Emma Unsworth: Animals

I looked to my side and saw a glass I’d somehow had the sense to fill and place there before I collapsed. I reached for it, gulped one twice three times. My gunky mouth made the liquid milky. Swallowing was an effort. I drank water like it was a job to do, an unpaid internship at my own inner (highly corrupt) Ministry of Health. Getting the whole pint down was hard work. As soon as the water was in me it wanted to come out. I ran along the thin hall to the bathroom, left tight-leg trailing. Slammed the door.

The tiles were blissfully cool under my feet. Bathrooms were the best kind of room. You knew that whatever happened in there, you were going to be all right. You had a sink, a toilet, no soft furnishings, usually no audience. I pulled down my knickers and sat. A thunderbolt of piss plummeted and the rest trickled through.

The wall next to me was full of holes — a succession of injuries from various toilet-roll holders, towel rails, shelves and, I could only imagine, fists and fingers — that had been botchily plastered and painted over in sickly pale yellow by the tenants before us. On the other side, my knee rested against the flimsy fibreglass bath-side. The slightest pressure could dint the bath-side in and out. Sometimes I did it for fun — just pressed in and out with my knee. (Sometimes I did it for hours.) A cityscape of curdling beauty products sprawled along the bath-side and then, at the foot of the bath, the winking sink with its hot tap head missing. A red metal heart, dusty and hollow and punctured with crescent shapes, hung on a long chain from a nail above the sink, next to an extending shaving mirror that Tyler used to do her eyeliner. Next to the sink, two folded banknotes balanced on a rung of the towel rail, drying. I stood and looked in the bowl before I flushed, recalling the adage of a girl I’d once worked with: White piss good; amber piss bad . Orwellian in its visceral simplicity. Meanwhile the liquid I had dispatched into the toilet bowl was almost ochre. Not good, not good at all. More water was in order.

I walked down the hallway to the kitchen, past the coats, hats and bags dangling from hooks like the vaporised hanged. Tyler owned the flat — her dad had stumped up the cash (not just the deposit, but The Cash) not long after she moved over — and I was meant to give her a hundred a month for my bare little box-room, but I never had it and she never asked. The flat was part of a wood-and-chrome cooperative that had been built in Hulme, south of the centre, in the late 1990s. The block shared a central courtyard with a patch of grass and a few raised beds where people with the time and organisational skills grew their own vegetables. Someone had tried to keep chickens in there once ( Stuck in Fucking Chickentown , said Tyler, quoting John Cooper Clarke), in a little sustainable-wood hutch they’d whittled themselves or something, but they hadn’t lasted long with all the foxes. Zuzu alone had dragged in four hens, limp-necked and lovingly punctured, through the cat-flap, leaving each splayed in the centre of the kitchen floor and she’d looked up at us as if to say: I caught it, bitches — the least you can do is pluck it and cook it. It was mostly hippy types who lived in the surrounding flats; ‘hippysters’ as Tyler called them ( eco-friendly toilet cleaner and fifty designer jumpers …). In the shop space on the ground floor of the block there was a vegan café that Tyler and I ate in when we forgot to buy food (often), taking in our own ham and honey, applied under the table to liven things up — the latter because a) Tyler liked sweet toppings on toast and b) they’d reprimanded her once when she asked them whether they had any, thinking it would be a safe bet. They looked at me like I’d just slaughtered an orang-utan in front of them , she said. And this was HONEY. It’s a natural product. Bees LIKE MAKING IT. No one forces them to. Where will the madness end???

She was in the kitchen merrily slicing up a bumper jar of German Bratwursts. Zuzu wound expectantly around her ankles. Zuzu was muscular; more military hardware than cat. She barrelled up and down the hallway. When she trod on my foot it hurt. Tyler walked over to the sink and drained the pan, tipped the pasta into a bowl. A few greasy bows spilled over the sides and slid steaming across the draining board.

‘We’re gonna need a bigger boat.’

Spinning around looking for a larger bowl, she eventually shrugged and tipped the pasta back into the pan. ‘Fuckit. Those are for you, by the way.’

I looked over to the opposite counter and saw a pint of iced water and two ibuprofens. I necked them and edged around her to refill the glass with water at the sink.

Tyler scraped the slices of sausage into the pan, squirted ketchup over the top and stirred it all together with the handle of a rusty fish slice. ‘So Tom texted.’

I put the glass of water down, goggled her on.

‘Jean’s gone into labour.’

Jean was Tyler’s sister. Lived in London. Did something to do with funding for museums. Or at least used to, before.

‘Shit.’

‘Yeah. She’s dil-ating . Saying it’s all his fault. You know the drill.’

A grimace with this. Tyler and Jean were close — so close that it had been a composite betrayal when Jean got pregnant, considering the fact that at twenty-eight Jean was a whole year younger. Another one lost for a decade! was Tyler’s initial reaction, delivered with a sweep of her kimono sleeve, like a Roman emperor declaring the closing of the games.

‘Is she all right?’ I said. ‘What—’ It was hard to know what to ask about someone who was in labour. How’s her perineum holding out? Has she shat herself yet?

Jeannie Johnson. Who’d once accidentally set her own pubes ablaze standing naked on a candlelit dinner table. She’d out-spectacled us all. Now where was she? Spouting clichés, in stirrups.

‘Yeah,’ Tyler said. ‘Tom’s going to call when there’s news.’

She handed me the bowl and a mug, a fork and a teaspoon, and walked ahead carrying the pan with two hands. She paused at the kitchen door and turned. Nocturnal woodland eyes, black and glistening. ‘Do you want some wine?’

We looked at each other for a few moments, assessing the weights of our various desires and reservations as they rolled and pitched inside. After all: the first rule of intoxication was company. Do it together and you have a party; do it alone and you have a problem. I felt the dryness of my insides, tubes crackling and gasping.

‘I don’t know, are you having wine?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Well, we might as well, if it’s there.’

‘Yes!’ Tyler said, dancing with the pan. ‘Make like mountaineers!’

She jogged through to the lounge, deposited the pan on the plate-glass coffee table and jogged back to the kitchen. She returned a few minutes later with two grubby tumblers of white wine. Drops of water clung to the top of the glasses where she’d rinsed them. She put one on the table and drank heartily from the other.

Somewhere, my phone started to ring. I ran around, uprooting cushions and rifling through papers. There were books all over the flat, poetry mostly. The previous Christmas we’d made a Christmas tree out of them: hardbacks at the bottom, working up through paperbacks, finally to slim modern collections (Spenser’s The Faerie Queen propped up on top). We’d wrapped the whole thing round with fairylights that turned off looked like barbed wire. Now, only the bottom three branches remained. I pulled them apart and threw them across the room.

‘It’s in your jacket in the hall,’ said Tyler, sitting. ‘It’s rung twice already.’

Out in the hall I located my jacket on the coat-stand and patted the pockets until I felt the hard boxy telltale form of Phone. It was Jim, of course it was Jim — only two people ever called me and one of them was in the next room. I picked up. ‘Hello.’