Read Online Animal People by Charlotte Wood - Free Book Online

even the most basic ones—even simply sitting cross-legged, his knees pointed at the ceiling while Fiona’s limbs were fluid, her knees horizontal—and his inability made him feel stupid.
    But Fiona’s concentration was absolute. Her effort, as she turned her body into the inverted V, her face growing red as she struggled to hold the pose for yet another minute, moved him. Her tracksuit pants would slip down her hips and her t-shirt would ruck up. The tremor in her legs and elbows, her belly rising and falling, her eyes closed, lips softly closing and opening for breathing exactly as Dawnelle instructed; all this sent a shard of love through Stephen every time.
    Fiona carried a tiny, flimsy little mint-green mat to classes, but to Stephen’s eye it was useless; hardly a thing at all, thin as a sheet. So he went to Foam City to get her the best yoga mat he could find, choosing a two-inch thick sheet of black industrial rubber. Bigger , he said when the salesman indicated where he would cut. He wrestled the coiled thing into the back of his ute, and then through the front door of Fiona’s house one afternoon, getting it almost to the living room before it unfurled with a mighty whump , filling the width and half the length of the hallway.
    â€˜It’s huge ,’ Fiona crowed, clutching his arm. ‘It’s hilarious!’ She lay down on it in the hallway, and the girls came running to bounce up and down along its length before collapsing, throwing themselves over her. She groaned and shrieked, and they all lay there, beaming up at him. His girls. Later Stephen heard Fiona telling someone he had given her the best yoga mat ever . ‘It’s like doing yoga in a jumping castle!’ she cried into the phone. He felt a glow of pride inside himself for days.
    His car rolled on, stopped, rolled. The traffic wave carried him forward, stopped again.
    So what had happened? That’s what she would ask him. How had things changed so much, what was the difference between then—only two months ago—and now? He felt his jaw clench, the nausea lapping. He couldn’t say. It just was.
    He sighed. Please, oh please let this day be ended.
    The doctor. That’s what the skimming fear was, to do with his mother. The doctor said . . . especially now . Stephen gripped the wheel. She never mentioned doctors to Stephen, though Cathy was always on about some ailment that supposedly plagued their mother, the various pills she took. But Cathy worked in a pharmacy, she was obsessed with drugs. Still, it pressed at him. Margaret knew Stephen hated any mention of doctors, or hospitals. Especially since their father—but he would not be dragged back to that, that room, that bed, not today. He trawled back through his mother’s words. ‘Especially now.’ Was she trying to hint at something too awful for direct speech? Is that why she had gotten so wound up about the bloody party? He tried to think. She said she had sent him a link about it. Was it possible there had been some news Stephen had simply missed? Surely Cathy would have berated him about it. But it was possible. For did he not spend his life trying to make sure of it, trying to escape from the knowledge of awful things?
    Stephen rested his face in his hands for a moment. He breathed, then lifted his head, returned his hands to the wheel. Of course it was stupid. His mother was perfectly fine. She was old. One day she would die, but not yet. He made himself stare back into the Foam City window. C OUCH CUSHIONS ! C UT TO ORDER ! Why did it feel that he had never, till this moment, considered the fact that his mother would die? Malevolent jellyfish blobs of bitter green polystyrene hung in the Foam City window. His skin chilled under the air-conditioning’s blast.
    Fiona would be home from the beach now. Thinking of her swimming calmed him. Sometimes she looked down at her body with despair, like the time after the smiling