Animal People by Charlotte Wood Page B

pastel singlets and thick-heeled, rubber-soled sandals that were somehow sluttish and practical at once. There were two populations in Norton—this world, of fiercely sucking smokers outside shops and pizza-eaters over garbage bins, and then the others—the inner city vintage freelance crowd. These were gaunt men with scruffy hair and fastidiously shabby fashion sense, the kind who carried fat happy babies on their shoulders when they shopped, whose black and grey clothes looked old even when new, who worked from studios at home as architects or freelance lighting designers. The women of this crowd seemed to have given up caring how they looked, except for the fact they all looked the same. Stephen studied them in supermarket queues and listened to their conversations. They did Pilates and had blunt fringes, wore small rectangular glasses and Japanese-looking clothes so severely ugly you knew they were expensive. These were editors or radio producers or consultants who wrote policy on restorative justice. You heard them greeting each other in the mall; they rolled their eyes to cover the embarrassment of being discovered in the food court (they blamed their children); they always kissed each other hello. They called their work my project . They were the kind of people who didn’t like to be thought wealthy even if they were—this was an inner-city phenomenon, unlike the beachside suburbs or Longley Point where Fiona lived, where being thought wealthy was the aim of the game.
    The two populations of Norton were ghosts to one another as they brushed past each other in the streets, at the automatic teller or the supermarket queue, the air between them barely riffling.
    He drew alongside Foam City, where he’d bought Fiona’s yoga mat.
    Fiona loved yoga, she would sigh, almost every time she floated in the door after her Wednesday evening class. And she did seem different after these classes—the whirring energy in her was temporarily stilled, she moved more slowly, was less provoked by the bickering of the girls. Except last Wednesday, that was. When she had walked in and hurled her bag down on the couch, swearing. ‘Can you believe ,’ she raged pouring a huge glass of wine, ‘that this woman laughed at me!’
    The new teacher, it seemed, had urged Fiona to try a headstand.
    â€˜But I was scared of falling,’ she said. ‘So I just made this tiny hopeless little hop, instead of getting my legs right up, and then this woman next to me, flexible as hell, you know—spent half the class with her chin on the floor—she bursts out into this little snigger at me!’ Fiona gulped the wine. ‘But then I looked at her and I thought, well, you might be able to do a headstand but you’ve got a fat arse.’
    Stephen laughed out loud, but Fiona was actually, truly offended. She took a big swig from the glass again and swallowed, wiped her mouth with her hand, and then peered into the pot of gluggy pasta sauce Stephen had made for the girls.
    When she turned back she sighed, twisting the glass stem in her hands. ‘That wasn’t very yogic of me, was it,’ she said glumly. ‘But she was a bitch.’
    From the couch both girls turned eagerly at this, calling, ‘You said the B-word!’ They adored catching adults swearing.
    Stephen had sworn a lot when Fiona had tried to teach him yoga a few times, the two of them cross-legged on the living room floor, following the instructions of an American yoga teacher called Dawnelle on a DVD. He liked the lessons, but only so he could watch Fiona. He liked the careful way she laid out her little yoga things around her—a purple cushion, a wheat-filled eye bag, an ugly grey blanket—and then lay down with her eyes shut, an obedient rod, before the DVD began. She refused to fast-forward any of it, even the boring music at the start. Stephen found the poses impossible; his body wouldn’t accommodate