Animal People (21 page)

Belinda said, ‘You look nice, Jeanette.'

‘Oh! The blouse is Country Road,' Jeanette said, pointing a skinny forefinger at her bosom and then, looking to the ceiling so as not to be distracted, began counting off the rest of her outfit on her fingers: ‘The pant is from Sportscraft, and—' frowning down through the lattice of her fingers at her shoes, ‘Oh! Esprit! Just cheapies, but I thought they were fun!' And she lifted a heel coquettishly, then giggled and gave her pillowy blonde hair a little shake.

Pat rummaged among the bags with his great hands, while Jeanette turned back to the bench, and stood up on her tiptoes to reach for coffee cups in the cupboard above his head. Maureen stood, hands empty by her sides, her boiled-vegetable-coloured dress drooping to her sandalled feet.

Stephen felt sorry for Maureen but his intent was focused on a gradual, casual move toward the fridge and a beer. Now he was there, his hand on the door, he noticed for the first time in months a drawing of Ella's among the notes and papers and drawings. It was from way back at the start of the year, and the photocopied lettering at the top said
My Aussie Mum.
Beneath that was Ella's awkwardly composed picture of a fat round woman in a flowered dress. In the teacher's neat hand in purple texta below the picture were the dictated words:
My Aussie Mum. She wears skirts. She wears dresses. She has brown hair.
The evening of the day she brought it home, Fiona and Stephen had passed the picture back and forth to one another and laughed till they wiped tears away. Australia Day had a lot to answer for. Fiona rarely wore anything but jeans.

Now Stephen stared at the picture, remembering how pleased he had been that there was no accompanying
My Aussie Dad
.

Why had he never had children of his own? Here in the kitchen, for the first time in his life, the question came to him, bald and shocking.

He glanced into the living room for Fiona, but she was not there. He opened the fridge and reached in for a bottle of Heineken.

He could see down the length of the hallway and out into the bright front yard from here. Fiona was at the gate, calling to the kids that the fairy was arriving. The house filled with a dozen ear-splitting screams and the girls came galloping through the kitchen once more. Joshua squealed along with the rest of them, but seemed not to know what it was he squealed about. From the living room
ABBA
's ‘Waterloo' exploded.

Stephen looked at the clock. It was four-thirty.

‘Like a beer, Pat?' called Stephen over the noise, as indifferently as possible, sliding a bottle along the bench. ‘What about you, Maureen? Glass of wine? Beer?'

Maureen looked down at the cup in her hand and then at Jeanette.

‘She's got a cuppa
tea
,' said Jeanette witheringly.

Pat shook his head in agreement at Stephen's stupidity, but he took the beer anyway and turned back to showing Chris his mobile phone. ‘And look at this. Compass.'

Then Jeanette cried suddenly, ‘All my life I've wanted a life-sized Alice chess set!' The others turned to look at her.

‘For Pete's sake,' growled Pat, and sniffed a long, liquid snort. Stephen, watching Pat's laboured swallow of what had gathered in his throat, felt nauseous. He took a large swig from his beer, and for a moment was gloriously lost in the draught of it, the deliciously cold pins of it over his tongue, all down his throat. He put the bottle to his forehead. He saw that Aleksander had got up again and, unobserved by the others, was stepping unsteadily toward the living room door.

Jeanette ignored her husband, looking down at her splayed fingers, smiling slyly. ‘I don't need your permission,' she sang gaily to her rings, and then beamed around the room, finally resting her triumphant gaze upon the toaster.

‘Your mother's got a pretty face but she can be a silly bitch,' Pat said to Chris.

‘Dad,' said Chris.

Stephen watched Aleksander's progress toward freedom. As the baby reached the door, he spied a peanut-half on the floor. With sudden speed and agility he dropped to all fours, plucked the peanut up, pushed it into his right ear and crawled off into the living room. Stephen suppressed an urge to cheer.

Pat ignored his son and locked eyes with Belinda. ‘Sorry, love. But the woman's got no idea. I've told her that.'

Belinda only winced, still dabbing at her cheekbone with the ointment.

‘They make the chess sets in Germany,' Jeanette said to Maureen, who nodded vigorously, terrified by the looming argument. Jeanette began smoothing her trousers and said with pride, ‘Danka found out for me.'

Danka was Jeanette's boss in the expensive bed-linen store in the Peppermint Beach Village shopping strip where she worked one day a week. The shop was called Blue Duck Green, or White Bird Blue, or some other name to do with birds and unrelated to bed linen. Jeanette and Danka's shared passions included mohair throws and Nigella Lawson. Jeanette did not need to work but loved going to the shop, which she called Duckys or Bluey or Birdy. She had baby nicknames for everything. Her red Audi was called Ruby. I'm just taking Ruby for a run down to Peppy.

Jeanette said proudly that Danka had found the chess set on a website. Pat stood by shaking his head, arms folded. The internet had changed everything for Jeanette, as it had for Stephen's mother. There was nothing these women could not do now. If they didn't know something, they found a chat site and asked someone. If they wanted to buy a wig or a giant chess set or a Wii Fit or a trip to Santiago de Compostela, off they went. This was what sent Pat rigid with fury. Having prided himself on always telling people his wife could have whatever she wanted, now that she could actually
get
whatever she wanted under her own steam, he was a tyrant deposed.

Stephen's own father would have greeted Margaret's technological love affair with alarm, too. If his father had lived she wouldn't have had a chance at it. But it wasn't just the internet for Margaret—she didn't even have a credit card until he died. Jeanette, on the other hand, had always been canny with a credit card, and now she had the job with computer access at Danka's, the world of internet shopping was her oyster.

‘She doesn't even know how to play chess!' Pat shouted, braying one of his nastier laughs. He shook his head slowly at Belinda to make her agree with him: ‘Chess set. For
outside
. Jesus bloody wept.'

‘It's already ordered!' Jeanette's eyes shone at Stephen, but then she remembered he was irrelevant so—seeing Belinda was already taken—she turned to engage Maureen in the wonders of the chess set's workmanship.

‘It's available stained or
beautifully hand-painted
—I chose hand-painted, in blue and red,' she said. ‘The pieces are all hand-carved, easy to lift. The queen is Alice, the bishops are Mad Hatters and the pawns are White Rabbits.'

She turned to stare out through Fiona's glass doors, perhaps imagining the chess pieces out there on the terrace.

Pat said to Belinda, ‘I dunno where the bloody hell she thinks it's gunna go.' Jeanette might have won the battle but the war was far from over.

Jeanette whirled around to Belinda. ‘By the pool! I told him! There's plenty of room by the pool!'

‘Ha! It's not even
level
down there. I told her! I said, go for your life! Your bloody White Rabbits can all roll down the bank!'

Pat was enjoying himself now, chuckling at Maureen who stood there, silent and moist-eyed. She looked very tired. She was sallow and flat-chested in her sad, boring dress with the gaping armholes. Nobody had offered her a seat and she was too timid to take one.

‘Why don't you take a load off, Maureen,' Stephen said, gesturing to the bench at the bay window. She almost smiled at him, and then backed away to the seat.

Chris came to stand beside Stephen. Quietly so Belinda could not hear he said, ‘So you're heading up to Rundle next weekend? Say hi to your mum for me.'

He said it casually, but Stephen's heart lurched in his chest. How could Chris know about this? And why would he bring it up now?

‘Um, yeah, well I don't know if that's still on, actually,' he murmured.

But Chris looked surprised. ‘Oh I thought it was. I spoke to Cathy earlier,' he said.

A new wave of heat flushed horribly through Stephen's body. He felt a trickle of sweat creeping deep into his ear. Did Chris know? When did he talk to Cathy?

Was he pretending surprise, had she told him—surely not—about Fiona?

‘Right,' he said. He could not meet Chris's eye again.

Belinda called to Chris then, pointing at the stroller. She wanted it put away.

Stephen seized the moment, took his beer into the living room. The children had disappeared out to the garden with the fairy, and he stood in the blissful, carpeted silence. Children's things were strewn everywhere: a sparkling gumboot, two pairs of wings, a striped pair of damp knickers that someone had discarded, a red hairclip, a half-eaten piece of iced donut.

Aleksander stood beneath the window, gripping another bookshelf with one hand and peaceably pulling tissues from a box with the other. They rose in a soft white cloud at his feet. Stephen sat down cross-legged beside him, put his beer on the shelf and pulled the baby gently into his lap, tipping him sideways until the peanut fell out. Aleksander gave him a puzzled look, but didn't protest. Stephen smelt his head and kissed it before propping the baby back up at the bookshelf. ‘All yours, buddy,' he said, standing him before the tissue box. Aleksander frowned, and returned to his work.

Stephen stood up, sucked again at the beer bottle. He felt lightheaded from standing too suddenly, or the beer, or the heat. Or guilt. He put out his hand on the window-sill to steady himself.

Outside, Larry and two of the little girls squatted in their fairy clothes before the drooping leaves of a shrub. In the gloom beneath the canopy Stephen could see the dim white face of Fluffy, the rabbit. Larry thrust her arm into the darkness and hauled the scrabbling creature out into her lap; the girls squealed with disgusted delight. But then the rabbit convulsed and wrenched free, and darted back beneath the bush, too far for Larry to reach. ‘Good for you, bunny,' Stephen whispered. Stay there, and don't come out.

At the front door he heard a heavy step, and Richard's voice.

CHAPTER 5

‘So who organised the lesbian?'

Belinda snickered into her mineral water as Richard bent to kiss her hello. As he straightened, she clasped his forearm to inspect his watch.

‘Is that the new Panerai?'

Richard nodded, and shook his wrist. Belinda called, ‘Chris, you should get a Panerai. They're top of the line.' She gave Richard, a wide, appreciative smile. They didn't take their eyes off each other.

From several paces away the watch looked just like Stephen's father's old one from the fifties. He supposed that was the point. He supposed it cost a million dollars. Belinda never even smiled at Chris the way she did now at Richard, but then Chris probably didn't know what a Panerai was any more than Stephen did. Richard and Belinda should get a room. A schoolboy's snigger bubbled up inside him.

Richard surveyed the room from his great height, nodding at Maureen before striding across the floor to greet Jeanette and Pat with the same warmth he had Belinda. He ignored Stephen altogether. Stephen pretended not to notice, and drained his beer. He wanted another one, right now.

Jeanette tittered. ‘Richard! That's not very kind! She's not a lesbian, she's a fairy.'

Pat roared from the corner at his wife's unintentional gag. Jeanette giggled again and batted Pat's silliness away with her hand. ‘I mean her
daughter
is a fairy, but she's got gastro. That one's an ambulance lady, apparently.'

‘Huh,' Richard said. This was the way Richard ended conversations. Huh. Whatever. Stephen felt acid squirling through his gut.

They all turned to look through the French doors, past the deck, where the fairy could be seen squatting on her thick thighs on the lawn, the wings straining across her back. She had a purple blanket spread out before her and was slowly rotating the plastic wand in the air—the way a riot policeman might threaten with a baton. She shouted at the children in her rasping voice. The little girls and Joshua sat before her as instructed, cross-legged, backs straight, staring up at her in hopeful horror, their gazes flicking often to the pink velour sack she had beside her.

Stephen drew back from the window. He must keep himself out of her sight. He realised his jaw had been clenched tightly shut ever since Richard arrived. He opened his mouth wide, made his ears click. This was quite possibly the longest day he had ever lived. He saw the junkie girl flying through the air. Smack, on the bitumen. Huh. Junkie.
Smack.
He stopped a high weird laugh beginning in his throat.