Animals (4 page)

‘Did he die?’

‘No, but I can see where you’re coming from.’

I got the next one in fast. ‘Did he get famous?’

Mrs Coan ignored me and looked expectantly at the rest of the class. I kept my hand up, Rolodexing options and collating them into a list of descending likelihood. Meanwhile Rachel Atherton lifted a slender, tanned arm. She was the girl I always vied with for top of English. We wound up sharing the sixth-form English prize – the first time in the school’s history there had been joint winners. A photo from the ceremony, in a silver frame on my parents’ dining-room radiator shelf, showed us gripping the small plaque on either side in an almost invisible tug-of-war. Rachel was smiling in the photo. I was not. We might have locked horns intellectually but she surpassed me when it came to dignity.

‘Yes, Rachel?’ said Mrs Coan.

Rachel cleared her throat. Took her time. Knew she had a winner. ‘Did he retreat into his art?’

Mrs Coan clasped her hands and smiled as though all her years of pedagogic graft had finally been validated. Here it was! Lo and, while you’re at it, behold: a shining pearl in a sea of gritty little oysters. ‘What a beautiful answer,’ said Mrs Coan. ‘Yes, Rachel. He did.’

My inner swot hawked and spat and I spoke again without being asked to. ‘I disagree,’ I said. ‘It’s not just that.’

Mrs Coan rolled her eyes.
This girl. This girl who chews her fingers and won’t sit still, who whispers in assembly and reddens when she’s looked at.
She levelled me with an assassin’s grim, unimpeachable gaze. ‘Your problem, Laura Joyce, is that you
try too hard
.’

And yes, that’s my name. Laura Joyce. Quite a blinder from the great beyond, I think you’ll agree. A fine example of blistering cosmic humour – and one I didn’t truly appreciate until I first started sending out submissions and received several rejections referring to the discrepancy between my own writing and that of my streamy namesake. Want to know what the mysterious ‘dark matter’ they’re searching for actually is? It’s Irony – billions of tons of the stuff, lurking, ready to go. The Universe is not indifferent; the Universe is
amused
.

To get out of my bedroom I had to slide a clothes rail out of the way of the door. It was tricky getting back in again. In addition to the clothes rail and a small desk I had a single bed, which was why I often ended up in bed with Tyler.

I went to the fridge and found a beer – the last. The kitchen was in its usual state of neglect – the fridge full of things mouldering or threatening to moulder. Philadelphia Light with a green, hairy thing in it that had almost as much character as a muppet. Curling dried bacon, half the pack used and left ripped open as though it had been attacked by a badger. An array of slowly rotting condiments, pickled this and that, bought on drunken whims in express supermarkets. A bowl of withering fruit on the top of the defunct microwave. Bananas that had furiously ripened after being placed beneath apples and grapes (how many times had I warned Tyler that the banana was not a sociable fruit?) that had themselves softened in more sanguine defeat. We didn’t really keep on top of things (Tyler:
I’m thrilled when I put the right fucking bin out on the right fucking day
).

I drank my beer looking out of the window. The pub over the road had been boarded up for months. It was long and thin like a pale yellow torpedo, built to suit the shape of an old junction that had since been altered, so the pub wasn’t on a junction at all any more and looked lost even before it was put up for sale. Further down the road was the community garden centre, its chicken-wire fence crocheted with wet spider-webs. When I’d finished my beer I went to the ‘cocktail cabinet’, a kitchen cupboard where we kept the random glasses and anything that had survived the previous weekend. A quarter bottle of whisky glinted from the cupboard’s shadowy depths. I pulled it out. Maybe it would help. Whisky was a lucid kind of drunk. You kept your faculties, mostly. Wine and whisky were my favourites because they felt – and I’m aware of the tragic-sounding nature of this – like
company
. The easy kind. Maybe it was the names. Merlot – that rambunctious exchange student who talks all night. Chardonnay – the girl with the steam-hammer laugh who’s crashed her sports car on the way over. Pinot Grigio – the quiet one who stuns the room with a braining bombshell. Chianti – total psychopath but charming with it. Chablis – point-blank refuses to go in a tumbler, gets acidic when talked down to. Laphroaig – earthy; always up for intensity without getting po-faced. Lagavulin. Oh, Lagavulin. But for all my appreciation of booze’s plethora of personalities, I didn’t subscribe to the old Romantic lie: if you were sozzled you’d produce works of genius. Hey, lose your mind! Get the opium in. Get tanked. Go fucking bonkers. You’ll produce masterpieces … No no no no no. The point of intoxication for me was not to create but to destroy the part of myself that cared whether or not I created. I drank for self-solidarity; to settle the battles within, or at least freeze-frame them. Because the truth was: I
had
tried too hard at school. I’d done everything too hard. I sketched too hard (even kind Miss Spooner, the wispy-voiced art teacher, threatened to resort to violence:
What am I going to have to do to get you to sketch lightly, Laura, WHIP YOU?
); I brushed my teeth too hard (the dentist:
Really, Mrs Joyce, if you don’t get her to calm down on this then we’re going to have to worry about receding gums
…); I played netball too hard – overshooting, overshooting, terminally overshooting.

I filled a Fosters glass a quarter of the way and carried it back to my desk. Sat staring. Drinking. Staring. It was no good. I picked up a book of poetry and took it with the whisky down to the grass. It was sunny for March – not warm but the light was cold and yellow and cheap, like margarine. I sat in the shade by the wall and bent my legs, making a lectern of my knees. Strained to read as the sun shifted meanly over the Manchester skyline. A blackbird clucked in a nearby hedge. A thousand tiny flies went about their business. Early spring. Things awakening. I kicked off my shoes and socks and surveyed my feet. Oh, they were ugly, my feet. Monkeyish. Almost clawed. They hadn’t yet invented the kind of therapy required to console me about them. When I was younger I’d tried to make myself feel better about them by telling myself that Lolita had monkeyish feet and
she
was desirable. Granted, in a sick, twisted way, but beggars couldn’t be choosers – or rather, mill-workers couldn’t be choosers, because that’s where my long-toed feet had originated from. The girls who worked in the mills of Lancashire (my maternal grandmother being one of them) had to limbo under the moving threads to clear detritus as it fell from the looms. They couldn’t bend for fear of cotton-cuts (think
machine-driven
paper cuts) so they developed a way of picking things up with their feet, snatching and gripping with their toes then kicking their legs back against their bum to grab the bits between their fingers. Toes stretched and became more dexterous as a result. Darwin got involved (I
know
, impossible, but throw me a toe-bone here). Jim said I might be able to play the piano with my feet, that he’d teach me.

Jim. I missed him in a physical way, like a thirst. Missed his mouth and his composure and his steady loving eyes. I didn’t buy the whole ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ spiel. I was with Rochester on the matter: a cord was tied to my ribcage at one end and tied at the other end to Jim’s, and the further away he got, the thinner the cord stretched. Memories helped and didn’t help. What had he said to me the other day?
We are not defined by how we are but by how we try to be.

What if you try too hard to be everything?
I countered.

Lie down
, he said.
Lie still.

I finished my whisky, picked up the glass and got to my feet. I walked to the stairwell and up the stairs. As I walked past my desk I checked my phone. Two missed calls. Tyler. I called her back. She answered on the first ring.

‘I’m outside a city-centre drinking establishment and there’s a chair opposite baying for your ass.’

‘I’m writing, remember.’

I heard her suck on a cigarette.

‘Fine. I’ll still be here when you change your mind.’

The bloodrush of temptation. An alfresco drink (and a cigarette at the same time, a rare luxury) with my best friend on a sunny eve. In March, too. How many evenings like this did we get in March? If that wasn’t an oasis in the wilderness then –

‘Are you on your own?’ (As if I could somehow make this about compassion …)

‘Only until you get here.’

Ohhhhhhhhh. She cajoled me like an over-confident boy at the bus interchange. She was persistent. She was cocky. She was
good.

‘Jim’s back in the morning.’

‘So just come for a couple.’

‘Ha! That’s a good one.’ I inspected my fingernails. ‘Anyway, I’ve already had a whisky and a beer.’

‘You do know that beer
isn’t even alcohol
.’

Another drag on her fag. She was enjoying this. The practice scales of her siren call. I said: ‘Don’t you have work at seven tomorrow anyway?’

‘Baby,’ (‘Baby’, was it? Three drinks at least, likely on her fourth) ‘I’ve got work at seven tomorrow every day for the rest of my life, serving mochafuckingchickenlattes to people counting off the days in little coffee stamps. What gives?
Only
the fact that there are nights in between.’

And there it was, as always, swinging my way: The Night. With its deals, promises and gauntlets, by turns many things: nemesis, ally, co-conspirator, master of persuasion. It tosses its promises before you like scraps on the road, crumbs leading into the forest: pubs, parties, booze, drugs, dancing, karaoke …

Here, kitty.

Here, kitty kitty.

Whatever your peccadilloes, The Night knows.

I looked at my laptop, at my desk with its dirty mugs and fag-ash archipelago. The grubby keyboard from eating on the job. The dimp-filled saucer (had I smoked that much today? Holy fuck). The hob lighter I used as a lighter. The Marlboro packet with the take-heed photo of the bloke with the big neck tumour and bigger moustache (Tyler:
Difficult to say which of those disturbs me more
…).

I said: ‘I have £1.72 to last me until payday.’

‘Are there no notes on the towel rail?’

‘No.’

‘Check underneath.’

‘I did, yesterday.’

‘Well, I’m buying. Correction: I have bought.’

She hung up. My laptop screen flicked to sleep mode, displaying a bashful black-and-white photo of Jim sitting outside a pub the previous year, a half-drunk pint of Guinness in front of him. It was a confusing sign: half-warning; half-endorsement. I chewed my thumb. I’d need a shower and something quick to eat although I could always get something when I got there, yes that made more sense. I could throw my jeans on, a t-shirt, cardigan, trainers – no need to dress up. No need for much make-up. But then … Didn’t I want to be full of the joys of productivity and rejuvenating sleep tomorrow? I could make it quick. I could. ‘A couple’ might be optimistic but five drinks was a good number to have in mind. Yes, five drinks was jolly but not silly. Five drinks was just
normal
. I could use the last of my money to hop on a bus the few stops into town, Tyler could pay for a cab home, saving more time, getting into bed Even Earlier – because I hadn’t been out all week. That was right, I hadn’t been out all week. I deserved a break. Also it made sense to get some input, some fresh inspiration, no one ever wrote anything good in a vacuum …

My phone beeped in my hand. A text.

THIS WINE IS SO COLD AND IMPOSSIBLY REFRESHING THE GLASS IS STICKING TO MY HAND AND I’VE GOT YOU A PRESENT

Here, kitty.

Thirst woke me. Thirst and Fear.

Oh fuck. Oh holy
fuck
. What time was it? My head pounded with its own globe-splitting seismic beat. I scrabbled for consolations. I was in bed. I had made it there. But I was meant to be going over to Jim’s and cooking a meal and giving him a hero’s welcome and on top of all that I was going to have to make myself stop smelling like a six-week-old bar towel that had been twice through the digestive system of a yak. My armpits were cadaverous. I liked smelling of myself but
this
– I took another sniff and boaked: sour booze and raving and not nearly, as always, enough water – this was pushing even my own tolerance. My hand found my phone, finger pressed it awake, eyes and brain interpreted numbers. 10 a.m. Jim was home at lunchtime, which meant twelve at the earliest, to be safe. Two hours. Doable. Just about. I could have a bath at his place once I’d put the food on. Yes yes, this was shaping up fine. Now all I had to do was work out how to move my limbs.

I’d arrived at the pub to find Tyler resplendent on a picnic bench with a bottle of wine in an ice bucket on the table in front of her.

‘GREETINGS!’ she shouted across the beer garden.

Oh god, I thought. She’s doing Christian Slater in
Heathers
. We’re there already, are we? I did a little wave and weaved between the benches. She poured me a glass of wine. I took a swig, felt the wine do its thing – the smacky whack hitting my stomach and brain simultaneously. Bliss. The promise of more bliss to come. Tyler was on the more already. Her wormhole pupils and tangible gravitas gave it away. Coke. Nothing else provided quite the same inflation; quite the same
Fuck all y’all
. I took another swig of wine and she grabbed my hand, pulled it under the table and shoved the wrap into my palm. My fingers obediently curled around it. No point asking how she afforded it. No point asking where she got it. Probably from ‘The Queech’ – a man with Dennis the Menace hair who’d locked us in his flat the previous month to wait for him (or rather the deal, drug-lust nullifying social niceties) while he went to buy milk to make us a cup of tea.
That
was an hour of my innocence I was never going to get back.