Animals (13 page)

I pulled my t-shirt out of my armpits. What had I done to deserve such a generous quota of sweat glands? I went up for more wine, looked around. There were barely twenty people in the room and the talk was due to start any minute. The wine-to-people ratio was looking good. A woman walked up to the lectern. A fountain pen dangled on a cord round her neck and I smiled to see it – this place was comprehensively antiquated. ‘Welcome, ladies and gents!’ By her side was a man – the professor, surely. He had a hobo sort of look about him: mid-forties, Americana beard, denim shirt, black knitted hat worn slightly too far back from his face, wire glasses, thick little lips. I thought,
You look like Richard Dreyfuss in
Jaws. He nodded and the thin arm of his spectacles glinted like gossamer.

‘Thanks for coming,’ he said. An accent without geography, each vowel free, each consonant its own continent. ‘Please, take a seat.’

I took a detour via the drinks table and then sat at the end of a row three from the back, in case it lasted too long.

As it turned out, it wasn’t long enough.

The professor talked about what had brought him to Yeats, first for his thesis and then to complement his teaching.
I tried to love other people, really I did, but something kept bringing me back – especially these later poems, which are at once so deeply personal and so evasive, so desperate and defiant
… Yes, I thought. Yes and yes and yes. This is a fine ambush. I kept looking down and finding I had wine to drink. An hour passed and I didn’t notice.

Suddenly: sparse applause, and the woman was there at the front again, saying thanks to everyone. I glanced at the wine table as I clapped – plenty left, great, great. When would be acceptable to get up and get another glass? I was having such a good time.

And then another thought budded and began to uncurl.
I should go up and thank him
. I should do this because he has reminded me of so many things. Also it makes me look less like a freeloader.

I downed a glass of wine standing next to the table and then I took another glass down to the front where the professor was standing, coat on now, bag on shoulder, talking to the woman from the library. I stood there a few seconds feeling conspicuous. When my presence became suitably oppressive, when the atmosphere in the room felt like it just about to crack and I was just about to leg it, they turned to look at me.

‘Hallo!’ said the woman.

‘Hi,’ I said, and then, to the professor: ‘I just wanted to thank you. That was very inspiring.’

He smiled and I wondered whether he thought I was drunk. Was I drunk? I was not. Maybe I was. Either I was or I wasn’t.

‘My pleasure,’ he said. ‘Glad to be of service.’

‘Are you a member?’ said the woman.

No penis jokes.

‘No.’

‘Are you interested in becoming one? I can give you some literature to take away …’

‘Okay.’

And off she went.

The professor stuck out his hand. ‘Marty.’

I shook his hand. ‘Laura.’

‘You said “inspiring”. So you write poetry yourself then?’

‘Oh god, no, not poetry. I mean, I’d like to. Wouldn’t everyone?’

‘Would they?’

‘All writers, I mean.’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Aren’t you?’

It was perhaps a little early to do something like disagree but I couldn’t help myself. I was having fun. He raised an eyebrow, acknowledged interest, opened his mouth to speak –

The woman was back. She handed me a slim stack of white and blue sheets of paper. ‘If you’re interested, just fill in the membership request form and drop it in.’

She stood there, waiting for me to walk away. What she didn’t know was that I was waiting for
her
to walk away.

‘Hester,’ Marty said, ‘do you mind if I sit in your lovely anteroom an hour or so while I wait for my train? And do you mind if I take a bottle of that leftover wine in there with me?’

‘With pleasure, Professor!’

He looked at me. ‘Do you like wine, Laura?’

Hm. Hm hm hm.

The anteroom was sentinelled with heavy-legged tables and lit by standing lamps with Christmassy shades: emerald, crimson, gold. As in the main room the walls were thickened with dishevelled bookshelves. It felt cosy and clever. We sat down opposite each other at a table for four. He enjoyed his teaching job well enough, he lived in Islington, his book,
Widening Gyres
, had been published ten years ago to little effect. We drank two bottles of wine. We were halfway through the second when he said: ‘You’re engaged, aren’t you?’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because you’re not wearing a wedding ring and I’m only ever attracted to irreversibly attached women.’

I burned for that. I was engulfed. Ambush No. 2 of the day. I topped up our glasses for something to do. The second bottle was empty. I set it down.
Stop shaking.

‘So you said not poetry, but you are writing something?’

For once I was glad of this particular conversational trench.

‘A novel.’

‘Got a title?’

‘
Bacon
. Why is that funny?’

‘I’m not laughing. What’s the story?’

‘It’s about a priest who falls in love with a talking pig.’

‘Why?’ His mouth was slightly lopsided, his features untidier, the wine showing on him. Good.

‘He can’t help it.’

‘No, why do you want to write?’

I dismissed Moira Shearer, pre-fantasia:
Why do you want to live?
He leaned forward and his teeth flashed, or something in his mouth did, and looking at his mouth even briefly felt very inappropriate. I composed myself and said solemnly: ‘How else to rage around the dark mansion?’

‘You know I’m going to kiss you if you keep talking like that. What does your fiancé do?’

I should have sat back, should have objected, shouldn’t have acquiesced by ignoring that thing he said but – I failed the test. I didn’t care.

‘He’s a pianist.’

‘A penis? Great.’

The wine. The wine was making him slur.

‘So I take it you’re not married?’

He laughed like I’d asked him whether he played the spoons or did topiary on his pubes. ‘No no no. Too selfish. Too much to do.’

‘Girlfriend?’

‘No one that regular.’

I felt it, then: a tremor down my spine; a cold spot at the back of the courtyard. A cat lying in the shade, flicking a caught bird with its claw over and over and over. He felt me feel it. A bolt of recognition. He drained his glass and without looking at his watch said: ‘I should get to the station.’

‘Thanks for the chat, Marty. It was –’

‘Yes, you too. All that. Don’t suppose I can take your number?’

I shook my head. He smiled, saluted, left.

An undrunk blob of wine, like a glass eye, stared at me from the hollow where the stem met the bowl. I felt the need to talk to Jim. I pulled my phone out of my bag. Three long, flat rings and then he answered. ‘Hello, you.’ A rush of air on the line said he was in a moving car.

‘Where are you?’

‘Dubai. Where are you?’

‘A library in town.’

A pause. ‘Have you been drinking?’

‘A bit.’

Another pause. Was there some kind of satellite delay?

‘Is Tyler with you?’

‘No, she stood me up.’

‘You know, if she was reliable she’d be dangerous …’

‘Jim.’ He tutted. ‘Don’t tut at me! This is driving me fucking insane.’

‘All right, all right, calm down. There’s no need –’

‘DON’T FUCKING TELL ME TO CALM DOWN.’

‘You’re shouting now. Are you in a library, shouting?’

‘I DON’T GIVE A FUCK, EVERYONE’S A – .’

‘Take a breath.’ I almost hung up. Oh, white wine. White wine. I was so excited and so angry and so myself. I took a breath. ‘Look, why don’t you invite her over for dinner or something when I get back?
Does
she eat, or do any of the other normal human things?’

I didn’t say anything to that. He’d invalidated his gesture. He didn’t deserve praise.

‘I’ll cook. I’ll even buy the wine.’

I maintained a haughty hush.

He said: ‘I had a really good wank this morning thinking about you.’

This was more like it. ‘Tell me.’

‘Later.’

He hung up. As I focused on the phone screen the room bulged in my peripheral vision. I put on my jacket one arm at a time and walked carefully through the library, smiling at the woman on the desk as I passed. She didn’t smile back. I walked down the stairs like a toddler, one foot then both together, next foot then both together, holding on to the wall and then the handrail.

Outside: rush hour. How had four hours passed? I weaved along Portland Street, past the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, and waited to cross the road on the corner. I wanted Tyler. Tyler, with her eyes and elbows, could have easily guided me through the heartless scrum of 5.30 p.m. The lights took too long to change so I crossed anyway, dispatching an elaborate double bird to a honking hackney cab, and carrying on up the street, where the Odeon cinema used to be, now just a fly-postered deco wreck with peeling paint and, I imagined, dusty staircases and huge vaulted rooms inside, like a run-aground liner. Someone banged into me as they passed, not on purpose but they didn’t say sorry, I turned to see him turning his briefcase back round to his side. The impact of his arm or case or whatever had struck me and knocked me sick and I had to veer towards the wall, to the side of the Odeon building, and place my palm flat on the peeling blue paintwork for a moment, breathing deeply until the air pumped all the nausea out. I did not want to be sick at rush hour. Once, at a boutique music festival, I’d been walking along with Tyler when she emitted a neat curve of projectile vomit onto the grass in front of her and just carried on walking, resuming what she was saying exactly where she’d left it, barely missing a beat. I don’t think she even wiped her mouth. It was an adept expulsion – not so impressive for the twenty people sitting at picnic benches outside a food stand, wooden cutlery held aloft, unable to finish their falafel. We’d christened it the ‘walk and puke’. It was the epitome of styling out. I wasn’t up to it. All I wanted to do was lie down.

I walked through St Peter’s Square, past the Midland Hotel, down Peter Street towards Deansgate, a nonsensical, higgledy, mindless route, walking for walking’s sake. Only when I got to the Free Trade Hall building did it dawn on me that a) I was making my way to Jim’s and b) he wasn’t there. Just before Deansgate there was a place called Lion Bar, built beneath an old Methodist church with an organ and, according to
Most Haunted
, who had investigated in 2005, a disapproving ministerial spirit. Previously, Lion Bar had been a club called the Red Room. I’d worked there for a few months in my early twenties and had started refusing to go upstairs after another waitress, Jacqueline, saw a mop bucket fly across the abandoned church of its own accord. She was always helping herself behind the bar, but still, with that and Yvette’s findings …

I’d had a laugh with Jacqueline. The club had a regular fetish night and one night I’d almost swept up a gimp on the mezzanine. There was all sorts to clean up after those nights. They turned the downstairs area into a dungeon complete with nets, chains and a corrugated cardboard ‘rock’ wall we put up with a staple gun. The interesting thing to me was that hardly anyone drank there; all we really sold was diet coke. I guess you have better aim when you’re … anyway. I was sweeping away, stacking chairs, dragging tables, working my way from the steps to the back corner. As I tried to sweep the broom into the corner it struck against something hard. I pulled the broom back and peered into the darkness, thinking it would be an upturned chair or forgotten handbag. It was a shoe. Or rather, a patent leather socklike thing. Up from the shoe was an ankle, and, following on, ankle bone connecting to leg bone, leg bone connecting to knee bone, etcetera, etcetera, until the shape of a whole adult person was discernible, crouched like a frog. I screamed. The gimp scurried out from the corner, and this was someone who had gone full-gimp, zipped up to the chops, and ran down the stairs and almost through the glass front door. The door was locked and the gimp began bashing the glass with its fists and Jacqueline had to abandon her dishwashing duties to release it. The gimp scarpered down the street, patent leather flashing orange under the streetlamps. I wondered what that gimp was doing for nights out, now that Red Room had become a cocktail bar. Suburbia, I concluded. Suburbia would offer gimps something. And what about Jacqueline – what was she doing now? We’d always got on. I still had her number in my phone. I’d scrolled past it a few times when I was drunk and thought about her for a moment. If I was on Facebook I wouldn’t have to wonder about these things. But then, if I was on Facebook I wouldn’t have to wonder about these things.

Where the dual carriageway began there was a series of roundabouts over which a small viaduct split the sky. At the side of the viaduct were a few outcrops of green – fast-growing trees, spiky bushes that had ensnared windswept litter, scrubby defiant grass – elevated from the street on tilting brick embankments. Almost impossible to climb. Almost.

I jumped and grabbed the top of the sloping wall, put my trainers flat on the bricks and slid down a little. The wall was slippy. I gripped tighter with my fingers. One foot found purchase on a cracked brick. I nipped the toe of my other trainer into a gap in the mortar. Tested it with a little bounce. It would bear my weight for a few seconds while I found my next foothold. I moved my other foot, lost my balance, ended up scraping my knee and hurled myself upwards, laddering my tights and nicking my shin. At the top of the wall I rolled onto my back and lay there, panting. Above me leaves, just leaves. I got onto all fours and crawled under a bush, out of sight of the pavement and passing traffic. Wide, flat ivy covered the ground in a sea of tongues. Between the ivy, skeletons of sycamore seeds lay pale and brittle like moth wings. I heard footfalls and a man’s low laughter. I turned onto my side like I did in bed, into the foetal position that was slowly eroding my left shoulder. I closed my eyes and listened to the tidal ebb and flow of traffic.