Animal People Read Online Free PDF Page A

dejected way.
    â€˜Sorry,’ Stephen called over the noise of the leaf blower, and then shouted his usual addendum: ‘It’s just that I’m allergic.’ The skin of his fingers that had touched the firm, hairy planes of Balzac’s snout began tingling with allergic activity. He felt an urgent compulsion to wash his hands.
    Jill dropped into a crouch, pulling Balzac to her. She put a protective arm around the dog’s broad, shaggy girth to shield him from Stephen’s insulting allergy, and crooned apology into his ear: ‘It’s all right boy, it’s okay.’ She pushed her face close to the dog’s, and closed her eyes. Balzac yawned wide, then extended his long elastic tongue and licked at Jill’s offered mouth and nose and eyes with enthusiastic, probing strokes.
    Stephen felt nauseous watching this drooling exploration. ‘Sorry,’ he said again, annoyed with himself for saying it. Behind his back he splayed the fingers of the hand that had touched Balzac’s wet nose. He imagined the sticky paths made for the allergens running all up and down his hand. He pictured them: microscopic cartoonish creatures pricking at his skin with their sharp claws, waiting to spring into his eyes on their tiny chemical feet if his hand strayed to his face. Stephen knew this was silly, but his nose and eyes begin to itch and water anyway.
    â€˜Have you seen this?’ Nerida said, nodding at the telegraph pole where a copy of the lost ferret flyer was sticky-taped. ‘Isn’t that revolting! What kind of a person would keep a ferret! Good riddance, I say.’
    Jill murmured in appalled assent.
    â€˜But I suppose they feel like you would if you lost Balzac,’ Stephen said. Jill and Nerida looked at him, then each other. ‘I don’t think so,’ muttered Jill. It was the most direct thing she had ever said to him, but she still didn’t look up. She pursed her lips and went back to letting Balzac lick her face, up and down, in long syrupy strokes, while Nerida peered at the ferret picture, shaking her head.
    Something about her stance—that hand over her mouth—brought Stephen’s mother to mind again. I don’t ask you for much. Something else she said had set up a tinny alarm, faint but persistent, in the depths of his mind.
    â€˜I have to get to work,’ he said to the women. He waved his keys and turned away towards the Plaza.
    How anyone could let a dog lick their face, their mouth, was beyond Stephen. They could watch a dog happily licking its balls, or worse, and then — he felt sick again as he crossed the street, towards the centre’s entrance. But Nerida and Jill were Dog People. They identified it early in any conversation with someone new. We are dog people. Are you a dog person?
    Stephen knew he demonstrated some lack of humanity by not being a Dog Person. This seemed unfair. He was not a cat person either. He was not an animal person in the same way he was not a musical person, or an intellectual person. One was born to these things, like the colour of one’s eyes, or the length of one’s legs. Not to be musical or intellectual was unremarkable and provoked no suspicion. But not to be an animal person somehow meant he wasn’t fully human.
    When Stephen told people he worked at the zoo their faces would light up. ‘Oh, I love animals! How wonderful!’ they gushed. How lucky he was, how privileged. They held him in high regard, and waited for tales of giraffe-teeth cleaning or lion-cub nursing. When he told them he worked only in the fast-food kiosk, their faces fell. But then they recovered. Still, to be surrounded by all those beautiful creatures. He usually agreed at this point, to finish the conversation. He did not say he found the zoo depressing. It was not the cages so much as the people—their need to possess, their disappointment, the way they wanted the animals to notice them.
    He