Animal People (16 page)

The woman was dressed in the Longley Point way—small white t-shirt, tight jeans, shiny black Birkenstocks on her slender feet. The girl wore the fresh blue uniform of one of the suburb's private schools. Stephen supposed they were mother and daughter, though the mother only looked about thirty. All the adults here looked young. It was something he had noticed often, walking the streets of Fiona's suburb. Now he wondered again how such young people could possibly have amassed so much wealth. It was at times like this he felt his country boy's naiveté most keenly. He imagined his parents wandering these streets, and knew they would be as bewildered as he was. In Rundle, money was made by farming or small business or, in the upper echelons, dentistry. It was made from things you could see and touch—teeth, wool, sports equipment, radiator parts. But in the city, it had dawned on Stephen some years ago, there were millions of invisible, indescribable jobs which produced nothing tangible, but spun inconceivable levels of wealth. Twenty years after coming to live here he still had absolutely no idea of what these jobs could look like. He felt a simpleton when people—like Fiona's friends from her marriage—said things like ‘futures trader', or ‘hedge fund manager', or ‘chief risk officer' or ‘group executive, people and strategy'. What
were
these jobs, he wanted to ask, but knew he never could.

He came to a shop selling things for pets. Kreature Kumforts, said the sign. The first few months he had passed by this shop Stephen thought it sold things for children; its window display bore the bright colours and dangling, playful lettering of a toyshop. Only one day when he stepped inside to buy some little treat for the girls did he realise the balls and climbing frames, the hairbrushes and printed t-shirts and snugly rugs were not for babies but for dogs and cats. There were doggy sweatshirts with baseball-team lettering spelling out ‘woof' across the backs. There was a plastic contraption called a doggy drinking fountain that filtered and aerated continuously moving water to keep it fresh. There were, unbelievably, ‘Tushie Wipes' for cats' and dogs' arses, like the ones for human babies' bums. Stephen had stood and gaped.

Now his phone began its long, insistent vibrations in his pocket. He looked at the number, closed his eyes, and swallowed.

‘Hi Cathy.'

His sister launched in. Their mother had called her about next weekend, upset because Stephen had said he might be coming alone, but then Fiona had seemed fine about it, so what the fuck was going on? And why was he not answering his phone?

‘Cath, just don't worry about it,' Stephen said, staring into the window of the pet shop. He could still smell on himself the musty, rancid oil. The window display had a rock-star theme: there was a doggy Elvis suit, a range of rhinestone charms and Tiffany hearts to hang from cat collars. At the back of the display hung a curtain of multicoloured leads studded, the labels said, with Swarovski Crystals.

‘What do you mean, don't worry about it? Mum's invited all those people. She's desperate to see Fiona and the girls.'

Stephen said coldly, ‘If Mum would just stick her nose out of it everything would be fine.'

In the window a trolley held stainless steel bowls with silver cloches propped open to reveal packets of dog chocolates and Licky Treats of liver and kangaroo. He knew what his mother would say to all this, and it would not be
poor creature
. It would be: To think, there are children starving in Africa.

Cathy paused, but she was only warming up. ‘So what's going on?' she demanded.

‘It's just none of anyone's business,' he said weakly. But then, rising to anger: ‘The party is a stupid bloody idea anyway. And why the hell is Mum calling
Fiona
, for Christ's sake?'

Cathy sighed. Stephen knew exactly the face she would be making, standing with her raised forearm resting along some shelf, her forehead on her arm, glaring at the ground.

‘Oh, you're joking,' she said.

Stephen looked at a stand of DVDs.
Kitty Goes Hunting
.
Kitty goes Fishing
. These were nature DVDs for cats.

‘I don't believe it. No, actually, I do,' said Cathy.

So she knew. He had known all day, in his guts, that if he spoke to Cathy she would somehow know. Oh, he hated sisters.

‘Listen—' he said firmly, desperate to shut her up, but she interrupted: ‘You're going to dump her. You are. You stupid, stupid boy.'

Stephen's head began to throb. He iced his voice: ‘
Listen
, Cath—'

‘Why do you want to live like this?'

His little sister, but how she loved to sound older than both of them, how
weary
with wisdom. ‘Live like
what!
'

She was silent. Then she said, more brightly, ‘Did you see that nature doco on TV last night?'

He longed to trust this change of subject. But he knew it was a trap.

‘It was all about evolution.' She was furious. More than furious; she was on the verge of tears. ‘And they started talking about maladaptive behaviour—you know, the sort of behaviour that's counterproductive to an individual's survival. And I thought, that's Stephen! That's my brother!'

He could not believe his ears. Cathy, whose own life consisted of working at a pharmacy and watching
Master-Chef
, lecturing him with some snatch of pseudoscience from the Discovery Channel. He snorted, but she said, ‘It's true. You do it every time. Give me one good reason why you're dumping her.'

‘I have reasons,' he said.

But she crowed: ‘See? You don't even
know
why!'

He leant his head against the glass of the window and said with stiff dignity, ‘I won't cause Fiona unnecessary pain. I'm going to—'

Cathy snorted. ‘You fucking idiot,' she said. ‘
She'll
be fine.
You're
the one who won't be.'

He stared at the catnip teabags and the beef-flavoured beer for dogs.

‘I figured out why it's so perfect that you work at the zoo, actually,' she said then. ‘You like your life forms behind bars or glass, so you don't have to get in there and wrangle with any of it. You don't have to engage with it. You can just
watch
, from a distance, and whenever you get sick of it you can just walk away.'

Oh, she could fuck off.

‘Whatever you say, Cath,' he said, as slow and coldly as he could. ‘I have to go. Tell Mum I'll talk to her later—' His mother. Into Cathy's accusing silence he said gruffly, ‘Is she alright? Her health, I mean?'

‘Stephen,' said Cathy in a dead voice, ‘as if you have ever given a shit about anyone but yourself.' And she hung up in his ear.

He sighed, gulped air; it was like inhaling oily bath-water. His body was heavier than he had ever known it. When,
when
would the cool change come?

Cathy was so full of bullshit. He made an indignant mental note to report this to Russell, but then Russell's words stung him again. Living like a fuckwit. What did that
mean?
He wiped a hand over his sticky head and neck. The mask of his face was now thick, mouldering rubber; he longed to peel it away. He pictured his real face beneath, melted, a grey knob of candlewax.

Each shop doorway he passed sent out a plume of luscious air-conditioned cool. He kept on walking.

Everything had grown confused and tangled. All he knew was that he needed to be free of it, of all of it. He must empty his mind of these unbearable things—Cathy, his mother, Russell, the junkie girl. Fiona. At the end of this day he would be liberated.

He must find a way to fill his mind. He turned his thoughts to the junk in the pet toy store, the DVDs and clothes and beer. A whole industry existed, livelihoods were made by the lavishing of human gifts on animals. In the paper last week he had seen a review of a café for dogs. They sat at tables, eating organic pasta and drinking juice; no human food was served. Stephen had found this incredible, but anyone he mentioned it to simply cried out, ‘How cute!' That place—and the clothes and toys, the Christmas presents and special doggy cupcakes—existed because of the mysterious longings of people like Jill and Nerida.

He knew there was something about animals he could not perceive, that this was a deficiency in him. For even people who did not dress their dogs in silly clothes were able to find something serious, something profound in a creature's company. When animal people looked at a dog or a lion or a meerkat or a monkey they perceived a fellow being where Stephen only saw a bundle of muscle, a package of alien hair and foetid, frightening breath. He didn't like to look into the eyes.

Georgia from the kiosk was one of these animal people. She claimed to prefer the company of animals; they were less barbaric, more peaceable. She abhorred the word
pet
. She called her dog her ‘non-human companion', she was its guardian, not owner. Her bike helmet was stickered with the slogan ‘meat is murder'. She saw animals as individuals with lives of purpose and meaning, with personhood. She and Russell argued day after day about animal rights, Russell lifting dripping baskets from the fryer and Georgia stuffing chips into cartons. It mattered not, Georgia said, that animals had no concept of a future, and anyway, how could Russell possibly know this? They often had sophisticated communication systems, and organised societies of immense complexity. Many species grieved for their dead. They had not destroyed the planet with their hubris, as foolish humans had done. One day Georgia, flushed with triumph, brandished an article in which the world's greatest sperm whale expert offered evidence that the whales were capable of abstract thought and may have
formed their own religion
. Russell had snorted and said if that was her evidence for the sophistication of animals she was well and truly fucked.

(This was good. Even Cathy's outburst could be nudged off in this way, like something brought in on the tide. You just went in up to your knees dragging the unpleasant things she had said, and then shoved at them, and the waves drew them away. Maladaptive behaviour. She was so full of shit.)

How could it be, he kept puzzling as he walked, that a pet was a person? A cat wearing jewellery would still drag its arse over the carpet. A dog in an Elvis suit still ate its own vomit, would crush a mouse's warm body with its teeth, or gobble up another dog's shit. Georgia would say they were simply unencumbered by human repressions—at which Russell would snigger his old joke about why dogs licked their balls—but Stephen remained nonplussed.

It wasn't that he wanted to feel this way, about animals. But he sensed no bond, no likeness. The overwhelming, simple fact was that when he looked at Jill and Nerida's Balzac he saw no link between the dog and himself at all. When he looked into Balzac's face all he saw was otherness.

It had always been this way. His mother's stocky black bitser, Leia, was elderly, three-legged and arthritic, but even when she was young, Leia had never functioned as a playmate or the focus of human longing. Like her predecessor, Buster, she simply
was
, lying in the sun on the back verandah, or placidly lapping water from a faded plastic bowl beneath the tap. Stephen recalled only one moment as a boy when he was troubled by his family's lack of emotion toward their pets: after watching an episode of
Lassie
on television, he had sought out the mutt, Buster, where he lay in the shade beneath the station wagon. He didn't come when Stephen called him, so he hauled him out by the collar and prodded at him until he sat up, in order that Stephen could fling his arms around the dog's neck and nuzzle his face into his fur, saying
Good boy, Buster. How I love you, boy.
The dog had sat stiff, ever patient, and endured this unexpected assault, simply tilting its head the smallest degree away from Stephen's face. When he had finished and let go his collar the dog slunk back beneath the car and would not come out again.

The junkie girl came unbidden to Stephen's mind. Did she have a dog, that would sit by her as she died? But he could not allow her to come trailing back into his thoughts. He took a deep breath, and exhaled her from his mind. She must be forgotten. This seemed possible now, for she was no longer his affair, here in Longley Point. Here in the green, cushioned air she was as irrelevant as dust. Perhaps this was one of the reasons everyone here looked so clean, so young: they had no other, darker world to carry in their nerves, no public sobbing echoed in their ears. The grime and violence and anguish could not enter their bodies, because here it simply did not exist.

In his pocket the phone buzzed once, and then again. He groaned, fuck
off
. If he were in a film he could throw the phone away. He fantasised hurling it into the traffic, if there was any. He could walk away, light as a feather.

Instead he drew it from his pocket. The first message was from an unrecognisable number.
RTA COURTESY SMS
, it said.
VEHICLE REG
.
SDY
768
TOWED FROM NO
-
STOP ZONE QUEEN ST NORTON PENALTY
$198
CALL
1300 230 230
FOR VEHICLE RETRIEVAL
.

Fucking
hell.

But even as he read, he welcomed its cool, automated, emotionless efficiency. Why could not all communication be like this? Here is the crime, there is the penalty.

The other message was from Cathy, two words:
PLEASE DON
'
T
.

In his mind he sent the phone spinning through the air, landing
crack
on the road, exploding into a thousand tiny electronic pieces.

He turned into Fiona's street—and as he looked down its length to the cement fencepost of her house where a pair of balloons fluttered, a new, overwhelming surge of fear came flooding in. The balloons beckoned, and he understood that all the day's ordeal so far—the junkie girl, his mother, Russell's betrayal, Cathy—all of this had been nothing. It had been respite, and now it was over. The dreadful time was now. He could do nothing to stop it; it had already begun.