Animals Read Online Free PDF

over the road had been boarded up for months. It was long and thin like a pale yellow torpedo, built to suit the shape of an old junction that had since been altered, so the pub wasn’t on a junction at all any more and looked lost even before it was put up for sale. Further down the road was the community garden centre, its chicken-wire fence crocheted with wet spider-webs. When I’d finished my beer I went to the ‘cocktail cabinet’, a kitchen cupboard where we kept the random glasses and anything that had survived the previous weekend. A quarter bottle of whisky glinted from the cupboard’s shadowy depths. I pulled it out. Maybe it would help. Whisky was a lucid kind of drunk. You kept your faculties, mostly. Wine and whisky were my favourites because they felt – and I’m aware of the tragic-sounding nature of this – like
company
. The easy kind. Maybe it was the names. Merlot – that rambunctious exchange student who talks all night. Chardonnay – the girl with the steam-hammer laugh who’s crashed her sports car on the way over. Pinot Grigio – the quiet one who stuns the room with a braining bombshell. Chianti – total psychopath but charming with it. Chablis – point-blank refuses to go in a tumbler, gets acidic when talked down to. Laphroaig – earthy; always up for intensity without getting po-faced. Lagavulin. Oh, Lagavulin. But for all my appreciation of booze’s plethora of personalities, I didn’t subscribe to the old Romantic lie: if you were sozzled you’d produce works of genius. Hey, lose your mind! Get the opium in. Get tanked. Go fucking bonkers. You’ll produce masterpieces … No no no no no. The point of intoxication for me was not to create but to destroy the part of myself that cared whether or not I created. I drank for self-solidarity; to settle the battles within, or at least freeze-frame them. Because the truth was: I
had
tried too hard at school. I’d done everything too hard. I sketched too hard (even kind Miss Spooner, the wispy-voiced art teacher, threatened to resort to violence:
What am I going to have to do to get you to sketch lightly, Laura, WHIP YOU?
); I brushed my teeth too hard (the dentist:
Really, Mrs Joyce, if you don’t get her to calm down on this then we’re going to have to worry about receding gums
…); I played netball too hard – overshooting, overshooting, terminally overshooting.
    I filled a Fosters glass a quarter of the way and carried it back to my desk. Sat staring. Drinking. Staring. It was no good. I picked up a book of poetry and took it with the whisky down to the grass. It was sunny for March – not warm but the light was cold and yellow and cheap, like margarine. I sat in the shade by the wall and bent my legs, making a lectern of my knees. Strained to read as the sun shifted meanly over the Manchester skyline. A blackbird clucked in a nearby hedge. A thousand tiny flies went about their business. Early spring. Things awakening. I kicked off my shoes and socks and surveyed my feet. Oh, they were ugly, my feet. Monkeyish. Almost clawed. They hadn’t yet invented the kind of therapy required to console me about them. When I was younger I’d tried to make myself feel better about them by telling myself that Lolita had monkeyish feet and
she
was desirable. Granted, in a sick, twisted way, but beggars couldn’t be choosers – or rather, mill-workers couldn’t be choosers, because that’s where my long-toed feet had originated from. The girls who worked in the mills of Lancashire (my maternal grandmother being one of them) had to limbo under the moving threads to clear detritus as it fell from the looms. They couldn’t bend for fear of cotton-cuts (think
machine-driven
paper cuts) so they developed a way of picking things up with their feet, snatching and gripping with their toes then kicking their legs back against their bum to grab the bits between their fingers. Toes stretched and became more dexterous as a result. Darwin got