Animals (2 page)

She was in the kitchen merrily slicing up a bumper jar of German Bratwursts. Zuzu wound expectantly around her ankles. Zuzu was muscular; more military hardware than cat. She barrelled up and down the hallway. When she trod on my foot it hurt. Tyler walked over to the sink and drained the pan, tipped the pasta into a bowl. A few greasy bows spilled over the sides and slid steaming across the draining board.

‘We’re gonna need a bigger boat.’

Spinning around looking for a larger bowl, she eventually shrugged and tipped the pasta back into the pan. ‘Fuckit. Those are for you, by the way.’

I looked over to the opposite counter and saw a pint of iced water and two ibuprofens. I necked them and edged around her to refill the glass with water at the sink.

Tyler scraped the slices of sausage into the pan, squirted ketchup over the top and stirred it all together with the handle of a rusty fish slice. ‘So Tom texted.’

I put the glass of water down, goggled her on.

‘Jean’s gone into labour.’

Jean was Tyler’s sister. Lived in London. Did something to do with funding for museums. Or at least used to, before.

‘Shit.’

‘Yeah. She’s
dil-ating
. Saying it’s all his fault. You know the drill.’

A grimace with this. Tyler and Jean were close – so close that it had been a composite betrayal when Jean got pregnant, considering the fact that at twenty-eight Jean was a whole year younger.
Another one lost for a decade!
was Tyler’s initial reaction, delivered with a sweep of her kimono sleeve, like a Roman emperor declaring the closing of the games.

‘Is she all right?’ I said. ‘What –’ It was hard to know what to ask about someone who was in labour. How’s her perineum holding out? Has she shat herself yet?

Jeannie Johnson. Who’d once accidentally set her own pubes ablaze standing naked on a candlelit dinner table. She’d out-spectacled us all. Now where was she? Spouting clichés, in stirrups.

‘Yeah,’ Tyler said. ‘Tom’s going to call when there’s news.’

She handed me the bowl and a mug, a fork and a teaspoon, and walked ahead carrying the pan with two hands. She paused at the kitchen door and turned. Nocturnal woodland eyes, black and glistening. ‘Do you want some wine?’

We looked at each other for a few moments, assessing the weights of our various desires and reservations as they rolled and pitched inside. After all: the first rule of intoxication was company. Do it together and you have a party; do it alone and you have a problem. I felt the dryness of my insides, tubes crackling and gasping.

‘I don’t know, are you having wine?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Well, we might as well, if it’s there.’

‘Yes!’ Tyler said, dancing with the pan. ‘Make like mountaineers!’

She jogged through to the lounge, deposited the pan on the plate-glass coffee table and jogged back to the kitchen. She returned a few minutes later with two grubby tumblers of white wine. Drops of water clung to the top of the glasses where she’d rinsed them. She put one on the table and drank heartily from the other.

Somewhere, my phone started to ring. I ran around, uprooting cushions and rifling through papers. There were books all over the flat, poetry mostly. The previous Christmas we’d made a Christmas tree out of them: hardbacks at the bottom, working up through paperbacks, finally to slim modern collections (Spenser’s
The Faerie Queen
propped up on top). We’d wrapped the whole thing round with fairylights that turned off looked like barbed wire. Now, only the bottom three branches remained. I pulled them apart and threw them across the room.

‘It’s in your jacket in the hall,’ said Tyler, sitting. ‘It’s rung twice already.’

Out in the hall I located my jacket on the coat-stand and patted the pockets until I felt the hard boxy telltale form of Phone. It was Jim, of course it was Jim – only two people ever called me and one of them was in the next room. I picked up. ‘Hello.’

‘Hi.’

It struck me as it always did: the contradiction. The beauty of phones! But also the inadequacy. Jim’s voice was a tonic: a Midlands accent softened by natural sibilance and university down south. Henry Higgins might have clocked him but everyone else found him hard to place. Me, I was instantly Mancunian: too clipped for Lancashire; too glottal for Cheshire.

‘How was your night?’ he said.

I clutched at the phone, hunched in the hallway, feeling suddenly goblin-like. The long-distance line buzzed. I thought of Jim’s sharp agile lips, the colours of the political world map, slowly looping satellites. In the lounge, the TV came on.

‘Fun,’ I said.

‘Great!’ Jim said. ‘How fun?’

‘Home-and-sleep-but-a-bit-hungover fun. How was the recital?’

‘Not fun, but nice people.’

Jim had been teetotal for two months – a decision made when his workload increased to such an extent that he rarely got a day off with travelling and rehearsals. As a concert pianist he couldn’t take any chances. Classical music fans were ferociously attentive.

‘How’s Tyler?’ he asked. He always asked. I had to give him credit for that.

She snorted a tequila slammer through a straw. She stole a Magic Tree air freshener from a taxi. She
–

‘She broke a shoe. Otherwise she’s intact.’

We’d been running across a road when the plastic heel of her ankle boot – which had been threatening to go since December – had snapped clean off. She’d sworn a long, lusty
Fuuuuck
and then started singing, cornily:
You picked a fine time to leave me, loose heel
…

A fraction-second of silence. A conversation drawing to a close. I tried to picture New York in my mind, seeing Earth from low orbit, then falling through the sky, zooming down and down through map scales, to the hotel room where Jim was sitting, holding the phone. The image disintegrated as it smashed into memory: Jim, the way he’d looked leaving for the airport with his Bart-Simpson-church-hair, side-parted and slick from the shower, in his white shirt and diamond-pattern tank top. The memory put more miles between us rather than fewer.

‘Get back to your girlfriend,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you Friday.’

‘See you Friday.’

Exhalation.

Love: funny how you knew you’d found it, when you found it. I didn’t like believing in fate, it struck me as a concept for happy people to cling to. Majestically unfair when you thought about it. Someone gets a shit lot – that’s their
fate
, is it? Oh, bad luck – sorry about that Alzheimer’s, that dead kid, that bombed-out family home.
Sor-ry.
It’s just … well, it’s destiny, you know? At the same time I knew I felt lucky, having found someone to make some promises to; to be in turns fascinated and reassured by. Jim was solid and separate: hooded eyes, pointed chin, black widow’s peak – not dissimilar to young Spock and just as logical, just as smart and self-contained. Knew exactly who he was. And there’s
nothing
more attractive than someone who knows who they are, especially when you’re – well, a fucking shambles. Lately, our love, too, had been assuming more of a definite shape – a
marriage
shape. I’d never really known whether marriage was for me; I’d just said it as a word, an abstract –
When I’m married
– without thinking about what it meant. But the abstract was manifesting. It was white and huge and heavy and expensive, like a Fifties American fridge appearing at the foot of the bed, and I didn’t know what the fuck I was going to do with it.

‘How’s loverboy?’ Tyler said as I walked back in the lounge.

I looked at her and I could see she was reading me, seeing how the conversation with Jim had gone, getting everything she needed to know – the words were just her playing for time. Since meeting Tyler I’d believed that a psychic connection between human beings was possible. ‘Kinship’ is the best word in English for it. The French call it
une affinité profonde
, which I also like it but it still doesn’t quite get there. It’s that doppelgänger effect that can go either way: to mutual understanding or mutual destruction. Someone sees right to your backbone and simultaneously feels their backbone acknowledged.

‘Fine, thanks.’

‘Does he think we’re savages?’ (This with her mouth full, spraying pasta bits down her front.)

‘Of course he does. We
are
savages. How’s the pasta?’

‘Functional.’

Tyler was a dreadful cook, not that she gave a shit. She liked food but she wasn’t fetishistic about it – quantity not quality gave her her kicks. ‘Yeah, it’s definitely done the job,’ she said, getting up and patting her stomach. ‘I could dump a corpse right now.’

We’d met nine years ago. I was ordering a coffee in a shop halfway along Deansgate. The shop’s leather sofas and hat-sized sponge cakes had looked inviting as I passed on my way to the library after work, which at the time involved standing on Market Street with a clipboard selling £9.99 baby photos to people with babies. (Of all the jobs I’d had it had been the simplest – new parents were the most vulnerable demographic, the most desperate to preserve and present their legacy; the easiest to sell shit to.
And yet you’re still going to die – that’s the punchline!
I thought as they proffered their tenners, bloodshot, sleep-starved, unsexed, their offspring indifferent.) The coffee shop was part of an Italian chain and hadn’t been open long. She was at the coffee machine grappling with a metal jug – the milk wouldn’t froth properly by the looks of it – and she was shaking the jug and frowning and pouting. Her pinny was skewiff, her baseball cap was backwards like Paperboy’s, her name badge said DENISE. She looked up and I saw a look pass through her eye that I’d caught in my own, in bathroom mirrors – it was a look that said she was outside somewhere, and running. She made the coffee with the milk as it was and came to take my order. I ordered a frappé and as I ordered it I said,
I never believed the day would come when I’d order a frappé
and she nodded at the books I was pressing to my chest and said,
That’s a Moleskine, isn’t it, like Hemingway used?
and I said:
Touché
.

I picked up my bowl of pasta and stabbed it with my fork, failing to spear a single piece. Zuzu glanced at me. The cat only trusted Tyler, an exclusivity Tyler had ensured by getting her when I was away on a random week’s holiday with Jim. When I came back the cat was already indoctrinated to Tyler’s ways, brainwashed in some kind of one-cat cult. ‘I’ve trained her to recognise only my face,’ Tyler said. ‘The rest of humanity are inferior mutants in her eyes.’ Zuzu tolerated the odd pat or stroke but always with hackles-ready suspicion. She never came on my lap, never took food from my fingers. Tyler was unhealthily proud of her hairy little devotee.

The pasta was rotten – overcooked and laced with the poison-tang of too much basil. I ate it anyway. The small flatscreen TV in the corner was tuned in to a tacky Saturday night dating show I liked. Tyler was objecting. The elitist in her often stropped centre-stage, raised as she had been amongst poetry and horses. Conversely, light entertainment was mother’s milk to me. It relaxed me, rendered me junk-drunk at the teat of British terrestrial telly. That was how my four-strong, two-up two-down family had rolled: takeaways in front of game shows and horror films. (I’m not trying to
out-working-class
you, by the way; I went to grammar school and university, but my first touchstones were forged in the garish gore of Granada TV.)

The dating show was a bit like
Blind Date
except instead of a screen and the old ‘love is blind’ philosophy there were thirty girls behind a bank of white-lit pillars and one man standing in front of them for their perusal. The poor bastard descended onstage in a lift, the ‘Love Lift’, and thrashed about like a landed fish under the studio lights to whatever godawful tune he’d chosen to come onto (in this case, bludgeoning irony to within an inch of its life with Sister Sledge’s ‘The Greatest Dancer’). He proceeded to further fuck up his chances by doing a ‘party piece’ (juggling bananas) and allowing his friends and family to defame him via an impishly edited video of them all discussing his personality down the pub (
Steve’s VERY close to all his exes and his mum, such a nice guy
…).

I was on the floor, practically laughing out toxins. Tyler – fork poised chin height, split pasta dangling – was aghast.

‘Someone get him the fuck out of there,’ she said. ‘Preferably
not
someone he knows.’

It got worse. The second part of the show began with Steve in an energetic headlock courtesy of the comedian host, and the line of girls manically dancing behind their booths to the theme tune.

‘Christ on a cracker,’ said Tyler. ‘Did they crop-dust them with poppers during the commercials?’

The camera homed in on one girl in a partially see-through dress, her nipples almost visible beyond the corners of a diamond of fine black net. ‘This is Our Lou,’ said the host, ‘and she has a very special talent: she can pick men up!’

‘Presumably in the literal sense,’ Tyler said. ‘Or she wouldn’t be involved in this fiasco.’

Tyler had been single as long as I’d known her. I’d once overheard her saying to a boy at a party:
Sharing your life with someone is like Marmite. It’s FUCKING SHIT.
She took him home after.

On the TV Lou came out from behind her pillar, grasped the host round the thighs (face practically in fellatio-proximity) and lifted him a good two inches off the ground to deafening applause. ‘I bet you can do it with Steve, too, can’t you?’ said the host. Steve gulped but looked game.
Pick him up! Pick him up!
chanted the audience. Steve came forward and Lou lifted him, nose-to-crotch. After she’d returned him to his feet she did strongman arms to the roaring crowd.

‘You utter cunts!’ said Tyler. ‘What are they doing? Do they think stupid is sexy?’

‘They probably make a lobotomy mandatory in the early stages of the selection process.’

When the women had been whittled down to the final two it was time for Steve’s decider question. ‘I like to buy myself fresh flowers every week,’ he said. ‘How would you guarantee romance blossomed on our date?’