When I Saw the Animal

by Cohen, Bernard;

  ‘That wasn’t very nice of you,’ I said. ‘You’ve upset him.’

  ‘Ha! It’s always nice to introduce a little honest intercourse here and there.’

  ‘No. It’s not always nice at all. Let’s just go. I’m going,’ I told her. ‘You coming with me?’

  ‘We’ll have to agree to disagree on this. I’m not finished eating yet,’ she said, picking up her fork and prodding a single tine half-heartedly at the lamb.

  ‘You haven’t started.’

  I hadn’t moved either. We had one car parked outside and a hundred and twenty miles to our destination. I could have left her there, abandoned with nothing to sustain her but coloured cornflour; or I could have dropped the keys on the table, stormed out and caught a train to somewhere, picturing myself with the cold glass of the train windows and the stink of steel friction in the carriage, an olfactory undertone to the cigarette smoke. I could have ended our marriage there and then, a thought which occasionally recurred during our years together after that moment. If only I had left her back then, in that Chinese restaurant, what a life I would have lived! But at that moment I did not have the foresight or the purposefulness and I did not move.

  Nobody ate.

  Peter returned with a thin perspiring man in a stained white apron.

  ‘This is Alfred,’ said Peter. ‘You tell him what you want. He’s the boss.’

  ‘He tells me you’re not happy,’ said Alfred. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘It’s all okay,’ I said (diner-qua-diner).

  ‘Look at this lamb,’ said my wife, sawing rapidly and ineffectively at it with the side of her spoon. ‘Very tough.’

  ‘Bring the lady a knife,’ said Alfred, as though he were compelled to speak commandingly. Peter, who had been half-hovering, half-hiding behind Alfred, looked relieved to be sent away from us again. He disappeared back into the kitchen.

  ‘And look at him,’ she said, pointing at me with her spoon tip. ‘He’s my husband, you know, and just look at him.’

  I feared she would say more, describe the shame I brought to her family or list my various failures and shortcomings, but Alfred didn’t give her the chance.

  ‘He, I cannot help you with,’ he said.

  A guest at the next table chose that moment to wave his own spoon, ‘Excuse me, excuse me. When you have a moment, mate. This soup is not hot.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have ordered vichyssoise, old-timer,’ commented my wife for my benefit, sotto voce. After her non-specific venting about me to Alfred, my wife seemed to settle into a quieter bitterness. The man and woman at the other table were not in fact old. They were about our age, and my wife must have forgotten that we had also aged. Alfred had taken up one of the soup bowls and was holding it with both hands cupped, presumably to assess its temperature.

  Peter meanwhile was negotiating unsuccessfully with the newcomers. The two children had already crossed the room once more and stood at the door.

  ‘Let’s go, let’s go,’ called the larger of the two, who might have been six or seven. The smaller one, who was at most three years old, turned it into a chant, ‘Le-et’s go! Le-et’s go,’ until the father pulled open the door with some more tinkling and an exaggerated apologetic wave, and they were gone.

  Alfred was still holding the small soup bowl. I turned halfway around to look at the neighbours’ meals. The soup must have been a side dish, as there was also a plate in front of each of them and a tub of rice. They had no bread and butter. Had they asked for authentic food? If so, it looked disappointing. The meals the couple weren’t eating were something like prawns with carrots and beans for her and, for him, a brown gelatinous gloop that I took to be beef with black bean sauce. They had been given both western cutlery and chopsticks.

  The woman was holding a single chopstick. I must have fixed on this more intently than I was aware of, for she stopped picking at a carrot with it and stared straight back at me.

  ‘Why don’t you take a damned photograph. It’ll last longer,’ she muttered.

  ‘No damned camera,’ I said.

  ‘Shhh,’ said my wife, which was a bit rich considering her contribution to our enjoyment of the evening up to that point.

  ‘Too late,’ I told her. The man stood up. He was about my height though perhaps chunkier, broad in that manner which makes it difficult to tell whether he was strong or just fat.

  ‘Listen here,’ he commenced, wagging a thick finger in my direction.

  ‘Siddown, boofhead,’ I said.

  ‘Please,’ said Alfred. ‘Gentlemen.’

  ‘You keep a civil tongue, mate. I won’t have you talking to my wife,’ the other man grumbled. His posture was threatening to bring him forward, but he stayed where he stood and, after a further two or three seconds of gesturing, he did as I’d suggested.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Alfred. If anything, he was even sweatier than he had been, positively diaphoretic.

  ‘What a pair of dickheads,’ said my wife.

  ‘Yep,’ said the carrot-eater.

  ‘You’re no better,’ said my wife. ‘You actually started it.’

  I estimated the number of additional friends she would make by the end of our meal at zero. I did not estimate the length of the meal.

  Carrot-eater swore. My wife gave three claps of applause.

  ‘Listen,’ said Alfred. ‘You must stop these bad manners or you must leave.’

  ‘Bad manners is the only aspect of this place keeping us here. Otherwise the attractions are pretty limited,’ said Carrot-eater. I laughed for the first time that evening.

  Alfred scowled briefly, but controlled his expression and switched to a concerned smile.

  Peter returned with a knife for my wife. He crossed to the family’s abandoned table and removed the tablecloth, making himself very, very busy away from my wife’s potential speeches. The four plates of food sat untouched in their places, looking less and less like the photographs in the restaurant window. The only reason my wife stayed put was that I had suggested leaving. Perhaps the other couple stayed so as not to appear to yield the restaurant to us. Interesting how Anglos think of the Chinese as being the ones obsessed with losing face. For a moment I considered explaining this to all present.

  ‘I will bring you new soup,’ Alfred offered the other couple and, turning to us, still with his fixed smile, ‘but you, I won’t offer you anything, the way you make trouble for everyone. You stay or you go, it’s up to you, but no more arguing.’

  He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, inelegantly took up the soup bowls and exited behind the curtain.

  ‘I wasn’t clear on that. Did that include arguing with each other?’ I asked my wife.

  ‘Scene two,’ said my wife. ‘Later the same evening in the same bloody restaurant. All are silent.’

  ‘Scene three,’ I said, ‘in which someone spills sweet and sour sauce and someone else cleans it up.’

  ‘Shut up, will you,’ said Carrot, a propos, as they say, of nothing. Her nuggety husband glared at me, ready to leap to her defence in case I might be tempted to respond.

  ‘You see that?’ I said to my wife. ‘You see that? That’s a solid relationship.’

  ‘Just ignore them,’ said Nugget, taking up his chopsticks. I realised he was no more skilled with chopsticks than I was: he attempted to pick up a bean but it dropped onto the tablecloth.

  My wife waggled her head childishly and repeated, ‘Just ignore them.’

  ‘Why didn’t we get chopsticks?’ I whispered.

  ‘And don’t whisper.’

  Nugget gave up on the chopsticks and folded his arms. Alfred, now luminescent with dampness, returned with two soup bowls. The couple across the room were attempting to attract Alfred’s attention: their food had not yet arrived. Each had an arm in the air. Alfred set down the soup on Carrot and Nugget’s table, where
the bowls sat steaming and untouched. After an interminable pause, the steam ceased. Peter peered out from the kitchen every now and then, in case something had changed. Perhaps he was hoping the restaurant would have emptied. We stayed, my then wife and I, preparing to sleep, to lay down our heads amidst the dishes and cutlery, our neighbours in their moods, the lace curtains against the front window shifting with each inexplicable draught.

  It’s Not That

  It’s not that we had a choice about the point of entry, as every grumpy kid is bound to tell every grumpy parent. Thanks Mum, kind of thanks Dad, said a teenager in a teenaged fashion. Teenaged fashion meaning: grunting and sarcasto. Content meaning: as if.

  It’s not that she thought her life was dynamic and that the lives of others should be static, or that it followed from her sense of others in the world that those others would stay where she left them until she returned. Ha! Good luck with that idea, even if she had thought it. It’s not that he was at all judgemental, not nearly as much as many are. He considered his life in the same way as she did or didn’t consider hers, that he was the dynamo and that others were furniture. This, though, was hardly their primary site of conflictual agreement.

  It’s not that one should be narrating stories in such a manner. He said and she thought. She said and he thought. Said and said, thought and thought. Blue shift on approach. Red shift on reproach. It’s annoying to have to guess who the characters are, complained Georgina. And where, and stuff like that. Just give them all names and set it maybe in a city. Nyeeeeeeowwww, dopplered a kid.

  What’s your name, kid? enquired a passerby.

  None of your beeswax, said the kid.

  It’s not that people don’t have the right to decide what they do or don’t think about, is it? Think about it, said my mum. No, said the kid (me). I want you to have a good long think about what you did, said an adult. I already thought about it really fast, said a different kid. Some words were on a billboard and some others on a door. And so on. What’s your point, said the teenager. You want me to grow up and be an arsehole and get divorced like all adults?

  It’s not that they all lose their tempers in different ways, shouters and seethers, broadcasters and sulkers, pop-eyes and pouters and shakers and souses. Don’t forget the receivers, said a radio. Post-conflict ratio of insomniacs to hibernators is not known, said a policy wonk with a policy wink, and that really set them off.

  It’s not that half a billion people want to have pointless arguments with people they don’t know about ideas they don’t understand, is it? It’s not that, at a certain moment, a star literally blinked out. (Literally, someone must have said or else the word wouldn’t have landed right here on the page.) If stars are infinite in number, it makes no theoretical difference to the amount of light in the universe if one twinkles itself to extinction. Otherwise, it makes some. If the extinguishment had occurred in your part of infinity, you would have noticed the diminution, commented someone (not a meteorologist). John, if that was the character’s name, cried. About something other than stars. Like, for instance, arguments that may have some point.

  It’s not that John was hoping someone would place a hand on his shoulder and squeeze. Tiny nerves and capillaries did their things if that happened. He patted at the hand. The hand squeezed. In retrospect, he reconsidered what his hopes of a someone might have been. The hand stayed for a while, and perhaps wasn’t sure how to let go.

  It’s not that characters died in every story Emilia read, and that this caused her despair to grow year by year, so that she had taken it upon herself to save people wherever she sensed grief. Some of the old men on the street just wanted the money, though some also wanted conversation. I haven’t been to the movies for eight years, said perhaps Philip or Dilip, but of course that’s not why I want fourteen or sixteen dollars. Why is he even there in a sleeping bag, said a kid (different kid). Think about it, said Emilia, more to herself.

  It’s not that if you were my ex-husband I would try not to shout at you and slam doors every time you came by to collect the kid. It’s not that the older I become the more inclined I am to say what I think, to tell the truth, to let diplomacy hit the concrete and shatter into little mannerisms, to fail to account for the feelings you endlessly explain to me. They were trying to nod slowly, but they nodded at the normal pace. You have no idea what normal is, accused a teenager who had not seen daylight in like forever.

  It’s not that he was not capricious on occasion. It’s not that she was afraid of superficiality. It’s not that he wasn’t who he said he wasn’t. It’s not that either of them was susceptible to vengeful impulses. Or not only that. Let me tell you who I am and how I’d like to be treated, said a voice. Someone was shouting something which sounded from where she stood like something else. That’s too unhelpful, said Georgina’s friend, in the comments. The fuck would you know, said several other commenters. Bitch.

  It’s not that materialism is a new phenomenon. Things were once made from stone, which in general meant they were extremely durable, proponed Alex. People liked having those things, in all likelihood, though many were not very transportable. You can’t say ‘in all likelihood’ as an unsupported filler, said a kid (prodigious) who wasn’t there. She and he thought different things in relation to the same stimulus, but only discovered this later when they had to converse. It’s not that thinking was the problem. Should you define who Alex is? queried an editor in a margin note.

  It’s not that one can finesse contentment. Various people calling out ‘Don’t even try’ and ‘Don’t risk it’ and ‘Oh my goodness’. (People in this audience are as polite as can be, considering all the heckling.) John, feeling encouraged, has by now stopped crying. No one has judged him except for one professional in a small room. Happy now? said a narrator to another implied character, who shook her head and pouted like a selfie. It’s not that probability couldn’t apply, she said, but that it doesn’t apply. All the intellectuals made jokes which we all got, including me.

  It’s not that anyone reads anymore, not in the immersed manner of the good old days, said someone of a certain type. Georgina’s friend went apoplectic in the comments. All of the youths went feral, once per generation. The leadership went AWOL. I went already, whined a little kid. I went like blam, lied a teenager with gunfingers. Considering everything, that went as well as could be expected. Unexpected, corrected one of the parties to the dispute, went as well as could be unexpected. Time we went back to the main story, said a kid. Whatever that’s supposed to mean, went one of the teenagers from before the story began.

  It’s not that people grow apart, said a man on TV, because people are not that much like forks in trees. A bunch of people I don’t know were nodding. The kid had grown, not really taller or wider, but kind of grown to suit the house. Gothic or colonial? joked the relative who makes those jokes. Obviously the kid was mopey, being a kid. She said a whole bunch of stuff that she’d been saving up since March, just stopped biting her lip and released it all at once. Had he said something to provoke or even to provide an opening? He’d been Mr Low Profile around the house and Mr Projectile in his mind. That’s what point of view is all about, replied Georgina to her friend. I don’t know, said her friend for the first time, because up till then she’d always known everything. It would be better if there were maybe three or four kids, she said, by way of recovery.

  It’s not that there was a moment when you could or couldn’t say goodbye. He had something wrong with his ear. She had exams. The kid was filling more and more of the house, but not because of growing. Maybe there was another kid as well, a bit smaller but similar looks, so that two or three rooms were always kid-occupied. Plus a teenager overflowing with atmospherics. It’s not that that cleaved them together or apart. It’s not that John pre-enacted what was about to happen with the two of them. It’s not that there was a deadline for everything except goodbye. It’s not that everything kind of blurred into their li
ves. The blurriness somehow seemed to come out of their eyes.

  It’s not that endings are so distinguishable from beginnings. It’s not that we are snakes following or swallowing our tails or tales. It’s not that cyclical and circular mean the same. Everyone needs to know what state they find themselves in, psychocorporeally and geographically, generalised the well-defended Chris, whom I don’t remember meeting. I don’t know how I feel, even when I reflect very deeply or at length on myself, said a vessel or vehicle. The kid grew a bit more. The other kid or kids, probably as well, but no evidence. True that someone or other was tired, more tired than usual, but it isn’t that anyone was worn down. It’s not that.

  It’s something else.

  The Tin Can Story

  My brother rang me the other day as I was driving across town. He had just moved house; I figured perhaps he was about to ask me to dinner, which would in ordinary circumstances have been a rare occurrence, and he did offer an invitation of sorts. He wanted to know whether, seeing as how I didn’t have a proper job, I would wait there the following morning. Some kind of issue with the pipes needed attending to, and the plumber was due at 9.30.

  Thanks very much. I could have pointed out that having a range of freelance engagements was actually a job, and that I was frequently extremely productive. No doubt he would have expressed agreement and denied that he had implied anything other than that I might be free for an hour or two on a particular morning. Had he said I was unproductive? Had he stated that regular employment hours were preferable to occasional paid engagements? He knew that I was happy with my choice of employment lifestyle.

  In return I could have noted to my brother that every conversation with him had embedded within it some kind of a reminder of his earning capacity compared with mine – nonsense, didn’t I recognise that he had a senior role and it went without saying that he would be appropriately rewarded just as my work had its own rewards – but as usual I said nothing of the sort, agreed to his request and undertook to be at his house by 9.15 at the latest so as to make sure I would be there on time because plumbers don’t wait around if you’re late, and their time is valuable. Surely I wasn’t over-reading the implication in this about my own time? He repeated the address, which he was disappointed to hear I hadn’t remembered from the real estate link he’d sent seven weeks earlier. I had to hang up any moment, I told him. The connection was not so good as I was driving through the city and had to go into a tightly scheduled meeting very, very soon, as soon as I had found an unmetered parking spot, and there were many tall buildings and overhead wires.