Animals (12 page)

‘I think it comes from me,’ I said, because I wanted to give the right answer. Professor Eggle nodded.

I woke to find a warm, recently vacated dent in the bed next to me. Jim’s bedding. Jim’s room. Morning.

Fuck.

I’d gone to Jim’s.

This was bad of me. It was one of our new rules: not turning up at Jim’s late at night. Yeah. Try telling that to yourself when you’re goulashed. Times like that, everything seems like a fine idea. Contacting that person you fell out with? Why not? A capella karaoke in a taxi queue? Oh boy! Leapfrogging over a postbox? You betcha …

Shafts of sunlight cut through the blinds, scoring celestial rents on the floor. By the look of it, it was about nine. Outside, I could hear the post-dawn weekend soundtrack: tidal traffic, descending planes and the postman’s squeaky cart making its way along the street. A flock of geese flew overhead, honking. It was a sound that always cheered me. The town hall clock started to bong. That was a cheering sound, too. I lay still and counted ten beats. I could hear Jim down the hall in the kitchen – in the distant inside, sharp and dull sounds: of metal on pot, of pot on metal, of glass on glass. I listened to the creaks of the waking flat, its pipes warming the walls, like blood bringing something back to life, and I felt an ancient nostalgic feeling in my guts. The hollow expanding into a sort of hunger, not pleasant or unpleasant; a rich, savoury hopelessness. The old yearning for yearning. I put my hands down my knickers like I often did to comfort myself, making a triangle with my thumbs and index fingers. I turned my head to one side and smelled my breath coming back off the pillow: the acrid scent of just-used emery board; of something grown dead and burned. I was thirsty. I pulled my hands out of my knickers and sat up. There was a pint of water on the table beside the bed. I reached for it and looked inside, swooshing the water round. One of the only times Jim had stayed at mine I’d woken in the night and grabbed a glass of what I thought was water from the top of the laundry box only to hear Jim shout NOOOOOOOOOO! It was too late. I’d drunk his contact lenses.

I pieced the memories of the previous evening together: I’d left Tyler with Nick in a tiki bar on Stevenson Square around 2 a.m. They were in a hammock sharing a fish-bowl cocktail. She’d tried to stop me from going over to Jim’s.
He’s hounding you with these text messages!
I’d ignored her like I’d been ignoring him.

I got up and walked along the hall. The kitchen was a shock of brightness. Jim was at the sink, topping up a glass of iced orange squash with water. He liked orange squash and I liked watching him drink it. When he drank he held his free hand (usually his right) close to his chest and clenched and unclenched his fist. A relic from toddlerdom. I’d vowed never to tell him about it. Through the window the day looked clear and not overcast, the city turning in the distance to green, to height, and the grey-pelted humps of the Pennines. I went and looped my arms around him from behind and squeezed his back against my chest. We stood like that for a while and did a slow little silent dance. I pressed my head on one side between his shoulder blades. He was wearing a vest so thin I could smell the night on him; the slow-leached losses of his dreams, the unrealistic fabric conditioner. I looked to my side and noticed that the LED display of the tumble dryer was flashing with a little orange message:
Clean Door Filter
. It had been flashing all night, unnoticed, and I felt sorry for it. I pulled away from Jim and switched the dryer off. He pulled me back towards him. I kissed him, holding the back of his head, my fingers splayed, thumbs spasmed. I liked the look of them when I looked.

We got dressed and walked to the shop. He took my hand and tutted at the dirt beneath my fingernails.

I looked at him – his hair, his skin – and I felt thick and bloody by comparison, pink and bulgy in my tight t-shirt, like vacuum-packed meat. A chill in my chest.

‘Do you remember what you said to me when you got in?’ he said.

I couldn’t remember getting in as such. ‘No.’

‘You said you weren’t sure you wanted to move into the flat. You said we should look for somewhere new because you weren’t sure my place could ever feel like home.’

‘Oh.’

‘Is that true? Because if it’s true then we need to have a proper talk about it.’

A
proper talk
. It sounded like a work meeting. This was what the wedding was doing to us. Making us professionally involved.

‘I think I was probably just talking shit.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Well, you should watch that. Probably.’

I thought I might vomit. Was there a bush I could run behind? There was not.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to give you a hard time, especially not today, but I need to know this won’t keep happening. I don’t want this to be my life: not knowing what time you’re coming in, what state you’re going to be in. I couldn’t get back to sleep last night after you said that.’

I stopped walking.

‘What’s the matter?’

I didn’t speak. He shook my shoulder.

‘Why are you just staring at the ground?’

I looked at him. I was aware of my movements.

‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘don’t make
me
feel like the bad person.’

I gave him a firm nod. The week’s miseries were in the post: Teary Tuesday, Weepy Wednesday. For now: Silent Sunday. ‘I’m tired, that’s all. Let’s walk.’

He took my hand. ‘Apology accepted.’

As we approached the shop I felt a flutter of nerves. The woman in there had caught me off-guard not so long ago. She’d put the contents of my basket through the till – sausages, thick sliced bread, tinned macaroni cheese, Tia Maria – and said:
Got kids, have you?
I didn’t want to get into it. I was abominably hungover for a start, so in the moment I said:
No, but I’m expecting
. EXPECTING! Where did this shit come from? It wasn’t as though this was a shop in St Ives, or Knutsford even. This was Jim’s local shop, where I went almost every week, at least once. For booze and fags. I’d fucked it. Totally fucked it. I didn’t know how I was going to sustain this fabrication – whether I should shove cushions up my top, gradually increasing in size for the next nine months, and then borrow a baby off someone when I went in after that. Whose baby, though? Shirley was the only baby I knew and she was in London. I lingered on the threshold.

‘Do you mind if I wait outside?’ I said. ‘I fancy a fag.’

He looked at me. ‘Course,’ he said, and went in the shop. By the time he came out I was myself again.

Back at the flat we made eggs and sat down in the living room.

‘Have you thought about drinking less?’ he said.

Oh not today not today I thought you said not today.

I put my cutlery down, unhungry. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘in the morning usually. Then by the evening I change my mind.’

He looked at me. Oh. Give me a glance between two lovers on any day and I will show you a hundred heartbreaks and reconciliations, a thousand tallies and trump cards. And still there is something that survives beyond the sham of domesticity, beyond the micro-promises and micro-power-shifts, and
that
is the motherfucking miracle.

‘I find myself wondering more and more how we’re going to stay on a level in the precious time we get together.’

I was unable to speak. In this, paralysis. The past reviled; the future threatened.

‘I’m just trying to be realistic in terms of both our needs,’ he went on. ‘I didn’t mean to put you off your breakfast.’

I held on to the sofa. ‘You didn’t. I’ve had enough.’ He looked worried then and I liked it so I let him worry a few more seconds before I said, ‘Of the eggs.’

He put his plate down. ‘I forgot to say, my folks want to invite a few extra people to the wedding.’

‘How many?’

‘A few friends. Ten max.’

‘Imagine having ten friends.’

He laughed and the room relaxed.

‘Can I invite an extra, then?’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘Kirsten.’

‘Kirsten?’

‘She’s a no-nonsense person, isn’t she?’

Kirsten was a cellist with the Hallé. We’d had a long night together after a concert the previous year. She was a pert, bitchy-shy blonde who looked like Kirsten Dunst or maybe I just made that association because of her name. The three of us were the last men standing at the afterparty and ended up smoking on a bench down by the Irwell until it got light. Kirsten had grown up in Stockport with her mum, who was just eighteen when she had her. They’d lived in a refuge for a month when they first got away from her dad. Kirsten could remember it vividly. Her dad had tried to break into the refuge one night and one of the other mothers, a woman who smelled of weed (Kirsten knew it was weed, she was seven), had hidden her in a kitchen cupboard while her mum shouted at her dad and her dad tried to drag her mum out. Kirsten said at the time she’d wanted him to drag her off so that she could be done with both of them. She said she used to fantasise about being an orphan, like Annie.
A fresh start.
That’s what she said.
I must have been the only seven-year-old in Stockport who wanted a fresh start.
We’d texted each other a few times and then the connection had waned. I thought about her sometimes. I’d dreamed about her a couple of times – we were always running away from something together. Sometimes I thought about calling her, in the small hours. I still had her number.

‘I dunno,’ Jim said, ‘I’ve invited enough people from the orchestra. It’s going to get complicated if I start asking those not so close.’

A surge of peevishness. ‘So your parents are inviting people I’ve never met but we can’t invite people I
have
met and liked?’

He rubbed his forehead. ‘This is exactly what I didn’t want. Stress. Maybe today isn’t the best time to discuss it.’ A significant look. ‘But we get so little time together at the moment …’

I looked down at my feet. They would always be my feet. That was a shame. I looked at Jim.

Looked at him.

In the bedroom he said: ‘Let’s not use a condom.’ Something about this appealed, in the absence of alcohol, in the rip and flick of quickly undressing: to just have a good old-fashioned unabandoned
fuck
. I felt better as he belted my wrists to the bed frame, felt his frustration, allowed him it, and loved myself for that allowance. I punished him, too, in that fuck. I gave him nothing to suggest I was enjoying it or not enjoying it. I made a china doll of myself. A cold pose. An abandoned shell; uninhabited. The night is a zoo and the next day is its museum.

A text arrived from Tyler as I was lying in bed, untied, the shower spitting in the bathroom.

TURNS OUT NICK DOES UNDERSTAND IF HIS FACE IS ANYTHING TO GO BY

I wondered whether we’d been fucking simultaneously in beds across town, our lives in split-screen. I recalled a conversation we’d had at the beginning of our friendship.

‘Define love,’ Tyler said, her hand dropping onto her forearm as we sat relighting saggy rollies. She’d spent the previous ten minutes doing CPR on a pack of ancient Golden Virginia. It was 6 a.m.

And I said: ‘True freedom.’

She thought about it.

‘So you’re talking unconditional,’ she said after a while. ‘Not romantic. Agape as opposed to Eros.’

‘Okay, then: maximum contact with maximum freedom.’

‘That’s not love,’ she said, exhaling with a gurn, like Popeye. ‘That’s a tampon ad.’

At lunchtime on the 4th of May I stood waiting for Tyler outside the Georgian library. It was raining half-heartedly, still enough to make the smoking of a cigarette unpleasant. I had to keep relighting my fag after tapping it too hard and losing the hot end to the glossy pavements. Overhead, a plasticky lid of cloud sealed the city in a thwarted dream. The windows of passing trams were beaded with condensation. Outside the Sainsbury’s over the road, gloomy groupings of students queued by the cashpoint, eating packet sandwiches. I waited twenty-five minutes and at five to one I called her.

‘Tyler, I’m at the library – it’s that Yeats talk, remember? I reminded you yesterday.’

‘Oh shit. Look, Lo, I got blackout-drunk last night. I feel like if I move I’ll vomit electricity. Can we take a raincheck?’

I looked at my shoes. They were wet through. I’d come straight from a nightshift and hadn’t anticipated the weather.

‘Course.’

I threw my dimp towards a grid and made my way inside the library, up three sets of winding stairs, to the main room where the ceiling rose in a stained glass dome. It wasn’t a large space, a square twenty metres, but it was airy and light and had the vast tranquility of libraries that’s a lot like being outdoors; you feel like there’s more air in those places. I inhaled at the sight of the dome above and exhaled dry-mouth tobacco taste. Books held together with yellowing strips of masking tape lined the walls, spliced with dark-wood shelving. A few people milled around the large room, their hair wet, their faces amiable. In the middle of the room were five or six rows of chairs and, beyond, a lectern backed by a series of concertina’d screens pinned with what from a distance looked like charcoal drawings. There was a table of red and white wine at the back of the room – free, and at lunchtime! I thought,
I should really make an effort to come to more literary events
. I took a white wine and sipped it – it was tepid and acidic, curving my stomach with windy cramp but relaxing my limbs, my mind. I tucked myself away by a back window and peered over the wide wooden ledge to the sill and beyond. The tops of umbrellas, parked cars, empty taxis, beneath the steaming rain. The library itself – its poise, its stark lighting – reminded me of a girl I used to be friendly with before I got close to Tyler. Maud the Painter. Her face was drawn to a point – I always thought of Yeats’
beauty like a tightened bow
when I saw her.
Not natural in an age like this.
And she wasn’t of the age, not at all. She went through friends like she went through cities, never settling, leaving in a blaze of fire and offence.
A person of dubious evolution
was how Tyler (jealously) kissed her off. I wondered where Maud kept herself these days, these nights, in the small hours; whether she had found love. Had babies. Joined Facebook.