that he’s New York. Well, I don’t think he is. But they are.’

‘Sure. Lots of New York references. “Whores on Seventh Avenue”, “New Jersey Turnpike”. Except that’s a New Jersey reference, I suppose.’

‘And what exactly is a turnpike? I’ve always wondered about that. Like, is there a pike there?’

‘It’s a good question. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get to check it out at the end of the year. I’ll send you a postcard. If there’s a postcard of any kind of pike in New Jersey, I’ll send it to you. Anyway, I got Bright Lights, Big City for my birthday late last year. I’d read about it somewhere. And I got a camera—a regular camera—since I figured I should learn about still photography too, if I’m looking at making films. Not that I’ve done much yet—my mother’s birthday, and a few compositional things. And we started taking some photos for a uni revue sketch, Frank and me, but it kind of got canned. There was a difference of opinion. Well, Frank told the organisers some of their ideas were fucked, and that they had a real problem listening to constructive criticism. So they told us we didn’t have to come back.’

‘That doesn’t sound like Frank,’ she says. She knows him too well by now. ‘Hey, Dad says you do Shakespeare when you’re doing the chicken.’

‘Sometimes. I thought that was between him and me.’

‘We’re a close family. Get used to it.’

‘It’s pretty boring out there. You’ve got to do something.’

‘No kidding. I think Shakespeare’s a good idea.’

‘So what do you do?’

‘Just wave my arms around a lot. Try to be like a chicken, I guess.’

‘But what does your brain do?’

‘Tries to stop me falling in front of the traffic. Don’t you find the lights, like, hypnotic?’

‘I think you’re getting a bit too much into that chicken brain space.’

How did it become Shakespearean? I’m thinking when I’m back out there and realising I can’t recall enough of ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ to make it worth trying.

It was the chicken costume, and the comb on the head, which came as a separate piece of moulded plastic and had a bad lean to the left. It took a while to sort that out, so it was on my mind and led to cockscomb, and therefore to standing at the roadside mouthing faux-Elizabethan advertising slogans and insults at the unstopping traffic. And that led, irresistibly, to Henry V’s speech before Agincourt (or was it Harfleur?) and eisteddfod flashbacks and Hamlet’s soliloquy, which is so over-recited that practically No one gets the emphasis right. No one listens to it any more. No one realises that the key word is ‘be’. Except of course this seven-foot chicken at the Taringa lights on Moggill Road. The one whose brain is always elsewhere, the one at very little risk of being fatally mesmerised by the traffic.

Frank waves me back in early.

‘Zel reckons we should pack up before ten if there’s No one around,’ he says, having already tidied some leftover chicken into three burgers that he’s now wrapping neatly and putting in a box for taking home.

I can remember, years ago, reading ads for bullworkers in American comics always featuring some bulky guy and a life-changing steel tube with handles. I was horrified when I worked out what their representative weakling weighed in kilograms. If only I’d left it in pounds and hadn’t put myself through the maths, I would have had years of those blissful dreams of sea monkeys instead. I always wanted sea monkeys, even if they were just tiny translucent aquatic insects that came as a packet of eggs not much bigger than dust. And I wanted X-ray glasses and the famous Black Liteª light bulb and peace patches for jeans. I must have been young. The peace symbol was everywhere on those pages.

But it wasn’t peace I needed. My life has always had peace in abundance. What it lacked, clearly, was muscle. And perhaps the people who go to beaches are kinder here than in America but I knew that, when the time came to have sand kicked in my face—the characteristic way for shame to manifest itself in a bullworker ad—it’d be at the time of maximum embarrassment. It hadn’t happened so far not because it wasn’t going to happen, but because it wouldn’t have meant enough. In the ads, the representative weakling was usually shamed in front of his girl. In the ads, the Charles Atlas way was the way of salvation. Charles Atlas never copped sand in the face, but nor did he kick it. He was above all that, oiled and buffed and able to shoulder the whole world. If Charles Atlas was on the beach, the sand kickers would look like scrawn and they’d have to run home and bullwork compulsively between now and next summer before daring to show themselves again.

It hadn’t been my plan get a bullworker for my nineteenth birthday. It had been years since the comics and all I’d put on the list had been ‘exercise equipment’. But that was too general so, when queried, I mentioned that I was thinking of something that’d bulk me up a bit, give me an all-over workout. Something that could do that in the privacy of my room. Something No one outside the family would have to know about. It was my mother who was drawn in by the claims on the bullworker box in Kmart. She even got the shop assistant to take the booklet out and, as soon as she saw that it offered forty-two different ways to a total-body makeover, she knew she was on the money.

So far, the results have not been spectacular, and my commitment to the bullworker has been in the waning phase for nearly two years. We had a plan, my mother and I, a bullworker-plus-Sustagen plan that practically couldn’t fail. It should have been very safely anabolic. It appears to be petering out into nothing. And that, dammit, is so very 1985 for me.

I’m in my sleeveless muscle shirt in my room realising that, on me, it’s just a sleeveless shirt and all it’s doing is putting my armpits on the outside. I’m pulling hard at the bullworker and trying not to grunt. Maybe there has been some progress. I grunt less than I once did and there are now only a couple of the forty-two bullworker moves where I get no compression at all, and they both involve holding the bullworker behind my back. As if I’m going to need those muscles out in the real world. Or, more to the point, as if I’m ever going to get a chance to display them. I am viewing muscles the way a peacock views tail feathers. I have been completely enslaved by those cruel sand-kicking ads. If only I’d put sea monkeys on the list instead. You got a whole damn country of sea monkeys, including a king and queen. They had a sketch of them in the ad.

That’s it. I’m stopping.

I make myself a massive chocolate Sustagen milkshake, I turn on the TV and I watch my arm veins bulge in the dim blue light. In the relevant section of my second-person bio, that part will read ‘muscles’ not ‘veins’:

You stop. You fix yourself a drink, you turn on the TV and your arm muscles bulge in the dim blue light. Not tonight, you tell her. Not again tonight. I’m spent.

Close to cool. Close indeed. Replacing ‘veins’ with ‘muscles’ and pretending my bullworker was a girlfriend certainly improved the look of my evening. That’s a tactic I won’t be sharing with Frank.

Not tonight, you tell her. Not again tonight. I’m spent. Shagged stupid like the king of the sea monkeys, slumped low in his throne.

The awesome breeding power of sea monkeys was always a feature. First they’d hatch, then they’d breed and breed until you owned a nation of them. What was I doing, taking any interest in them? Surely they’re just lice in a jar. And what was it all about when Zel turned up tonight? I’ve had plenty of times when I’ve craved invisibility, but with this one I actually got there. I vanished, Frank went into autoflirt. I’ve told him that in less than twenty years all he’ll be left with is autosleaze, but does he listen? Autosleaze won’t be pretty.

I’m glad she picked Frank, and that he did his duty and went with it. Made her a burger, schmoozed her like a prize customer. In the car I told him I was grateful, since I couldn’t have done it, and he just said, ‘No worries. I figure you handle Ron, so fair’s fair. And you handle Sophie, too. Or you would, given the chance . . . ’

I let that one go. Things didn’t start out brilliantly with Sophie, but they’ve improved. I think, on our second or third shift together, I might have commented favourably on her earrings and she said something as fuck-right-off transparent as ‘Yeah, my boyfriend Clinton really likes them too.’ To which I said, My girlfriend likes it when I can be relaxed enough to compliment a person without having an agenda.

So, in an instant, I’d invented a girlfriend. Invented her and, in the following instant, called her Phoebe. Yes, my mother’s name, and a present-tense girlfriend, even though it’s practically been a year other than the second weekend of last September (a relationship that lasted all the way till the following Tuesday). Pretty sad. Sad enough that I couldn’t stop myself going on to say, She’s a bit older than I am.

Sophie asks about her quite often. She’s like that. Annoyingly considerate.

Phoebe? Sure. I met her through my mother. She has brown plastic handles at both ends and an insanely strong spring in between, and she offers forty-two different ways to a total-body makeover. We’ve been together two and a half years. I don’t need a human girlfriend. I’ve found the Phoebe Atlas way. She loves me, even sleeveless, and that’s saying something. She makes my veins work, damn hard.

I can be excused, I think, for viewing myself as being in something of a rut.

In the week between psych and surgery, I wrote to six med schools in America. Two have rejected me, three haven’t replied and UCLA was the surprise, offering me the possibility of a place in an exchange program for interstate and overseas final-year students planning to specialise in emergency medicine. I’ve read the documentation. It looks like hell. I’m waiting for the three who haven’t replied, but it’s two months since I sent the letters.

I can’t imagine UCLA, LA or what it’s really like in a US emergency room when things turn crazy. The letter has an embossed crest and says that the cheque for the thirty-five US dollar processing fee should be made out to the Regents of the University of California. All I know is that that tells me nothing about what it’d be like. I wouldn’t be hanging out with the Regents, asking for someone to pass another sheet of embossed writing paper as a pierced femoral artery squirts blood across the lino floor.

What do I know? What do I know about America, really? Sure I watch every movie that comes to town, and a lot of TV. Sure there are bits of Annie Hall, and probably a few other Woody Allen films, that I can recite without ever having tried to learn them. And there are books, with Bright Lights, Big City only the latest. I ran my Dim Lights, Big Town idea past Sophie this evening, and she said she’d never thought about Brisbane that way but maybe she hasn’t read enough books.

But the small flecks of knowledge I have only make the size of the gaps apparent. What’s a Hostess Twinkie, for instance? The kids in the American comics I used to read ate them all the time. What’s a turnpike? Okay, etymology: something ancient and British. Already I’m seeing a beefeater. A beefeater pointing and saying, ‘No, go that way’. And I’m remembering my mother at the Tower of London when I was about eight, pointing to the beefeater’s weapon and explaining the expression ‘plain as a pikestaff’.

I’m guessing there isn’t one beefeater in the whole state of New Jersey.