Read Animal People for Free Online Page B

that.’ But she was gone, and only Larry stood at the edge of the deck, the guinea pig put away now, her hands by her sides. Then Ella reappeared, joining her sister. They stood together, staring at Stephen in curious revulsion.
    And finally, thank Christ, Fiona emerged from the house with a jug of water and glasses.
    Ella, emboldened, cried out in contempt: ‘It’s not for Smooth,’ and fled. Larry cast one last dark glance his way before following her sister, flouncing away down the side of the house.
    Fiona was amused, sitting down beside him and laying her cool hand on the back of his neck. They both looked at the bowl of sludge. ‘It’s fruit salad,’ she said. ‘She made it for you.’

    He stood in the delicious cool of the darkened food court and breathed, eyes still stinging. Most of the shops had not yet opened; there was an unaccustomed peace in the gloom. The girls would be all right, he had already decided. Children were resilient. Adults did not like to accept this, but Stephen knew it to be true, as he made his way to the centre’s toilets. Children understood more intelligently than adults that all things passed. They would bounce back. They would forget him in a couple of weeks.
    Would Fiona ever let him see them again?
    He stood in the dank toilet air, lathering his hands and forearms with soap, rinsing away Balzac’s sticky hair-dust, the heat and the sweat. It was only eight o’clock and he was half a block from his own house, but already the dog, the city, had layered him with grime and pathogens and sweat. He bent low over the basin and stared at the porcelain, left the tap running and splashed cold water again and again onto his face. He blinked and squinted the water into his wide open eyes, sluicing it all around his eyeballs, filling the lids and sockets. Then he screwed them tightly shut, splashed his face again and again, and stood grimacing, the water running down to soak the neck of his t-shirt. He ran his cool, wet hands back and forth over his head and face and neck. He breathed out, stood up straight and looked into the mirror. His eyes were rimmed red, as if he’d been crying. But he felt better. He rubbed at his nose one last time, and pushed out of the toilet door into the great cavern of the shopping centre.
    In Kmart he stared at the shelves of My Little Ponies. Ella and Larry were infatuated with this junk. They had My Little Pony toys—hard plastic ones, soft fluffy ones—and books and DVDs and lunch boxes and drink bottles, but still they begged and whined for more every time one of the nauseating My Little Pony ads came on the television. But which to get?
    Standing here in the industrial draught of the Kmart air-conditioning he learned there were many different ponies, called Starsong and Sweetie Belle and Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie. They had wide, hoofless feet, tiny little bodies and wide flat heads with enormous, freakishly lashed eyes. But the essential part of the My Little Pony was the hair. Every pony’s luxuriant, roiling, pink and purple nylon mane was longer than the pony’s height, and each had a pink and purple nylon tail, equally long, to match. Each Pony came with a set of hair accessories: hairbrushes, combs, ribbons, hairclips, extensions and tiaras. The lushly curled hairstyles of the ponies reminded Stephen of the slightly dangerous bombshells who lolled over velvet chaise longues in the midday movies of his childhood—Zsa Zsa Gabor, Mrs Robinson. Stephen had tried to follow the logic of the ponies’ peculiarly female world. They stood on their hind legs and carried handbags. They lived in Ponyville, in mansions made of ‘candy’. There were also smaller, baby Little Ponies that wore diapers and sucked on pacifiers . They all visited fun parks, rode Ferris wheels. When Ella explained that whenever the ponies visited the sea they magically became beautiful mermaids, Stephen gave