Animal People by Charlotte Wood Page B

shameful second he was liberated: if a bomb went off he would not have to tell Fiona.
    But then he recalled the photographs of the London bombings—people staggering around covered in blood. That girl with no legs, who went on television. People with their arms blown off, but still alive, still conscious.
    The bag seemed to pulse there now, against the iron leg of the seat.
    Stephen’s head ached, his body was soaking in sweat, now his guts churned and it was only ten o’clock in the morning. There could be a bomb.
    He missed his father. He hated this city.
    He imagined his mother’s morning in Rundle, what she would be doing now. Folding the tennis newsletter into envelopes, perhaps, licking and sticking. Or clipping greenery from the garden if it was her turn to do the flowers for Mass. He envied the pure simplicity of Rundle life, where there were no bombs on buses—there were no buses. No junkies ran into traffic in Rundle, images of tortured creatures were not thrust at you as soon as you left your house. There were no workplace teambuilding exercises to be endured, for there was no-one to run them.
    The woman across the aisle had opened a tabloid newspaper. Stephen could see almost a full-page photograph of a hunted-looking dog behind the bars of a police wagon, its eyes large and glossy. V ICIOUS ATTACK . It was the Rottweiler that had killed a child the day before in an outer suburb, savaging it while the parents were outside chatting to a neighbour. The dog was to be destroyed. Stephen imagined what the parents had found. The blood, the dog standing there, its four feet planted on the carpet, slavering over the motionless child. Waiting, wild-eyed and lost. He looked at the photograph, at the dog’s bewildered eyes behind the bars. It had no idea what it had done.
    Stephen looked out of the window again, thinking of the other dog in the news, the bomb-sniffing army dog that had been lost and then found in Afghanistan. Earlier in the week it was presented with a bravery award. It had been the good-news story at the end of all the television bulletins. There was a garden ceremony, with chairs and officials and speeches. The woman from the RSPCA had hung the Purple Heart around the dog’s neck—it was only the second animal to get the medal after Simpson’s donkey—and thanked the dog for its resilience and its unquestioning service to our troops. Although he had been alone in the room, Stephen had thrown back his head, looked about him for confirmation. Was this actually what the woman had said? And was he the only person to think a bravery medal for a dog was madness? The people at the ceremony clapped and looked tearfully moved. The newsreaders did too. Only Stephen and the dog, it seemed, were baffled. Everyone else seemed to think it perfectly normal to lead donkeys and dogs onto battlefields and then pretend they chose it for themselves, fired by patriotic valour.
    Stephen’s glance was dragged back to the bag beneath the seat. There were only three stops until this bus reached the interchange. He just needed to calm fucking down.
    He pushed his mind back to Rundle where there were no bombs, where children were not killed by dogs or de factos, where no homeless people slept in nests of garbage. The streets were wide and flat, the empty skies enormous. Perhaps he would go and stay with his mother for a while. He could get a farm-hand job. There were farms where chickens ran free, and eggs were found in hiding places, not factories. It was romantic, but it comforted him. He could work somewhere out there, somewhere in the wide space and open air. Other people did this, didn’t they?
    The woman turned the newspaper and on the raised right-hand page a quote in enlarged type caught his eye: ‘I work in people’s gardens to earn money for food. Sometimes I collect firewood and sell it.’ That was the kind of thing, exactly. It was an omen. He could do that. He