Animal People Read Online Free PDF Page B

half-smile and said the woman was just like any other shopper.
    He passed by them now, the woman and the wheelchair man. The wheelchair man was about thirty, and was often at the Plaza, whizzing along the wide aisles. Stephen had developed a deep dislike of him over the months, with his little crossed feet and his sparse, mousy beard and his thin grey jumpers. The man had a proprietorial air about the Big Issue woman. He always bought a magazine, and then she would have to stand with her awkward smile and listen while he talked at her, and they both knew that this, not the magazine, was what he had paid for. Often the man was still there, berating her, when Stephen came out of the Plaza an hour later; the woman would still be smiling, nodding wearily.
    From the fluorescent interior of Jungle Jim’s up ahead came the familiar funky stink of mouse shit and dog biscuits. Stephen had bought a goldfish there once. To him a goldfish seemed the ideal domestic creature. You could sit by and watch its graceful movements through the water. Just the fact of a fish pond, Stephen thought, lent a special Oriental peacefulness to the place. It was a golden thread linking him in his Norton backyard, despite the leaf blowers and the aircraft noise and the abandoned shopping trolleys, to the world’s ancient wisdoms. A goldfish slid through the dark water, dignified, detached and silent, heedless of him.
    Also, it was hairless.
    But the goldfish had died. He learned later you were first supposed to do things to the water, but he hadn’t known this, and over twenty-four hours the fish swam slower and slower in the water of the big cracked garden pot, and then developed a whitish desiccated coating, and finally floated horribly on its side. He had to scoop it out and bury it beside the old staggery lavender bush.
    It came to Stephen suddenly that all his mother’s friends were dying.
    First his father, and now their friends, one by one. Every few months his mother had to stand in the Rundle graveyard and watch a friend lowered into the ground. He had never talked to her about this, and she had never mentioned it except in passing. But each time he went to Rundle he saw the growing pile of homemade funeral service booklets on the table by the phone.
    The pet shop woman was sorting through the lumpy display of dog-chewing things as he glanced in through the door. A flash of revulsion went through Stephen at the sight of those strange bone-like objects, their seeped-on bandage colour. In the glass compartments of the window were three puppies on the upper level, and one lone guinea pig on the lower floor. The sign on the dogs’ level—no matter what breed was in there—said ‘Pomeranian Maltese X’ and ‘ Shi-tzu’ (Stephen remembered his boss Russell’s worn joke about how the zoo had replaced the lions and elephants with one small dog: ‘It’s a shit zoo!’) but the puppies all looked the same to Stephen. They leapt and yapped in their knee-high bed of shredded paper. A sign said DO NOT TAP ON THE GLASS and had some small print about RSPCA regulations against tapping on pet shop windows. Soon the sun would strike the glass directly and stay there all day until sinking below the Plaza roof peak in the afternoon. The puppies would stop leaping and lie panting in their white forest of shredded documents.
    The guinea pig snuffled, a hairy caramel all-sort, forgotten in the far corner of the window.
    Stephen’s eyes still itched; he ran his hands down his jeans again to stop himself rubbing at them. He peered into the shop. He supposed a mouse was out of the question for a birthday present. Fiona would kill him.
    He shut his mind, once again, on the many things Fiona might be tempted to say to him today.
    Anyway, Ella and Larry already had a guinea pig and a rabbit. The first time he went to their house Stephen sat on the back deck, looking down at the view, feeling the great luxury of