New Animal by Ella Baxter (speed reading book .TXT) 📕

I flush the toilet and wash my hands slowly. I’m unsure if he will ever leave. I could initiate sex again but make it better by telling him to slow down until he’s barely moving. This slow? he might say—like they all say, incredulous. Even slower, I will tell him.

I shake my hands dry and slide the door open, making immediate eye contact with Adam, who raises his empty wineglass towards me.

‘Refill?’

I slip through the beaded curtain separating the bed and the kitchenette, and it clatters together in a loose tangle behind me.

‘It’s getting late,’ I say, sliding a bottle of wine behind the kettle.

‘So will you be working on someone tomorrow?’ he asks, while pulling at some leg hairs on his exposed thigh.

‘Yes. There’s a big funeral, actually.’

‘Why big?’

‘She’s young and it was suicide.’ I cross my arms and check the clock. It’s almost midnight.

‘Oh,’ Adam says. ‘Wrists or neck?’

‘Wrists,’ I say, rejoining him in bed. ‘In the bath.’

‘Shit,’ he says.

I’m used to people impulsively asking the most macabre questions, then being unsettled by the answers.

What does a body smell like? Chemicals. Sometimes like talcum powder. Sour.

What does a body feel like? Firm and cold. Clammy. Heavy.

Does it ever move? Yes. But you begin to expect the slow decompression. It helps to think of them as old balloons at times. They deflate.

Does it frighten you? No. Never. Sometimes. Rarely.

I can see Adam gearing up to keep talking, but I don’t have the patience to answer all his questions in a way that will both satiate his curiosity and maintain my professionalism, so I reach for my phone, select the first album that appears, then lie back as the opening bars start to tinkle out from the tiny speaker. Snare drum fights for space. I am twenty-eight, almost twenty-nine. The tambourine commences. I should turn this down so it doesn’t wake Mum and Vincent. Relentless rattling metal of the tambourine. Or my brother, but he should really move in with Hugh and Carmen. Tambourine outplays the snare. He’s thirty now. Trumpet interrupts them both. Time to go, Simon, you lump. Trumpet and tambourine fight. At least I live in the bungalow, not the main house. Trumpet wins. It has a separate entrance.

The main house is fundamentally suburban. Two brown leather couches and one pine bookshelf, which proudly display a large collection of Reader’s Digest. But the bungalow is different. It has a rug woven from strips of rags. It has floor cushions, most of them remnants from when Vincent had a mild interest in Buddhism and used it as his meditation zone. For one whole winter he wore kimonos and spoke softly when he remembered to. As he slowly lost interest, I equally slowly moved the contents of my bedroom into the bungalow until all my furniture surrounded his, and just like that we swapped places.

‘Is it gross?’ Adam asks.

‘It’s the opposite.’ I rub one eye and let out another wide yawn.

‘Lovely?’ He looks suspicious.

‘Very.’

The deceased are beyond beautiful, but only because they are so emptied of worry. Everything tense or unlikable is gone. Like a shopping centre in the middle of the night, they have lost all the chaos and clatter.

‘Is it gory?’ Adam wants to know. ‘Like, when you see how they died?’

I stare steadily at his hands, which are clasped together. ‘It can be.’

I think about all the skulls I’ve had to drill back together, and all the wounds I’ve filled with plaster of Paris. On some days, I’ll unzip a bag that contains a body so broken it has become like shards of ice; like unearthed soil. There are hours in which all I do is map a whole person out. And even though he’s asking, I won’t tell him that we are both two long, fleshy sacks full of bones and electricity, and that one day the switch will be flicked. We are on, and then we are off.

I’ve told people down at the pub that life rests like a layer of chiffon over a body: one puff of wind and you’re dead. It’s a revelation that doesn’t sit easily with most, but I’ve learned to adjust by compartmentalising. I can separate feelings into imaginary boxes inside the mind. In one box, I put all the delicate, fractured wounds of the bodies I see all day. I fill it up with uncomfortable emotions and images. Then, in another box, I shove all the vivid warmth and liveliness of the people I see at night. I need both boxes, one balancing out the other, me ping-ponging between them.

Adam crosses his legs, letting his limp penis hang between us, somehow a part of the conversation but disengaged.

‘Do they look empty?’

He seems genuinely thrilled that we are talking.

‘Sure,’ I say. It’s not inaccurate.

‘So what made you do this for a job?’

‘It’s my family’s business, but I would have picked it anyway.’

‘You love it that much?’

‘I do.’

I squeeze his thigh, pressing each finger one by one into his leg. I push my chest forward and gaze at him, while trying to lengthen my neck and look elegant. Shakespeare once wrote that two people together is a beast with two backs, and most nights I find myself trying to combine with someone else to become this two-headed thing with flailing limbs, chomping teeth and tangled hair. This new animal. I am medicated by another body. Drunk on warm skin. Dumbly high on the damp friction between them and me.

‘You’re quite confident, aren’t you?’ he says.

‘Yes.’

‘And you seem to want to have sex again?’

‘Yep.’

‘Do you want me to go down on you?’ he asks.

‘Not right now,’ I say.

I stand at the foot of the bed and put my t-shirt back on, and then cross one leg in front of the other so that my vulva is at least partly covered. I find that redressing sometimes helps to get things moving again. There has to be an element of desire in order for us both to get