Emma Unsworth - Animals

He rubbed his forehead. ‘This is exactly what I didn’t want. Stress. Maybe today isn’t the best time to discuss it.’ A significant look. ‘But we get so little time together at the moment… ’

I looked down at my feet. They would always be my feet. That was a shame. I looked at Jim.

Looked at him.

In the bedroom he said: ‘Let’s not use a condom.’ Something about this appealed, in the absence of alcohol, in the rip and flick of quickly undressing: to just have a good old-fashioned unabandoned fuck . I felt better as he belted my wrists to the bed frame, felt his frustration, allowed him it, and loved myself for that allowance. I punished him, too, in that fuck. I gave him nothing to suggest I was enjoying it or not enjoying it. I made a china doll of myself. A cold pose. An abandoned shell; uninhabited. The night is a zoo and the next day is its museum.

A text arrived from Tyler as I was lying in bed, untied, the shower spitting in the bathroom.

TURNS OUT NICK DOES UNDERSTAND IF HIS FACE IS ANYTHING TO GO BY

I wondered whether we’d been fucking simultaneously in beds across town, our lives in split-screen. I recalled a conversation we’d had at the beginning of our friendship.

‘Define love,’ Tyler said, her hand dropping onto her forearm as we sat relighting saggy rollies. She’d spent the previous ten minutes doing CPR on a pack of ancient Golden Virginia. It was 6 A.M.

And I said: ‘True freedom.’

She thought about it.

‘So you’re talking unconditional,’ she said after a while. ‘Not romantic. Agape as opposed to Eros.’

‘Okay, then: maximum contact with maximum freedom.’

‘That’s not love,’ she said, exhaling with a gurn, like Popeye. ‘That’s a tampon ad.’

At lunchtime on the 4th of May I stood waiting for Tyler outside the Georgian library. It was raining half-heartedly, still enough to make the smoking of a cigarette unpleasant. I had to keep relighting my fag after tapping it too hard and losing the hot end to the glossy pavements. Overhead, a plasticky lid of cloud sealed the city in a thwarted dream. The windows of passing trams were beaded with condensation. Outside the Sainsbury’s over the road, gloomy groupings of students queued by the cashpoint, eating packet sandwiches. I waited twenty-five minutes and at five to one I called her.

‘Tyler, I’m at the library — it’s that Yeats talk, remember? I reminded you yesterday.’

‘Oh shit. Look, Lo, I got blackout-drunk last night. I feel like if I move I’ll vomit electricity. Can we take a raincheck?’

I looked at my shoes. They were wet through. I’d come straight from a nightshift and hadn’t anticipated the weather.

‘Course.’

I threw my dimp towards a grid and made my way inside the library, up three sets of winding stairs, to the main room where the ceiling rose in a stained glass dome. It wasn’t a large space, a square twenty metres, but it was airy and light and had the vast tranquility of libraries that’s a lot like being outdoors; you feel like there’s more air in those places. I inhaled at the sight of the dome above and exhaled dry-mouth tobacco taste. Books held together with yellowing strips of masking tape lined the walls, spliced with dark-wood shelving. A few people milled around the large room, their hair wet, their faces amiable. In the middle of the room were five or six rows of chairs and, beyond, a lectern backed by a series of concertina’d screens pinned with what from a distance looked like charcoal drawings. There was a table of red and white wine at the back of the room — free, and at lunchtime! I thought, I should really make an effort to come to more literary events . I took a white wine and sipped it — it was tepid and acidic, curving my stomach with windy cramp but relaxing my limbs, my mind. I tucked myself away by a back window and peered over the wide wooden ledge to the sill and beyond. The tops of umbrellas, parked cars, empty taxis, beneath the steaming rain. The library itself — its poise, its stark lighting — reminded me of a girl I used to be friendly with before I got close to Tyler. Maud the Painter. Her face was drawn to a point — I always thought of Yeats’ beauty like a tightened bow when I saw her. Not natural in an age like this. And she wasn’t of the age, not at all. She went through friends like she went through cities, never settling, leaving in a blaze of fire and offence. A person of dubious evolution was how Tyler (jealously) kissed her off. I wondered where Maud kept herself these days, these nights, in the small hours; whether she had found love. Had babies. Joined Facebook.

I pulled my t-shirt out of my armpits. What had I done to deserve such a generous quota of sweat glands? I went up for more wine, looked around. There were barely twenty people in the room and the talk was due to start any minute. The wine-to-people ratio was looking good. A woman walked up to the lectern. A fountain pen dangled on a cord round her neck and I smiled to see it — this place was comprehensively antiquated. ‘Welcome, ladies and gents!’ By her side was a man — the professor, surely. He had a hobo sort of look about him: mid-forties, Americana beard, denim shirt, black knitted hat worn slightly too far back from his face, wire glasses, thick little lips. I thought, You look like Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws. He nodded and the thin arm of his spectacles glinted like gossamer.

‘Thanks for coming,’ he said. An accent without geography, each vowel free, each consonant its own continent. ‘Please, take a seat.’

I took a detour via the drinks table and then sat at the end of a row three from the back, in case it lasted too long.

As it turned out, it wasn’t long enough.

The professor talked about what had brought him to Yeats, first for his thesis and then to complement his teaching. I tried to love other people, really I did, but something kept bringing me back — especially these later poems, which are at once so deeply personal and so evasive, so desperate and defiant … Yes, I thought. Yes and yes and yes. This is a fine ambush. I kept looking down and finding I had wine to drink. An hour passed and I didn’t notice.

Suddenly: sparse applause, and the woman was there at the front again, saying thanks to everyone. I glanced at the wine table as I clapped — plenty left, great, great. When would be acceptable to get up and get another glass? I was having such a good time.

And then another thought budded and began to uncurl. I should go up and thank him . I should do this because he has reminded me of so many things. Also it makes me look less like a freeloader.

I downed a glass of wine standing next to the table and then I took another glass down to the front where the professor was standing, coat on now, bag on shoulder, talking to the woman from the library. I stood there a few seconds feeling conspicuous. When my presence became suitably oppressive, when the atmosphere in the room felt like it was just about to crack and I was just about to leg it, they turned to look at me.

‘Hallo!’ said the woman.

‘Hi,’ I said, and then, to the professor: ‘I just wanted to thank you. That was very inspiring.’

He smiled and I wondered whether he thought I was drunk. Was I drunk? I was not. Maybe I was. Either I was or I wasn’t.

‘My pleasure,’ he said. ‘Glad to be of service.’

‘Are you a member?’ said the woman.

No penis jokes.

‘No.’

‘Are you interested in becoming one? I can give you some literature to take away… ’

‘Okay.’

And off she went.

The professor stuck out his hand. ‘Marty.’