Animal People (11 page)

His mother was not ill, he decided. She was only seventy-four. She was fit as a fiddle, she always said. She had arthritis in her hands, but that was normal. But still, the last time he was in Rundle Stephen had been shocked by the weakness of her grip. She spent the whole weekend handing him bottles to open and her kitchen drawers were full of objects to help perform the simplest tasks—opening jars, picking things up off the floor. She had little claw-grabber things on sticks, and ugly rippled rubber mats in the bathroom. Even, he saw, a horrible white plastic chair in the shower stall of her en suite. There was a tray of white plastic pill bottles and vitamin jars from the chemist on a corner of the kitchen bench, which she covered with a white lace doily. That was the worst of all. Stephen had found it distasteful and made a joke about it, told her the house was starting to look like a frigging nursing home. He sat on the bus now, his cheeks colouring at the memory of her offence, snapping at him that he didn't have to live there and could go back to the city whenever he pleased.

‘I don't ask you for much,' she had said this morning. But it
was
too much. He wished he could properly eradicate her injured voice on the phone. He was so tired, already, of managing his mind, of fending off all the things that must not be allowed to burden him today.

It was a relief to eavesdrop on the arch, affected chatter of the two girls at the front of the bus. Not that he had to try. They spoke loudly, performed their conversation the way all young people on buses did. Not just girls, boys did it too, braying to one another at top volume about themselves, their friends. Exploits with alcohol and authority and money and coded references to sex were detailed with loud guttural laughs and swaggers throughout the city's public transport system. Had Stephen ever been like this? Had his sisters? He didn't think so, but youth was a long time ago. Perhaps he and his friends had preened and flexed and fidgeted, drawing attention to themselves in the way he saw hulking young men doing every day. Perhaps Mandy and Cathy had cursed and laughed and fingered their slender white throats and fondled their own hair in the way the two girls on the bus did now.

One of them—the peachy one, all firm roundness in her shoulders and cheeks and breasts—suddenly put her hand on her friend's arm and gasped.

‘Oh my
God
I forgot to tell you.' She flicked her hair from her eyes in a coy, faux-apologetic way. ‘There's a nudie picture of me on Facebook.'

The other girl, also pretty with long straight hair (did any woman under forty have short or curly hair?) considered her friend's dilemma for a microsecond. Then she shook herself, as if emerging from some quaint but pointless reverie. ‘But that's fine!' she said. The first girl was instantly, stupidly at ease. ‘Oh yeah! I thought it was, and then I didn't know. But cool!'

They went on to discuss how what the peachy one
really
wanted was a little jeans miniskirt.

Stephen thought of the nude photograph, trapping the compromised girl there on the internet forever; some blurred mobile phone image of her breasts or bum or opened thighs. Worse, her face as well, rich with desire. Would she ever again consider this exposure? Would Larry and Ella grow up to be like this: long-limbed and pale, shockingly confident, utterly unprotected? What would Fiona do, if one of the girls got carted to hospital to have her stomach pumped, or she found a pregnancy test in the bathroom rubbish bin?

No. He would not have it. This would not happen to Ella or Larry. They would not grow up to be handled—
photographed
—by men, they would not endanger themselves, cause Fiona heartache and sorrow. But he knew it would happen. And Fiona would be alone with it, all through the anxious small-hours sickening heartbreak of them not coming home. If she wasn't with another man, that was. But Stephen instantly closed the opening of that possibility,
snap
, and dropped it away into the far, far depths of his mind.

No. It would not be a man. It would be Fiona's old friends who would save her. The friends from before her marriage, from college—the other physiotherapists, speech pathologists, social workers, who met in their first years on the public hospital wards before they all grew tired of the shit pay and the hours and the abuse, and drifted off to start their own private practices.

Sometimes these friends still gathered noisily at Fiona's place for drinks and pretend book club, dumping tubs of hummus and a couple of paperbacks on the table, then breaking into affectionate chatter. When Fiona was with them, any guardedness in her disappeared. She was all openness, all ruby iridescence, as she joined their shrieks and cackles, their adoration of each other. How unashamed they were, in their blithe appraisals and comparisons of each other's bodies, the exacting dissection of their emotions. They held each other's hands across couches, lavished compliments on one another's cooking, earrings, ankles, shoes. They exchanged health worker war stories, of fuckwit famous footballers with ankle injuries, or gruesome tales from people they knew who still worked on the wards.

Stephen busied himself with the girls in adjoining rooms and eavesdropped on the women, their conversation gothic and entrancing: ‘The boyfriend yelled out, Anthony's hurt himself! So she ran in—but what he'd
actually
yelled was, Anthony's
hung
himself.'

He glimpsed them through doorways as they regaled each other with ghastly tales of accidents, of failed suicide attempts and their aftermath, speaking with relish as they plunged rice crackers into dips.

‘I saw a guy once, terrible depression for years, shot himself like this'—one of the speech pathologists once said, a finger-gun beneath her chin—‘but he aimed wrong. Completely missed the brain; it all came out here.' She held a hand vertical at her nose, let her fingers fall forward in an arc. ‘His depression completely disappeared and he wanted to live. And I thought, oh darling, nobody's going to want you now.'

She took a cheerful swig of wine; the others nodded lazy grins. None of this was unfamiliar; they all had patching-up stories.

‘And I'm supposed to get him talking again,' she said, ‘but you know, where's the tongue?'

There was the blackest of laughter, and then through the doorway Stephen saw Fiona look up—or he sensed it first—to see where he was, to see if he had heard. Perhaps she made some signal to the others he could not see, to quieten their macabre turn of conversation.

Always he has met her eye steadily, through doorways, across rooms.

When a shocking thing happened to you, people—women, mostly—related your whole life to it; this is what Stephen had learned. They watched for it to spill out, for your suffering to show. They wanted it; they made little spaces for it to happen, were disappointed when it didn't. The reason Fiona looked around for him at such moments was that years ago, in Rundle, a man he'd known in passing shot himself and Stephen saw it happen. So did other people. It was horror, and it passed. But women liked to link you forever to that one thing. They loved it, made it become the pivot, the story, of your life. But the death, and even his own father's death soon afterwards (he had opened his eyes once, swept a potent gaze over his wife, his children around his bed, before he died), were not the story of Stephen's life. They were not his excuse. Because life went on. Fiona's friend's suicide story showed this, all their laughing at it showed it too. This is what he would say to Fiona, it came to him now: upsetting things happen, and you get through them, and life goes on. Fiona would be all right. The women would gather with sauvignon blanc and casseroles, and gradually begin to kick at the edges of Fiona's feeling for Stephen, heeling off little lumps of it like clumps of clay from a cliff edge.
I mean, he's sort of a nice guy and everything.
Letting her doubt it.
But what was he actually offering you?
And one day, quite soon, Fiona would sit back with a start and find she could not recall his face very well, and wonder what had possessed her to fall in love with him.

At the zoo there were therapy classes for arachnophobes, where they made people hold great monstrous spiders in the palms of their hands. Stephen had seen it, watching from the back of the room one day during his lunch break. People all over the place, tears streaming down their faces, and in the centre of their open, shaking palms the terrible black spiders squatted, crumpled black pipe cleaner legs as thick as human fingers. Why a person would do this to herself Stephen had no fucking idea. But there you were. People got over all sorts of things.

The woman across the aisle turned from the window and caught his eye before turning away again, expressionless. Stephen wondered briefly what her glance at him told her, but he didn't really want to know.

Just then Stephen noticed something on the floor under one of the bus seats, between the woman and the man with the phone. He bent his head to see it. It was a silver plastic bag, oddly shaped as if the bag had been wrapped around something. It was shoved up against the pole of a seat, on the dirty lino floor. He could see part of a shop logo printed on the bag, a swirling pink
Gi
of what must, in those colours, say ‘
girl'
.

A high tinnitus whine of alarm started up deep inside Stephen's ears.

Someone had just left it there accidentally, obviously. Some shopping bag left behind. But the bag was not new. The silver was scuffed, wearing off here and there to reveal the white plastic beneath. And it was wrapped tightly around the thing inside it. The thing had not been slipped in by a shop assistant's manicured hand and handed over with a smile. Someone had shoved the thing, the rounded heavy thing—heavy enough for it not to slide around with the motion of the bus—into the bag and left it there, and got off the bus.

If you see something, say something.

Stephen looked around at the people, willing someone to catch his eye. But nobody did. Nobody looked in his direction.

He grasped hold of his own hands. This was ridiculous. It had been a terrible morning. The junkie girl, sailing above the traffic, a sallow malnourished angel. Then the sickening plummet. He wondered where she was now. Perhaps she had gotten herself home on the glazed momentum of the methadone, and sat down on the couch, where the leaking vein inside her brain, allowing the slow seep of blood all through the spongy coral, could no longer withstand the pressure. It suddenly tore and burst and she, the junkie girl Skye whom he had hit with his car, cried out in anguish and clutched her head, and died, all alone on her dingy couch.

He breathed out. In and out.
In
, hold, and
out
, the way he had learned from yoga Dawnelle.

The bus heaved off from a stop where nobody got on or off. Stephen looked again at the silver bag. Now he had seen it, it glowed there beneath the seat. He could not believe nobody else had noticed it. For if they did, surely someone would raise the alarm. Stephen did not know what bombs looked like. Could they be bulky like this? Surely these days all they needed was a mobile phone, some small electronic wizardry they could detonate remotely. But, he reasoned, the thing had to be big to contain enough explosives to do the damage. As big as a bucket? Have to be. And the bag was much smaller than a bucket. Half a bucket, probably.

But the thrumming in his ears grew louder, despite his reasoning, and his heartbeat began to match it. Breathing was not helping, and in fact he began to feel a little lightheaded. Would they know, when it went off, that it was happening—or would it be so big, so instant, that all you would know was a burst in your eardrums, and then black? That wouldn't be so bad, would it?

For one shameful second he was liberated: if a bomb went off he would not have to tell Fiona.

But then he recalled the photographs of the London bombings—people staggering around covered in blood. That girl with no legs, who went on television. People with their arms blown off, but still alive, still conscious.

The bag seemed to pulse there now, against the iron leg of the seat.

Stephen's head ached, his body was soaking in sweat, now his guts churned and it was only ten o'clock in the morning. There could be a bomb.

He missed his father. He hated this city.

He imagined his mother's morning in Rundle, what she would be doing now. Folding the tennis newsletter into envelopes, perhaps, licking and sticking. Or clipping greenery from the garden if it was her turn to do the flowers for Mass. He envied the pure simplicity of Rundle life, where there were no bombs on buses—there were no buses. No junkies ran into traffic in Rundle, images of tortured creatures were not thrust at you as soon as you left your house. There were no workplace teambuilding exercises to be endured, for there was no-one to run them.

The woman across the aisle had opened a tabloid newspaper. Stephen could see almost a full-page photograph of a hunted-looking dog behind the bars of a police wagon, its eyes large and glossy. V
ICIOUS ATTACK
. It was the Rottweiler that had killed a child the day before in an outer suburb, savaging it while the parents were outside chatting to a neighbour. The dog was to be destroyed. Stephen imagined what the parents had found. The blood, the dog standing there, its four feet planted on the carpet, slavering over the motionless child. Waiting, wild-eyed and lost. He looked at the photograph, at the dog's bewildered eyes behind the bars. It had no idea what it had done.

Stephen looked out of the window again, thinking of the other dog in the news, the bomb-sniffing army dog that had been lost and then found in Afghanistan. Earlier in the week it was presented with a bravery award. It had been the good-news story at the end of all the television bulletins. There was a garden ceremony, with chairs and officials and speeches. The woman from the RSPCA had hung the Purple Heart around the dog's neck—it was only the second animal to get the medal after Simpson's donkey—and thanked the dog for its resilience and its
unquestioning service
to our troops. Although he had been alone in the room, Stephen had thrown back his head, looked about him for confirmation. Was this actually what the woman had said? And was he the only person to think a bravery medal for a dog was madness? The people at the ceremony clapped and looked tearfully moved. The newsreaders did too. Only Stephen and the dog, it seemed, were baffled. Everyone else seemed to think it perfectly normal to lead donkeys and dogs onto battlefields and then pretend they chose it for themselves, fired by patriotic valour.