Animal People Read Free Page A

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.
    â€˜I have to get going, Mum,’ he said, dragging underpants up one wet leg.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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: