Animal People (25 page)

He reached the corner of his street. The fake laughter filled the air behind him, only now it didn't sound so pathetic. Stephen was nudged by some understanding that had surfaced and subsided around him all day. It had to do with the
Big Issue
woman, and the junkie Skye. It was to do with the woman with the Sydney Olympics cord around her neck. It had to do with the Facebook girls, and the seals at the zoo, even Russell's surrender. It had to do—impossibly—even with Belinda, at the mercy of her beliefs, and Jeanette's sad attempts to stand up to Pat.

He had felt sorry for them all. But he had
left
Fiona and the girls. He had lost them. It came tumbling in: it was he, Stephen, who had been wretched all along. He was the lost one, the poor creature. Back in the park the laughter grew into hoots and shrieks. They were laughing now, actually laughing. It was Stephen who was alone and mirthless, coming to his empty house at the end of this dreadful, dreadful day.

Balzac, the German shepherd, appeared on the footpath in front of Stephen. Too tired to hold the dog's probing snout at bay, he simply kept walking as Balzac gave him a weary sniff. But Balzac was exhausted too, Stephen saw, watching the dog pant, his shaggy flesh rolling from side to side over his ribcage as he trotted alongside him. They neared Nerida's house. The house was empty, gate and front door shut with the locked-up look that only came with absence. From some way behind them a car came roaring along the street. As Stephen turned toward the noise he heard Balzac's claws scrabble on cement, heard the throat-deep growl as the dog leapt. Stephen cried out and lunged to grasp him but too late, and then it came, the skidding, the bang and Balzac's discordant yelp. The driver, a man, shouted ‘D
UMB FUCKING ANIMAL
' and the car smoked off and away down the street.

In the road lay Balzac, shrugging and turning his long shaggy body on the bitumen, a yairling whine rising up out of him.

Stephen moved towards the fallen animal as if wading through thigh-deep water. For the second time today he knelt in the road, and he recognised this: in its leaping the dog, like the girl—like Stephen, too—had cast itself out. He knew the fatal impulse; he felt it in the animal, in his own body, as it leapt. He knelt beside the dog. He knew Nerida and Jill were not home, was grateful, for they must be protected from this sight: Balzac lying oddly bent, his front legs splayed, head slid sideways in pain on the bitumen, the long body dragging, breath whining out in a long, high, agonised hiss. His back was broken. Stephen put his hand to the soft heaving flank, concave beneath the ribs, then touched the dog's muzzle in a single strong, gentle stroke.

‘Poor Balzac, poor boy.'

The dog's belly rose and fell, his head fallen still. ‘
Poor creature, poor boy
,' Stephen repeated, blinking to keep out the filaments of dusty hair rising into his eyes and mouth and nose. But he saw the animal's fearful brown eyes. Was it true, that animals did not foresee their deaths? If it was true, why did Stephen now recall his own father's eyes, cast around at them all, this same sorrowful stare, in the instant before he died?

He abandoned himself to the dog, to its gaze. He lay down on the road, his head on the bitumen, face turned to Balzac's, whispering
poor boy
, letting his eyes sting and his nose run. The dog panted, saliva hanging from his crinkled, leathery lips, his loosened tongue drooping. His breath came in short, shallow pants, and Stephen lay curved around him on the hot road, stroking the matted fur, smelling the warm piss steaming off the asphalt. This mess and agony. It was a life, ending, he marvelled, just as he was beginning to understand. The point of an animal was not for it to love you; it was that you could love it. In all its otherness, your unbelonging to its kind, it could yet receive—boundlessly—your love. He inhaled the dank animal breaths with his own, and he thought of his father, of his mother, how one day soon this dying gaze would be hers, endless and sorrowful.
Poor creature.
His own death would come, soon or distant, it didn't matter now. The animal's flanks rose and fell, rose and fell. His father's last shallow breaths became the dog's, there on the steaming road.

It was in this abjection, he saw now—his eyes closed, face pressed into the dog's neck—that we were most animal and because of that became most human after all. We all are only hair and bone and stinking breath, and the only thing we can hope for is a fellow creature who will lie beside us in the road, and stroke our flanks while we die.

He lay, stroking Balzac's life away with the exhausted, huffing little breaths. He opened his eyes and followed the line of the dog's slowing gaze. And he saw there a woman stepping from her car further up the street.

It was Fiona, shutting her car door, here in his street.

Stephen began to weep softly to the dog, to himself. She was here. He cried, gumming the hair with his snot and tears, and another door opened and Ella and Larry climbed out. Stephen lay weeping and they stepped off the kerb and came to sit down beside him and the dog in the road. Fiona put out her hand to the rising, falling fur, and whispered,
Poor boy, we're here
.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was written with the assistance of a grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts. I am extremely grateful for that support.

My thanks once more to Jane Palfreyman, Judith Lukin-Amundsen and Siobhán Cantrill for their editorial guidance, and to Donica Bettanin, Gayna Murphy, Andy Palmer, Renee Senogles and all at Allen & Unwin for helping this book reach its readers.

Thank you to Jane Johnson, Brian Murphy, Rebecca Hazel, Caroline Baum and David Roach for their help in various ways, and to my siblings and extended family for their loving support. Tegan Bennett Daylight, Eileen Naseby, Lucinda Holdforth, Vicki Hastrich and David Roach provided essential feedback on early drafts. It was invaluable, as was Michelle de Kretser's practical and moral support.

Among other books
Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals
by Hal Herzog (HarperCollins, 2010), John Berger's
Why Look at Animals?
(Penguin, 2009) and
The Finlay Lloyd Book About Animals
(Finlay Lloyd, 2008) were useful and inspiring.

I'm especially grateful to Jenny Darling for her insight as a reader and professionalism as an agent, and to Jane Palfreyman for her tremendous publishing verve.

Sean McElvogue was a sensitive and insightful reader of various drafts, and has been steadfast in his support. He has my love and gratitude.

Charlotte Wood is the author of
The Children, The Submerged Cathedral
and
Pieces of a Girl, and
editor of
Brothers & Sisters,
an anthology of writing about siblings. Her novels have been shortlisted for various prizes, including the Australian Book Industry Awards
,
Miles Franklin Literary Award and the regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

Charlotte also writes the popular cookery blog How to Shuck an Oyster.
Love & Hunger
, her ode to good food, was published in 2012 to wide acclaim.

www.charlottewood.com.au