The Chicken Gave It To Me Read online

  Oh, boy. Oh, boy oh boy!

  Down on the muddy ground, under the ventilation shaft of the spaceship, I stood as if rooted, two totally different feelings fighting under my feathers.

  (1) The sheer dancing joy of sweet revenge. See how you like it, people! Serves you right!

  (2) Horror that others might suffer as I had.

  Oh, which of these feelings would triumph? Which would win?

  5

  Penguins or cheetahs, whales or sharks

  All morning Gemma had chicken on the brain. The moment the first lesson started, Andrew slid the little sacking book safely into his desk, and both of them were kept busy. But just from glancing at some of the mistakes in Andrew’s workbook –

  the cluck said 9.45

  she put the coop on the saucer

  Jane cycled feather than Jilly

  – Gemma knew that he, too, wouldn’t rest till he’d read on, and found out what had happened next on that black night at Harrowing Farm.

  Would the chicken decide on revenge? Or on pity?

  It wasn’t easy to guess. What did Gemma know about what a chicken thought or how a chicken felt? The closest she came to them was when she found one sitting quietly on her plate, crisply roasted or steaming in sauce.

  She leaned across to nudge Andrew.

  ‘Do you realise,’ she told him, ‘that there must be millions and millions of chickens all over the world, and I don’t know anything about them.’

  ‘You should watch the animal programmes on telly.’

  ‘They never do chickens.’

  Didn’t they? Now Andrew came to think about it, Gemma was right. Almost every evening you could watch a programme about penguins or cheetahs, whales or sharks. You saw them hunting, sleeping, giving birth. But when did you ever get to see the day-to-day life of a chicken?

  Never.

  ‘You don’t get stuffed chickens, either,’ Gemma was telling him now.

  ‘Yes, you do. I ate one yesterday.’

  ‘No, no!’ Gemma sounded quite angry with him. ‘I mean soft furry toys. You’re given teddy bears and pandas. You get tigers and cats and ponies. You might even get three fluffy yellow chicks in a nest especially at Easter. But no one ever gives you a hen.’

  True. Under his bed at home Andrew still had Snoopy and Topcat and Dobbin and Grizzly. But for the life of him he couldn’t remember ever ripping the bright shiny paper off a present, and shouting: ‘Oh, goody! It’s a hen!’

  Gemma was getting angrier by the minute.

  ‘In fact,’ she was muttering, ‘when I come to think about it, I know more about dinosaurs than I do about hens. I know more about hairy mammoths. I know more about pterodactyls!’

  Her usual little placid face had gone quite hard with rage. He knew her well enough to know what she was thinking. She couldn’t bring the words out, so he said it for her.

  ‘Because people don’t have to be so ashamed about those. They’re already dead.’

  And suddenly neither of them could wait a moment longer to find out what happened next. Carefully, under cover of his workbook, Andrew slid the chicken’s testament out of his desk.

  They took it in turns to keep watch, as they read on.

  6

  I show myself to be naturally chicken-hearted

  Revenge! Oh, ho, ho, ho. The very idea was ridiculous. Chickens aren’t built for revenge. We don’t have it in us. We’re not the sort to slink about for years, feeling bitter, and then, when the moment comes, plunge in the sharpened claw.

  We’re a bit bird-witted, really. We mess about, scratching through each day as it comes. By daylight the only thing on my mind was breakfast, and I was out there peck-peck-pecking. I wouldn’t even have noticed I was back near the sheds, except for the horrible wailing . . .

  ‘Let me ooooouuuut!’

  ‘Heeee-eeelp! Heeee-eeeelp!’

  Oh, it was ghastly. Some creatures make your flesh creep when they cry. Rabbits, for example. And baby hares.

  But people!

  ‘Saaaaave us, pleeeeaaase!’

  Quick workers, these little green men. While I was roosting overnight, they must have pulled all the wire cages apart, and set them up again, exactly the right size.

  (Of course, when I say, ‘exactly the right size’ . . .)

  You couldn’t help feeling sorry for them. There they sat, squashed in so tight they couldn’t stand. They couldn’t stretch. They couldn’t turn around. Their pale faces pressed up against the cage bars.

  ‘What’s going to happen to us?’

  ‘Let me out!’

  ‘Oooooh!’

  ‘Help us, please!’

  Oh, it was pitiful. But they were one up on us poor chickens. They could at least argue with their jailors.

  ‘Why are you keeping us in here? Are you planning to eat us?’

  ‘’Fraid so.’

  ‘But that’s outrageous.’

  The little green man busy filling their water troughs was clearly a bit put out to hear this.

  ‘What’s so outrageous about it? You taste good.’

  ‘You can’t just eat us because we taste good!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because we’re people, that’s why.’

  The little green man shrugged.

  ‘Pigs. Chickens. People. What’s the difference?’

  ‘Pigs and chickens are only animals.’

  ‘So? You’re only people.’

  ‘But we’re superior.’

  ‘Not to me, Buster,’ said the little green man. And scowling horribly, he left the shed. When he came back, he brought a mate with him, to give him a hand with the water troughs.

  ‘These people here,’ he said, pointing to the inmates of the cages. ‘They say they’re superior.’

  ‘Not to me, they’re not,’ his friend scoffed.

  ‘That’s what I told ’em!’ laughed the first little green man.

  The people were rattling their cage bars in a fury.

  ‘We are! We are!’

  ‘Superior? Come off it!’ The little green man lifted his hand and ticked his points off, one by one, on some of his willowy green fingers.

  ‘Horses are stronger. Swans are more loyal. Chimps live more peaceably. Seahorses have more babies. Dogs follow a scent better. Giraffes are taller. Squids have better eyesight. Camels go longer without water. Jaguars run faster. And little green men know more languages.’

  He had plenty of fingers left, but he’d got bored.

  ‘I could go on and on,’ he said, picking up the last bucket and tipping the water smoothly into the last trough. ‘In fact, I could be quite rude, and say that the only thing you lot really had going for you was that you ran the whole planet.’

  Just before he slammed the shed door behind him, he added as an afterthought:

  ‘Oh, yes! And you taste better than chicken!’

  7

  ‘Not today, thank you.’

  ‘I won’t have the chicken, thank you,’ Gemma said to the dinner lady. ‘Not today. Can I have what Vinit is having?’

  The dinner lady made her usual joke.

  ‘If Vinit doesn’t eat up his meat, he won’t grow.’

  Vinit gave his usual polite chuckle. He was the tallest boy in the class, and had never eaten meat in his whole life. Today, Gemma and Andrew sat down on either side of him. Gemma seemed to have chicken on her mind, even if she had none on her plate.

  ‘You’ve never eaten it ever?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about lamb?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pork?’

  ‘No. We don’t eat meat at all. No one in my family does. We never have.’

  He watched as Gemma peeled open her sandwich hopefully, to see if the peanut butter was any thicker in the middle.

  Across the table, Leila finished her mouthful and spoke up.

  ‘My mum says that if we didn’t eat animals, there would soon be hardly any of them about.’

  Simon looke
d round in surprise when he heard this.

  ‘My dad says if we didn’t eat them, they’d overrun us in no time.’

  ‘They can’t both be right.’

  ‘Maybe they’re both wrong.’

  The whole table fell quiet, thinking about people and animals. Whales. Dolphins. Elephants. Gorillas. Hard to believe that any animal in the world would be all that much worse off left alone.

  Moodily, Andrew poked at the lump of chicken on his plate. He was hungry, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to eat it. Gemma felt sorry for him. She didn’t feel like swapping plates, but she did try to encourage him.

  ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t eat it if you want. That chicken was keen enough to gobble up the grub. And that was still alive.’

  Vinit was staring now.

  ‘What are you two on about? What chicken? What grub?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  Andrew made another stab at eating his lunch. This time the fork got as far as his mouth before he had to put it down again.

  Vinit was still staring at him.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  Andrew laid down his fork.

  ‘I just can’t eat it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think it’s because I’m not sure where it comes from. I don’t know how it fetched up on my plate. I don’t know anything at all about it. I don’t even know what sort of life it led.’

  He looked gravely at Gemma.

  ‘Maybe it even came out of one of those long brown sheds . . .’

  Vinit was grinning now.

  ‘If you can’t eat it because you didn’t know it personally,’ he said, ‘then you’d better have some of my sandwich.’

  Gratefully, Andrew took what he was offered. Silently, Gemma handed him some more. While he was chewing, he eyed the slab of chicken cooling on his plate.

  ‘I’d eat it,’ he told Gemma and Vinit, ‘I’d eat it with no trouble if I knew for certain that all its life it had been –’

  He broke off. It sounded so silly that he couldn’t say it.

  ‘Yes?’ Vinit prompted him. ‘You’d eat it if you knew that all its life it had been –?’

  Andrew blushed.

  ‘Happy as a grub.’

  ‘A grub? You mean, like a maggot?’

  Andrew nodded.

  Vinit laid down what was left of his sandwich, and pushed back his chair.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said politely, and got up and left.

  Without even thinking, Andrew snatched up the remains of Vinit’s sandwich, and gobbled it.

  ‘Hungry work, all this reading,’ he explained to Gemma.

  8

  Chicken no longer!

  I stuck my beady eye to a knothole. Inside the shed, an argument was raging.

  ‘Listen, you don’t need to eat us. You got on perfectly well before you landed here. None of you look starved. None of you even look hungry. Why pick on us?’

  ‘I told you. You taste good. After a long, hard day taking over a new planet, there’s absolutely nothing to beat the smell of a nice, roasting –’

  ‘Shut up! Shut up!’

  All the cage bars were rattled frantically.

  ‘Stop saying that!’

  ‘Not in front of the children!’

  The little green man tried to be reasonable.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I grant you it isn’t the world’s best life, being stuck in a cage till you’re eaten. And maybe we were a bit rough with one or two of you. I’m sorry about that.’ He spread his green hands. ‘There. I’ve said it. I’m sorry. I can’t say fairer than that, can I?’

  He waited for his apology to be accepted as generously and graciously as he had made it.

  There was a stony silence. Then, from the back row of cages came the word:

  ‘X!*&@/%!’

  Language a chicken wouldn’t dream of repeating.

  The little green man’s mood turned a shade on the ugly side.

  ‘I’ll tell you what gets me,’ he said. ‘The sheer hypocrisy of it! Who built these sheds without any windows or fresh air? You lot did! Who put up the cages? You did! And who locked those poor stupid little chickens up in them?’

  (‘Poor stupid little chickens’? I didn’t care much for his attitude. But I kept watching.)

  He was swinging around now, pointing a green finger at cage after cage.

  ‘And who kept them in here, not just day after day, or week after week, but for lifetimes?’ His green lip curled with scorn. ‘Now look at you! The tables are turned, and do any of you have the guts to face the fact you’re getting no worse than you gave out? No. It’s moan, moan, moan! Weep, weep, weep! Whine, whine, whine! You disgust me!’

  He glowered round the shed.

  ‘Want to know something?’ he said. (They clearly didn’t, but he told them anyway.) ‘Your sort really make me sick! Even the chickens took it better than you do!’

  (I still didn’t care for his tone, if I’m truthful.)

  Someone behind him started arguing again.

  ‘But it wasn’t so bad for the chickens. They’re not as sensitive as we are.’

  The little green man’s eyes widened.

  ‘That’s a good one,’ he said, almost admiringly. ‘Is that how you did it? Is that what you kept telling yourselves?’ He grinned from green ear to green ear. ‘We could try that one,’ he said. ‘We’re sending the spaceship back tonight, to fetch a few spices and a much bigger casserole dish. If anyone up there starts feeling sorry for you lot, I’ll try that one on them.’

  Tipping his head to one side, he waved his willowy green fingers and said in a very silly fashion:

  ‘Oh, don’t you worry about those people. They’re all right. I know they squawk and fuss and rattle the cage bars, trying to get out. But, honestly, they don’t mind really. You see, they’re not nearly as sensitive as we are!’

  And then he fell about laughing.

  Another time, I might have had a little private cackle at this joke. But not right that minute. You see, just then I’d come to a decision. Quite a brave decision for a chicken. I think I’ve mentioned that we lot aren’t really built for revenge. Well, if I’m honest, we’re not a byword for courage, either. We’re not daredevils. We’re not desperadoes. The name ‘chicken’ in fact (you may not know this) has almost come to mean ‘faint heart’ or ‘a bit of a funker’.

  No need to mince words. We chickens tend to have cold feet.

  But call me chicken no longer! For I had decided on a plan so bold, so daring, so foolhardy, I frankly doubted if anyone, anywhere, would ever truly think of me as chicken again.

  I’d stow away on the spaceship.

  Yes! Yes! I’d fly a frillion miles, to outer space! Tell everyone on the planets exactly what was going on!

  Surely, oh, surely, as soon as all the little green families out there heard about the horrible cages and learned what was happening, to feed them, they’d stick to eating boring old breads, seeds, grains, beans, cheese, eggs, salads and vegetables.

  And maybe the odd happy grub or two . . .

  9

  Just a toy

  ‘So brave . . .’

  Gemma was bursting with admiration as she waited for Andrew to reach the bottom of the page.

  He lifted his head, distracted.

  ‘Brave? Who?’

  ‘The chicken, of course! Who else?’

  Andrew took a moment to answer. Then he said:

  ‘I don’t know. It all seems very odd. I’m not sure if I believe it. I mean, here’s this farm, almost next door to the school. We’ve lived here all our lives, and never heard anyone say a word about the place. Not once.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So how can it be that bad? If it was that bad, surely people would be talking about it.’

  What he said bothered Gemma. Was he right? She stabbed her finger on the chicken’s book, to get him reading again, so they could both turn ove
r. But while he laboriously worked his way down the page of scratchy writing, she thought about what he’d said. And as soon as he reached the last line and looked up, she was sitting there ready to argue.

  ‘I’ll tell you how. Because they don’t notice what they do, just so long as they’re the ones doing it!’

  ‘Who? Chickens?’

  ‘No. Adults, of course! Think about it. If we did some of the things they do, they would be horrified. Suppose some of us took horses and rode them so fast in a race over such high and dangerous fences that, every year, some of them crashed down on the other side and broke their legs and had to be shot. They would go mad at us! They’d say our parents weren’t looking after us properly. They’d take us into care.’

  She was right.

  ‘They would, too.’

  ‘And suppose you were poking about at an animal as if it were just a toy, and you wanted to look at the clockwork inside it. You’d get in such trouble! You couldn’t just put a white coat on, and say, “I only wanted to know what would happen if I did this, or that”. “I’m curious” isn’t any better excuse for poking at things than “I’m spiteful”!’

  ‘No,’ Andrew agreed with her. ‘Not if you’re the one getting poked.’

  Gemma took a deep breath.

  ‘I’ll tell you something,’ she said. ‘I don’t think this chicken is just brave. I think this chicken is a saint.’

  He tried to hide his smile, but it was too late. She had seen it.

  ‘No, really!’ she insisted. ‘If I’d been treated this way by people, I’d be glad to see them stuffed in my old cage. I would! I wouldn’t risk what was left of my life flying frillions of miles to try and save them.’

  Her look was fierce.

  ‘I would let them roast!’

  And before he could even begin to argue, she’d flipped the page over and carried on reading.

  10

  Green sky. Green earth. Green wind. Green sand.

  Take my advice. Don’t ever stow away in a spaceship. You’ll have the worst time ever.

  They go faster than light. The soothing hum of the engines keeps lulling you off into daydreams. And when you try and distract yourself by peering out of the porthole, all you can see is crazy glittering spirals of shooting stars, blazing fireballs, bright spinning planets and shimmering flares of comet tails.