Animals (8 page)

‘Bill! Heather!’ Julian stepped forward and shook hands with my dad then hugged my mum. He shook hands with Jim next, leaving me until last given that I was a deplorable little freeloading wastrel who was transferring her debts from her parents to her partner (or was I being paranoid?).

I shook his hand and hugged Melanie. She smelled of too much Chanel, like always. ‘I saw about Jean on Facebook,’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Tyler’s thrilled.’

Mel smirked. ‘I wouldn’t have thought she’d be thrilled about any baby – what is it she calls them?
Human grubs
?’

Jim snickered.

‘Don’t start,’ I said.

‘Start what?’ Mel’s nails were a shiny maroon colour and she had one of those bras on where you weren’t supposed to be able to see the clear plastic strap but you could.

‘The Tyler-bashing.’

‘You look great, Jim,’ Mel said, hugging him. ‘
Great
.’

‘Nearly three months now.’

‘It’s really agreeing with you.’

I looked at Jim. He did look good but then he always looked good. I wondered whether the vein on my face was visible. I looked around the restaurant and saw my dad looking around, too. He jerked his head towards the bar and I nodded and went over. We ordered a Guinness and a red wine, followed by the other drinks in order of interestingness: half a lager, an orange juice, a diet coke, a lime and soda. The Guinness swirled stormily on the drip-tray.

‘Know what I’ve been thinking?’ he said.

The barmaid put our drinks on the bar. My dad picked up his pint. His fingers flickered around the glass, tightened, loosened, flickered again. He spoke in little fanfares, swinging his head from side to side, posing and gazing for a moment before carrying on. Children and animals flocked to him. How many times had he caught something in the old pond behind our estate and held the net up to show us.
Look here, girls! Hard to believe that within this tiny space is a beating heart, a circulatory system, a rapidly sparking brain
… Me and Mel standing there, leering in our anoraks. He was why I picked stranded worms off the pavement and threw them into gardens even when I was on my way out. He was why I couldn’t kill wasps even though I hated them. He was why I looked for, and loved, the creatures in people. They were always there. As family legend went, it was my dad who’d got the first proper grin out of me. I was six months old; he was thirty. We were sitting at the dining table. Way he told it, I was sliding soggy Wotsits around the plastic tray of my highchair, he was eating chops and gravy. He stopped eating for a minute and angled his head to one side to match the angle of mine. Stayed that way until I noticed. He said he saw it dawn on me that there was no sensible reason for him to be doing that – so what then? Something else … Something … Something … Searching … Then, CRACKLE. A spark by the black obelisk. Delight. So it was his fault, you see, when I was at the blaming stage of my existentials. He didn’t fuck me up; he funned me up. Despite all the years my mum smashed loaded dinner plates onto the back patio; despite all the nights he didn’t come home because he didn’t want the men he owed money to following him; despite the countless bookies’ I’d stood outside, kicking the toes of my trainers in the cracks in the pavement, desperate,
desperate
to see what was beyond the
No Under-18s
sign and the postered-out windows. Despite his selling atheism to me as a simple truth. He was forever the man who let me balance, buttocks tensing, on the back wheel-arch of his window-cleaning van as he drove down Jutland Street (the steepest street in Manchester) at a friction-hot forty-five. He’d taught me to read: a double-edged sword. I wanted to learn to read so badly. Learned quickly. But then came the frustration at not being able to look at words without understanding them. I tried to glance at road signs and away, but it was always too late: to see words was to understand them. I sensed a loss there. (Later, Emily Dickinson would confirm it:
Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words
…). Meaning was everywhere. And once you started with meaning, well, you got a taste for it.

In Los Nachos, Guinness in hand, my dad said: ‘Lately I’ve had this feeling that as a species we’re on the brink of something; something that redefines everything. Like when they discovered the world was round instead of flat.’

‘They’re closing in on the God particle …’

He grimaced. ‘The
Higgs boson
, you mean. Maybe it’s that at the back of my mind. Although it doesn’t feel that specific, it’s more a general feeling of …’

‘Vertigo?’

He looked at me. Swigged his pint and grimaced again. Mel said he had mouth ulcers. ‘Yes.’

We ferried the drinks to the rest of them and then went back over to the bar, just the two of us. I said: ‘This brink, Dad. Don’t you think every generation has thought the same thing?’

He cleared his throat. Sipped his drink and swallowed hard. ‘Laura, I’ve been alive for the equivalent of two and half generations now and this is the first time I’ve felt it.’

I did think he was being sincere even though the harder part of me thought:
Dad, you’re shit-scared, that’s all this renaissance talk is. You need to feel something mind-blowing might happen before … Before the curtain’s pulled back and you see the man with the megaphone. Or worse still: the great big Fuck All that’s there, waiting, just behind the Irony.

And of course I’d heard him, hadn’t I. At his outer limits. Hedging his bets. It was six months since he’d found out (five months since he’d told me and Mel, on Mum’s insistence, two days before his operation).

A grey day. The world in ugly molecular detail. Stones in the driveway. Dust in the air of the house. I went upstairs to use the bathroom while Mum and Mel sat downstairs not drinking tea out of matching floral mugs. Mel kept saying,
I can’t believe we couldn’t tell
– as though our ignorance was more horrifying for her than the fact of the cancer itself. I heard him as I got near to the bathroom, whispering at first and then a shout breaking through on certain syllables. At first I thought he was on the phone. I crept closer.

You cunt. You fucking cunt. You waited until I’d retired, didn’t you?

I stood rigid on the landing, knowing how mortified he’d be to know I’d heard him.

Just give me ten more years. Ten more years and then you can do what the fuck you want with me.

We sat down to eat. I ordered a rare steak and a salad and another glass of wine. The waiter took my dad’s order next.

‘I’ll have the beef fajitas.’

‘No, he won’t,’ said my mum.

‘Yes, I will.’

‘Four more months and you can eat all the red meat you want, that’s what Dr Grayling said. Now behave.’

The waiter looked to Mel. ‘Salmon, please,’ she said.

My dad leaned towards me. ‘I had a bacon sandwich yesterday. Slipped through me like a greased otter.’

‘Bill!’

He turned to my mum. ‘I need iron, woman!’

‘Have some greens!’

‘I’m not a pet bleeding rabbit.’

‘Oh, just let him have the fajitas, Mum,’ I said.

She looked at me. ‘You haven’t been up with him all night when he can’t sleep with cramps. You haven’t washed your bedding five times in twenty-four hours. Mel saw what it was like when she stayed …’

My dad looked at me. The blotches on his cheeks had joined up with rage. ‘Grayling said he’d never seen someone hold on to so much hair. I walked six miles on Sunday without stopping.’ I nodded. ‘All right, then. I’ll have the grilled chicken and a side salad. With blue cheese dressing.’

My mum waited until the waitress had gone and turned to me. ‘So where are you up to with everything?’

Jim produced a list and a pen from his pocket.

‘What’s that?’ I said.

‘My list.’

‘You have a
list
?’

‘I find lists very calming,’ said Mel.

‘I’ll tell you one that isn’t calming,’ Jim said. ‘The guest list. We’ve been trying to keep the numbers down but every person raises a few others. It’s like that mythical beast where you chop a head off and two others sprout up in its place.’

‘Just tell them all no,’ said Julian. ‘If we get married it’ll be just the two of us on a beach. I’m not paying for every piss-taker I’ve ever met to come fill their boots.’ He sat straight and breathed in bullishly through his nose, inflating his lungs to full capacity. It was a way of breathing that said
More Oxygen For Me
.

I looked at Mel. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t need to.

‘I’ve nearly finished your invites,’ my mum said. ‘And I’ve bought the silk flowers for the table decorations.’

Jim crossed something out on his list.

‘Least I can do,’ my mum said.

Jim’s parents were paying for the wedding.

My mum raised a finger, reached her other hand down under the table and brought out a magazine. ‘And I got this for you, Laura.’ I looked down.
Bride Be Lovely
. The actor-bride on the front, with her stony whited eyes and rictus grin, looked as though she had been saying BE LOVELY BE LOVELY to herself in the mirror through gritted teeth while getting ready.

‘Thanks, Mum.’

Mel turned to me. ‘Have you picked a dress yet?’

‘I’m going shopping with Tyler at the weekend.’

Julian snorted. He’d first met Tyler at my dad’s sixieth. I could still see his face as he watched her, off her tits on Prosecco, moonwalking across the dance floor to ‘Moves Like Jagger’, shrugging disingenuously.
You know what his problem is?
Tyler said whenever his name came up.
Too much fucking hair gel.

‘Where are you going to look?’ asked my mum.

‘Apparently there’s some kind of bridal village in Cheshire,’ I said. ‘Tyler’s driving me there.’

‘Does Tyler
drive
?’

‘You know she does.’

‘Well, goodness knows what you’ll end up with if you’re going with that rum bugger,’ said my dad. This was how my dad referred to Tyler –
that rum bugger
– with more than a hint of admiration. Unlike the rest of them, my dad liked Tyler because he knew a grifter when he met one and couldn’t help but be enthralled when she wrinkled her nose and told him to
Get lost
and tell her another.

The last time I’d brought Tyler to a family meal she’d gone to the toilet and come back and sat on my dad’s knee and started telling the whole table about how she’d stood on a chair in the coffee shop that day and recited
Beowulf
(Medieval Literature MA; she’d got a distinction). She said it had gone down well. I wanted her to shut up – or maybe it was because she was perched on my father’s lap and it was making me queasy. I jerked my head, indicating she should get back in her own seat. She did. Only when the mains arrived and I saw her discreetly slide a cod fillet into her lap and wrap it in her napkin, unable to eat it – flinching as the hot fish burned her thin-trousered thighs – did I understand the real reason behind her sudden eruption of intimacy. Zero appetite. Conversation ramped up to eleven. Busted.

‘So we need to plan a date for a rehearsal sometime in August,’ said Jim, pen hovering.

‘Second half of the month’s best for us,’ said my mum. ‘Last chemo session’s on the twelfth.’

My dad was supposed to be giving me away.

‘Great. But see how you feel nearer the time, Bill,’ said Jim.

‘I’ll be fine, pal, don’t you worry. You just make sure
you’re
around.’

When we got back to Jim’s I went to the bathroom. As I sat on the toilet I heard him laugh. Rushed wiping, flushing, not wanting to miss out.

He was sitting on the sofa, the bridal magazine unfurled across his lap. He looked up. ‘Blitz those bingo wings and be strapless without shame! What a bizarre choice of word that is. Shame.’

‘Well, what could be more shameful than flabby upper arms? I know. These things offer no perspective. They should do a feature on what to do when you’ve fucked the best man or spunked the flower money on ketamine.’

Jim looked at me.

‘I haven’t done either of those things,’ I said. ‘I mean, you haven’t even
got
a best man …’

He looked at the magazine. I sat down next him to hunt for more funnies. I thought,
How nice it would be to crack open a bottle of wine now and drink it together, getting merry and mocking the ridiculousness.
I felt a pang remembering how much we used to dick about together. The time we dressed up as Paula Yates and John Leslie for a Dead Celebrities party. The time we put on too much pink lipstick in Pere Lachaise cemetery and kissed the marble marker of Oscar Wilde’s grave. The time we swam in a loch at lunchtime and had sex beneath a war memorial, causing a group of hikers to call the police. The time we did an impromptu ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’ at a jazz bar and the manager asked if we’d consider being the house band. The time he held my knife. The time I wore his shoes. The time we danced – like, didn’t stop, like constant, deadly dancing – for six hours at a trance festival in Germany; him mostly ballet, me mostly zumba. The times we talked all night, all night – grasping for those ‘meaningful’ conversations (I always meant Every Word). The time I christened him ‘Poirot’ after he drank so much brandy he pinballed along the walls of his flat towards the bathroom – me staggering behind and buffering him when I could – and bellowed several hearty blasts of puke into the sink, the shower cubicle, and finally, finally, the toilet. As I started to mop up with the bathmat he spun towards me, a thin vomit moustache on his top lip, and said: ‘AND WHERE WERE YOO WHEN ALL THIS WES ’EPPENING?’ As he said the word ‘THIS’ he twirled his finger round the outskirts of his face. I had to laugh because his vom-tash and accent (warped by booze-dulled enunciation) combined to give him the air of the Belgian detective. Also, a reckoning there: a responsibility to each other for the state we were in. For the states we got in. Together or apart. A vow of sorts.

Good times.

A few days later I was sitting out in the garden ignoring my phone (my mum, ringing to ask about envelopes, the tentative voicemail revealed) when Tyler came tearing round the side of the block. She’d been out all night.