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

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