Emma Unsworth - Animals

I clawed up a handful of peanuts from a bowl on the table and sprinkled them into my mouth.

‘What are you doing?’ said Tyler. ‘Do you not know that there will be hipster urine particles in there?’

I shovelled in another handful. She pressed a wrap into my other palm.

‘What’s that?’ I said, spraying nuts. The affectation of innocence was such a comfort sometimes. Still. The wrap was like a gauntlet, a glove thrown down, a dare.

When I was secure in a cubicle I uncurled my palm. What was this? As I carefully picked open the wrap I saw it was a flyer, the words gradually revealed. I jiggled the crystals around to decipher it in full.

THEMES OF THE EMBITTERED HEART: A Talk on W.B. Yeats by Professor Marty Grane, Goldsmiths University, London. Join us for a lunchtime lecture about the later works of the great Irish poet. The Georgian Library, Mosley Street. 4th May. 1 P.M. Free.

I stared at the words. Had Tyler done this on purpose, as a joke? This was going to be difficult. I could hardly bear to, it was so desecrating. I say hardly .

As I handed it back to her I said: ‘Was that flyer especially for me?’

‘What flyer?’

‘The one you’re using as a wrap.’

She looked confused. ‘I picked it up off a stack on the counter at work. I didn’t even look at it.’

‘Oh. It’s for a talk on Yeats in Manchester next month.’

‘Your favourite!’

‘Fancy it?’

‘Sure.’

Approximately twenty-three minutes later I was in the corner of the studio dancing by a tinny stereo to a song I didn’t know and didn’t care that I didn’t know, it had a beat and that was enough for me. I could work with it. I could work with anything. Tyler was eyeing up two boys and I have to say boys, they were doing their utmost to look like boys, in tight jeans by the window. She went over to them and I heard her shout: ‘What is it with young men and this knock-kneed flamingo stance? You clearly haven’t got enough Vitamin Me in your diets. Straighten your legs. Straighten your legs right now.’

There was a woman next to me, running on the spot, smiling. I ran with her, keeping my arms and legs in time with hers and in time with the music.

I saw that Nick the Artist was by my side. He started dancing with me. ‘That’s Caroline,’ he whispered in my ear, nodding towards the running woman. ‘Old Hacienda head. It’s like she went out in 1992 and never went home.’

I looked at her. Maybe she did go home, I thought. Maybe she found something that made her happier than a semi in West Didsbury, or a semi in someone’s fat mam.

‘Ever tried your hand at art, Lisa?’ Nick said.

Tyler came to join us. She heard me saying no to Nick and asked what I was saying no to.

‘I’ve never chanced my arm at art.’

‘Yes, you have, tell him about your dirty protest.’

‘Okayyy… ’

‘We need another drink for this,’ Tyler said, dragging us over to the trestle table, where a few lonesome beers bobbed around in the dirty ice. I looked around the room. Ten or fifteen people remained. How long had we been there? An hour? Longer.

‘I was about seven years old, and I needed the toilet, you know, and the teacher wouldn’t let me go until break-time,’ I said. ‘So by that point—’

‘She’d crapped her pants!’

‘I crapped… my pants, yes. So I hobbled to the loo at break-time and when I got there… Well, it hadn’t exactly remained in one piece.’

‘It was like a cow pattie!’ said Tyler.

‘It was like a cowpat, yes. Anyway, I thumbed what I could into the toilet bowl and flushed — but then, well, what to do with the rest?’

Nick was looking around the room but I wasn’t deterred.

‘So I took my knickers off, stood on the toilet seat and wiped the inside all over the cubicle walls. I really got into it by the end, doing wild strokes, emphatic arcs.’

Tyler slapped her thigh with her spare hand. ‘Tell him what the headmaster said!’

‘And so the next day in assembly the headmaster said: Well, the caretaker had a nasty surprise last night … and he told everyone about the thing in the toilet and a few of the teachers started casting aspersions and he had to say No, no, Mrs. Jennings, this was the GIRLS’ .’

Tyler doubled up like a penknife. Nick was regarding me with a look of appalled concentration.

‘I was an anxious child. Pulled my eyelashes out. Threw up a lot.’ My phone vibrated in my pocket. ‘Oh, that’s my fiancé.’ I read the text. Jim had just got home.

‘You’re engaged ?’ Nick said.

‘Do not call him,’ Tyler said, straightening herself. ‘Just text him back. Remember The Rules.’

When I was twelve my parents took me to a psychiatrist who they said was a doctor but I knew better. Prof. E.G.L. Daubney’s name was affixed in solid silver letters on his door.

‘Eggle,’ my mum said as we waited on the chairs opposite. ‘That’s a funny name, Eggle.’

We were half an hour early. I’d vomited on myself in bed the night before and could still smell it on my hair. I stroked the tip of a cheeseplant leaf between my thumb and index finger. On the wall clock the minute hand slowly fell to half past.

My parents waited outside when I went in. The psychiatrist didn’t have a couch, which was disappointing. I sat on one of two chairs at the back of the room. He waited until I sat down and then made a big show of asking me to sit on the chair next to his desk so there were no barriers between us, so that we were just two people sitting having a chat together and that was nice, wasn’t it. I wondered whether he was a paedophile.

He sat down, clapped his knees and said: ‘Well, it must have been a relief to find out it’s not anything physical, eh?’

They’d had me in for tests the previous month at the other hospital, thinking it might have been triggered by some latent tropical disease. Not one of the doctors seemed deterred by the fact I’d never been anywhere tropical.

‘Yes,’ I said. I didn’t want him thinking he was a bad psychiatrist.

‘How would you describe yourself as feeling, generally? Happy? Sad?’

I thought. Quickly. ‘Pressured.’

‘That’s an interesting word.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, because I knew how to accept a compliment.

He looked at me until he realised I wasn’t going to say anything else and then he said: ‘Where do you think this pressure comes from, Laura?’

I wondered whether he could smell the sick on me. I’d vomited in bed because I’d had a dream where I was balancing on a football of rock in outer space holding a spoon. The spoon could shoot out hard bolts of lightning that created a temporary bridge for me to walk across to the next football of rock. I knew this was going to go on for ever.

‘I think it comes from me,’ I said, because I wanted to give the right answer. Professor Eggle nodded.

I woke to find a warm, recently vacated dent in the bed next to me. Jim’s bedding. Jim’s room. Morning.

Fuck.

I’d gone to Jim’s.

This was bad of me. It was one of our new rules: not turning up at Jim’s late at night. Yeah. Try telling that to yourself when you’re goulashed. Times like that, everything seems like a fine idea. Contacting that person you fell out with? Why not? A capella karaoke in a taxi queue? Oh boy! Leapfrogging over a postbox? You betcha…

Shafts of sunlight cut through the blinds, scoring celestial rents on the floor. By the look of it, it was about nine. Outside, I could hear the post-dawn weekend soundtrack: tidal traffic, descending planes and the postman’s squeaky cart making its way along the street. A flock of geese flew overhead, honking. It was a sound that always cheered me. The town hall clock started to bong. That was a cheering sound, too. I lay still and counted ten beats. I could hear Jim down the hall in the kitchen — in the distant inside, sharp and dull sounds: of metal on pot, of pot on metal, of glass on glass. I listened to the creaks of the waking flat, its pipes warming the walls, like blood bringing something back to life, and I felt an ancient nostalgic feeling in my guts. The hollow expanding into a sort of hunger, not pleasant or unpleasant; a rich, savoury hopelessness. The old yearning for yearning. I put my hands down my knickers like I often did to comfort myself, making a triangle with my thumbs and index fingers. I turned my head to one side and smelled my breath coming back off the pillow: the acrid scent of just-used emery board; of something grown dead and burned. I was thirsty. I pulled my hands out of my knickers and sat up. There was a pint of water on the table beside the bed. I reached for it and looked inside, swooshing the water round. One of the only times Jim had stayed at mine I’d woken in the night and grabbed a glass of what I thought was water from the top of the laundry box only to hear Jim shout NOOOOOOOOOO! It was too late. I’d drunk his contact lenses.