Emma Unsworth - Animals

He smiled. ‘You really want to talk about that ?’

‘No,’ I said, burning for my crassness. I skittered, recovering. (This is the way it is with me, I don’t know whether I want to be the life and soul or the mystery.) ‘Not at all,’ I said, ‘I don’t want to talk about anything. I just feel like I should because I’m a product of my generation and we abhor a lull in communication. Sometimes I envy Neanderthal times. A caveman moment, where you could just stand there throwing meat at each other. None of the inane chitter-chat.’

A single nod. The firmest eyes. A chin not unlike the horn of a saddle.

‘I’m a pianist,’ he said.

No penis jokes.

‘Classical or jazz or…? I can’t think of any more.’

‘Both, but mostly classical. I mean, that’s where the big bucks are.’ A twinkle at this. Was he? Yes — yes, he was. Ripping the piss. Oho, this boded well.

‘Go You.’

‘Go me,’ he said, squinting. That squint. He had me at that squint . ‘I played the RNCM earlier. That’s why I’m here.’ He looked around, raised his eyebrows and sipped his long drink. ‘ Some one recommended it.’

‘Was it your girlfriend?’

‘No, it wasn’t my girlfriend.’

‘Is she quite boring, then?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Boring in a kind of non-existent way?’

‘There’s no “kind of” about it.’

(HOORAY.)

‘So,’ he said. ‘What do you drive?’

‘A hard bargain.’

‘Let me guess: you’re a comedian.’

‘Way off. Freezing, in fact.’

‘Let’s have it then.’

‘I’m a writer.’

‘A writer of what?’

Words. Laura, I scolded myself, YOU ARE NOT BOB DYLAN.

‘Short stories mostly. But I’m working on a novel. I know everyone says that but it’s nearly finished and I’m quite determined.’

Quite determined? Jesus. I sounded like Elizabeth fucking Bennett.

‘Great,’ he said. ‘Anything published?’

I did a sour little tequila burp and hoped he hadn’t noticed. ‘A few things, in a small way.’

He stuck out his hand then. ‘Jim.’

‘Laura.’

His was a good hand. Clam-shaped nails, raised veins, knuckles just worn enough. I had a fleeting erotic vision; a rush that spilled from jaw to ribs to pelvic floor — lowering myself, holding his hips, not losing eye contact, seeing what his face did. I hoped the vision hadn’t passed through my hand as I took his, and then I hoped it had. I sensed a gentleness emanating from him, a soft lamp on somewhere inside. I wanted to collapse like a blooming flower in reverse stop-frame animation, rush to the point of his hand, and go in there. I wanted to be inside him. I felt — as I did again and again whenever I had hold of Jim — Yeats’ loveliness that has long faded from the world.

I woke up naked in a bed that wasn’t mine. Someone next to me who wasn’t Tyler. A not-unpleasant achiness. Memories of deep kissing, his hands on my shoulder blades, the nape of my neck attended to. Closeness. Intimacy. I remembered undressing, the condom, the carpet. A rented room. Magnolia paint, sloe gin his niece had made, no cigarettes. I rolled over, and there : the back of him pale and straight like a candle. I reached out — atoms displacing atoms, that’s all it was, funny, just before the moment of contact — then my hand was on him. Warm, downy skin prickled. He murmured and turned to face me.

We’d stayed in the bar until two then we got a taxi back to his place. Tyler ended up at a party in Salford, bum-grinding with a Coronation Street star who wouldn’t admit he was in Coronation Street —not surprising under the circumstances; the circumstances being nitrous balloons and Arrested Development on Spotify. Actors , her morning voicemail said. Actors.

I called her back at the end of Jim’s street. So how about you and your fancy friend?

So how about that?

Well, I’d only gone and fallen in love.

Beyond all fantasies, this one, right from the start. It’s a beautiful thing when you know you have a bolder look in your eye and can bolt one back. That sudden ownership of someone’s body, the requited favouritism when it comes to yours. That sense of communion. I can touch you here, here and here — look at me just touching you all over. I made love to Jim religiously; it felt like prayer or what I knew of prayer. The ritual. The bending. I felt a new point to things, a new purpose, an endlessness in that. I’d been so disappointed to discover at the age of sixteen, after losing my virginity to a gentle, shy schoolmate and dating him for a year or so, that an orgasm was merely what I had been giving myself all those years (Is that it ? Oh, it is. Oh, well). Jim and I explored each another, turning stones, dropping depth gauges. It was about what I could do to him, and it was about seeing what what I was doing was doing to him; the tease and retreat, the whispered exchange of devils. And beyond all that, the purity of possibility. You haven’t had the chance to fuck up. You could be anything. You could be perfect (unlikely, but the freedom of having the whole rainbow of potential flaws in the running is not to be underestimated). He doesn’t know yet about your limited geographical knowledge; that you don’t read the papers every day; that you sometimes hide instead of answering the door (and the phone). You are yet to drink white wine and turn into a complete fucking lunatic over absolutely nothing. You are yet to, yet to, yet to.

We got engaged just over a year later on New Year’s Eve, after a party at Tyler’s that we left early (she was in the process of kicking up a fuss but then someone had put ‘Buffalo Stance’ on and our departure had gone unnoticed). We sat on the rug in his lounge drinking a bottle of port that his parents had left and we were so drunk that we couldn’t remember who had asked who in the end, but it didn’t matter; it was a minor detail. We’d been talking about the future and what we both wanted, and agreed that being together for ever was The Thing. The idea of marriage suddenly felt — well, a bit crazy and dramatic, over the top really (SOLD!). We woke up on New Year’s Day and turned to each other with that heart-filleting, hungover something-big-happened-and-is-it-okay wariness.

Did you mean that?

Yes. Did you?

Yes.

(Phew.)

Since then things had got busy. In January we took a trip to Scarborough before his spring touring picked up. We stayed two nights in a wind-blasted B&B and spent the Saturday afternoon skimming stones down at the beach in our scarves and hats. From a distance we could have been any age. I turned from throwing a particularly good skimmer — four bounces, my dad had taught me well: keep the stone flat, like that, direct it with your first finger like you’re trying to hit the horizon and not the surface — and said to Jim, who was looking out to sea: ‘Can we always live in the city?’ The sun was low, like a bubble on a spirit level, and Jim didn’t turn round so I carried on talking to his back. ‘When we’re married, I mean. Let’s not put ourselves out to pasture. Let’s keep having adventures.’ I didn’t know where it had come from, that panic, the feeling that we were somehow closing down, reducing possibilities.

When Jim turned he was looking at me in an odd, epic way; as though he’d been looking at the sea too long and his irises had absorbed an extra element. Infinity is a grand word, but you know what, fuckit, sometimes only the grand ones will do. I knew that whatever was coming, it was big. If we hadn’t already been engaged, I’d have thought that he was about to propose. If Jim had been a woman, I’d have thought he was about to tell me he was pregnant. Behind him, waves broke regularly in fat little flops.