Animal People by Charlotte Wood Page A

fifteen bucks already, Savannah asked him: ‘Off to a shift then? Where do you work?’
    â€˜The zoo,’ he said.
    She blinked, looked him up and down.
    â€˜These aren’t chef’s pants,’ he said. ‘I’m not a chef.’
    He extended his hand but she drew back from him, shaking her dreadlocks slowly in disbelief. Then, before he even said goodbye, she leapt in front of a woman with a pram. ‘Does your little girl like animals, madam?’
    As the doors slid open a great draught of scorched air greeted him—how suffocating, how impossibly airless it was—along with the wheelchair man’s hoots of repugnant, vulgar laughter.
    Stephen was blooming with resentment about Savannah’s horrified glare, the money he had given her. He could not save the Big Issue woman today; there was only so much he could do. Already the weight of his guilt pressed down upon him like layers of earth. His mother loomed, with her humming secret. Fiona’s face flashed once, staring at him in the same disbelief as Savannah’s, before he brought a shutter down upon the image. The only way he could reach the end of this day was not to allow such visions. He could not.
    If only Stephen were braver, a better man, he would say something to the wheelchair man. But he passed them with his head down, his bag heavy and his jaw set with shame. And then he saw something strange. The Big Issue woman was laughing, and she put out a hand to touch the wheelchair man’s arm.
    Stephen didn’t understand it. She wasn’t trapped. She and the wheelchair man were having a whale of a time.

CHAPTER 2

    Cambridge Road was always a bottleneck in the mornings. He was a little late now. Usually he did not mind the slow start to the morning’s drive across the city. You could allow the traffic to carry you in a sort of reverie, crawling in a lulling forward roll, half a car length at a time, motor idling and your mind free to wander. But today he did not welcome the meanderings of his mind. He must stay composed. He peered out at the shops, watching the Norton morning coming alive.
    The Cat Protection Society op shop door hung open. Stephen supposed the shop was run by crazy old women, the kind who hoarded cats. Men were cruel to animals with kicks and blows, but it was women who starved them to death. Gathering them by the hundred, allowing their houses to fill with shit and piss, watching the creatures weaken, sicken, day by day.
    This was why he had to do what he must today. A single sharp blow was surely preferable to the misery of slow starvation. Fiona would see. He was being kind.
    The open door offered a glimpse inside the shop: a gloomy corridor between a rack of heavy wool coats and shelves of ugly handmade pottery. Stephen didn’t have to see further to know what else would be in there: shelves of books on microwave cookery, flesh-coloured Stable Tables, with their saggy, discoloured beanbag undersides, for bedridden invalids to rest their dinner plates on. The stippled tubs of ‘foot spas’ manufactured in grubby pale-blue plastic, as if the colour might somehow evoke the sea instead of the fungal dust of elderly strangers’ pumiced heels.
    Stephen saw the homeless man who sometimes crouched in a little nest of dirty blankets across the road from Stephen’s house. Tangle-haired, grizzled, he squatted now against the Cat Protection Society’s tiled wall, a filthy bag beside him.
    Stephen’s car rolled forward.
    A woman sat smoking on a plastic chair outside the hairdresser, in a lurid pink nylon cape and a cement-coloured helmet. Strands of plastered hair stood out from her head like electrodes as she squinted and sucked at her fag. She was one of Norton’s people, the people in tracksuits and logo-covered working clothes: the men with hard, chiselled calf muscles and lurid orange or green occupational health and safety vests, the women in tight black skirts and