Emma Unsworth: Animals

‘One’s still going, I think. The other one took a fall in 2009 and they haven’t heard from it since. Resting under a dune, no doubt.’

‘If you have to be buried, I suppose Mars is as good a place as any.’

Buried. The word hurt us both, I think — death being the latest source of constant innuendo. He filled the silence. ‘It’s only a universe because of the things that don’t work. The flops. The mutations. Know what this would all be if it weren’t for all the fuck-ups?’ He swore to save me. Waved his free arm around. I shook my head. ‘A perfect line of ball bearings stretching for ever. Or maybe just nothing at all. Look, love, look — I think it’s down.’

On the TV people in blue shirts were hugging each other behind banks of desks. Messages from viewers scrolled across the bottom of the news report. Godspeed little rover! Don’t go crunch!

I looked across the mote-bright air at the drip, eking out its poison. He saw me looking and jerked his head towards it. ‘Want a go?’

‘Wouldn’t touch the sides with me that shit, Dad.’

He looked at me. I looked at him.

‘How are you doing?’

‘How am I doing?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Fine.’

‘Listen, you take your time with things. There’s life in the old dog yet.’

I was staying in my old room. Remnants of me remained despite the redecorating. When I went to bed I stuck my head in the many earthy-smelling jewellery boxes on the dressing table, the velvet insides, the leather outside, like they were extinct things displayed in a private collection. There were pieces of jewellery from my teen years — silver pendants, lace chokers, precious stones and crystals from when I used to get my fortune read at the Corn Exchange. I licked the inside of one of the chokers, trying to taste my old skin smells, my old perfume. I used to wear perfume.

Hours later I awoke cold and turned to the bedside table for my phone. 4 A.M. No messages. I turned onto my back, feeling the dull click of my bones going in and out of place. Balls in sockets. Things wearing away. There was water by the bed but water wasn’t enough. I needed something with some taste. Juice or squash or something. I got up and crept downstairs so as not to wake anyone. As I crept into the kitchen I saw something outside — ectoplasmic plumes coming off a dark figure on the driveway. I jumped, thinking it was a ghost (at last! I knew it, knew

it …) but no — as I hid there, staring, I saw that it wasn’t a ghost.

It was my dad. Outside. Smoking.

Smoking.

I hid and watched him. The party line was that he’d given up when Mel was born. Still, there he was, kicking against the tide. The big Fuck You to the big Fuck All.

I sat at the dining table the next day, planning my next move. The table had been in our family for generations. The surface was more like skin than wood. The grain had gone black in its recesses with grease, sweat, ash and old food. It breathed in the patches where the varnish had worn off. It remembered everything. A hundred thousand homeworks. A hundred thousand dinners. I felt the history coming off it as my parents buzzed around in the background, attending to the kettle and the catalogues and things that may or may not need posting. A bluebottle circled the room, lazy with imminent death, regularly bashing against the windowpane and I wondered whether to put it out of its circular misery. I’d once Googled whether insects feel pain while deciding whether to euthanise a twitching beetle on Tyler’s bathroom floor. Apparently they didn’t have a central nervous system, so it doesn’t translate to an emotion, to pain as such. They just respond to negative stimuli. They reverse. Hide. Play dead. Run like hell. In Edinburgh I lived in a student house that was riddled with cockroaches. When the man from Rentokil came I asked him how the poison worked. It rots their stomachs. The next day we came down to the kitchen to find hundreds of them lying along the skirting boards, the odd leg daintily flexing. They took hours to die. I’d sat in the living room, holding my stomach, rocking, hating those fucking cockroaches for what they were putting me through.

The way back to Tyler was laid out in repetitions; an executive desk toy, unplayed with. Jim had starred in nightly nightmares. I was full of forlorn foregone conclusions. Sitting at the dining table, the twilight kindling the street outside, I longed for a drink to numb my metaphysics.

I went outside to call Mel and smoke a fag. Through the kitchen window I could see sections of my parents side by side on armchairs in the lounge, his arm and her arm visible, the backs of their heads bobbing in and out of view as they chatted about something on the TV. When my phone rang in my hand I answered thinking it would be Julian calling me back to arrange a viewing on another flat. I registered the name as my finger pad hit the green bar but it was too late.

‘Laura?’

‘Jim.’

Exhalation, of a kind. ‘What’s going on? My parents are beside themselves. All this money and everything’s on hold. I know you’ve every right to ignore me but it’s been over a week now… ’

‘I don’t know what to say.’

Sighing. ‘Well, we need to sort this out.’ How romantic . I awaited more overtures. ‘I’ll be in the Circus Tavern at 3 P.M. tomorrow.’

Through the window, deep in the lounge, I saw my mum bat my dad’s arm as she laughed despite herself. My dad shot her a sideways look. Their song was Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘America’.

‘Noted.’

I hung up and slid down the wall into a ball.

When I arrived at the smallest pub in the city he was sitting in a back corner, two balloons of white wine in front of him. Would he stand up? He would not. Would we kiss each other? We would not. Shake hands? I sat down next to him, looked at the wine and waited. He reached forward, picked up a glass and took a sip. I picked up the other glass. He looked exhausted. Probably from shagging string players.

LAURA.

He took a second sip before lowering his glass. Fuck, it was good to see him have a drink, I can’t say it wasn’t.

‘How’s that going down?’ I said. It felt like a cavalier thing to say, inaptly breezy. But then — what? Darkest dissonance. This man I’d been making plans with, that I’d spent the past however long in love with, and I had not a single thing to say. I wondered whether it was because there was so much, it was impossible to articulate… etc. etc . I put my glass down on the hammered copper table and held it for a moment to check it didn’t wobble.

‘Oh, it’s disgusting,’ he said, taking another swig. He grinned but his eyes weren’t involved. And there it was, opening: the possibility of some kind of renewal. I sipped my wine, welcomed the quickening in my blood as it provided the necessary transfusion. ‘So what do you think?’

‘Would you apologise to your parents for me? For all the fuss—’

The tail-end of the sentence caught my throat as it flew up and out. I sat swallowing with pity for myself and my own tender heart in the mix — I thought I might have been enjoying his pain until that point, thought I might still just be angry. He picked up his glass. Sipped. Put the glass down again. The Spock look. It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it. I raised my glass again and a familiar bittersweet feeling washed over me, classic futuristic déjà-vu: reassuring on the surface and, beneath that, profoundly depressing. You’ve been here before. You’ve always been here.

‘I mean how are you feeling about us .’

I drank. Drank. Drank. Then I said: ‘I think it was the dream itself enchanted me.’