Animals (27 page)

T,

They found this when they were clearing your father’s house and forwarded it to me with some other paperwork, so I’m sending it on. I haven’t opened it. It’s up to you whether you open it or not. If you want to talk about it I’m here and I love you.

X Mom

In the kitchen I put the glasses down, almost missing the work surface, and read the longer letter, dated 24th of December 2006.

Dear Tyler,

I don’t know what else to do other than write you – you won’t take my calls and then last week you threw me out of your apartment (which I have to say has deteriorated considerably in the five years since I bought it) after I had made a special trip to England to see you and your sister (I also thought it was particularly mean of you to refuse to give me Jean’s address in London and let her make a decision herself about whether she wanted to see me or not). So all I can do now is get what I want to say down on paper in the hope it might help you see things from my point of view and not be so dismissive when you don’t know the whole picture.

I know that I was a terrible father, and a terrible husband for that matter, however as a Christian I believe in second chances and while I know you girls never really took to mine or your mother’s religions, and we never forced you, I can’t help the values mine gives me now especially at this stage of my life, and what it encourages me to contemplate and pacify. I don’t expect much, just a few minutes of your time once a week or once every two weeks, to hear what you are doing with yourself and maybe a small amount of news about what it is like to be living in a different place so far away from home. I really wouldn’t expect any more but now I suppose I do expect a small something after the financial support I did not deny even for a second the last time we spoke, which was just after you arrived in England. As I believe the laws of physics clearly state, you can only get out of a thing as much as you put in, and I do believe I have put a little in recently not just with the apartment but also with the extra studies you wanted to do, so I suppose the question
you
have to ask
your
self is: will
you
give a little back?

If you will, I won’t waste your time with griping. I’ve spent enough years now knowing I kicked the whole thing away and sure there will always be moments when any person in their life looks back and feels challenged to decide whether or not they made the grade and I really never meant it to get so bad but as I say I’m not for dwelling although I will say that I never meant that bottle to hit you and that has been one of the hardest things for me to forgive myself for. There are some things you might be interested in hearing about, for example the population over in Crawford is almost down to 1000 now if you can believe it and a few months back a few boys on a school trip from the city drowned in the river up by Fort Robinson so I suppose that makes it even lower, haha! You shouldn’t laugh at these things but you’d cry otherwise – a famous poet said that and I suppose you’d know which one. Also your old horse Marshall is doing well, I take him an apple most Saturdays (they laugh at me in the store shopping for myself and a horse – tell that to your mother if you like) and there’s a girl from the Normangill place (the Fletcher place as it is now – June Fletcher is her name) who comes and takes him out during the holidays. I’m thinking of saying she can have him permanent but I suppose I wanted to check with you first that that would be alright.

Your father.

There was a phone number at the bottom of the letter.

I wondered when he’d died. I thought it had to have been around the time Jean went back to rehab. I folded the letters in half and put them away at the back of the cocktail cupboard, behind all the glasses. I rummaged around in there until I found the plastic jug we were always sick in, stained orange from microwaving beans. I carried it through to the living room.

I thought she was asleep but as I put the jug down on the table she said: ‘Don’t leave me, Lo.’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

She stayed in bed for four days. I called her every hour from work and walked back via the indoor market. I got her to eat crushed ice at first to get her system used to the idea of solids, then I peeled and mashed fruit and vegetables and gave her mugfuls of purée, which she hated. I cancelled the viewing with Julian. He sounded relieved.

I sat with her every night as she fell asleep, descending with sweating and ranting – one time about making ratatouille, another time about deadheading sunflowers. Childhood whisked in with the dreams. Memories, fabrications, her brain unpacking. I knew she’d been further than her will, grew up in an instant. Did I envy her still, lying broken in bed: her completion? The Night didn’t beckon Tyler – she summoned it, saddled it and rode it down the street. My darkness had been drafted in, was unconceived.

While she slept I stood smoking at the kitchen window, looking out. Drinking water. Popping pills. Small ones, primrose yellow, the same time every night to be sure, whatever happened, whoever – A small decision, absolute. Not for me to pass on my greed and ingratitude. And for what? Redemption? I knew I had an ego, but … I couldn’t be something I couldn’t run from, either. I was a swarm, a murder of birds, a shape-shifter, co-existing with my panics and habits and all the ways they flung me. What was it Kierkegaard said about anxiety = dizziness = an overwhelming sense of possibility?
What wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!
Anxiety is a privilege when you live with it like that, akin to the privilege of seeking mayhem. My life was full. It had a rotten apple in its mouth.

Ten minutes from the end of my shift. Two phone calls to go, three if the enquiries were straightforward. I sat big-eyed, repeating phrases, my fingers pressing on and off the same keys. I said exactly the same thing over and over again to customers who knew exactly what I was going to say. No one broke from the script. Work felt like a bad dream on a loop, one I couldn’t break from. Once a boy at the centre had asked a girl out at the end of a call (she’d lost her card in a Portaloo at a music festival and they got on so well) but even though she said yes he was being monitored for training purposes and got fired. I hoped they were still together or had managed at least to have a brief, life-affirming love affair that he could eulogise about in his darker hours and tell himself that it (life, unemployment) had all been worth it. I was shutting down but mockeries persisted in the high smell of acetone, carpet tiles below, ceiling tiles above, whiteboards like tiling on all sides, peace lilies on every other desk. An office was a parody of a bathroom.

My mobile began flashing, next to my company-issue coaster. I picked it up, answered.

‘So I’m in this new bar on Whitworth Street.’

‘You’re out?’

‘I’m fucking
rocking
, baby.’

‘Tyler, I don’t think –’

‘This city needs me. They have dishcloths for napkins in here. It’s abominable. The whole square half-mile would go to the dogs – and by that I mean the hipsters – without me around.’

‘I think you still need to rest.’

‘They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.’

Dorothy Parker. Irresistible.

‘Ha.’

‘This place is heaving with promise, they’re all revoltingly young.’

‘You must catch one for us to drink from.’

‘Come help me, why don’t you.’

I told myself I was going to monitor her. I told myself that.

She was waiting with a bottle of wine and a bag from a fancy-dress shop. She’d bought us black eyemasks and capes. We stood together in front of the mirror in the Ladies, the same red lipstick on, our hair in suave ponytails. I wasn’t nearly drunk enough.

We sank the bottle of wine, sank another, walked to a karaoke joint in Chinatown. I went up first. ‘Is That All There Is?’ – Peggy Lee. There were six people in the place including us. A quiet middle-aged couple, possibly celebrating an anniversary, sat drinking tropical-looking cocktails in one corner. A pair of teenaged boys nursed illegal pints in the other. She danced with whoever she could drag up while I sang. There was more wine, and more wine, on and on we went, as the place filled up there was suddenly a DJ somewhere and bigger gaps between the songs and more people singing and the two of us disintegrating, losing all our differences.

We sat down and Tyler sparked up a cigarette and I didn’t think anything of this until the barman was standing by the table. ‘Put the fag out, Turpin.’

‘Make me,’ Tyler said, taking another drag.

‘I just might.’

‘Do it and see what happens.’

‘What happens?’

‘You find the grave a welcome embrace after the wrath of my ju-jitsu.’

I waited to be ejected. He stood there. When she’d finished her cigarette she tossed the dimp into an empty glass. It fizzled. He picked up the glass with our other empties and walked away.

‘Fuck me. He’s so beautiful it’s
humiliating
.’

‘He’s all right.’

I felt a hot blip and put my hand down my pants instinctively, pushed a finger inside and pulled it out to see a blob of something on my fingertip. Dark blue in the neon. I held it up to show Tyler. She lifted her mask.

‘What?’ she said. ‘You didn’t think –?’

‘No. But it’s always a surprise, isn’t it? All these years, every month since I was thirteen and still it surprises me, like a season.’

The sudden physicality of myself made me weak. Tyler stood up and pulled me up by my hands. ‘Let’s dance.’

‘No, I don’t think I can. I feel all hot and dizzy.’

She pulled me onto the dance floor and started whirling me round. Everything was spinning. I broke free of her grip and went and walked to the edge of the dance floor, pressed my palm on a wall. She followed me, patted my back. ‘You okay?’

‘I need to lie down somewhere quiet. Can we go back to yours?’

She looked over to the bar. The barman was standing behind it, cleaning glasses, watching us.

‘Do you need me to come with you?’

‘No.’

‘You sure?’

‘I said so, didn’t I?’

As I turned she grabbed hold of my hand. ‘I used that flyer on purpose but I didn’t know he’d be in the pub.’

I looked at her.

When the end comes you know it’s real because it isn’t remotely cinematic. I looked round as I reached the exit. She was dancing in the middle, people closing in around her. She kept her arms in as she danced. That was the thing with Tyler. She was her own hero.

Outside the club I took off my mask and cape and threw them into the gutter. Hailed a cab. Got in. At a red light I saw two teenaged girls sitting in a shop doorway, having one of those conversations, smoking their jaws square. They had long mullety hairstyles dyed platinum and pink, brightest at the ends, glam-rock style, dyed over the same sink. As my cab pulled away I felt the smallness of myself and everyone I knew, even the city. The appalling humanity of it all. These mundane things we do to each other, these miniscule effects we mistake for epic at the time.

From the fridge door, half a bottle of wine winked back at me. I poured a glass and carried the bottle through to my room. I lay on my bed in my jacket and boots. My phone vibrated. Clearly things hadn’t gone so well with bar boy. I reached into my jacket pocket, thinking I’d turn the phone off before her pestering reached crescendo point –

It was Jim.

In Manchester. I miss you. x

I stared at the text and all I could think was that he had taken the trouble to make the kiss lower case after the full-stop.

Delete delete delete.

Telling someone you missed them was an imposition, all said and done.

Wherever you are, infinity stretches away equally in every direction. Whether you’re under someone’s fingernail or straddling Saturn, infinity stretches away from you equally in all directions.

I held on to the bed so I didn’t fall. Then I called the one place I had left to go.

We walked arm in arm along the row of empty chairs and closed curtains to a chair ready-rigged halfway down the ward.

‘Usual for me, please, love,’ my dad said to the nurse. ‘And a bag of pork scratchings.’

The nurse looked at him.
Laugh, you bitch
, I thought. She managed a smile. Heard them all before, no doubt. The padded grey chair released a crisp sigh as he reversed onto it. He was wearing a faintly striped pink shirt that did his skin tone no favours but he’d had the shirt so long – I recognised it from my childhood – I thought it might be a talisman for the day. I wondered whether it had been a present from me and Mel, and I’d forgotten (these things we treasure …). The fact he’d put a freshly ironed shirt on, that he looked
smart
, hurt.

My mum pulled the curtain round us. The nurse stood in her solid shoes and hung a pouch with a yellow warning sticker on it, DISPOSE OF PROPERLY (
I should have one of those on
me
, eh
– this time the nurse forced a laugh), on a hook next to the chair.

‘I’ll go and get some drinks,’ my mum said.

‘Pint of Guinness, please, love.’

More forced laughter. They hadn’t wanted me to come, and now my belated show of solidarity, my half-arsed support act, felt transparent under the strip-lights. The nurse held my dad’s hairy, freckled arm and inserted the needle. Previous treatments had left their marks, a line of red tracks branding his skin from wrist to elbow like the footprints of a tiny devil.

My mum walked away down the line of chairs.

‘Still furious with me,’ my dad said, nodding after her.

I sat down on a buckety visitor’s chair. Nuclear light poured through the blinds at the end of the ward, where another curtain was pulled round the last treatment chair, several metres away; respectfully distanced. It was sunny outside – something close to summer. Sometimes the weather had no idea. In the long thin room, dust hung in sun-shafts, as though the air had been suspended at a molecular level and was waiting, stunned by its own potential, wondering what to do next. The nurse stretched a tube from the pouch and slotted it into the plastic slot on the back of the needle. There was a TV up on a wall bracket, showing the news. The rover ‘Curiosity’ was about to land on Mars. The nurse stepped back from the chair, adjusted the drip. ‘There you go, Bill. Button’s there if you need me.’