Emma Unsworth - Animals

We sat down and Tyler sparked up a cigarette and I didn’t think anything of this until the barman was standing by the table. ‘Put the fag out, Turpin.’

‘Make me,’ Tyler said, taking another drag.

‘I just might.’

‘Do it and see what happens.’

‘What happens?’

‘You find the grave a welcome embrace after the wrath of my ju-jitsu.’

I waited to be ejected. He stood there. When she’d finished her cigarette she tossed the dimp into an empty glass. It fizzled. He picked up the glass with our other empties and walked away.

‘Fuck me. He’s so beautiful it’s humiliating .’

‘He’s all right.’

I felt a hot blip and put my hand down my pants instinctively, pushed a finger inside and pulled it out to see a blob of something on my fingertip. Dark blue in the neon. I held it up to show Tyler. She lifted her mask.

‘What?’ she said. ‘You didn’t think—?’

‘No. But it’s always a surprise, isn’t it? All these years, every month since I was thirteen and still it surprises me, like a season.’

The sudden physicality of myself made me weak. Tyler stood up and pulled me up by my hands. ‘Let’s dance.’

‘No, I don’t think I can. I feel all hot and dizzy.’

She pulled me onto the dance floor and started whirling me round. Everything was spinning. I broke free of her grip and went and walked to the edge of the dance floor, pressed my palm on a wall. She followed me, patted my back. ‘You okay?’

‘I need to lie down somewhere quiet. Can we go back to yours?’

She looked over to the bar. The barman was standing behind it, cleaning glasses, watching us.

‘Do you need me to come with you?’

‘No.’

‘You sure?’

‘I said so, didn’t I?’

As I turned she grabbed hold of my hand. ‘I used that flyer on purpose but I didn’t know he’d be in the pub.’

I looked at her.

When the end comes you know it’s real because it isn’t remotely cinematic. I looked round as I reached the exit. She was dancing in the middle, people closing in around her. She kept her arms in as she danced. That was thing with Tyler. She was her own hero.

Outside the club I took off my mask and cape and threw them into the gutter. Hailed a cab. Got in. At a red light I saw two teenaged girls sitting in a shop doorway, having one of those conversations, smoking their jaws square. They had long mullety hairstyles dyed platinum and pink, brightest at the ends, glam-rock style, dyed over the same sink. As my cab pulled away I felt the smallness of myself and everyone I knew, even the city. The appalling humanity of it all. These mundane things we do to each other, these miniscule effects we mistake for epic at the time.

From the fridge door, half a bottle of wine winked back at me. I poured a glass and carried the bottle through to my room. I lay on my bed in my jacket and boots. My phone vibrated. Clearly things hadn’t gone so well with bar boy. I reached into my jacket pocket, thinking I’d turn the phone off before her pestering reached crescendo point—

It was Jim.

In Manchester. I miss you. x

I stared at the text and all I could think was that he had taken the trouble to make the kiss lower case after the full-stop.

Delete delete delete.

Telling someone you missed them was an imposition, all said and done.

Wherever you are, infinity stretches away equally in every direction. Whether you’re under someone’s fingernail or straddling Saturn, infinity stretches away from you equally in all directions.

I held on to the bed so I didn’t fall. Then I called the one place I had left to go.

We walked arm in arm along the row of empty chairs and closed curtains to a chair ready-rigged halfway down the ward.

‘Usual for me, please, love,’ my dad said to the nurse. ‘And a bag of pork scratchings.’

The nurse looked at him. Laugh, you bitch , I thought. She managed a smile. Heard them all before, no doubt. The padded grey chair released a crisp sigh as he reversed onto it. He was wearing a faintly striped pink shirt that did his skin tone no favours but he’d had the shirt so long — I recognised it from my childhood — I thought it might be a talisman for the day. I wondered whether it had been a present from me and Mel, and I’d forgotten (these things we treasure…). The fact he’d put a freshly ironed shirt on, that he looked smart , hurt.

My mum pulled the curtain round us. The nurse stood in her solid shoes and hung a pouch with a yellow warning sticker on it, DISPOSE OF PROPERLY ( I should have one of those on me, eh —this time the nurse forced a laugh), on a hook next to the chair.

‘I’ll go and get some drinks,’ my mum said.

‘Pint of Guinness, please, love.’

More forced laughter. They hadn’t wanted me to come, and now my belated show of solidarity, my half-arsed support act, felt transparent under the strip-lights. The nurse held my dad’s hairy, freckled arm and inserted the needle. Previous treatments had left their marks, a line of red tracks branding his skin from wrist to elbow like the footprints of a tiny devil.

My mum walked away down the line of chairs.

‘Still furious with me,’ my dad said, nodding after her.

I sat down on a buckety visitor’s chair. Nuclear light poured through the blinds at the end of the ward, where another curtain was pulled round the last treatment chair, several metres away; respectfully distanced. It was sunny outside — something close to summer. Sometimes the weather had no idea. In the long thin room, dust hung in sun-shafts, as though the air had been suspended at a molecular level and was waiting, stunned by its own potential, wondering what to do next. The nurse stretched a tube from the pouch and slotted it into the plastic slot on the back of the needle. There was a TV up on a wall bracket, showing the news. The rover ‘Curiosity’ was about to land on Mars. The nurse stepped back from the chair, adjusted the drip. ‘There you go, Bill. Button’s there if you need me.’

‘Oh, I’m fine thanks now, love. This is my last blast.’

She smiled. ‘Let’s hope so.’ She pulled the curtain round so there was just a small gap for us to talk through.

Down the ward, a girl emerged from behind the other curtain. She was in her late teens, dressed in a fluoro-green t-shirt and grungy jeans. We glanced at each other — I supposed I was still young enough (at a distance) to arouse her competitive streak and we sized each other up (I wished I wasn’t sitting down) before politeness stepped in and her scrutiny dissolved into an orthodontic smile. I gave her another once-up-and-down for good measure. She knew I was nobody’s mother.

‘Looks like we just made it in time,’ my dad said. On the TV, the rover was descending in its parachute.

‘There’s a storm coming in,’ I said. The gas-station guy to Sarah Connor, Terminator.

He got the reference but not my bitterness. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, you can’t put that much hope in something’s direction and not expect it, sooner or later, to start to assume some sense of responsibility.’

I’d been staying at my parents’ for a week. Tyler had called and I’d ignored her. I felt a monkish need for solitude — for starvation and sleeplessness and clarity. I was writing a little at night and sometimes I came downstairs in the early hours for a glass of water and saw the kitchen tidy in the low light and felt tranquil and private and as though all was well.

‘I could socialise with robots,’ said my dad. ‘Cheap rounds, for a start.’

‘It’s the old ones I feel sorry for. Haven’t they just stopped dead?’