Emma Unsworth: Animals

Tyler and I had stayed a few hours in the pub, growing raucous with much table-pounding and face-gripping. We’d sorted plenty out, over tables, over the years. It was dark when we decided to head across town. We walked along the canal towpath, up, over bridges, under arches. Above Deansgate Locks there was a row of chain bars. Outside each bar was a small, roped-off section, guarded by doormen, where clubbers stood smoking. Tyler unhooked each rope as she passed, as though she was opening the pens in a zoo, saying: RUN, BE FREE, NOW’S YOUR CHANCE . Canal Street was manic with revelry. Boys in fairy-wings. Gazelles in hotpants. The homeless and their hounds. Dishevelled after-work drinkers for whom one drink had turned into one too many. Teenagers cramming burgers in their mouths outside neon-lit takeaways. We went into a club because someone told us it had a balcony, reserved for VIPs — not that it stopped Tyler. In the unisex toilets I got talking to a man who said his name was ‘Chicken Sandwich’. He slipped me a green pill. I split it with Tyler and she said she’d got two Valiums for us for later from the doorman. We danced like wardrobes.

I went into Jim’s bathroom and ran myself a bath. Looking around, I knew that if I was going to have an input on any room, then really it should be this one. Some new tiling. Maybe I could do it myself. How hard could tiling be? I could get into DIY as a hobby. Keep me busy. I liked the idea of a wedding list at Wickes; that would be funny. Screw John Lewis! Our guests — all forty-eight of them — could race to snap up the under-£20 items: the bog brush holder and impractical wicker bin. I lit the half-collapsed candle by the side of the bath and stripped. Looking in the mirror I saw a thread vein had burst on my cheek, just beneath the bag of my bloodshot left eye. You are a total dickhead , I said. I felt the whole bathroom swell and nod in agreement. Yes, you are. A total dickhead. What the fuck was I going to do about this fucking veiny thing? Would Jim notice? I stepped back from the mirror. Squinted. Stepped forward. It was noticeable. I could wash my face and then attempt to cover it with concealer. These things happened anyway, with age. It could just be an age thing. It all started to change in your thirties. Things popped up all over the place. I had a ganglion at the base of my right middle finger that had sprung out of nowhere the previous month. I had a fallen arch in my foot that hadn’t been there when I was twenty. Now I had a thread vein. Furthermore, I deserved it. It was as though the huge, punishing hand of God had reached down during the night and flicked me really hard in the face for being such a total fucking dickhead. I walked into the bedroom and checked the time on the radio. I’d wasted a good fifteen minutes inspecting my face and it was now quarter past eleven. T-minus forty-five minutes until Jim landed. Fine, fine. Cool, fine. Finecoolfine. A bath was all about the first thirty seconds anyway, that almost unbearable immersion when the water feels so hot it’s cold, your skin’s receptors in blind panic mode. Washing, like imbibing water, felt like a chore. I did it as little as I could get away with. I cringed in the shower, like a cat. Besides, I liked the various smells of myself; I often sat with my head to one side, nose close to my armpit. I liked the raw smells of other people, too; in particular scalps, ears, and the insides of wristwatches — these smells were more comforting than perfume or aftershave, which set me on edge with their keen social purpose. I went back into the bathroom, turned off the taps and stepped into the bath. Sweet holy JehooHEEsus! It was a hot one. I gripped the bath handles and lowered myself, teeth gritted, legs reddening, pausing as the tide of firewater lapped at my navel.

The last thing I could remember from the club was the lights going up and seeing Tyler’s hair flattened to her cheeks and forehead, glued in place with her own sweat and also communal condensed sweat, dripping luminously from the ceiling. Over on the bar a man was on all fours as a second man held his arse-crack open and a third poured a bottle of beer into it. The man on all fours was Chicken Sandwich. Tyler said: ‘I think if I tried right now I could probably do the Caterpillar.’ Time to go.

I dipped myself fully into the bath and dunked my head, came up gasping. I washed the holy trinity. I shaved my armpits. The hair on my legs was downy, mostly invisible; worse when meddled with. I shaved it occasionally in summer when my own treacherous aesthetics meant I couldn’t go tightless otherwise. Tyler — coarser, darker — kept hers in honour of feminist historian Janet Fraser: All that time I save in body hair removal I devote to revolution . I teased her about it whenever I caught her coming out of the bathroom.

How much revolution this time?

Oh, heaps. There’s a LOT of blood…

I got out of the bath, pink and quivering, and hobbled to the clothes I’d taken off, lying in the middle of the floor. I didn’t keep clothes at Jim’s as such, just the odd thing. A black vest, greying with age. A pair of thermal leggings. A silver lamé thong Tyler had bought me as a joke ( That, my friend, is just a yeast infection waiting to happen …).

My mobile rang. Where was it, where was it? I ran into the hall and tipped the contents of my bag onto the floor — running out of time now, that ten-ring emotional crescendo before the maddening voicemail tag-team that would ensue — saw the phone, grabbed it, and answered.

‘I can’t feel my legs, Keyser.’

‘I’m not quite dead. I’m just very badly burned.’

Film quotes. Self-charming standards. The dream-house was our helpless Hotel California.

‘I thought you were going to be Jim.’

‘Sorry to disappoint you.’ She sounded like she was lying down, her voice flat and gargly.

‘Actually, it’s a relief to hear you,’ I said. ‘Mastering meaningful speech is next up on my list of Things to Achieve Today. I’m not quite ready for Jim but I can just blart vowel-sounds at you and it’s okay.’

‘It’s more than okay. I understand your blarting perfectly.’

‘You’re the world’s leading expert in the field of my blarting.’

She inhaled and sighed. ‘You staying there today, then?’

‘Jim’s back shortly — you know that.’

‘Ah.’ She sniffed. ‘Pulling rank, is he?’

‘It’s not like that, I just need to get things straight. Myself, mainly. I’m practically brain-dead. Jim might as well be coming home to someone on life support — hey, at least he might have some sympathy for me that way… ’

‘Listen, just don’t apologise, whatever you do. That only feeds the fire. I made the mistake of reading the news earlier. You know what the biggest problem is right now with Western society?’

‘Our lack of real commitment to addressing climate change?’

‘Our pornographic appetite for contrition. You have to be sorry for everything, all the time. Are you sorry you ate all those burgers? Are you sorry you smoked all those cigarettes? Are you sorry you said that dumb thing online? It’s not morality, it’s just another fix, another kind of greed: give me all your sorry, I’m so hungry for sorry. But sorry changes nothing. There are more progressive motivations. When you go out and tear the night a new hole you do it for a reason, even if that reason is taking a vacation from Reason.’

‘Yeesh, Tyler, I really hate that expression.’

‘Sorry — I forgot, you have previous.’

‘Hey, they were only internal and very small. I was eating too much bread.’

The curry was a predictable disaster. I ruined everything I cooked because of my inherent lack of cruise control. I had to remind myself to stand by pans. You are cooking. Concentrate. Stir. When I heard the key in the lock I ran to the door, hurling myself into his arms before he’d put his bags down.