Animal People (3 page)

He surveyed the whole living room then with new, post-Fiona eyes. Over the past year, as he spent more and more time at her place on the other side of the city, this had become less his home and more a storage unit for his things. His
old
things, he saw now. Like the couch, a curved blob of Ikea foam covered in dusty black quilted cotton. The other things were mostly cast-offs from his sisters or from garage sales: the small square dining table with the rippling blonde-wood veneer and the three flimsy folding chairs; the low, angular ornamental bookcase where a few Dostoyevsky and Brett Easton Ellis and Camus novels were stuffed in between phone directories and takeaway menus. A corner of one of the girls' texta drawings poked from between the menus. He bent to draw it out while his mother talked, the phone held between his neck and shoulder. He rubbed dust away from the corner of the page and smoothed it out on the tabletop. It was one of Larry's mobile phone drawings: the white page empty but for a small line, at the bottom of the page, of lumpen purple oblongs covered in emphatic dots, a crumpled little aerial worming up from each phone. He should throw it away. He should throw all this stuff away. He folded the paper in half and half again, and pushed it back between the books.

His mother's voice washed over him as he appraised the rest of his living room. There was the nest of swirly-caramel laminated occasional tables that even his sister Cathy had not wanted; the single monumental green armchair with its frayed maroon piping. A lamp or two would help. Although it would mean another set of extension cords, snaking around the skirting boards to the single power point, where an outcrop of double adaptors already bulged from the wall.

It was one of the things that made Fiona's place so spaciously adult: electrical cords and power points were all invisible, built into walls.

Fiona had stayed over here a few times early on, but only a few. It was soon obvious that her place was
the
place; her large house by the water had soft, lavish couches and a fridge full of proper food—vegetables, and two types of milk, and cooked chicken legs under plastic wrap. Stephen's fridge held a block of cracked yellow cheese, an ancient container of leftover takeaway, two six-packs of beer and, for some reason, a heavy jar of flour. Fiona's place was full of matching crockery, fruit in bowls, glassware, framed paintings. It was part of the problem: her house was a monument to a marriage, even if it was long over.

Of course, at Fiona's there were also the girls.

His chest tightened at the thought of Ella and Larry. They visited his place occasionally, all of them arriving—with him—as a team, to pick up mail or for some other errand, on the way to somewhere else. Their visits here had the air of an outing, like going to the zoo or some hokey, familiar museum. While he unlocked the front door the girls would flip the heavy lid of the letterbox and pat the faded cement gnome's head, and Fiona would idly deadhead the few strands of yellowing, woody basil that poked from the front-yard weeds. Once inside, the girls would pelt up the hallway, through the kitchen and out the back door to the toilet in its little shed at the end of the yard, sitting on the huge white throne of it with the door open, gripping the sides of the seat and peering out. Or, they would race to the mantelpiece of op-shop curiosities they loved: the cast-iron figurine Fiona called the Racist Moneybox—a bust of Ella Fitzgerald with whorls of bulging iron hair and big red lips and a cupped monkey-hand on a lever, which fed coins into her mouth when you pressed it—or the smelly little animal-skin drum Stephen's sister Mandy had sent him from Afghanistan. The girls fought over the big green chair, clambering to end up both squashed in it, shrugged up together against its vast back cushion, their feet only just reaching past the sagging seat.

When they left his house they left as a foursome; the visits were quick and cursory and after those first few lustful weeks he could not remember Fiona ever sitting down in his house.

He decided to be glad of it now, as he looked around. This was his place. After a good clean-up—he had not noticed before how filthy the windows were—he would be glad to be here again, have his life back. He tested the phrase cautiously in his mind—yeah,
got my own life back.
It would sound right in a few weeks. When he got used to it.

His mother was still talking, and it was almost half-past seven. He went to the bedroom, looking round for clothes. He had to get a birthday present at the shops for Ella and then hit the road. The working day loomed, shadowy and life-sapping, with the deep fryer to be cleaned, the bloody teambuilding event. After that, Ella's party. And then—he forced it past in one sharp swipe—telling Fiona.

‘I have to get going, Mum,' he said, dragging underpants up one wet leg.

‘The trouble is,' said Margaret, ‘that the last time I went, because I wanted to check about the standby consumption, Robert wasn't there. It was his day off. There was just a girl with a pierced eyebrow, and
she
said the only thing really to be concerned about was inches for dollars.' She paused again, and when Stephen gave no reply she said, ‘But I don't think that's right.'

He glanced out of his bedroom window. Beyond the council workers unloading gardening gear from a ute, the checkout operators from the supermarket had begun to arrive for work. Pretty Greek and Indian girls in their ugly green uniforms, getting out of large cars driven by their boyfriends. The older, rough-voiced Australian women trudged in from the car park. Stephen knew them all, or at least their faces, and they knew his. But they never acknowledged one another across the black rubber belts of the supermarket counters.

He extracted a t-shirt from the dirty laundry pile and held it to his face to smell, before tossing it on the bed, smoothing with one hand and scanning it for stains. Not too bad.

‘Anyhow, what she
did
say was they have a special offer.' Margaret brandished this sentence, showing she did have something new to report. Before he could answer she said, with practised relish: ‘A bonus Wii.'

‘Mum, I have to get to work,' he said.

His mother sighed in exasperation. ‘Do you know what a
Wii
is, Stephen?'

‘Not really.'

‘Well it's a game, that you play on the television, and you can get fit. I think it would be very good for me. The doctor said I need to exercise, especially now.' She sighed again. ‘I sent you a
link
about it. Did you even get it? You never reply.'

‘My computer's broken,' he lied, glancing at the dusty laptop propped open on the chest of drawers. He had not turned it on for months.

‘What's wrong with it?' she demanded, suspicious. ‘Mine's never had a problem.'

Margaret loved her laptop. At the kitchen table in Rundle she sat before the sleek black machine, a floral cloth on the table, the sun at her back. She would have unzipped it from the padded black computer backpack to which she religiously returned it whenever it was not in use. The optimistic tilt of her chin, the way she adjusted her glasses with her fingers up to her face like blinkers whenever she peered down the screen. All this—the packing and unpacking of the computer four times a day, the careful way she would read and make sure she understood every irritating menu that popped into life on the screen—was both poignant and exasperating. Stephen was unnerved by her growing command of technology.

Before his father died the old cement-coloured monitor and keyboard in his ‘office'—Stephen's old bedroom—were foreign objects to Margaret. The computer was Geoff's particular shrine, untouched by Margaret except occasionally with a brush on the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner. It was as inanimate to her as a cricket bat, only coming alive when Geoff sat before it, stabbing at the keyboard with two fingers and scowling at the screen with the suppressed rage he felt whenever he didn't understand something.

But after he died, Stephen and his sisters bought their mother the laptop, and Cathy set her up with email and Skype accounts, and Margaret went to an Introduction to the Internet course for Seniors at the local library. Where she was astonished to find that the use of technology came to her intuitively, with ease and pleasure. Now she sent Stephen emails by the dozen, and carried her mobile phone everywhere. She used acronyms in conversation—
Did you get my SMS? I sent you the URL!
—and appeared most of all to enjoy being part of a new era which had left her friends behind. Even the men
,
she would say smugly, could barely switch a computer on. If Stephen or Cathy visited Rundle their mother would insist on Skyping Mandy, who would wave at them from the screen and then weave her laptop around the room so they were transported—vertiginously, miraculously—into the hotel room in Kabul or Baghdad or Islamabad.

Cathy had told Stephen their mother was even thinking of starting a
blog
. It would be called Margaret's Musings, he supposed. Or Rundle Ruminations.

Down the phone line her voice took on a quick, sly tone: ‘I could ask Robert about your laptop,' she said. ‘You could bring it when you come, and he could have a look at it!'

Fuck.

Margaret was silent for a second. When Stephen did not reply she said evenly, ‘You are coming next weekend,
and
'—adding this emphatically, as if saying would make it true—‘bringing Fiona-and-the-children. You
are
, Stephen.' Warning, plaintive.

Stephen lay back across his bed. He stared at the ceiling. He had forgotten. This, not the television, was the reason for his mother's call. This was what lay beneath the planned brightness in her voice, the prattling on about Robert Bryson-Chan. It was a circuitous, duplicitous stroll, leading him into this ambush.

Next weekend would have been his father's birthday. And now, inexplicably, four years after Geoff's death, Margaret was giving a birthday party. For her dead husband, in Rundle. Mandy, of course, was out of the country (he sent out another spiral of resentment towards her for this), and so Cathy and her new boyfriend Dave, and Stephen and Fiona and the girls—whom Margaret had assiduously tried to fashion mentally into her own grandchildren, despite the fact they didn't know her name and wouldn't recognise her in a photograph—must be there.

It was months ago that Cathy bailed Stephen up about this. She had cornered him, and he had agreed. She made him promise. But everything had changed. Cathy didn't know; nobody but he knew that after today there wouldn't be any Fiona-and-the-girls to bring.

He felt a panicked flare of fury towards his mother. He could imagine the invitation list, the dwindling set of his mother's small-town friends boasting of their grandchildren and sons-and-daughters-in-law. He saw his mother's urgent logic: she must work quickly, this state of affairs could only last so long before Stephen ruined it by losing another girlfriend. He was In A Relationship—it was an endangered condition, must be captured, preserved.

But it was too late.

‘We'll see, Mum,' he said, closing his eyes. ‘I don't know though, actually. I don't know if we can make it after all.'

‘Oh, Stephen!' Margaret cried. ‘I
emailed
you, and
texted,
and you promised Cathy, you said you
would
!'

He didn't say anything. He heard her breathing.

‘I don't think I have ever asked you for very much,' she said in a small voice.

Oh, there it was. A final push of mutiny rose in him. He stood and looked around for his shoes.

‘I think you should buy the television,' he said flatly.

She was silent. Was she crying? He strained to listen. In the long moment of her silence he heard the disappointment he had always been to her, and the vain effort she had always made to hide it. His resolve faltered.

‘I'll let you know,' he muttered. ‘Fiona can't make it but I might be able to sort something out.'

She would know he was lying.

‘Okay?' he said, more gently. More silence. Well, fuck her then. He said curtly, ‘I have to go to work.'

Margaret spoke at last, haughty and wounded. ‘Well. Thank you
very much,
Stephen.'

Sarcasm did not come naturally to her; her bald attempt at it clutched at him. He began to speak but Margaret interrupted, quite coldly now, that she had the tennis newsletter to do and—with emphasis—she didn't want to
hold him up
. She hung up.

Stephen punched the telephone handset into the bedclothes and lay back again, groaning
fuck
and
shit
. He hated this obnoxious need of his mother's for him to be improved, her years of cautious hinting that he could do better if he only tried. Her phases of sending him job advertisements cut out from the newspaper had evolved, of course, into sending him
links.

‘You've got a lovely mind,' she wrote in one email a year ago. ‘We just wish you would use it.' We
,
as if she was still talking about his father. Who else was meant by
we?
It was insulting. He replied with four words.
I use my mind
.

But then, almost as soon as Stephen began seeing Fiona—even despite the strained familial complications—it seemed Margaret had decided this fact was achievement enough. She had adjusted her expectations of him so far downward over the years that even Fiona's children by another man could somehow be counted as an accomplishment of Stephen's. Margaret showed photographs of Ella and Larry to her friends—Stephen winced in shame and pity—as if they were her own grandchildren.

He sat up, and now turned his blame to Cathy. She had, without protest, accepted their mother's pretences about the stupid fucking party. She knew it was nothing to do with their father, that it was simply for Margaret to show off to her friends—and she had talked him into it too. Cathy probably
wanted
to parade her boyfriend in front of the geriatric Rundle crowd. She was as pathetic as their mother.