Animals
Contents
White Piss Good; Amber Piss Bad
The Cowpat and the Psychiatrist
An Inspiring Encounter that Causes Our Hero to Sleep Under a Bush
Near-Death in a Subterranean Bar
I can Resist Everything Except Metafiction
Infinity Stretches Away Equally in all Directions
Hungry, the Stars and Everything
EMMA JANE UNSWORTH
Published in Great Britain in 2014 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Copyright © Emma Jane Unsworth, 2014
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
Extract from ‘Fair Weather’ by Dorothy Parker reproduced by permission of Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd and Penguin USA.
‘Evidently Chickentown’ words and music by John Cooper Clarke, Martin Hannett, Stephen Hopkins © 1980, reproduced by permission of EMI Songs Ltd, London W1F 9LD and BMG Dinsong Ltd.
This digital edition first published by Canongate Books in 2014
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 9781782112129
eISBN 9781782112143
For Alison
You know how it is. Saturday afternoon. You wake up and you can’t move.
I blinked and the floaters on my eyeballs shifted to reveal Tyler in her ratty old kimono over in the doorway. ‘Way I see it,’ she said, glass in one hand, lit cigarette in the other, ‘girls are tied to beds for two reasons: sex and exorcisms. So, which was it with you?’
I squinted up at my right arm, which felt like it was levitating – but no, nothing so glamorous. The plastic bangle on my right wrist had hoopla’d over a bar on the bedhead during the night, manacling my hand and suspending my arm over the pillow. I wriggled upwards to release it but only managed to travel an inch or so before a strange, elasticky feeling pulled me back. I looked down. My tights – or rather the left leg (I was still sluttishly sporting the right, mid-thigh) – had wrapped itself around a bed knob. I tugged. No good. The knot held fast.
‘Get that for me, would you?’ I croaked.
She’d moved across the room and was leaning against the wardrobe.
Her
wardrobe. Her room.
We’d been out. Holy fuck, had we been out. A montage of images spooled through the brainfug. Fizzy wine, flat wine, city streets, cubicles, highly experimental burlesque moves on bar stools …
Tyler took her time looking for somewhere to put her cigarette. I knew that she was really savouring the scene. This was one for the ever-burgeoning anecdote store; to be wheeled out, exaggerated and relished on future nights that would doubtlessly end in similar indignities.
Hey, remember the time you tied yourself to the bed?
Killer.
‘Where did you sleep, anyway?’ I said.
‘I didn’t sleep. I Fonz’d it on the back lawn with a spritzer and my shades on.’
‘Fonzing it’ was making yourself feel better about things (aka the inevitable existentials) by telling yourself that you were cool and everything was fine. We also referred to it as ‘self-charming’. It had a 55% success rate, depending on location and weather.
‘What time is it now?’ I asked.
Tyler tugged at the knot, raised an eyebrow and unthreaded the tight-leg into a straight black line, which she held taut to show me. ‘Half past five.’
‘And what time did we get in?’
She pinged the tight-leg at me and held up her hand. I thought she was saying five – but no, she was saying no.
No forensic autopsies.
I nodded. The effects of the day’s self-charming were stable but critical. Don’t think about endings. Don’t look down. There were rules that had to be obeyed in order to guarantee a horror-free hangover: no news, no parental phone calls, some fresh air if you could tolerate the vertical plane. Sitcoms. Carbohydrates.
I ran my swollen tongue over my unbrushed teeth. A farm-ish smell. Furriness.
‘How do you feel?’ she asked.
‘Like an entire family of raccoons is nesting in my head.’
‘Nesting raccoons? How nice for you. I’ve got two bull-seals fucking a bag of steak.’
I sat up. Woof. Liquefying headrush. I looked down and caught sight of the prolapsed duvet on the floor by the side of the bed, its insides lolling between the missing buttons of the striped cotton cover. I squinted at Tyler. Five-two with cropped black hair sprung into curls. Face like a fallen putto. Deadly. She gripped her fag between her teeth as she opened her kimono and re-tied it tighter. She was wearing knickers but no bra: a bold move for the garden in March. She pulled the fag from her teeth and exhaled. ‘I know this will only concuss you further,’ she said, ‘but I’m getting excited about the Olympics.’
I held my head with one hand, squeezed my fingers into my temples. ‘The Olympics? Fuck! What month are we in?’
‘March.’
‘Thank Christ.’
My paranoia wasn’t so paranoid when you took into account the time we’d gone to bed on Saturday only to wake up on Monday morning. On that occasion I’d raised my head to see Tyler frantically shrugging off her kimono in front of the dresser.
What are you doing, you maniac? It’s Sunday!
It’s fucking Monday and I’m fucking late
, she said, batting a dimp out of her regulation baseball cap.
What’s that on your eye?
She turned to the mirror. Gasped and sighed.
It’s a low-budget high-definition eyebrow.
It’s permanent marker.
It’s A ClockworkmotherfuckingOrange
.
Oh Lo Lo Lo, what am I going to do?
There were still red wine stains on her kimono from that night some months ago. She took another drag on her fag. ‘And then the rover is almost at Mars, just a few months now until it performs its neurotically precise landing. There’s too much happening this summer. My hope can’t take the strain. There was this Olympics ad just on with a cartoon man diving off a cartoon cliff. It had me in
bits
.’
‘Cartoons can be very moving.’
‘Why do I feel more for cartoons than the news?’
‘Because you’re perverse. And American.’
‘Barely, any more. American, I mean.’
‘Say “vitamin”. Aluminium.
H
erbs.’
She’d lived in England for ten years and hadn’t lost her accent – I especially liked hearing her say the words ‘mirror’ (
mere
) and ‘moon’ (
murn
). Tyler had moved over from Nebraska when her mum, an English lecturer, decided she wanted a divorce and applied for a teaching job at Manchester Met. The Johnsons were well off, the profits of her dad’s family’s cattle-farming mostly. They had a ranch in Crawford with stables and turkeys and a porch with a chair-swing. But for all the perks Tyler said that living there had been like standing on a mathematical plane drawing: eerily flat and evenly portioned into squares of sallow crops. Just you and the horizon, waiting. More specifically: filling the hours. You had to tell yourself you were waiting or really there was no point in eating your breakfast, changing your shirt.
‘I was thinking of boiling up some pasta bows,’ Tyler said. ‘Reckon you could eat?’
‘Possibly.’
She looked at her watch.
‘By my estimation this culinary extravaganza should be ready in about fifteen. Now, do you need some help getting up?’
‘No. And don’t be nice to me, or I’ll cry.’
‘Roger that.’
She retrieved her cigarette from the side of the dresser and left the room, fagsmoke trailing. On the back of her kimono was the logo of a Thai boxing club in Salford – the Pendlebury Pythons – along with their motto, in looping gold font: DEATH BEFORE DEFEAT.
I lay still for a moment, planning. An order of ceremony was needed. Become upright. Brush teeth. Find phone.
Phone.
Jim.
My fiancé (although we both hated the word) was in New York performing a piano recital on a barge in Brooklyn. We’d spoken the previous night before he sound-checked.
You be careful
, he’d said. He knew me, knew the way the night rose in me, knew the way Tyler and I egged each other on.
Course
, I said. At the time I was
carefully
smoking outside a bar on Oxford Road, while Tyler was inside
carefully
transferring the number of a dealer from her dying phone onto her forearm in lip-liner. The rest was – well, not quite history; more a chain of events that amounted to the same headache, the same ransacked purse, same wasted day-after. But at least we’d made it home (you congratulate yourself with the
avoided
crimes when you’re clutching at the grubby straws of self-charming) – why, I’d been positively restrained, getting home and sort-of into bed. The previous week we’d ended up at a house in Stretford with a fifty-year-old air traffic controller called Pickles who’d invited us for a (purely friendly) nightcap to discover he only had an eighteenth of a bottle of gin in the cupboard.
How he could have over-estimated that situation quite so much is beyond me
, Tyler had said.
It’s enough to make you never get on a plane again
.
I looked to my side and saw a glass I’d somehow had the sense to fill and place there before I collapsed. I reached for it, gulped one twice three times. My gunky mouth made the liquid milky. Swallowing was an effort. I drank water like it was a job to do, an unpaid internship at my own inner (highly corrupt) Ministry of Health. Getting the whole pint down was hard work. As soon as the water was in me it wanted to come out. I ran along the thin hall to the bathroom, left tight-leg trailing. Slammed the door.
The tiles were blissfully cool under my feet. Bathrooms were the best kind of room. You knew that whatever happened in there, you were going to be all right. You had a sink, a toilet, no soft furnishings, usually no audience. I pulled down my knickers and sat. A thunderbolt of piss plummeted and the rest trickled through.
The wall next to me was full of holes – a succession of injuries from various toilet-roll holders, towel rails, shelves and, I could only imagine, fists and fingers – that had been botchily plastered and painted over in sickly pale yellow by the tenants before us. On the other side, my knee rested against the flimsy fibreglass bath-side. The slightest pressure could dint the bath-side in and out. Sometimes I did it for fun – just pressed in and out with my knee. (Sometimes I did it for hours.) A cityscape of curdling beauty products sprawled along the bathside and then, at the foot of the bath, the winking sink with its hot tap head missing. A red metal heart, dusty and hollow and punctured with crescent shapes, hung on a long chain from a nail above the sink, next to an extending shaving mirror that Tyler used to do her eyeliner. Next to the sink, two folded banknotes balanced on a rung of the towel rail, drying. I stood and looked in the bowl before I flushed, recalling the adage of a girl I’d once worked with:
White piss good; amber piss bad
. Orwellian in its visceral simplicity. Meanwhile the liquid I had dispatched into the toilet bowl was almost ochre. Not good, not good at all. More water was in order.
I walked down the hallway to the kitchen, past the coats, hats and bags dangling from hooks like the vaporised hanged. Tyler owned the flat – her dad had stumped up the cash (not just the deposit, but The Cash) not long after she moved over – and I was meant to give her a hundred a month for my bare little box-room, but I never had it and she never asked. The flat was part of a wood-and-chrome cooperative that had been built in Hulme, south of the centre, in the late 1990s. The block shared a central courtyard with a patch of grass and a few raised beds where people with the time and organisational skills grew their own vegetables. Someone had tried to keep chickens in there once (
Stuck in Fucking Chickentown
, said Tyler, quoting John Cooper Clarke), in a little sustainable-wood hutch they’d whittled themselves or something, but they hadn’t lasted long with all the foxes. Zuzu alone had dragged in four hens, limp-necked and lovingly punctured, through the cat-flap, leaving each splayed in the centre of the kitchen floor and she’d looked up at us as if to say:
I caught it, bitches – the least you can do is pluck it and cook it.
It was mostly hippy types who lived in the surrounding flats; ‘hippysters’ as Tyler called them (
eco-friendly toilet cleaner and fifty designer jumpers
…). In the shop space on the ground floor of the block there was a vegan café that Tyler and I ate in when we forgot to buy food (often), taking in our own ham and honey, applied under the table to liven things up – the latter because a) Tyler liked sweet toppings on toast and b) they’d reprimanded her once when she asked them whether they had any, thinking it would be a safe bet.
They looked at me like I’d just slaughtered an orang-utan in front of them
, she said.
And this was HONEY. It’s a natural product. Bees LIKE MAKING IT. No one forces them to. Where will the madness end???