Animal People by Charlotte Wood Page A

Stephen saw with a shock of embarrassment that she was old, must be at least seventy, beneath all the tight white clothes and make-up. She had a pink mobile telephone hanging from a patterned lanyard around her slouchy neck. Then he saw that the design on the lanyard was the repeated blob of the Sydney Olympics 2000 logo. The woman had kept the lanyard all this time. Probably she was a volunteer, one of that brigade of happy folk in brightly patterned short-sleeved shirts and their unblemished Akubra hats, pointing and ushering. Wearing their uniforms in the streets months after the games were over. Maybe the mobile phone cord was the only thing tying the woman in white to her glorious two weeks as an Olympic volunteer, standing beside a roped-off area, smiling fit to burst, motioning with her hands.
    She climbed gingerly into a seat, settling her plastic bags around her.
    He should have got the number of the clinic. This came to him in a bolt of urgency. Stephen twisted around in his seat, seized with panic. What if she died? He would be arrested for leaving the scene. For leaving her in the hands of a methadone nurse, for not insisting on the hospital. He pressed his face to the window, peering back along Queen Street. What was the street number of the clinic? There must be more than one methadone clinic in Norton. He had never noticed that one before; for all he knew there could be dozens of clinics in the long, colourless, grit-swept stretch of Queen Street.
    The bus moved on. Just calm bloody down , Stephen told himself. It was his father’s bellowed dictum on every holiday trip in the car when someone whined or screeched. Stephen would put the girl Skye from his mind. She had medical help. She was fine. The taxi driver was right, he thought bitterly. He should have left. He knew that was wrong, but allowed himself the surge of self-pity. He had done the right thing. He had done more than the right thing. Stephen tried out this way of thinking: she was only a junkie, after all. Stupid bloody junkie who had no right to scare the shit out of him like this. They all had death wishes. But Stephen did not have the heart for it; instead what kept coming to him was his mother and the television news, hand over mouth. Poor creature.
    Near the intersection of Fitzroy and Swan streets he saw the yellow road-sign, REFUGE ISLAND . A replica of the signs of his childhood in Rundle, egg-yolk yellow with its thick black border, the stencilled image of the two figures, slightly bent as if in frail, unsteady movement. When Stephen was a kid there was a refuge island sign in the centre of Aurora Street as it stretched down to the town-centre, and the figures were boy-and-girl silhouettes. Back then, as a child, he associated the sign with the wailing people who populated the evening news—the Vietnamese refugees in their papery wooden boats, landing exhausted and frightened on Australia’s shores. Boat People, they were called, and to his child’s ears it seemed these might be pirate people, or somehow connected to the Owl and the Pussycat. But on the television there were no birds nor cats, only the howling children and stick-thin, ruined parents on the broken boats, and the concrete strip in Aurora Street became forever linked with them, an island for these wretched, half-dressed children.
    The bus moved off again, but in Stephen’s mind these images bundled and collapsed, folding over one another like the leaves of those origami paper fortune-tellers that children made. So that even seeing the sign here, outside an inner city row of terrace shops, he felt himself to be six years old, safe on Rundle’s refuge island, one hand clutching the pole and the other reaching out to offer welcome and shelter to the poor, discarded wreckage of the heartless world’s distant wars.
    The bus had stopped for too long. Stephen looked up as a gaunt, dishevelled young man stood by the driver’s side, searching his