Chapter Six –You’re Polish, Felicja, said Dee. –Aren’t you? –Yes, Dee, said Felicja. –I am Polish. –So, you don’t mind killing animals. Felijia shrugged.
–I’m easy with that, Dee, she said. –It’s cool.
Although she wasn’t sure if it was, in fact, cool. Felicjia had never killed an animal, had never even thought about it. But she’d delivered the answer she knew Dee wanted. Biffo’s feathers had been washed from Dee’s hair in the shower but the hot water had done nothing to remove the anger that made Dee’s face look so sharp and lethal, and so very beautiful. Looking now at Dee, Felicja was quite confident that Dee would need no help when the time came to kill. Dee’s eyes said one clear thing: slaughter. Felicja was glad she was not one of the neighbours’ chickens, or even one of the neighbours’ children. Chicken blood alone would never satisfy her mad employer’s lust for vengeance. Nothing with lungs was safe.
It was still snowing, quite heavily. It fell like plucked feathers past the kitchen window.
–Ready? said Dee.
–We are not waiting until tonight?
I saw Dee pull two knives from the wooden block beside the microwave. She tested their sharpness with an apple. Peel and pips hopped along the counter. Then she threw one of the knives at me.
–There’s no point in waiting, said Dee. –Let’s cut some throat. Boys?!
Two voices delivered one word.
–What?
–How’s Biffo? Dee shouted.
She had wrapped the featherless rooster in a duvet and put him in a cardboard box, in front of the plasma television. Biffo was watching Scrubs with Dee’s two sons.
–He’s cool, the sons shouted back.
–He isn’t bored, is he?
–No, he’s well into it.
–Good. We’ll be back in a minute.
Felicja had picked the knife up off the floor. She didn’t know where to put it. But Dee was already at the door, opening it, and gone.
She followed Dee into the snow. The knife in her hand felt good.
They followed the same, simple route they had followed the night before, over the wall, made magical by the snow, into mad Monica’s enchanted garden. They wore no camouflage this time, and no masks. As she climbed the wall, Dee held her knife between her teeth. Felicja wanted to do this too, but worried that she’d slip and slice off some of her face. She dropped her knife over the wall, and found it quite easily when she’d climbed over. The soft crunch of their boots as they ran across the snow was, perhaps, the most beautiful, exciting sound that Felicja had ever heard. This is so cool, she thought. This is the sound of silence.
Dee had stopped in front of Monica’s coop.
–We kill these chickens, Dee? she said.
–We do, said Dee.
–But these are Monica’s chickens, said Felicja. –You said it was Maeve who plucked the Biffo.
–This is war, girlfriend, said Dee. –There are no neutrals.
–You will not wait until Monica actually does something wrong?
–She will do something, don’t worry.
Dee opened the door of the coop.
–This is pre-emptive, she said. –Like Bush going into Iraq.
She stood up and looked at Felicja.
-–It’s not fashionable to say it. But he was fucking right.
She bent down.
–Come to Mammy, little red hens.
Felicja was in love with Dee. Or, perhaps, just overwhelmed. She’d never witnessed such decisiveness, or such calm and elegant savagery. Dee swung a Rhode Island Red in front of her face, then stabbed it, once, and twice, and dropped it. Blood jumped from the hen, onto the snow. The chicken ran in a silent circle around Dee, as if thanking her. Then it stopped its charge, and fell and died. Dee already had the next one in her hands.
–Let me help, Dee, said Felicja.
Dee held the hen in front of Felicja.
–Go to it, girl, she said. –This one is a Red, a Russian. Now’s the time.
Ohmygod, she thought. I am doing this.
The blood shot over Felicja’s shoulder. She I was so happy, she thought. Perhaps she was becoming Irish.
Dee put the blade back in her mouth and jumped at the next wall. Felicja, happily – oh, so happily – followed.
Maeve’s hens were hacked and dead in less than a minute and, for a second inside that minute, Felicja wondered at the fact that she had never seen or met Maeve.
This was to change.
As they ran at the wall, laughing and blood-covered, a woman with a lot of hair and a baseball bat jumped – jumped! – out the kitchen window. They scrambled over the wall – they could hear Maeve’s quick feet on the snow – and fell into Monica’s garden, where Monica, mad, magnificent Monica, was waiting.
Ohmygod.
© Roddy Doyle 2009
