Animal People Read Free

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.’
    â€˜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.
    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