Animals (7 page)

We got engaged just over a year later on New Year’s Eve, after a party at Tyler’s that we left early (she was in the process of kicking up a fuss but then someone had put ‘Buffalo Stance’ on and our departure had gone unnoticed). We sat on the rug in his lounge drinking a bottle of port that his parents had left and we were so drunk that we couldn’t remember who had asked who in the end, but it didn’t matter; it was a minor detail. We’d been talking about the future and what we both wanted, and agreed that being together for ever was The Thing. The idea of marriage suddenly felt – well, a bit crazy and dramatic, over the top really (SOLD!). We woke up on New Year’s Day and turned to each other with that heart-filleting, hungover
something-big-happened-and-is-it-okay
wariness.

Did you mean that?

Yes. Did you?

Yes.

(Phew.)

Since then things had got busy. In January we took a trip to Scarborough before his spring touring picked up. We stayed two nights in a wind-blasted B&B and spent the Saturday afternoon skimming stones down at the beach in our scarves and hats. From a distance we could have been any age. I turned from throwing a particularly good skimmer – four bounces, my dad had taught me well: keep the stone flat, like that, direct it with your first finger like you’re trying to hit the horizon and not the surface – and said to Jim, who was looking out to sea: ‘Can we always live in the city?’ The sun was low, like a bubble on a spirit level, and Jim didn’t turn round so I carried on talking to his back. ‘When we’re married, I mean. Let’s not put ourselves out to pasture. Let’s keep having adventures.’ I didn’t know where it had come from, that panic, the feeling that we were somehow closing down, reducing possibilities.

When Jim turned he was looking at me in an odd, epic way; as though he’d been looking at the sea too long and his irises had absorbed an extra element.
Infinity
is a grand word, but you know what, fuckit, sometimes only the grand ones will do. I knew that whatever was coming, it was big. If we hadn’t already been engaged, I’d have thought that he was about to propose. If Jim had been a woman, I’d have thought he was about to tell me he was pregnant. Behind him, waves broke regularly in fat little flops.

‘Laura,’ he said. ‘I’ve made a decision.’

I tensed, prepared myself. Did he not want to marry me any more? Ah, it was silly idea anyway, marriage. I’d been having my doubts, hadn’t I? We didn’t need it to prove our commitment. Tyler was right –

‘I’m giving up drinking.’

I shook my head to shake the words he’d said into place. ‘WHAT?’

‘I can’t do it any more, with work. With what I want for our future. It doesn’t … agree.’

I was so flabbergasted I couldn’t say anything else. Jim and I had had so much fun together when we were drinking. Drinking, unlike smoking (he bought a ten-pack sometimes drunk or stole mine, yep, one of
those
), was something we shared. And then, the beginning of a strange feeling, deep down inside. Hard to put your finger on. Inner space stretching, and despite the unease, my heart perversely rejoicing.
A new feeling! A new feeling at thirty-two! This is something!
I looked back to the town. Was there a pub nearby? We should really get a – Oh.

Jim took my hand. ‘Is that okay?’

I shrugged, the polite words coming on instinct. ‘Well, of course it’s okay. It’s your choice, you know.’

It was a steely sky, a steely sea, and I had that hollow feeling I always got in my gut whenever I saw the horizon or the night sky.

‘I’ve never been as good at it as you, Laur,’ he went on. ‘So I might not be your man for adventures. But I can be your rugged base.’

I kissed his hand hard and fast, it was cold as a stone and my lips burned on it. ‘You’re not rugged, I’m rugged. I’m rugged enough for two! Anyway, what makes you think that I think that all adventures have to involve drinking? Do you think I’m that shallow, that ridiculous?’

We bought bags of chips on the way back to the B&B. I’ve never been able to finish a full bag of chips so I gave most of mine to the gulls.

Psssshhhhhht.

I ducked as a jet of fine mist shot towards my face from the automatic air freshener on the medicine cabinet. I shook the remaining water off my hands and stepped to the other side of the bathroom.
Pssssssshhhhhht!
Another shot fired from a second air freshener on top of the toilet cistern.

‘Fuck!’

I crouched and shielded my eyes, peered up through the gaps between my fingers. Above me a nimbostratus of ‘Cashmere Woods’ began to precipitate.

‘All right in there?’ My dad’s voice on the landing beyond the door.

I unlocked the door, opened it. There he was in his green plaid shirt, grinning, hunched, visibly thrilled he’d heard me swear.

‘Sorry, Dad. It’s like an FBI training zone in here.’

He backed up against the wall and made his hands into a gun shape. ‘Come on, Clarice. I’ve got your back.’ The effects of the chemo were showing. His hair was thinner and ashier, the skin mottled on his cheeks, dark umbra eclipsing his eye sockets. He darted his eyes back and forth and jerked his head.

I walked ahead of him down the stairs. His downward pace was fast for a man of his age in his condition, and I wondered whether he was trying too hard, which made me think of something my mum said sometimes – partly to embarrass him and partly to endear him to us.
He follows you and Melanie round the house, you know, whenever you come home.

Home. It was and it wasn’t, any more. (Hovis Presley helped:
Wherever I Lay My Hat, That’s My Hat
.) My old bedroom had been redecorated and besides I’d only spent a few years in Middleton before moving away to Edinburgh and university. Most of my childhood memories were from the house before, where I’d lived from the age of eight to sixteen – in fact, my child-self was attached to the terrace in Crumpsall so tenaciously that a few times on my way home from the doctor’s in my mid-twenties, fever-dazed and comfort-hungry, I’d given the taxi driver directions to Crumpsall only to get halfway there and realise that I lived in the other direction entirely, as a grown-up.

Down in the hall, which reeked faintly, perennially, of mice, Jim was helping my mum put on her coat. I rotated Jim and Tyler as my date for family meals – it seemed only fair. I’d taken Tyler before I met Jim and it felt wrong for him to suddenly usurp her, and besides her mum had moved to London to help Jean so Tyler didn’t get many dinners out. I didn’t like to admit it but the meals with Jim were easier. He was golden amongst the Joyces; they hung on his every word, saw him as a bona fide exotic mystery. It was a different relationship to the one I had with his family, which had been sullied from the start. That memory! How it burrrrrrrned.

We were on the M6 on the way to his folks’ place in Birmingham when I’d felt a sudden painful and irrepressible need.

Darling
, I said,
I need you to pull into the next Services
.

But we’re nearly there.

No – I mean I REALLY need you to pull in. This isn’t desire. It is necessity.

Fifteen minutes and we’ll be there, Laur. Can you not wait?

Nnnnnnnnggggggggggggg.

I hung on against my better instincts, hunching and groaning and cursing and feeling magma shifting inside. I loosened my seatbelt and hooked it around my knees but it didn’t help. As we got close to his parents’ cul-de-sac Jim handed me his keys and I held them in my sweating hand, ready to run. When we pulled up outside the house I threw the door open and toppled out before the car had come to a halt.

Top of the stairs and first left!
Jim shouted.
They won’t be back from church yet.

I ran to the front door and fumbled the Yale key in the lock, swearing. I ran up the stairs, pulling down my pants, swearing and shaking. I dived into the bathroom and sat on the toilet, releasing a Niagara of scalding diarrhoea. When it was purged I exhaled with relief and wiped the sweat from my brow. I turned to unspool some toilet paper, only to see Jim’s dad sitting in the bath next to me, a white-knuckled flannel obscuring his nethers, the newspaper limp in his hand.

They hadn’t gone to church that day. They’d prepared an extravagant Sunday roast instead. And what an awkward occasion that was.
No gravy for me, Mrs Partington
…

‘Thanks, love,’ my mum said to Jim when her arms were in her coat. She touched her hair and I saw the mauve veins of her inner wrists bulge and flatten between her bracelets. Quiet and proud (my mum hardly ever drank but when she did it was as though every thought she’d had for the past forty years spilled out), it was only her love of outlandish costume jewellery that might direct a stranger to the Sixties fairground of her heart – the heart that had fallen for and stuck with my dad.

A copy of the
Daily Mail
sat folded on the sideboard, its masthead scowling out in Satan’s own handwriting. Mel and I – liberal upstarts that we were, politics worn as flashily as our Levi 501s and Doc Martens – had been so pleased with ourselves when we’d convinced our parents to stop buying the
Sun
. And what had they started buying instead? Oh, Universe. You and your jokes.

My mum batted non-existent dust from her shoulders and set about buttoning her coat. ‘Jim, be a love and close the Very Front Room door, would you? Give it a good slam. It’s started to stick and Bill – well, there, yes, that’s it. You are a marvel.’

The ‘Very Front Room’ was the result of nobody knowing what to do when we moved into a house with two front rooms (although crucially did this mean two TVs?), but one was at the front of the house and one was at the back, so we christened them accordingly. At the time it seemed like logic but now, like so many things that had once seemed logical, all that was left was a needling sense of the surreal. The Very Front Room was kept for special occasions like when Dad got three balls on the lottery and threw a bit of a party. There was an uncomfortable antique sofa in there, thick-veined with loosened springs, and a throttle of disintegrating bulrushes in a pure 1970s vase.

I got in the back of the car and put my seatbelt on. Jim drove us to the restaurant – a Tex-Mex place a few miles away. As we passed the Baptist church on the main road I read out the billboard, which was always comical.

‘WHAT IS MISSING FROM CH CH?

U R’

‘Puh,’ said my dad. As a child I’d questioned him – repeatedly – on his upbringing and all he’d said was:
Religion trains you to take things personally
.

Before I started at the grammar school I was buddied up with a Jewish girl called Dina to ease me into the new regime. I went round to her house with my mum in early September before term started. Our mums talked at the breakfast bar while Dina and her younger sister Danielle took me upstairs to a bright pink bedroom full of Barbie vehicles and voile fabrics. I was wearing a Garfield digital watch at the time – a cumbersome thing I adored, with a plastic Garfield-in-relief face that flipped open to reveal a liquid crystal display. Dina and her sister were admiring it when I heard myself say:
Oh, this thing … they were giving them away at our local kosher butchers
… I trailed off, let the suggestion hang there. Dina and Danielle looked at me.
You’re Jewish?!
they exclaimed. I pouted, looked around the room. After an hour or so they dropped it.

When I actually got to prep school it wasn’t by accident that I made best friends with Jessie Roberts – a tall, Poochie-fringed Catholic girl. I bought garage freesias for her mum and complimented her dad on his cooking. Eventually she said I could accompany her family to church one Sunday. They expected me to just sit there and take it in, sing the songs, kneel during the prayers, but I got so involved (rituals had me rapt) that I followed them up to take communion. I saw Jessie’s dad glance at me curiously from where he stood further up the queue. I finally gave the game away when I said
Thanks
to the priest instead of
Amen
, the host melting helplessly on my tongue like a very thin ice cream wafer soaked in Calpol. The priest looked to Jessie’s dad, who shrugged and then glared at me. They didn’t invite me round again. I seethed, silently, about it. I had a
right
to be there, didn’t I? MY FATHER WAS AN ALTAR BOY. And so it was my dad I took it out on, making excuses to go up to my room straight after dinner. He won me round with fishing trips, Sunday drives, trips into town to see the retired satellite, a glinting blue drum of circuits, at the Science and Industry Museum. What else did I try? I had a friend who was a Methodist (the church hall was dull; the nativity was lively, but I abandoned my faith when I was told off by the minister for wearing earrings in the shape of a cross – a bizarre humiliation). Another friend was a nerdy Quaker, and made a convincing case for how to be religious and scientific at the same time, but her pervy uncle put me off the meetings. Another friend was Muslim (I over-appraised the self-discipline of fasting, I was dismissed as a creepy little voyeur). In GCSE Maths I sat opposite a big-eyed Sikh girl who I was obsessed with but never plucked up the courage to talk to. I realised what the awful feeling was when Rajveer asked everyone else in the maths group to go and watch
Batman Returns
for her birthday: God was just another party I hadn’t been invited to.

At the restaurant, Mel and her boyfriend Julian were waiting for us in the foyer. Mel waved when she saw me. Julian stood with his hands in his trouser pockets. Melanie, two years older than me, was still in many ways my idol. I always thought I’d catch up height- and beauty-wise, but never did. That’s not false modesty; it’s irrefutable fact. I was always able to live with it because: a) I loved my sister; b) I wasn’t that superficial most of the time,
most of the time
; and c) Julian was The Most Boring Man On Earth. He wasn’t unkind (or we’d have had him killed), but I’d never felt so genetically alien to my sibling as when Julian had come round to the house for the first time and spent three hours telling my dad (who didn’t have a pot to piss in after forty years’ window-cleaning) about his new foray into property development and why now was the time to BTL. My dad and I had briefly rendezvous’d in the kitchen for a large whisky, and neither of us had felt the need to speak. But Melanie loved Julian and we had to give her credit for her choices – after all, she
was
thirty-four. So I stopped appealing to her with my eyes whenever he launched into a tirade about one of his many problematic tenants (they never sounded particularly unreasonable in their requests to me as a lifelong renter) but I couldn’t help but wonder about her private happiness. I mean, what was he like in bed? If he wasn’t forthcoming with boiler repairs then it didn’t bode well for cunnilingus.