Wildlife (6 page)

Joe finds the front door of his flat ajar. He pushes it open with an outstretched foot and peers cautiously down the hall. In secure complexes like this one, burglary is rare. Joe steps slowly into his flat. To his left is the bathroom door. He realises how little he cares about getting robbed. Bathrooms, famously, are the least robbed rooms in houses, and the only thing of value Joe possesses is a piece of shit. No black market trades literally in shit. Not even in Manchester. Joe takes a deep breath.

‘Hello,' he says, in a tone of voice designed to ring out, unanswered.

‘Hello,' comes the reply, a second later, followed by the uncontrolled shriek of a child.

Joe doesn't recognise the man he finds in his living room. He doesn't recognise the baby that the man is holding and feeding either. He watches for a moment as the child's
chugging cheeks suck black milk from an upturned bottle, held gently in the fingers of the man. Why is the milk black?

‘How did you get in?' says Joe, stepping forwards into the room.

‘Life gave me the key. I couldn't risk waiting around in the cold with this one with me.' The man nods at the child in his arms. He is scruffy, the man. Ripped jeans, a faded Rolling Stones T-shirt short enough to reveal an inch of his midriff and a few straggling pubes. His head is shaved, maybe even wet shaved. He's about twenty-nine. One of those. Not quite thirty. He removes the bottle from the baby's tiny lips. A trickle of black milk descends into the baby's shawl. A series of black bubbles spreads across its lips.

‘There you go,' says the man, placing the baby into a travel seat on the floor. The baby's face creases, its eyes get desperate. Seconds later it is sucking on a dummy.

‘Now, Joe,' says the man, standing up and shaking his arms back to life, ‘I'm sorry to barge in like this but I don't have much time. We need you to look after Sally here for a week or so. Life says you're good with secrets, that you don't go out much and that you're looking for opportunities in the Wild World. You're perfect. And your academic record is excellent, we've checked. Any questions so far?'

‘Have you used my toilet?'

‘I'm sorry?' The man puts a hand on top of his hairless head.

‘Just tell me,' snaps Joe. ‘Have you taken a piss since you got here?'

Looking perplexed, the man nods his head. Joe sighs.
Why is life impossible? He sits down slowly on one of the wooden arms of his sofa. He puts his head into his hands and leans forward. It's gone, he decides. Would I fit round the U-bend? he thinks. Could I just about squirm round it and then swim through the pipes and drop into the Mancunian sewers? I could spend a lifetime sifting through shit, interrupting rats, throwing up, getting poisoned. I would gladly spend my lifetime just searching for crumbs.

‘I was absolutely bursting,' says the man. ‘It's hard to find time when you're caring for a baby.'

Joe says nothing. He knows that there is no point in going to check. The man has pissed in his toilet. A man has pissed in his toilet. The rules of the competition say that the crumb has been pissed away. He dreads to imagine this man's pride as he increased the power, got the aim spot on and then strained to fire the crumb away before he ran out of juice. He was probably panting when he'd finished. It would have held on pretty tight, that lovely bit of crap. But there is no point going to check. Because people succeed.

‘Listen, Joe,' says the man, impatiently. ‘Sally needs feeding six times a day. I'm leaving you enough milk to get you through two weeks. She's very well behaved. Everyone says so. You'll be paid, of course, and Life says you could do with the cash. This is a great opportunity for you. You're just the type of person we need at this stage. Low-key, unattached, no real reason to endanger –'

‘How is she?' interrupts Joe. ‘How is Life? Is she OK?'

‘She's fine. She said to say hello.'

‘Why is the milk black?'

The man smiles a frown. ‘Sally needs certain things that
other children don't. In fact, I should say: don't take Sally south of Birmingham.'

‘Where are her parents?'

‘Dead. Sally's an orphan, see. Just keep her safe and in the north. You'll be doing us a huge favour. Life said you're the most caring guy she knows.'

‘It's true,' says Joe, getting up off the sofa and crawling in the direction of the travel seat. ‘I do care. I'm over-sensitive.' He leans over Sally. ‘What's wrong with her eyes?'

‘An infection. Nothing serious. They'll have some colour in them soon, for deffo.'

For deffo? Sally's eyes are only black and white. Joe presses her nose lightly and Sally giggles a little, a few more blackish bubbles are blown about her mouth. ‘Hello there,' Joe says to Sally. ‘Hello there.'

‘So you agree?' asks the man, unloading large bottles of the black milk from a rucksack on the floor. ‘I bet you never thought the Wild World was this easy, I mean, bloody childcare, piece of piss, eh?'

Joe quickly decides that Sally is the perfect replacement for the crumb of Life's shit. I'll take her. I need her. For so much of life, you are capable of nothing. Anything's possible, sure, only it isn't. Hardly anything's possible. But right now, thinks Joe, I could, I could do anything.

‘Who are you?' he asks the man.

‘I work in marketing, with Life, for the Wild World.'

‘I see,' says Joe. ‘And what is the Wild World?'

The man taps his nose like twats tap their crotches or killers tap the handles of their guns. ‘Top secret,' says the man through a smile. He's probably shagging Life, thinks Joe. I bet he's banging her with a mask on with his white and weirdly massive dick. Who entrusts a total
stranger with a baby? A bell-end. The kind of man who takes shits on fans. Baby Sally lets out a deep, painful burp.

‘Wait a minute,' says Joe, turning from Sally and grabbing the man by the wrist. ‘I'd do anything for Life, she knows that, I guess that's why you're here. And I'm not stupid. I'll keep your secret. But Sally, she's not . . . you know?' The man shakes his head. Joe continues in a whisper: ‘Sally's not the new Jesus, is she?'

The man is almost bursting with laughter. The man is saying, ‘Don't be an idiot,' then he's saying, ‘Is she fuck.' Moments later and Joe is chuckling too. He is asking the man what his name is and the man is saying that it doesn't matter. He's putting on a battered leather jacket and saying goodbye to Sally who is almost smiling. Joe shows the man out of his flat. After, he checks the toilet, and yes, it's vanished. Gone. No more crap. He remembers how Life had said to say ‘hello'. What a terrible thing to say. ‘Hello.' He calls her on her mobile but it goes straight to answerphone:
Hey, this is Life. I'm busy. Leave a message
. Next Joe is looking in the mirror, trying to work out if his roots are showing at his scalp yet. They are. So soon. It's a miracle. There is a millimetre of pure white at the bottom of each strand of hair. Jesus. My natural colour is a perfect white. Fuck me. He's thinking. Fuck me. Going white at twenty-four. What a tiny little nightmare. Now I've got Sally, he thinks, I won't be able to go and nest with the puffins in the Faroe Islands. Ha. I probably won't even grow wings now. He goes into the living room and watches Sally as she kicks and struggles in her little chair. She is beautiful. Even her poorly eyes convey a very convivial
character. He starts making funny noises and Sally starts laughing. She is trying to smile. More funny noises. More touching. Within minutes, the adult and the child are squeaking, giggling, squeaking, giggling.

ANKA KUDOLSKI LEAVES
the Press Club on Deansgate at six fifteen in the morning. It is becoming day. The sun will rise. Odds on. But, for now, a half-light hangs sleepily between the new buildings and above the grey road.

The coffee shops are coming to life with first blinking and then constant yellow light. Through windows, knackered youths in aprons carry trays of muffins. Hanging mouths and barely open eyes.

The Press Club is Anka's least favourite of her many jobs. It used to cater for members of the press, theatrical types, people in television, but it doesn't any more. Anka spent last night selling warm cans of Red Stripe to aspirational gangsters from Longsight and Moss Side. Chunky chains; too gold. Revolting rings. Trails of cocaine snot from each nostril. Dead women falling off their knees in dirty old miniskirts. Nowhere near enough fun. Where are the laughing humans, Anka? Where are the laughing humans?

Not in the Press Club, thinks Anka, heading south
towards St Peter's Square. I think I might quit. I need jobs that kick reality like a goalkeeper kicks a football. Into the air. Out of reach.
QUIZ TV
works. It detaches me from the world. So does selling overpriced bags to posh pigs at Selfridges. I thought the Press Club would be the same. It's not. I think I might quit.

Anka skips between the town hall and the Library Theatre and into St Peter's Square. A minute later and she is sitting down at a square table in Luciano's, saying hello to Nic, a large, blonde, Italian-English part-time lesbian from Anka's London days. Nic works nights, too. She deals with nocturnal room service at the Midland Hotel. It's normal for the two of them to meet like this. Nic orders a sausage sandwich from the olive-skinned waiter. Anka orders a boiled egg with broccoli soufflé, red-onion tarte tatin, some frizzled shallots and a pancetta garnish. The waiter shrugs his shoulders.

‘How is the eating going lately?' asks Nic in north London notes, tweaking her slightly large but necessary nose. ‘Your tits are still big, but your arms, Anka, you're not eating.'

Anka smiles. ‘I am. I'm working loads, eating loads, I'll be fine. Did you see me the other night?'

‘I watched the first half-hour before I went to work. Whose idea was it?'

‘Not mine, sadly,' says Anka. ‘The producer's. We got triple the amount of calls we normally get.'

‘I bet, but how many of them were just wanking down the line? I was blushing, all those horrible little groans every time you took a call.'

The food arrives. The sandwich for Nic and, for Anka, just one lonely boiled egg that rolls around the plate.
Luciano's, by the way, is an Italian cafe whose Italian menu has been eroded by the staples of the English breakfast cuisine over the three years since it opened. It is now run by Greeks.

‘The sad thing is,' says Anka, ignoring her egg for the moment, ‘is that a lot of the genuine callers we got last night were Romanian. They haven't figured out it's a con.'

‘Foreigners are fucked. The Wild World will see to them and their fucking work ethic,' says Nic, already halfway through her sandwich. ‘The Wild World is gonna save the English, the depressed. Do you know if you speak English, you're more likely to suffer from depression? It's been proven. The Wild World's gonna stop that, surely. It'll help us to deal with affluence, make it more pleasant for us to obsess over appearance, celebrity, money and status, stop us hanging from beams, shooting bullets through our brains or just moaning and moaning and moaning. I mean, Anka, look at you.'

‘I don't moan.'

‘Maybe not, but you're succeeding in starving yourself to death. I hope the geniuses behind the Wild World realise that there is a definite link between the English language and suicide. Or else, I should go back to Italy. Or the English should start speaking Italian. Italians don't give a fuck.'

‘I'd rather speak French.'

‘I'd rather you ate your egg, you anorexic English psycho.'

‘Are you a lesbian today, Nicola?'

‘I am, yes, your tits have given me a huge erection.'

The two girls laugh. The sky outside gets lighter, encouraged, no doubt, by the sound of female laughter.

‘Speaking of the Wild World,' says Nic. ‘Did you ever meet Life Moberg?'

Anka shakes her head. She has an egg in her mouth.

‘I'm sure you did.'

‘Only on the Internet,' says Anka, swallowing. ‘I once looked at loads of her family photos, but we never met, for deffo.'

Nic leans across the table. ‘I spoke to her last week. She's working for the Wild World in London. It sounds amazing.'

‘What does?'

‘The Wild World, dickhead. Life's helping to organise the launch party. You'd love that, Anka.'

‘Would I?' Anka is sucking each of her fingertips and letting out a huge sigh. ‘I'm well and truly trapped in this world. I got an email this morning asking me to strip for a mobile phone porn site. They saw the show last night and were impressed. But that's got to be the old world, right?'

‘Are you going to do it?'

‘Probably. As long as they buy me lunch.'

The conversation returns to Life. Nic gives Anka her email address and suggests she gets in touch. She describes how Life recently dumped her boyfriend, Joe, saying, ‘Apparently, he stopped kissing her. He just used to peck her lips like a bird and flap his arms like they were wings. Also, she suspected he was trying to make a nest in her arse. He became fixated with her anus, not fucking it, just staring at it and holding himself against it at night.'

‘That's pretty normal, isn't it?' says Anka, pulling on her coat and flicking her blonde hair over its khaki-green hood. ‘All boys are obsessed with anal nowadays. Fannies will soon seal up – evolution!'

The two girls leave Luciano's laughing. Once in the street,
Nic does a little fart and both girls bend over in hysterics. They separate with an affectionate kiss outside the Palace Hotel. It's eight in the morning and the streets are full of people.

It's hours before Anka is due back at Selfridges. Having worked solidly for over a day, she decides to return home and sleep through the morning. She lives in Parkers Hotel, the glamorous and dilapidated Georgian building on the corner of Miller Street and Corporation Street. It's a dump, of course, but she's hardly ever there.