Animal Lovers

by Rob Palk

  ‘Fuck, but I needed that,’ she said. ‘We should probably do it again.’

  We watched a film on her sofa, unsure whether to hug. She said I should probably go home. She smiled, unconvincing, and waved goodbye.

  When I got back, Alistair ushered me onto the balcony and quizzed me about my day. He was enthused. I slept well. Life felt to be improving. The smell of the basil plant soothed me through my dreams.

  Forty-One

  I got to know Kerry. We talked most of the day on Facebook Messenger, the ping as her words hit my phone providing a painkiller release, a second’s happy calm. The possibility of happiness presented itself, unplanned for, unconsidered. It would mean giving up on my goal and I thought about whether I could do this, embrace the unexpected, let go of Marie. I thought I should give it a shot.

  Kerry’s nights and spare days were spent on protests, at meetings, rallies or sit-ins. She worked for the Feminist Library in Waterloo, and this seemed virtuous enough, but she didn’t let up after hours. She would be out trying to stop a Sure Start in Enfield from being closed down or waving a placard outside a detention centre. She would get back late, sweaty and optimistic. It went well, she would say. Public opinion was changing. Or some nights she would be cynical, question her own motives, scorning the idea that things would ever change. ‘Do I even want them to, deep down? I mean, my life is pretty awesome. Might be bored if I had nothing to protest about.’ If I echoed her despondency she would snap at me in an instant. Cynicism had to be earned. Other times she would come home at night in an even darker mood. She was wasting her time, the status quo was far too powerful. People were selfish or racist or thick. I didn’t disagree. I said some of this was true but most people were all right.

  ‘Ah, you should teach me to care a bit less,’ she said. ‘You seem to have it down.’ It wasn’t that I didn’t care and for a moment or two I sulked. I was trying to get back into writing and work out who I was. It wasn’t a case of not caring.

  She didn’t know how to measure out her energy, to keep some in reserve. She would run through the whole lot of it, at the same frenetic pace, until she would flop, wilting, onto the sofa and not come off for a week. After the necessary recovery, she would be up and running again, getting herself kettled, dodging truncheons.

  ‘It’s like you want to be a saint,’ I said. ‘A funny sort of saint but still a saint.’ I nuzzled at her throat. I pressed my lips against the ridge of her ear.

  ‘Not an urge you seem to have. I’m going to grab a drink,’ she said. ‘Do you want one?’ I said yes, watched her walk to the fridge. Her windows were open onto the hot dark street below. High heels clicked on the pavement, in tottering return. Snatches of wine song, the rattle of a van.

  ‘Don’t you want to do anything with yourself? Except read and write and fuck me?’

  ‘I quite like cooking you meals. I’m adjusting, I told you. I’m deciding what I care about.’

  ‘Maybe I should have a stroke.’ She led me into her room. ‘Stop me running around all day trying to do stuff.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Is it Marie that scares you?’ she said. ‘Do you think anyone who actually believes in stuff is liable to be a loony? Let it take over their lives?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Undo this zip, will you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  She wriggled away from her dress. ‘Must have made you cross though.’ Her back to me, buttocks raised. ‘Made you really angry.’

  ‘I’m not really an angry person. I never get angry at all.’

  ‘Who does she think she is? Three months into marriage and she’s running around like that.’

  ‘I really wasn’t.’

  ‘Shh,’ she said. ‘I’m doing a thing. Does it make you cross that I’m always off at meetings? When I should be at home tending to you?’ She raised her buttocks a little bit more, inched her legs apart. ‘Make you want to lay down the law?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You must have so much anger stored up there. Waiting to explode.’ Her feet shifted further. I understood, stepped up to her. ‘God but you must be cross. God but you must be furious. You must really want to . . . Could you shift your elbow a bit? Cheers. Oh. Yeah, you must be angry. You must be so fucking cross.’

  The ward was noisy and ill lit. The man in the next bed was moaning. There were banks of wire-strewn medical equipment at odd angles in the corridors. It took a long time for anyone to come and see me. Kerry sat by the bed, looking alternately at her phone and over at me. I had collapsed for the first time in ages. She’d been at my place, meeting Alistair and Raoul. He had cooked one of his special dinners, which she’d eaten with seeming relish.

  ‘It scares me that you will die,’ she said. ‘It scares me how much I don’t want that.’

  ‘I’m not too keen on it either,’ I said. She put a hand on mine. Eventually the doctor came and told me it was only another faint. My first one in a while.

  We rode in a cab back home. I didn’t ask her about the fear and what she meant.

  I said I was sorry about Alistair. He could be a little full-on but was actually sweet. She said she didn’t know about that, that she had liked him straight away, had even enjoyed his food. I wasn’t sure I welcomed this. It had been strange, seeing her in the divorce flat. Raoul had stared and told her she was the first woman he had seen there in a year. He looked at her like he was in the sort of film where live-action people interact with cartoons. Back in my room it was hot and airless. I shut Malkin outside and he wailed and scratched at the door. I was glad I’d put away the picture of Marie.

  ‘I was worried about you,’ said Kerry.

  ‘I am incredibly brave,’ I said.

  We began to undress. I was slow, my movements cautious. I gulped down a bottle of Evian which had been resting on my bedside too long, the plastic turning it stale.

  Together on the narrow bed. ‘We have to be pretty gentle,’ I said. I was inside her and it was like swimming, it felt frictionless, different and familiar both at once. Something was altered. She threw her arms back and knocked the basil plant off the windowsill. There was a crash of it shattering on the balcony below.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I said. It was hopeless to go on. I pulled back and clambered up so that my head leant out of the window. It was too dark to see the plant. I sat back on the bed, rubbing my eyes. Kerry had her knees up, shielding herself.

  I patted her, trying to reassure. My head began to throb. The next day I had to go out and put all the soil in a bag.

  Forty-Two

  The picture showed Marie outside Selfridges, placard in her hand. I had been looking at it for some time. ‘Fur is murder’ said the placard. She was looking tired, I thought. Frown lines on her forehead. There was no sign of Henry and this pleased me for a bit until I decided he probably took the picture. Her eyes were shining. I tried to read them. Passion, I supposed.

  I thought she’d have suited fur. I thought that in another life she’d have been on Flask Walk in a stole, comfortable, not caring. I didn’t know this person, yelling into a megaphone. I didn’t know why she cared so much. I couldn’t stop looking at her.

  ‘Wotcher doing?’ said Kerry and I slammed my laptop shut. ‘Are you looking at porn?’

  I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure if porn was one of those things that had become okay over time. ‘Yes, I am,’ I said.

  ‘Gissa look,’ said Kerry. Porn was obviously okay.

  ‘You wouldn’t want to,’ I said. ‘This is really disgusting porn.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Kerry.

  ‘I mean it’s really horrible,’ I said.

  She went into the other room.

  Kerry soon had me marching myself. Not against fur – I had my limits – but against austerity, neoliberalism, cuts in services, Tories. Non-specific discontent. Bad things. I could question the march’s efficacy, but I had no reason not to join in.

  ‘Do you really think sitting a
t home and writing is enough?’ she said. ‘Don’t you want to be, I don’t know, engaged with life? Fat lot of good it does us, but at least you’ll be doing something.’

  ‘I really do need to write,’ I said.

  ‘You disagree with everything this march is against,’ she said. ‘So why not join it? Why not be for something?’ I said I’d come but only because she wanted me to. She said that wasn’t the point.

  We joined the march near Embankment station. There were discarded placards on the pavements. I picked one up that said ‘if you can read this, thank a teacher’. I felt extremely radical. I felt spasms of engagement.

  ‘I might even join the Labour Party,’ I said.

  ‘Labour Party,’ said Kerry, with a snort.

  Alistair and Raoul had come along, Raoul bringing corned beef sandwiches. Alistair said he didn’t believe in this sort of thing. He was an artist, that was enough. What we needed was to change ourselves. I didn’t think he planned on doing so. Recently his talk had been full of his bride-to-be. Their relationship would threaten the status quo. We would quake, he said, if we could only understand it. He was writing a lot of erotica.

  Old men waved unread papers. There were teenage girls, faces covered in crayoned slogans. Trade union banners that looked like they should be draped over barrel organs. A few signs blamed austerity on Israel. I worried about this for a while. ‘You can’t wait for everyone to be perfect before you join in,’ said Kerry. ‘There’ll always be some nutters.’

  ‘Don’t your legs get tired?’ I said.

  Raoul told us how he had not been on a march for years. ‘I was a protest baby,’ he said. ‘Red diaper, almost. Inner city stuff. Then my mom got into pyramids and crystals. Took the steam out of her. She still gets on it, past a certain hour. Man, she hates Obama. Takes it personally from him. Like he should know better.’ Alistair kept quiet. Kerry said she’d been thrilled when Obama got in. She’d stayed up all night watching the results at her student union. There’d been an American guy there who had guiltily told her he was a Republican. He said he was scared to admit it over here. She’d drunk too much and kissed him, for a bet. And when the new president was announced she’d been so giddy and out of nowhere this old black American woman had appeared, she seemed too old to be a student and Kerry had hugged her and the woman had whispered ‘we won, my god, we won.’ Kerry had gone back to halls, with the Republican guy and she’d insisted on opening the window and playing Sam Cooke out of it, at full volume, letting his song roll over the quadrant, in through the sleeping windows, waking a world that had changed.

  ‘Sounds stupid now,’ she said.

  ‘Not so much,’ said Raoul.

  The crowd began to boo. We were passing Downing Street. There was no sign of anyone except for policemen at the gates. I booed a bit, to keep up. I always felt sorry for the police. ‘Bastards,’ said Kerry. Alistair didn’t mention his future safe seat. He kept his head well down. Raoul tapped me on the shoulder. ‘So, Stu, your friend Rupa, she single now?’ She had visited the other day. Raoul had told her this increased the number of women he’d seen in there by 200 per cent.

  We reached Trafalgar Square. Misty rain and familiar speeches. A mention of Tony Benn. We cheered. Maybe there was something in all this. I couldn’t see what we were changing but maybe that wasn’t the point. Enthusiasm returning, the sense that life was special. I looked around the crowd and saw the banner.

  At first I wasn’t sure. But then, who else could it be? Him, still tall as an oak tree, still with his Timotei glister, his life-raft chest. Her, tiny, sheltered by his bulk, yelling into a megaphone. In a badgers-army tee shirt a size too big. And what did they have with them, on this march against austerity? A giant badger banner, a badger dressed as Guy Fawkes, with a ‘tache and a Jacobean hat.

  ‘Henry,’ said Kerry. Not Marie, I noticed. Her attention was all on him.

  ‘For god’s sake, let’s move on before they see us.’

  ‘Its fine,’ said Alistair but our stares outvoted him and for once he made no fuss. We edged along in caterpillar formation, squeezing past hoarse pensioners and teenage girls in veils, until we were out of the crowd. Crossed the statue of Edith Cavell and went into the Chandos. Inside there were beet-toned boozers and confused tourists eating fatty breakfasts.

  ‘Need a drink,’ I said.

  ‘You really aren’t over her at all are you?’ She wasn’t joking. She seemed cross. As though I were malingering.

  ‘I am. I am. I’m absolutely okay. That was just a shock, is all.’ I tried to look like a man who is over his wife. Like someone out of a Caspar David Friedrich, cocking an eye to the sublime. Privately though, I bristled. And not just at the sight of Marie holding hands with her eight-foot lover, seeing badgers in everything. My concern was over Kerry. Why on earth had she said ‘Henry’? Why had his name this primacy in her mind? Why was it written in her notebook? It even came out in her sleep. Henry, please, man. Please what? The fucking guy got everywhere.

  I glugged down a gin and tonic, not looking anyone in the eye, thinking murderous thoughts. Henry had obviously preceded me, just as he had followed. Kerry was his cast-off and he was still in her mind. Did she cry for him when I wasn’t there, was his face what she saw before opening her eyes? A standard I could never attain. When she clutched at my chubby body she was touching the ghost of his strength. She saw us, surely, as refugees from two better loves, making do with what was left. Survivors, gripping onto one another in the waves, only to speed up their drowning.

  I thought I had hated Henry before but it was nothing to how I felt now.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ she said. I told her I wasn’t thinking at all. She held onto my hand.

  ‘Stuart,’ she said. ‘I am starting to fall in love with you. You know that? You understand? I know it’s probably too soon or whatever the fuck. But I am falling in love with you and I would like this to mean something. I’m offering you the chance to be really fucking happy. So if you’re planning on being a dick, for god’s sake do it now so I can get rid of you.’

  I blinked a lot and smiled. We kissed. Someone had left a mattress at the bottom of the cliff. Someone had broken my fall. But the poison still ran through me.

  ‘Tell me about your ex.’ I couldn’t help asking. As soon as I knew, I’d be fine with it, as soon as I knew all the facts. As soon as I knew, I’d be able to let go. How Henry had been the greatest lover she’d had, making all her other loves seem like satires on life with him. How she’d done things with Henry, willing and without shame, that she would no more do with me than she’d stand up and do in church. I stared at her, trying to force out the truth.

  It didn’t work. Instead she told me about some bozo called Neal, with an A (the A, I gathered, was important). He’d been one of those intense young men you get around protest movements, explaining the evils of capitalism over a Guinness while pale and shrinking women nod along. I found a picture on her Facebook: he was boxy-headed, buzzcut, like the kind of American soldier he presumably abhorred.

  Kerry had come over to England for university, eager to be changed. This little squirt Neal mustn’t have believed his luck. Consumerism was bad, the patriarchy was bad, most religions were bad apart from ones that must be respected, war, when fought by men like his father, was evil through and through. He was going to start a magazine; he was going to start a movement. She’d drunk it down and offered her virginity as the first of the many sacrifices she would make for a better world. She had jumped right under him like a suffragette under a horse.

  Oh, he was a genius, was Neal, she insisted on this point. A great, a brilliant man. Only, over the years, he’d backed down. She’d kept going to every protest, embracing every cause. But he’d started to make excuses. The world was a bit more complicated than that, he’d said. He’d declined to explain quite how. He’d applied himself at work, given his Marxist set-texts to the local Oxfam shop. One day, out of the blue, he’d told her he was seeing someone else.
Someone the same as she’d been when he met her, only this time ready to adopt his new caution, his quietism, as her own.

  Kerry wasn’t about to do that. She may have started on this path with him but she would continue it alone, while friends gravitated to the media or marketing, even financial services. She would carry on.

  I listened, proud of her. She was unafraid of bad things happening, unafraid of life.

  There had been no Henry in this story. I guessed that asking her now would get me nowhere.

  ‘You still aren’t over Marie, are you?’ she said, after minutes of cloudy silence. ‘Don’t worry, you don’t have to be. I mean, seriously, how could you? The time you spent together. You stood up there and married her. You went and made a speech. You signed the papers. You stood and said your vows. You were trying to win her back a couple of months ago. How can you be over her? I’m trying to remember the last time I made a speech. It was about the environment, I think. If I did that and then the environment swanned off I reckon I’d feel sore.’

  ‘I am. I really am.’ I meant it as I said it. Even if it wasn’t entirely true, it seemed the right state to reach. An aspiration that became a fact by pretending it already was.

  Kerry sat up on the bed, her hands wrapped round her cup of tea. ‘It’s okay, it’s just sort of sad.’

  ‘Honestly I wouldn’t go back now even if I could. I am starting to love you too.’ It was true, I really was. I still wanted to know about Henry though. I wanted to know what he’d done.

  Forty-Three

  ‘We should go out,’ said Kerry.

  I didn’t take this proposal especially seriously. She was wearing pyjama bottoms and one of my tee shirts. From the street below came the sounds of early night, overlapping conversations and car stereo sub-bass. The air of it got through her windows, turned the room into the street.