Read Online Animals by Emma Jane Unsworth - Free Book Online Page A

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