Emma Unsworth: Animals

‘I’m not infectious.’

He leaned in. ‘I’m trying to give you a reason .’

I looked at the whiteboard on the wall. My rating was second from the bottom in an office of sixty-three. I looked back at my boss. He was a man who enjoyed golf.

‘Noted,’ I said.

‘It’s a tough climate,’ he said. ‘We need to pull together. You should really flush those.’

I took my pile of tissues to the Ladies and threw them down the toilet, then took a piss on top of them. I stared at the fish-head hinges and drunk-fighty-octopus hook on the door. Beneath the hook, a graffiti conversation was scrawled in three different-coloured pens.

Gas gas gas the middle class!

To which someone had replied:

I put my semi in West Didsbury on this cunt being middle-class.

To which someone else had replied:

I put my semi in your fat mam.

The sooner I finished my novel, the better.

I stubbed out my cigarette and pressed send. Ping! Off the last email went, specifying breaded ham instead of honey-roast for the buffet. I felt free and proud. I located my phone and called Jim. He was in Vancouver. A long flat ring tone, then a pause, then another, then—

‘Well done!’ he said.

‘I’m wondering how I should celebrate.’

‘I land around lunchtime tomorrow, shall I see you at mine?’

In the background someone was hacking at a cello, the Jaws theme but faster.

‘What?’ His voice was quieter, as though he’d moved the phone away from his mouth. ‘Yes, okay.’ Then he came back at full volume. ‘Look, Laur, I’ve got to—’

‘Course. Hey, why don’t I cook for us tomorrow?’

What can I say? I was delirious with success.

‘Oh, you don’t have to. We could—’

‘No, I want to.’

Just before he went I heard the whole orchestra strike up. I tossed my phone onto the unmade bed. It stopped solid on the sheet, like a brick. I turned the router box off at the wall. I didn’t like it just being on, it made me feel located, matrixed. I had a strange relationship with the internet, avoided it most of the time. I didn’t do social networking because I didn’t trust myself, I got too involved . Plus, drunk and home alone it could too easily go tits-up, as Tyler had proved. She’d sunk two bottles of wine (they were half-price so buying two was right and just) and signed up to a dating website under the pseudonym ‘Vivian Fontaine’. She then proceeded to maraud round the site, sending obscene messages to random men. I was looking for connections —that was how she’d defended it— you know, like normal people do on the internet . She’d even sent one man — who, to be fair, encouraged her — a photo of herself prancing in a half-mast leotard and a werewolf mask. She eventually got into bed with her laptop, where only the irresistible coma of max-capacity drinking saved her from further disgrace. The next morning, snouting out from under her duvet at 6 A.M., she’d seen the open laptop and shrivelled. Called me.

‘LO, I’VE DONE SOMETHING BAD LIKE REALLY BAD.’

‘Calm down.’ I was at Jim’s. I got out of bed and walked into the hallway so I didn’t wake him. ‘It won’t be—’

‘It’s the worst yet. I’m in TEFL City.’

‘TEFL City’ because we called those times ‘TEFL-pondering mornings’, when your only option felt like emigration, and teaching.

‘Did you hit anyone?’

‘No.’

‘Vomit on anyone?’

‘No.’

‘You didn’t kill someone, did you?’

‘Does cyber-suicide count?’

I sighed. ‘Sit tight, I’ll be round in ten.’

With no hope of self-charming her way out of it, between the phone call and my arrival Tyler had gone back online and messaged each of the men under the guise of Vivian’s sister saying that Vivian would sadly be unable to attend any of the arranged three-ways since she’d been admitted to hospital with a nasty case of gout. The most annoying thing was she’d used my laptop and, thanks to the guile of direct marketing, ads for dating sites were still popping up in the sidebar of my email inbox three months later. She was holding her right hand to her nose and smelling her first two fingers the way she always did when she was scared (‘oysters and bonfires’ was how she described the smell). ‘I panicked!’ she cried. ‘Anyway, you had gout when you were twenty-five.’

This was true. When I’d hobbled my cartoonishly swollen left big toe into A&E the doctors had been taken aback. Super-strong anti-inflammatories were all they could give me — those and the official literature on recommended weekly units of alcohol for women. Fourteen. Seven glasses of wine. Per week. Barely enough for a vole to have a good time. But you know, they had to try. We all have to fucking try , don’t we.

Now whenever a dating site ad appeared by my inbox, I informed Tyler and she displayed suitable mortification. And this was Tyler , who was generally unshockable and certainly un-embarrassable when it came to sex. Aged ten she’d been caught masturbating in the school sickbay and the school nurse had hauled her into the headmaster’s office. ‘I apologised,’ Tyler said wearily in the re-telling, ‘but the headmaster was a joyless soul, a non-carrier of the fuckit gene. And it’s not as though I lied. I DID have a headache — I had a headache because I needed to jerk off .’ Tyler’s parents had been called into the school and her mum had defended her. You know people are really rich, like generations -rich, when they’re not embarrassed discussing sex in public. One of the things I admired most about Tyler’s family was their openness. They told it to each other straight. This ranged from That dress doesn’t suit you to That thing you said to me yesterday made me very upset . My family pussyfooted around, especially when it came to illness. Last autumn, my mum had answered the phone with a cheery Hello! and when I asked her where she was she replied Oh, just in A&E! in the tone you might expect someone to say Oh, just in B&Q! She said she’d burned her hand on the oven (even went so far as to wear a bandage when I saw her next) but it eventually transpired that my dad had been going back and forth with a bad cough they nailed down as stage-two lung cancer. You know the Black Knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail , when he’s getting his arms lopped off and saying it’s just a flesh wound? That’s my family. If we end up having a family mausoleum our epitaph should be Don’t worry about me, I’m just having a little lie-down .

So apart from checking email, odd facts (I listed them and did them in bulk at 5 P.M.) and sometimes — when I was feeling particularly brave — my overdraft balance, I kept the wi-fi off. The book was proving hard enough without the added worry of where it might or might not fit in the world, especially when I was yanked every day into a heinous, staticky place, a grey carpeted box of lies concerning credit cards. All that got me through was telling myself I was buying as well as biding my time, a dangling carrot for most people who worked in the call centre. There were musicians, playwrights, poets, novelists — all of us detesting every second in our headsets; all of us dreading the time someone would turn round and say: I’VE GOT MY BREAK! I’M OUT! SEE YOU LATER, LOSERS!

GCSE English class. Tuesday afternoon. Me — thirteen, ginger, unstylishly myopic — navigating my way through Yeats’ ‘When You Are Old’ with rabid intent. I loved it, loved it without knowing exactly why. Loved the words, the rhythm, the idea of someone having a ‘pilgrim soul’. Didn’t think it could be anything to do with a bitter albeit complicated man putting a hex on a girl who’d said no. (For the record I still loved it at thirty-two, experience notwithstanding.)