Animal People (4 page)

He dragged a shoe from beneath his bed with a hooked finger, filling with bitterness. Mothers were supposed to think you were magnificent no matter what. Sisters were supposed to side with you. But instead they kept grasping at him, making him feel guilty, expecting things of him he could not be expected to deliver.

A weariness rose in him as he realised his mother would straightaway call Cathy to complain. He could add another martyred, angry phone call, then, to the troubles that lay ahead. The acres of the day unrolled before him: all the different kinds of disappointment he would be, all the various arenas of his failure.

He turned away from the mirror, and stood to worm first one narrow foot, then another, into his trainers.

The sun was high, relentless in the clear sky as he slammed the door behind him and turned out of his gate. As he stepped from the shade of the house onto the footpath he was stunned motionless for a moment—Christ almighty!—by the white brilliance of the heat. He stood shielding his eyes with his hand—he would have to go back for a hat—when Nerida from up the road called out to him. He hesitated, looking down towards the Plaza. He wished he could pretend he hadn't seen her, but he was caught.

Neighbourliness made him uneasy. In Stephen's trudging back and forth to the outdoor toilet over the years he had developed almost without realising it an intricate sonic awareness of his neighbours' private lives: the wheedling voices they used to talk to pet cats and dogs and birds, their habits with power tools and garbage bin lids (droppers or lowerers). He knew which back doors had aluminium flyscreens and which were sliding glass, he knew whose water pipes banged and filled at strange hours in the night, and he knew who had sat in their courtyards illicitly smoking when their partners or children were in bed. Occasionally, on the night air, came the floating grunts of sex.

But this was backyard knowledge. In the street, at their front gates, Stephen and his neighbours maintained the barest of greetings and he imagined that, like him, they were happiest that way.

Except for Nerida.

Retired Nerida and her girlfriend Jill—he was sure they were gay, though never sure enough to venture any remark that might reveal this—lived two houses from Stephen, on the other side of Bridget and Keith, who had moved out with the new baby while the renovations were done. Today the builders were absent, the house silent.

From her gateway Nerida beckoned at him again with a box of snail pellets. Stephen moved down the pavement and into the shade cast by her verandah. This was necessary—the sun was unbearable—but regrettable, as she took his nearness as a signal that Stephen was waiting for confidences. She beamed, tilting her head towards Bridget and Keith's.

‘Spending a lot of money in there,' she said, in a tone that meant fools and gold were soon parted.

‘Right,' said Stephen. To keep out of the sun he had to lean towards her; it might look eager. He must make it clear he was in a hurry. ‘What's up?' he said.

Nerida's face was square and masculine, like a nun's, her metallic grey hair swept back from her forehead. She wore short-sleeved floral blouses with the collars ironed flat—today's was maroon. The cobweb thread of a fine gold chain with a tiny crucifix lay against the sun-damaged skin of her chest.

Nerida said again, nodding at each word: ‘A
lot
. Of money.' She still held the snail pellet box aloft. A cartoon snail grinned evilly from the box, showing its white human teeth, raising its villain's eyebrows. Strange, how poisons were so often labelled with pictures of the pest being schemingly wicked. Stephen supposed it would be harder to kill a snail if you thought it was innocent. If the box had instead, say, a picture of a snail writhing in slimy agony, vomiting blood. If snails had blood.

Nerida was waiting for him to respond, her free hand delving recreationally inside the roomy pocket of her trousers.

He said nothing; he did not want to allow Nerida the pleasure of telling him how much was
a lot
. She'd once uprooted three little native shrubs Stephen had planted on a whim in the nature strip, and replaced them with another two clumps of agapanthus. He hated agapanthus; they reminded him of Fiona's parents' long lawns on the far side of the city. But the agapanthus flourished, and the one grevillea Stephen guarded had neither grown a millimetre nor died since he planted it. It stood twenty centimetres high, atrophied in the shadow of the lush, healthy straps of the agapanthus leaves.

He saw Jill looking down at them from the verandah. The German shepherd, Balzac, was a shadow in the gloom of the hall behind her. Jill had never once, in all the time he had lived here, said hello or spoken to Stephen. Just as his glance met hers now, she averted her eyes as she always did, and stared down the street at the man from the Plaza starting up his leaf blower. Together they watched the leaf-blower man's slow, zigzagging pursuit of three different leaves. One by one, he escorted each leaf across the footpath into the gutter.

‘I see the beggars have got at your place again,' called Nerida to Stephen over the noise. She meant the graffiti tags adorning his fence in the back lane. The fence was covered in the squiggles and swearwords and odd, mysterious expressions:
Hazfelt is Ace,
or
Carl Scully is a deadshit.
Or in one place, in small black felt pen:
forgive me
.

With those two words Fiona's wide, grey eyes last week—her light puzzlement as she asked him if anything was wrong—came into his mind. But he could not allow this scrutiny today, could not bear the steadiness of her gaze. It must be banished.

‘I'll paint over it,' he said to Nerida.

Up on the porch Jill stooped to hook a leash to Balzac's collar. The dog was elderly and losing his sight, with a deep, loosely shaggy coat that to Stephen, with his dander allergy, was even more floatingly hairy than the fur of ordinary dogs. But as always, as soon as Balzac's cloudy old eyes made out Stephen he strained at the leash, pulling Jill along behind him down the stairs and out of the gate.

Stephen called, ‘Hello Balzac,' in a weary manner that he hoped might convey to Nerida and Jill just how little he enjoyed what was to come next, and that might even (he knew this was futile) distract the dog. But there was no stopping Balzac doing what he always did—skirting round behind Stephen in a neat side-step, planting his brawny weight on the pavement and lodging his snout firmly up between Stephen's buttocks. ‘Hellooo,' said Stephen, trying once again to laugh it off and skipping forward, wriggling to dislodge Balzac's nose. It made no difference, it never made any difference: the dog merely followed with his own heavy steps, nuzzling his broad snout a little further in. It felt to Stephen that he was balanced on the dog's nose, legs dangling.

Nerida and Jill gazed fondly down at the dog. ‘He loves to say hello, don't you boy,' said Nerida. ‘
Done
choo,' she repeated, in the low, guttural baby talk people used with dogs.

At the sound of Nerida's voice Balzac gave a shiver of enjoyment and, as always, Stephen was forced to reach down behind himself and push the dog's snout firmly down and out of his bum. He followed this with a swift half-turn, quickly positioning his backpack at his groin so Balzac couldn't begin again at the front.

Balzac licked his lips in a dejected way.

‘Sorry,' Stephen called over the noise of the leaf blower, and then shouted his usual addendum: ‘It's just that I'm allergic.' The skin of his fingers that had touched the firm, hairy planes of Balzac's snout began tingling with allergic activity. He felt an urgent compulsion to wash his hands.

Jill dropped into a crouch, pulling Balzac to her. She put a protective arm around the dog's broad, shaggy girth to shield him from Stephen's insulting allergy, and crooned apology into his ear: ‘It's all right boy, it's okay.' She pushed her face close to the dog's, and closed her eyes. Balzac yawned wide, then extended his long elastic tongue and licked at Jill's offered mouth and nose and eyes with enthusiastic, probing strokes.

Stephen felt nauseous watching this drooling exploration. ‘Sorry,' he said again, annoyed with himself for saying it. Behind his back he splayed the fingers of the hand that had touched Balzac's wet nose. He imagined the sticky paths made for the allergens running all up and down his hand. He pictured them: microscopic cartoonish creatures pricking at his skin with their sharp claws, waiting to spring into his eyes on their tiny chemical feet if his hand strayed to his face. Stephen knew this was silly, but his nose and eyes begin to itch and water anyway.

‘Have you seen this?' Nerida said, nodding at the telegraph pole where a copy of the lost ferret flyer was sticky-taped. ‘Isn't that revolting! What kind of a person would keep a
ferret!
Good riddance, I say.'

Jill murmured in appalled assent.

‘But I suppose they feel like you would if you lost Balzac,' Stephen said. Jill and Nerida looked at him, then each other. ‘I don't
think
so,' muttered Jill. It was the most direct thing she had ever said to him, but she still didn't look up. She pursed her lips and went back to letting Balzac lick her face, up and down, in long syrupy strokes, while Nerida peered at the ferret picture, shaking her head.

Something about her stance—that hand over her mouth—brought Stephen's mother to mind again.
I don't ask you for much.
Something else she said had set up a tinny alarm, faint but persistent, in the depths of his mind.

‘I have to get to work,' he said to the women. He waved his keys and turned away towards the Plaza.

How anyone could let a dog lick their face, their mouth, was beyond Stephen. They could watch a dog happily licking its balls, or worse, and then
—
he felt sick again as he crossed the street, towards the centre's entrance. But Nerida and Jill were Dog People. They identified it early in any conversation with someone new. We are dog people. Are you a dog person?

Stephen knew he demonstrated some lack of humanity by not being a Dog Person. This seemed unfair. He was not a cat person either. He was not an animal person in the same way he was not a musical person, or an intellectual person. One was born to these things, like the colour of one's eyes, or the length of one's legs. Not to be musical or intellectual was unremarkable and provoked no suspicion. But not to be an animal person somehow meant he wasn't fully human.

When Stephen told people he worked at the zoo their faces would light up. ‘Oh, I love animals! How wonderful!' they gushed. How lucky he was, how privileged. They held him in high regard, and waited for tales of giraffe-teeth cleaning or lion-cub nursing. When he told them he worked only in the fast-food kiosk, their faces fell. But then they recovered. Still, to be surrounded by all those beautiful creatures. He usually agreed at this point, to finish the conversation. He did not say he found the zoo depressing. It was not the cages so much as the people—their need to possess, their disappointment, the way they wanted the animals to notice them.

He supposed being an animal person meant you liked to caress animals, be licked by them. That you did not fear them, nor they you. They gave you
unconditional love
. What was this love? Was it like love between people? He felt this to be impossible, but animal people did not agree. Some claimed their dog's or cat's love was greater than human feeling. After Stephen's father died and he returned to the data entry place where he worked back then, a receptionist made sympathetic noises about his loss. ‘I know just how you feel,' she said: her dog had died three months before. Stephen had tried to be offended, but found it hard to muster the energy. He could not understand it, but he believed her when she said his grief and hers were parallel. For she was an animal person. She believed her dog chose to love her, could recognise her as special, in the same way a father could love a son.

But Stephen was unnerved by them. He feared the hair of animals, its quivery ability to float towards him and stick to his skin. And then it would begin, as it was beginning now: the watering eyes, the congested nose, the desperate desire to wash himself down. The furious itching in the eyes, then the sides of his nose, forcing him to scratch and rake at his face till it was red. He would have to lean into a bathroom sink and rinse his eyes, but no matter how much he did this, the fierceness of the itching would not abate until he was far away from the creature, and had changed his clothes. Cats were the worst, but dogs too, horses, rabbits, anything with hair or fur. Worst of all was the way they insinuated themselves upon him. It was true, the little jokes people made about cats going to people who didn't like them. But it was not a joke. Though it would only make things worse, he screwed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets, twisting and gouging at the unbearable itch.

He made himself stop then, and tried to ignore the itch—don't
scratch
—along with the low humming anxiety about his mother, and the much more sombre, deeper chord, about Fiona.