Animal People by Charlotte Wood Page A

everything. Letting her doubt it. But what was he actually offering you? And one day, quite soon, Fiona would sit back with a start and find she could not recall his face very well, and wonder what had possessed her to fall in love with him.
    At the zoo there were therapy classes for arachnophobes, where they made people hold great monstrous spiders in the palms of their hands. Stephen had seen it, watching from the back of the room one day during his lunch break. People all over the place, tears streaming down their faces, and in the centre of their open, shaking palms the terrible black spiders squatted, crumpled black pipe cleaner legs as thick as human fingers. Why a person would do this to herself Stephen had no fucking idea. But there you were. People got over all sorts of things.
    The woman across the aisle turned from the window and caught his eye before turning away again, expressionless. Stephen wondered briefly what her glance at him told her, but he didn’t really want to know.
    Just then Stephen noticed something on the floor under one of the bus seats, between the woman and the man with the phone. He bent his head to see it. It was a silver plastic bag, oddly shaped as if the bag had been wrapped around something. It was shoved up against the pole of a seat, on the dirty lino floor. He could see part of a shop logo printed on the bag, a swirling pink Gi of what must, in those colours, say ‘ girl’ .
    A high tinnitus whine of alarm started up deep inside Stephen’s ears.
    Someone had just left it there accidentally, obviously. Some shopping bag left behind. But the bag was not new. The silver was scuffed, wearing off here and there to reveal the white plastic beneath. And it was wrapped tightly around the thing inside it. The thing had not been slipped in by a shop assistant’s manicured hand and handed over with a smile. Someone had shoved the thing, the rounded heavy thing—heavy enough for it not to slide around with the motion of the bus—into the bag and left it there, and got off the bus.
    If you see something, say something.
    Stephen looked around at the people, willing someone to catch his eye. But nobody did. Nobody looked in his direction.
    He grasped hold of his own hands. This was ridiculous. It had been a terrible morning. The junkie girl, sailing above the traffic, a sallow malnourished angel. Then the sickening plummet. He wondered where she was now. Perhaps she had gotten herself home on the glazed momentum of the methadone, and sat down on the couch, where the leaking vein inside her brain, allowing the slow seep of blood all through the spongy coral, could no longer withstand the pressure. It suddenly tore and burst and she, the junkie girl Skye whom he had hit with his car, cried out in anguish and clutched her head, and died, all alone on her dingy couch.
    He breathed out. In and out. In , hold, and out , the way he had learned from yoga Dawnelle.
    The bus heaved off from a stop where nobody got on or off. Stephen looked again at the silver bag. Now he had seen it, it glowed there beneath the seat. He could not believe nobody else had noticed it. For if they did, surely someone would raise the alarm. Stephen did not know what bombs looked like. Could they be bulky like this? Surely these days all they needed was a mobile phone, some small electronic wizardry they could detonate remotely. But, he reasoned, the thing had to be big to contain enough explosives to do the damage. As big as a bucket? Have to be. And the bag was much smaller than a bucket. Half a bucket, probably.
    But the thrumming in his ears grew louder, despite his reasoning, and his heartbeat began to match it. Breathing was not helping, and in fact he began to feel a little lightheaded. Would they know, when it went off, that it was happening—or would it be so big, so instant, that all you would know was a burst in your eardrums, and then black? That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?
    For one