Emma Unsworth - Animals

Dear Tyler,

I don’t know what else to do other than write you — you won’t take my calls and then last week you threw me out of your apartment (which I have to say has deteriorated considerably in the five years since I bought it) after I had made a special trip to England to see you and your sister (I also thought it was particularly mean of you to refuse to give me Jean’s address in London and let her make a decision herself about whether she wanted to see me or not). So all I can do now is get what I want to say down on paper in the hope it might help you see things from my point of view and not be so dismissive when you don’t know the whole picture.

I know that I was a terrible father, and a terrible husband for that matter, however as a Christian I believe in second chances and while I know you girls never really took to mine or your mother’s religions, and we never forced you, I can’t help the values mine gives me now especially at this stage of my life, and what it encourages me to contemplate and pacify. I don’t expect much, just a few minutes of your time once a week or once every two weeks, to hear what you are doing with yourself and maybe a small amount of news about what it is like to be living in a different place so far away from home. I really wouldn’t expect any more but now I suppose I do expect a small something after the financial support I did not deny even for a second the last time we spoke, which was just after you arrived in England. As I believe the laws of physics clearly state, you can only get out of a thing as much as you put in, and I do believe I have put a little in recently not just with the apartment but also with the extra studies you wanted to do, so I suppose the question you have to ask yourself is: will you give a little back?

If you will, I won’t waste your time with griping. I’ve spent enough years now knowing I kicked the whole thing away and sure there will always be moments when any person in their life looks back and feels challenged to decide whether or not they made the grade and I really never meant it to get so bad but as I say I’m not for dwelling although I will say that I never meant that bottle to hit you and that has been one of the hardest things for me to forgive myself for. There are some things you might be interested in hearing about, for example the population over in Crawford is almost down to 1000 now if you can believe it and a few months back a few boys on a school trip from the city drowned in the river up by Fort Robinson so I suppose that makes it even lower, haha! You shouldn’t laugh at these things but you’d cry otherwise — a famous poet said that and I suppose you’d know which one. Also your old horse Marshall is doing well, I take him an apple most Saturdays (they laugh at me in the store shopping for myself and a horse — tell that to your mother if you like) and there’s a girl from the Normangill place (the Fletcher place as it is now — June Fletcher is her name) who comes and takes him out during the holidays. I’m thinking of saying she can have him permanent but I suppose I wanted to check with you first that that would be alright.

Your father.

There was a phone number at the bottom of the letter.

I wondered when he’d died. I thought it had to have been around the time Jean went back to rehab. I folded the letters in half and put them away at the back of the cocktail cupboard, behind all the glasses. I rummaged around in there until I found the plastic jug we were always sick in, stained orange from microwaving beans. I carried it through to the living room.

I thought she was asleep but as I put the jug down on the table she said: ‘Don’t leave me, Lo.’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

She stayed in bed for four days. I called her every hour from work and walked back via the indoor market. I got her to eat crushed ice at first to get her system used to the idea of solids, then I peeled and mashed fruit and vegetables and gave her mugfuls of purée, which she hated. I cancelled the viewing with Julian. He sounded relieved.

I sat with her every night as she fell asleep, descending with sweating and ranting — one time about making ratatouille, another time about deadheading sunflowers. Childhood whisked in with the dreams. Memories, fabrications, her brain unpacking. I knew she’d been further than her will, grew up in an instant. Did I envy her still, lying broken in bed: her completion? The Night didn’t beckon Tyler — she summoned it, saddled it and rode it down the street. My darkness had been drafted in, was unconceived.

While she slept I stood smoking at the kitchen window, looking out. Drinking water. Popping pills. Small ones, primrose yellow, the same time every night to be sure, whatever happened, whoever — A small decision, absolute. Not for me to pass on my greed and ingratitude. And for what? Redemption? I knew I had an ego, but… I couldn’t be something I couldn’t run from, either. I was a swarm, a murder of birds, a shape-shifter, co-existing with my panics and habits and all the ways they flung me. What was it Kierkegaard said about anxiety = dizziness = an overwhelming sense of possibility? What wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility! Anxiety is a privilege when you live with it like that, akin to the privilege of seeking mayhem. My life was full. It had a rotten apple in its mouth.

Ten minutes from the end of my shift. Two phone calls to go, three if the enquiries were straightforward. I sat big-eyed, repeating phrases, my fingers pressing on and off the same keys. I said exactly the same thing over and over again to customers who knew exactly what I was going to say. No one broke from the script. Work felt like a bad dream on a loop, one I couldn’t break from. Once a boy at the centre had asked a girl out at the end of a call (she’d lost her card in a Portaloo at a music festival and they got on so well) but even though she said yes he was being monitored for training purposes and got fired. I hoped they were still together or had managed at least to have a brief, life-affirming love affair that he could eulogise about in his darker hours and tell himself that it (life, unemployment) had all been worth it. I was shutting down but mockeries persisted in the high smell of acetone, carpet tiles below, ceiling tiles above, whiteboards like tiling on all sides, peace lilies on every other desk. An office was a parody of a bathroom.

My mobile began flashing, next to my company-issue coaster. I picked it up, answered.

‘So I’m in this new bar on Whitworth Street.’

‘You’re out?’

‘I’m fucking rocking , baby.’

‘Tyler, I don’t think—’

‘This city needs me. They have dishcloths for napkins in here. It’s abominable. The whole square half-mile would go to the dogs — and by that I mean the hipsters — without me around.’

‘I think you still need to rest.’

‘They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.’

Dorothy Parker. Irresistible.

‘Ha.’

‘This place is heaving with promise, they’re all revoltingly young.’

‘You must catch one for us to drink from.’

‘Come help me, why don’t you.’

I told myself I was going to monitor her. I told myself that.

She was waiting with a bottle of wine and a bag from a fancy-dress shop. She’d bought us black eyemasks and capes. We stood together in front of the mirror in the Ladies, the same red lipstick on, our hair in suave ponytails. I wasn’t nearly drunk enough.

We sank the bottle of wine, sank another, walked to a karaoke joint in Chinatown. I went up first. ‘Is That All There Is?’—Peggy Lee. There were six people in the place including us. A quiet middle-aged couple, possibly celebrating an anniversary, sat drinking tropical-looking cocktails in one corner. A pair of teenaged boys nursed illegal pints in the other. She danced with whoever she could drag up while I sang. There was more wine, and more wine, on and on we went, as the place filled up there was suddenly a DJ somewhere and bigger gaps between the songs and more people singing and the two of us disintegrating, losing all our differences.