Animals (3 page)

‘Sunsets and sunrises,’ said Lou, who had unsurprisingly made it down to the final cut. ‘They make romance blossom.’

‘Get me a gun,’ said Tyler. ‘I’m going to shoot the TV, then myself. No wonder people go postal in shopping malls. The populace deserve it.’

‘You’d have to get me there and then you’d find out,’ said the other girl coquettishly.

Tyler mock-vommed. ‘This piece of shit is an
assault on my soul
. Every second of it that I endure robs me of MILLENNIA. Just so you know.’

‘Oh shush,’ I said. ‘Just go with it.’

‘I can’t believe
you
enjoy this,’ she said. ‘You, with all your high-falutin’ ideals of “romance” …’

I stopped laughing. ‘This is not Romance,’ I said, pointing at the TV. ‘This is the other end of the spectrum. It’s the dregs of reality.’

Her hand shot to her eye.

‘What now?’

‘I’ve lost a contact. No, seriously.’ She blinked and rubbed at her eye.

I looked at her. ‘Well, fancy putting your lenses in today when you’ve got no moisture in you.’

‘It was more a case of not taking them out.’

‘Not to mention how old they must be.’

‘Best-before dates are for pussies.’

A few days after I’d met Tyler I was walking across town, heading home to my parents’ house, where I was living at the time. I stopped at the tram tracks at the top of Market Street when a tram tooted to indicate that it was pulling away from the stop. As I stood waiting by the track I looked up to the front of the tram and saw inside the driver’s cabin. And there, in the driving seat,
driving the tram
, was Tyler. I blinked. It was still Tyler. Driving a tram. The driver was standing behind her, grinning and waving. I waved back. It must be her dad, I thought, he must be a tram driver. But when I questioned her the next day she said:
No, I was just on the tram and I thought,
I don’t want to die not knowing what it’s like to drive a tram
– so I asked the driver and he said I could have a quick go. That’s what I call Society.

I lay in her bed later, Tyler snoring next to me, Zuzu curled between her legs. When Tyler’s phone rang I nudged her and she moaned and reached over to the bedside table.

‘Hello?’ Louder: ‘Jean? JEANNIE?’

She sat up, flicked the light on. I sat up, too. Zuzu opened one thin green eye.

‘Oh fuck! Oh fuck!’

It was a good
Oh fuck
. She was grinning. I grinned back.

‘What is it?’

Tyler looked at me. ‘A girl! Shirley.’ I held onto her arm. ‘More wine,’ she said to me and then, down the phone: ‘We’re toasting you, Jeannie, we’re toasting you all right now, you beautiful bovine bitch.’

I ran to the kitchen and swooshed a couple of glasses clean. We had a fine collection of branded beer pots and family-sized ashtrays we’d pillaged over the years. (One time Tyler had tried to steal a chair from a bar – and not a small chair either but an
armchair
. She’d got stuck in the doorway, like a dog with a bone.)

I came back with a Kronenburg half-pint and a Duval goblet, both filled with wine. Tyler was off the phone, sitting with her back against the bars of the bed’s headboard, one hand holding the bed knob, resplendent. The swirls of teenage tattoos on her upper arms were slowly greening, like algae on a shipwreck.

‘Congratulations!’

Tyler sniffed like a football rattle. ‘Jean sounded rinsed,’ she said. ‘And it’s only just begun. Give it a week and it’ll be like when she used to take meth except she won’t be able to hide away because she’ll have this
thing
to feed.’

‘
Shirley.
’

‘Imagine suddenly losing all your privacy, all your hope of self-development. You put everything on hold. Oh, the feelings, Lo!’

It was something we said often:
What to do with all the feelings.
They ambushed you sometimes. They rioted. They were legion.

‘Yes yes, just drink.’ I cheers’d her glass.

After she’d fallen asleep I took the glasses through to the kitchen, placing them quietly in the sink. The sky was dark beyond the window, starless and moonless, the city muddled with reflections in the glass. I lit up a cigarette.

Babies. I didn’t know how to feel about them. I had a recurring dream where I was walking through a room with babies sitting on the floor, regularly spaced, and I bent down to each one, took its chin in my hand and looked at its face. They stretched away in every direction, like a prism of mirrors.

I stood staring out the window and sensed a huge thing turning in the supposedly great beyond. The pull of it made me grip the sink.

Five days later I was in my room replying to emails about the wedding. As always when otherwise occupied, I wanted to be writing – a desire that rarely withstood the presence of actual writing time.
Bacon
, my novel-in-progress, was the story of a priest who fell in love with a talking pig (I could already see the movie trailer: Gene Hackman in a dog collar, the back of a pig’s head in the foreground as they desperately embraced: ‘God help me, I love you!’). I’d been halfway through the thing for a few years now and needed to crack on if I was ever going to escape the call centre. I’d reduced my hours there to the minimum but I still spent every second pondering quiet desktop suicide. The previous week I’d been losing the will to live ten minutes into my shift when my boss came over and asked whether I had flu.

‘It’s just a cold,’ I said, stoically.

He looked at the pile of congealed tissues on my desk.

‘You know, Laura, it’s best if you don’t come in when you’re infectious.’

‘I’m not infectious.’

He leaned in. ‘I’m trying to give you
a reason
.’

I looked at the whiteboard on the wall. My rating was second from the bottom in an office of sixty-three. I looked back at my boss. He was a man who enjoyed golf.

‘Noted,’ I said.

‘It’s a tough climate,’ he said. ‘We need to pull together. You should really flush those.’

I took my pile of tissues to the Ladies and threw them down the toilet, then took a piss on top of them. I stared at the fish-head hinges and drunk-fighty-octopus hook on the door. Beneath the hook, a graffiti conversation was scrawled in three different-coloured pens.

Gas gas gas the middle class!

To which someone had replied:

I put my semi in West Didsbury on this cunt being middle-class.

To which someone else had replied:

I put my semi in your fat mam.

The sooner I finished my novel, the better.

I stubbed out my cigarette and pressed send. Ping! Off the last email went, specifying breaded ham instead of honey-roast for the buffet. I felt free and proud. I located my phone and called Jim. He was in Vancouver. A long flat ring tone, then a pause, then another, then –

‘Well done!’ he said.

‘I’m wondering how I should celebrate.’

‘I land around lunchtime tomorrow, shall I see you at mine?’

In the background someone was hacking at a cello, the
Jaws
theme but faster.

‘What?’ His voice was quieter, as though he’d moved the phone away from his mouth. ‘Yes, okay.’ Then he came back at full volume. ‘Look, Laur, I’ve got to –’

‘Course. Hey, why don’t I cook for us tomorrow?’

What can I say? I was delirious with success.

‘Oh, you don’t have to. We could –’

‘No, I want to.’

Just before he went I heard the whole orchestra strike up. I tossed my phone onto the unmade bed. It stopped solid on the sheet, like a brick. I turned the router box off at the wall. I didn’t like it just being on, it made me feel located, matrixed. I had a strange relationship with the internet, avoided it most of the time. I didn’t do social networking because I didn’t trust myself, I got too
involved
. Plus, drunk and home alone it could too easily go tits-up, as Tyler had proved. She’d sunk two bottles of wine (they were half-price so buying two was right and just) and signed up to a dating website under the pseudonym ‘Vivian Fontaine’. She then proceeded to maraud round the site, sending obscene messages to random men.
I was looking for connections
– that was how she’d defended it –
you know, like normal people do on the internet
. She’d even sent one man – who, to be fair, encouraged her – a photo of herself prancing in a half-mast leotard and a werewolf mask. She eventually got into bed with her laptop, where only the irresistible coma of max-capacity drinking saved her from further disgrace. The next morning, snouting out from under her duvet at 6 a.m., she’d seen the open laptop and shrivelled. Called me.

‘LO, I’VE DONE SOMETHING BAD LIKE REALLY BAD.’

‘Calm down.’ I was at Jim’s. I got out of bed and walked into the hallway so I didn’t wake him. ‘It won’t be –’

‘It’s the worst yet. I’m in TEFL City.’

‘TEFL City’ because we called those times ‘TEFL-pondering mornings’, when your only option felt like emigration, and teaching.

‘Did you hit anyone?’

‘No.’

‘Vomit on anyone?’

‘No.’

‘You didn’t kill someone, did you?’

‘Does cyber-suicide count?’

I sighed. ‘Sit tight, I’ll be round in ten.’

With no hope of self-charming her way out of it, between the phone call and my arrival Tyler had gone back online and messaged each of the men under the guise of Vivian’s sister saying that Vivian would sadly be unable to attend any of the arranged three-ways since she’d been admitted to hospital with a nasty case of gout. The most annoying thing was she’d used
my
laptop and, thanks to the guile of direct marketing, ads for dating sites were still popping up in the sidebar of my email inbox three months later. She was holding her right hand to her nose and smelling her first two fingers the way she always did when she was scared (‘oysters and bonfires’ was how she described the smell). ‘I panicked!’ she cried. ‘Anyway,
you
had gout when you were twenty-five.’

This was true. When I’d hobbled my cartoonishly swollen left big toe into A&E the doctors had been taken aback. Super-strong anti-inflammatories were all they could give me – those and the official literature on recommended weekly units of alcohol for women. Fourteen. Seven glasses of wine. Per week. Barely enough for a vole to have a good time. But you know, they had to try. We all have to fucking
try
, don’t we.

Now whenever a dating site ad appeared by my inbox, I informed Tyler and she displayed suitable mortification. And this was
Tyler
, who was generally unshockable and certainly un-embarrassable when it came to sex. Aged ten she’d been caught masturbating in the school sickbay and the school nurse had hauled her into the headmaster’s office. ‘I apologised,’ Tyler said wearily in the re-telling, ‘but the headmaster was a joyless soul, a non-carrier of the
fuckit
gene. And it’s not as though I lied. I DID have a headache – I had a headache because I
needed to jerk off
.’ Tyler’s parents had been called into the school and her mum had defended her. You know people are really rich, like
generations
-rich, when they’re not embarrassed discussing sex in public. One of the things I admired most about Tyler’s family was their openness. They told it to each other straight. This ranged from
That dress doesn’t suit you
to
That thing you said to me yesterday made me very upset
. My family pussyfooted around, especially when it came to illness. Last autumn, my mum had answered the phone with a cheery
Hello!
and when I asked her where she was she replied
Oh, just in A&E!
in the tone you might expect someone to say
Oh, just in B&Q!
She said she’d burned her hand on the oven (even went so far as to wear a bandage when I saw her next) but it eventually transpired that my dad had been going back and forth with a bad cough they nailed down as stage-two lung cancer. You know the Black Knight in Monty Python’s
Holy Grail
, when he’s getting his arms lopped off and saying it’s just a flesh wound? That’s my family. If we end up having a family mausoleum our epitaph should be
Don’t worry about me, I’m just having a little lie-down
.

So apart from checking email, odd facts (I listed them and did them in bulk at 5 p.m.) and sometimes – when I was feeling particularly brave – my overdraft balance, I kept the wi-fi off. The book was proving hard enough without the added worry of where it might or might not fit in the world, especially when I was yanked every day into a heinous, staticky place, a grey carpeted box of lies concerning credit cards. All that got me through was telling myself I was buying as well as biding my time, a dangling carrot for most people who worked in the call centre. There were musicians, playwrights, poets, novelists – all of us detesting every second in our headsets; all of us dreading the time someone would turn round and say:
I’VE GOT MY BREAK! I’M OUT! SEE YOU LATER, LOSERS!

GCSE English class. Tuesday afternoon. Me – thirteen, ginger, unstylishly myopic – navigating my way through Yeats’ ‘When You Are Old’ with rabid intent. I loved it, loved it without knowing exactly why. Loved the words, the rhythm, the idea of someone having a ‘pilgrim soul’. Didn’t think it could be anything to do with a bitter albeit complicated man putting a hex on a girl who’d said no. (For the record I still loved it at thirty-two, experience notwithstanding.)

The teacher waited until we’d all finished reading and asked a question. ‘What do you think he means when he says “hid his face amid a crowd of stars”?’

Mrs Coan had seen countless kids like me wriggle their way up through the grammar school: first-generation middle-class with an unstable core of entitlement and parents poised at home for results; for
a better way for you, easier than I had, one with options
. I didn’t know much but I knew I had to impress. And as Pope said (Pope! Listen to me! I told you …): ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing …’.

Mrs Coan didn’t smile as she acknowledged my raised hand. A slightly exasperated tone in her voice. ‘Yes, Laura.’