3 minute read
Homecoming
THE ROOSTER WAS OUT AGAIN, TEARING APART MUM’S VEGGIE GARDEN WITH HIS SHARP BLACK BEAK. HE LOOKED LIKE A CARTOON, WITH PERFECT WHITE CIRCLES ON EACH SIDE OF HIS HEAD.
My girlfriend thought that when he crowed, it sounded like the Jurassic Park theme song, but all I could hear was screeching. She woke me up at six am every morning, balancing her pointy elbows on my chest as she looked for his shadowy figure on the fence. Our bodies become uncomfortably one in the single bed, the blanket twisted up tight in all the wrong places.
Grandad saw him balanced, soft footed, on a green pine pole when we came back from our parallel parking adventure. “He is one of your roosters, is he? I promised ya Mum I’d get rid of them for her. When do they go to roost?”
I had kind of accepted early on in life that I would be one of those pathetic types who wouldn’t be able to drive. When I was younger, I plummeted my Dad’s ute through two sheets of metal, four poles, and a mound of dirt. I nearly hit my little sisters on the way through. I still remember climbing dazed out of the front seat, while my Mum cried in flowing spurts. My head rang, and I couldn’t hear anything but a skullbound “Oh shit, oh fuck!!!”, as my siblings shouted raucously and structures collapsed around me. At first my inability to drive was a grave embarrassment, but later I clung to it. Maybe I was one of those people who were too talented and gay to also be able to drive, like David Sedaris. Yes, all my younger cousins had their licence. But none of them get to go to gay clubs or play shit pop songs at the Brisbane Hotel in their band, now, do they?
It took around fifteen rejections from pretentious magazines, one mental breakdown, and losing my job and home to the Coronavirus crisis to realise that maybe I wasn’t quite gay and talented enough to avoid getting my drivers licence. So now I’m generously helping my relatives to come to terms with their own mortality by letting them drive around with me in my Mum’s clapped out Peugeot, lovingly named St Mary MacKillop. Today, my Grandad taught me how to reverse park swiftly behind bulky utes and family vans. It felt good having him growl at me reproachfully while my hands twisted the wheel the wrong way. I never thought I’d be able to make him proud after my Mum told him I was gay. I tell my Grandad that the chooks go to roost around six. He comes back then, using one hand to haul his pants up over his skinny legs as I pull open the gate for him. We sneak into the chicken coop and grab the roosters as they sleep, stuffing them in a large hessian bag.
One by one, Grandad pulls them out gently, before sharply twisting their neck back three times. He hacks their heads off and I drop them into a bucket of hot water. Their dead bodies jerk frantically, and Grandad yells out in surprise when they inevitably spray warm blood and soap onto the concrete.Our hands are so different, his old and overworked, and mine olive and tiny, but they work as one as we methodically strip their quivering bodies of feathers. The last one we kill is the naughty escapee. His body is surprisingly small, but his craw is overstuffed from his daily feasts.
“I didn’t know Niamhy had it in her!”, he later tells my Mum. She comes back into the house shiny with pride. “That is the highest praise, Niamhy. It may not sound like it, but it is.” I’m vegetarian, so I felt kind of sick about killing the roosters, especially when I strewed their guts across the backyard for the foxes to eat. But, my coiled up belly is nothing in comparison to the overpowering joy that courses through my body when I hear what Grandad said.
