Animal People Read Online Free PDF

supposed being an animal person meant you liked to caress animals, be licked by them. That you did not fear them, nor they you. They gave you unconditional love . What was this love? Was it like love between people? He felt this to be impossible, but animal people did not agree. Some claimed their dog’s or cat’s love was greater than human feeling. After Stephen’s father died and he returned to the data entry place where he worked back then, a receptionist made sympathetic noises about his loss. ‘I know just how you feel,’ she said: her dog had died three months before. Stephen had tried to be offended, but found it hard to muster the energy. He could not understand it, but he believed her when she said his grief and hers were parallel. For she was an animal person. She believed her dog chose to love her, could recognise her as special, in the same way a father could love a son.
    But Stephen was unnerved by them. He feared the hair of animals, its quivery ability to float towards him and stick to his skin. And then it would begin, as it was beginning now: the watering eyes, the congested nose, the desperate desire to wash himself down. The furious itching in the eyes, then the sides of his nose, forcing him to scratch and rake at his face till it was red. He would have to lean into a bathroom sink and rinse his eyes, but no matter how much he did this, the fierceness of the itching would not abate until he was far away from the creature, and had changed his clothes. Cats were the worst, but dogs too, horses, rabbits, anything with hair or fur. Worst of all was the way they insinuated themselves upon him. It was true, the little jokes people made about cats going to people who didn’t like them. But it was not a joke. Though it would only make things worse, he screwed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets, twisting and gouging at the unbearable itch.
    He made himself stop then, and tried to ignore the itch—don’t scratch —along with the low humming anxiety about his mother, and the much more sombre, deeper chord, about Fiona.
    At the Plaza entrance the small, tidy woman who sold the Big Issue magazine had already set up next to her camping chair. She wore her red vest and her baseball cap, her long, thick grey ponytail behind. And the man in the wheelchair was there again.
    Stephen felt sorry for the Big Issue woman. She was about fifty, small and wiry, with a broad, husky voice that to Stephen evoked a life of hard knocks. She had gaps in her teeth, mostly remembered to keep her mouth shut when she smiled. She stood outside the Plaza every second day or so for hours. Stephen usually bought the magazine, but not always. A stack of unread Big Issue s lay on the floor by his couch.
    He sometimes wondered where the woman lived, whether she was really homeless. He couldn’t imagine her living on the street—she looked healthy and well-kept, purposeful. Perhaps she was saving up to buy a house. He pondered now, nearing her, whether this was allowed. If you were very successful, at what point did the Big Issue people tell you that you weren’t allowed to keep being a vendor? Once or twice he had pictured the woman in some grotty refuge in the inner city. He imagined she kept her area of a broken-windowed dormitory scrupulously clean, her bed always made, but he worried about her living in such a place, with the junkies and the violence and the filth. He worried about her being robbed, her Big Issue money taken from under her mattress while she slept. But this anxiety only visited him if he had bought a magazine, when he felt some responsibility for her well-being, and it only lasted for a moment. Mostly it was easy not to think of her at all. He had seen her occasionally in civvies buying cigarettes or groceries and looking, without her red vest and cap, like any other shopper. He felt an odd pride for her then. He once said this to Fiona, but she gave him a strange