The New Animals by Pip Adam

Author:Pip Adam [Adam, Pip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781776561162
Publisher: Victoria University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Elodie left East Street after everyone else. Tommy hadn’t had much to say. Mainly, he was worried the girl was going to be too ‘done up’. Elodie had never done anyone up in her life.

‘Yip,’ she said, smiling. ‘Totally.’

‘Yip.’

‘Aha.’

‘You’re not wrong.’

He’d only kept her so that Kurt would have to leave without her. She was walking by herself down Queen Street now – past Topshop. All the lights were on. There was so much stuff. Garments and garments, squashed into racks. Some on sale because the season was over. All over town, there were huge posters up for H&M, which was opening in Sylvia Park. H&M were the worst – they turned everything around, constantly. Most of it wouldn’t sell and then where would it go? Topshop felt like a sad goodbye. The whole of Queen Street did.

Elodie told herself she had no idea where she was going. As if practising for what she would tell a reasonable person, if they asked, if she was caught wandering like this, here, on Queen Street in the middle of the night, with the lights from the stores shouting out. Carla wasn’t really to blame. She’d tried to go away. Elodie looked down Queen Street, where she was heading, now. But Carla had come back. That was what she had to live with. She’d got away. Extricated herself from all of it and then come back. Cold, wet, naked. Quietly, without any attention, and she’d fit back in again, eyes fucked, skin awful, bung feet. She’d come back, washed away the salt, got dressed, and fallen back in line. Behind Tommy, behind Cal, behind the shampoo company she styled for – and the others. She came back and worked for money, tried to fit herself back into Duey’s life, which had worked for a while but Elodie was pretty sure wasn’t going to help her ignore this. Elodie pointed with her mind across the road into the window of Glassons. Pointed like she was telling the story of what she saw happening before anyone else did.

She walked with purpose now, even though she had no idea where she was going. She told herself she had no idea where she was going but she knew exactly where she was going. The street was still busy. Wednesday was student night. There were people sleeping in the street because this is how it was, now. The bright, bright shops keeping the merchandise warm and the people outside them under cardboard and newspaper.

Elodie had been to London with her parents ten years ago and there were people sleeping in the streets there and when she came back her mother had said wasn’t it great there were no people sleeping on the streets in New Zealand? There were people sleeping in the streets, now. Elodie wanted to shout, but there was no point. Every time she shouted she eventually stopped. Carla had told her she was thinking about de-barking Doug. But it was Elodie who was de-barked.

She stopped outside the Louis Vuitton store.

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