Nothing But Animals

When I first kissed Daisy she tasted of cigarettes. I’d have thought that would have bothered me, but it didn’t. Mum and dad were always telling me how disgusting smoking was, how if they ever caught me doing it, it would be the slipper for me. Although I got the slipper most days anyway. They’d take it in turns, mum first, then dad. It was like the tag matches that mum used to watch when the wrestling was on TV.

It didn’t hurt all that much, not after a while. I’d go someplace else in my mind. That was a good trick, and I learned it early.

They both smoked, that was the worst of it, often actually having a cigarette on the go, even as they were lecturing me. I knew what hypocrisy was long before I understood the word. I pointed this out in my own, hesitant, awkward way, from time to time, but that would only prompt them to move onto another favourite; do as we say, not as we do.

They agreed on my most things, mum and dad. They got on pretty well, which was something, I suppose, even if it was mostly at my expense.

I was fourteen when I kissed Daisy. It was at about that time that I started to associate people with animals. Daisy’s features were sharp, like a fox. She was sly too, so it seemed obvious to see her that way. My parents were bears. Not funny and cuddly, like the ones I’d watch in the cartoons that played sometimes on a Saturday morning, but not vicious and horrible either. Not really. Not always. It wasn’t that I thought they’d tear me to pieces and eat me; not literally, at least. Their faces were big, though, and round, and dad’s was hairy, and mum’s was heading that way also, if you looked close enough, and the light was a certain way.

Daisy was in the year above me at school. “I’m your older woman,” she said in that sing song voice of hers, as she grabbed my hand and pulled me into the brief clump of woods that lay between the school and housing estate on which we both lived.

She had a reputation, did Daisy. It seemed unfair to me, even at my age, and with my upbringing, that the boys in my class could boast about the things that they got up to (it didn’t occur to me until many years later that they were almost certainly lying), but they’d call Daisy a slag, a whore, if she even looked at a boy.

Although, she did much more than look.

She was pretty. She was funny. I think she singled me out because she could see that I was odd. Also, I was big for my age, a fact that saved me from too much in way of teasing or beatings, when I turned up for school again in mismatched socks or shoes with holes in or that shirt that I wore until the collar and cuffs frayed to nothing.

“Goodness, you are big for your age,” Daisy whispered thickly into my throat, her fox-musk overwhelming the smell of cigarettes, overwhelming me, as her little hands, with those little fingers, the nails, half-painted, bitten half-away, becoming urgent and busy and I closed my eyes tightly as my own hands clung to her hair, her fur, the slick pelt-like wonder of it.

“That’s all we can do for now,” she said briskly, a little later, as she cleaned herself up. It was summer, probably. There was a canopy of leaves, at least. Daisy’s coat sparkled in the skeins of sunlight that penetrated the trees. “We can’t do the other thing. Not yet.”

I wanted to say, what other thing, but didn’t.

It bothered me that Daisy smoked. I’d seen somewhere that it could make you sick. I said this to her once and her laugh was instant and brief. “Aren’t you sweet?” she said, her snout wrinkling, her hand reaching into her bag for another cigarette.

For a while my parents smoking worried me also. I said to them what I’d said to Daisy; did they know it could make them ill?

Why do you care, my mother said?

I thought about that later, as I lay in bed. The growling and huffing from my parents room bled through the thin walls, as it did most nights.

I considered them both becoming sick. Dying.

What did I care?

There was an uncle. My mother’s brother. He was a wolf.

Lupine, is the word, I suppose, although I didn’t know it then.

He wore his grey hair slicked back. He had these sharp features. Not pretty sharp, like Daisy. He was all points and edges. Teeth that loomed forward when he smiled. A face like a knife. Thick dark hair on his forearms and the backs of his hands.

He lived on his own in a flat across the other side of the city. He’d been married once, but it hadn’t worked out.

“Nobody’s fault,” my mother insisted, jowls wobbling.

My father seemed less convinced, but kept his thoughts to himself.

Uncle John didn’t visit that often. I hated it when he did.

I asked Daisy if she’d like to go to the pictures with me.

“Why’s that then? Get me in the back row, huh? You sly dog.”

“What? No.”

“You think you’re the first boy to ask me that?”

I wasn’t thinking anything. I just wanted to go on a date. I’d seen stuff on TV and heard some of the other boys talking about them. I thought it might be nice. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Don’t sulk, Cam. Jesus.”

“I’m not sulking.”

“Look, my folks are away at the weekend. Come over. We don’t need the pictures.”

The fine hairs on the back of her hand prickled as I stroked them.

#

“Cameron! Look at the size of you. My goodness.” Uncle John closed in for a hug. We were not huggers, my parents and I. Becoming rigid I felt his jaw close to mine, sensed the teeth, waiting beyond. He smelled of hair oil and old sweat. “Look what I’ve got you.”

“What use is that?” my mother said, as John handed me a cricket bat.

“It would do him good. It’s a fine sport. I captained the school …”

“We know,” Mum said. “You’ve said. You think they play cricket at that school of his?”

As though it was my fault, the school I attended. Not that I cared either way, about cricket, or any other sport. I quite liked the heft of it, though. The bat. The feel of it in my hand. “Thanks.”

“See? He likes it.”

We were in the kitchen, the three of us. Mum by the window, blocking out the light. Dad was in the living room, reading the Daily Mail. We could hear him, snuffling and muttering, the pages turning at predictable intervals.

“Do I get any tea?” John said.

“I don’t have any cake.”

John aimed a nod and a wink in my direction. “Talk about hospitality, hey, Cam?” It was meant to be conspiratorial, I supposed, but I just stared at him blankly. His smile died on thin lips. Eyes narrowing, he said, “What’s this I hear about you and that Slater girl?”

Mum growled. The sound of newspaper pages turning in the other room stopped abruptly.

#

I offered her a peach. I’d stolen it from the grocer’s across the road from our school.

Daisy looked at it, then back at me. Her laugh was a bark. “I don’t eat fruit, Cam. I’m a meat girl.” She sidled closer. My flesh quivered. “I’d have thought you’d have known that by now.”

“Oh.”

She edged away again. My senses flared and ebbed. “Anyway. Saturday. Seven sharp. Don’t be late.”

I ate the peach later, on my own, it’s juices coating my chin, slickening the fledgling stubble. The flesh yielded, the stone did not. I kept on biting. The sweetness was almost impossible to bear.

#

“She’s a slut!”

The kitchen was too small for the four of us. Mum and dad prowled around the table. I was trapped in a corner. John lurked by the doorway, half-occluded by shadow.

“I like her.”

“You like her,” Dad said.

“I’ll bet you do,” John said.

“And that family,” Mum said, her voice shrill and quavering, and totally at odds with the sheer bulk of her.

“What’s wrong with her family?” I think I was probably angry. I wasn’t sure. Anger was not something with which I was familiar. I had no idea what to do with it.

“You wouldn’t understand,” Dad said.

“Tell me, then. Please.” My eyes felt hot.

“They’re not from around here. They don’t understand …”

“He doesn’t get it, Dot.” Dad’s voice was gruff and low and stunned my mother into silence. I didn’t get it. But then I’d never asked Daisy about her own life. Her family. Never really considered her as an individual at all. “Don’t bother.” To me, lower, quieter, “You’re grounded.”

“No.”

“Yes. This weekend, all next week.”

It was Saturday lunchtime, a few hours before I was meant to go to Daisy’s. “This isn’t fair.”

“Life isn’t fair, son,” my dad said, his voice sonorous and grave, as though he was imparting some great wisdom. “It’ll be the slipper as well. When your uncle has gone.”

“Don’t mind me,” John said.

“When your uncle has gone,” my father said again.

I didn’t care about the slipper. I cared about Daisy. There was a telephone in the hallway, next to the front door, but I didn’t know her number and, in any case, I had to ask permission to use it.

I imagined her waiting and waiting. I thought of her smoky kisses, and the feel of the fine hairs on her throat, abrasive against my lips.

I saw my uncle outside, just as he was leaving. “Why?”

“I’m doing you a favour,” he shrugged. “You’d only catch something. Girl like that.”

“I hate you.”

A grin like a blade. “Take a ticket, boy. Get in line.”

#

Seven o’clock came and went, as did my beating. I barely felt it. Afterwards, my parents made me sit in the living room with them, while they watched the Generation Game and Jim’ll Fix It and Blankety Blank.

They smoked constantly. Dad drank beer, mum nursed a couple of small sherries.

I was allowed to go to the bathroom once. I opened the little window above the toilet, sniffing at the sharpening air. I wanted to sense Daisy somehow, imagined her with her button nose upturned, seeking my scent.

Then dad was hammering on the door and asking what the hell I thought it was that I was doing in there.

At ten dad said, “Bed. And straight to sleep.”

In the lamplight, on that sunken old sofa, they seemed to have merged into one. They were mostly hair and smoke, I thought, as I left them, ascending the narrow stairs, trudging, mind empty except for thoughts of Daisy.

I never discovered how she’d felt that evening. Perhaps she’d been out anyway; it had all been a ruse, just a tease, somebody else set on winding up that “odd Cameron boy.”

Daisy. She was fifteen years old. I thought about that later, when I had all the time in the world and no-one to spend it on.

Or maybe she’d waited and waited. Eventually, she may have stood at her front door, head tilted towards the evening air, seeking out my scent. Trying to find a way to guide me to her arms.

We could have saved each other, perhaps.

Maybe Daisy didn’t actually need saving. I hope that she didn’t. I knew that I did.

#

Sleep wouldn’t come. I pretended that it had, when mum eased my door open a crack to check on me.

I heard their throaty mumbling as they paused on the landing. I could smell the musk of them, even though my bedroom door was closed.

Once they were in their own room the noises began. I clenched my eyes shut tight. I wanted to scream.

Muffled grunting, sweat and hair, the pair of them, pawing at each other.

I clawed at my eyes, my ears, but nothing changed.

I stood, stumbled to my bedroom door. I opened it slowly. The cricket bat was propped against the door jamb. I picked it up, feeling the weight of it, the balance.

The door to my parents room was already partially open. Through the crack I saw their shapes, thrashing.

What kind of animal am I?

It’s an oft repeated question, if an unresolved one.

Quietly, I pushed the door further open.

It was time to find out.

END

BIO: Andrew Humphrey lives and works in Norwich, England. His short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Black Static, Crimewave, Weird Tales, and Midnight Street. He is the author of three short story collections and two novels. His collection Other Voices was an inaugural East Anglian Book Award winner, and his story "Trick of the Light" was selected for The Year's Best Horror 13.

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