Animal People (15 page)

The sheriffs were Meredith Kingston from promotions and a large, square-built mini-train driver, a man Russell had always claimed was Serbian. The pair stood at the edge of the river, looking at their little silver cap-guns, not speaking to each other.

‘Here,' said Russell, tossing a neckerchief at Stephen. ‘Put this on, or Slobodan might take you out.'

Suddenly the room filled with deafening banjo music, and Nestor waved a toy gun above his head. ‘You have an hour to fill your sacks. Naw,
GIT
!' he screamed over the music and popped his starter gun.

People began rushing about the room, waving tickets and shouting at one another, creating crushing bottlenecks on the butcher's paper bridge across the river.

Stephen had no idea what they were supposed to do. Russell shrugged. Patricia and Denis trotted off to join the crowd. Mia eventually unwound her legs and sighed, ‘Give me your tokens, you idiots.' Russell and Stephen emptied their tickets into her hands. Then she strode off across the room, ignoring the bridge, marching over the river to the merchants.

‘Hey, Radovan!' Russell yelled at the mini-train guy, who glared, then followed Russell's pointing finger to see Mia. He stomped towards her with his gun out.

Stephen and Russell began to titter, watching on.

Patricia and Denis shuffled back to them, still holding their tickets and the team's A4 sheet of rules. The music jangled, people shouted. Then Russell stood up. Stephen expected him to say he was going out for a fag, but instead he said to Patricia, ‘Let me have a look, see if we can figure this bullshit out.'

Stephen stared as Patricia wordlessly handed over the sheet. Russell read silently, and then looked up. ‘Tell Mia to give you half the tokens, and bring the rest to me. And tell her to stay out of the fucking river.'

Patricia and Denis, astonished, did as they were bid. As they moved off Stephen smirked, waiting for the joke to happen. But Russell turned his blue eyes to Stephen and said, ‘I've got another job.'

Stephen swallowed. ‘What?'

Russell licked his lips, didn't look at Stephen. ‘Management. Parris is leaving.'

Stephen was incredulous. ‘You're joking.'

Russell exhaled a big sigh. ‘You'll be right, mate. You can have this job.'

Stephen nodded, slowly. ‘Shit,' he said. They both knew any job in the kiosk would be unbearable if Russell left. He nodded again, to show he forgave Russell even though he didn't.

The banjo music scrambled the air. Stephen sat on his plastic chair, trying to breathe, trying to think of coming to the kiosk without Russell, to imagine Russell sitting in an office at a computer, wearing chinos and ironed shirts. Having client meetings, talking to staff about targets and customer service.

Stephen stared at his friend. ‘But why?' he whispered.

Russell shook his head and sighed at the floor. ‘I dunno. Partly, Lucy wants to buy a place.' He bit his lip, then straightened and met Stephen's eyes with his. ‘I'm forty-three, for Christ's sake.'

He looked over to where Mia and Patricia were sharing out the pile of paper tokens.

‘I'm just sick of living like a fuckwit, mate,' Russell said. He gave a dark, horrible grin. ‘I'm sick of it.'

And he got to his feet and in the din and the shouting and the banjo music he walked across the butcher's paper bridge to the other side of the river.

Stephen, alone on his plastic chair, could not believe what he had just heard. He was overtaken once more by the almighty tiredness, worse than before. He wished he could drop to the floor, fall into an unstirring sleep as deep and silent as death.

He forced himself to stand—his head was heavy on his neck, his limbs slow and thick—and walked out past the freckled girl and the whiteboards, past the blaring speakers. He walked out of the cool gloom of the conference centre into the glaring white daylight.

When he was far enough that he could no longer hear the banjo music or the shouting he stopped. He listened to the shickering of the eucalyptus leaves and the high syncopated trillings of the birds above him. He found the shade of some trees near the macaques' enclosure, sat down on a low wooden bench and rested his chin in his hands.

None of the monkeys was to be seen. They were inside sleeping, staying out of the heat—all except for the biggest male. Stephen glimpsed it now. It sat at the rear of the enclosure, squatting by a wall, considering a corn cob gripped in its fist. Stephen was reminded of something, but couldn't think what. He watched the monkey's long red face peering from beneath the shelf of its brow and wondered if it were true, that the creature was as filled with uncertainty as humans were. In computer game experiments macaques apparently skipped the tricky questions, which researchers said proved they understood when they were likely to make an error. They knew when they didn't know. The scientists were elated, but to Stephen it seemed a terrible thing, to inflict self-doubt on a monkey.

The macaque lifted its head and returned Stephen's gaze across the enclosure. Then he made the connection: it was the homeless man across the road from Stephen's house that the monkey resembled. It delivered the same stare of wounded disbelief
.

This was why people didn't like medical experiments on monkeys these days. If chimpanzees shared almost all our DNA, it meant they might
understand
. Even the coldest-hearted scientist surely could not drill into the head of a creature who could stare back at him the way the macaque was staring at Stephen now. A drowned mouse's brain might not reveal everything you wanted, but at least you wouldn't have to dream about it.

Stephen closed his eyes and put his head in his hands. What did Russell mean, he was sick of how he lived? From far off, the amplified twang of surf-guitar music floated up: the seal show was beginning. When Stephen first started work at the zoo he used to take his lunch down to the performing seal show and sit in the bleachers with the punters while he ate. An open-faced young keeper wearing a bucket of fish tied to his waist would keep up a light, entertaining patter while one or other of the trained seals—Bindi or Fifi or Rocky or Miff—slid and rocked on cue beside him, waddled up some stairs to dive from a height, dipped its head and croaked when he asked it a question (sometimes the seal began the answer before the question was finished, in which case no fish), or shot into the pool on command, swimming up and down against the glass wall of the pool to demonstrate its amazing natural abilities for the audience. The crowd roared with delight as the animal carried a ball on its nose, wobbled to a Britney Spears song, swam with one flipper out of the water ‘pretending' to be a shark, and delivered with various antics the conservation messages buried in the keeper's patter. Stephen wondered if the young man with the microphone sometimes longed simply to shout, ‘Don't dump your rubbish in the ocean, you arseholes!' instead of what he did say, which was ‘We all love to have fun at the beach, but sometimes we leave more than sandcastles behind!', while the seal emerged from the water wearing a specially tailored piece of plastic ‘garbage' and pretended to be caught in its net.

Stephen sat and listened to the floating lecture and the audience applause coming through the trees. What did Russell mean, living like a fuckwit? He lived the way Stephen lived. They were a team, Russell had always said. They stood shoulder to shoulder, holding fast against the great, relentless tide of morally bankrupt, materialist mediocrity of contemporary life, lived out by cretins. That's what he had said.

Stephen's phone vibrated. In all the noise of the auditorium he had missed two more calls from Cathy. He deleted the messages. But he could no longer avoid her. She would keep calling, growing more and more irate each time he didn't answer. He dialled her number. He must simply keep calm, and get off the phone as soon as possible.

Just then Marilyn Parris appeared beside Stephen. ‘What are you doing?'

He looked up at her and pressed ‘end call'. Saved.

‘Sorry,' he said. ‘Just felt a bit off-colour.' She stared at him, waiting, while he put the phone back in his pocket. The security tag round her neck reflected a hard, square glint of light.

‘I'm fine now though,' Stephen said, and followed her back into the auditorium.

The game was over. The teams huddled on their plastic chairs, untying their neckerchiefs and counting their money. The banjo music faded softly away, and Nestor stepped back up to the microphone, grinning and shaking his head in an exhilarated way.

‘Folks, we hope you had as much fun in Coyote Canyon as we did,' he said. His voice took on a calm, brotherly tone. ‘How many of you have played Coyote Canyon before?'

His offsiders looked around the room, as if spotting for auction bids. ‘Nobody? Wow,' said Nestor. He turned to the women; they made exaggerated faces of surprise.

‘Aside from all the fun, what do you think today's game has been about?' he asked the room.

Someone at the back of the room called out, weakly, ‘Teamwork.'

Nestor smiled. ‘Good. What else?'

A few more suggestions were tossed up: Coping with pressure. Working within the right boundaries. Nestor nodded sagely at each one, eyes closed. Stephen watched Russell in silence. And then Russell, arms folded and staring at the floor, called out in a clear, audible voice, as Stephen knew he now must: ‘Entrepreneurship.' Everyone stared. Russell did not look up from his boots at the end of his outstretched legs. He stared and stared at his boots, tapping the toe-tips against each other, slow and rhythmic.

Up on the stage Nestor opened his eyes. ‘So you see,' he said, his voice low and soft now. ‘You have played Coyote Canyon before. The truth is, you all play Coyote Canyon—
every, single, day
.'

The music began to rise again, and Nestor snapped back into cowboy mode. ‘We've been Adrenaline Learning, and you've been
great!
' he screeched, tossing his cowboy hat in the air.

Patricia Alvarez began collecting neckerchiefs, flushed with pleasure. ‘Wasn't that marvellous!' she said, beaming at Stephen and Russell. They didn't speak. As they made their way from the hall, Russell joined the small band lining up to enter their names on an attendance list on the door for the next exercise: (M
ANAGEMENT
O
NLY
) G
OING
D
EEPER
, W
IDER
.

Stephen left the building and trailed down the stairs, drenched once more by sweat and the suffocating air. The Coyote Canyon banjo and the seal show music grew louder, merging into a single hysterical, jangling anthem. It occurred to Stephen then that he and Russell and the others, the seals and the rhinos and monkeys, were all the same. They were all just captive animals, performing tricks for food.

CHAPTER 4

It was so quiet here.

Stephen had never liked to admit how soothed he was to walk the streets of Longley Point, how velveted by silence he was, how the moneyed suburb's gentility allowed his body to soften and forget itself. It was only in Fiona's suburb that he realised how physically alert he was to violence in his own. Even the air was cooler here. He was grateful, this of all afternoons, for the great corridors of shade created by the arching of the plane tree limbs across the streets. His socks were sweaty rags, his shoulders ached from the weight of his backpack.

In Longley Point the houses were large and hardly visible but for glimpses of glass and steel and timber, set back from the road behind freshly rendered brick fences and high, well-maintained hedges. The streets were wide and quiet. No sub-woofer hip-hop thuds emanated from cars; they glided by, black Saabs and four-wheel drives, silver Lexuses and Mercs. At the busy Vietnamese restaurant nearest Stephen's house in Norton the owners had a hairy little dog named Lexus, and at the end of the evenings when enough customers had gone they let it tear through the restaurant, leaping from chair to chair. Stephen didn't think the dogs in Longley Point were named after luxury cars. Here nobody screamed in the street to get someone's attention. Nobody wore clothes plastered with obscene images or threatening slogans. Stephen thought of the Lebanese boy on the bus. H
ARDEN THE FUCK UP
.

As he walked he peered through the doorway of the butcher in the small strip of Longley Point shops. It was one of only two shops selling food; the rest were spacious, wooden-floored showrooms with a small white table and a tower of bangles here, a rack of six shapeless shreds of dun-coloured women's clothing there, and a black wooden plate the size of a cartwheel on the floor. In those shops nothing cost under two hundred dollars.

In the butchery, a woman with a ponytail stood with her daughter before the cabinet of meat. A sign on the window declared everything free range or organic; the shop walls were plastered with laminated magazine articles showing photographs of pigs and lambs running free in lush green pastures. The butchery customers were well informed about their dinner's quality of life before they met it; they could congratulate themselves on their concern for every moment of the animal's existence. Except for the end, Stephen thought. The hanging upside-down electrocution, or the throat-slitting or neck-wringing or bolt to the head. There were no pictures of that.