Animal People by Charlotte Wood

physiotherapists, speech pathologists, social workers, who met in their first years on the public hospital wards before they all grew tired of the shit pay and the hours and the abuse, and drifted off to start their own private practices.
    Sometimes these friends still gathered noisily at Fiona’s place for drinks and pretend book club, dumping tubs of hummus and a couple of paperbacks on the table, then breaking into affectionate chatter. When Fiona was with them, any guardedness in her disappeared. She was all openness, all ruby iridescence, as she joined their shrieks and cackles, their adoration of each other. How unashamed they were, in their blithe appraisals and comparisons of each other’s bodies, the exacting dissection of their emotions. They held each other’s hands across couches, lavished compliments on one another’s cooking, earrings, ankles, shoes. They exchanged health worker war stories, of fuckwit famous footballers with ankle injuries, or gruesome tales from people they knew who still worked on the wards.
    Stephen busied himself with the girls in adjoining rooms and eavesdropped on the women, their conversation gothic and entrancing: ‘The boyfriend yelled out, Anthony’s hurt himself! So she ran in—but what he’d actually yelled was, Anthony’s hung himself.’
    He glimpsed them through doorways as they regaled each other with ghastly tales of accidents, of failed suicide attempts and their aftermath, speaking with relish as they plunged rice crackers into dips.
    â€˜I saw a guy once, terrible depression for years, shot himself like this’—one of the speech pathologists once said, a finger-gun beneath her chin—‘but he aimed wrong. Completely missed the brain; it all came out here.’ She held a hand vertical at her nose, let her fingers fall forward in an arc. ‘His depression completely disappeared and he wanted to live. And I thought, oh darling, nobody’s going to want you now.’
    She took a cheerful swig of wine; the others nodded lazy grins. None of this was unfamiliar; they all had patching-up stories.
    â€˜And I’m supposed to get him talking again,’ she said, ‘but you know, where’s the tongue?’
    There was the blackest of laughter, and then through the doorway Stephen saw Fiona look up—or he sensed it first—to see where he was, to see if he had heard. Perhaps she made some signal to the others he could not see, to quieten their macabre turn of conversation.
    Always he has met her eye steadily, through doorways, across rooms.
    When a shocking thing happened to you, people—women, mostly—related your whole life to it; this is what Stephen had learned. They watched for it to spill out, for your suffering to show. They wanted it; they made little spaces for it to happen, were disappointed when it didn’t. The reason Fiona looked around for him at such moments was that years ago, in Rundle, a man he’d known in passing shot himself and Stephen saw it happen. So did other people. It was horror, and it passed. But women liked to link you forever to that one thing. They loved it, made it become the pivot, the story, of your life. But the death, and even his own father’s death soon afterwards (he had opened his eyes once, swept a potent gaze over his wife, his children around his bed, before he died), were not the story of Stephen’s life. They were not his excuse. Because life went on. Fiona’s friend’s suicide story showed this, all their laughing at it showed it too. This is what he would say to Fiona, it came to him now: upsetting things happen, and you get through them, and life goes on. Fiona would be all right. The women would gather with sauvignon blanc and casseroles, and gradually begin to kick at the edges of Fiona’s feeling for Stephen, heeling off little lumps of it like clumps of clay from a cliff edge. I mean, he’s sort of a nice guy and