Animals (21 page)

And then we were alone. We walked a little way down the corridor, towards the door.

‘How was the orange juice?’ Jim said.

‘Delicious.’

‘You’re a shitty actor, you know. You’ll never play the Dane.’

‘Fuck the Dane. I was Aladdin.’

‘Aladdin?’

‘Upper-fourth Christmas panto, December ’91. A ginger, female Aladdin. And they say the North is backwards.’

He stopped. I stopped. ‘You look tired,’ he said.

‘Must be the travel.’

‘How was Tyler’s birthday?’

‘Fine! Cool.’

‘You look as though you haven’t been to bed.’

‘Stop scrutinising me,’ I said and turned away. Oh don’t cry don’t cry you fucking baby, fucking idiot.

‘That’s how much this trip meant to you, is it?’

I took a breath, unsure how to proceed.

‘Oh, have a drink for fuck’s sake, Laura,’ he said. ‘You might as well. You’re not going to be much company like this.’

I opened my mouth to say
I thought I was doing pretty well until you turned the Manson lamps on me
, but then I stopped, because Kirsten walked round the corner.

‘Oh hello!’ she said. She was carrying her cello and she didn’t put it down when she reached us. Agonies of awkwardness! I hadn’t seen Kirsten for months and now to bump into her here, like this! It was so obvious there was an atmosphere, too. She didn’t know where to look.

‘Kirsten!’ I said, trying to sound normal. ‘How are you? I didn’t know you were in Stockholm! This is a nice surprise!’

I sounded like someone who was learning the English language.

‘Oh, I’m playing here tomorrow with Joanna Newsom. I just bumped into Jim in the foyer earlier …’

I liked the way she said ‘foyer’. It was a good, Northern way of saying ‘foyer’. I wanted her to say it again so I could close my eyes and savour it.

‘You weren’t at the concert, then?’

‘No, we’re rehearsing downstairs in a minute.’ She widened her eyes as though remembering something. Kirsten glanced at me, met my eye, and away. ‘I’d better go …’ Killer. What a thing to step into.

‘It’s a shame you can’t make the wedding,’ I said.

‘Yeah.’ She edged past with her cello and ran to the end of the corridor.

Jim looked at me and frowned. Disapproval. Something else in his look, too: annoyance. The wedding. Every time we saw each other all we talked about was the wedding. ‘Let’s go outside,’ I said, desperate for air.

We walked along the water to the hotel. A group of teenagers were swimming off one of the piers, screaming and jumping in.

‘Idiots,’ said Jim and I realised what I really wanted to do was accuse him of having lost his sense of adventure, which wasn’t really fair. Hadn’t I fallen for his fixedness, his pin-like regard, as I’d sprayed around that scruffy bar like a Catherine wheel come off a fence? Was that what happened: the things you fell in love with became the very things that repelled you, in the end? (In the
end
? Where had that –?) There had been a time when the idea of me wilding it might have turned Jim on. No more.

We sat down in the bar at the hotel. I blinked, the tiredness taking over me. ‘I might have a whisky,’ I said. And then, before I really thought: ‘Have one with me.’

He smiled and shook his head. ‘I was wondering if you’d manage it.’

Bet you can’t get back inside that bottle, genie.

This was the perfect time to turn into Tyler – and furthermore, dearest,
up with this passive-aggressive bullshit I will not put
… But instead I said: ‘I bet I fucking can.’

He dipped his fingers into his shirt breast pocket (he kept notes there, like a bus driver – a detail I’d immediately put in the sacristy of my heart when I’d first spotted it). ‘I’ll get you whatever you want,’ he said, standing up. As he pulled a ten-euro note out of his pocket his passport came with it.

‘You keep your passport in there, too, now?’

‘Might as well.’

I cried then and he sat down and put his arm around me.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s up with me.’

‘You’ve just used up all your serotonin.’

‘I’m sorry I didn’t save you any serotonin.’

‘You know,’ he said, hugging me closer. ‘If we’re going to have a baby you should start respecting your body. I dread to think what you’re like inside.’

I stopped crying. I felt – well, fucking furious actually. Before I knew it I unleashed a torrent. That’s the thing with honesty I guess, once you break the seal … I hadn’t known how much I’d been holding back but as I spoke I felt like I’d pulled my finger out of the dam and fuckit fuckit drown them all and watch them die. ‘Your conversation has never been up to all that much,’ I said, ‘but this is really scraping the barrel. Constant nagging and talking about babies like some moany little bitch with no ideas. And you’re shit in bed since you stopped drinking.’

Of course, we went straight to our room then and fucked, hard and porny, lots of looking. Sometimes tenderness was the way, other times you had to take it all out on each other. I felt a deep, sunless fury in him, swirling round the things he hadn’t said: the times he’d been at a bar or in company and craved a quick fix (had he always resisted?), all the times he’d sat alone in his hotel room sober and bored and unable to sleep (somehow this was my fault, why was it my fault?), the encroaching wedding with its myriad inanities. What did I have to hit him with? Guilt from the weekend; the fact that all I wanted to do was write and yet I never did when I sat down to do it; the pressure to do the next thing even though we weren’t even done with this one; my own cowardice at bringing none of this up. I got on him and went harder and then, because me coming first didn’t feel like enough, and I was determined not to give him anything that could be construed as a compliment, I pushed him out, got on my knees and held him down my throat. When I heard him about to come I pulled back. I hawked and spat on his cock. Hawked and spat again. Turned around. ‘There.’ I clenched, intensifying the grating physicality. Like chewing a lollystick, it was nicely un-nice. It was another experience, surely one of the few remaining now, that said You Are Here – ho yeah, definitely mostly
there
right now. He shuddered as he came but made no sound. The porthole window in the opposite wall was misted.

(Tyler in my head again – would she always pop up like this, for ever, wherever?
Isn’t that just the term you use when you do it with precisely the right lighting and music?
)

As we lay in bed I listened to him falling asleep, his breathing slowing and deepening, until his snores rose regularly to questioning snotters. I felt the soreness of myself and took a righteous pleasure in it. I thought about killing Jim, how I could do it with a pillow.

Some not entirely unpleasant embarrassment as he left the next morning. I was on the toilet, dispatching a dirty rag. He opened the door and leaned in to kiss me. ‘Text me when you land.’

‘Shall do.’

‘There’s money for a cab on the bedside table.’

He squinted. I squinted back. I said: ‘I’ve got a subway ticket.’

I left his money as a tip for the maid.

The plane was delayed and we sat on the runway waiting to take off. I turned my eyes from tray table to window and round again, over and over. I thought I saw Tyler standing on the scrubby grass across the tarmac. I looked back and she was wearing a werewolf mask. I looked back again and she was on all fours. I laughed and then remembered there was a man next to me. I looked at him and he was looking straight ahead but too concentratedly. How did he always end up next to the raving weirdo – on buses, planes, trains, in the cinema? I looked away and bit my lip. Tyler had gone. After half an hour they offered us a free drink and the man ordered a gin and tonic and I copied him. We took off an hour later. Every time the man ordered a drink, I ordered one – he bought me a few, too. Four doubles in, he started crying about his loveless marriage and eventually fell asleep on my shoulder. I looked out the window. The sea below was dark and blue and glittery, like just-mopped lino. I took out my notebook and held a pen lightly over it, fantasising, as I always fantasised on planes, of a sudden explosion, fire cascading down the cabin, of burning, of falling, of everything falling away. Would there not be relief in that, just for the briefest of moments, before the end? How much longer could I spend all of my time thinking,
How does this fit? How does this fit? How does this fit?
and then when clarity came – rarely, and only for a split-second – feel as though it had arrived before it set off (it was so bleeding obvious!). Was deliverance not just a trap? Something pre-ordered? Had I been too compliant with Jim? My detachment hadn’t come out of nowhere – it had hobbled and straightened and crept to a canter. How had I not noticed? Had I got some twisted kick out of becoming what someone wanted me to be? Embody someone’s desire and you feel powerful: giving them what they want; knowing how. But the emptiness that screams in when you realise you are merely a creation. Everything I was I had allowed myself to be. I was so good at beginnings, so good at beginnings. Hadn’t my writing shown me that? All those perfect false starts. Maybe beginnings were all I was good for. Maybe my life could just be a series of beginnings, and that would be fine, that would be
best
, in the end. I looked down at the table and saw I had written three words over and over down the page of my notebook.

Killing

The

Changes

I closed the notebook as we commenced our descent. The man next to me woke when the wheels juddered out, reached into his trouser pocket and twisted a silver ring back onto his finger. ‘Terribly sorry about that.’

‘No worries. I finished your drink.’

He was all admiration.

I opened the front door and heard the TV on. Tyler at home at noon on a weekday. Something was wrong.

I ran through the kitchen, down the hall, into the living room.

‘Tyler?’

She turned, her face revealing itself in classic cinematic style, millimetre by millimetre, centimetre by centimetre, millennium by millennium, until … I gasped. Her eyes were insolent but there was a carnation-sized purple bruise across the left, from brow to bag.

‘Shit! What happened?’

‘They followed us. They fucking followed us. Marie and her work-experience henchmen. They waited outside and when Nick left they knocked on. I thought it was him, I thought he’d forgotten something. And I was still fucked, you know. I shouldn’t have answered. That’s the mistake I made. Answering.’ She brought her right hand up to her nose and squished the knuckles of her first two fingers into her nostrils, grimaced, and pushed them in harder.

‘Jesus, Tyler!’

‘Don’t flip out.’ She sounded like an adenoidal robot.

I ran to my room, grabbed the bin bags I’d been packing and pulled them to the living room. ‘Get your necessaries,’ I said. ‘We’re getting out of here. Where are your car keys?’

She muted the TV. ‘What are you talking about? I’ve been here twenty-four hours on my own and I’m absolutely fine. They got what they came for. It’s done.’

‘She’s a fucking psychopath! Who knows when she’s “done”?’

Her hand dropped from her nose. ‘Lo, I’m not running. I am not afraid.’

I ran into her room, pulled her hold-all out from under the bed and started throwing clothes, shoes and underwear into it. All the toiletries in the bathroom I could see.

‘Turn the TV off,’ I said, coming back into the room. ‘I’ve got our things. Now all we need to do is ask someone to feed Zuzu tomorrow and leave my keys with them …’

She stood up. She winced as she put the weight on her feet. I dreaded to think whether she had bruises on her body. ‘No need,’ she said. ‘They took the cat.’

I fell to my knees.

‘They took
Zuzu
? Why would they do that?’

‘To break my heart, little did they know. She said they’d take care of her. I said they could kill her for all I cared.
Make a fucking stole for yourself, Marie. Cover up that turkey neck.
’

I couldn’t take it in. ‘Car keys. Where?’

‘I’ve told you I’m not running.’

‘You’re just going to wait for them to come back and kill you? Come back and kill
us
? I can’t stay here, Ty, and I don’t want to go to Jim’s, and it wouldn’t be fair on my parents – come on, just get in the car, would you?’

She staggered round the sofa and picked up a bag.

‘Save me, then, Lo. That way, you get to blow your load with the notion that you’re kind. But you’re not kind because there’s no such thing as kindness, there’s only pity and stealth.’

I didn’t care what she was saying as long as she was moving.

‘What about Jesus?’ I said, putting her arms into her jacket and pushing her towards the door. ‘And Father Christmas?’

‘Angling for fans.’

In the car, at a red light, I turned to inspect her. ‘Fuck you. And anyway, what about that time you saved
my
life?’

I’d been choking on a pear drop and she’d given me the Heimlich manoeuvre (courtesy of a Beanz coffee shop first-aid training day).

She sighed. ‘Well, it
was
my fault you were dying …’

We’d been watching a documentary about Simon Weston and she said
WOULD YOU LOOK AT THIS WHINING TORY CUNT
.

At Lancaster Services I called Jim. ‘We’re having a little holiday together, Tyler and I.’ I only thought of it then but we were already on the ring-road heading north somehow, so it made perfect sense: ‘We’re going to Edinburgh. For the festival. For inspiration.’ I almost said
Think of it as my hen do!
to bolster it but for some reason I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell him about the black eye, couldn’t tell him about Marie.

I pitched the idea of Edinburgh festival to Tyler in the car.

She shook her head. ‘Chinless drama graduates haranguing me to go see some “really cool improv” at every turn? No sirree.’

‘There’s literature,’ I said. ‘And comedy. You like comedy.’

‘I like watching comedy on TV so the people who made it can’t see me
not
laughing. Now hand me the keys. You are relieved of your duties, blessed saviour.’