Emma Unsworth: Animals

‘Hi.’

It struck me as it always did: the contradiction. The beauty of phones! But also the inadequacy. Jim’s voice was a tonic: a Midlands accent softened by natural sibilance and university down south. Henry Higgins might have clocked him but everyone else found him hard to place. Me, I was instantly Mancunian: too clipped for Lancashire; too glottal for Cheshire.

‘How was your night?’ he said.

I clutched at the phone, hunched in the hallway, feeling suddenly goblin-like. The long-distance line buzzed. I thought of Jim’s sharp agile lips, the colours of the political world map, slowly looping satellites. In the lounge, the TV came on.

‘Fun,’ I said.

‘Great!’ Jim said. ‘How fun?’

‘Home-and-sleep-but-a-bit-hungover fun. How was the recital?’

‘Not fun, but nice people.’

Jim had been teetotal for two months — a decision made when his workload increased to such an extent that he rarely got a day off with travelling and rehearsals. As a concert pianist he couldn’t take any chances. Classical music fans were ferociously attentive.

‘How’s Tyler?’ he asked. He always asked. I had to give him credit for that.

She snorted a tequila slammer through a straw. She stole a Magic Tree air freshener from a taxi. She —

‘She broke a shoe. Otherwise she’s intact.’

We’d been running across a road when the plastic heel of her ankle boot — which had been threatening to go since December — had snapped clean off. She’d sworn a long, lusty Fuuuuck and then started singing, cornily: You picked a fine time to leave me, loose heel …

A fraction-second of silence. A conversation drawing to a close. I tried to picture New York in my mind, seeing Earth from low orbit, then falling through the sky, zooming down and down through map scales, to the hotel room where Jim was sitting, holding the phone. The image disintegrated as it smashed into memory: Jim, the way he’d looked leaving for the airport with his Bart-Simpson-church-hair, side-parted and slick from the shower, in his white shirt and diamond-pattern tank top. The memory put more miles between us rather than fewer.

‘Get back to your girlfriend,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you Friday.’

‘See you Friday.’

Exhalation.

Love: funny how you knew you’d found it, when you found it. I didn’t like believing in fate, it struck me as a concept for happy people to cling to. Majestically unfair when you thought about it. Someone gets a shit lot — that’s their fate , is it? Oh, bad luck — sorry about that Alzheimer’s, that dead kid, that bombed-out family home. Sor-ry. It’s just… well, it’s destiny, you know? At the same time I knew I felt lucky, having found someone to make some promises to; to be in turns fascinated and reassured by. Jim was solid and separate: hooded eyes, pointed chin, black widow’s peak — not dissimilar to young Spock and just as logical, just as smart and self-contained. Knew exactly who he was. And there’s nothing more attractive than someone who knows who they are, especially when you’re — well, a fucking shambles. Lately, our love, too, had been assuming more of a definite shape — a marriage shape. I’d never really known whether marriage was for me; I’d just said it as a word, an abstract— When I’m married— without thinking about what it meant. But the abstract was manifesting. It was white and huge and heavy and expensive, like a Fifties American fridge appearing at the foot of the bed, and I didn’t know what the fuck I was going to do with it.

‘How’s loverboy?’ Tyler said as I walked back in the lounge.

I looked at her and I could see she was reading me, seeing how the conversation with Jim had gone, getting everything she needed to know — the words were just her playing for time. Since meeting Tyler I’d believed that a psychic connection between human beings was possible. ‘Kinship’ is the best word in English for it. The French call it une affinité profonde , which I also like it but it still doesn’t quite get there. It’s that doppelgänger effect that can go either way: to mutual understanding or mutual destruction. Someone sees right to your backbone and simultaneously feels their backbone acknowledged.

‘Fine, thanks.’

‘Does he think we’re savages?’ (This with her mouth full, spraying pasta bits down her front.)

‘Of course he does. We are savages. How’s the pasta?’

‘Functional.’

Tyler was a dreadful cook, not that she gave a shit. She liked food but she wasn’t fetishistic about it — quantity not quality gave her her kicks. ‘Yeah, it’s definitely done the job,’ she said, getting up and patting her stomach. ‘I could dump a corpse right now.’

We’d met nine years ago. I was ordering a coffee in a shop halfway along Deansgate. The shop’s leather sofas and hat-sized sponge cakes had looked inviting as I passed on my way to the library after work, which at the time involved standing on Market Street with a clipboard selling £9.99 baby photos to people with babies. (Of all the jobs I’d had it had been the simplest — new parents were the most vulnerable demographic, the most desperate to preserve and present their legacy; the easiest to sell shit to. And yet you’re still going to die — that’s the punchline! I thought as they proffered their tenners, bloodshot, sleep-starved, unsexed, their offspring indifferent.) The coffee shop was part of an Italian chain and hadn’t been open long. She was at the coffee machine grappling with a metal jug — the milk wouldn’t froth properly by the looks of it — and she was shaking the jug and frowning and pouting. Her pinny was skewiff, her baseball cap was backwards like Paperboy’s, her name badge said DENISE. She looked up and I saw a look pass through her eye that I’d caught in my own, in bathroom mirrors — it was a look that said she was outside somewhere, and running. She made the coffee with the milk as it was and came to take my order. I ordered a frappé and as I ordered it I said, I never believed the day would come when I’d order a frappé and she nodded at the books I was pressing to my chest and said, That’s a Moleskine, isn’t it, like Hemingway used? and I said: Touché .

I picked up my bowl of pasta and stabbed it with my fork, failing to spear a single piece. Zuzu glanced at me. The cat only trusted Tyler, an exclusivity Tyler had ensured by getting her when I was away on a random week’s holiday with Jim. When I came back the cat was already indoctrinated to Tyler’s ways, brainwashed in some kind of one-cat cult. ‘I’ve trained her to recognise only my face,’ Tyler said. ‘The rest of humanity are inferior mutants in her eyes.’ Zuzu tolerated the odd pat or stroke but always with hackles-ready suspicion. She never came on my lap, never took food from my fingers. Tyler was unhealthily proud of her hairy little devotee.

The pasta was rotten — overcooked and laced with the poison-tang of too much basil. I ate it anyway. The small flatscreen TV in the corner was tuned in to a tacky Saturday night dating show I liked. Tyler was objecting. The elitist in her often stropped centre-stage, raised as she had been amongst poetry and horses. Conversely, light entertainment was mother’s milk to me. It relaxed me, rendered me junk-drunk at the teat of British terrestrial telly. That was how my four-strong, two-up two-down family had rolled: takeaways in front of game shows and horror films. (I’m not trying to out-working-class you, by the way; I went to grammar school and university, but my first touchstones were forged in the garish gore of Granada TV.)

The dating show was a bit like Blind Date except instead of a screen and the old ‘love is blind’ philosophy there were thirty girls behind a bank of white-lit pillars and one man standing in front of them for their perusal. The poor bastard descended onstage in a lift, the ‘Love Lift’, and thrashed about like a landed fish under the studio lights to whatever godawful tune he’d chosen to come onto (in this case, bludgeoning irony to within an inch of its life with Sister Sledge’s ‘The Greatest Dancer’). He proceeded to further fuck up his chances by doing a ‘party piece’ (juggling bananas) and allowing his friends and family to defame him via an impishly edited video of them all discussing his personality down the pub ( Steve’s VERY close to all his exes and his mum, such a nice guy …).