Animals by Emma Jane Unsworth Read Free Book Online Page A

washed the holy trinity. I shaved my armpits. The hair on my legs was downy, mostly invisible; worse when meddled with. I shaved it occasionally in summer when my own treacherous aesthetics meant I couldn’t go tightless otherwise. Tyler – coarser, darker – kept hers in honour of feminist historian Janet Fraser:
All that time I save in body hair removal I devote to revolution
. I teased her about it whenever I caught her coming out of the bathroom.
    How much revolution this time?
    Oh, heaps. There’s a LOT of blood …
    I got out of the bath, pink and quivering, and hobbled to the clothes I’d taken off, lying in the middle of the floor. I didn’t keep clothes at Jim’s as such, just the odd thing. A black vest, greying with age. A pair of thermal leggings. A silver lamé thong Tyler had bought me as a joke (
That, my friend,
is just a yeast infection waiting to happen
…).
    My mobile rang. Where was it, where was it? I ran into the hall and tipped the contents of my bag onto the floor – running out of time now, that ten-ring emotional crescendo before the maddening voicemail tag-team that would ensue – saw the phone, grabbed it, and answered.
    ‘I can’t feel my legs, Keyser.’
    ‘I’m not quite dead. I’m just very badly burned.’
    Film quotes. Self-charming standards. The dream-house was our helpless Hotel California.
    ‘I thought you were going to be Jim.’
    ‘Sorry to disappoint you.’ She sounded like she was lying down, her voice flat and gargly.
    ‘Actually, it’s a relief to hear you,’ I said. ‘Mastering meaningful speech is next up on my list of Things to Achieve Today. I’m not quite ready for Jim but I can just blart vowel-sounds at you and it’s okay.’
    ‘It’s more than okay. I understand your blarting perfectly.’
    ‘You’re the world’s leading expert in the field of my blarting.’
    She inhaled and sighed. ‘You staying there today, then?’
    ‘Jim’s back shortly – you know that.’
    ‘Ah.’ She sniffed. ‘Pulling rank, is he?’
    ‘It’s not like that, I just need to get things straight. Myself, mainly. I’m practically brain-dead. Jim might as well be coming home to someone on life support – hey, at least he might have some sympathy for me that way …’
    ‘Listen, just don’t apologise, whatever you do. That only feeds the fire. I made the mistake of reading the news earlier. You know what the biggest problem is right now with Western society?’
    ‘Our lack of real commitment to addressing climate change?’
    ‘Our pornographic appetite for contrition. You have to be sorry for everything, all the time. Are you
sorry
you ate all those burgers? Are you
sorry
you smoked all those cigarettes? Are you
sorry
you said that dumb thing online? It’s not morality, it’s just another fix, another kind of greed: give me all your sorry, I’m so hungry for sorry. But sorry changes nothing. There are more progressive motivations. When you go out and tear the night a new hole you do it for a reason, even if that reason is taking a vacation from Reason.’
    ‘Yeesh, Tyler, I really hate that expression.’
    ‘Sorry – I forgot, you have previous.’
    ‘Hey, they were only internal and very small. I was eating too much bread.’
    The curry was a predictable disaster. I ruined everything I cooked because of my inherent lack of cruise control. I had to remind myself to stand by pans.
You are cooking. Concentrate. Stir.
When I heard the key in the lock I ran to the door, hurling myself into his arms before he’d put his bags down.
    ‘Whoa,’ he said. His eyes were tight and sunken with travel: the red-eye flight from JFK and a connection at Heathrow. I held his face, kissed him hard. He tasted of mint and coffee. He smelled of plastic and his own delicious sweat. I drew back and we stood there for a minute taking each other in, the fear-excitement that there might have been a change in the space of a week; the slow-swell satisfaction-disappointment in