Animal People (9 page)

When they reached the other side he shrieked at her: ‘What are you fucking trying to do!' but she ignored him, steering toward the tinted door. He rushed to shove it open before she could use her damaged arm. The door closed behind them with a sucking thud, and they stood, clutching one another, sealed in the muggy silence of a tinted glass chamber. In front was another brown tinted glass door and beyond that, an empty waiting room. The girl cried out ‘Pam!' and there was a loud buzz and they burst into the waiting room.

There were chairs, magazines, but no people. Stephen was lost. He stared at the girl, and then heard a woman say, ‘G'day, Skye.' He whirled to see a high counter like a bank teller's, and more glass panels. Behind the counter an older woman gave him a brief, businesslike nod. Relief surged through him; here was someone older, someone medical and parental and sane.

‘She needs a doctor!'

In the silence of the room, his shouted panic sounded foolish. The girl had lifted her weight from his arm and was standing unsupported. She had stopped making any noise at all. The girl—called Skye—now stood impossibly straight, her broken arm hanging almost naturally, and she called to the woman, ‘I'm fine, Pam, I just need me dose.' Her grizzling and panting gone, her voice deliberately low, the only sign of her earlier agony a tense frown, her mouth held open, tongue running across her lower lip over and over in a rhythmic distraction from her pain.

Stephen began to yelp and babble. ‘But she got hit by a car.
My
car. I hit her! She needs a
doctor.'

Pam looked on doubtfully. She said to Stephen, ‘Was she hurt?'

He shouted, ‘She landed on her
head
,' but at the same time Skye's voice descended, calm and steely, over his: ‘I'm fine, Pam, I just need me dose, please.'

‘It's okay,' Pam said to Stephen. ‘You can go.'

‘But she needs a
doctor.
' He sounded hysterical.

Skye spoke in a fierce, threatening murmur: ‘I'm fine, Pam, please. Me dose, please
.'
She didn't look at Stephen. He was of no use to her.

He wheeled round to Pam, begging. ‘Please, she's got a smashed
head.
'

But Pam was already pushing a small paper cup across the counter to Skye. She looked up at Stephen and said, more kindly now, ‘It's okay. You can go.'

Defeated, he found himself scribbling his phone number on the back of a supermarket docket. ‘I have to go to work. But if you need to get in touch with me,' he said, his voice small. He held it out to Skye, who ignored him, reaching for the cup. The buzzer sounded again. Pam looked at him expectantly. He understood the buzzer was for the door. He put the paper with his number on the counter in front of Skye, and turned to go back out the way he came. The two women chorused, ‘Other way,' and Pam pointed toward a new glass door across the room. The buzzing swelled and filled the space. He took one last look at Skye, now small in the big room, tipping the cup back as she drank. She did not look at him. And in an instant he was through the door and it fell heavily shut behind him and he was bumped outside again, onto Queen Street and the gritty summer humidity of Norton. He turned to look behind him but the methadone clinic was sealed off, hidden by thick mirrored glass, and all he could see was himself: stricken, sweaty, middle aged, gaunt in the face with thinning hair. He saw the stretched red t-shirt, the sludge of flesh hanging over the waistband of the stupid chequered black-and-white pants. The dirty sneakers.

He stood, wondering what to do. Here on Norton's main street the only sounds were the weekday traffic, an ascending plane, and the clumsy three-chord strumming and off-key Elvis crooning of a homeless man busking outside the 7-Eleven.

Stephen's phone rang.

He looked at the thing in his hand. Here, from the distant universe of her Longley Point life, was Fiona. His whole body was swamped with relief. He wanted the capable nearness of her, his ally. He wanted to tell her everything: about the accident, his mother, about his dread of hurting her this afternoon. His feet burned in his sneakers.

‘Hi,' he said tenderly into the phone. He clutched it in both hands, as if it might fly away, or fall.

But Fiona's voice was tense. ‘It's me,' she said. ‘Listen, what's wrong with your mother?'

He heard Larry in the background, yelling,
Pissoff! Pissoff
! ‘Larry!' Fiona shouted away from the phone.

‘What do you mean what's wrong with her?' Stephen asked, the tremor in his guts growing stronger. The white pavement was smudged with small grey discs of old grease and chewing gum. He wanted to lie down upon it, right now, and sleep.

‘She just called me,' Fiona said irritably. ‘She asked whether we were coming up next weekend and I said as far as I knew, yes. She sounded weird. Why is she calling me about it? She's your mother.'

Stephen for the first time fully understood the word ‘dumbstruck'. It was intelligence, and words, that were struck away.

‘I don't know,' was all he said.

Pissoff bumhead
, shouted Larry. It's a mistake, he wanted to say. I don't want to leave you. I don't know why I'm going to.

He said: ‘What's Larry yelling at?'

‘The little boy from next door. Aidan. Hang on.
Larry!
'

There was a pause while Fiona covered the phone and shouted at her daughter. Stephen tried to think of something to say.

‘I didn't know you wanted to go,' he said, trying to make his voice normal. He was so tired, and so, so
hot
.

Fiona sighed, as if Stephen was another of her children. ‘Look, all I know is it's on the calendar. Cathy asked us ages ago, remember? Your dad's birthday thing.'

‘I didn't think you would want to go.'

‘What? Why?' Fiona said, her annoyance rising a little. ‘But anyway, why's your mum calling me and not you about this? I'm supposed to organise your whole life as well as my own because I'm a girl, I suppose?'

‘No!' This unfairness stung him.

‘Well why then?'

He was trapped. He looked at the footpath and his trainers. He could smell his feet. He wondered if other people could smell him, if dishonesty seeped from your skin, like those cancer smells that dogs could detect. They licked at patches on legs or arms, in places where tumours sprouted into being beneath the skin. He could say, I don't know what's happening to me. Or, I saw some animals, tortured. He saw Skye's pallor, her broken head.

‘I just ran over somebody,' he said, his voice going into a high whisper. ‘In the car.'

‘
What?
' Fiona's irritation vanished. ‘Oh, Stephen! Are you okay?'

‘I just left her at a doctor's. But she landed on her
head
.'

He was tearful, grew more so with Fiona's sympathy. She said ‘Oh,
honey
,' said
poor thing,
and he wished she were here now with her long arms about his neck, the soothing strength of her fingers over his shoulders. Whatever had to be done, all he wanted in this moment was her touch. At the thought of it he had to stop himself from letting out a sob, from telling her everything.

She had once told him that as soon as you placed your hands upon a stranger, they began to talk. Everybody found it so, she said: hairdressers, nurses, nuns. It was dangerously easy to give in: human defences dissolved at another person's touch.

A man in a tightly wound black turban stood on the pavement at the corner, waiting for the lights to change. From each of his hands hung a heavy plastic shopping bag, and he had a bus ticket stuck between his teeth. He tapped his foot, looking up the street towards an approaching bus.

At last Stephen said, ‘I got Ella a ticket to the circus.'

‘Did you,' Fiona said, deciding not to demur, demanding nothing from him. Having mercy. These old-fashioned words came to him. Clemency. Honour. Who was he to disavow such things?

Disavow
? He was going mad. This must be shock. The bus loomed; the Sikh man tilted to cross the road. Stephen let out a long breath and gathered himself. He would leave the car, catch the bus. He would regain control of this day, get a grip. He would do what must be done.

Fiona began to speak, but Stephen knew he must stop this. He hardened his voice. ‘I have to go.'

He pushed the phone into his pocket, hurried across the road with the Sikh man and climbed on to the bus. He found an empty double seat towards the back and slid into it, rested his head against the window.

As the bus filled with people he saw a black-and-white dog tied by its lead to one of the bus shelter's supporting posts. Nobody seemed to own the dog. It sat, feet and tail neatly tucked away, mouth open and tongue hanging in the heat, patiently waiting. Stephen's hands rested in his lap, astonishingly still. A ghostly body was there inside his own, quaking and shivering, but outwardly his hands did not tremble. He was in shock. He had run over someone and it was not his fault. Or it was his fault, and she would die. Hit and run. Is this what they meant? He had hit someone, and now he was running.

Just below his eye level, taped to the bus-shelter's pole, was a flyer (the city was full of flyers—nobody knew anybody; if you wanted human contact you had to put a sign up in the street and summon strangers). This one was for the Norton Laughing Club. Stephen almost burst into scornful laughter himself as he read:
Need some chuckles in your life? Come join us each Friday, Dunmore Park.
There was a phone number to call. Stephen had heard of this: people stood round in a circle, practising different kinds of laughing. In public. Who were these sad fuckers who needed to go to a club once a week to manufacture laughter? It was the most depressing thing he had ever heard.

The bus moved off, and the tethered dog looked at the ground, waited in the grimy heat. It thought whoever had abandoned it was coming back.

In front of Stephen sat a muscle-bound young man who might be Lebanese, the curls of his hair shaved away on both sides of his head, turning the squared-off crown into a thick black mat. Across the back of the boy's black t-shirt was printed
HARDEN THE FUCK UP
in white military-style stencilled capitals. The squared head and rounded shoulders made Stephen think of the hippopotamus at the zoo. People thought hippos were cute, until they saw one. He imagined the boy's aggressive round nostrils, the small malevolent eyes, the gleaming flesh of his face. An old man sat beside the boy and Stephen could see hair coming from his ears beneath the band of a bright yellow baseball cap embroidered with
Snoop Dogg
in black graffiti-style lettering. It passed through Stephen's mind to wonder if his own father had had ear-hair like that before he died. He hoped not. The baseball cap was embarrassing, but Stephen was too overcome to care. The air in the bus was stifling, despite the rattle of the air-conditioning. He felt sweat between his shoulder-blades; he leaned his head against the window and half-closed his eyes.

The Sikh man sat at the very front of the bus, on the seat where you were supposed to let old people sit. Stephen tried not to watch old people getting on at each stop, and their dithering. He could not bear the tension, waiting to see if they would find a seat before the bus took off. Each one, once they reached their seat, had an expression of triumph. But nowadays the bus driver had to watch them in his mirrors like a hawk. The drivers were not allowed to take off until all the oldies had sat down, ever since an old woman died when her head slammed into the floor of the aisle. But the old people seemed never to realise this, and would stand in the aisle, looking up and down the empty seats as if choosing something from a supermarket shelf, not understanding—or not caring—that the bus wouldn't move until they sat down. It usually infuriated him, but not today. He no longer cared how late he was. He was simply glad to sit, be transported by forces beyond his control. He stared out of the spotted, grimy window and saw the junkie girl flying through the air again, plummeting, smacking her skull—narrow, bony as a sheep's—on the bitumen. He felt a surging tide of nausea again. He should ring the clinic. He had left his number, but he doubted she would call him.

At Clare Street a woman got on, dressed in spotless white: tight white jeans, white t-shirt with a picture of what looked like a peacock picked out in sequins. White boots. Her long ringleted hair, a dull, tired red, reached to her shoulders. When she turned, Stephen saw with a shock of embarrassment that she was old, must be at least seventy, beneath all the tight white clothes and make-up. She had a pink mobile telephone hanging from a patterned lanyard around her slouchy neck. Then he saw that the design on the lanyard was the repeated blob of the Sydney Olympics 2000 logo. The woman had kept the lanyard all this time. Probably she was a volunteer, one of that brigade of happy folk in brightly patterned short-sleeved shirts and their unblemished Akubra hats, pointing and ushering. Wearing their uniforms in the streets months after the games were over. Maybe the mobile phone cord was the only thing tying the woman in white to her glorious two weeks as an Olympic volunteer, standing beside a roped-off area, smiling fit to burst, motioning with her hands.