Emma Unsworth - Animals

We’d had a long dinner with lots of wine and by the time we adjourned to the residents’ bar we were pretty much wedding-drunk (an ironic observation now…). Things had been going okay. Jim and Tyler had slowly relaxed after scoping each other out with questions about their upbringing (Jim to Tyler) and favourite poems (Tyler to Jim). I was feeling very hopeful about everything, like a well-oiled axle between two shiny wheels that would speed me joyously through the rest of my life. Easy to be happily morbid when you’re drunk in good company. I kissed Jim on the cheek and he squeezed my knee under the table.

‘Look, there’s a piano,’ said Tyler, nodding to a barkish old hulk propped up against the wall. She looked at Jim. ‘There’s a piano, Jim.’

Jim looked. ‘I can confirm that that is a piano, Tyler, yes.’

Tyler let her thumb glance off Jim’s elbow. ‘Well, you should play it then. You being all piano-y.’

I laughed nervously into my drink. Jim looked at me and took a swig of wine. He’d told me it happened a lot, people asking him to play ( If I was a plumber they wouldn’t say, Go on, do something with a pipe, would they? But musicians are constantly on call … I thought it a little churlish of him. A little). Then he stood up and walked over to the geriatric instrument, pulled over a chair from a nearby table and sat down. Tyler sat back in her seat, pleased.

I tensed. I’d heard him play the second-hand Steinway upright in his flat a few times drunk, but never anything in public. The concerts he’d played so far had been abroad and it had been too early for all that. I was worried what Tyler might think, what — dare I think it? — what ammo it would give her. She didn’t like how often I was staying over at his. She’d brought up the matter of rent a few times, swiftly dropped it. Still.

Jim ran his fingers along the keys in opposite directions. The room filled with noise — a good rhythm and a cascade of sounds. He turned to look at us. ‘It’s not quite tuned but it’s not as bad as I thought,’ he said. His fingers were hitting the keys as he talked. ‘Hang on… almost got it… ’ His fingers fluttered, up and down, in ever decreasing breadth until he was down down down to one note which he struck struck struck with a DONK DONK DONK. ‘There,’ he said, and grinned. ‘Found the room.’

My pelvic floor twitched.

‘What do you mean, found the room ?’ said Tyler.

Jim, playing again, up and down and up and down, smiled at her — bizarrely in that smile he’d reminded me of Tyler , as though something had in that moment been transferred — and said, ‘There’s always one note that makes the room resonate. It’s something you want to avoid.’

Tyler rolled her eyes, raised her glass and struck the side with a flick of her middle finger. The glass sounded with a short ping. ‘Look, I found it, too.’

Jim turned back to face the piano. ‘Anyway, now I’ve got it… ’ He launched into a casually glorious, soaring, swelling, hell perfect rendition of ‘At Last’ by Etta James.

‘Fuck,’ I said under my breath.

I looked around to see the bar staff standing by the door, rapt. I looked at Tyler. She was watching Jim, her glass poised midway between her mouth and the table, her face a crisp twist of angry awe. It took a lot to make Tyler forget about her drink.

‘French onion soup!’ Tyler declared. ‘That’s what we need to recover. Soup and a pint of real ale, like the ursines drink.’

We walked from Salford — where we’d abandoned the car post-Cheshire — to one of our favourite pubs, a Victorian chophouse that was tiled like a swimming pool and staffed by bartenders in bowties. The onion soup there was the best in town — rich and murky as pond water, served with a dumplingy cheese crouton the size of a baby’s fist. Tucked away in the slats and canopies of the beer garden, we dissected the day over ale and then red wine.

‘I’ve got the decorators in!’ Tyler said loudly, raising her glass. It was a phrase I’d told her was a traditional English toast for whenever you were drinking red wine. As a gag it had enjoyed a remarkably good innings.

‘Just get a normal dress from a normal shop,’ Tyler said. ‘That place was heinous.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s almost as if they want to put you off.’ I swirled my wine. The legs lingered in thin, filmy waves on the sides of the glass and then retreated back to the pool at the bottom.

‘Why ever would they want to do that? Put you off a barely evolved pagan ceremony for needy morons?’

‘I’m not a needy moron. Well, maybe I’m needy sometimes, but aren’t we all?’

‘I’m not.’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘I’m not.’ She grabbed my wrist. ‘Tell me. Tell me I’m not needy, Laura. Say it. Say you’re not needy.’

I picked her hand off my wrist. ‘No.’

She drained her glass. ‘I just don’t get it. What is this need for a special dress ?’ She said ‘special dress’ in a little-girl voice. ‘Why don’t you just wear your favourite dress — the maroon lacy one? It’s not as though we’re the kind of people who take photos of ourselves all the time when we’re out in a desperate need to document our lives.’ I thought of the photo I’d sent earlier to Jim. ‘I think it’s so fucking tragic when people do that. What, so they can sit there when they’re eighty, pointing through albums mid-air with a virtual-reality glove, saying And here’s another glorious moment I failed to participate in because I was too busy taking a fucking photo . Wear the maroon. In ten years you’ll have forgotten you didn’t buy it especially. And you know what, Lo, it’s your fucking wedding .’

This one was from Tyler’s friend Agnes, the only friend from Crawford she’d ever kept in touch with — although Agnes had recently ‘gone over to the dark side’ (childrearing). Apparently Agnes had been so bombed on speed at her own wedding that when the photographer and members of her family were hassling her to get out of her room to have some photos taken Agnes had emerged enraged, her train hitched halfway up her legs, stood at the top of the grand central staircase and roared at the foyer of assembled guests below: ‘LISTEN UP, PEOPLE: IT’S MY FUCKING WEDDING.’ Tyler, boshed on the same speed, stood on a chaise longue and applauded. The phrase had since been applied to any situation where you were going to do something your way because it was your thing.

‘The whole idea of marriage is preposterous, though, in the modern age,’ Tyler went on.

‘Everything’s preposterous when you look at it too long,’ I said. ‘Especially the word “preposterous”.’

She swigged more wine and banged her glass down on the table. The glass base hit the wood with a jarring crack. ‘But there’s no ceremony for friendship , is there? Does friendship mean nothing in this world? Nothing to you ?’

I lit up a cigarette and took the first drag back hard into my throat, so hard it made my eyes water. I looked at her. ‘Take a day off from this. An hour, even.’

‘Why? Because you know it’s true?’ I looked at her. She looked back. ‘If you go ahead with this wedding then you realise that what you’re actually saying is that your friendship with me is not meaningful and durable. That,’ she sipped her wine victoriously, ‘is the logical conclusion.’

‘Believe me, if I could marry you too, Tyler, I would.’

Would I? Probably not.

‘Did you know there are now as many unmarried parents as married parents in the UK? Things are changing. You don’t have to fuse the nuclear family any more.’

‘I don’t want to fuse the nuclear family.’