Emma Unsworth - Animals

‘So why marry Jim at all? Why this insistence on upheaval?’

I looked at her and kept looking at her as I brought my glass to my lips. I had to make light of it, had to. ‘I dunno, variety ?’

‘You’re ruining my life for variety’s sake?’

‘I’m not ruining your life! There’s more to your life than me! And I’m marrying Jim because I love him, I do, and this feels like… ’ I couldn’t say ‘adventure’. ‘… progress.’

She smacked her forehead with her hand. ‘Progress? What about our hard-earned system? Have you forgotten about that? Isn’t marriage just another example of everything we’ve always fought against, as in the shit people do because they think they should rather than because they actually want to?’

I held her chin and turned her face to mine. ‘Listen to me, Tyler. I want to marry Jim. I have not been coerced or conditioned—’

‘But how would you—?’ She looked like a Cabbage Patch doll, her mouth squished in my hand. I released her.

‘And I want to be part of a team against the world again. When I was a child—’

‘Oh, the formative anecdote… Come on then, Fred fucking Savage, let’s have it.’ She looked into the middle distance, made her eyes all dreamy. ‘ That was the day I realised … ’

I slapped her arm. ‘When we were in his van going out on a Sunday my dad used to say We’re the J-Team! Like the A-Team.’

She nodded. ‘I am aware of The A-Team . It’s one of my people’s cultural gifts to the world.’

‘So I want to be part of a new team against the world.’ I quailed at my own schmaltziness but I knew it was true — the idea, at any rate.

‘Teams are awful. Families are awful. People are awful. Why perpetuate the awfulness?’

‘So why don’t you live alone? Why have me around?’

Neither of us said it but it was there, unspoken. It flashed in her eyes at the same time it went through my head but I was afraid of saying it and I knew she was, too. We used to be a team. She lit a fag.

I reached for the fag packet and lit one up, too. ‘You can get a new housemate.’

‘Who? I don’t know anyone else. I don’t like anyone else.’

She wiped her nose on the back of her hand. Two jackal-faced men came out of the pub and perched on the seats at the end of our table without asking. It irked me but I didn’t say anything. Tyler picked up her phone, read something and put it back down on the table. The men didn’t speak to each other, and I saw them clock Tyler with interest. She registered them, too. An audience.

‘So I was at this party the night before last in an old mill,’ she began. ‘That was where all the trouble started. I was fiercely bored as I so often am in this weary little city.’ Curls had snapped out from the kirby grips above her temples. Her fingernails were filthy where they were missing polish, all coal seams and saffron crescent moons. ‘Around 2 A.M. someone put a metal pole through the amp—’

‘Doormen,’ one of the men piped up.

Tyler didn’t look at him but she nodded sagely, acknowledging the suggestion. ‘There was talk of sabotage.’

‘Rival clubs,’ the man said again. ‘This town’s run by them, you know.’

‘Anyway,’ Tyler said, still without a glance at the men, ‘that was exciting for all of five minutes but the upshot was that there was no music.’

‘Whereabouts in America are you from?’ said the other man.

‘What has this got to do with us?’ I said.

Tyler glanced at the men. ‘The Midwest. Where the twisters are.’

‘You don’t look American.’

I sighed. ‘I really think we should finish our conversation.’

‘I don’t want to. I want to tell you about last night.’

I dragged on my fag and exhaled, frustrated. ‘Go on then.’

‘So we sat around in a circle on the floor of the club, talking about sex.’

‘Your suggestion, I presume?’

She took off her sunglasses and tugged a stray hair out of the hinge. ‘Well, what the fuck else? Charades? You need a bit of stimulation at that point. You need a good fuck or a good fight or a good sing-song.’

‘Want some weed?’ said one of the men. I looked at him holding out his soggy joint and shook my head.

Tyler batted the offer away with her hand. ‘No. Hate pot. Too slow.’

‘What’s the matter, love?’ the man said to Tyler. ‘Is your body too bootylicious for me?’ The other man laughed.

‘Bored,’ said Tyler, ‘my body is too bored.’

I drained my glass, anticipating our imminent departure. I hoped this wasn’t going to turn out like the time a man had overheard us talking about drugs in a queue for a cashpoint and said: I thought junkies were meant to be thin? She’d punched him.

She lit up another cigarette. ‘And some reprobate,’ she said exhaling, ‘posed the question: What’s the worst thing someone can say to you just before sex? ’

The men froze. You could have heard a joint drop in that beer garden.

Tyler went on: ‘So people started putting forward their suggestions, you know. Put this horse’s tail butt-plug in… Call me Uncle Mo … I won of course.’ She tapped her fag in a leisurely way and smiled like a boar, pink wine-tusks disappearing into grin-folds.

‘Go on then,’ I said. ‘Let’s have it.’

She made me wait a few seconds. Dragged on her fag. Sipped her drink. Leaned in, tongue lolling in her bottom lip. ‘Make a face like you don’t understand.’ She reclined, victorious.

The men stood up and went inside.

‘Shall we get another drink?’ I said.

‘Yes, more drink. More everything. There’s a party going on not too far away if you fancy it. New friend of mine. An artist. I’ve got something in my pocket.’ I looked at her. Of course: the whole conversation had been an elaborate preamble. Tyler was good: talking about parties made you want to party. I felt like it by then — I felt as though (oh, the justifications, they come like flying monkeys through the window) getting lost somewhere together might be good for us.

I said: ‘I need at least ten hours’ sleep in the next forty-eight hours.’

‘Baby, that’s so feasible that it’s verging on Logic .’

Nick the Artist opened the door and held his arms wide at the sight of Tyler. His hair was hairsprayed into a tsunami of a side-parting.

‘I’m so glad you came!’ he said, and looked at me like he wasn’t so glad.

‘This is my friend Laura,’ said Tyler.

‘You’ll have to excuse my informal attire,’ I said. ‘I was planning on coming in a wedding dress but I just couldn’t find one that fitted… ’

Tyler laughed — not her usual laugh but one that got her by socially sometimes. ‘Come get a drink,’ Nick said.

We walked through the crowded studio and people didn’t move to let us pass, we had to say excuse me a lot and walk sideways with our hands up like crab-claws around manbags and jutting elbows. The studio was in a semi-derelict building just behind Oxford Road and through the grey-paned windows the grey city towers loomed like tired totems. Everyone at the party seemed to be wearing the same thick, black-rimmed glasses. The party was a private view — a launch for Nick’s new collection. He’d invited Tyler the previous night at the mill. Before or after your sex-face story? I asked. Oh, after , she said. But he’ll be disappointed if he thinks he’s in there. Too prissy for me. He’d be making a face like he didn’t understand because he wouldn’t actually understand.

‘Annihilations’ consisted of cushion-thick canvases hung from the walls at daring intervals. Splodges of dark oil paint on darker backgrounds, clumsy blobs and squares — they looked to me like large versions of micro-bacterial slides that a monkey had attempted to replicate with handfuls of baby shit. We reached a trestle table that didn’t look strong enough to support the two ice buckets teetering on its gummy surface. Tyler fished two beers from a bucket and opened them with her teeth. She had a tiny curved scar on her top lip — I imagined this was from removing a bottle-top inexpertly at some point. She handed me a beer and whispered: ‘Let’s not stay long. It’s all rather austere.’