Animal People (19 page)

Fiona was leaning back against the kitchen bench, one bare foot resting on the other, listening to Belinda, biting a corner of her lip the way she always did when amused. Stephen could tell she was gearing up for one of her mischievous challenges.

‘So I advised her, with her blood type,' Belinda was saying, ‘to start with the Cleansing Series Three.' She swept about the room in a long tiered skirt and layers of opaque clothing, pulling things from her oversized leather bag and distributing them on the table and the countertop, speaking all the while in her low, confiding voice.

‘Hi, Belinda,' said Stephen. As she turned Fiona grinned behind her, drawing hippy-dippy circles in the air.

Belinda was a pharmacist-turned-naturopath-entrepreneur, who owned a small but rapidly expanding chain of salons, Belinda Burton's Naturaceuticals Therapeutic Day Spas. She was also married to Mandy's ex-husband, a fact Stephen still found strange.

When Stephen's sister and Chris finally split, it was Chris everybody felt sorry for. He was the sensitive architect husband, who coped with Mandy's absences, with her curtness and anger and her strange war-reporter's life, without complaint. He had always met her decisions—including the one not to have children—with quiet, grieving acceptance. When the news of the breakup came the couple's friends immediately took Chris's side. If anyone should leave the marriage, it should have been him. Mandy's mother was among the devastated; she loved Chris, he seemed to love her. They were family. It wasn't only Stephen who suspected Chris was the son Margaret always really wanted.

But Chris and Mandy's graceful Harper Hill house would not stay empty for long. Available men of Chris's age and
calibre
, Stephen was told by more than one of his sisters' friends, were rare as hen's teeth. And then one evening Chris brought Belinda to a party where Stephen and Cathy were. He stood grasping her hand and gazing at her the whole night—an adoration she absorbed without surprise, for she was used to it. At the end of the party Chris, flush with drink and a new determination his former in-laws did not recognise, told Stephen and Cathy he was getting remarried.

Cathy went to the wedding. Stephen was invited but he made an excuse not to go. He knew Chris didn't really want him there; they had never been friends, as Chris and Cathy were. Stephen liked to think he also declined out of loyalty to his mother, who was still devastated and pointlessly hopeful that Mandy might see the error of her ways and beg Chris to allow her back.

Cathy reported that the wedding, for two atheists in their forties, was bizarre. It was in a Catholic church, because Belinda wanted sandstone in the photographs. She wore a skin-tight, floor-length white satin dress with a train. They had flower girls, for God's sake. Not Fiona's girls but a friend's daughters; pretty, long-haired ballet types
.
The reception had been at a yacht club and involved a string quartet.

Cathy told Stephen this over lunch at the zoo kiosk one day. She told him too, how now that Chris and Mandy's old friends had got to know Belinda they'd gone back to Mandy's side. They'd muttered it to Cathy at the reception: what could a nice guy like Chris possibly see in Belinda?

But the siblings were unsurprised, as they sat together chewing stale foccacia. ‘If I'd been married to Mandy I'd want someone easier too,' Cathy said, and Stephen nodded. He too could see the appeal—Chris no longer had a woman demanding he join her exhausting, endless challenge to the world. He could simply let go, live in a nice house, buy stuff and do what he was told. And with any luck she would be giving him a baby.

They sat at the metal table beneath the umbrella, recalling Chris's first wedding, to their sister all those years ago. The reception in the Rundle Corroboree Room, when Mandy had worn a second-hand hippie frock and the wine came from cardboard casks and the music from a portable CD player. But that was a long time ago, and the world had changed many times since then. Stephen had expected never to see Chris again.

Today Belinda wore multicoloured gemstone beads and bangles at her neck and wrists, her honey-blonde hair pulled back from her face into a chignon, held there with big fake flowers. (Stephen had once heard Cathy and Fiona deriding Belinda's clothes. They had a near-empty bottle of cheap champagne on the coffee table between them, and their conversation had a reckless air. ‘It's sort of
boho,'
Fiona said when he asked, as if this was an explanation, ‘which doesn't really suit her.' When he'd asked why not, Cathy said drily, ‘Because she's more ho than bo
,
' and Fiona snorted into her glass.)

Belinda had the gaunt, hunted look of magazine women. Her skin was evenly tanned—fake, Fiona said—and her long ponytail swung and shone. She had a small nose and a bony face on a long neck. She held her spine very straight. She did a lot of Pilates. She even took the one-year-old, Aleksander, to some kind of baby yoga class, where they played special music and pulled the babies' legs around.

Now Belinda glanced at him with her customary distaste. ‘Hello, Stephen,' she said, and turned back to Fiona.

Each one of Belinda's all-white shopfronts—counters, halogen-lit walls and shelving, all done out in glossy white plastic, though she called it
resin
—featured a massive backlit photograph of Belinda's face on one entire wall, with the printed Belinda Burton Naturaceuticals Pledge For Your Wellness and her flamboyant signature beneath. The Naturaceuticals product range—skin cleansers with vitamins in them, as far as Stephen could tell—was packaged in silver-and-white tubes and boxes, each banded with a small horizontal label in clean, pale green, printed with tiny black medical-looking text, giving the stuff a scientific yet ecological sort of feel.

Fiona's bathroom was full of Naturaceuticals samples given her by Belinda: shampoo, face cleanser, pore opener, eye hydrator. Fiona said all the claims were rubbish, but it smelt nice. She explained to Stephen that the shops, or
clinics
—Belinda hated it if you called them shops—provided various beauty-cum-health services: facials, ‘body wraps', waxing (Stephen flinched), as well as liver analysis, iridology and something called biorhythm interpretation. Behind the counter of every shop was a hyper-lit, locked glass case containing the Naturaceuticals Wellness Supplements and Detoxification Series. The women who worked in the centres were as narrow-faced and ponytailed and glossy-haired as Belinda. Fiona said they must have to undergo hair analysis before they got the job.

Belinda grew up in a caravan park in Easton, but moved to the wealthier suburbs as soon as she could make her escape. She studied pharmacy while working two jobs, but then abandoned it for natural therapy studies. She propelled herself out of the poverty she felt doomed to by sheer force of intellect and will. Chris told all this one night to Stephen after he began seeing Fiona, when the two men attempted to alleviate the awkwardness of their knotted relationship by going to the pub together and getting rat-arsed. It didn't work.

Stephen learned that Belinda was the only child of an alcoholic taxi driver and a downtrodden nursing home aide. The pair, now elderly, had retired to a broken-down farm with a yard full of rusting vehicles beyond the mountains outside the city. Despite their regular attempts to contact her, Belinda would have nothing to do with her parents: they were
toxic
, she told Stephen much later. Riddled with dysfunction. He'd murmured in sympathy, and Belinda had eyed him and added in a cool voice, ‘Most people can't recognise their own toxicity, of course.'

Toxicity and its banishment was like religion to Belinda. And it was her twaddle about toxins and metabolic wastes and chemical imbalances that most incensed Fiona. She left the energy healing and shamanism alone, but Fiona had excelled at chemistry and biology at school and was personally offended by linguistic abuses of her beloved facts. She had wanted to be a doctor until her father talked her out of it (she wouldn't be able to cope, he said, and tried to push her into nursing instead). She was still angry all these years later—as much with herself as her father, Stephen thought—at how she had capitulated into physiotherapy. Sometimes he wondered if it was the fact that Belinda had thrown away the chance to study pharmacy that fuelled Fiona's attacks on her mumbo-jumbo. And—very occasionally—he even felt a little sorry for odious Belinda, caught in the cold glare of Fiona's logic. Because Belinda would make no concession, even as Fiona demolished the ground she stood on with her direct, steady questions. Belinda's whole life depended on her faith in herbal hocus-pocus, and although Fiona was the only person who could rattle her, the faith remained unshaken.

Fiona knew she could be cruel, that Belinda was an easy target. (‘She said, “Of course the pelvis is the brain of the body,” and I said, “Um, Belinda, I think you'll find the
brain
is the brain of the body.”') And although she still occasionally rose to the bait, after the first few forays she mostly left her sister-in-law alone.

But watching her now across the kitchen, Stephen knew this was not one of those days.

‘So how does that work again, this detox thing?' Fiona asked mildly, turning to butter a stack of white bread triangles and press them into a bowl of hundreds-and-thousands.

Belinda eyed her. ‘It releases the toxins,' she said, after a pause. ‘By flushing them through the lymphatic system.'

‘Right,' said Fiona. ‘Just before we get to the lymphatic system, what are the toxins, specifically?'

‘Oh,' Belinda said, ‘just the accumulated waste materials which interfere with healing and metabolism.' Patiently, as though this was something everybody knew.

‘But which waste materials? What are they, exactly?' Fiona was smiling lightly, looking directly at Belinda now. Stephen wished she wouldn't. He could not be entertained by this today.

Belinda pressed her glossed lips together. She paused again, but she would not back down. ‘Well, as I said, the
lymphatic
system—' she began, but she was saved. The front doorbell rang, and Ella's and Larry's shouts echoed through the house. The two women made resolute smiles at each other as Fiona wiped her hands on a tea towel, rolling her eyes at Stephen as she passed him.

Belinda sighed—with relief, Stephen imagined—and began to unpack a cooler bag of organic dips and packets of organic rice crackers and organic tamari almonds on the bench. Stephen was suddenly starving. He had eaten nothing all day but the Icy Pole at work, and now a ravenous greed overcame him. He scrabbled in a plastic bowl that Fiona had set out for the kids, shoving a handful of bright yellow corn chips into his mouth. He felt Belinda's cold gaze on him as he chewed. She rezipped her cooler bag, folded it neatly away, snipped open the rice cracker packet with a pair of kitchen scissors and arranged them carefully on a plate, her movements deliberate, delicate.

‘So, Belinda,' Stephen said, pretending not to notice her contempt (why was it that so many women seemed so openly to despise him?). As he spoke he found he had not quite finished his mouthful, and a fine spray of yellow corn chip escaped from his lips. ‘Sorry,' he said, wiping his mouth. Belinda backed away from him with the pained face she often wore, which was possibly an attempt to smile. It was more of a wince.

Where was Chris? Stephen craned to look down the hallway. The girls and some other children clamoured out in the front yard. Then he remembered the fairy would be arriving, and he moved out of sight. He wondered if it was too early to go to the fridge and take out a beer. He had left a six-pack of Heineken here last time, he was certain. He hoped he had. He thirsted for it, wished to lick the cold green glass.

Chris arrived in the kitchen, thin and harried, pushing the enormous black stroller that Fiona privately referred to as the Hummer. Deep in the gloom of its cave lay fat, happy Aleksander.

The two men clenched awkward hands. Stephen was about to offer Chris a beer, but remembered Chris had given up alcohol. He was vegan now, too, like Belinda. Not to protect the rights of animals, like Georgia at the kiosk, but because Belinda declared that meat made you dwell in the past. She never drank alcohol, either. If she were ever offered a glass of wine she would smile and say, ‘No, thank you, I prefer not to poison my body.' Belinda talked often about self-respect, and watched what other people ate and drank with open revulsion. She was also prone to placing her palm flat across her chest and emphasising that she was a mother. She included this fact in almost everything she said. These days Fiona and Stephen had to look at the floor when Belinda said things like
As a mother, I'm concerned about the environment
, because it had become one of their favourite mean jokes. ‘As a mother, I need another drink,' Fiona would say. Or Stephen, lunging for the remote control: ‘As a mother, I need to watch the football.' ‘As a mother, I don't give a fuck about anyone but myself,' they crowed.