Emma Unsworth: Animals

I was on the floor, practically laughing out toxins. Tyler — fork poised chin height, split pasta dangling — was aghast.

‘Someone get him the fuck out of there,’ she said. ‘Preferably not someone he knows.’

It got worse. The second part of the show began with Steve in an energetic headlock courtesy of the comedian host, and the line of girls manically dancing behind their booths to the theme tune.

‘Christ on a cracker,’ said Tyler. ‘Did they crop-dust them with poppers during the commercials?’

The camera homed in on one girl in a partially see-through dress, her nipples almost visible beyond the corners of a diamond of fine black net. ‘This is Our Lou,’ said the host, ‘and she has a very special talent: she can pick men up!’

‘Presumably in the literal sense,’ Tyler said. ‘Or she wouldn’t be involved in this fiasco.’

Tyler had been single as long as I’d known her. I’d once overheard her saying to a boy at a party: Sharing your life with someone is like Marmite. It’s FUCKING SHIT. She took him home after.

On the TV Lou came out from behind her pillar, grasped the host round the thighs (face practically in fellatio-proximity) and lifted him a good two inches off the ground to deafening applause. ‘I bet you can do it with Steve, too, can’t you?’ said the host. Steve gulped but looked game. Pick him up! Pick him up! chanted the audience. Steve came forward and Lou lifted him, nose-to-crotch. After she’d returned him to his feet she did strongman arms to the roaring crowd.

‘You utter cunts!’ said Tyler. ‘What are they doing? Do they think stupid is sexy?’

‘They probably make a lobotomy mandatory in the early stages of the selection process.’

When the women had been whittled down to the final two it was time for Steve’s decider question. ‘I like to buy myself fresh flowers every week,’ he said. ‘How would you guarantee romance blossomed on our date?’

‘Sunsets and sunrises,’ said Lou, who had unsurprisingly made it down to the final cut. ‘They make romance blossom.’

‘Get me a gun,’ said Tyler. ‘I’m going to shoot the TV, then myself. No wonder people go postal in shopping malls. The populace deserve it.’

‘You’d have to get me there and then you’d find out,’ said the other girl coquettishly.

Tyler mock-vommed. ‘This piece of shit is an assault on my soul . Every second of it that I endure robs me of MILLENNIA. Just so you know.’

‘Oh shush,’ I said. ‘Just go with it.’

‘I can’t believe you enjoy this,’ she said. ‘You, with all your high-falutin’ ideals of “romance”… ’

I stopped laughing. ‘This is not Romance,’ I said, pointing at the TV. ‘This is the other end of the spectrum. It’s the dregs of reality.’

Her hand shot to her eye.

‘What now?’

‘I’ve lost a contact. No, seriously.’ She blinked and rubbed at her eye.

I looked at her. ‘Well, fancy putting your lenses in today when you’ve got no moisture in you.’

‘It was more a case of not taking them out.’

‘Not to mention how old they must be.’

‘Best-before dates are for pussies.’

A few days after I’d met Tyler I was walking across town, heading home to my parents’ house, where I was living at the time. I stopped at the tram tracks at the top of Market Street when a tram tooted to indicate that it was pulling away from the stop. As I stood waiting by the track I looked up to the front of the tram and saw inside the driver’s cabin. And there, in the driving seat, driving the tram , was Tyler. I blinked. It was still Tyler. Driving a tram. The driver was standing behind her, grinning and waving. I waved back. It must be her dad, I thought, he must be a tram driver. But when I questioned her the next day she said: No, I was just on the tram and I thought, I don’t want to die not knowing what it’s like to drive a tram —so I asked the driver and he said I could have a quick go. That’s what I call Society.

I lay in her bed later, Tyler snoring next to me, Zuzu curled between her legs. When Tyler’s phone rang I nudged her and she moaned and reached over to the bedside table.

‘Hello?’ Louder: ‘Jean? JEANNIE?’

She sat up, flicked the light on. I sat up, too. Zuzu opened one thin green eye.

‘Oh fuck! Oh fuck!’

It was a good Oh fuck . She was grinning. I grinned back.

‘What is it?’

Tyler looked at me. ‘A girl! Shirley.’ I held onto her arm. ‘More wine,’ she said to me and then, down the phone: ‘We’re toasting you, Jeannie, we’re toasting you all right now, you beautiful bovine bitch.’

I ran to the kitchen and swooshed a couple of glasses clean. We had a fine collection of branded beer pots and family-sized ashtrays we’d pillaged over the years. (One time Tyler had tried to steal a chair from a bar — and not a small chair either but an armchair . She’d got stuck in the doorway, like a dog with a bone.)

I came back with a Kronenburg half-pint and a Duval goblet, both filled with wine. Tyler was off the phone, sitting with her back against the bars of the bed’s headboard, one hand holding the bed knob, resplendent. The swirls of teenage tattoos on her upper arms were slowly greening, like algae on a shipwreck.

‘Congratulations!’

Tyler sniffed like a football rattle. ‘Jean sounded rinsed,’ she said. ‘And it’s only just begun. Give it a week and it’ll be like when she used to take meth except she won’t be able to hide away because she’ll have this thing to feed.’

‘ Shirley. ’

‘Imagine suddenly losing all your privacy, all your hope of self-development. You put everything on hold. Oh, the feelings, Lo!’

It was something we said often: What to do with all the feelings. They ambushed you sometimes. They rioted. They were legion.

‘Yes yes, just drink.’ I cheers’d her glass.

After she’d fallen asleep I took the glasses through to the kitchen, placing them quietly in the sink. The sky was dark beyond the window, starless and moonless, the city muddled with reflections in the glass. I lit up a cigarette.

Babies. I didn’t know how to feel about them. I had a recurring dream where I was walking through a room with babies sitting on the floor, regularly spaced, and I bent down to each one, took its chin in my hand and looked at its face. They stretched away in every direction, like a prism of mirrors.

I stood staring out the window and sensed a huge thing turning in the supposedly great beyond. The pull of it made me grip the sink.

Five days later I was in my room replying to emails about the wedding. As always when otherwise occupied, I wanted to be writing — a desire that rarely withstood the presence of actual writing time. Bacon , my novel-in-progress, was the story of a priest who fell in love with a talking pig (I could already see the movie trailer: Gene Hackman in a dog collar, the back of a pig’s head in the foreground as they desperately embraced: ‘God help me, I love you!’). I’d been halfway through the thing for a few years now and needed to crack on if I was ever going to escape the call centre. I’d reduced my hours there to the minimum but I still spent every second pondering quiet desktop suicide. The previous week I’d been losing the will to live ten minutes into my shift when my boss came over and asked whether I had flu.

‘It’s just a cold,’ I said, stoically.

He looked at the pile of congealed tissues on my desk.

‘You know, Laura, it’s best if you don’t come in when you’re infectious.’