Free Animal People by Charlotte Wood Page B

she calling me about it? She’s your mother.’
    Stephen for the first time fully understood the word ‘dumbstruck’. It was intelligence, and words, that were struck away.
    â€˜I don’t know,’ was all he said.
    Pissoff bumhead , shouted Larry. It’s a mistake, he wanted to say. I don’t want to leave you. I don’t know why I’m going to.
    He said: ‘What’s Larry yelling at?’
    â€˜The little boy from next door. Aidan. Hang on. Larry! ’
    There was a pause while Fiona covered the phone and shouted at her daughter. Stephen tried to think of something to say.
    â€˜I didn’t know you wanted to go,’ he said, trying to make his voice normal. He was so tired, and so, so hot .
    Fiona sighed, as if Stephen was another of her children. ‘Look, all I know is it’s on the calendar. Cathy asked us ages ago, remember? Your dad’s birthday thing.’
    â€˜I didn’t think you would want to go.’
    â€˜What? Why?’ Fiona said, her annoyance rising a little. ‘But anyway, why’s your mum calling me and not you about this? I’m supposed to organise your whole life as well as my own because I’m a girl, I suppose?’
    â€˜No!’ This unfairness stung him.
    â€˜Well why then?’
    He was trapped. He looked at the footpath and his trainers. He could smell his feet. He wondered if other people could smell him, if dishonesty seeped from your skin, like those cancer smells that dogs could detect. They licked at patches on legs or arms, in places where tumours sprouted into being beneath the skin. He could say, I don’t know what’s happening to me. Or, I saw some animals, tortured. He saw Skye’s pallor, her broken head.
    â€˜I just ran over somebody,’ he said, his voice going into a high whisper. ‘In the car.’
    â€˜ What? ’ Fiona’s irritation vanished. ‘Oh, Stephen! Are you okay?’
    â€˜I just left her at a doctor’s. But she landed on her head .’
    He was tearful, grew more so with Fiona’s sympathy. She said ‘Oh, honey ,’ said poor thing, and he wished she were here now with her long arms about his neck, the soothing strength of her fingers over his shoulders. Whatever had to be done, all he wanted in this moment was her touch. At the thought of it he had to stop himself from letting out a sob, from telling her everything.
    She had once told him that as soon as you placed your hands upon a stranger, they began to talk. Everybody found it so, she said: hairdressers, nurses, nuns. It was dangerously easy to give in: human defences dissolved at another person’s touch.
    A man in a tightly wound black turban stood on the pavement at the corner, waiting for the lights to change. From each of his hands hung a heavy plastic shopping bag, and he had a bus ticket stuck between his teeth. He tapped his foot, looking up the street towards an approaching bus.
    At last Stephen said, ‘I got Ella a ticket to the circus.’
    â€˜Did you,’ Fiona said, deciding not to demur, demanding nothing from him. Having mercy. These old-fashioned words came to him. Clemency. Honour. Who was he to disavow such things?
    Disavow ? He was going mad. This must be shock. The bus loomed; the Sikh man tilted to cross the road. Stephen let out a long breath and gathered himself. He would leave the car, catch the bus. He would regain control of this day, get a grip. He would do what must be done.
    Fiona began to speak, but Stephen knew he must stop this. He hardened his voice. ‘I have to go.’
    He pushed the phone into his pocket, hurried across the road with the Sikh man and climbed on to the bus. He found an empty double seat towards the back and slid into it, rested his head against the window.
    As the bus filled with people he saw a black-and-white dog tied by its lead to one of the bus shelter’s supporting posts. Nobody seemed to own the dog. It