Read Online Animal People by Charlotte Wood - Free Book Online Page B

across the empty space to his car with its door hanging open, watched by all the waiting traffic, and get in, close the door, and edge the vehicle forward and wait with the rest of them.
    The lights changed, finally, and Stephen accelerated across the intersection; moving, at last, into the day. But then a noise, his foot plunged to the brake. Something had happened, was happening. Something flapped above his car; a huge, ungainly bird filled the windscreen. It sailed above his bonnet, and he saw then that the thing was a woman. Her eyes lightly closed, head tilted skywards, mouth agape. Cars spun past in the four lanes of Cambridge Road, swerving around his, sounding horns. Stephen understood he had hit her. The body—the jeans, zippered grey tracksuit top, the tiny head with its dull brown fur—plummeted to the bitumen before his car. The clothes and body bounced—how bounce? —and there was the face again, eyes wide, mouth yawning in laughter or a scream. Stephen sat in his seat, foot jammed hard on the brake, hands gripping the steering wheel, the car skew-whiff on the axis of its lane, trying to fathom what the fuck had happened to him now.
    A dreadful wail rose up; the woman was somehow scuttling to the side of the road, crouched low, dragging herself through gaps in the lurching traffic. Stephen skipped through the cars, found himself kneeling beside her on the side of the road, his car abandoned behind him, door open, in the centre lane. Cars slowed but kept moving, horns sounding, accelerating away.
    He shouted: ‘Are you alright?’
    She could not possibly be alright. She lay, her little shorn head in the gutter, her long thin body sideways, skinny black-jeaned legs weirdly angled. She moaned, her long body churning in the gutter. He looked for blood, registered relief at the sound of her crying.
    Stephen stared at her stretched open mouth, one bony hand clutching at her shoulder. ‘Me aarm , mey arm , ’ she wailed, and Stephen heard his own panicked shouting, ‘Just wait,’ as if she could go anywhere, and he scampered across the lanes back through the horns and the cars, shut the door, put his feet on the pedals.
    What he had just seen—the body falling like a doomed, plummeting kite—was a watermark over everything he saw now, and panic and blood rose in him. He forced it away with his own voice, aloud in the car: keep calm don’t fucking panic. He edged the car to the kerb, all the time hearing another voice: just go! just go!
    She was still in the gutter, her head now lolling horribly onto the footpath. Her eyes squinted shut, her mouth a wide grimace of pain. She had stopped wailing, and instead, much worse, grizzled like an animal, a long, dirt-coloured creature in black jeans and a thin grey singlet and the zippered tracksuit top, one grasshopper leg tucked beneath and the other bent above her. She panted, her cheek pushed into the kerb, her face the same colour as the concrete. Her right hand still clutched her left shoulder. She whimpered, ‘Mefuckingarm, Jesus Christ!’ Stephen could only repeat it, Jesus Christ, as he squatted, and then shouted, ‘I’m going to lift you.’
    He scooped her up and she yairled a high, animal shriek of pain—somehow his brain recalled a possum fight outside his window one midnight—and kept shrieking as he lowered her into the passenger seat, yanking his backpack into place to fashion a support for her head. He pushed her legs in and slammed the door. The voice in his head still shouted Go. Go. Leave her. And he understood finally that this voice came not from him but a taxi-driver across the road, pulled up by the kerb. Stephen stared in dumb confusion as he started the ignition; he saw the taxi-driver’s face, red with frustration. The man shouted: ‘It’s just a fucking junkie! Her own fault! Just go!’
    Stephen stared, uncomprehending. The taxi-driver shook his head,