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He pushes the note into my hand and tells me I should step back sometimes and take a look at what I'm doing. He's off to buy gourmet spice mixes after this, the first new signs should be out at World of Chickens as early as this evening and he thinks things could be about to turn around. Plus, he would never have seen a movie like
The Killing Fields
if it hadn't been for me. And it's not the kind of film you'd like to see every day, but every once in a while you've got to go there. It's socially responsible.

‘Quite a change for me,' he says. ‘I'm used to films where, if they've got a problem, there's a song in it for sure.'

‘It's a genre thing. There are plenty of films where the girls wear big skirts and fall for guys because of the cars they drive, but you can't have every film like that.'

‘Not that there's not meaning in them.'

‘No, of course not.'

‘Take “Beauty School Dropout” in
Grease
, for example. Quite clearly a song about the importance of education. But you want to get into this game, the film game. What have you got in mind? If you were going to make a movie here and now, what would it be?'

‘Here and now? I don't know. I don't know what kind of movie you'd make here. I think the way Woody Allen does things is really interesting, but there's something very Manhattan about it. People don't talk like that here. People don't go out on balconies above all that traffic and have those conversations here.'

‘Conversations like what? If I wanted to see what Woody Allen was about, what's one I could get out on video?'

‘There'd be a few.
Annie Hall
?'

‘
Annie Hall
.' He takes a pen from his pocket and writes the name on his palm. He reads it and laughs. ‘Better be careful going around with some woman's name on my hand.' He writes the word ‘video' underneath, which either fixes the problem or makes it look like Annie Hall's a porn star. ‘It's not . . . um, it's not like
The Killing Fields
, is it?'

‘No. Not at all.'

‘Good, 'cause . . . that was excellent, but something a little different'd be fine too.'

‘No wars, but there's a lot of talking. Be ready for character stuff.'

‘Character stuff. Good.' He nods.

‘And, for something a bit edgier but also great film-making and some amazing acting,
Taxi Driver
. Robert de Niro in
Taxi Driver
. You've got to see that.'

‘
Taxi Driver
.' The pen comes out again and, with the extra two words, his palm is full. ‘So, um, same time next week, hey?'

‘That'd be good, but it might be a bit close to the end of term next week. Maybe in a couple of weeks.'

‘Oh, sure, sure. And your pick again of course but, if I could just put in a word for one I've been wanting to see for a little while, I think there's a film out with Madonna that's supposed to be rather good. Entertaining but thoughtful. And every young person these days loves Madonna, don't they? What's it called?
Desperately Seeking Susan
?'

 

*

 

I try ignoring the phone when it rings but, since I'm watching TV, I know I'm expected to answer it. My mother's still reading
Your Child in Trouble
, so she's in one of her strange distract-me-at-your-peril head-in-a-book moods. TV, around here, is seen as occupying one of the lower rungs on the cultural ladder. But my parents are pre-baby-boomer. It's not their fault.

It's Frank.

‘I'm calling,' he says in a creepy, husky voice, ‘from the lair of the Evil Ddotnor.'

‘You can't be serious.'

‘Yes, I can.' The husky voice again. ‘I'd recognise the purple heart-shaped bed and the ceiling mirrors anywhere.'

‘No, surely not.'

‘I thought you'd had the tour.' Back to his normal voice again. ‘Didn't they show you upstairs? Didn't they tell you they bought the place from a guy in the magazine business?' He says magazine business as though it's definitely in inverted commas. ‘He bought it when it was a display home and he had the master bedroom fitted out with the gear and then he moved interstate or went bankrupt or something. And it's all fixtures. You can't interfere with the bed without buggering up the jacuzzi.'

‘Frank, I'm okay about not having had the upstairs tour.'

‘Mate, it's a fucking palace. I'm serious. I feel like Hugh Hefner in here. There's even gold bits on the phone.'

‘Good. I'm happy for you.'

‘Listen, I need to talk to you. Seriously. I didn't quite get what you were on about the other night. Monday, in the car. You were lining up Vanessa and Sophie to do things . . .'

‘Because there's no budget.'

‘Yeah, and I wasn't thinking. It was kind of a reminder that the place isn't doing so well, and I need that job.'

‘I think it's doing better than it was. It's just . . . for various people's states of mind, yours included, I thought it'd be good if we could get it to do a bit better.'

‘Yeah. I know. You should see Vanessa's signs. She's done a great job. It's practically all she's been doing since you gave her the go-ahead. We're borrowing the truck to take them over there tonight, actually, and she was thinking we might come by your place and pick you up. I think she wants you to see them first, since you lined her up for it. How would that be? Would six o'clock get us there by six-thirty?'

‘Yeah, it probably would.'

‘Righto then. Well . . .' There's a noise in the background, perhaps a voice. His hand moves over the mouthpiece and, for a few seconds, every sound is muffled. When he lifts it off again there's a new noise, something industrial, like a powerful vacuum cleaner or a pool filter. Then a sound that might be the frenzied quacking of a nearby rubber duck. ‘Listen mate,' he says. ‘Got to go. Six o'clock, hey?'

And, with that, his Carindale adventure continues.

 

*

 

Vanessa tells me she's come up with something ‘a bit tricky', but she's determined to make it work. She says she took the Dylan clip as her inspiration, but she figured we couldn't go tossing the signs away one word at a time.

‘Just wait,' she says, sitting between Frank and me on the bench seat of the Green Loppers truck. ‘Just wait.'

We drive across town and the cab smells of sweat, fuel and mulched vegetation. Frank drives like he knows the truck well. Well enough that, to him, it probably doesn't even smell.

‘Have you seen Frank's hands?' Vanessa says. ‘Have you seen how wrinkly his fingers are? He's been in water most of the afternoon. He's got this lady . . .'

‘Ness.' Frank stops her. ‘We're not talking about that tonight, remember. Not at all tonight, okay? You're part of the team this evening, and we've got a no-smutty-talk-at-work rule.'

‘Okay.' She looks straight ahead, as if nonchalantly accepting what he's said, and then she turns back to me. ‘Frank reckons he's been riding the skin train to . . .'

‘Ness.'

‘But we're not at work yet. I'm just trying to fit it all in before we get there.' Suddenly, she's less nonchalant. ‘It's not fair. I don't get to say that stuff at home, but this is the Loppers truck. This is where Dad and Nev and that sit and swear all day. And you told me I'd be part of the team tonight, with the signs. I'm part of the team, I'm in the truck, I get to talk the talk. I get to say skin train to tuna town if I want to.'

‘You don't even know . . .'

‘It's a fish, Frank, it's a fish. You're not catching me out, pal. I'm part of the bloody team now.'

‘Oh, so it's a bloody team now?'

‘It is if I want it to be,' she says, and laughs.

‘Ness and her bloody team, driving around town in the bloody Loppers truck.'

‘Yep,' she says. ‘Bloody yep.'

She turns the radio up. There's a Creedence double-play beginning, and she sings along to most of ‘Lookin' Out My Back Door', and makes us join in on the choruses. If Jackson Browne's next, I know she'll have me doing oooos to ‘Running on Empty'. They're that kind of family.

When we get to World of Chickens, we stop in the driveway to unload. The individual signs are light, but my muscles need every bit of their sporadic bullworking when Frank passes something large, timber and chickeny out of the back of the truck. It's the board that the signs will hang on, with its rooster's head on top and chicken legs. Four chicken legs—two for the front view and two for the back—with the pieces of wood joined by hinges at the top and ropes around knee level. Do chickens have knees? Surely everything has knees.

‘I'll just take the truck down the back and get to the counter with Sophie, hey?' Frank says. ‘You two should be right setting this up. And, Ness, you've got to be careful with Sophie. She's a devout Christian. So we all watch our mouths around here. Language and content, okay? You get what I mean? For Sophie's sake, we pretend all that sexual stuff doesn't exist. Including wrinkly fingertips, right? And we don't even mention god, 'cause her religion's very private. So you have to pretend I didn't tell you.'

Vanessa looks as though that's almost too much to remember, as though she came here for the signs, not for all this work politics and being careful with people.

‘Honestly,' she says when he's back in the truck and she's picking the signboard up more easily than I'd like her to. ‘That florist I work with, they don't come much more Christian than her, and we get on okay. I've got to go easy on the blasphemy, obviously . . .'

‘Blasphemy?'

‘Blasphemy. The god words, used for swearing purposes. First couple of times I cut my finger or spiked myself, she went nuts about the blasphemy. Of course, I kept doing it till she told me what it was. Now we're fine. There's plenty more words you can use.' The signboard slips from her hands and lands on her toe. ‘Fuck. Fuck.' She scrunches her face up, in genuine pain. ‘Ah, my fucking toe.'

‘It's heavy, isn't it?'

‘Nah, it's just the new paint. It's slippery.'

We open the board out and stand it by the roadside. There are runners on the front where all the signs go, one behind the other like files in a filing cabinet. To keep it interesting for the traffic, the chicken every so often has to pull up the front sign and move it to the back, displaying a new message. She starts to show me how it works, and tells me it'll really kick arse when she plugs the strobe in.

The board is white like a chicken's front and the writing on the signs is in bright primary colours, like T-shirt slogans for the chicken to wear. She says she got a bit artistic with the chicken features, and she hopes that's okay. We start racking the signs, with Vanessa reading them aloud as we put them up—‘eat me $4.95' (with a picture of a half-chicken meal), ‘I am your burger—$1.95', ‘it's your World', ‘burger meister' and ‘real meal deal'.

‘So there we are,' she says, ‘just like you wanted, I hope. And then there's the one Frank got me to do, which goes ‘how good is slaw?' And, finally, the one I did today, ‘famous hotplate chicken'. I didn't know this place was famous until Mister Todd called about that sign. Maybe Sunnybank's just too far away.'

The chicken suit is waiting inside and, by the time I'm wearing it, she's run an extension cord through the doorway and she's plugged the strobe light in. She gives it a test flicker across the sign, then turns it off until we're ready. The last thing she pulls out of her bag before we get started is a massive pair of pretend sunglasses.

‘I got these in a showbag last year,' she says. ‘I just thought, there'd be all that strobe action, and you said you were changing the image, you know? I would have preferred Ray-Bans, but . . .'

‘But in the end you're not going to find a two-foot pair of Ray-Bans, and a chicken's never quite going to look like Tom Cruise. This . . . this is the look we need. Ness, things are about to change around here.'

She's gives a crumpled, embarrassed kind of smile. ‘Well, get 'em on then.'

From there, the evening doesn't look back. Ness tapes the sunglasses to my head, and turns the strobe on. Suddenly, movement comes more easily out here. The strobe is very forgiving of poor white-guy coordination and it makes the whole experience even more surreal than usual. Plus, I have signs. I have something to do. Signs to unveil—grandly, cheekily, flamboyantly and, sometimes, when people least expect it.

Ness goes back to her bag, and this time she produces a tape recorder. She says she couldn't find any Dylan at home, but would Boz Scaggs or Alice Cooper do? She plays
Silk Degrees
and I'm a dancing chicken in these wild flashing lights, flipping through signs with something that would approximate rhythm if the signs were any easier to handle.

She tells me to do the windmill guitar thing, like Pete Townshend, and I figure she must have watched a lot of TV with her brothers over the years.

I have no idea if this is getting us custom, but it must be getting noticed.

 

*

 

‘It's all in the lights,' I tell Sophie when it's her turn and she's trying to persuade me that she might just do it the usual way. ‘Nothing hides dorkiness like a strobe. It's a scientific fact, and I've put it to the test several times at the Underground myself.'

She's not convinced, so we go out to the road before she puts the suit on. I introduce her to Vanessa and we show her how the signs work. They're not as heavy as she'd thought.

‘And,' Vanessa says, ‘you can have either Boz Scaggs or Alice Cooper. Sometimes I have Christian tapes, but not today. Evie Tornquist, or that nun with the guitar.'