the shop.'
'He hates me.'
'He hates me too,' she said simply, folding up the pyjamas on the kitchen table. 'That's beside the point.'
'Leah, she's gone mad.'
She could hear him crying at the other end of the phone. It was a terrible noise. She closed her eyes. 'Listen,' she said. 'Listen to me, Charlie. I'm leaving now. You meet me in Taylor Square with the key for the shop. I'll be there in thirty minutes.' She could hear him crying still. 'Hang up,' she said, and waited until he had.
Yet when she let herself into the pet shop she did not feel as capable as her voice suggested. She moved slowly, warily, unsure of what to expect. In all the rich variety of smell the shop contained, she now detected the unmistakable odour of human shit and, by going to the place where the smell was strongest, she found Emma and the baby in the cage next to the rabbits. She saw a wild-haired dirt-smeared woman lying amongst the damp straw on the floor of the cage. The baby's face was covered in yellow snot and its eyes seemed gummed together. Leah held out her hand and had it taken. Emma murmured affectionately but her nails were sharp and painful. Leah looked at her eyes and wondered if she was drunk.
'All right, Emma.' She disengaged the sharp nails slowly, so as not to give offence. 'We're going to get you clean because I can't talk to you when you're dirty like this. So I'll take you upstairs and get you washed and I promise you I'll bring you back here. Is that agreeable?'
It seemed to be. Leah escorted mother and child up to the concrete-floored bathroom where she found both of them equally dependent. She did not talk except to say which way she wanted the woman to turn, simple practical requests, e. g. lift your arm, your leg, turn your head, now we wash your botty, etc. She was not used to handling women's bodies and although she tried to do what she had to do without looking, she was fascinated by the difference between herself and Emma who had such large nipples on her shiny swollen breasts and white stretch marks on her young stomach and hips, like white rivers on the map of a foreign country. Leah tried not to stare, but Emma was as lacking in modesty as her little boy and closed her eyes happily to let the shampoo be rinsed from her hair by saucepan after saucepan of steaming water.
When Leah had them both washed and had combed their hair, dried between their toes and the cheeks of their bottoms and powdered them with talc, she took them downstairs, the one in a clean napkin, the other in her husband's dressing gown. She changed the straw in the cage and, before returning them to it, introduced the pink eiderdown as a mattress – the baby had several scratches from that rough straw.
She then squatted on the floor beside the cage and, amidst the piercing din of birds, the low hum of aquariums, and the baby's gentle gurgling, tried to talk to Emma quietly.
She understood, she thought, what it was that Emma was up to, and she said so.
This single comment produced such a look of hope in her friend's eyes that she immediately set out to explain, in detail, what it was she understood.
'I know,' she said, wondering if she should towel Emma's hair dry. 'He loves them so much, and then he cages them. He has always loved them, ever since he was little.'
Emma frowned. Leah did not notice.
'He picked up my snakes. I'll never forget it. He was just a little boy and he had no fear at all. Then we have all this.' She waved a hand around the shop where lorikeets and wrens hopped and fluttered, fidgeted and fussed, forever in nervous motion. 'It's tragic. He loves them all so much and then he cages them. He turns them into a product and you can look at it, if you want to, as a perversion. Izzie agrees with you. But you won't make the point by climbing into a cage. You'd be better off to discuss it with him because, I can tell you, he's missed your meaning.'
'He's not the only one,' said Emma, but the unusual clarity of this statement was lost amidst an outburst from the cockatoos.
'What?'
Emma murmured irritably.
'Am I barking up the wrong tree?'
Emma murmured assent.
'Is it because you are ashamed of being kept?' asked Leah, but in spite of the reasonable tone of her voice she was becoming irritated by Emma's manner.
Emma murmured again.
'For God's sake, don't make me play idiot guessing games. What is it? Tell me.'
Emma blinked, and told her: Charles had enlisted in the army.
'Oh shit,' said Leah. Her legs were weary from such uncomfortable squatting. She stood up. 'What in the hell is the matter with you? I live with a Jew who claims he cannot distinguish between Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain. But your husband is a decent man and you are lucky to have him. He feels things. He has a heart. He tries his best. I thought you were good and kind, Emma. I watched you with animals and with your baby. But you're as stupid as the rest of us.'
And then she was crying – fat hot tears rolled down her cheeks. 'I hate the world.' The words surprised her as much as the tears did, like huge white tails on tiny blackheads. 'I wish I were dead. Look at what we've done. Look at all his cages. Look at you. We are all perverted. Everything good in us gets perverted. I wanted to be good and kind and I made myself a slave instead. I lie awake at night planning how I am going to leave him, but I can't. When he touches me he makes my skin creep. He has lost his legs and he thinks that's a licence for selfishness and spite. When he speaks in public everyone admires him. A woman in Newtown told me he was a saint.'
Leah sat on the floor again, crossing her legs, and not worrying about the filthy straw that prickled her legs and laddered her stockings. 'Oh, Emma,' she said wearily. 'I'm so sick of it. I wish I was with Charlie's father, dancing and arguing and drinking sweet wine.'
Emma looked at Leah Goldstein – the flinty face now contorted in misery like a crumpled newspaper unfolding in a fire, the slumped shoulders, the clenched fists, the slender crossed legs leading to a pair of bright red high- heeled shoes that had seemed so gay when they had first clicked through the early-morning gloom.
Emma murmured. She moved to one side of her cage. She was large and the cage was small but she managed to make some room. She patted the eiderdown and held out her hand.
Leah gave a self-mocking little laugh, but she joined Emma in the cage and let herself be embraced and comforted by her murmuring friend who dried her eyes with the rough sleeve of the dressing gown and stroked her hair and neck until she was, in the midst of all those pet-shop noises, sound asleep.
30
When Leah woke up she was so refreshed as to be almost light-hearted. Cramped by wire, prickled by straw, she was as elated and optimistic about human beings as she had been despairing an hour before. She forgot her stern judgement of Emma's selfishness and remembered only her kindness, the quality that she most closely approximated to goodness, her thirst for which would always lead her to idealize and oversimplify the characters of those who displayed it.
She kissed the sleeping woman on the forehead, and rearranged the baby's blue bunny rug around its chubby legs. She felt heady, almost silly. She crawled out of the cage and dusted the straw from her severe black suit.
She looked up to see Charles standing behind the counter. The shop was closed.
Leah hoisted her skirt a fraction and did a small dance for him, smiling broadly and tapping (dangerously) on her bright red shoes.
Charles was too worried to smile. He had returned to the shop and found two women in a cage that had previously held one.
'Treasure her,' Leah said, panting a little. 'She loves you. She worships you. You are a lucky man to have a wife who will be so mad on your behalf.'
She sat herself, athletically, on the counter, spilling roneoed notes about the feeding requirements of various cockatoos and these yellow sheets now sliced through the air and floated so much longer than expected that Leah
