Animal People (18 page)

‘Okay, Ella, I have something special for your birthday.'

The girls stared, biting their lips, suddenly frightened and serious, as they were whenever extreme pleasure was imminent. Their eyes darted to Stephen's bag on the floor, then back to his hands as he pulled his wallet from his pocket, and took out the yellow paper tickets.

He leaned down. ‘We're going . . . to . . . the
circus!
' he cried, flourishing the tickets.

Ella glanced at Larry and then back at him, waiting for meaning. ‘Happy birthday!' he cried, leaning in to kiss her cheek. But she remained motionless, wan with polite incomprehension. Larry simply looked down at the tickets with open disgust.

Stephen said, ‘These are just the tickets. But the circus will be such fun!'

His voice was strained, stupid. He pressed on. ‘There will be lions, and monkeys, and camels!' He pushed the tickets into Ella's hands. ‘And acrobats! You know those ladies in sparkly costumes? Hanging on trapezes?' He drew in the air, hapless. ‘We'll go together—the three of us.'

Ella held the tickets, peered at them. ‘What about Mum?' she asked suspiciously. The paper scraps forlorn in her hand.

‘Well,' Stephen licked his lips, ‘Well, maybe we will just go specially, just a special treat for the three of us.'

The girls heard his voice, thick and odd. Ella stared at Larry. Her little sister took charge, turning on him. ‘But what else?' she demanded. ‘Is there anything else?' She peered down at his bag. She knew there was something there, something better.

The insult went deep. ‘No,' he snapped at her.

He turned back to Ella. He would appeal to her mercy, her higher self. He angled himself between her and her sister, ducked to meet Ella's gaze.

‘I thought you would like this present,' he said softly. ‘I thought about it really hard. I think you'll really love it. We'll have fun, and popcorn, and there will be acrobats and animals. And we will be together.'

Ella stared at him sadly. She knew her duty. She climbed down from the chair, stepped stiffly to him and kissed him coldly on the cheek. ‘Thank you,' she said. In a sweet, horrible, artificial voice, she added, ‘I'll put them up here so Mum can look after them,' and slipped the tickets on to the kitchen bench. Then she looked at Larry in a way that meant they had business to discuss, and walked away, her fairy skirt hanging.

But Larry was not finished with Stephen. She stood, hands on her hips. ‘She's got lots of presents coming,' she declared. ‘She's already got twenty dollars from Grandma and eighteen more dollars, because more from pocket money. And a
Bratz
.'

This last was meant as the knife-plunge Stephen felt it to be. Larry's hard little eyes met his in a baleful stare, and then she left.

He walked out through the French doors and across the terrace. He leaned over his crossed arms on the railing, staring out across the harbour past the sparkling white stalactites of sailboats and runabouts and fishing craft and ferries, past the bridal trails of churning water, out to the distant blue bank of the horizon where a ship rested on the quiet steady line between sea and sky. He could be out there, on that ship
.

The girls would come around. He had seen this before, at parties and Christmas—children tossing aside the carefully chosen gifts (books, hand-made dolls) for any bit of plastic crap with a logo or a battery. But soon, when the plastic cracked underfoot or the batteries died, they returned to the discarded things and saw their true, instrinsic worth, and grew to love them. The girls would remember the circus; remember him.

He stared out at the ship, suddenly unsure. Maybe they would not like the circus at all. He saw them sitting in the dust and the dark, unsmiling, arms folded, as the bears danced, mangy and lumpen, in the distance. Or worse, thanking him quietly with that terrible politeness, holding in their minds the promised reward for good behaviour at home, once it was over. They might despise him for it.

The ship lay, a grey slug, on the horizon.

He had not travelled enough; hardly at all. This came to him with sudden urgency. A trip to Thailand eight years ago. Before that, Europe (which turned out to be Earl's Court and Nice) with his friend David when he was twenty-two, sleeping on someone's floor with not enough blankets, and then the dirty French youth hostel. He drank till he vomited, then lay on a spinning bed in the dark, wracked by turns with homesickness and longing for a girl passed out in the opposite bunk.

Fiona was back; he heard her opening and closing drawers in the kitchen at the same time as he heard a car door slam in the street, then Belinda's voice, and Chris's.

‘They're here,' he called over his shoulder to Fiona. He heard her set a knife down on the chopping board before going to answer the door.

He had never before known the cadences of a person's movements like this, except in his own family, as a child. It was not just her tread; footsteps were easy, especially here in Fiona's house when there were just the two of them and the girls, whose hard little heels struck the floorboards like mallets. But even elsewhere, in other houses, in shops, he could tell Fiona's presence by the sound and rhythm of her movements: keys in a handbag, the taking of a breath. Surely humans could only breathe in so many ways—inhalation, exhalation could not possibly be so individual—but still, he always knew her. He knew the sound of her swallow, her bite of an apple from another room.

Belinda came clopping up the front steps, chiding Chris in her modulated customer-service voice. Belinda began most sentences with Chris's name, followed by a question that was really an instruction. Stephen sighed into his folded arms. Soon they would all be here, the whole grotesque parade of Fiona's family. Her father Pat, in his ironed jeans and tucked-in shirt, croaking about some new violation of his rights. Last time it had been Aborigines and Sorry Day (‘Howbout
Thankyou
Day instead! I'd like to know where Evonne Goolagong would be without the white man!'). And nervy, bug-eyed Jeanette with her stiff hair and tidy clothes, who couldn't stop talking, never meeting your eyes but fixing her gaze instead on the rings she wore, her spotty hands forever held out before her with the fingers splayed, palms down, then up, then down again, examining then twisting and adjusting all the gold rings she never took off.

A jet ski rider began to shred the silence in the bay below the house, lifting and hurling the machine so it hit the water in violent thuds. Obnoxious fuck. Which made Stephen remember that Richard was coming too.

He dropped his head into his arms and let out a long, high, muffled cry into his own chest.

Richard. Objectionable ex-husband, wine-collecting, six-foot-four, human-fucking-rights
barrister
Richard. Expert shaver, wearer of custom-made suits and spotless, expensive sportswear. Stephen looked down at the harbour. He could throw himself down there to the Moreton Bay figs and the jutting rocks, right now. He could bawl like the mummy's boy Richard had always known he was.

Stephen hated so many things about Richard. The way he took possession of Fiona's house, as if he had never left. The things Fiona still had in the house from him, from her marriage. Books with Richard's flourished handwriting scrawled on the inside pages, or on the backs of paintings.
Darling. All my love.
Stephen had always known he could not ask Fiona to throw them out—she would be incredulous:
I use that cookbook all the time!
—but he was disturbed by this evidence of how things once were, of how Richard once knew every inch of Fiona the way that Stephen knew her now. His own fingers hooked through Fiona's belt-loop in a crowd, or her elbow crooked through his, their legs brushing one another's lazily, convivially, in bed—all of this seemed unique to him, exceptional. The idea that Fiona had done these things with someone else, someone as loathsome as
Richard
, was unthinkable.

The few times the two men had met, Richard seemed to see straight through Stephen, with his smug, appraising, rich-boy's smile and his sharp lawyer's gaze. He took one look, it seemed, and knew everything about him—his failings with money and women and jobs. Stephen knew this was fanciful, but Richard dropped little grenades into conversation, like the time he idly mentioned some exploited woman in a wage case. Could you believe how pathetically low some poor bastards' incomes were, he said—giving Stephen that level, awful stare—‘like
fourteen-dollars-eighty an hour
.'

He couldn't say anything to Fiona; to suggest Richard had bothered to find out how much Stephen was paid would sound delusional. He was just a bully-boy, Stephen knew—but knowing didn't help. Anytime Richard came near him Stephen would begin to perspire, would feel himself slouch; the lawyer's presence seemed to cause his very skull to thicken, his thoughts to come sludgy and stupid. But it was worse than that. It was not that Richard caused these things; he simply revealed the deficiencies that had always been there.

A few weeks ago, when Richard arrived at the front door to collect the girls, Stephen was inside watching the cricket and he heard the bastard say coolly to Fiona, ‘Still slumming it with dishwashers, are we, Fi?'

It was not Richard's barb that made Stephen flinch. It was that Fiona had tried to say something cutting in reply, but her voice had faltered; she was unnerved. Listening from the living room, Stephen felt his stomach drop. Was she recognising some truth in Richard's words? Was this—slumming it—a realisation she had been coming to herself?

He shrank into his chair, trying to concentrate on the game. But he had heard it. Watching the players run and scramble on the screen, he began to think that maybe there was something about Fiona's embrace of him that had only ever been . . . symbolic. That perhaps his invitation into her house, her bed, was wreathed in (prompted by, even?) her ill-will towards Richard. That it was not to do with him, Stephen, at all.

Things forgotten came to him then, though he tried to stop them, sitting there that afternoon waiting for Richard to leave. He remembered dinner parties with couples in the early months, when Fiona sat with her hand on his arm, her eyes shining a little brightly as she inserted her own merry answers to whoever had asked him a question. Announcing his job before he was asked about it. ‘Stephen works in a café, at the zoo. No career bullshit, no corporate wife crap. I can't tell you how refreshing.' The wives would break off from talk of their holiday houses and children to glance at him afresh, as if Fiona's words might actually convince. The men sighed, pretending envy. One of them actually said he wished he could piss off his futures job and work at something with his hands, as Stephen did.

Stephen had thought: you're doing it right now, you cock, but in reply he simply smiled and said, ‘So why don't you?' After the tiniest pause the talk turned back to renovations and schools. After a few of those times the dinner parties stopped, and they took to Friday nights at home with the girls and takeaway Thai, and Stephen, he now realised, had not even noticed or cared.

Then, sitting before the television that day, Stephen heard their voices rising. Fiona's had a pleading note—‘but we agreed on this!'—but Richard's came down coldly over hers. The pickup day would have to change, he was saying. Something to do with his work.

‘But that's my clinic day. I'd never be able to get home in time!' Fiona begged. By the time Stephen registered the distress in her voice he found himself at the door, stepping to her side, facing up to Richard just in time to hear him say, ‘You'll just have to sort something out.' Icy, a command.

‘Don't think so, mate,' Stephen heard himself say. Fiona and Richard both turned to him in astonishment. Fiona's hand went to his back, took hold of his shirt. His gut rizzled and he could feel a tremor in his legs. He could not believe he was saying lightly into Richard's face, ‘Sounds like you're the one who needs to sort something else out.'

And though he had to lick his lips for fear as he smiled, he felt Fiona straighten beside him, felt her grip on him relax. Then the girls came running down the hallway, and Richard—miraculously—stepped back, fondling his car keys in his huge fist, looking at Stephen with cold contempt. ‘Whatever,' he said, feigning disinterest. But it was clear he was furious.

After they waved the girls off and stepped back inside, Fiona pulled herself to him, her head on his chest. ‘Thank you,' she said. His legs still felt weak. He kissed her back, but waved away her gratitude as he fell back into the chair and took up the remote control. She stood behind him, put her cool hand on his neck. Then she said, ‘This is why I love you,' as she left the room.

He knew she meant it. In that moment, she meant it.

But since that day it had become clear to Stephen how much he did not belong here, in her life, in this watery suburb of lawyers and Mercedes. Fiona surrounded herself with people who despised him—her parents, Richard who would now be biding his time, even her brother Chris wished him gone. Stephen knew her whole family talked about him. He did not belong in any part of Fiona's life and in the truest part of her—even if she had not yet gotten around to accepting it—she knew.

Now, as if she had heard his thoughts, she called to him from inside the house that Chris and Belinda had arrived. He could hear in her voice the playful
don't-leave-me-in-here-with-them
and
you-gotta-hear-this
—Belinda was probably going on with some entertaining new bit of shamanic nonsense. But Stephen did not want to go in there today. He wished he'd showered. He was afraid.

The jet ski rider thrust and ground his way back across the harbour.

‘Stephen?' Fiona called.

Over by the fishpond something moved and then was gone. He stopped and watched, and then he saw it: the water dragon again, on the rocks of the pond. This lizard, with its curved stance, raised up on its front legs with its cement-coloured nose in the air, delighted Fiona and the girls. It had become a sort of pet—they fed it grapes, and recently a smaller one had begun to appear as well. Stephen had come across it sometimes, a piece of grey bark on the terrace that suddenly sprang alive, bolting in its waggling gait across the paving then darting out its tongue at a fleck of something on the ground. The girls loved the little reptiles—Ella had named one of them Sophie—but the dragons privately alarmed Stephen: the camouflage, their sudden presence when you had glanced at that spot just an instant before and seen nothing. Sometimes out here on the terrace the larger dragon appeared and began stalking Stephen, twisting itself towards him. He would stamp his foot on the paving, but the dragon never moved away: just stopped, a statue again, staring at Stephen sideways. Waiting him out. And Stephen always found a reason to step quickly across the pavers and draw the sliding glass door shut behind him.
You prefer your life forms behind glass.
He stopped, faltered. He shunted the door roughly closed and turned away, leaving the dragon stock still, its back straight and narrow, head tilted, listening for danger.