Animal People (5 page)

At the Plaza entrance the small, tidy woman who sold the
Big Issue
magazine had already set up next to her camping chair. She wore her red vest and her baseball cap, her long, thick grey ponytail behind. And the man in the wheelchair was there again.

Stephen felt sorry for the
Big Issue
woman. She was about fifty, small and wiry, with a broad, husky voice that to Stephen evoked a life of hard knocks. She had gaps in her teeth, mostly remembered to keep her mouth shut when she smiled. She stood outside the Plaza every second day or so for hours. Stephen usually bought the magazine, but not always. A stack of unread
Big Issue
s lay on the floor by his couch.

He sometimes wondered where the woman lived, whether she was really homeless. He couldn't imagine her living on the street—she looked healthy and well-kept, purposeful. Perhaps she was saving up to buy a house. He pondered now, nearing her, whether this was allowed. If you were very successful, at what point did the
Big Issue
people tell you that you weren't allowed to keep being a vendor? Once or twice he had pictured the woman in some grotty refuge in the inner city. He imagined she kept her area of a broken-windowed dormitory scrupulously clean, her bed always made, but he worried about her living in such a place, with the junkies and the violence and the filth. He worried about her being robbed, her
Big Issue
money taken from under her mattress while she slept. But this anxiety only visited him if he had bought a magazine, when he felt some responsibility for her well-being, and it only lasted for a moment. Mostly it was easy not to think of her at all. He had seen her occasionally in civvies buying cigarettes or groceries and looking, without her red vest and cap, like any other shopper. He felt an odd pride for her then. He once said this to Fiona, but she gave him a strange half-smile and said the woman
was
just like any other shopper.

He passed by them now, the woman and the wheelchair man. The wheelchair man was about thirty, and was often at the Plaza, whizzing along the wide aisles. Stephen had developed a deep dislike of him over the months, with his little crossed feet and his sparse, mousy beard and his thin grey jumpers. The man had a proprietorial air about the
Big Issue
woman. He always bought a magazine, and then she would have to stand with her awkward smile and listen while he talked at her, and they both knew that this, not the magazine, was what he had paid for. Often the man was still there, berating her, when Stephen came out of the Plaza an hour later; the woman would still be smiling, nodding wearily.

From the fluorescent interior of Jungle Jim's up ahead came the familiar funky stink of mouse shit and dog biscuits. Stephen had bought a goldfish there once. To him a goldfish seemed the ideal domestic creature. You could sit by and watch its graceful movements through the water. Just the fact of a fish pond, Stephen thought, lent a special Oriental peacefulness to the place. It was a golden thread linking him in his Norton backyard, despite the leaf blowers and the aircraft noise and the abandoned shopping trolleys, to the world's ancient wisdoms. A goldfish slid through the dark water, dignified, detached and silent, heedless of him.

Also, it was hairless.

But the goldfish had died. He learned later you were first supposed to do things to the water, but he hadn't known this, and over twenty-four hours the fish swam slower and slower in the water of the big cracked garden pot, and then developed a whitish desiccated coating, and finally floated horribly on its side. He had to scoop it out and bury it beside the old staggery lavender bush.

It came to Stephen suddenly that all his mother's friends were dying.

First his father, and now their friends, one by one. Every few months his mother had to stand in the Rundle graveyard and watch a friend lowered into the ground. He had never talked to her about this, and she had never mentioned it except in passing. But each time he went to Rundle he saw the growing pile of homemade funeral service booklets on the table by the phone.

The pet shop woman was sorting through the lumpy display of dog-chewing things as he glanced in through the door. A flash of revulsion went through Stephen at the sight of those strange bone-like objects, their seeped-on bandage colour. In the glass compartments of the window were three puppies on the upper level, and one lone guinea pig on the lower floor. The sign on the dogs' level—no matter what breed was in there—said
‘Pomeranian Maltese X'
and ‘
Shi-tzu'
(Stephen remembered his boss Russell's worn joke about how the zoo had replaced the lions and elephants with one small dog: ‘It's a shit zoo!') but the puppies all looked the same to Stephen. They leapt and yapped in their knee-high bed of shredded paper. A sign said
DO NOT TAP ON THE GLASS
and had some small print about RSPCA regulations against tapping on pet shop windows. Soon the sun would strike the glass directly and stay there all day until sinking below the Plaza roof peak in the afternoon. The puppies would stop leaping and lie panting in their white forest of shredded documents.

The guinea pig snuffled, a hairy caramel all-sort, forgotten in the far corner of the window.

Stephen's eyes still itched; he ran his hands down his jeans again to stop himself rubbing at them. He peered into the shop. He supposed a mouse was out of the question for a birthday present. Fiona would kill him.

He shut his mind, once again, on the many things Fiona might be tempted to say to him today.

Anyway, Ella and Larry already had a guinea pig and a rabbit. The first time he went to their house Stephen sat on the back deck, looking down at the view, feeling the great luxury of Fiona's ex-husband's wealth lapping over him with the breeze and the sound of the water. Then Larry, the younger daughter, had appeared beside his chair, clutching something long and furred at her chest.

‘Oh!' he'd said, making a child-greeting smile. ‘Hello!'

His voice was awkward; he had not been ready for this. And then he saw that the column of fur was a live rabbit. Larry held the creature under its forelegs, elbows at her sides, her fingers meeting as she clasped it, as if it were a posy of flowers.

Stephen yelped. Larry and the rabbit both stared at him in silence. He watched the rabbit's glazed gaze from its brown eyes, its long body dangling down the little girl's front. It didn't struggle or shiver, merely hung there, resigned, its soft, pouchy skin bunching up around its neck. Was Stephen supposed to do something? He leaned back, away from its fur. Larry just stared, her jaw set, blinking now and then in the sun. He heard himself babble. ‘What a lovely rabbit! Is it yours?'

She said nothing, but moved her jaw to one side, then nodded. She shifted a little, hitching the rabbit up as though it were a piece of clothing.

‘What's its name?' Stephen was worried now, not about his allergy but about the rabbit. Perhaps it was going into some sort of catatonic trauma, its blood supply halted. It hung, like a pelt.

Larry stared at him with her slightly bulging, wide blue eyes, and looked as if she might cry. She said, in a low, gravelly voice: ‘Fluffy.'

‘Hello, Fluffy!' Stephen said, hearing his woodenness. ‘Do you think he might like to go back to his cage now?' He looked around for Fiona, but she was nowhere to be seen.

Larry shook her head. ‘Oh,' said Stephen. ‘It's a girl,' croaked Larry.

‘Ah,' Stephen said. He swallowed. The rabbit swallowed too. Then Larry whirled and ran off down the side of the house, the rabbit's body stretching and bouncing softly as she ran, the breeze billowing her little purple dress.

Stephen had slumped in his chair, a simmer of unease beginning in him. What was he doing there anyway? Fiona was his ex-brother-in-law's sister; could there be a more tangled and foolish thing to consider, than what he was considering?

There had been something erotic about it from the start, all those years ago when they danced together at Mandy and Chris's wedding, and snuck out to share a line of speed Fiona had brought. At the end of the evening they took another bottle of wine from the ice crate and drank it on the back steps of Stephen's parents' house, talking and laughing and smoking furiously till dawn. Nothing had happened between them, but whenever the memory returned his gut had fizzed with recalled anticipation. After the wedding, on the three or four times they met over the years there had been a fond, enthusiastic embrace, a lively clinking of glasses.

But well over a decade then passed without them seeing each other, and in that time Mandy and Chris divorced, Chris had remarried. Fiona had long finished uni, become a physiotherapist at one of the big teaching hospitals, married and then unmarried a barrister. And had two kids.

They had met again by accident at the zoo kiosk counter, the little girls behind her at one of the iron tables, stuffing chips into themselves. The promising warmth in Fiona's eyes across the counter, the instant flirtatious revival of the possibility that had always been there, made him catch his breath. He'd watched her stride back to her bag on the table for a pen, observed her as she bent over the counter to write down his phone number. He found he wanted to bury his fingers in the thick sandy scruff of her short, surfie-boy's hair. He wanted to touch the fine sheen of sweat on her brow. As she bent to write and the neckline of her blue cotton sundress fell open, he saw the soft cleft between her breasts, and he wanted to fit his thumb to that space, just there.

When she moved back to the table and her chattering girls, gathering up the strewn detritus of their lunch, his boss Russell saw him watching.

‘Who's she?' Russell said too loudly.

‘Just someone I used to know,' Stephen murmured, turning away to wipe the counter.

‘Bit mumsy, isn't she?' said Russell, considering her as she began to push Larry's stroller up the sloping path, calling to Ella over her shoulder.

Russell, like most men, would never notice what Stephen found so arousing in Fiona. She was too circumspect, too guardedly dressed, for one thing—Russell liked unambiguous short skirts and bouncy cleavages. But in seeing her again Stephen was undone, just as in their youth, by her direct, mischievous gaze; the sceptical way she listened to him talk, biting her lip a little to keep from smiling. She had a held-back quality, a hiddenness, that to Stephen—along with her slender, strong brown arms, the quick, graceful movement of her smooth calves as she walked—was sexy as hell. An old, old lust sprang up in him.

On his way out of the zoo that day Stephen paused to watch one of the keepers feeding a hummingbird from his cupped hand. The little bird whirred and hovered, darting in and out to the keeper's motionless upturned palm. A drab little bird with a black throat, until it moved again and the light struck differently, and for the briefest instant its throat flashed iridescent red, then dulled again. The watchers gasped, waiting for that miniature glory to reveal itself once more, but the colour vanished, the bird cocked its head and moved away. Fiona was like this, Stephen thought then. The ruby-throated hummingbird. If you waited, if you carefully watched, she might show you a glimpse of this gorgeousness, this vividness. And you wanted nothing more than to see it again.

But two
kids
, he'd thought, sitting on her deck that afternoon. Let alone the awkwardness of their own siblings' marital history. Suddenly there by his side Larry reappeared. This time she gripped a scrabbling guinea pig to her chest. ‘Oh,' Stephen said weakly. Where the hell was Fiona?

The guinea pig wriggled and struggled in Larry's little hands, which formed a vice-like band around its body. She gave Stephen the same slightly hostile stare. ‘And what's this one's name?' Stephen said, praying for the guinea pig to calm down, or else escape.

‘Smooth.'

‘And it's a—'

‘Boy!' She looked scornfully at Stephen. He nodded; he could feel sweat in his armpits. The guinea pig had stopped struggling now. Perhaps she had killed it. But then it suddenly began again, and Larry bent her head, whispering ‘
Nuh
-uh,' into her chest. Her tone was not cruel, rather that of a firm, patient nurse, but still she squashed the animal's little body against herself, to calm or disable it.

The glass door to the house slid open; relief flooded through Stephen at the sound. But when he turned towards it, it was not Fiona striding towards him but Ella, the older girl, who had earlier stood behind her mother when she greeted him at the front door. Ella had changed her clothes from the t-shirt and shorts and now wore a pink floral dress with a bow around the middle. Her blonde hair floated around her head in a knotted staticky halo, as if she had begun to brush it but then lost heart. She did not look at him or speak as she flew past him, seemingly on her way to something important, but paused briefly to fling a plastic heart-shaped bowl on the table. It was filled with compost, fruit and vegetable scraps; some sludgy lumps of watermelon, a bent and bruised parsley stem, shreds of apple skin and banana and other unidentifiable flesh.

‘Ah,' Stephen called brightly to Ella's disappearing back, ‘old Smooth will love that.' But she was gone, and only Larry stood at the edge of the deck, the guinea pig put away now, her hands by her sides. Then Ella reappeared, joining her sister. They stood together, staring at Stephen in curious revulsion.

And finally, thank Christ, Fiona emerged from the house with a jug of water and glasses.

Ella, emboldened, cried out in contempt: ‘It's not for
Smooth,'
and fled. Larry cast one last dark glance his way before following her sister, flouncing away down the side of the house.

Fiona was amused, sitting down beside him and laying her cool hand on the back of his neck. They both looked at the bowl of sludge. ‘It's fruit salad,' she said. ‘She made it for you.'