Animal People by Charlotte Wood

sat, feet and tail neatly tucked away, mouth open and tongue hanging in the heat, patiently waiting. Stephen’s hands rested in his lap, astonishingly still. A ghostly body was there inside his own, quaking and shivering, but outwardly his hands did not tremble. He was in shock. He had run over someone and it was not his fault. Or it was his fault, and she would die. Hit and run. Is this what they meant? He had hit someone, and now he was running.
    Just below his eye level, taped to the bus-shelter’s pole, was a flyer (the city was full of flyers—nobody knew anybody; if you wanted human contact you had to put a sign up in the street and summon strangers). This one was for the Norton Laughing Club. Stephen almost burst into scornful laughter himself as he read: Need some chuckles in your life? Come join us each Friday, Dunmore Park. There was a phone number to call. Stephen had heard of this: people stood round in a circle, practising different kinds of laughing. In public. Who were these sad fuckers who needed to go to a club once a week to manufacture laughter? It was the most depressing thing he had ever heard.
    The bus moved off, and the tethered dog looked at the ground, waited in the grimy heat. It thought whoever had abandoned it was coming back.

    In front of Stephen sat a muscle-bound young man who might be Lebanese, the curls of his hair shaved away on both sides of his head, turning the squared-off crown into a thick black mat. Across the back of the boy’s black t-shirt was printed HARDEN THE FUCK UP in white military-style stencilled capitals. The squared head and rounded shoulders made Stephen think of the hippopotamus at the zoo. People thought hippos were cute, until they saw one. He imagined the boy’s aggressive round nostrils, the small malevolent eyes, the gleaming flesh of his face. An old man sat beside the boy and Stephen could see hair coming from his ears beneath the band of a bright yellow baseball cap embroidered with Snoop Dogg in black graffiti-style lettering. It passed through Stephen’s mind to wonder if his own father had had ear-hair like that before he died. He hoped not. The baseball cap was embarrassing, but Stephen was too overcome to care. The air in the bus was stifling, despite the rattle of the air-conditioning. He felt sweat between his shoulder-blades; he leaned his head against the window and half-closed his eyes.
    The Sikh man sat at the very front of the bus, on the seat where you were supposed to let old people sit. Stephen tried not to watch old people getting on at each stop, and their dithering. He could not bear the tension, waiting to see if they would find a seat before the bus took off. Each one, once they reached their seat, had an expression of triumph. But nowadays the bus driver had to watch them in his mirrors like a hawk. The drivers were not allowed to take off until all the oldies had sat down, ever since an old woman died when her head slammed into the floor of the aisle. But the old people seemed never to realise this, and would stand in the aisle, looking up and down the empty seats as if choosing something from a supermarket shelf, not understanding—or not caring—that the bus wouldn’t move until they sat down. It usually infuriated him, but not today. He no longer cared how late he was. He was simply glad to sit, be transported by forces beyond his control. He stared out of the spotted, grimy window and saw the junkie girl flying through the air again, plummeting, smacking her skull—narrow, bony as a sheep’s—on the bitumen. He felt a surging tide of nausea again. He should ring the clinic. He had left his number, but he doubted she would call him.
    At Clare Street a woman got on, dressed in spotless white: tight white jeans, white t-shirt with a picture of what looked like a peacock picked out in sequins. White boots. Her long ringleted hair, a dull, tired red, reached to her shoulders. When she turned,