Animal People (12 page)

Stephen's glance was dragged back to the bag beneath the seat. There were only three stops until this bus reached the interchange. He just needed to calm fucking down.

He pushed his mind back to Rundle where there were no bombs, where children were not killed by dogs or de factos, where no homeless people slept in nests of garbage. The streets were wide and flat, the empty skies enormous. Perhaps he would go and stay with his mother for a while. He could get a farm-hand job. There were farms where chickens ran free, and eggs were found in hiding places, not factories. It was romantic, but it comforted him. He could work somewhere out there, somewhere in the wide space and open air. Other people did this, didn't they?

The woman turned the newspaper and on the raised right-hand page a quote in enlarged type caught his eye:
‘I work in people's gardens to earn money for food. Sometimes I collect firewood and sell it.'
That was the kind of thing, exactly. It was an omen. He could do that. He saw himself in his ute, gardening tools sliding round the back, an axe for chopping wood. He felt his heartbeat slowing. It was clear to him now. He could lift himself out of this miserable city, this complicated, messed-up life. He could build a wooden hut on someone's bush block, greet each day with the birds, a cup of tea steaming in his hands. Jane Doepel from his high school was running an organic cashew farm outside Rundle now, his mother had told him. He remembered Jane Doepel's long, lithe legs at the year ten athletics carnival. He could work for her, build his hut on her place. Grow his own vegetables and barter them for meat. He knew he was being crazy now, but for the first time today Stephen felt a clearing, an opening out of something good and pure. People did these things, didn't they? It wasn't beyond the realm of possibility. People changed their lives all the time. Wasn't it this, in fact—free will, the ability to determine one's own path in life—which separated humans from the beasts?

The woman folded her newspaper, and as she did he saw the lower half of the page. The person quoted about the gardening and the firewood was a starving woman from Darfur. It was an ad for third world aid.

He turned away. The fucking bag was still there, still monstrously present, still unnoticed by anyone but him. He stared out of the window, willing himself not to look at it. Then it came to him, a sudden, welcome slosh of cold water. Someone's gym shoes. That was it! A smelly pair of gym shoes, taken off before going into the office. Relief flooded through him.

But when he looked again the parcel did not have the shape of shoes. It was too high, too round.
If you see something, say something.
Seconds passed. Stephen found his fingers pressing the stop button, found he had leapt to his feet and was stepping fast down through the flung-open back doors of the bus.

He stood, panting, on the pavement as the bus moved away.

The woman with the newspaper, the cheap suit, the Asian student, the old man with the scabbed head, the driver and the actressy Facebook girls, all unaware, all trapped there in the bus with the throbbing silver bundle that may be a lunch box or a jumper or a pair of gym shoes or a home-made peroxide-based explosive device.

Stephen had seen something and said nothing, and he heard the thrum of his cowardice in his ears long after the bus disappeared from view.

In his pocket his phone vibrated. He looked at the screen, saw
CATHY MOBILE
. He considered it there in his hand, shivering its long, accusing notes. He imagined her at work at the pharmacy, standing before the white shelves of pills in the dispensary, waiting for him to answer. Biting her lip in rage. He knew how her voice would sound, and that he had not the strength to hear it. The phone stopped vibrating. He breathed out. In a moment a message flashed up:
Call me.

CHAPTER 3

As Stephen hurried through the zoo entrance, the crisp, amplified voice of a woman came to him through the birdcalls and the rustle of eucalypts high above, her schoolteacher's voice rising and sinking on the currents of the air.

It was ten-thirty. He was supposed to be here an hour ago. Stephen put his head down and pushed up the path, trying to breathe deeply. It was even hotter now, the sun very high in the swollen blue sky, and he was faintly dizzy with exertion. He wiped his face; if he could only find an edge of this fine mask of perspiration, lift and peel it away, he would feel better. His feet burned in his sneakers; they were laced too tight, pressing painfully on the top of his feet. All he could think now, apart from praying that Mia was not already looking for him, was of wrenching off his shoes, plunging his feet in cold water.

He almost looked forward to the punishment of the deep fryer now. The other things—his mother, the junkie girl's internal bleeding, his dread about this afternoon—could be allayed for a while by the simple, visceral hatred he had for this job. The shining golden swing of the oil as he turned the valve, the rude fishy stench as it slubbed and glugged, the slippery art of holding the mouth of the tin in place, then once all the old oil was gone and the boil-out done, the ache that would spread up his back as he hung over the edge into the great rancid space of the ancient fryer, scrubbing its walls, the skin of his fingers puckering in the sweaty rubber gloves. You couldn't clean the oil entirely from your skin—it just had to wear off over days, as did the metallic stink his hair would take on despite the hygiene cap.

We're pretty famous for our snakes in Australia
, the voice said through the trees.

Ahead of him on the curving grey footpath a man in a dun-coloured zookeeper's uniform carried a bucket in one hand and a bicycle wheel in the other. The animal attendants were always walking around carrying things. Sacks, buckets, armfuls of branches—but also weird things like this: bicycle parts, or huge pieces of brightly coloured polystyrene foam. You rarely actually saw these people inside the cages—
exhibits
, they were not allowed to call them cages—and it seemed to Stephen they simply mooched about all day carrying these odd combinations of objects. As long as you wore a pair of khaki pants you could pretty much get away with anything here. How many strange combinations of objects would you have to walk round clutching before someone questioned you? A bag of muesli and an umbrella? A violin bow and a chainsaw? As long as you had that purposeful stride, nobody would bat an eyelid.

The Bush Clearing came into view. Stephen could see, through the gaps in the deliberately rustic fence posts, a few people scattered on low benches around the shallow amphitheatre, all eyes intent on the woman standing down on the grass before them with her arms outstretched. She squinted up at the people and flicked her high black ponytail as she spoke, her voice amplified by the kind of headset microphone worn by motivational speakers or stadium evangelists. Through and around her outstretched arms, a huge snake slowly curled and slithered. The woman's name was Melanie, she told the audience, and she was a snake handler here at the zoo.

‘I s'pose we should be famous, 'cos we do have some of the deadliest snakes in the world,' Melanie said cheerfully, too loudly, into the microphone bud. She wore a green zoo windcheater, khaki shorts and workman's boots. She began strolling through the crowd, the enormous splotch-patterned snake swaying in her arms. It looked heavy. Stephen watched the clutches of people draw back from Melanie and the snake as she walked; nervous laughter and flutters of whispered Japanese and German rose up from the crowd.

‘But we also have some beautiful and gentle snakes, like this
gorgeous
diamond python,' shouted Melanie. She rotated one of her shoulders and her wrist, twisting the snake's face to meet hers. She smiled lovingly at it. Stephen half expected her to kiss its deadly looking mouth, as if she were a bride, festooned and looped and draped with black-and-yellow-patterned snake.

‘And this python's name is—' said Melanie, and then stopped, puzzled.

She turned to look over her shoulder towards the other snake handler standing behind her on the grass, bored as a security guard. Legs apart, hands behind his back, a canvas sack pooled open at his feet. ‘Which one's this, again?' Melanie whispered to him, loud and clear into the mike.

The other man shrugged. It was of no interest to him.

Melanie turned back to peer at the python again for a moment, her face blank. Then she took charge. ‘Wirri Gurri,' she said in a firm voice, beaming at the audience. The other handler stared.

‘Which, in our local
indigenous
language, means,' said Melanie, looking around, then casting her gaze upwards, ‘Very Big Tree.'

A satisfied murmur moved through the crowd. Melanie, back on familiar ground now, resumed her stroll through the benches, lowering the python into people's faces. ‘Have a pat, she's
lovely
.'

Melanie's voice followed Stephen through the trees. ‘Go on, she feels beautiful. Nah, go on. She won't hurtcha.'

The lorikeets squealed and shrieked as Stephen passed the bilby-and-bat house, the Crocodile Crepes Cafe sandwich board chained to a light pole. He could feel the sun burning his scalp through his hair.

You right?
Melanie's voice was still cheerful, but with a little note of irritation.

The lurid orange Goodfellow's tree-kangaroo sat on its ugly bare branch, surveying him with a level gaze as he passed. Stephen had always felt unnerved by it: that musty colour, its voley face. He was glad of the fence. He looked down at the bitumen as he walked, passing a woman crouched behind a pram, scrabbling into its basket underneath, while all around her on the footpath was strewn the detritus of early childhood—bottles, several plastic bags, a purple lunch box, two nappies.

Melanie, still audible, sounded disconcerted now.
Oh. Are you her husband? She'll be all right in a minute, I reckon.
There was a note of steel in her voice, and now a loud shuffling, a laboured breathing noise as Melanie's headset moved and rubbed against something. Then, as if struck by a thought, her voice asked the high blue air over the city,
Actually, is anyone else actually really scared of snakes?
There was a moment's pause before her equanimity returned.
I should of asked that before, I s'pose.
And her high, microphoned giggle floated through the trees.

The Caribbean flamingos teetered on their folding crimson legs, clucking and squawking, their beaks at the end of the snaking, pink-stockinged necks inscribing arcs on the muddy water. A sign nearby claimed the flamingos did not fly away because they were very content in their exhibit, and also because one wing had been pinioned in a painless surgical procedure carried out under general anaesthetic, after which they showed no desire to fly.

He passed the barren, stony enclosure for the Barbary sheep. There were no sheep to be seen, but there was a swishing noise, and high up on a ledge a keeper moved, patiently sweeping the rocks with a straw broom, the black walkie-talkie at his belt jiggling as he moved. The sheep, Stephen saw then, were huddled down at the fence line, heads in a trough.

At the Sumatran rhino enclosure the line for the next session was growing. Ever since the rhino calf was born it was the zoo's star attraction, and staggered viewing-times had to be introduced. The birth—only the second in captivity—was covered on the television news and the commercial channels named the infant Mr Waddles. Its official name was Adik, apparently a term of endearment translating as ‘little brother', but nobody called it that.

Stephen watched the queue as he drew near. At the end of the line two large women stood shifting their weight uncomfortably in the blazing heat. Between them a boy of nine or ten slouched on the low ledge of the garden bed, and the women—one in a leopard-print, one in a zebra-striped top pulled down over her shorts—looked down at him, discussing him as if he were an exhibit himself. ‘He's sick of the band-aid, he says it's getting itchy,' one of the women said. She reached down and turned the boy's head, using his ear as a handle, to show her friend a band-aid behind his ear. The friend murmured in reply, keeping her arms folded in a repelled way. She kept her hands to herself. The boy, listless and bored, did not speak. He did not look well.

The women fanned themselves with zoo maps and pulled at their clothes. The first reached beneath one armpit, pinching the stretchy zebra-print fabric away from her body to cool herself. Stephen imagined the body odour on her fingers. ‘This thing better be good,' she said, straining to look at the line ahead, to see if anyone was moving. Beside them was a sandwich board advertising the Rhino Shop that stood not far from the enclosure, a separate demountable room selling rhino merchandise. There were rhino cups, rhino slippers, rhino computer mouse pads, rhino-shaped chocolates, stuffed fluffy rhino toys (mother and baby joined by an elastic strap), rhino doorstoppers, mobile phone covers, rulers, pens, notepads and key rings. At first there had been rhino-foot umbrella-holders made of plastic for $59.99, but these had been removed after some complaint, and the zoo acknowledged that there had been an error of judgement in the merchandise ordering and that the umbrella-holders had sent the wrong message.