Emma Unsworth - Animals

I pieced the memories of the previous evening together: I’d left Tyler with Nick in a tiki bar on Stevenson Square around 2 A.M. They were in a hammock sharing a fish-bowl cocktail. She’d tried to stop me from going over to Jim’s. He’s hounding you with these text messages! I’d ignored her like I’d been ignoring him.

I got up and walked along the hall. The kitchen was a shock of brightness. Jim was at the sink, topping up a glass of iced orange squash with water. He liked orange squash and I liked watching him drink it. When he drank he held his free hand (usually his right) close to his chest and clenched and unclenched his fist. A relic from toddlerdom. I’d vowed never to tell him about it. Through the window the day looked clear and not overcast, the city turning in the distance to green, to height, and the grey-pelted humps of the Pennines. I went and looped my arms around him from behind and squeezed his back against my chest. We stood like that for a while and did a slow little silent dance. I pressed my head on one side between his shoulder blades. He was wearing a vest so thin I could smell the night on him; the slow-leached losses of his dreams, the unrealistic fabric conditioner. I looked to my side and noticed that the LED display of the tumble dryer was flashing with a little orange message: Clean Door Filter . It had been flashing all night, unnoticed, and I felt sorry for it. I pulled away from Jim and switched the dryer off. He pulled me back towards him. I kissed him, holding the back of his head, my fingers splayed, thumbs spasmed. I liked the look of them when I looked.

We got dressed and walked to the shop. He took my hand and tutted at the dirt beneath my fingernails.

I looked at him — his hair, his skin — and I felt thick and bloody by comparison, pink and bulgy in my tight t-shirt, like vacuum-packed meat. A chill in my chest.

‘Do you remember what you said to me when you got in?’ he said.

I couldn’t remember getting in as such. ‘No.’

‘You said you weren’t sure you wanted to move into the flat. You said we should look for somewhere new because you weren’t sure my place could ever feel like home.’

‘Oh.’

‘Is that true? Because if it’s true then we need to have a proper talk about it.’

A proper talk . It sounded like a work meeting. This was what the wedding was doing to us. Making us professionally involved.

‘I think I was probably just talking shit.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Well, you should watch that. Probably.’

I thought I might vomit. Was there a bush I could run behind? There was not.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to give you a hard time, especially not today, but I need to know this won’t keep happening. I don’t want this to be my life: not knowing what time you’re coming in, what state you’re going to be in. I couldn’t get back to sleep last night after you said that.’

I stopped walking.

‘What’s the matter?’

I didn’t speak. He shook my shoulder.

‘Why are you just staring at the ground?’

I looked at him. I was aware of my movements.

‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘don’t make me feel like the bad person.’

I gave him a firm nod. The week’s miseries were in the post: Teary Tuesday, Weepy Wednesday. For now: Silent Sunday. ‘I’m tired, that’s all. Let’s walk.’

He took my hand. ‘Apology accepted.’

As we approached the shop I felt a flutter of nerves. The woman in there had caught me off-guard not so long ago. She’d put the contents of my basket through the till — sausages, thick sliced bread, tinned macaroni cheese, Tia Maria — and said: Got kids, have you? I didn’t want to get into it. I was abominably hungover for a start, so in the moment I said: No, but I’m expecting . EXPECTING! Where did this shit come from? It wasn’t as though this was a shop in St. Ives, or Knutsford even. This was Jim’s local shop, where I went almost every week, at least once. For booze and fags. I’d fucked it. Totally fucked it. I didn’t know how I was going to sustain this fabrication — whether I should shove cushions up my top, gradually increasing in size for the next nine months, and then borrow a baby off someone when I went in after that. Whose baby, though? Shirley was the only baby I knew and she was in London. I lingered on the threshold.

‘Do you mind if I wait outside?’ I said. ‘I fancy a fag.’

He looked at me. ‘Course,’ he said, and went in the shop. By the time he came out I was myself again.

Back at the flat we made eggs and sat down in the living room.

‘Have you thought about drinking less?’ he said.

Oh not today not today I thought you said not today.

I put my cutlery down, unhungry. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘in the morning usually. Then by the evening I change my mind.’

He looked at me. Oh. Give me a glance between two lovers on any day and I will show you a hundred heartbreaks and reconciliations, a thousand tallies and trump cards. And still there is something that survives beyond the sham of domesticity, beyond the micro-promises and micro-power-shifts, and that is the motherfucking miracle.

‘I find myself wondering more and more how we’re going to stay on a level in the precious time we get together.’

I was unable to speak. In this, paralysis. The past reviled; the future threatened.

‘I’m just trying to be realistic in terms of both our needs,’ he went on. ‘I didn’t mean to put you off your breakfast.’

I held on to the sofa. ‘You didn’t. I’ve had enough.’ He looked worried then and I liked it so I let him worry a few more seconds before I said, ‘Of the eggs.’

He put his plate down. ‘I forgot to say, my folks want to invite a few extra people to the wedding.’

‘How many?’

‘A few friends. Ten max.’

‘Imagine having ten friends.’

He laughed and the room relaxed.

‘Can I invite an extra, then?’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘Kirsten.’

‘Kirsten?’

‘She’s a no-nonsense person, isn’t she?’

Kirsten was a cellist with the Hallé. We’d had a long night together after a concert the previous year. She was a pert, bitchy-shy blonde who looked like Kirsten Dunst or maybe I just made that association because of her name. The three of us were the last men standing at the afterparty and ended up smoking on a bench down by the Irwell until it got light. Kirsten had grown up in Stockport with her mum, who was just eighteen when she had her. They’d lived in a refuge for a month when they first got away from her dad. Kirsten could remember it vividly. Her dad had tried to break into the refuge one night and one of the other mothers, a woman who smelled of weed (Kirsten knew it was weed, she was seven), had hidden her in a kitchen cupboard while her mum shouted at her dad and her dad tried to drag her mum out. Kirsten said at the time she’d wanted him to drag her off so that she could be done with both of them. She said she used to fantasise about being an orphan, like Annie. A fresh start. That’s what she said. I must have been the only seven-year-old in Stockport who wanted a fresh start. We’d texted each other a few times and then the connection had waned. I thought about her sometimes. I’d dreamed about her a couple of times — we were always running away from something together. Sometimes I thought about calling her, in the small hours. I still had her number.

‘I dunno,’ Jim said, ‘I’ve invited enough people from the orchestra. It’s going to get complicated if I start asking those not so close.’

A surge of peevishness. ‘So your parents are inviting people I’ve never met but we can’t invite people I have met and liked?’