Animals (5 page)

The Queech had two dice tattooed on his wrist and waved a fist-sized iron padlock at us as he left.
I’ll just be putting this on the outside of the door, won’t be two mins.
(He was thirty-two mins.) I’d looked at Tyler as the lock clunked into place and his footsteps receded down the hall.

I don’t even want a fucking cup of tea!

I don’t want a cup of tea either!

What are we going to do Tyler what are we going to do?

I don’t fucking know. How high are we?

I’m not high at all – what have you had? Is that why you went to the bathroom?

No, dick-head, I meant LITERALLY off the ground. Is it jump-able?

We got out of the lift at the NINTH floor, remember?

Fuck. I need more wine. I’m getting my sense of reason back. Any minute now I’m going to sober up and wonder WHAT THE FUCK I’M DOING LOCKED INSIDE A DRUG DEALER’S FLAT.

Oh god oh god shall we check the fridge?

Well if he hasn’t got any fucking milk he’s unlikely to have any fucking wine, is he?

I guess not.

Hey.

What?

I’m just thinking.

What?

Well unless he’s got it on him which is unlikely it must be in here somewhere.

Do not even think about it. Do NOT even think about it. Tyler. Tyler. Look at me. No. Listen THAT is how people get shot and die. Sit your ass back down I mean it.

Ohhh he doesn’t seem the type to have a gun … What?

From her seat across the table in the beer garden, Tyler eyed me like the superior being I knew she knew she was. She was up in the stratosphere, one arm around Space and the other around Time, looking down on the world and saying
You haven’t got a clue, not a fucking clue
. It was a cosmic can-can I wanted in on.
Wanted
. Therein lies the crux. The knowledge of non-addiction was, ironically, grist to the mill. That was how it went: down, down and down, deeper and deeper, until I reached, as I always reached, the final pre-
fuckit
outpost. The saloon on the edge of the desert. The 40,000-league crab shack. The brothel on Pluto.

This is my will.

Tyler leaned in saucily, breasts first. ‘You know it’s really good when it scares the shit out of you,’ she said. ‘I had to stop myself from roaring in the bathroom earlier. Like this,’ she tipped her head back and waggled it from side to side, ‘RAAARRRRRRR.’

I rolled out of bed and leapfrogged around the square metre of rough carpet, lifting balled papers and carrier bags, looking for clothes. Eventually I found some: a clean t-shirt and – gusset sniffed – some just-about-acceptable jeans. I stuffed random toiletries and – even more randomly, a bag of decomposing grapes (For Health) into a bag and called a cab. I usually walked to Jim’s, it took twenty minutes or so, but time pressures plus Bambi-legs made walking as unlikely as successful social interaction.

The cab company sent a minibus. Oh great, typical, I thought when I saw its hollow bulk chugging away by the kerb.
Te-rrific
. If there’s one thing sure to amplify the existentials it’s a minibus ride across town on your own. I nodded at the driver as I heaved the sliding door open. Threw my bag across the seats and climbed inside. Didn’t put my seatbelt on. The cab smelled of hot fabric and pine. Four empty seats stared back at me. Another four empty seats behind. I found my phone in my bag and called my sister.

‘Minibus, is it?’ Mel said when she answered.

‘Eh?’

‘You only ever call me when you’re in a minibus after a big one.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yep.’

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘Where are you?’

‘At the folks’. Dad had chemo again this morning.’

‘Oh god. Is he –’

‘It went fine. He’s resting.’

‘They didn’t hear you say that, did they? About the
minibus after a big one
.’

‘No, but even if they did I doubt they’d give much of a shit right now.’

‘Course. Sorry.’

‘Look, drink some water. Get some sleep.’

‘I’ll try.’

I hung up feeling wretched, and then wretched for feeling wretched, and then proud for feeling wretched for feeling wretched. I asked the cabbie to stop at the Co-Op opposite Victoria (the tenner rolled itself up in the plastic money-tray, I unrolled it, it rolled itself up again – I got out without waiting for change). In the supermarket I scuttled to the meat section, past the cold huddles of vegetables and uniformly stacked pasta and rice. Nothing smelled of anything. In the meat fridge there was a pack of mutton that had been discounted and I picked it up without thinking. What else should I get? A bottle of wine. A Shloer or something for Jim (fuck’s sake). Bread. Milk. Fags. Loo roll. Cooked chicken. Crisps. Credit card the lot and worry about it next month, if I was still alive. I bought too much and when I pulled the bags off the counter I swayed with the weight and thought I might vomit. Oh god, no. I looked around. There were never any bathrooms in these little supermarkets. Could I feasibly get outside and find somewhere discreet? The last time I’d vomited was before Jim had left. He had a late flight so I’d stayed at his, drinking wine on my own and playing
Portal 2
on his PS3. At 2 a.m. I was starving and there was nothing in so I staggered to McDonald’s in St Ann’s Square in his canvas espadrilles (did they ever record for Google Earth at night, or was that just during the day? Mortification). I bought too much food and ate it walking back, and then – schoolgirl error – got in bed too soon. The internal tide turned and I knew there was only one way it was going to go. Just thinking about that night made vomiting inevitable so I paid quickly and left the shop. Around the corner I leaned against a wall and dropped my bags. The glass bottles rang against each other. The sound, and the lurch of worrying about them breaking, made me even sicker. Jim’s street was about five minutes away, towards the arena. Did this require another taxi? Yes, my stomach said, yes it did. I reached for the wall and pressed my palm flat. I retched. Nothing. Sometimes a retch was worse than a gip. I tried not to think about food or fun of any kind and definitely not Jim. My nerves surged. You know that feeling. You feel pins and needles rushing and wonder if it means you’re healing.

When I felt like I could move I walked to the rank outside the station and got in the front cab. The driver was nice enough about the shortness of the journey. I think he saw the panic in my eyes. When I got to Jim’s I walked up the steps at the front of his building (he lived on the ground floor, mercifully) and let myself in.

He’d had a key cut for me in January and the plan was for me to move in when we were married but I couldn’t see it yet. Cohabitation. Would I have to contribute to the décor, posters in clip frames, that kind of thing? Was Athena still open? I loved Jim’s place but it didn’t feel like home. Still, where did? Not Tyler’s. Tyler’s was Tyler’s. Maybe when I made some money I could rent my own flat opposite Jim’s and we could wave to each other over the road, like Woody Allen and Mia Farrow across Central Park. That would be romantic. Or lonely – would it just be lonely?

My phone started to ring. Expecting it to be Jim, I hunted through my bag and cleared my throat. The screen said ICE. In Case of Emergency. My parents’ house. Dad, probably. I watched the letters flashing. His body. My body. What I’d done. What he hadn’t. Oh, the shame of raiding my body’s chemical joy-stores! I was no better than a looter. When it stopped ringing I noticed the time on the screen. I had just over an hour.

I put a pan on the hob, heated oil. Sliced onions. Fried spices. Tipped the mutton in. I’d never cooked with it before but I knew that it was basically the same thing as lamb, the archaic name reassuring. Dickens probably did a lot with mutton. The steam from the searing meat made me feel like I might vomit. I stepped back and flicked on the extractor fan in the hood over the hob. I added ginger, garlic, curry powder. I turned down the heat and went for a little lie-down on the settee. When I felt up to it I went back to add water and tomatoes to the pan. There. That could sit awhile. Next: washing. But first … Jim had some rehydration salts in his medicine cabinet. I took a glass from the cupboard and tipped a packet of rehydration salts into it. The salt sat at the bottom of the glass in a little pile. It looked like cocaine. I took the glass to the sink and turned on the cold tap. Water twisted out in a clean, violet-edged ribbon.

Tyler and I had stayed a few hours in the pub, growing raucous with much table-pounding and face-gripping. We’d sorted plenty out, over tables, over the years. It was dark when we decided to head across town. We walked along the canal towpath, up, over bridges, under arches. Above Deansgate Locks there was a row of chain bars. Outside each bar was a small, roped-off section, guarded by doormen, where clubbers stood smoking. Tyler unhooked each rope as she passed, as though she was opening the pens in a zoo, saying:
RUN, BE FREE, NOW’S YOUR CHANCE
. Canal Street was manic with revelry. Boys in fairy-wings. Gazelles in hotpants. The homeless and their hounds. Dishevelled after-work drinkers for whom one drink had turned into one too many. Teenagers cramming burgers in their mouths outside neon-lit takeaways. We went into a club because someone told us it had a balcony, reserved for VIPs – not that it stopped Tyler. In the unisex toilets I got talking to a man who said his name was ‘Chicken Sandwich’. He slipped me a green pill. I split it with Tyler and she said she’d got two Valiums for us for later from the doorman. We danced like wardrobes.

I went into Jim’s bathroom and ran myself a bath. Looking around, I knew that if I was going to have an input on any room, then really it should be this one. Some new tiling. Maybe I could do it myself. How hard could tiling be? I could get into DIY as a hobby. Keep me busy. I liked the idea of a wedding list at Wickes;
that
would be funny. Screw John Lewis! Our guests – all forty-eight of them – could race to snap up the under-£20 items: the bog brush holder and impractical wicker bin. I lit the half-collapsed candle by the side of the bath and stripped. Looking in the mirror I saw a thread vein had burst on my cheek, just beneath the bag of my bloodshot left eye.
You are a total dickhead
, I said. I felt the whole bathroom swell and nod in agreement. Yes, you are. A total dickhead. What the fuck was I going to do about this fucking veiny thing? Would Jim notice? I stepped back from the mirror. Squinted. Stepped forward. It was noticeable. I could wash my face and then attempt to cover it with concealer. These things happened anyway, with age. It could just be an age thing. It all started to change in your thirties. Things popped up all over the place. I had a ganglion at the base of my right middle finger that had sprung out of nowhere the previous month. I had a fallen arch in my foot that hadn’t been there when I was twenty. Now I had a thread vein. Furthermore, I deserved it. It was as though the huge, punishing hand of God had reached down during the night and flicked me really hard in the face for being such a total fucking dickhead. I walked into the bedroom and checked the time on the radio. I’d wasted a good fifteen minutes inspecting my face and it was now quarter past eleven. T-minus forty-five minutes until Jim landed. Fine, fine. Cool, fine. Finecoolfine. A bath was all about the first thirty seconds anyway, that almost unbearable immersion when the water feels so hot it’s cold, your skin’s receptors in blind panic mode. Washing, like imbibing water, felt like a chore. I did it as little as I could get away with. I cringed in the shower, like a cat. Besides, I liked the various smells of myself; I often sat with my head to one side, nose close to my armpit. I liked the raw smells of other people, too; in particular scalps, ears, and the insides of wristwatches – these smells were more comforting than perfume or aftershave, which set me on edge with their keen social purpose. I went back into the bathroom, turned off the taps and stepped into the bath. Sweet holy JehooHEEsus! It was a hot one. I gripped the bath handles and lowered myself, teeth gritted, legs reddening, pausing as the tide of firewater lapped at my navel.

The last thing I could remember from the club was the lights going up and seeing Tyler’s hair flattened to her cheeks and forehead, glued in place with her own sweat and also communal condensed sweat, dripping luminously from the ceiling. Over on the bar a man was on all fours as a second man held his arse-crack open and a third poured a bottle of beer into it. The man on all fours was Chicken Sandwich. Tyler said: ‘I think if I tried right now I could probably do the Caterpillar.’ Time to go.

I dipped myself fully into the bath and dunked my head, came up gasping. I washed the holy trinity. I shaved my armpits. The hair on my legs was downy, mostly invisible; worse when meddled with. I shaved it occasionally in summer when my own treacherous aesthetics meant I couldn’t go tightless otherwise. Tyler – coarser, darker – kept hers in honour of feminist historian Janet Fraser:
All that time I save in body hair removal I devote to revolution
. I teased her about it whenever I caught her coming out of the bathroom.

How much revolution this time?

Oh, heaps. There’s a LOT of blood …

I got out of the bath, pink and quivering, and hobbled to the clothes I’d taken off, lying in the middle of the floor. I didn’t keep clothes at Jim’s as such, just the odd thing. A black vest, greying with age. A pair of thermal leggings. A silver lamé thong Tyler had bought me as a joke (
That, my friend,
is just a yeast infection waiting to happen
…).

My mobile rang. Where was it, where was it? I ran into the hall and tipped the contents of my bag onto the floor – running out of time now, that ten-ring emotional crescendo before the maddening voicemail tag-team that would ensue – saw the phone, grabbed it, and answered.

‘I can’t feel my legs, Keyser.’

‘I’m not quite dead. I’m just very badly burned.’

Film quotes. Self-charming standards. The dream-house was our helpless Hotel California.