When the wind blows
Jeremy Clarke
It must be very dispiriting to be born into this world and find that you are an intensively reared hen. But maybe, if a representative of the human race explained gently to you in chicken language that human beings are the apex of creation, and chickens commodities, and that this, in a roundabout way, accounts for your breasts being so heavy your legs can’t support you, you might think to yourself, as you hang upside-down waiting to have your six-week-old throat slit by a youth on piecework listening to drum and bass on his iPod, ‘Hey, it’s been fun. Glad to have been of service.’ But if you learnt instead that your breasts, instead of nourishing a human being, will be fed to a domestic cat, you’d probably want to register a complaint somewhere. The widow next door to us, a pensioner, subsists chiefly on chips, supplemented at this time of year with Brussels sprouts, which she eats raw. Yet she feeds her cat, a smelly, insufferably arrogant creature, possibly evil, exclusively on top-quality chicken breasts. Now, cat breasts fed to chickens I would allow, even encourage with tax breaks. But the other way round to my mind is obscene.
She rang up the other day in a bit of a state. The gales have been so strong for the past few days, she said, she’s been unable to go out. If this sounds a bit farfetched I should explain that she’s a tiny, bird-like woman. And in front of our respective houses is a sheep field, a 300ft cliff, and then nothing but sea and sky as far as the continent of Europe in one direction and North America in another. So when the wind blows it can knock you about a bit.
What with this wind we’ve been having, she said, stifling a sob, she hasn’t been able to make it to the bus stop to go shopping in town. When she tried to walk the 50 yards to the post office yesterday to buy a lottery ticket, a gust of wind snatched the £5 note out of her fist and she’d had to hang on to the wall to stop herself being blown away as well. She’s never known gales like it, she said.
I told her not to worry. The chances of winning the lottery by releasing a £5 note into the wind are probably roughly the same as those to be had by buying a ticket from a national lottery sales point.
But she’d run out of chicken breasts for Timmy, she said. That was what was really worrying her. And Timmy doesn’t eat anything else because Timmy’s got sensitive digestion. And she can’t go out in this wind to buy more. I know, don’t I, how much she hates asking anyone for a favour. But could I possibly run her into town, to the Co-op, to buy some more chicken breasts for Timmy?
It was true what she’d said about hating to ask a favour. Her fierce determination not to be a burden to anybody is as overthe-top as her cat worship and her frugal diet. In olden times she would have been the first to go in the pond.
I got the car out and drove it round to her house and parked it outside the front door, which was open. I went in. Timmy was sitting imperiously on a large cushion on a kitchen chair. She was kneeling in adoration before it. ‘Mummy going to the shop to buy Timmy his supper,’ she crooned. And then she kissed it reverently on the top of its head, struggled to her feet and said that she was all set. She had her coat on, ready. She motioned me to go back out through the front door first, so she could pull it shut and lock it behind us. For a moment it looked as though the opportunity to wish Timmy a merry Christmas with a size ten Dr Marten’s shoe, when she wasn’t looking, for which I earnestly beseeched the Lord with a humble and contrite heart, was not going to be granted unto me. As we were going out, however, she remembered her pension book, which was on the mantelpiece in the sitting room, and went to fetch it.
I fixed Timmy with a stare and made a clucking noise. At this he looked suddenly uncertain of his power, like Ceausescu on the balcony. My air-soled season’s greeting caught him squarely on the rump and sent him spinning from his exalted cushion, limbs akimbo. He hit the ground running and shot under the dresser. She returned with her pension book. ‘Where’s Timmy?’ she said. Instead of replying, I pointed under the dresser and made the soothing noise that a contented hen makes. And I continued to make that sound under my breath on our journey into town.
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