Animal People Read Free Page B

‘A bonus Wii.’
    â€˜Mum, I have to get to work,’ he said.
    His mother sighed in exasperation. ‘Do you know what a Wii is, Stephen?’
    â€˜Not really.’
    â€˜Well it’s a game, that you play on the television, and you can get fit. I think it would be very good for me. The doctor said I need to exercise, especially now.’ She sighed again. ‘I sent you a link about it. Did you even get it? You never reply.’
    â€˜My computer’s broken,’ he lied, glancing at the dusty laptop propped open on the chest of drawers. He had not turned it on for months.
    â€˜What’s wrong with it?’ she demanded, suspicious. ‘Mine’s never had a problem.’
    Margaret loved her laptop. At the kitchen table in Rundle she sat before the sleek black machine, a floral cloth on the table, the sun at her back. She would have unzipped it from the padded black computer backpack to which she religiously returned it whenever it was not in use. The optimistic tilt of her chin, the way she adjusted her glasses with her fingers up to her face like blinkers whenever she peered down the screen. All this—the packing and unpacking of the computer four times a day, the careful way she would read and make sure she understood every irritating menu that popped into life on the screen—was both poignant and exasperating. Stephen was unnerved by her growing command of technology.
    Before his father died the old cement-coloured monitor and keyboard in his ‘office’—Stephen’s old bedroom—were foreign objects to Margaret. The computer was Geoff’s particular shrine, untouched by Margaret except occasionally with a brush on the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner. It was as inanimate to her as a cricket bat, only coming alive when Geoff sat before it, stabbing at the keyboard with two fingers and scowling at the screen with the suppressed rage he felt whenever he didn’t understand something.
    But after he died, Stephen and his sisters bought their mother the laptop, and Cathy set her up with email and Skype accounts, and Margaret went to an Introduction to the Internet course for Seniors at the local library. Where she was astonished to find that the use of technology came to her intuitively, with ease and pleasure. Now she sent Stephen emails by the dozen, and carried her mobile phone everywhere. She used acronyms in conversation— Did you get my SMS? I sent you the URL! —and appeared most of all to enjoy being part of a new era which had left her friends behind. Even the men , she would say smugly, could barely switch a computer on. If Stephen or Cathy visited Rundle their mother would insist on Skyping Mandy, who would wave at them from the screen and then weave her laptop around the room so they were transported—vertiginously, miraculously—into the hotel room in Kabul or Baghdad or Islamabad.
    Cathy had told Stephen their mother was even thinking of starting a blog . It would be called Margaret’s Musings, he supposed. Or Rundle Ruminations.
    Down the phone line her voice took on a quick, sly tone: ‘I could ask Robert about your laptop,’ she said. ‘You could bring it when you come, and he could have a look at it!’
    Fuck.
    Margaret was silent for a second. When Stephen did not reply she said evenly, ‘You are coming next weekend, and ’—adding this emphatically, as if saying would make it true—‘bringing Fiona-and-the-children. You are , Stephen.’ Warning, plaintive.
    Stephen lay back across his bed. He stared at the ceiling. He had forgotten. This, not the television, was the reason for his mother’s call. This was what lay beneath the planned brightness in her voice, the prattling on about Robert Bryson-Chan. It was a circuitous, duplicitous stroll, leading him into this ambush.
    Next weekend would have been his father’s birthday. And now, inexplicably, four years after