Emma Unsworth - Animals

The aftershow was up in the venue’s polished wooden-floored café. I fetched two orange juices from the drinks table and waited by the dressing room door. The juice was from concentrate, oily, and tasted vaguely of the afterburn of vomit.

Jim came out, freshly changed, a bottle of water in hand, and was accosted by the venue manager and wife — champagne-giddy and both of them tactile now — before he could get to me. I smiled and looked into my drink. Half of it was gone. I didn’t want another. I’d have to make this one last. I sipped it in greasy little mouthfuls until he came over.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘Very good.’ I held his chin, kissed him.

We stood together, holding hands, as a stream of people came over one by one to congratulate him. I thought, Isn’t this lovely, just being together, celebrating Jim’s talent in a beautiful city? I am a lucky wretch. After half an hour or so the well-wishers slowed, the odd one bursting forward for a handshake on their way out. I thought absurdly of microwave popcorn.

And then we were alone. We walked a little way down the corridor, towards the door.

‘How was the orange juice?’ Jim said.

‘Delicious.’

‘You’re a shitty actor, you know. You’ll never play the Dane.’

‘Fuck the Dane. I was Aladdin.’

‘Aladdin?’

‘Upper-fourth Christmas panto, December ’91. A ginger, female Aladdin. And they say the North is backwards.’

He stopped. I stopped. ‘You look tired,’ he said.

‘Must be the travel.’

‘How was Tyler’s birthday?’

‘Fine! Cool.’

‘You look as though you haven’t been to bed.’

‘Stop scrutinising me,’ I said and turned away. Oh don’t cry don’t cry you fucking baby, fucking idiot.

‘That’s how much this trip meant to you, is it?’

I took a breath, unsure how to proceed.

‘Oh, have a drink for fuck’s sake, Laura,’ he said. ‘You might as well. You’re not going to be much company like this.’

I opened my mouth to say I thought I was doing pretty well until you turned the Manson lamps on me , but then I stopped, because Kirsten walked round the corner.

‘Oh hello!’ she said. She was carrying her cello and she didn’t put it down when she reached us. Agonies of awkwardness! I hadn’t seen Kirsten for months and now to bump into her here, like this! It was so obvious there was an atmosphere, too. She didn’t know where to look.

‘Kirsten!’ I said, trying to sound normal. ‘How are you? I didn’t know you were in Stockholm! This is a nice surprise!’

I sounded like someone who was learning the English language.

‘Oh, I’m playing here tomorrow with Joanna Newsom. I just bumped into Jim in the foyer earlier… ’

I liked the way she said ‘foyer’. It was a good, Northern way of saying ‘foyer’. I wanted her to say it again so I could close my eyes and savour it.

‘You weren’t at the concert, then?’

‘No, we’re rehearsing downstairs in a minute.’ She widened her eyes as though remembering something. Kirsten glanced at me, met my eye, and away. ‘I’d better go… ’ Killer. What a thing to step into.

‘It’s a shame you can’t make the wedding,’ I said.

‘Yeah.’ She edged past with her cello and ran to the end of the corridor.

Jim looked at me and frowned. Disapproval. Something else in his look, too: annoyance. The wedding. Every time we saw each other all we talked about was the wedding. ‘Let’s go outside,’ I said, desperate for air.

We walked along the water to the hotel. A group of teenagers were swimming off one of the piers, screaming and jumping in.

‘Idiots,’ said Jim and I realised what I really wanted to do was accuse him of having lost his sense of adventure, which wasn’t really fair. Hadn’t I fallen for his fixedness, his pin-like regard, as I’d sprayed around that scruffy bar like a Catherine wheel come off a fence? Was that what happened: the things you fell in love with became the very things that repelled you, in the end? (In the end ? Where had that—?) There had been a time when the idea of me wilding it might have turned Jim on. No more.

We sat down in the bar at the hotel. I blinked, the tiredness taking over me. ‘I might have a whisky,’ I said. And then, before I really thought: ‘Have one with me.’

He smiled and shook his head. ‘I was wondering if you’d manage it.’

Bet you can’t get back inside that bottle, genie.

This was the perfect time to turn into Tyler — and furthermore, dearest, up with this passive-aggressive bullshit I will not put … But instead I said: ‘I bet I fucking can.’

He dipped his fingers into his shirt breast pocket (he kept notes there, like a bus driver — a detail I’d immediately put in the sacristy of my heart when I’d first spotted it). ‘I’ll get you whatever you want,’ he said, standing up. As he pulled a ten-euro note out of his pocket his passport came with it.

‘You keep your passport in there, too, now?’

‘Might as well.’

I cried then and he sat down and put his arm around me.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s up with me.’

‘You’ve just used up all your serotonin.’

‘I’m sorry I didn’t save you any serotonin.’

‘You know,’ he said, hugging me closer. ‘If we’re going to have a baby you should start respecting your body. I dread to think what you’re like inside.’

I stopped crying. I felt — well, fucking furious actually. Before I knew it I unleashed a torrent. That’s the thing with honesty I guess, once you break the seal… I hadn’t known how much I’d been holding back but as I spoke I felt like I’d pulled my finger out of the dam and fuckit fuckit drown them all and watch them die. ‘Your conversation has never been up to all that much,’ I said, ‘but this is really scraping the barrel. Constant nagging and talking about babies like some moany little bitch with no ideas. And you’re shit in bed since you stopped drinking.’

Of course, we went straight to our room then and fucked, hard and porny, lots of looking. Sometimes tenderness was the way, other times you had to take it all out on each other. I felt a deep, sunless fury in him, swirling round the things he hadn’t said: the times he’d been at a bar or in company and craved a quick fix (had he always resisted?), all the times he’d sat alone in his hotel room sober and bored and unable to sleep (somehow this was my fault, why was it my fault?), the encroaching wedding with its myriad inanities. What did I have to hit him with? Guilt from the weekend; the fact that all I wanted to do was write and yet I never did when I sat down to do it; the pressure to do the next thing even though we weren’t even done with this one; my own cowardice at bringing none of this up. I got on him and went harder and then, because me coming first didn’t feel like enough, and I was determined not to give him anything that could be construed as a compliment, I pushed him out, got on my knees and held him down my throat. When I heard him about to come I pulled back. I hawked and spat on his cock. Hawked and spat again. Turned around. ‘There.’ I clenched, intensifying the grating physicality. Like chewing a lollystick, it was nicely un-nice. It was another experience, surely one of the few remaining now, that said You Are Here — ho yeah, definitely mostly there right now. He shuddered as he came but made no sound. The porthole window in the opposite wall was misted.

(Tyler in my head again — would she always pop up like this, for ever, wherever? Isn’t that just the term you use when you do it with precisely the right lighting and music? )

As we lay in bed I listened to him falling asleep, his breathing slowing and deepening, until his snores rose regularly to questioning snotters. I felt the soreness of myself and took a righteous pleasure in it. I thought about killing Jim, how I could do it with a pillow.