Animal People (7 page)

Last week, as Fiona's knife worked doggedly through a thick layer of pork rind and fat, he heard her give a small gasp. They both stared for a moment at the hard little nipple looking back at them from the chopping board: tender, clean and pink as Fiona's own. She stared down at it, stricken. ‘I can't cut it off,' she whispered. Stephen said quickly, ‘Let's not look,' and flipped the piece of belly over. After a moment Fiona went on working at the meat, but the strange discomfort remained in the air, and at dinner they exchanged a look before cutting into the soft, sweet meat.

Fiona had told him something else once: that after Larry was born by Caesarean, the doctors had worked away beyond the sheet at her waist to close her up. She lay there with the baby on her breast, tearful and exhausted, while they cauterised something, some part inside her. Fiona's grey eyes widened and her voice dropped to a whisper as she told him: ‘It smelled like a
barbecue
.'

She thought it grotesque, and Stephen felt faint with horror at the idea of her soft, creamy belly carved into with knives—how they had touched her, pushed into that same soft part of her that he cradled with his hand as he curled behind her in bed. The idea of such invasion was dreadful.

It was when he touched the curved, glassy scar—afterwards, that first time in bed—that he saw she had learned to protect herself. She lifted his hand away from the scar, slowly drew up her knees to curl on her side and face him, his hand held between both of hers. She gazed at him, and he understood that life had toughened her. Childbirth had done it, and marriage, divorce.

Her husband had wanted a girl, not a grown-up, she told Stephen. And so he found one, at work. The first time she'd got past it, for the sake of the girls, but after that it was impossible.

‘I can't do that little-girl, wifey shit anymore. I'm an adult now,' she said calmly. And in the jut of her chin, the gentle seriousness in her eyes, Stephen saw how hard won was her strength, and what courage it had taken for her to come to him, how fiercely she wanted his desire. For the first time in his life he found himself wanting to live up to something—to meet her, to take this beautiful risk—and it made the wave of his need for her crest and break again, unashamed and glorious. And as she rose above him in the dark he glimpsed it again, the ruby-throated bird. He lay awake beside her all night, falling in love.

But bodies, he thought now, watching the butchers hefting flesh, didn't matter. Fiona's story about the cooking smell had not unnerved him in that way: he was unfazed by the knowledge that human beings were made of meat. In fact—he had never voiced this, but—more and more he thought that surely any immorality in eating animals would vanish if it were permissible to eat people too.

Perhaps he should share his theory now, with Savannah. She lifted her avid, righteous gaze to him. He decided not.

‘Ask yourself a simple question, Stephen. Does your palate or pleasure or fashion sense justify the suffering or death of another creature?'

She waited. He was forced now to look down at the picture she held open. In some gloomy darkness, a huge sow lay on its side on a concrete floor behind thick stainless steel bars. The pig's belly faced the camera, pressed up against the bars so its legs and teats stuck through the rails. In the foreground of the picture four little piglets, separated from their mother by the bars, suckled at the sow's teats through the gaps. The animal's eyes were open; it stared into the middle distance. Lying helpless on the cold floor, its expression was unmistakable: the pig was in sheer and utter misery.

‘That's . . . terrible,' Stephen murmured, looking away.

The poor creature, his mother would say (why could he not shake off the burden of her, this of all mornings?). She said it often, about everyone; a neighbour with the flu or a murdered policeman on the television news, it didn't matter.
Poor creature
was for all suffering, everywhere.

Savannah's eyes shone. ‘
Yes,'
she said, triumphant. ‘It is.'

She sighed then, as if this simple admission was all she wanted from Stephen, all she wanted from anybody. They stood there together. Her sudden stillness made Stephen wonder what other people said when she made them look at the picture. That the image was doctored, perhaps, or this one was an aberration, or that the animal didn't mind.

There was no way out now. He slid the credit card from his wallet and signed over fifteen bucks a month for the promotion of animal rights.

Savannah bent to fill out the paperwork, glowing, it seemed, with the shock of her success. Stephen thought grandly that there might even be something a bit like love for him in her gratitude. He stole a glance down the curve of her spine to where her army trousers gaped to show the soft, inviting hollow of her bum. But he looked away quickly before she stood up. He was aware now that women knew when you looked at their bums or their boobs. Fiona had set him straight on that one time, laughing at his denials and blushes.

Savannah ripped the form off her pad of tiny-print credit-card forms and thrust them at him. As he folded the page into a small grey wad, regretting the fifteen bucks already, Savannah asked him: ‘Off to a shift then? Where do you work?'

‘The zoo,' he said.

She blinked, looked him up and down.

‘These aren't chef's pants,' he said. ‘I'm not a chef.'

He extended his hand but she drew back from him, shaking her dreadlocks slowly in disbelief. Then, before he even said goodbye, she leapt in front of a woman with a pram. ‘Does your little girl like animals, madam?'

As the doors slid open a great draught of scorched air greeted him—how suffocating, how impossibly
airless
it was—along with the wheelchair man's hoots of repugnant, vulgar laughter.

Stephen was blooming with resentment about Savannah's horrified glare, the money he had given her. He could not save the
Big Issue
woman today; there was only so much he could do. Already the weight of his guilt pressed down upon him like layers of earth. His mother loomed, with her humming secret. Fiona's face flashed once, staring at him in the same disbelief as Savannah's, before he brought a shutter down upon the image. The only way he could reach the end of this day was not to allow such visions. He could not.

If only Stephen were braver, a better man, he would say something to the wheelchair man. But he passed them with his head down, his bag heavy and his jaw set with shame. And then he saw something strange. The
Big Issue
woman was laughing, and she put out a hand to touch the wheelchair man's arm.

Stephen didn't understand it. She wasn't trapped. She and the wheelchair man were having a whale of a time.

CHAPTER 2

Cambridge Road was always a bottleneck in the mornings. He was a little late now. Usually he did not mind the slow start to the morning's drive across the city. You could allow the traffic to carry you in a sort of reverie, crawling in a lulling forward roll, half a car length at a time, motor idling and your mind free to wander. But today he did not welcome the meanderings of his mind. He must stay composed. He peered out at the shops, watching the Norton morning coming alive.

The Cat Protection Society op shop door hung open. Stephen supposed the shop was run by crazy old women, the kind who hoarded cats. Men were cruel to animals with kicks and blows, but it was women who starved them to death. Gathering them by the hundred, allowing their houses to fill with shit and piss, watching the creatures weaken, sicken, day by day.

This was why he had to do what he must today. A single sharp blow was surely preferable to the misery of slow starvation. Fiona would see. He was being kind.

The open door offered a glimpse inside the shop: a gloomy corridor between a rack of heavy wool coats and shelves of ugly handmade pottery. Stephen didn't have to see further to know what else would be in there: shelves of books on microwave cookery, flesh-coloured Stable Tables, with their saggy, discoloured beanbag undersides, for bedridden invalids to rest their dinner plates on. The stippled tubs of ‘foot spas' manufactured in grubby pale-blue plastic, as if the colour might somehow evoke the sea instead of the fungal dust of elderly strangers' pumiced heels.

Stephen saw the homeless man who sometimes crouched in a little nest of dirty blankets across the road from Stephen's house. Tangle-haired, grizzled, he squatted now against the Cat Protection Society's tiled wall, a filthy bag beside him.

Stephen's car rolled forward.

A woman sat smoking on a plastic chair outside the hairdresser, in a lurid pink nylon cape and a cement-coloured helmet. Strands of plastered hair stood out from her head like electrodes as she squinted and sucked at her fag. She was one of Norton's people, the people in tracksuits and logo-covered working clothes: the men with hard, chiselled calf muscles and lurid orange or green occupational health and safety vests, the women in tight black skirts and pastel singlets and thick-heeled, rubber-soled sandals that were somehow sluttish and practical at once. There were two populations in Norton—this world, of fiercely sucking smokers outside shops and pizza-eaters over garbage bins, and then the others—the inner city vintage freelance crowd. These were gaunt men with scruffy hair and fastidiously shabby fashion sense, the kind who carried fat happy babies on their shoulders when they shopped, whose black and grey clothes looked old even when new, who worked from studios at home as architects or freelance lighting designers. The women of this crowd seemed to have given up caring how they looked, except for the fact they all looked the same. Stephen studied them in supermarket queues and listened to their conversations. They did Pilates and had blunt fringes, wore small rectangular glasses and Japanese-looking clothes so severely ugly you knew they were expensive. These were editors or radio producers or consultants who wrote policy on restorative justice. You heard them greeting each other in the mall; they rolled their eyes to cover the embarrassment of being discovered in the food court (they blamed their children); they always kissed each other hello. They called their work
my project
. They were the kind of people who didn't like to be thought wealthy even if they were—this was an inner-city phenomenon, unlike the beachside suburbs or Longley Point where Fiona lived, where being thought wealthy was the aim of the game.

The two populations of Norton were ghosts to one another as they brushed past each other in the streets, at the automatic teller or the supermarket queue, the air between them barely riffling.

He drew alongside Foam City, where he'd bought Fiona's yoga mat.

Fiona
loved
yoga, she would sigh, almost every time she floated in the door after her Wednesday evening class. And she did seem different after these classes—the whirring energy in her was temporarily stilled, she moved more slowly, was less provoked by the bickering of the girls. Except last Wednesday, that was. When she had walked in and hurled her bag down on the couch, swearing. ‘Can you
believe
,' she raged pouring a huge glass of wine, ‘that this woman
laughed
at me!'

The new teacher, it seemed, had urged Fiona to try a headstand.

‘But I was scared of falling,' she said. ‘So I just made this tiny hopeless little hop, instead of getting my legs right up, and then this woman next to me, flexible as hell, you know—spent half the class with her chin on the floor—she bursts out into this little
snigger
at me!' Fiona gulped the wine. ‘But then I looked at her and I thought, well, you might be able to do a headstand but you've got a fat arse.'

Stephen laughed out loud, but Fiona was actually, truly offended. She took a big swig from the glass again and swallowed, wiped her mouth with her hand, and then peered into the pot of gluggy pasta sauce Stephen had made for the girls.

When she turned back she sighed, twisting the glass stem in her hands. ‘That wasn't very yogic of me, was it,' she said glumly. ‘But she was a bitch.'

From the couch both girls turned eagerly at this, calling, ‘You said the B-word!' They adored catching adults swearing.

Stephen had sworn a lot when Fiona had tried to teach him yoga a few times, the two of them cross-legged on the living room floor, following the instructions of an American yoga teacher called Dawnelle on a DVD. He liked the lessons, but only so he could watch Fiona. He liked the careful way she laid out her little yoga things around her—a purple cushion, a wheat-filled eye bag, an ugly grey blanket—and then lay down with her eyes shut, an obedient rod, before the DVD began. She refused to fast-forward any of it, even the boring music at the start. Stephen found the poses impossible; his body wouldn't accommodate even the most basic ones—even simply sitting cross-legged, his knees pointed at the ceiling while Fiona's limbs were fluid, her knees horizontal—and his inability made him feel stupid.