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‘It'd be a squeeze even for a six-by-three,' she says. ‘This'd be their dream home, if this room was as big as Dad had wanted. But that's rock back there, so they didn't go any further. It's his territory down here, in case you hadn't guessed. It's Party Central when the Mowers crowd comes over.' Two poodles run out from behind the bar and start jumping around her ankles. ‘And, to finish the tour, welcome to the world's worst-behaved dogs.'

The dogs yelp and scratch and bite at the heels of her shoes. She says ‘sit', several times and firmly, but it's not a word or a tone that they recognise. She tells me she wanted to called them Ralph and Malph, but they were a present from her father to her mother so they ended up being Beau and Hope. She'd suggested Mork and Mindy as a compromise, but Zel hadn't gone for it.

‘Dinner's ready you two,' Zel calls from upstairs.

Ron is sitting at the table when we get there, and he's still managing to look like a propped-up dead guy.

‘Mate,' he says, with a friendly wink to show that he's picking up.

When he talks, we all try very hard not to look at his mouth and to pretend we can understand what he's saying. Zel serves a casserole, which she'd hoped would be soft enough for Ron but it doesn't work out that way. Ron dines only on Kool Pops and moselle. Quite a lot of moselle, and he rapidly becomes even less coherent. He starts rambling in a way that seems to be advice, mainly to me, or perhaps gratitude. Advice, winking, grinning, slurping at the moselle that's slopping from the still-numb right side of his mouth. He sidesteps whatever he's saying, moves into an analogy involving cattle on a hillside, moves somewhere else and gets lost in a conversation he's never been to before.

‘Dad,' Sophie says. ‘You're home now. You could take it easy. You've had a big day.'

Ron pulls himself to his feet, calling out, ‘Speech, speech,' and tapping his eyeball with his fork to get attention.

‘Dad,' Sophie says sharply. ‘Hit the glass one, not the good one.'

He blinks, and gives his eye a rub. It starts to water.

‘Sorry,' Sophie says to me. ‘He does that. It's like tapping on a glass, you know? Usually he . . . it doesn't matter.'

‘Hits the other one?'

‘Yep.'

‘He's a good lad, this one,' Ron begins. ‘A good lad when a fellow's down. Like Atlas, with the weight of . . . history . . . repeating, repeating. Get it? And there's the matter of . . . teeth . . . more on that . . .' The
pharmacology of moselle and medication and the chemistry of stress sweep across his brain like the waves of an incoming tide. He sits down, but still thinks he has the floor. ‘And you,' he says, ‘my ladies . . . thick and thin, richer poorer . . . sickness teeth . . . well done all of you. Bloody well done.'

He starts to become tearful, but then falls asleep in his chair, the tip of his Kool-Pop-blue tongue slipping out of his mouth as his head lolls forward.

 

*

 

There's no unravelling that, I decide later in the cab on the way home. But the teeth are gone now, and that's progress. Next, we have to make World of Chickens work, and I'm not sure how we're going to do that. And I have to pass obstetrics. It's lucky that Jacinta and I discovered those political differences, or I'd never get any study done.

For the moment, Frank and I settle on something that could be described as an uneasy truce. I've told him what I think, I haven't backed down and he hasn't said what he's going to do. It's his idea that we go back to my place between our Wednesday early finish and our shift at World of Chickens.

‘We could take a look at antepartum haemorrhage,' he says. ‘That'd be good.'

I assume he means we'll be talking about bigger issues but, Frank being Frank, it turns out there's no code involved and it really is obstetrics he wants to look at.

We sit at the kitchen table with Beischer and Mackay, my notes, two cups of tea and Frank's half-baked ideas. We start to draw up lists of clinical features associated with particular causes of antepartum haemorrhage. Frank gets bored and develops an unhelpful liking for the term ‘Couvelaire uterus' instead. He plays around with a biscuit until it starts to crumble on the table. He slurps his tea and hums. I can't believe there's any room in his life for this kind of boredom at the moment.

He experiments with the word ‘Couvelaire' in an accent he probably thinks is French, and the list we draw up of clinical features is just about all mine. I tell him he won't get far, throwing names around with abandon because they sound good, and we have an argument about it.

‘Well, we're going to have to agree to disagree,' he says eventually.

‘That depends on how much you want to pass.'

‘What's that about? Ever since surgery . . .'

‘It's not about surgery.'

We move on, to the degrees of placenta praevia and their implications.

Ron Todd calls before we're too far into it, before we've found anything new to fight about. My mother hands me the phone and the first thing he says is, ‘Mate, you champion. Couldn't have done it without you yesterday.'

‘No problem.'

‘The old mouth feels a bit funny today—a bit bloody roomy—but we'll get there.'

‘Yeah.'

‘Listen, I've been thinking. It's like you said. It's not about chickens. We've got that covered. It's about buzz. It's about the customers feeling attached, like they belong. It's about love.'

‘It's about love?'

My mother looks up from her book.

‘That's right, mate, we want them to love the World.'

‘Okay, well, we'll work on it.'

And that undertaking—nebulous as it is—seems enough for now. Sometimes I get lucky.

‘Just thought I'd put it to you,' he says. ‘Just that one big broad brush stroke. We can get to the details later.'

And then he's gone, a busy man in pursuit of something about love.

My mother's still looking at me over her reading glasses. She's never good when she hears half a conversation. I knew I was right to let her know nothing about what's going on.

‘It's just work,' I tell her, and she maintains her look of unease.

She lifts her book up again and goes back to reading. ‘Me too,' she says, as if she's got plenty of stories she's not telling. ‘Just starting work on a new module for next semester.'

 

*

 

A train pulls into Taringa station on its way into town. Sophie flaps a wing at the passengers, but they never see us up here in the half-dark. The carriages are too bright. It's physics again, but I don't go Bernoulli on her with the detail so she still waves sometimes.

‘Your mother,' she says. ‘She's working me hard.'

‘Are you doing her thing next semester too?'

‘The rise of the tabloid, or whatever?'

‘No, the thing about adolescence—adolescents in the media.'

‘I haven't heard of that one.'

‘She was reading books for it at home before we came here.
Your Child in Trouble
, that kind of thing. About adolescence and how the media portrays it, and the new set of problems that creates.'

‘What? Why don't I ever get told? I was sure it was something to do with tabloids. I've put my name down for it already.' I can see her eyes in there, deep in the beak, imploring me to take my mother aside and talk some sense into her. ‘This is too hard. I'm going crazy.'

‘It's next semester. Don't worry about it. It's nearly two months away.'

‘Why is nothing normal any more?'

‘Um, I didn't mean . . .'

‘No. It's okay.'

‘It doesn't sound like it's okay.'

She leans on the railing and the big chicken head slumps down. ‘Did you think last night at my place was normal?'

‘Well, that downstairs bar . . . was fine, obviously. But your father had just had his teeth taken out. There was medication involved. He wasn't going to be at his best.'

‘Yeah, it's more than that. I don't know though. I don't know what. There's this place here. He's pretty keyed up about it, turning it into something.'

‘And it's a great opportunity, but that doesn't mean it's all easy. But given some time . . .'

‘Yeah. He's big on family as well, though. He's been big on family lately. You know what I think? Just between you and me?' She turns to face me again. ‘I think he might want another baby while mum still has time.'

‘What? I didn't think that'd be possible after the incident in 'Nam.' Okay, big trouble. She's caught me completely by surprise, and I've blown it badly.

‘What? He was just a clerk in the Defence Department in Canberra.'

‘I think I've misunderstood something. A couple of things. He said I'd be surprised at the prospects he had before 'Nam. There was an idea I got that something had gone badly wrong there.'

‘Oh, right. No, that's not it. He had no prospects before 'Nam. That's what he means. You'd be surprised because of what he's made of himself since. They worked some pretty awesome hours back then, you know. So the overtime he got paid was what let him get started in business. And he got to put through the paperwork to get himself a medal. They all did, his unit at work at the Defence Department, the four of them. P Force, they called themselves. The ‘P' was for the paperwork. But don't tell anyone. He's pretty proud of what he did in the 'Nam campaign. It wasn't easy over there, remember? And they got a really bad time when they came home. P Force stood by its own when not a lot of people were there for them. And Dad might not have been part of the actual Vietnamese end, but he copped the stigma pretty much full on. There was a long time when it wasn't easy being a Vietnam veteran, and that's only starting to change now.'

‘But what about his glass eye and his hip problem?'

‘I think the eye got put out by a stick when he was a kid. He was giving some other kid in the neighbourhood the shits. And the hip was something to do with an inter-departmental touch-football match in the public service. He fell over. He's well into his forties you know. He's taken a few knocks. Anyway, why would his eye and his hip get in the way of having another baby?'

‘Well, they wouldn't, obviously. It's just the way it all added up. Or, really, the way rumours circulate. I think it was something one of the Mowers people said when they were doing shifts here early on. You know, if there's a glass eye, it gets talked about. And if it's the guy who owns the place, and he's got a Vietnam medal and a limp as well, the story gets a lot more interesting and gets totally blown out of proportion.'

‘Really? That's what they said? They said my Dad's damaged down there? That's just the kind of bullshit they'd come out with. Those Mowers people really piss me off.'

 

*

 

This only gets harder. I took it to the brink of calamity, perhaps over the brink, and somehow I might have pulled it back. And what am I left with? More secrets. Sophie's baby theory, the real story of Ron's Vietnam non-service, my lie about the talk circulating in the Mowers crowd concerning his external genitalia. Only the lie seems really plausible, and it's the part I definitely made up.

I'm outside, being a really distracted chicken while I think it through. Does Ron want a baby, or is that just a theory? Where did the genital story begin? Is it Zel's? Is it Frank's? Did it start as a misunderstanding between Zel and Frank? A misunderstanding between Frank and me? What did he actually say?

It's not as though I can fix it tonight. I can't raise it with Frank in the car later, tell him I ran the idea past Sophie and she seemed to think Ron's intact in the pants and what does he have to say about that? I've talked too much already. I'm going to listen. I'm going to be much more careful. I fixed it with Sophie this time, but only just.

Zel's there when I turn to look back inside. Zel, Frank and Sophie are talking at the counter. I'm fearful that, even through the glass, I'll see it all fall apart. There'll be a revelation that I can't hear—Zel or Frank will slip up and something will come out—Sophie will realise and everything will collapse. I go in a few minutes early, determined to make it as normal as possible and to steer us clear of risk for now.

‘Hello, Philip,' Zel says. ‘It is Philip in there, isn't it?'

‘Who else would it be?' Sophie says, in a tone that could be more friendly. But she's lifting buckets of coleslaw, so perhaps it's the effort.

‘Philip was wonderful last night you know, Frank. Ron had a shocking experience at the dentist and Philip thought nothing of catching a cab into town and driving him home.'

The strange week I'm having, in one move from Zel, gets stranger. She's trying to treat us all normally, I'm trying to treat her normally, Frank's pretending to be taciturn—his version of a low-risk approach to group conversation—and I'm pretending not to notice. I'm hiding in the costume like some kid peeping out at a badly behaved grown-up world, trying to remember how I'd handle this back in the old days. Back last week.

‘Now, you're not on on Friday, are you?' Zel says, apparently to all three of us. ‘I don't think you are because I've checked the roster. Are you boys free?'

‘Free? On Friday?' Frank's still working on taciturn, so the question's left to me. ‘You want us to work?'

‘No, no, something quite different. Anyway, you two, you're always working, here or at that hospital. This is Friday night I'm talking about. A bit of a jaunt.'

She looks at Frank, looks back at me. I'm not sure what to say. The sentence ‘Are you completely insane?' comes to mind as a good starting point, though. Instead, I try to hide a little deeper in the costume. That superhero power of invisibility? I could really use it now. Also the superhero power of being at home in my room with the door shut. I often think that one's highly underrated.