Animal People by Charlotte Wood Page B

voluminous clothes for a ticket, calling too loudly to the driver don’t worry mate , I’m not gunna getcha in trouble. The driver glanced warily at the man and then shoved at the gears, and the bus moved off. The man found his ticket and screwed it down into the machine, then swayed away, forgetting to take it out again. He teetered up the aisle with his arms out to either side to steady himself, searching the faces of the people in the seats closely, as if looking for someone he knew. Stephen felt the shimmer of anxiety fill the bus, saw all the people turn their faces from the man. His hair was shoulder-length, dyed jet black and matted, not quite dreadlocked, and he wore thick black-rimmed glasses. There were no lenses in the frames. The people on the bus felt for their mobile phones and pretended to read text messages, or concentrated their gaze beyond the man, on the strip of advertisements above his head—ads for cold sore cream and airport novels and pictures of a suspicious package with the government’s terrorism warnings . I F YOU SEE SOMETHING , SAY SOMETHING .
    The man still wandered ominously up the aisle. His gaze, quick-moving, birdlike, swept the seats, and Stephen knew there was no vacant seat except the one beside him. He could smell the man now, as he approached, and he sighed silently. He narrowed his shoulders and shifted toward the window to make way as the man sat down heavily, his khaki clothes flapping, his wet lips moving. Stephen turned his face to the window to avoid the man’s breath and any potentially insane conversation. The man inhaled and exhaled loudly through his nose, dragging in the air, forcing it out again. And now, as Stephen knew he would, he began to mutter low, emphatic declarations to himself, his voice a little slurred and the words running together. ‘Bescountry on earth,’ he whispered to his chest. He snickered, and whispered, ‘Besfucking city on earth.’
    Then he gave a low, private snort of disgust: ‘ Melbourne. Gimmeabreak.’
    Stephen stared out of the window again, stared so hard his eyes watered. This was the trouble with living in Norton. The place was full of fucking mad people. Like the man who used to wander past his bedroom window at four-thirty every morning, pushing a trolley from the Norton Village Plaza before him, jingling along the uneven council pavement in the dark. One morning, after a new couple had moved in across the lane and begun renovating, Stephen heard their window wrench open and the neighbour shout at the trolley man in his clear, educated voice: ‘Piss off, you freak.’ The trolley had stopped instantly. Stephen was not awake enough to get up and look out, but he imagined the man, stock-still and terrified, his private singing-trolley world suddenly torn open. He never came back after that, and Stephen sometimes imagined him now sitting in some horrid dark room, longing to be out with his trolley, too frightened to set off. He hoped he found another route.
    Then there was the middle-aged woman with the lank, steel-coloured hair and the mammoth, cannon-shaped breasts that swung low and loose and frightening beneath the stretched cotton of her faded little-girl floral dresses, who sang her strange operatic callings directly in front of the glass sliding doors of the Plaza entrance, breaking a loaf of bread apart and throwing enormous chunks of it down to the Welcome To Our Norton Village Plaza doormat, so the mat covered instantly with ravenous pigeons. To get into the Plaza the shoppers had to walk around the woman, standing with her hands lovingly clasping her own body, her long mad hair falling. She was like that painting of Venus on the seashell, beaming, only her grin was inane and her shell was a doormat and a dirty sea of pigeons. Then the security guard would arrive on his Segway and bark at her to go away.
    There were the other asylum-seekers too, drawn to the Plaza like moths to light: