Animal People (2 page)

Allen & Unwin
Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone:   (61 2) 8425 0100
Email:    [email protected]
Web:      
www.allenandunwin.com

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available
from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au

ISBN 978 1 74331 184 4

♣
quote from ‘Portrait of a Lady' reproduced with kind permission of Faber and Faber Limited from
Collected Poems 1909–1962
by TS Eliot.

Text design by Gayna Murphy
Set in 13.5/16 pt Mrs Eaves by Bookhouse, Sydney
Printed and bound in Australia by the SOS Print + Media Group

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For SEAN

And I must borrow every changing shape

To find expression . . . dance, dance

Like a dancing bear,

Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.

TS ELIOT, ‘Portrait of a Lady'

Whereas in animals fear is a response to signal,

in men it is endemic.

JOHN BERGER,
Why Look at Animals?

Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CHAPTER 1

Stephen stood naked in his living room. He shuffled through the mail on the table, laying this sorting of envelopes and catalogues over the sickly, complicated guilt that had greeted him on waking. It was too hot already, even at seven o'clock, even here in the dark house.

He looked again at the junk mail flyer.
STOLEN
: Have you Seen our Ferret?

It was the same as the poster sticky-taped to the telegraph pole between his house and the shopping centre. He had often seen the skinny owner walking the creature on a leash on his way to the centre. The man was tall and pale with a small, delicate face, a black felt trilby and a greasy grey ponytail hanging down his back. He always wore tight, faded black jeans and a leather jacket too small for him, riding high above his narrow hips and short in the sleeves, his long white wrists protruding. In one dangling hand the man held a thin leather leash, and at the end of it the ferret undulated, long and low. Sometimes the ferret clucked in a strange, high stutter as it wafted and rolled. When they reached the shopping centre, just before the automatic doors slid open, the man would bend himself in half, scoop up the ferret and slip it inside his shirt, before straightening and sloping off into the cavern of the Plaza. Each time Stephen saw this he imagined with revulsion the creature's horribly elastic body, its claws clicking against the man's studded belt buckle, its fluffed fur against his bony chest.

Why would anyone steal a ferret? But there were the words, handwritten in photocopied black felt pen.
Someone has Stolen our Pet Ferret ‘ANGEL' we miss her Dearly and want Her Back ‘Reward'.
A phone number, an email address and a patchily inked photograph of the ferret. Its peaky little face stared out at the camera.

Stephen thought again of the creature's fur against the man's chest, the fine filaments rising, breathable and dusty. His own eyes and throat itched, and he rubbed a spread hand upwards over his chest and neck.

In the shower, Stephen scrubbed himself hard all over with the loofah brush Fiona had left here on one of those early visits last year, when she'd got a babysitter to stay over in Longley Point with the girls. They'd eaten dinner at one of Norton's cheap Vietnamese restaurants, and then gone to a pub to hear a punk country and western band called Big Fat Country. There, full of new middle-aged lust, they drank beer and allowed their hands to roam over each other's bodies in the crowded, noisy dark.

Stephen could not afford to think of Fiona like this today, but the image came to him anyway from one of those nights, right here in the bathroom: holding her gently against the tiles, gripping her sturdy, muscular bum with both his hands, her urging breath in his ear, the steam.

No. Stephen drew back the shower curtain and tossed the loofah into the handbasin. But one last flicker of sensation came to him, her slippery skin and then in the bed afterwards, her cool, moist hands seizing his hair, the twisting sheets, and now he gave in, leaning with his forehead on the shining tiles, cupping and slicking himself soapily until he came.

He stood beneath the beating water, already defeated by the day ahead.

The phone rang as he passed through the living room. He lurched, dripping. At this hour it could only be Fiona or his mother. He waited a few rings, breathing evenly, before picking it up.

‘Hello, love,' said Margaret in a bright, innocuous voice. ‘I know it's early, I just wanted to catch you.' This last bit as if she understood he was busy, as if the call would be quick. Stephen knew it wouldn't.

He held a hand over his groin, surprised by his mother's voice into guilt about what he had just done. ‘Hi Mum,' he said, businesslike. Fiona said she could always tell when he was speaking to his mother by the guarded tightness in his voice. But if he relaxed the call would never end; best to pre-empt with a sense of urgency.

He pictured his mother in Rundle, standing in the hallway with the cordless phone, peering furtively out through the narrow pane of yellow frosted glass next to the front door, as she always did while speaking on the telephone. Or gazing at the floor, pointing her toe at the points of flower petals on the carpet, one by one, in a circular, unconscious ritual as she spoke. After their father died Stephen and his sisters insisted Margaret get a cordless phone so she could have one by the bed. But she plugged the charging unit into the same place as the old phone by the front door, and when she answered it she stood by the hall table as she had always done, as if still tethered there by the telephone cord. The only time the handset moved from the hall table was when Stephen or Cathy came to visit for a weekend and left it between the cushions of the couch or on the kitchen bench. The next time it rang Margaret would have to trot blindly through the house, listening, until she found it.

‘Now I've just been thinking about the
television
,' Margaret said, as if this were a new topic. Her voice was still carefully bright, but there was an anxious note in it that made Stephen close his eyes. Sometimes he had seen her preparing for difficult conversations by writing down what she had to say, nodding to herself, straightening her spine for courage before making the call. He felt a throb of guilt.

‘Right,' he said. In the past few weeks they had had at least four conversations about the television Margaret had her eye on. The Panasonic Viera 46-inch full-HD Digital Plasma. She was aghast in the first call when, after five minutes of her describing it he'd said, ‘Sounds good, Mum. Why don't you get it?'

‘It's too
expensive
!' she'd cried.

‘How much?'

Margaret said, as if he was trying to pull the wool over her eyes, ‘I know how much it is, don't you worry about that. It's ridiculous.'

He sighed. ‘It's your money, Mum. You should do what you want with it.'

‘It's
your father's
money,' Margaret said crisply. ‘Which is
your
money, and Cathy's, and Mandy's. I have no intention of frittering it away on
televisions.
' She sniffed. ‘That's what I said to Robert.'

Robert Bryson-Chan was the salesman at the giant new Good Guys electronics warehouse that had opened out on the highway, on the outskirts of Rundle. Stephen by now knew the life story of Robert Bryson-Chan, because Margaret had told it to him several times. He knew all about the salesman's parents, his engineering degree, his wife, his mortgage savings plan. His bloody tropical fish.

Stephen heard Margaret riffling pages. He knew the notebook she would be using, the one with little black-and-white cows printed all over the cover. On its blue-lined pages Robert Bryson-Chan had written the features of the Panasonic Viera 46-inch Plasma. Robert Bryson-Chan was clearly a patient young man; as Stephen heard the pages turn he felt a collegiate warmth towards him, in the way that two people sharing a queue with a garrulous bore might exchange sympathetic glances.

Margaret began—again—to read this list aloud. ‘Full HD—that's high-definition—Plasma Panel,' she recited. ‘Viera Image Viewer with SD card slot.'

A new thought occurred to Stephen: if she did get the television he could have her old one. It was big. He pulled the towel up into a tight short dress around his ribs and said, ‘Mum, I think you should get the television.'

‘One thousand and twenty-four times seven hundred and sixty-eight resolution,' Margaret said, as if he had not spoken. Now she had made it over the first hurdle of his conversational reluctance she showed an iron determination to press on.

Stephen pressed a fingertip onto a tiny opalescent shard on the tabletop and inspected it. It was either a bit of fingernail or a grain of rice. Rice, he decided, pressing the grain to his front teeth and nibbling as his mother went on about standby power consumption and energy ratings. He pulled a thread of fluff from his tongue. The tabletop was greasy, it really needed a clean. He swapped the phone to his other hand and pulled the towel from his waist, began wiping the table with it.