Emma Unsworth - Animals

‘Well, what could be more shameful than flabby upper arms? I know. These things offer no perspective. They should do a feature on what to do when you’ve fucked the best man or spunked the flower money on ketamine.’

Jim looked at me.

‘I haven’t done either of those things,’ I said. ‘I mean, you haven’t even got a best man… ’

He looked at the magazine. I sat down next him to hunt for more funnies. I thought, How nice it would be to crack open a bottle of wine now and drink it together, getting merry and mocking the ridiculousness. I felt a pang remembering how much we used to dick about together. The time we dressed up as Paula Yates and John Leslie for a Dead Celebrities party. The time we put on too much pink lipstick in Pere Lachaise cemetery and kissed the marble marker of Oscar Wilde’s grave. The time we swam in a loch at lunchtime and had sex beneath a war memorial, causing a group of hikers to call the police. The time we did an impromptu ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’ at a jazz bar and the manager asked if we’d consider being the house band. The time he held my knife. The time I wore his shoes. The time we danced — like, didn’t stop, like constant, deadly dancing — for six hours at a trance festival in Germany; him mostly ballet, me mostly zumba. The times we talked all night, all night — grasping for those ‘meaningful’ conversations (I always meant Every Word). The time I christened him ‘Poirot’ after he drank so much brandy he pinballed along the walls of his flat towards the bathroom — me staggering behind and buffering him when I could — and bellowed several hearty blasts of puke into the sink, the shower cubicle, and finally, finally, the toilet. As I started to mop up with the bathmat he spun towards me, a thin vomit moustache on his top lip, and said: ‘AND WHERE WERE YOO WHEN ALL THIS WES ’EPPENING?’ As he said the word ‘THIS’ he twirled his finger round the outskirts of his face. I had to laugh because his vom-tash and accent (warped by booze-dulled enunciation) combined to give him the air of the Belgian detective. Also, a reckoning there: a responsibility to each other for the state we were in. For the states we got in. Together or apart. A vow of sorts.

Good times.

A few days later I was sitting out in the garden ignoring my phone (my mum, ringing to ask about envelopes, the tentative voicemail revealed) when Tyler came tearing round the side of the block. She’d been out all night.

‘GET INSIDE GET INSIDE!’ she yelled. Her cardigan was hanging off, in one hand dangled a pair of ridiculously high wedges that her sister had given her, her other hand was pressed to her chest trapping a large glass jar that looked as though it was full of road grit. It wasn’t winter. I jumped up and ran after her, kicking away the empty whisky bottle I was using as a doorstop. The door banged shut behind us. We pegged it up the stairs.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’

‘JUST HURRRRY!’

She fumbled for her door key with the hand she was holding her wedges in; I shoved her out the way and used my key to open the door. She rammed it open and ran inside. I ran after her, slamming the door and double locking it. She went into the kitchen, opened the fridge and pulled down the plastic flap that sealed off the ice box. She started shoving the jar into the freezer, pulling out ice cube trays to accommodate it.

‘What the fuck is that?’ I said, moving closer. Then I recognised the sugary, beige crystals. I’d never seen them in such a large quantity before, but I knew them, and my stomach knew them, and my bowels. My lower insides contracted with hope and fear and all the big feelings. ‘Jesus, Tyler, is that—?’

She looked at me. Her eyes said it all. ‘Mandy, yes. It’s a fucking massive great big jar of mandy and we need to keep it in the freezer for freshness because that’s where she kept it.’

I shook my head. ‘That’s where who kept it?’

Tyler turned away from the jar (which still wouldn’t fit in the ice box, being one of those large jars with a clasp on the top, normally used for storing spaghetti or cereal) and looked at me. ‘The drug dealer I stole it from.’ She didn’t need to add ‘silly’ to the end of the sentence.

I shook my head again, quicker this time, adrenaline and fear and panic all having their say in the choreography of my muscles. ‘What. The. Fuck?’

Ice was melting on the floor. Tyler held the jar up aloft and shook it. ‘This baby’s gonna keep us rocking till Christmas.’

I pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes. ‘You stole drugs from a drug dealer.’

‘Well, you know what she’s like, what’s her name. She’s always dancing round to techno when you go in there. Stupid old dog slobbering in the corner and a few reprobates crashed out in the lounge.’

I said it again. ‘You stole drugs from a drug dealer.’

‘Oh, she won’t miss it, believe me. She doesn’t know what fucking day it is.’

‘ What’s her name ?’ Tyler looked at me blankly. ‘You know what she’s like , do you? You know what she’s like and YOU DON’T KNOW HER FUCKING NAME?’

Tyler did a slow, elaborate blink. It was the blink of someone whose eyes hadn’t closed properly for a while. ‘Marie,’ she said.

‘You just made that up.’

‘I didn’t. She’s called Marie.’

I collapsed on the floor. The realisation of it all hit me. There would be a violent raid. We would be tortured by vengeful gangsters and then, at the end of it all, after much begging and agony and suffering, there would be death.

‘Well, you’ve finally gone and done it, Tyler,’ I said. ‘I always knew you would.’

‘You’re worrying too much as per.’ She turned back to the jar and continued trying to ram it into the ice box.

‘So why were you running?’ She ignored me. ‘Tyler.’

‘Just let me get this stored, then we can relax.’

‘Tyler!’

She stopped ramming the jar but she didn’t look at me. ‘The dog followed me a bit of the way.’

I sat up straight. ‘How much of the way?’

‘I don’t know, I was running!’

With one final thrusting push, like a wired, diminutive Elvis impersonator, she succeeded in securing the jar fully in the ice-box. Shavings of frost flew out and fell to the lino. She slammed the plastic flap shut, then the fridge door, and turned to me victorious. ‘Look, Marie can’t operate a door handle. She’s officially tweaked out.’

I pulled a burn-marked tea towel down from the work surface and laid it over the ice and frost on the floor. Water bled into the cotton, darkening it.

‘The worst thing we can do is panic,’ Tyler said. ‘You know how these things go. When you panic you invite the existentials in… ’

I lay awake most of the night, clutching the top of my thin single duvet with rigor mortis hands, listening for the sound of a dog outside in the street. The next morning I found Tyler sprawled across her bed hugging the radio, tuned to some dance station on low volume, Zuzu stretched out alongside her, exposing her leopard-like belly. A floorboard clicked beneath me as I stood in the doorway and Tyler woke, sat bolt upright and raised the radio above her head. ‘Wha—?’

‘It’s me, Tyler. Put the radio down. Shall we get some breakfast before we hit the shops?’

She made a confused pig-face. ‘Shops what shops?’

‘You’re coming with me to buy a wedding dress, remember?’

‘A wedding dress?’

‘Yes, I thought I should probably get one at some point. Either that or walk down the aisle naked.’

She groaned. ‘Great. Now I’ve got an erection … ’