Emma Unsworth - Animals

‘Laura,’ he said. ‘I’ve made a decision.’

I tensed, prepared myself. Did he not want to marry me any more? Ah, it was silly idea anyway, marriage. I’d been having my doubts, hadn’t I? We didn’t need it to prove our commitment. Tyler was right—

‘I’m giving up drinking.’

I shook my head to shake the words he’d said into place. ‘WHAT?’

‘I can’t do it any more, with work. With what I want for our future. It doesn’t… agree.’

I was so flabbergasted I couldn’t say anything else. Jim and I had had so much fun together when we were drinking. Drinking, unlike smoking (he bought a ten-pack sometimes drunk or stole mine, yep, one of those ), was something we shared. And then, the beginning of a strange feeling, deep down inside. Hard to put your finger on. Inner space stretching, and despite the unease, my heart perversely rejoicing. A new feeling! A new feeling at thirty-two! This is something! I looked back to the town. Was there a pub nearby? We should really get a — Oh.

Jim took my hand. ‘Is that okay?’

I shrugged, the polite words coming on instinct. ‘Well, of course it’s okay. It’s your choice, you know.’

It was a steely sky, a steely sea, and I had that hollow feeling I always got in my gut whenever I saw the horizon or the night sky.

‘I’ve never been as good at it as you, Laur,’ he went on. ‘So I might not be your man for adventures. But I can be your rugged base.’

I kissed his hand hard and fast, it was cold as a stone and my lips burned on it. ‘You’re not rugged, I’m rugged. I’m rugged enough for two! Anyway, what makes you think that I think that all adventures have to involve drinking? Do you think I’m that shallow, that ridiculous?’

We bought bags of chips on the way back to the B&B. I’ve never been able to finish a full bag of chips so I gave most of mine to the gulls.

P sssshhhhhht.

I ducked as a jet of fine mist shot towards my face from the automatic air freshener on the medicine cabinet. I shook the remaining water off my hands and stepped to the other side of the bathroom. Pssssssshhhhhht! Another shot fired from a second air freshener on top of the toilet cistern.

‘Fuck!’

I crouched and shielded my eyes, peered up through the gaps between my fingers. Above me a nimbostratus of ‘Cashmere Woods’ began to precipitate.

‘All right in there?’ My dad’s voice on the landing beyond the door.

I unlocked the door, opened it. There he was in his green plaid shirt, grinning, hunched, visibly thrilled he’d heard me swear.

‘Sorry, Dad. It’s like an FBI training zone in here.’

He backed up against the wall and made his hands into a gun shape. ‘Come on, Clarice. I’ve got your back.’ The effects of the chemo were showing. His hair was thinner and ashier, the skin mottled on his cheeks, dark umbra eclipsing his eye sockets. He darted his eyes back and forth and jerked his head.

I walked ahead of him down the stairs. His downward pace was fast for a man of his age in his condition, and I wondered whether he was trying too hard, which made me think of something my mum said sometimes — partly to embarrass him and partly to endear him to us. He follows you and Melanie round the house, you know, whenever you come home.

Home. It was and it wasn’t, any more. (Hovis Presley helped: Wherever I Lay My Hat, That’s My Hat .) My old bedroom had been redecorated and besides I’d only spent a few years in Middleton before moving away to Edinburgh and university. Most of my childhood memories were from the house before, where I’d lived from the age of eight to sixteen — in fact, my child-self was attached to the terrace in Crumpsall so tenaciously that a few times on my way home from the doctor’s in my mid-twenties, fever-dazed and comfort-hungry, I’d given the taxi driver directions to Crumpsall only to get halfway there and realise that I lived in the other direction entirely, as a grown-up.

Down in the hall, which reeked faintly, perennially, of mice, Jim was helping my mum put on her coat. I rotated Jim and Tyler as my date for family meals — it seemed only fair. I’d taken Tyler before I met Jim and it felt wrong for him to suddenly usurp her, and besides her mum had moved to London to help Jean so Tyler didn’t get many dinners out. I didn’t like to admit it but the meals with Jim were easier. He was golden amongst the Joyces; they hung on his every word, saw him as a bona fide exotic mystery. It was a different relationship to the one I had with his family, which had been sullied from the start. That memory! How it burrrrrrrned.

We were on the M6 on the way to his folks’ place in Birmingham when I’d felt a sudden painful and irrepressible need.

Darling , I said, I need you to pull into the next Services .

But we’re nearly there.

No — I mean I REALLY need you to pull in. This isn’t desire. It is necessity.

Fifteen minutes and we’ll be there, Laur. Can you not wait?

Nnnnnnnnggggggggggggg.

I hung on against my better instincts, hunching and groaning and cursing and feeling magma shifting inside. I loosened my seatbelt and hooked it around my knees but it didn’t help. As we got close to his parents’ cul-de-sac Jim handed me his keys and I held them in my sweating hand, ready to run. When we pulled up outside the house I threw the door open and toppled out before the car had come to a halt.

Top of the stairs and first left! Jim shouted. They won’t be back from church yet.

I ran to the front door and fumbled the Yale key in the lock, swearing. I ran up the stairs, pulling down my pants, swearing and shaking. I dived into the bathroom and sat on the toilet, releasing a Niagara of scalding diarrhoea. When it was purged I exhaled with relief and wiped the sweat from my brow. I turned to unspool some toilet paper, only to see Jim’s dad sitting in the bath next to me, a white-knuckled flannel obscuring his nethers, the newspaper limp in his hand.

They hadn’t gone to church that day. They’d prepared an extravagant Sunday roast instead. And what an awkward occasion that was. No gravy for me, Mrs. Partington …

‘Thanks, love,’ my mum said to Jim when her arms were in her coat. She touched her hair and I saw the mauve veins of her inner wrists bulge and flatten between her bracelets. Quiet and proud (my mum hardly ever drank but when she did it was as though every thought she’d had for the past forty years spilled out), it was only her love of outlandish costume jewellery that might direct a stranger to the Sixties fairground of her heart — the heart that had fallen for and stuck with my dad.

A copy of the Daily Mail sat folded on the sideboard, its masthead scowling out in Satan’s own handwriting. Mel and I — liberal upstarts that we were, politics worn as flashily as our Levi 501s and Doc Martens — had been so pleased with ourselves when we’d convinced our parents to stop buying the Sun . And what had they started buying instead? Oh, Universe. You and your jokes.

My mum batted non-existent dust from her shoulders and set about buttoning her coat. ‘Jim, be a love and close the Very Front Room door, would you? Give it a good slam. It’s started to stick and Bill — well, there, yes, that’s it. You are a marvel.’

The ‘Very Front Room’ was the result of nobody knowing what to do when we moved into a house with two front rooms (although crucially did this mean two TVs?), but one was at the front of the house and one was at the back, so we christened them accordingly. At the time it seemed like logic but now, like so many things that had once seemed logical, all that was left was a needling sense of the surreal. The Very Front Room was kept for special occasions like when Dad got three balls on the lottery and threw a bit of a party. There was an uncomfortable antique sofa in there, thick-veined with loosened springs, and a throttle of disintegrating bulrushes in a pure 1970s vase.