Animal People (6 page)

He stood in the delicious cool of the darkened food court and breathed, eyes still stinging. Most of the shops had not yet opened; there was an unaccustomed peace in the gloom. The girls would be all right, he had already decided. Children were resilient. Adults did not like to accept this, but Stephen knew it to be true, as he made his way to the centre's toilets. Children understood more intelligently than adults that all things passed. They would bounce back. They would forget him in a couple of weeks.

Would Fiona ever let him see them again?

He stood in the dank toilet air, lathering his hands and forearms with soap, rinsing away Balzac's sticky hair-dust, the heat and the sweat. It was only eight o'clock and he was half a block from his own house, but already the dog, the city, had layered him with grime and pathogens and sweat. He bent low over the basin and stared at the porcelain, left the tap running and splashed cold water again and again onto his face. He blinked and squinted the water into his wide open eyes, sluicing it all around his eyeballs, filling the lids and sockets. Then he screwed them tightly shut, splashed his face again and again, and stood grimacing, the water running down to soak the neck of his t-shirt. He ran his cool, wet hands back and forth over his head and face and neck. He breathed out, stood up straight and looked into the mirror. His eyes were rimmed red, as if he'd been crying. But he felt better. He rubbed at his nose one last time, and pushed out of the toilet door into the great cavern of the shopping centre.

In Kmart he stared at the shelves of My Little Ponies. Ella and Larry were infatuated with this junk. They had My Little Pony toys—hard plastic ones, soft fluffy ones—and books and DVDs and lunch boxes and drink bottles, but still they begged and whined for more every time one of the nauseating My Little Pony ads came on the television. But which to get?

Standing here in the industrial draught of the Kmart air-conditioning he learned there were many different ponies, called Starsong and Sweetie Belle and Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie. They had wide, hoofless feet, tiny little bodies and wide flat heads with enormous, freakishly lashed eyes. But the essential part of the My Little Pony was the hair. Every pony's luxuriant, roiling, pink and purple nylon mane was longer than the pony's height, and each had a pink and purple nylon tail, equally long, to match. Each Pony came with a set of hair accessories: hairbrushes, combs, ribbons, hairclips, extensions and tiaras. The lushly curled hairstyles of the ponies reminded Stephen of the slightly dangerous bombshells who lolled over velvet chaise longues in the midday movies of his childhood—Zsa Zsa Gabor, Mrs Robinson. Stephen had tried to follow the logic of the ponies' peculiarly female world. They stood on their hind legs and carried handbags. They lived in Ponyville, in mansions made of ‘candy'. There were also smaller, baby Little Ponies that wore
diapers
and sucked on
pacifiers
. They all visited fun parks, rode Ferris wheels. When Ella explained that whenever the ponies visited the sea they magically became beautiful mermaids, Stephen gave up.

He reached up and grasped hold of a My Little Pony Cheeri-Lee Ponyville Supermarket Store Playset.

At the Mexican sandwich shop the tanned, muscle-bound young Vietnamese man—his tag said his name was Irving—twitched his hips as he frothed milk for coffee, head to toe in snug black fabric like a dancer, shimmying along to the music grinding out. ‘
Woohooo!
' he shouted now, wiggling his bum in time to a Michael Jackson drumbeat.

Two Chinese women who ran the cut-price linen outlet nearby were putting out displays of towels and pillows; the optometrist opening his glass door chatted with his neighbour at the Mr Minit stand. A Muslim woman in a pastel blue headscarf and leopard-print gown pushed a supermarket trolley with a garden rake sticking out of it. Across the food court, beyond Sushi Magic and the Gourmet Pizza Haven (
Friday special: Madras curry pizza
), Stephen saw the Plaza security guard watching her. The guard made his rounds of the shopping centre on one of those strange, two-wheeled vehicles with the low platform and a long vertical pole with handlebars. It made him look as if he were standing at a lectern, ready to deliver a speech. Stephen could walk the length of the whole centre in five minutes, but the security guard zoomed between duties—whatever they were—standing on his ridiculous vehicle with its giant wheels, spine rod-straight, staring unflinchingly ahead. The guard began to follow the Muslim lady at a distance on his little machine. Did the guard have duties in case of a terrorist attack, Stephen wondered? The only memorable attack—last year's ram raid—took place in the middle of the night. The next morning a giant red Pajero sat in the middle of the food court, broken glass everywhere. Stephen delighted in the brashness of it, the automatic teller machines on their sides, tyre marks on the lino. The guard had patrolled the perimeter of the police-taped food court on his Segway all day long. Now he followed the Muslim lady and her rake until she reached the exit, then swivelled on his machine, looking about for another disturbance.

Sticky-taped to the drinks cabinet behind Irving was a photocopied flyer advertising a circus.
African lions Monkeys Llamas, camels, geese liberty horses and performing bears
. There were also trapeze artists, acrobats and clowns.
Tickets here
.

Stephen's family had once driven all the way to Sydney to see the famous Moscow Circus. He and Cathy and Mandy boasted to their school friends for what felt like months in advance; to Stephen it seemed the whole town of Rundle thrilled at the idea. The Connolly children would be taken out of school for two days, be driven the nine hours to the city to see this miraculous show, would stay
in a hotel
, and be driven home again the next day.

He remembered only a few fragments of the actual circus: some swollen bears lumbering about, the sweet smell of fried food, the unfamiliar warmth of the air. He recalled spotlights and a feeling of risk, fearing the matted-overcoat bears even though they were far below in the dusty ring, waddling about on their hind legs in silly ruffs and hats, skipping rope and dancing waltzes with clowns in dinner suits.

But he remembered the occasion of it, the specialness of being taken. His parents' awe at their own profligacy; the inordinate, reckless pleasure they could not afford.

Forget the stupid Little Pony. He would take Ella to the circus. It would be her birthday gift; his last gift. He would take them both, sit with them on a hard wooden bench in a circus tent in the middle of a suburban sports oval, their soft weights pressing on either side of him, the smell of popcorn in the air, the dusty floodlit spectacle of lions, llamas, camels and geese before them. The girls would remember it—remember
him
—when they were grown. Fiona would have to let them come. Surely.

Irving pressed down the plastic lid on Stephen's coffee, and called over the music, ‘Still workin' same place, mate?' as he held out his hand for money, still boogying. The circus tickets now lay on the counter.

‘Huh?' said Stephen. They had never discussed Stephen's job, but Irving jerked his head towards the cafe across the food court, his collegiate tone indicating he mistook Stephen for a fellow Plaza worker.

‘La Villagio, isn't it?' said Irving.

Stephen was confused. ‘No,' he said, sliding the tickets into his wallet and reaching for the coffee. He didn't like friendly chat with shopkeepers. ‘I work at the zoo.'

‘Oh, sorry,' Irving chirped. ‘Thought you were a chef.'

Stephen realised Irving was looking at his trousers. This had happened before.

‘Ah. They're not chef's pants. They're just pants, with checks,' he said. ‘I got them at Aldi.'

Irving looked doubtful for a second, but he said, ‘All right,' and beamed past Stephen at the next customer.

Near the exit a gaggle of old people sat in food court chairs waiting, vigilant, for the Aldi doors to open. Stephen liked the lucky-dip nature of the German supermarket's layout. One day you might find a basket of children's lifejackets, and the next day, in its place would be a high stack of office binding machines, or men's sequinned waistcoats. The pants had appealed to Stephen—clean black and white checks, with a wide band of elastic at the waist. They were eleven dollars; he bought two pairs. They were not chef's pants.

Stephen realised now that back in the street Jill had also given his pants a suspicious once-over. But they were just pants. He tugged his t-shirt further down below his waistline and sucked at the teat on the coffee lid.

His path was suddenly blocked by a young woman with ginger dreadlocks, wearing green army pants and boots and holding a clipboard. ‘Do you care about animals, sir?' she asked sweetly. He half-nodded at the floor, trying to scoot past her. But unlike the Save the Children people who'd call ‘Thank you have a nice day' to your back when you ignored them, this woman was not to be deterred. She sidestepped; he had to stop walking or plough into her.

‘We're trying to stop the exploitation and degradation of animals in our society.' Friendly, challenging. ‘And we need your help.'

‘Ah, right,' he said. ‘Trouble is, I'm late for work.' A man scurried by, visibly gleeful at his own escape.

‘Oh, I
totally
know, and I won't hold you up for more than a second.' She gave him a wide, sensuous smile. Her name was Savannah. She shook his hand as if they were meeting at a party. Stephen sighed, and told her his name.

‘Do you care about animals, Stephen?' Savannah asked again in an interested way, as if she were asking did he eat almonds, or what was his favourite movie; as if it were possible for Stephen to answer no, he did not, and be on his way.

She smiled up at him in calm contemplation. Her dull reddish hair poked in matted strands from her head. An ugly brown rock hung from a fine silver circle around her neck, and below the rock Stephen noticed the pleasant, natural press of her breasts against her black singlet top. He quickly looked back to her face. Her nose was pierced with a green stone, and she wore big silver loops in her ears. She was freckled and small, but strong. Something in her stance—her optimism, her apparent belief in him, held him there. Even as he began rummaging in his mind for an excuse for not giving her money, he found he was glad of Savannah and her youth, that the world had people like her in it.

Just then she began flipping the laminated pages of a terrible book in her hands. Stephen's goodwill evaporated. He did not want to see them, the foggy images of trapped and tortured beasts. He had never actually looked at such photographs, though he was always grimly aware of their presence on a sandwich board at a market or stuck to the wall in a health food shop. At those times it was easy to avert his eyes, grateful that the quality of the photographs was always so poor (he supposed they were taken on mobile phones by reckless vigilante saboteurs at night) that even if you came across one without expecting it, it was easy to avoid the detail. His general impression now of the photographs at the periphery of his vision, as Savannah turned her stiff pages, was the same: murky, pink and black, gloomy shapes, blurred close-ups of mouths and ears and patches of red, all contrasting with the steely grey lines of instruments or bars.

And now Savannah's throaty voice took on the urgent, moral tone he knew would come. His scalp prickled. He was being manipulated, yet at the same time he knew that what was done to these animals was the fault of him and others like him: cruel meat-eaters, gluttons too greedy for their own pleasure to spare a second's pity for the enslaved providers of their food, their medicines. No matter the cause—Save the Children, the Wilderness Society, Amnesty International—Stephen accepted that blame for the world's ills could justifiably be laid at his feet. The question here, now, with Savannah, was how to show compassion, how to show her he was different from everybody else, and still hang on to his cash.

He stared absently at the curve where Savannah's smooth neck met her shoulder as she went on talking. He began to dislike her now. Wealthy family, he decided. Stockbrokers or lawyers for parents. The only rebel lesbian in her year at one of the posh girls' schools, but still living with her parents in the lush suburbs, one of those mansions with electric gates and a Merc in the garage, which she would scorn and lecture her parents about except when she needed a lift to a festival of films about Uighurs or arms dealers in Afghanistan.

Behind her the butchers shunted trays of pink meat into display cabinets, leaning inside the glass to yank the long fringes of green plastic grass into place between the trays. There were tubs of sticky-looking indistinguishable marinated meats in soy dark or lurid orange, and rafts of pale, mealy-looking sausages. Stephen could smell it: the dank, rude odour of raw flesh. Sometimes he wondered, about meat: what if this were human flesh? Would his own thigh meat look and taste like this?