Animal People by Charlotte Wood Read Free Book Online Page B

actually looked at such photographs, though he was always grimly aware of their presence on a sandwich board at a market or stuck to the wall in a health food shop. At those times it was easy to avert his eyes, grateful that the quality of the photographs was always so poor (he supposed they were taken on mobile phones by reckless vigilante saboteurs at night) that even if you came across one without expecting it, it was easy to avoid the detail. His general impression now of the photographs at the periphery of his vision, as Savannah turned her stiff pages, was the same: murky, pink and black, gloomy shapes, blurred close-ups of mouths and ears and patches of red, all contrasting with the steely grey lines of instruments or bars.
    And now Savannah’s throaty voice took on the urgent, moral tone he knew would come. His scalp prickled. He was being manipulated, yet at the same time he knew that what was done to these animals was the fault of him and others like him: cruel meat-eaters, gluttons too greedy for their own pleasure to spare a second’s pity for the enslaved providers of their food, their medicines. No matter the cause—Save the Children, the Wilderness Society, Amnesty International—Stephen accepted that blame for the world’s ills could justifiably be laid at his feet. The question here, now, with Savannah, was how to show compassion, how to show her he was different from everybody else, and still hang on to his cash.
    He stared absently at the curve where Savannah’s smooth neck met her shoulder as she went on talking. He began to dislike her now. Wealthy family, he decided. Stockbrokers or lawyers for parents. The only rebel lesbian in her year at one of the posh girls’ schools, but still living with her parents in the lush suburbs, one of those mansions with electric gates and a Merc in the garage, which she would scorn and lecture her parents about except when she needed a lift to a festival of films about Uighurs or arms dealers in Afghanistan.
    Behind her the butchers shunted trays of pink meat into display cabinets, leaning inside the glass to yank the long fringes of green plastic grass into place between the trays. There were tubs of sticky-looking indistinguishable marinated meats in soy dark or lurid orange, and rafts of pale, mealy-looking sausages. Stephen could smell it: the dank, rude odour of raw flesh. Sometimes he wondered, about meat: what if this were human flesh? Would his own thigh meat look and taste like this?
    Last week, as Fiona’s knife worked doggedly through a thick layer of pork rind and fat, he heard her give a small gasp. They both stared for a moment at the hard little nipple looking back at them from the chopping board: tender, clean and pink as Fiona’s own. She stared down at it, stricken. ‘I can’t cut it off,’ she whispered. Stephen said quickly, ‘Let’s not look,’ and flipped the piece of belly over. After a moment Fiona went on working at the meat, but the strange discomfort remained in the air, and at dinner they exchanged a look before cutting into the soft, sweet meat.
    Fiona had told him something else once: that after Larry was born by Caesarean, the doctors had worked away beyond the sheet at her waist to close her up. She lay there with the baby on her breast, tearful and exhausted, while they cauterised something, some part inside her. Fiona’s grey eyes widened and her voice dropped to a whisper as she told him: ‘It smelled like a barbecue .’
    She thought it grotesque, and Stephen felt faint with horror at the idea of her soft, creamy belly carved into with knives—how they had touched her, pushed into that same soft part of her that he cradled with his hand as he curled behind her in bed. The idea of such invasion was dreadful.
    It was when he touched the curved, glassy scar—afterwards, that first time in bed—that he saw she had learned to protect herself. She lifted his