Wildlife (2 page)

Joe pulled himself out from under the duvet and Life turned to look at him, her warm face framed by her golden hair.

‘What?' said Joe.

‘What?' said Life.

A bad start. Life's eyes contained no temperature. Bloodless. You could see the doubts of her brain.

‘Sleep well?' Joe asked.

No reply. The traditional morning lovemake in the spoon
position was already out of the question. Life just lay there until:

‘I've been thinking,' she said.

It is hell to meet a person who's been thinking. Waking up next to a person who's been thinking is the worst. What they mean by ‘been thinking' is simply that they've realised they're in the shit. In the shit, lifewise. Life is crap. You shouldn't have to have been thinking to figure this out. All this
been thinking
bullshit has been pissing about with people's lives for ages. I've been thinking – we should kill all the Jews, bomb all the cities, fuck with the countries. I've been thinking – we should start a band. I've been thinking – we should try for a baby, get a better car, do it up the arse. I've been thinking – we're drifting apart.

‘What have you been thinking about?'

‘Oh, you know,' said Life, sitting up on one elbow with a hand on her cheek. ‘I've just been thinking about the Wild World and everything. What I'll do.'

Just
been thinking is the worst. You're fucked if someone's
just
been thinking.

‘I've just been thinking about your job,' Life said. ‘Working in a theatre isn't going to get you anywhere, is it? And I've been thinking that the Wild World is really going to need well-managed events.'

Life, by the way, has almost completely lost her accent. The Scandinavians are good at this. Shit hot at English.

‘What are you saying?' said Joe, knowing that since Life had
been thinking
it was his job to ask,
What are you saying?

‘I don't know what I'm saying,' replied Life.

Of course she did. Joe knew it. Life knew it. Yes you do, thought Joe, turning over in bed and staring at the ceiling. You're saying that you've realised and you're saying that
the sex has gone to shit. The struck match of love has become twisted, scrawny and black. You're saying that you've noticed. Take no notice. You've noticed that I've been clinging to your arse every night for a year. You're saying that at twenty-four, I work a poorly paid job and that I've lost the beauty contest. You're saying that it's over.

‘I'm moving to London,' said Life. ‘I've been offered work with the Wild World.'

‘What?'

‘Helping with the launch. I interviewed. They said I was great fun.'

‘But, what about Manchester? Can't you help out with the launch here? I mean, can't you . . . What about Manchester?'

Joe watched from the bed as Life prepared to leave. She took her suitcase from the top of the wardrobe and began filling it with her clothes. Leaving on Jesus' birthday was mean. Mean on Jesus, I mean. But all statistics showed that Joe and Life weren't the only ones breaking up. Everyone was at it. Rejection got purchased early in November and sat wrapped under the tree until Christmas. Jesus was a tit for getting the whole Christmas thing going. Christmas gives people just enough space and just enough time to realise that they are completely disappointed. Capitalism keeps us busy while religion makes us see. No one wants to see. But once a year, at Christmas, we do see. Our eyes are allowed to focus. We choose to separate.

‘I love you so much,' Joe had said, as Life packed at speed. ‘Lie, please, I love you so much.'

They'd met two years ago at the Royal Exchange theatre in town. The play was
The Seagull
. Joe had approached Life at the bar and told her that he was Constantin. A beautiful
boy of ideals. A brain. A hero. A hope. They'd got together. They'd been happy. Life stuffed a fistful of knickers into her suitcase.

‘I'll call you. Don't take this too hard, Joe. I promise I'll call you soon.'

Life spent twenty minutes in the bathroom before finally coming to say goodbye. Joe had heard two flushes. What an insensitive shit to take, he had thought, frozen alone in the warm Christmas bed.

‘You're special to me, Joe,' said Life, from the doorway. ‘But . . . you know it's all about the Wild World. You do.'

Joe nodded. Glass shattered inside him. He covered his nose and mouth with his hands as Life left the room. His eyes were so wide. The door slammed. He cried.

He found the crumb in the toilet an hour or so after she left. The only piece of crap that Life had left behind. He considered eating it. Then decided that it had to be preserved and lowered both seats.

Joe will return to work tomorrow. Back to the theatre. The pop star Asa Gunn is starring in Corneille's
The Illusion
and full rehearsals begin in the morning. Returning to work will be tough. Normal life will lick him with its warm, rough tongue, and Joe will want to scream.

AS A TEENAGER,
Anka Kudolski looked set to lead a brilliant life. She was named in the
Sunday Times
‘New Millennium Talent' feature at the age of just fifteen. There was a picture of her, stern-faced, wearing a beret and Doc Martens boots with a paintbrush in her hand. To the question, What would you like to be?, Anka answered, somewhat precociously, A poet, a playwright, an artist. I want to live a brilliant life.

At the age of eighteen Anka got a place at Goldsmiths College to study Fine Art and Philosophy. She cut a cool figure in south-east London. She wore shades in the studio and was a virtuoso smoker (Lucky Strike). She taped long alcohol-fuelled rants about the misery of contemporary art and left unmarked cassette copies around the bars and on the doorsteps of New Cross. Anka Kudolski was known. Known for her quick brain, bleached-blonde hair and impeccable half-German genes. She was on her way. She was pointed at in bars throwing tequila down her neck or swinging round lamp posts late at night screaming Talking Heads lyrics at parked cars. But what is youth and what
can we say about it? Its drum roll is tribal. There is a solitary hit on a snare and you take your deepest breath. Then what?

Two years ago Anka Kudolski went to take a laxative-induced shit on her family toilet and fell through the wooden seat and got stuck. She was too thin. She couldn't get out. Too weak. As she sat there, completely trapped, pelvis wedged, waiting for her parents to return home from work, she decided it was time to have herself sectioned. This was a good idea. Two months of monitored eating in an Ealing clinic got her weight up dramatically and she never fell down a toilet again.

A psychiatrist told Anka that her anorexia was underpinned by manic depression and by a desire for control. Had she considered getting a job? Building a routine? She hadn't, but she could see the sense in it. Anka finds little comfort in the activity of shopping. It's too anarchic, she feels. There's too much choice which, for Anka, means indecision, self-doubt, panic, a loss of control and then weeks of living on mineral water and one Jacobs Cracker a day. Anka is twenty-two now. She moved from London to Manchester in January '05 and began applying for as many jobs as the week would allow. She works at Selfridges, selling designer bags. She works as a barmaid at the Press Club, an all-night celebrity dive on Deansgate. She's also the presenter of
QUIZ TV
on the Urbis-based TV station, Channel MANC. She's not sure what any of these jobs have got to do with the Wild World.

Anka leaves Selfridges via the staff exit on Corporation Street. She turns left.

Anka does enjoy selling. Shopping is like shitting; it feels too normal, but selling is much more fun. Anka particularly
enjoys selling the designer bags at Selfridges. She likes the laughable designs and she gets to meet a gone-off bunch of leather-loving piss-drinkers.

It's a short walk across Exchange Square to the Urbis building. On arriving, Anka eats a gratin of mussels with melted Camembert and foaming hollandaise. She drinks a bottle of Indian beer. She's downing the dregs as she enters the Channel MANC studio and approaches her producer, a ginger-faced boy called Ben.

‘Which one was it today?'

‘Flogging bags,' says Anka, taking a sheet of instructions from him.

‘You eaten?'

The studio is basic. Two cameras and a cheap set designed to mimic what might best be described as a boudoir. There is a bed draped in imitation velvet which Anka often lies on, tits puffed out, imploring people to phone in and answer questions. Behind the bed is a false wooden wall painted gold.

‘Well, there's nothing new,' says Ben, pointing out to Anka the usual spots marked with red tape where she is permitted to stand. ‘But please, babe, do your best. We have to triple the amount of calls. Yeah?'

Ben is a boy that shouldn't say ‘babe'.

The background music for the show is already playing. It contains atmospheric synth strings and a foreboding bass line. The bass line goes dum dum din dum, dum dum din dum. Anka and the young crew find its incessant promise of disaster very annoying. It's the first thing they switch off at the end of the show.

‘We're all going to Room for dinner after if you fancy it,' says Ben.

‘Room?' Anka replies, raising and bending the pitch of her voice. ‘Very Wild World. I can't make it.'

Ben nods and turns from where Anka has begun to perform her pre-show breathing exercises to where the two cameramen are awaiting his instruction. Anka can't be certain because she's breathing so loudly, but she thinks that Ben whispers, ‘Keep the cameras off those limbs. Tits and face, right, tits and face.' Anka's about to ask Ben how he can be so rude when he spins unexpectedly and addresses her abruptly through a smile.

‘Anka, unbutton, we need a tit shadow.'

‘Right,' she replies, looking down at one of her arms, assuring herself that it is coated in flesh, as limbs should be, yes, we humans should have flesh. Satisfied, she releases two of her shirt's buttons so the white rim of her bra becomes visible. So simple, she thinks, the channel-hoppers will see this bra. They will. They will see the shadow cast by my pushed tits and they'll reach for the phone.

‘Try not to speak too much,' says Ben, putting Anka into position. ‘Just stare. Open your eyes wide. We have to get them calling!'

When Anka got this job she was required to speak a great deal. It was her pretty face and her ability to speak in sentences that made her such a strong candidate.

‘OK. On in ten, everybody,' shouts Ben, retreating out of shot and placing a hand on the shoulder of the principal cameraman.

But
QUIZ TV
is changing. The public has become wise to the format. They've been fucked over too many times. People watch it for the funny guys and the fit girls but don't bother calling any more. There are too many horror stories of people going bankrupt because they couldn't stop calling.
Hundreds of times a night. Quid a pop. Pile of shit. TV's dead.

Anka corrects her straight blonde fringe with her fingers and stares down at the first question on the card of instructions. Gold lights illuminate the scarlet boudoir. ‘Five,' shouts Ben. Anka stares into the camera. The cameraman zooms in on her pretty face, her blue eyes, her happy tit shadow and her red cheeks, not knowing that two years ago this face was only bone and the flesh that cared to remain was grey. The clock on the studio wall says ten. ‘Action!'

‘Good evening!' Anka explodes with enthusiasm. ‘I am Anka. Anka as in wanker. Welcome to
QUIZ TV
!'

She'd used this line at her audition and it quickly became her catchphrase. Anka points at the thin air beneath her tit shadow, saying, ‘This is the number you need. This is the number you're going to dial. Isn't it, guys?'

QUIZ TV
has been getting more and more forceful as the number of callers falls. Anka stares into the camera with a look of contempt. She pictures the late-night losers slumped on their sofas, staring into her top, into her pretend eyes, hands round cans or hands round cocks. She purposefully eyes them with disdain. To make the pretty girl speak, you have to make her happy, you have to make the call.

‘Tonight's question is simple,' she says, climbing onto the bed and appearing to relax amid the cushions. ‘What beats beyond your ribs?'

She turns away as if bored by the camera.

‘The question is easy: what beats beyond your ribs?' she yawns.

Two work-experience girls are hunched over the telephone switchboard, waiting for red lights. ‘What beats?' says Anka,
staring down the camera with a sudden and slightly evil enthusiasm. ‘Come on. For five thousand pounds. What beats beyond your ribs?'

Time passes.

‘I'm getting very bored here.'

Anka Kudolski stares sternly into the camera. Shit shows like this are one of TV's final attempts to get cash. Advertising revenue is declining rapidly. The talent/reality shows like
The X Factor
,
Celebrities on Ice
,
Best Twat
, they're good because people pay to vote for their hero or their villain. But they're more expensive to produce than shows like
QUIZ TV
. The profit margins aren't as easy to realise. Anka Kudolski stares sternly into the camera.

Around Greater Manchester, people sit on creamy leather sofas. They watch as Anka attempts to bleed and intimidate them with silence. Give in. Go on. Reach for your phone. But the people on their sofas know better than to call. They're desperate. They're not desperate. They're desperate.

Behind the camera, Ben whispers into his mouthpiece and Anka presses her finger against her earpiece to listen. ‘Anka,' she hears, ‘try slagging them off, yeah? Try taking the piss, babe.'

Oh, Ben, never say babe again! Anka smiles and returns her gaze to the camera. She knows what's going on. All her life has led to this moment. The talent. The art. The beret. The
Sunday Times
. The eating. The not eating. The falling down the toilet. Now, look at us, here we are!