Emma Unsworth - Animals

I got in the back of the car and put my seatbelt on. Jim drove us to the restaurant — a Tex-Mex place a few miles away. As we passed the Baptist church on the main road I read out the billboard, which was always comical.

‘WHAT IS MISSING FROM CH CH?

U R’

‘Puh,’ said my dad. As a child I’d questioned him — repeatedly — on his upbringing and all he’d said was: Religion trains you to take things personally .

Before I started at the grammar school I was buddied up with a Jewish girl called Dina to ease me into the new regime. I went round to her house with my mum in early September before term started. Our mums talked at the breakfast bar while Dina and her younger sister Danielle took me upstairs to a bright pink bedroom full of Barbie vehicles and voile fabrics. I was wearing a Garfield digital watch at the time — a cumbersome thing I adored, with a plastic Garfield-in-relief face that flipped open to reveal a liquid crystal display. Dina and her sister were admiring it when I heard myself say: Oh, this thing… they were giving them away at our local kosher butchers … I trailed off, let the suggestion hang there. Dina and Danielle looked at me. You’re Jewish?! they exclaimed. I pouted, looked around the room. After an hour or so they dropped it.

When I actually got to prep school it wasn’t by accident that I made best friends with Jessie Roberts — a tall, Poochie-fringed Catholic girl. I bought garage freesias for her mum and complimented her dad on his cooking. Eventually she said I could accompany her family to church one Sunday. They expected me to just sit there and take it in, sing the songs, kneel during the prayers, but I got so involved (rituals had me rapt) that I followed them up to take communion. I saw Jessie’s dad glance at me curiously from where he stood further up the queue. I finally gave the game away when I said Thanks to the priest instead of Amen , the host melting helplessly on my tongue like a very thin ice cream wafer soaked in Calpol. The priest looked to Jessie’s dad, who shrugged and then glared at me. They didn’t invite me round again. I seethed, silently, about it. I had a right to be there, didn’t I? MY FATHER WAS AN ALTAR BOY. And so it was my dad I took it out on, making excuses to go up to my room straight after dinner. He won me round with fishing trips, Sunday drives, trips into town to see the retired satellite, a glinting blue drum of circuits, at the Science and Industry Museum. What else did I try? I had a friend who was a Methodist (the church hall was dull; the nativity was lively, but I abandoned my faith when I was told off by the minister for wearing earrings in the shape of a cross — a bizarre humiliation). Another friend was a nerdy Quaker, and made a convincing case for how to be religious and scientific at the same time, but her pervy uncle put me off the meetings. Another friend was Muslim (I over-appraised the self-discipline of fasting, I was dismissed as a creepy little voyeur). In GCSE Maths I sat opposite a big-eyed Sikh girl who I was obsessed with but never plucked up the courage to talk to. I realised what the awful feeling was when Rajveer asked everyone else in the maths group to go and watch Batman Returns for her birthday: God was just another party I hadn’t been invited to.

At the restaurant, Mel and her boyfriend Julian were waiting for us in the foyer. Mel waved when she saw me. Julian stood with his hands in his trouser pockets. Melanie, two years older than me, was still in many ways my idol. I always thought I’d catch up height- and beauty-wise, but never did. That’s not false modesty; it’s irrefutable fact. I was always able to live with it because: a) I loved my sister; b) I wasn’t that superficial most of the time, most of the time ; and c) Julian was The Most Boring Man On Earth. He wasn’t unkind (or we’d have had him killed), but I’d never felt so genetically alien to my sibling as when Julian had come round to the house for the first time and spent three hours telling my dad (who didn’t have a pot to piss in after forty years’ window-cleaning) about his new foray into property development and why now was the time to BTL. My dad and I had briefly rendezvous’d in the kitchen for a large whisky, and neither of us had felt the need to speak. But Melanie loved Julian and we had to give her credit for her choices — after all, she was thirty-four. So I stopped appealing to her with my eyes whenever he launched into a tirade about one of his many problematic tenants (they never sounded particularly unreasonable in their requests to me as a lifelong renter) but I couldn’t help but wonder about her private happiness. I mean, what was he like in bed? If he wasn’t forthcoming with boiler repairs then it didn’t bode well for cunnilingus.

‘Bill! Heather!’ Julian stepped forward and shook hands with my dad then hugged my mum. He shook hands with Jim next, leaving me until last given that I was a deplorable little freeloading wastrel who was transferring her debts from her parents to her partner (or was I being paranoid?).

I shook his hand and hugged Melanie. She smelled of too much Chanel, like always. ‘I saw about Jean on Facebook,’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Tyler’s thrilled.’

Mel smirked. ‘I wouldn’t have thought she’d be thrilled about any baby — what is it she calls them? Human grubs ?’

Jim snickered.

‘Don’t start,’ I said.

‘Start what?’ Mel’s nails were a shiny maroon colour and she had one of those bras on where you weren’t supposed to be able to see the clear plastic strap but you could.

‘The Tyler-bashing.’

‘You look great, Jim,’ Mel said, hugging him. ‘ Great .’

‘Nearly three months now.’

‘It’s really agreeing with you.’

I looked at Jim. He did look good but then he always looked good. I wondered whether the vein on my face was visible. I looked around the restaurant and saw my dad looking around, too. He jerked his head towards the bar and I nodded and went over. We ordered a Guinness and a red wine, followed by the other drinks in order of interestingness: half a lager, an orange juice, a diet coke, a lime and soda. The Guinness swirled stormily on the drip-tray.

‘Know what I’ve been thinking?’ he said.

The barmaid put our drinks on the bar. My dad picked up his pint. His fingers flickered around the glass, tightened, loosened, flickered again. He spoke in little fanfares, swinging his head from side to side, posing and gazing for a moment before carrying on. Children and animals flocked to him. How many times had he caught something in the old pond behind our estate and held the net up to show us. Look here, girls! Hard to believe that within this tiny space is a beating heart, a circulatory system, a rapidly sparking brain … Me and Mel standing there, leering in our anoraks. He was why I picked stranded worms off the pavement and threw them into gardens even when I was on my way out. He was why I couldn’t kill wasps even though I hated them. He was why I looked for, and loved, the creatures in people. They were always there. As family legend went, it was my dad who’d got the first proper grin out of me. I was six months old; he was thirty. We were sitting at the dining table. Way he told it, I was sliding soggy Wotsits around the plastic tray of my highchair, he was eating chops and gravy. He stopped eating for a minute and angled his head to one side to match the angle of mine. Stayed that way until I noticed. He said he saw it dawn on me that there was no sensible reason for him to be doing that — so what then? Something else… Something… Something… Searching… Then, CRACKLE. A spark by the black obelisk. Delight. So it was his fault, you see, when I was at the blaming stage of my existentials. He didn’t fuck me up; he funned me up. Despite all the years my mum smashed loaded dinner plates onto the back patio; despite all the nights he didn’t come home because he didn’t want the men he owed money to following him; despite the countless bookies’ I’d stood outside, kicking the toes of my trainers in the cracks in the pavement, desperate, desperate to see what was beyond the No Under-18s sign and the postered-out windows. Despite his selling atheism to me as a simple truth. He was forever the man who let me balance, buttocks tensing, on the back wheel-arch of his window-cleaning van as he drove down Jutland Street (the steepest street in Manchester) at a friction-hot forty-five. He’d taught me to read: a double-edged sword. I wanted to learn to read so badly. Learned quickly. But then came the frustration at not being able to look at words without understanding them. I tried to glance at road signs and away, but it was always too late: to see words was to understand them. I sensed a loss there. (Later, Emily Dickinson would confirm it: Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words …). Meaning was everywhere. And once you started with meaning, well, you got a taste for it.