Egg Man Extras.....

Two people have been interested enough to ask for a little more of ‘I Am the Egg Man’. Since it’s a favourite of mine (it is, after all, my first-born), I’m happy to oblige. I’ve included the opening chapter and a chapter that introduces the major character, Kane.

The Hatcher Room stank of egg and feathers. A fine dust from newly hatched chicks sifted through the room, almost invisible but sinister as silica. There were a dozen tables, each with a man at either side in white coat and forage cap of stiff, white paper trimmed with royal blue. Every morning, their first task was to roll trolleys of trays from the hatchers and count the new chicks into cardboard boxes, a hundred in each box. The air throbbed with the cheeping of thousands of chicks and the trays shimmered with yellow fuzz under the harsh ceiling lights. And the air stank of egg. It was like working in an omelette.

On my first morning, I worked opposite Horace Earnshaw. Horace was a Yorkshireman, affable but taciturn, in his late fifties. I could have been paired with somebody worse. I put my head down and got on with it. Horace made no conversation as I slid a tray of chicks from the trolley onto the table and began boxing them. Two lifted in each hand, turned upside down so that their rear ends got a quick check and then, if they were okay, deposited in the quartered cardboard box. Two more lifted in each hand, turned upside down so that their rear ends got a quick check and then, if they were okay, deposited in the quartered cardboard box.  Two more in each hand, turned upside down... And keeping a mental count all the time.

I counted and boxed chickens till the trolley was empty. Then I wheeled it through to the Mincer Room, while Horace piled the boxes full of chicks onto a pallet. In the Mincer Room, Terry hosed the trays and the trolleys as part of his duties. When I returned from the Mincer Room, I carried the bucket over to the big metal bins. Every table had a red plastic bucket into which all the deformed, crippled and black chicks of the hatch were discarded. I tipped the contents of my bucket into one of the bins. It was already half full of dead chicks, sad little swatches of black and yellow lint. Next, I splashed a few glugs of liquid from a can over them and replaced the rubber lid on the bin. In a few seconds, they would be dead too. Gassed. Terry, the speedfreak who worked the mincer, would eventually come and remove the full bins. The corpses would be thrown into the mincer and ground up, along with all the shells that had lately borne them. All that emerged from the mincer was a lumpy sludge of a loathsome mallow colour. This went to feed the lucky siblings that survived the first morning. I tried not to think about it.

By now, Horace had fetched another trolley and the whole process began again. We worked automatically: lifting, checking, boxing. Horace preferred not to talk at all, so we worked in silence. The bodies of the chicks gave an unpleasant warmth to the palms. I let my mind wander.

“What am I looking for?” I’d asked the foreman, Shanks, when he spent five minutes showing me the procedure.

“Looking for?” Shanks was a big man with a toothbrush moustache and plump cheeks.

“When I check their bums.”

“Deformities. Their guts hanging out of their arses. That kind of thing. If you see anything like that, they go in the bucket. Some chicks are born with one leg. Or three legs. Deformed chicks go in the bucket. Some chicks get crippled by the others or hurt in the hatching. Crippled chicks go in the bucket. Some are born black. Black chicks go in the bucket.”

It happened regularly enough. After hatching, some chicks got stuck to the paper that lined the trays - stuck in yolk or shit - and had to be ripped away, leaving flesh and feathers on the paper. They too were then tossed in the red plastic bucket. Tearing living chicks apart turned my stomach.

“If it bothers you, you can break their necks on the side of the tray,” Shanks said, casually. “Put them out of their misery.”

“Agony, more like,” I said.

“Same difference.”

Shanks showed me. I tried it. I pressed a chick’s neck against the rim of the tray. Under my thumb, I felt the soft bone give and break. The chick was dead. I tossed it in the bucket. That turned my stomach too, but made me feel a little less cruel. I lifted a black one – a perfectly healthy chick whose only defect was that its fuzz was a glossy jet rather than the standard bright yellow.

“Why do black ones go in the bucket?”

“No point in rearing them. If they’re slaughtered and put into polythene bags, their skin looks off. You know, as if it’s rotten. The housewife won’t buy it. Waste of time and money.”

“It’s not their fault they’re black.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s stupid. The economics of the madhouse. Surely they could be marketed as being black chicken meat?”

“No idea,” shrugged Shanks. “Who gives a shit? It’s only chickens.”

A guy I later found out was called Gary Prentice was working at the table next to us. He worked opposite Sloan, an acolyte who found everything Prentice said and did funny. Almost an hour passed before he made a comment. Finally, he said,

“What’d they call you, then, Goldilocks?”

“Me?” I said. “Martin.”

“Schoolboy, are you?”

“Just finished, actually. Going to university in the autumn.”

“Just what we need. Actually. Another fuckin’ student. Eh?”

Sloan smirked.

“Just what we need,” he parroted.

“Got a boyfriend, actually?” sneered Prentice.

Sloan brayed with laughter.

“That’s a good one, Gary. Got a boyfriend! Hey, you! Got a boyfriend?”

Prentice basked in Sloan’s admiration of the quip. I looked over then shook my head in disdain as I looked down again. Prentice’s grin froze. He considered for a second then, lifting a chick from the tray, he collected his bucket as if heading to the bins. He approached, held the chick up with its arse facing me, and squeezed its belly. A squirt of green shit landed on my cheek. Prentice lobbed the chick back onto his tray and brushed past me.

“Your make-up’s smudged, Goldilocks,” he said and walked on to the bins.

“Heh, heh! Your make-up’s smudged,” guffawed Sloan.

I pulled a tissue from my trouser pocket and wiped my cheek.

¶

The first morning I worked with Kane, he was silent for a long time. He often worked with the sexers, when they were in the building, and many mornings didn’t appear at the hatchers. This morning we slogged away, lifting chicks, two in each hand, tilting them up, checking their arses, dropping them in a quartered cardboard box. Two more in each hand, turned upside down...

Then he looked up, after maybe half an hour and said,

“So. You still at school?”

“Just finished,” I said. “Waiting for my results. Might go to Uni.”

“What age are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“Good age to be, seventeen. From what I remember.”

“I wish my my old man could remember that.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. What’s your name again?”

“Kane. What’s yours?”

“Martin. What’s your first name?”

Kane looked at me.

“My name’s Kane,” he said.

“Is that your first name or your second name?”

“Does it matter?”

I paused in my counting chickens and looked at him. He didn’t look up from his work. I smiled. I liked that. I wasn’t sure I knew what he meant by it, but I liked the fact that the only name he used was Kane. Then silence fell again as we sorted chicks. When he returned from the mincer, he said,

“Going on to Uni. Up for it?”

“Don’t know, actually,” I said. “My old man wants me to.”

“Study what?”

“Well,” I said, “it was going to be French. He wanted me to get into the Foreign Office. But I applied for English too.  I’m not convinced I want to go.”

“Don’t you like studying?”

“Yeah, I like it all right. I just don’t know if I want to spend another three or four years doing it.”

“Uh-huh. I can see that. But studying at Uni is different. You’re left to your own devices. You study at your own speed. You’re in charge of own life once you leave school.”

“Yeah. That’d be good.”

“What do you like studying now?”

“Don’t know. English, I suppose. I was going to be a linguist but that’s kind of … Well, I supposed I lost interest in the idea. I like reading. Novels. Poetry. Well, some poetry. Not the ancient shit they teach at school. Y’ know? The Lady of Shalott.”

Kane sniffed in a snort of air through arched nostrils.

“Mm-hmm. You read Adrian Henri? Allen Ginsberg?”

“Never heard of them.”

“They’re good. Yeah. Ginsberg’s American. Henri’s one of the Merseybeat poets. You should read Sylvia Plath.”

“She good?”

“Nobody like her. Her last book, Ariel, will fuck with your head.”

I’d never heard anybody talk that way about poetry. I was impressed.

“Sylvia what?”

“Plath. P-L-A-T-H. She’s American too. Psychiatric problems. Committed suicide. You can tell when you read her poems.”

“Okay. I’ll read her stuff.”

“Yeah. You’ll like it.”

“I think I probably would like to go to Uni. I’m just not, well… It’s because my father wants it. I don’t know if I want it enough for myself.”

“That’s sound. Don’t commit yourself to anything until you have to, I’d say,” said Kane. “And what’s wrong with your father?”

“Ach, he’s just so … old, you know?”

“Chronologically or in attitude?”

“In attitude, I suppose. He’s forgotten what it’s like to be 17.”

Kane worked for a while and then said, reflectively,

“Nobody ever forgets what it’s like to be 17. He just doesn’t know what it’s like to be 17 today. His experience of 17 was during the War or something. How could he know what it’s like now? Like, how could you know what it was like, then? Everybody has to live it for themselves. It’s a whole other world for him and just as scary as it is for you. That’s how I see it, anyway.”

I looked at him.

“Yeah?” I queried.

“Sure,” drawled Kane, closing up a box of chicks, “your old man wasn’t always forty, or whatever age he is. He was a young dude once, too. The real sad thing is not that he’s forgotten what it’s like to be 17, but maybe that he remembers what it’s like.”