They offered him coffee and biscuits and then, after a little polite conversation in which they inquired after the health of Mrs Pangloss to be told, cheerfully, that all her systems were working and her fuel pipes had lately been replaced which had brought the colour back to her cheeks, they set him loose to patter about the house.
He inspected the rooms, approved Baxter’s choice of furniture and bestowed his blessings upon them. And then, since the visit seemed complete, they began to walk him back to the door.
His daughter leaned forward to peck the top of his head, because she knew it annoyed him, his son-in-law shook him by the hand, and Ambrose Pangloss turned to leave. But as he opened the door something made him hesitate and stare thoughtfully at Charlie.
‘What do you know about chickens?’ he said, as if suddenly struck by a great idea.
‘Nothing,’ Charlie said.
‘What do you know about the wheels of industry, the engine of commerce, the triumph of trading nations?’
‘Nothing,’ Charlie said
Ambrose Pangloss nodded and smiled. ‘Good,’ he murmured happily. ‘That’s good, Charlie. I think you’re the man who can help me.’
‘No!’ Baxter snapped. She stepped quickly between the two men. ‘He’s not interested. I want him to be a painter. You can’t have him. I won’t allow it,’ she said fiercely, slaring down at her father. A pair of dangerously high-heeled shoes had turned her into a giantess.
‘I’m not going to steal him from you,’ he said in surprise.
‘You’re not even going to borrow him,’ Baxter warned him. ‘He’s mine and you’re going to leave him alone.’
Ambrose Pangloss shrugged and smiled. ‘I understand,’ he said mildly and glanced at his watch.
Charlie was mortified. What was happening here? How could she be so angry at this natty little napoleon? Her father had given them everything for their comfort and security.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he hissed as they watched the chicken millionaire stroll back to his limousine. The chauffeur snapped to attention and offered a brisk salute.
‘Don’t be a pain,’ Baxter said impatiently. ‘Do you want him to think that he owns you?’
‘We owe him something,’ Charlie said. ‘You don’t even know what he wanted…’
‘He wants to run our lives,’ Baxter replied in disgust. ‘He’s turned himself into our landlord and now he’s arrived to collect the rent.’ She pulled off her shoes and threw them across the floor.
‘But he’s been so kind,’ Charlie said.
‘He can afford it,’ Baxter said. ‘Shut the door and forget it. Come on, Charlie, let’s go back to bed.’
But Charlie ran out into the frost.
‘No, wait!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll be glad to help you.’
Ambrose Pangloss grinned like a cat and turned away from the limousine. ‘It’s a fine morning,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we take a walk around the garden?’ And he took Charlie by the arm and led him across the field.
‘Do you like to eat chicken, Charlie?’ he inquired confidentially when they were a little distance from the house.
‘Yes, sir,’ Charlie said. They’d been living on nothing but chicken for weeks.
‘That’s right,’ Ambrose beamed. ‘Everyone likes to eat chicken. It’s good and wholesome.’
The walked for a time in silence, Ambrose secure in his cashmere overcoat, Charlie in shirtsleeves shivering.
‘Do you know how many people there are in the world, Charlie?’ Ambrose said suddenly. He turned and looked back at the trail of black footprints in the silver grass.
‘No, sir,’ Charlie said.
‘Billions. Untold billions. And they all eat chicken Some of them won ’t eat pork and some of them won’t eat beef but they all say yes please to chicken,’ Ambrose said. A frown flickered for a moment across his face. ‘And do you know how many Melting Moments™ we sell in a week? Three point eight million, Charlie. Three point eight million.’ He sighed. His breath turned to smoke in the brilliant air. ‘Everybody likes to eat chicken. Why don’t they eat more chicken? That’s the question…’
They reached the far corner of the garden where the lawn ran into a ditch beneath the high wall. The ditch was filled by builders’ rubble, smashed bricks and broken shovels.
‘That’s bad,’ Ambrose said, staring into the ditch. ‘That’s very bad.’ But he wasn’t disheartened. Great cities had been raised from rubble. 'I’ll send someone down to clear it out and build something cheerful in this corner. A summerhouse with a veranda. It will catch the eye from the bedroom windows.’
‘Thanks,’ Charlie said.
‘Do you know how many people work for me, Charlie?’ the chicken tycoon continued, as they turned and retraced their steps.
‘No, sir,’ Charlie said
Ambrose closed one eye and squinted at the sky, as if making celestial calculations. ‘Thousands,’ he concluded vaguely. ‘Thousands of honest, hard working men with families to support. Large families. Women and children, the old and infirm. They depend on me to give them a living. They trust me. That’s a big responsibility, Charlie. It’s a terrible weight to place on one man’s shoulders.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Charlie said.
Ambrose Pangloss nodded, amazed by his own importance. ‘Do you know what I ask God when I go to bed at night?’ he asked softly. ‘I ask Him how I can help those poor devils who work for me. I ask Him how I can make their lives a little easier for them. And do you know the answer, Charlie? Chickens. A four portion meal on two legs. The working man’s feathered friend. We’ve got to make people eat more chicken.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Charlie said.
‘I don’t want to take you away from your sketching, Charlie. I know how you love your crayons. And it’s a wonderful gift,’ he added, smiling at Charlie with the kind of admiration a man might reserve for a tap-dancing chimpanzee. ‘You’re artistic and it takes all sorts to make a world. In fact, it’s because you’re artistic that I’m asking you this little favour.’
‘But I don’t know anything about the business,’ Charlie protested.
‘Exactly,’ Ambrose said. ‘You’re a pygmy in a land of giants. You’re floundering in the darkness of a pitiful ignorance, oblivious to the majestic beauty of a great industrial empire. And that’s why you’re so valuable to me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’ll be looking at everything for the first time. You’ll take a fresh approach. You’ll be able to tell me where we have strengths and weaknesses. And you might come up with some bright ideas. Deep-fried chicken feet. Chicken neck savoury spread. Who knows? I’ll pay generously for your time, Charlie. You could buy Baxter some decent clothes and a pair of sensible shoes. I know you’d welcome the money.’
He smiled at Charlie and wondered again how his daughter could find him attractive. He was so innocent, so eager to please, standing there, chilled to the bone, with his frost-bitten ears and wet carpet slippers. Battle-hardened by the boardroom, Ambrose Pangloss enjoyed a fight and Charlie had offered no resistance. There really was scant satisfaction in accepting his surrender. But he wasn’t discouraged. He had settled Baxter in a fine new house with a garden and summer pavilion. And now he was going to transform her husband from an imbecile into a smart, young Pangloss executive.
Yes, everything would be arranged for the best.
31.
Despite Baxter’s protests, Charlie had felt obliged to visit the Pangloss Chicken Empire. He couldn’t see the harm in it. He was a painter, not a farmer, but if Ambrose wanted him to look at chickens, Charlie could hardly refuse his request.
The Mercedes came to collect him the following morning. His guide for the tour of inspection was a young PR man named Sam Shingles. As they sat together in the leatherbound silence of the big limousine, Sam explained to Charlie that the Pangloss Empire owned four superior poultry farms within fifty miles of London. These were called Sweet Orchard, Old Meadow, Larks Rise and Honeysuckle.
He said their names reminded him of a team of prize-winning drayhorses and he laughed, in a nervous, gurgling way and started to chew his fingernails.
Sam Shingles was Charlie’s age but he looked older and was already starting to lose his hair. He combed it into elaborate circles and pasted the outer rings to his ears. He smelt of toothpaste, mouth rinse, scented soap, hair spray and aftershave. He wore a silver feather in his jacket lapel. This little mascot was his badge of office and marked him out as a junior toady. He’d been programmed to sell the Wonderful World of Pangloss Chicken with all the passion of a 19th century missionary. Nothing could stop him talking. Nothing could stop him feeling cheerful. He wanted to win a gold-plated feather.
While Sam was explaining the history and virtues of Instant Chicken Dinners, Charlie watched the world gliding past the window. It was a world of building sites, factory sheds, storage bins, oil tanks, railways and junkyards. A dead and dreary landscape. The land lay cold and the sky was heavy with rain. But then, ahead of them, beyond a bend in the narrow road, sunlight sprang from the earth and shone through a group of chestnut trees. It was a brilliant column of light that dazzled the eyes and seemed to be aimed directly at heaven.
‘That’s Larks Rise!’ Sam Shingles said gleefully and stopped eating his fingers.
The limousine turned into a gate and stopped beside a security post. Above their heads a huge hoarding, curved like a rainbow, was caught in the beam of light. Along the top edge of the hoarding, cut from letters of green and gold, was the legend: Larks Rise Farm. Home of the Pangloss Chicken. And beneath it, large as life but twice as lovely, was a wonderful painted farmyard. Fat and friendly chickens scratched for grain in the garden of a small thatched cottage, brown cows grazed in a buttercup field and behind the cows, the swollen hills were arranged like a row of dairymaids’ buttocks. Among these hills was a tiny orchard and beyond, standing against a smooth blue sky, was a village of gingerbread houses. There were hollyhocks in the cottage garden and rabbits in the meadow and far away above the line of the distant village, a church with a sugar spire.
The driver offered a few words to the security guard who nodded and smiled and gave Sam Shingles a smart salute; and then the Mercedes was whispering down a curving ornamental drive of holly and rhododendrons.
A few moments later the drive opened into a courtyard dominated by another giant poster board depicting a similar farmyard scene but this time, in letters of gold and green, was the legend: Larks Rise Visitors gate.
‘We’re here,’ Sam grinned, as a small door opened in the painted screen and a figure walked towards them. ‘Welcome to the wonderful world of the pedigree Pangloss Chicken. That’s Farkiss. He’ll show you around. I’ll he back to collect you in a couple of hours. I know you’re going to enjoy yourself.’
Farkiss, a fat man in a green bow tie, pulled open the car door and helped Charlie to his feet. He directed the baffled visitor towards the hoarding and urged him to enter through the little door.
Charlie stepped through the screen and stood gawking at a monotony of whitewashed office buildings, long factory sheds and towers of empty, metal crates.
‘Where are they?’ Charlie said, staring around the deserted concrete perimeter.
‘What?’ Farkiss said, supposing that his guest must have dropped something from his pockets and turning to search the ground at their feet.
‘The chickens,’ Charlie said.
‘There!’ Farkiss said in surprise, nodding at the factory sheds. He frowned at Charlie. ‘Did you never visit a chicken plant?’
‘No.’
‘This one is a marvel,’ Farkiss beamed proudly. ‘It’s frontier technology. You pack the eggs in one end of the plant,’ he explained, throwing out his left arm, ‘and six weeks later instant frozen chicken dinners come flying from the other.’ He threw out his right arm and stood for a moment with both arms outstretched, as if he wanted to embrace the entire factory, engines, cladding, pegs and rivets.
‘Don’t you ever let them out?’ Charlie said, very disappointed.
‘Let ’em out?’ Farkiss laughed. ‘Why should we let the buggers out?’
‘You let them out to run around and scratch in the grass.’
‘We don’t have any grass. Besides, they wouldn’t come out of there. You’d have to use dynamite to get them birds out of there. They have climate control, automatic feed, everything. The shock of this fresh air would kill ’em. These are pedigree Pangloss flocks. They don’t have the legs for running around and scratching and getting into mischief. Their legs have been scientifically designed. They’re made for eating, not walking. That’s the way we breed ’em. Come over here and I'll show you through Number Five Battery.’
They entered the battery through a set of hissing security doors and inside a small steel cabin Charlie was urged to borrow a nylon coat and shown how to tie his shoes into a pair of polythene bags fitted with welded rubber soles.
‘Regulations,’ Farkiss said. ‘We’re entering tomorrow’s world. Are you ready?’
Charlie nodded doubtfully.
Farkiss punched a number into an illuminated keyboard and the inner door swung open with a blast of hot and stinking air. Charlie found himself stepping down a narrow corridor in a vast catacomb or dimly lit cages. The cages were stuffed with chickens. Their eyes glittered like a million specks of blood. Every cage was connected to a system of air pipes, feed troughs, sprinklers and defecation trays so that the interior of the battery had the appearance of one monstrous machine into which the birds had somehow strayed and become fatally enmeshed. They could squeeze their necks through the narrow bars but they no longer had room to stretch their wings. They were mad-eyed cripples, slumped, one upon another, gasping for breath, their beaks cut to stumps and their feathers broken.
‘What’s wrong with them?’ Charlie whispered as he shuffled down the aisle. He had expected sweet artificial sunlight and yodelling cockerels and deep mattresses of straw. He had expected clouds of excited, scampering birds, exploding pillows of feathers. Here, in this fantastic twilight, there was no straw, no movement and no sound from the vast assembled flocks. There was nothing but the soft thunder of well-oiled machines.
‘There’s nothing wrong with them,’ Farkiss said with a note of irritation. ‘You’re looking at fully ripe birds in the very peak of their condition.’
The heat of the battery had soaked him in copious sweat. His bow tie had wilted. Pearls of moisture hung from his ears. Beneath his nylon coat he was gently cooking in his own juices.
‘But they’re so quiet,’ Charlie whispered.
‘That’s right,’ Farkiss said. ‘That’s chemistry. We’ve introduced sedatives into their drinking water. A docile bird is a happy bird and a happy bird will tolerate being packed into greater concentrations.’
‘Doesn’t it do them any harm?’
‘No!’ Farkiss scoffed. ‘These buggers are born addicts. Antiseptics. Antibiotics. Skin conditioners. Blood inhibitors. They’ll take all kinds of punishment. These flocks are beautiful. Quick growth. Heavy yield. Standard weight. Beautiful. If we could get them to eat their own shit we’d have the perfect factory bird.’
He paused, peered into a cage and banged the bars with the flat of his hand. ‘We get them to eat each other, of course, so they bury their own dead in a manner of speaking,’ he said, as he unclipped the front of the cage and pulled out one of the prisoners. The bird was an ugly dwarf with a body the size of a grapefruit carried on plump and succulent legs. One of its eyes was missing.
‘We collect up the corpses and process them back into feed pellets,’ he explained, slinging the body into a passing rubber bucket. ‘It’s an art spotting the dead ’uns. Sometimes they look dead when they’re alive and sometimes they look more alive when they’re dead. That’s why we use the Dead & Alive Men to check the cages every six hours. It’s skilled work. Chickens are crafty.’
Charlie watched the bucket glide away on its steel track and vanish into the gloom
.
‘We spray the pellets with vitamins, minerals and the Pangloss Special Recipe Natural Spicy Flavour™,’ Farkiss continued, snatching a handful of feed from a trough. He pushed the pellets under Charlie’s nose. ‘Smell it. That’s garlic, palm oil, bones and feathers. Smells good enough to eat.’
Charlie staggered, dazed by the heat and the stench of chickens.
‘But this can’t be very interesting for you,’ Farkiss said finally, wiping his sweating face. ‘I expect you’ll want to see how transform these humble birds into the world’s favourite big flavour dinner.’
‘I think I can imagine the rest,’ Charlie said.
‘You’ll be amazed,’ Farkiss said, taking Charlie by the arm. ‘You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen the slaughter houses.’
32.
The music was deafening. It roared through the extractor fans, rattled the chains in the ceiling and banged on the chilled water pipes. It slapped Charlie full in the face and made all his bones vibrate.
Farkiss was beside him and his jaws were working but all that came from his mouth was steam. The sweat that had gathered in his eyebrows sparkled now as it turned to ice.
Six men wearing mufflers and leather gauntlets were pulling chickens from iron crates and hanging them by their feet from an automated ceiling track. There were hundreds of birds in the crates and hundreds more in the air. Alarmed by their shackles the birds struggled weakly as they made the only flight of their lives. Their eyes glittered and their wings fell open as they felt themselves shuttled across the ceiling towards the electric hammer.
‘They’re dead before—hit—ground!’ Farkiss bellowed.
The hammer sizzled as it stunned the birds, banging their necks against a blade that sliced their heads from their bodies. The heads tumbled to earth, collecting in great twitching heaps along a gutter in the floor.
‘It wasn’t—this—old days!’ Farkiss shouted. ‘You couldn’t trust—machines—old days. We—find that—of the buggers—plucked alive. Nasty! Bad for the girls!’
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