Animal People (8 page)

But Fiona's concentration was absolute. Her effort, as she turned her body into the inverted V, her face growing red as she struggled to hold the pose for yet another minute, moved him. Her tracksuit pants would slip down her hips and her t-shirt would ruck up. The tremor in her legs and elbows, her belly rising and falling, her eyes closed, lips softly closing and opening for breathing exactly as Dawnelle instructed; all this sent a shard of love through Stephen every time.

Fiona carried a tiny, flimsy little mint-green mat to classes, but to Stephen's eye it was useless; hardly a thing at all, thin as a sheet. So he went to Foam City to get her the best yoga mat he could find, choosing a two-inch thick sheet of black industrial rubber.
Bigger
, he said when the salesman indicated where he would cut. He wrestled the coiled thing into the back of his ute, and then through the front door of Fiona's house one afternoon, getting it almost to the living room before it unfurled with a mighty
whump
, filling the width and half the length of the hallway.

‘It's
huge
,' Fiona crowed, clutching his arm. ‘It's hilarious!' She lay down on it in the hallway, and the girls came running to bounce up and down along its length before collapsing, throwing themselves over her. She groaned and shrieked, and they all lay there, beaming up at him. His girls. Later Stephen heard Fiona telling someone he had given her the best yoga mat
ever
. ‘It's like doing yoga in a jumping castle!' she cried into the phone. He felt a glow of pride inside himself for days.

His car rolled on, stopped, rolled. The traffic wave carried him forward, stopped again.

So what had happened? That's what she would ask him. How had things changed so much, what was the difference between then—only two months ago—and now? He felt his jaw clench, the nausea lapping. He couldn't say. It just was.

He sighed. Please, oh please let this day be ended.

The doctor. That's what the skimming fear was, to do with his mother.
The doctor said . . . especially now
. Stephen gripped the wheel. She never mentioned doctors to Stephen, though Cathy was always on about some ailment that supposedly plagued their mother, the various pills she took. But Cathy worked in a pharmacy, she was obsessed with drugs. Still, it pressed at him. Margaret knew Stephen hated any mention of doctors, or hospitals. Especially since their father—but he would not be dragged back to that, that room, that bed, not today. He trawled back through his mother's words. ‘Especially now.' Was she trying to hint at something too awful for direct speech? Is that why she had gotten so wound up about the bloody party? He tried to think. She said she had
sent him a link
about it. Was it possible there had been some news Stephen had simply missed? Surely Cathy would have berated him about it. But it was possible. For did he not spend his life trying to make sure of it, trying to escape from the knowledge of awful things?

Stephen rested his face in his hands for a moment. He breathed, then lifted his head, returned his hands to the wheel. Of course it was stupid. His mother was perfectly fine. She was old. One day she would die, but not yet. He made himself stare back into the Foam City window. C
OUCH CUSHIONS
! C
UT TO ORDER
! Why did it feel that he had never, till this moment, considered the fact that his mother would die? Malevolent jellyfish blobs of bitter green polystyrene hung in the Foam City window. His skin chilled under the air-conditioning's blast.

Fiona would be home from the beach now. Thinking of her swimming calmed him. Sometimes she looked down at her body with despair, like the time after the smiling Thai waiter at their regular Tuesday night restaurant had noticed the little pot of her belly and asked her, delighted, if she was pregnant. She blushed a fierce red as she laughed it off, saying gaily, ‘No, just fat,' waving away the waiter's embarrassed, bowing apologies. Stephen saw her swallowing tears, and her smile was tight until they left the restaurant. But in water, Fiona's body came sensuously alive; she swam in a strong, easy stroke, lounging in the water, utterly at ease. Each morning the girls went next door for half an hour while Fiona took the five-minute drive to the beach in her bathers, strode down to the sand and kicked off her thongs. She dropped the car key on its pink tag on to the towel, pulled a yellow rubber swimming cap down over her ears as she marched to the water. She high-stepped purposefully through the shallows, and as soon as the water reached her knees she launched herself and dived.

The first time Stephen watched her do this, he was seized with marvelling lust. That first time, when Fiona had called to him and he swam out to her, the light, shameful fear rose in him as it always did when his feet could not touch the bottom. He had grasped her slippery body and she held him too, mistaking his grip on her for one of desire, and she laughed when he joked about his fear of water, about his having been an inland child—the ghastly lessons at the Rundle pool, and the swimming carnival near-drownings. She thought he was exaggerating; he could never speak to her of the real fear that gripped him when a wave rose before him, when all he could see before it gripped and hurled him was the yellow beacon of her cap, and he fought the panic in himself while he gasped and pedalled water, floundering back to shore. Where he would thrust the air back out of his lungs and force his heartbeat slow again, and pretend he had not been terrified.

Now they took the girls to the beach together, and Fiona would swim out to the perilous dark water, slipping over and under the waves in her sleek dips and dives while Stephen splashed in the foaming shallows with the kids, crouching and shouting with them as the waves broke about his hips. Lifting the girls high—first one, then the other, both Larry and Ella kicking and shrieking with thrill, shouting
throw me, throw me!
He would throw them, chilled with fear himself every time as he watched them fall and plunge, and he would be on the verge of diving to find them when they would burst up, water streaming from their wide grinning mouths and the starfish lashes of their open blue eyes.

It was after one of these swims when they sat on the sand, the girls squatting on their heels digging holes nearby, that Fiona had suggested Stephen move into her place.

He squinted at the water while his breath caught, and then made a joke about being terrible at housework. He felt her waiting for him to meet her gaze, while he watched the girls. He stared and stared at them, but could not look at her. Then she said, quite calmly, ‘It's okay, Stephen. You don't have to.' And she'd got up and walked back to the water and flew beneath a wave, and was gone. Then Larry had leapt up and run, and Ella followed her across the white crush of the ocean's edge. They were like their mother: they hurled themselves to the waves, while Stephen sat on the sand, helpless with apprehension and envy. Fiona had not mentioned it again.

The cars crawled towards the traffic lights at Hunter Street. Last week at these lights he had seen a man leap from his car and charge up to the driver's window of the vehicle in front of him, screaming
you fucking moron,
and then, lightning-fast, throw a punch through the open window. The car had suddenly screeched off against the lights, on the wrong side of the road—Stephen admired the driver's quick thinking—and left the punching man standing alone in the street. He had had to walk back across the empty space to his car with its door hanging open, watched by all the waiting traffic, and get in, close the door, and edge the vehicle forward and wait with the rest of them.

The lights changed, finally, and Stephen accelerated across the intersection; moving, at last, into the day. But then a noise, his foot plunged to the brake. Something had happened, was happening. Something flapped above his car; a huge, ungainly bird filled the windscreen. It sailed above his bonnet, and he saw then that the thing was a woman. Her eyes lightly closed, head tilted skywards, mouth agape. Cars spun past in the four lanes of Cambridge Road, swerving around his, sounding horns. Stephen understood he had hit her. The body—the jeans, zippered grey tracksuit top, the tiny head with its dull brown fur—plummeted to the bitumen before his car. The clothes and body bounced—how
bounce?
—and there was the face again, eyes wide, mouth yawning in laughter or a scream. Stephen sat in his seat, foot jammed hard on the brake, hands gripping the steering wheel, the car skew-whiff on the axis of its lane, trying to fathom what the fuck had happened to him now.

A dreadful wail rose up; the woman was somehow scuttling to the side of the road, crouched low, dragging herself through gaps in the lurching traffic. Stephen skipped through the cars, found himself kneeling beside her on the side of the road, his car abandoned behind him, door open, in the centre lane. Cars slowed but kept moving, horns sounding, accelerating away.

He shouted: ‘Are you alright?'

She could not possibly be alright. She lay, her little shorn head in the gutter, her long thin body sideways, skinny black-jeaned legs weirdly angled. She moaned, her long body churning in the gutter. He looked for blood, registered relief at the sound of her crying.

Stephen stared at her stretched open mouth, one bony hand clutching at her shoulder. ‘Me
aarm
, mey
arm
,
'
she wailed, and Stephen heard his own panicked shouting, ‘Just wait,' as if she could go anywhere, and he scampered across the lanes back through the horns and the cars, shut the door, put his feet on the pedals.

What he had just seen—the body falling like a doomed, plummeting kite—was a watermark over everything he saw now, and panic and blood rose in him. He forced it away with his own voice, aloud in the car:
keep calm don't fucking panic.
He edged the car to the kerb, all the time hearing another voice:
just go! just go!

She was still in the gutter, her head now lolling horribly onto the footpath. Her eyes squinted shut, her mouth a wide grimace of pain. She had stopped wailing, and instead, much worse, grizzled like an animal, a long, dirt-coloured creature in black jeans and a thin grey singlet and the zippered tracksuit top, one grasshopper leg tucked beneath and the other bent above her. She panted, her cheek pushed into the kerb, her face the same colour as the concrete. Her right hand still clutched her left shoulder. She whimpered, ‘Mefuckingarm, Jesus Christ!' Stephen could only repeat it,
Jesus Christ,
as he squatted, and then shouted, ‘I'm going to lift you.'

He scooped her up and she yairled a high, animal shriek of pain—somehow his brain recalled a possum fight outside his window one midnight—and kept shrieking as he lowered her into the passenger seat, yanking his backpack into place to fashion a support for her head. He pushed her legs in and slammed the door. The voice in his head still shouted
Go. Go. Leave her.
And he understood finally that this voice came not from him but a taxi-driver across the road, pulled up by the kerb. Stephen stared in dumb confusion as he started the ignition; he saw the taxi-driver's face, red with frustration. The man shouted: ‘It's just a fucking junkie! Her own fault! Just go!'

Stephen stared, uncomprehending. The taxi-driver shook his head, exasperated, and then swerved out from the gutter. Gone.

Stephen pulled out into the traffic again. ‘We'll be at the hospital in one minute,' he called over the girl's whimpering, praying this to be true, thinking of the broken bones, the blood that must be swamping through her.

The girl slurred: ‘No.' She was mad with pain, or worse. She closed her eyes again and sucked in breath through clenched teeth. Stephen accelerated, changed lanes. ‘You have to go to hospital. You hit your head on the road.'
I hit your head on the road.
In a block he could turn left towards the hospital. Come on, come on, he whispered to the traffic. It crawled.
Fucking come on.
Her face was grey. Please don't die. He imagined the blood inside her skull, trickling and seeping, curling through the frills and furrows of the brain. He slowed and lurched to a stop as the car in front refused to run the orange light. Jesus,
Jesus
Christ. He leant on the horn.

The girl hissed with the car's lurching. Her eyes opened, then shut tight against pain, and she said, with effort, ‘Me doctor's just down here, jes' take me there.'

‘You have to go to
hospital
,' Stephen said. He jammed the horn again, began rolling down his window to wave at the driver in the next lane.

But the girl convulsed in her seat. She cried out, ‘Just fucken
STOP HERE
.'

Stunned into obedience, Stephen swung the Subaru into a no-stopping zone beside Blockbuster Video, the sudden stop making the girl roar even louder. She was burrowing at the door, trying to open the latch with her broken arm! Stephen leapt out into the bright air and tore once more around the car, looking about him for the doctor's surgery.

He wrenched her door open. For an instant, seeing the girl cornered here in his car, Savannah's animal torture photographs returned to him: the grizzled narrow head, the thin face pocked and pierced and blotched, the panting mouth, eyes closed in pain and fear. He reached in and she let out a low, agonised howl as he dragged her out and stood her upright, grasping her round the waist, trying to support her weight without touching her injured side. Her head was on his shoulder; again he pictured the blood rushing and flooding through her skull. Maybe she would die here, in his arms. He stared into the city and had no idea what to do.

But the girl lifted her broken head and fixed her blurred gaze on an anonymous brown shopfront across the road. She jolted, launching herself out into the traffic. Stephen bellowed and clutched at her, dragging her backwards as a large silver four-wheel-drive thundered past. ‘For fucksake! Stop
doing
that!' he roared, and then he wanted to punch her, and there was a break in the traffic and he ran, dragging her without care across the road.