Free Animals by Emma Jane Unsworth

bed? If he wasn’t forthcoming with boiler repairs then it didn’t bode well for cunnilingus.
    ‘Bill! Heather!’ Julian stepped forward and shook hands with my dad then hugged my mum. He shook hands with Jim next, leaving me until last given that I was a deplorable little freeloading wastrel who was transferring her debts from her parents to her partner (or was I being paranoid?).
    I shook his hand and hugged Melanie. She smelled of too much Chanel, like always. ‘I saw about Jean on Facebook,’ she said.
    ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Tyler’s thrilled.’
    Mel smirked. ‘I wouldn’t have thought she’d be thrilled about any baby – what is it she calls them?
Human grubs
?’
    Jim snickered.
    ‘Don’t start,’ I said.
    ‘Start what?’ Mel’s nails were a shiny maroon colour and she had one of those bras on where you weren’t supposed to be able to see the clear plastic strap but you could.
    ‘The Tyler-bashing.’
    ‘You look great, Jim,’ Mel said, hugging him. ‘
Great
.’
    ‘Nearly three months now.’
    ‘It’s really agreeing with you.’
    I looked at Jim. He did look good but then he always looked good. I wondered whether the vein on my face was visible. I looked around the restaurant and saw my dad looking around, too. He jerked his head towards the bar and I nodded and went over. We ordered a Guinness and a red wine, followed by the other drinks in order of interestingness: half a lager, an orange juice, a diet coke, a lime and soda. The Guinness swirled stormily on the drip-tray.
    ‘Know what I’ve been thinking?’ he said.
    The barmaid put our drinks on the bar. My dad picked up his pint. His fingers flickered around the glass, tightened, loosened, flickered again. He spoke in little fanfares, swinging his head from side to side, posing and gazing for a moment before carrying on. Children and animals flocked to him. How many times had he caught something in the old pond behind our estate and held the net up to show us.
Look here, girls! Hard to believe that within this tiny space is a beating heart, a circulatory system, a rapidly sparking brain
… Me and Mel standing there, leering in our anoraks. He was why I picked stranded worms off the pavement and threw them into gardens even when I was on my way out. He was why I couldn’t kill wasps even though I hated them. He was why I looked for, and loved, the creatures in people. They were always there. As family legend went, it was my dad who’d got the first proper grin out of me. I was six months old; he was thirty. We were sitting at the dining table. Way he told it, I was sliding soggy Wotsits around the plastic tray of my highchair, he was eating chops and gravy. He stopped eating for a minute and angled his head to one side to match the angle of mine. Stayed that way until I noticed. He said he saw it dawn on me that there was no sensible reason for him to be doing that – so what then? Something else … Something … Something … Searching … Then, CRACKLE. A spark by the black obelisk. Delight. So it was his fault, you see, when I was at the blaming stage of my existentials. He didn’t fuck me up; he funned me up. Despite all the years my mum smashed loaded dinner plates onto the back patio; despite all the nights he didn’t come home because he didn’t want the men he owed money to following him; despite the countless bookies’ I’d stood outside, kicking the toes of my trainers in the cracks in the pavement, desperate,
desperate
to see what was beyond the
No Under-18s
sign and the postered-out windows. Despite his selling atheism to me as a simple truth. He was forever the man who let me balance, buttocks tensing, on the back wheel-arch of his window-cleaning van as he drove down Jutland Street (the steepest street in Manchester) at a friction-hot forty-five. He’d taught me to read: a double-edged sword. I wanted to learn to read so badly. Learned quickly. But then came the frustration at not being able to look at words