Animals (11 page)

I held her chin and turned her face to mine. ‘Listen to me, Tyler. I want to marry Jim. I have not been coerced or conditioned –’

‘But how would you –?’ She looked like a Cabbage Patch doll, her mouth squished in my hand. I released her.

‘And I want to be part of a team against the world again. When I was a child –’

‘Oh, the formative anecdote … Come on then, Fred fucking Savage, let’s have it.’ She looked into the middle distance, made her eyes all dreamy. ‘
That was the day I realised
…’

I slapped her arm. ‘When we were in his van going out on a Sunday my dad used to say
We’re the J-Team!
Like the A-Team.’

She nodded. ‘I am aware of
The A-Team
. It’s one of my people’s cultural gifts to the world.’

‘So I want to be part of a new team against the world.’ I quailed at my own schmaltziness but I knew it was true – the idea, at any rate.

‘Teams are awful. Families are awful. People are awful. Why perpetuate the awfulness?’

‘So why don’t you live alone? Why have me around?’

Neither of us said it but it was there, unspoken. It flashed in her eyes at the same time it went through my head but I was afraid of saying it and I knew she was, too.
We used to be a team.
She lit a fag.

I reached for the fag packet and lit one up, too. ‘You can get a new housemate.’

‘Who? I don’t know anyone else. I don’t like anyone else.’

She wiped her nose on the back of her hand. Two jackal-faced men came out of the pub and perched on the seats at the end of our table without asking. It irked me but I didn’t say anything. Tyler picked up her phone, read something and put it back down on the table. The men didn’t speak to each other, and I saw them clock Tyler with interest. She registered them, too. An audience.

‘So I was at this party the night before last in an old mill,’ she began. ‘That was where all the trouble started. I was fiercely bored as I so often am in this weary little city.’ Curls had snapped out from the kirby grips above her temples. Her fingernails were filthy where they were missing polish, all coal seams and saffron crescent moons. ‘Around 2 a.m. someone put a metal pole through the amp –’

‘Doormen,’ one of the men piped up.

Tyler didn’t look at him but she nodded sagely, acknowledging the suggestion. ‘There was talk of sabotage.’

‘Rival clubs,’ the man said again. ‘This town’s run by them, you know.’

‘Anyway,’ Tyler said, still without a glance at the men, ‘that was exciting for all of five minutes but the upshot was that there was no music.’

‘Whereabouts in America are you from?’ said the other man.

‘What has this got to do with us?’ I said.

Tyler glanced at the men. ‘The Midwest. Where the twisters are.’

‘You don’t look American.’

I sighed. ‘I really think we should finish our conversation.’

‘I don’t want to. I want to tell you about last night.’

I dragged on my fag and exhaled, frustrated. ‘Go on then.’

‘So we sat around in a circle on the floor of the club, talking about sex.’

‘Your suggestion, I presume?’

She took off her sunglasses and tugged a stray hair out of the hinge. ‘Well, what the fuck else? Charades? You need a bit of stimulation at that point. You need a good fuck or a good fight or a good sing-song.’

‘Want some weed?’ said one of the men. I looked at him holding out his soggy joint and shook my head.

Tyler batted the offer away with her hand. ‘No. Hate pot. Too slow.’

‘What’s the matter, love?’ the man said to Tyler. ‘Is your body too bootylicious for me?’ The other man laughed.

‘Bored,’ said Tyler, ‘my body is too bored.’

I drained my glass, anticipating our imminent departure. I hoped this wasn’t going to turn out like the time a man had overheard us talking about drugs in a queue for a cashpoint and said:
I thought junkies were meant to be thin?
She’d punched him.

She lit up another cigarette. ‘And some reprobate,’ she said exhaling, ‘posed the question:
What’s the worst thing someone can say to you just before sex?
’

The men froze. You could have heard a joint drop in that beer garden.

Tyler went on: ‘So people started putting forward their suggestions, you know.
Put this horse’s tail butt-plug in … Call me Uncle Mo
… I won of course.’ She tapped her fag in a leisurely way and smiled like a boar, pink wine-tusks disappearing into grin-folds.

‘Go on then,’ I said. ‘Let’s have it.’

She made me wait a few seconds. Dragged on her fag. Sipped her drink. Leaned in, tongue lolling in her bottom lip. ‘Make a face like you don’t understand
.
’ She reclined, victorious.

The men stood up and went inside.

‘Shall we get another drink?’ I said.

‘Yes, more drink. More everything. There’s a party going on not too far away if you fancy it. New friend of mine. An artist. I’ve got something in my pocket.’ I looked at her. Of course: the whole conversation had been an elaborate preamble. Tyler
was
good: talking about parties made you want to party. I felt like it by then – I felt as though (oh, the justifications, they come like flying monkeys through the window) getting lost somewhere together might be good for us.

I said: ‘I need at least ten hours’ sleep in the next forty-eight hours.’

‘Baby, that’s so feasible that it’s verging on
Logic
.’

Nick the Artist opened the door and held his arms wide at the sight of Tyler. His hair was hairsprayed into a tsunami of a side-parting.

‘I’m so glad you came!’ he said, and looked at me like he wasn’t so glad.

‘This is my friend Laura,’ said Tyler.

‘You’ll have to excuse my informal attire,’ I said. ‘I was planning on coming in a wedding dress but I just couldn’t find one that fitted …’

Tyler laughed – not her usual laugh but one that got her by socially sometimes. ‘Come get a drink,’ Nick said.

We walked through the crowded studio and people didn’t move to let us pass, we had to say excuse me a lot and walk sideways with our hands up like crab-claws around manbags and jutting elbows. The studio was in a semi-derelict building just behind Oxford Road and through the grey-paned windows the grey city towers loomed like tired totems. Everyone at the party seemed to be wearing the same thick, black-rimmed glasses. The party was a private view – a launch for Nick’s new collection. He’d invited Tyler the previous night at the mill.
Before or after your sex-face story?
I asked.
Oh, after
, she said.
But he’ll be disappointed if he thinks he’s in there. Too prissy for me. He’d be making a face like he didn’t understand because he
wouldn’t actually understand
.

‘Annihilations’ consisted of cushion-thick canvases hung from the walls at daring intervals. Splodges of dark oil paint on darker backgrounds, clumsy blobs and squares – they looked to me like large versions of micro-bacterial slides that a monkey had attempted to replicate with handfuls of baby shit. We reached a trestle table that didn’t look strong enough to support the two ice buckets teetering on its gummy surface. Tyler fished two beers from a bucket and opened them with her teeth. She had a tiny curved scar on her top lip – I imagined this was from removing a bottle-top inexpertly at some point. She handed me a beer and whispered: ‘Let’s not stay long. It’s all rather austere.’

I clawed up a handful of peanuts from a bowl on the table and sprinkled them into my mouth.

‘What are you doing?’ said Tyler. ‘Do you not know that there will be hipster urine particles in there?’

I shovelled in another handful. She pressed a wrap into my other palm.

‘What’s that?’ I said, spraying nuts. The affectation of innocence was such a comfort sometimes. Still. The wrap was like a gauntlet, a glove thrown down, a dare.

When I was secure in a cubicle I uncurled my palm. What was this? As I carefully picked open the wrap I saw it was a flyer, the words gradually revealed. I jiggled the crystals around to decipher it in full.

THEMES OF THE EMBITTERED HEART: A Talk on W.B. Yeats by Professor Marty Grane, Goldsmiths University, London. Join us for a lunchtime lecture about the later works of the great Irish poet. The Georgian Library, Mosley Street. 4th May. 1 p.m. Free.

I stared at the words. Had Tyler done this on purpose, as a joke? This was going to be difficult. I could hardly bear to, it was so desecrating. I say
hardly
.

As I handed it back to her I said: ‘Was that flyer especially for me?’

‘What flyer?’

‘The one you’re using as a wrap.’

She looked confused. ‘I picked it up off a stack on the counter at work. I didn’t even look at it.’

‘Oh. It’s for a talk on Yeats in Manchester next month.’

‘Your favourite!’

‘Fancy it?’

‘Sure.’

Approximately twenty-three minutes later I was in the corner of the studio dancing by a tinny stereo to a song I didn’t know and didn’t care that I didn’t know, it had a beat and that was enough for me. I could work with it. I could work with anything. Tyler was eyeing up two boys and I have to say boys, they were doing their utmost to look like boys, in tight jeans by the window. She went over to them and I heard her shout: ‘What is it with young men and this knock-kneed flamingo stance? You clearly haven’t got enough Vitamin
Me
in your diets. Straighten your legs. Straighten your legs right now.’

There was a woman next to me, running on the spot, smiling. I ran with her, keeping my arms and legs in time with hers and in time with the music.

I saw that Nick the Artist was by my side. He started dancing with me. ‘That’s Caroline,’ he whispered in my ear, nodding towards the running woman. ‘Old Hacienda head. It’s like she went out in 1992 and never went home.’

I looked at her. Maybe she did go home, I thought. Maybe she found something that made her happier than a semi in West Didsbury, or a semi in someone’s fat mam.

‘Ever tried your hand at art, Lisa?’ Nick said.

Tyler came to join us. She heard me saying no to Nick and asked what I was saying no to.

‘I’ve never chanced my arm at art.’

‘Yes, you have, tell him about your dirty protest.’

‘Okayyy …’

‘We need another drink for this,’ Tyler said, dragging us over to the trestle table, where a few lonesome beers bobbed around in the dirty ice. I looked around the room. Ten or fifteen people remained. How long had we been there? An hour? Longer.

‘I was about seven years old, and I needed the toilet, you know, and the teacher wouldn’t let me go until break-time,’ I said. ‘So by that point –’

‘She’d crapped her pants!’

‘I crapped … my pants, yes. So I hobbled to the loo at break-time and when I got there … Well, it hadn’t exactly remained in one piece.’

‘It was like a cow pattie!’ said Tyler.

‘It was like a cowpat, yes. Anyway, I thumbed what I could into the toilet bowl and flushed – but then, well, what to do with the rest?’

Nick was looking around the room but I wasn’t deterred.

‘So I took my knickers off, stood on the toilet seat and wiped the inside all over the cubicle walls. I really got into it by the end, doing wild strokes, emphatic arcs.’

Tyler slapped her thigh with her spare hand. ‘Tell him what the headmaster said!’

‘And so the next day in assembly the headmaster said:
Well, the caretaker had a nasty surprise last night
… and he told everyone about the thing in the toilet and a few of the teachers started casting aspersions and he had to say
No, no, Mrs Jennings, this was the GIRLS’
.’

Tyler doubled up like a penknife. Nick was regarding me with a look of appalled concentration.

‘I was an anxious child. Pulled my eyelashes out. Threw up a lot.’ My phone vibrated in my pocket. ‘Oh, that’s my fiancé.’ I read the text. Jim had just got home.

‘You’re
engaged
?’ Nick said.

‘Do not call him,’ Tyler said, straightening herself. ‘Just text him back. Remember The Rules.’

When I was twelve my parents took me to a psychiatrist who they said was a doctor but I knew better. Prof. E.G.L. Daubney’s name was affixed in solid silver letters on his door.

‘Eggle,’ my mum said as we waited on the chairs opposite. ‘That’s a funny name, Eggle.’

We were half an hour early. I’d vomited on myself in bed the night before and could still smell it on my hair. I stroked the tip of a cheeseplant leaf between my thumb and index finger. On the wall clock the minute hand slowly fell to half past.

My parents waited outside when I went in. The psychiatrist didn’t have a couch, which was disappointing. I sat on one of two chairs at the back of the room. He waited until I sat down and then made a big show of asking me to sit on the chair next to his desk so there were no barriers between us, so that we were just two people sitting having a chat together and that was nice, wasn’t it. I wondered whether he was a paedophile.

He sat down, clapped his knees and said: ‘Well, it must have been a relief to find out it’s not anything physical, eh?’

They’d had me in for tests the previous month at the other hospital, thinking it might have been triggered by some latent tropical disease. Not one of the doctors seemed deterred by the fact I’d never been anywhere tropical.

‘Yes,’ I said. I didn’t want him thinking he was a bad psychiatrist.

‘How would you describe yourself as feeling, generally? Happy? Sad?’

I thought. Quickly. ‘Pressured.’

‘That’s an interesting word.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, because I knew how to accept a compliment.

He looked at me until he realised I wasn’t going to say anything else and then he said: ‘Where do you think this pressure comes from, Laura?’

I wondered whether he could smell the sick on me. I’d vomited in bed because I’d had a dream where I was balancing on a football of rock in outer space holding a spoon. The spoon could shoot out hard bolts of lightning that created a temporary bridge for me to walk across to the next football of rock. I knew this was going to go on for ever.