Animal People (10 page)

She climbed gingerly into a seat, settling her plastic bags around her.

He should have got the number of the clinic. This came to him in a bolt of urgency. Stephen twisted around in his seat, seized with panic. What if she died? He would be arrested for leaving the scene. For leaving her in the hands of a methadone nurse, for not insisting on the hospital. He pressed his face to the window, peering back along Queen Street. What was the street number of the clinic? There must be more than one methadone clinic in Norton. He had never noticed that one before; for all he knew there could be dozens of clinics in the long, colourless, grit-swept stretch of Queen Street.

The bus moved on. Just
calm bloody down
, Stephen told himself. It was his father's bellowed dictum on every holiday trip in the car when someone whined or screeched. Stephen would put the girl Skye from his mind. She had medical help. She was fine. The taxi driver was right, he thought bitterly. He should have left. He knew that was wrong, but allowed himself the surge of self-pity. He had done the right thing. He had done
more
than the right thing. Stephen tried out this way of thinking: she was only a junkie, after all. Stupid bloody junkie who had no right to scare the shit out of him like this. They all had death wishes. But Stephen did not have the heart for it; instead what kept coming to him was his mother and the television news, hand over mouth. Poor creature.

Near the intersection of Fitzroy and Swan streets he saw the yellow road-sign,
REFUGE ISLAND
.
A replica of the signs of his childhood in Rundle, egg-yolk yellow with its thick black border, the stencilled image of the two figures, slightly bent as if in frail, unsteady movement. When Stephen was a kid there was a refuge island sign in the centre of Aurora Street as it stretched down to the town-centre, and the figures were boy-and-girl silhouettes. Back then, as a child, he associated the sign with the wailing people who populated the evening news—the Vietnamese refugees in their papery wooden boats, landing exhausted and frightened on Australia's shores. Boat People, they were called, and to his child's ears it seemed these might be pirate people, or somehow connected to the Owl and the Pussycat. But on the television there were no birds nor cats, only the howling children and stick-thin, ruined parents on the broken boats, and the concrete strip in Aurora Street became forever linked with them, an island for these wretched, half-dressed children.

The bus moved off again, but in Stephen's mind these images bundled and collapsed, folding over one another like the leaves of those origami paper fortune-tellers that children made. So that even seeing the sign here, outside an inner city row of terrace shops, he felt himself to be six years old, safe on Rundle's refuge island, one hand clutching the pole and the other reaching out to offer welcome and shelter to the poor, discarded wreckage of the heartless world's distant wars.

The bus had stopped for too long. Stephen looked up as a gaunt, dishevelled young man stood by the driver's side, searching his voluminous clothes for a ticket, calling too loudly to the driver
don't worry mate
,
I'm not gunna getcha in trouble.
The driver glanced warily at the man and then shoved at the gears, and the bus moved off. The man found his ticket and screwed it down into the machine, then swayed away, forgetting to take it out again. He teetered up the aisle with his arms out to either side to steady himself, searching the faces of the people in the seats closely, as if looking for someone he knew. Stephen felt the shimmer of anxiety fill the bus, saw all the people turn their faces from the man. His hair was shoulder-length, dyed jet black and matted, not quite dreadlocked, and he wore thick black-rimmed glasses. There were no lenses in the frames. The people on the bus felt for their mobile phones and pretended to read text messages, or concentrated their gaze beyond the man, on the strip of advertisements above his head—ads for cold sore cream and airport novels and pictures of a suspicious package with the government's terrorism warnings
.
I
F YOU SEE SOMETHING
,
SAY SOMETHING
.

The man still wandered ominously up the aisle. His gaze, quick-moving, birdlike, swept the seats, and Stephen knew there was no vacant seat except the one beside him. He could smell the man now, as he approached, and he sighed silently. He narrowed his shoulders and shifted toward the window to make way as the man sat down heavily, his khaki clothes flapping, his wet lips moving. Stephen turned his face to the window to avoid the man's breath and any potentially insane conversation. The man inhaled and exhaled loudly through his nose, dragging in the air, forcing it out again. And now, as Stephen knew he would, he began to mutter low, emphatic declarations to himself, his voice a little slurred and the words running together. ‘Bescountry on earth,' he whispered to his chest. He snickered, and whispered, ‘Besfucking
city
on earth.'

Then he gave a low, private snort of disgust: ‘
Melbourne.
Gimmeabreak.'

Stephen stared out of the window again, stared so hard his eyes watered. This was the trouble with living in Norton. The place was full of fucking mad people. Like the man who used to wander past his bedroom window at four-thirty every morning, pushing a trolley from the Norton Village Plaza before him, jingling along the uneven council pavement in the dark. One morning, after a new couple had moved in across the lane and begun renovating, Stephen heard their window wrench open and the neighbour shout at the trolley man in his clear, educated voice: ‘Piss off, you freak.' The trolley had stopped instantly. Stephen was not awake enough to get up and look out, but he imagined the man, stock-still and terrified, his private singing-trolley world suddenly torn open. He never came back after that, and Stephen sometimes imagined him now sitting in some horrid dark room, longing to be out with his trolley, too frightened to set off. He hoped he found another route.

Then there was the middle-aged woman with the lank, steel-coloured hair and the mammoth, cannon-shaped breasts that swung low and loose and frightening beneath the stretched cotton of her faded little-girl floral dresses, who sang her strange operatic callings directly in front of the glass sliding doors of the Plaza entrance, breaking a loaf of bread apart and throwing enormous chunks of it down to the Welcome To Our Norton Village Plaza doormat, so the mat covered instantly with ravenous pigeons. To get into the Plaza the shoppers had to walk around the woman, standing with her hands lovingly clasping her own body, her long mad hair falling. She was like that painting of Venus on the seashell, beaming, only her grin was inane and her shell was a doormat and a dirty sea of pigeons. Then the security guard would arrive on his Segway and bark at her to go away.

There were the other asylum-seekers too, drawn to the Plaza like moths to light: the small, shifty man who wore a woollen beanie no matter the weather, and walked as if climbing over some eternally reappearing obstacle. At all times he clutched a longneck of beer inside a wrinkled paper bag, but Stephen had never seen him open it or drink from it. Sometimes he sat on Stephen's front fence, smoothing the paper bag around the bottle. There was the wild-haired homeless man from this morning who came and went, making a little nest of his belongings at the foot of the Plaza wall across the road from Stephen's house. Once, in the middle of this last cold winter, Stephen had given him some money and an old blanket. He couldn't stand the idea of the man sleeping out there without any covering. The man had shrunk back, alert, as if he expected Stephen to kick or shout at him. He said
efkharisto,
taking the blanket warily. The next morning Stephen saw Nerida standing at the homeless man's empty nest, pouring a bucket of water into the little pile of his belongings. Nerida would feed a stray cat or fret if Balzac had a cough, but the homeless were as intolerable as vermin.

When he was young and first came to the city, this daily witnessing of insanity—and of cruelty—shocked Stephen, and frightened him. In Rundle, it seemed, madnesses and cruelties were private affairs, if they existed, but here in the city each day brought some public hostility; each day you saw one human being degraded by another. You got used to it. If it was not directed at you, you learned to cast your eyes down and walk on by. If it was, you did the same thing but faster.

On his first day in the city, living by the beach, Stephen walked out of his new share house to buy a newspaper and reeled as he saw a man next to a car, shouting at a woman. He had a fistful of her hair in his hand, and she was bent awkwardly over the car bonnet. Stephen gaped, forgetting his sister Mandy's first injunction for living in the city: don't make eye contact. He wondered if he should call the police, but then the man turned to him and snarled, ‘What are you looking at, cunt?' and Stephen was so frightened he scurried back inside his house and shut the door. The last thing he saw was a child, sitting quietly in the back seat of the car.

Stephen never grew accustomed to it, the same way he never got used to the rain. A country boy grown up with drought-dust, whose lungs had never had to tolerate the smell of mildew, at thirty-nine he was still awed by the torrential rainstorms that dumped down upon the city, the days and days of rain, the skies staying dark day-long, the soft fur of mould growing over your leather shoes in your wardrobe. And he still flinched if he heard swearing in the street—even schoolgirls did it, shouting out ‘fuck' and ‘pussy' and other shocking things. Stephen had no problem with conversational swearing, but each time he heard a curse bellowed in the street he had to stop himself looking guiltily around, in case one of his mother's friends or the Rundle Rotary Club vice-president might hear.

But the worst thing you never got used to was this: the man beside him now leaned suddenly close, making Stephen shut his eyes. You never got used to being trapped into intimacy with the mad. He could smell the man's breath, and hear it. He desperately did not want to be taken into deranged, foul-smelling patriotic confidences about the best country on earth, to be forced to agree that New Zealanders were sheepfuckers, that Melbournians were wankers. He did not wish to be that person on the bus for whom every other passenger felt pity, but also gratitude, because it was not they who were being berated, breathed upon, wheedled at, humiliated. Stephen was the one to be pitied—but also judged for his coldness, his distaste, his craven fear of insanity.

Please don't talk to me, Stephen prayed, the vibrations of the bus's engine passing through the window pane into his skull,
please-
don't-talk-to-me,
please-
don't-talk-to-me
,
in the rhythm of the roughly idling motor. He felt the man lean away again, and when he snuck a furtive glance he saw he had shifted his weight not to get close to Stephen, but only to draw a magazine from one of his capacious pockets. He sat reading it now. It was called
Dominion
and had an astronaut in a space suit on the cover.

At the Burlington, the man got up and swung away down the aisle, shouldering other passengers out of his way. Stephen was swept with relief. He knew the man was harmless. They were all harmless. They scared the shit out of him.

Stephen flipped open the magazine left on the seat. Its opening pages were full of short, snidely righteous letters referring to ‘so-called biology', attended by lots of biblical reference numbers.
I found your article
‘
How Did Dinosaurs Get so Big, and How Did Noah Fit Them on His Ark?' to raise some most interesting questions. It's time the so-called ‘scientists' are called to account. Keep up the good work. (Ex.20:2; Deut.7:6).
One letter complained about militant evolutionists taking over classrooms and suppressing facts supporting the Bible.
We must be vigilant
. Stephen turned the magazine over and looked again at the cover.
Exposing the myths and lies of evolution
, said a subtitle. It cost $7.80. Someone had paid for this.

‘Jesus Christ,' he muttered. He flipped to the middle. Photographs of the Japanese tsunami covered three pages—people running for their lives from the wall of brown water and travelling buildings; cities turned to piles of sticks; the bodies of dead children lain in rows in the mud. Under the headline,
Tsunami: We've Been Here Before
, someone called Turner Bartlett (an importer/ exporter living in regional Victoria) reiterated the tsunami's devastation in cold scientific detail. There were seismologist's maps and geological diagrams of ocean earthquakes. Stephen scanned the paragraphs, trying to find the point. Then, far down in the article he found a subheading,
Unprecedented catastrophe?

No. Noah's Flood was seven-hundred-thousand times greater than the 2011 tsunami which caused so much destruction. Only Noah heeded the warnings God gave the populace, and only eight people—Noah and his family—survived. Many people in Japan died because they did not heed the warnings of the Bible. If they had only paid attention to Noah's story, they might still be alive today.

Stephen closed the magazine and dropped it to the floor. He looked around, hoping nobody had seen him reading it. While he had been absorbed in the magazine, the passengers had thinned out as the bus drew nearer to the harbour. The only people left were two girls who looked to be in their early twenties talking in a loud, actressy way; an old man way down the front whose hand kept rising to pick at a scab on the crown of his head; and a man of about forty wearing a cheap-looking grey suit, his gaze fixed on the mobile phone in his hand while the other lifted a paper coffee cup to his mouth. He lowered his lips to the plastic lid and clamped them softly over it like a kiss. The Lebanese boy and the old man had long gone, and a delicately built Asian girl now sat in the seat in front of Stephen, a textbook open on her lap. She was studying the structure of silica. Her long hair was shiny black, and very fine. Across the aisle from Stephen, a solid middle-aged woman who could be a worn-out mother of a teenager, or a youngish grandmother, stared absently out of the window.