The Loosening Skin

by Aliya Whiteley

  Taylor feels the same. She’s sipping a mint tea.

  ‘You like the work?’ I ask her.

  ‘It’s better than bouncing, am I right?’ So she’s recognised me as ex-Forces too, with all the bad choices that come along after that stint – or perhaps Phin told her about me. That wouldn’t surprise me at all.

  She frowns at something behind me, so I turn and look at Max, who is talking to a tall man with curly black hair – it might even be one of the Stucks, he looks familiar – and pointing at the sun, which is about to disappear behind a scudding cloud. Everyone is milling about, looking grumpy. Film work always did look more like standing around than doing.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Taylor says, ‘just outdoor filming stuff. He’s about to lose the sun. He’ll probably break for ten minutes. Well, you probably know that.’

  ‘I’ve never seen him as a director before. It looks like he enjoys it.’

  ‘Jobs,’ she says. ‘They come and go.’

  Her reflective tone annoys me; I’m not here to talk philosophy. ‘The night of the skin robbery – you weren’t here.’

  ‘No. It was my night off. You know the drill.’

  I do know the drill, well. One night off a fortnight, arranged in advance. ‘But you changed yours at short notice.’

  ‘Family emergency,’ she says, shortly.

  I don’t see any point in pushing her. ‘So you did a handover with your replacement?’

  ‘Yeah. I only know her as Smith.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  She glares at me. ‘Obviously that’s not her real name. She’s legit, though. Tall. From Korea, Phin said. She was a skin fighter, and he bought her contract.’

  ‘Smith the Korean skin fighter.’ Only in film star circles. If she really was in the skin fights then she’s hard as nails, but it crosses my mind that it might be a story to make her seem glamorous to the kind of people who get off on that stuff. My bodyguard used to be a hooker, that kind of line. People in the entertainment business can be downright weird.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ calls Max. ‘Ten minutes, everyone.’

  Taylor finishes her tea and stands. I get up too, and wonder if I once looked that good. She has that fearless, appraising gaze; the one I tried to find early this morning when I put on a dark grey suit for the first time in years. I stood in front of the wardrobe and willed myself back to that alert stance, but it just wouldn’t come.

  ‘I have to go. Listen, you should be asking Smith this stuff. It was her shift, so it’s her mistake.’

  Now I know I don’t like Taylor. She’s happy to drop Smith in it quick enough.

  ‘A mistake?’ I give her room to elaborate, but she swallows, and then only offers a nod. ‘We all make mistakes, though, don’t we?’ I can’t resist saying, just to see how much she rattles, and a familiar voice behind me says, ‘Don’t bother trying to win an argument with her, Taylor. It can’t be done.’

  I spin, and smile, and shake Max’s proffered hand, even though the contact must be unpleasant for both of us. The feeling of wrongness that comes from revisiting the past isn’t anywhere near as strong for other people; I must remember that. Perhaps he barely feels this need to put distance between us. Some people, like my parents, even manage to stay civil after moulting. It’s a trick I’ll never master, with my condition.

  ‘You’re paying me to ask the difficult questions,’ I say.

  ‘Nope. I’m paying you to get the difficult answers. I’ll start you off. Taylor didn’t have a personal reason for changing her night off. She was running an errand for me. One that’s best kept quiet.’

  ‘Pills?’

  He inclines his head. It’s always pills, with him. The endless pills that never work. To his credit, he doesn’t bother to explain it.

  ‘I’ll need the name of your supplier.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘They knew Taylor would be out collecting your order. Possibly they’ve got something on Smith, or suspected she wouldn’t be up to the task. It was a good opportunity to take what they really wanted.’

  ‘No, it’s not that kind of an organisation, I swear, Rosie.’

  ‘Max, I have to check.’

  He breathes out, his chest deflating, then asks Taylor for a pen and piece of paper, which she produces from her suit pocket. He writes down a name and address, and hands it to me.

  ‘Chichester? Not exactly a den of iniquity.’

  ‘I told you – they’re not the usual kind of people.’ He checks his watch, and strides off. No goodbye. Taylor throws me a glance, and then goes with him.

  As I slip the address into my pocket I feel my phone vibrate. It’s a message from another person I thought I’d left in my past, and it means Chichester has to wait. I need to get to London, fast.

  › • ‹

  It’s a difficult business, identifying old skins. The feeling you get from touching one is only a reflection of the love the old owner once felt, before it was sloughed away. If it was a particularly strong love you might get images accompanying the feeling: a flash of a face, or maybe even a snatch of music. Still, it’s like piecing together a puzzle, reconstructing an old photograph that’s been torn to pieces.

  Love is a Warm Layer

  says the poster on the dingy green wall. There’s a Labrador puppy wrapped in a blue blanket underneath the words. His face peeks out from the folds of material. I shift my position in the moulded plastic seat. My armpits are sweaty; I’ll have to keep my arms by my sides if I don’t want anyone to smell me. Which I don’t. This kind of place reminds me how much I want my smell to be my own business.

  The door opens, and in comes a small man, wearing a cream suit with a buttoned waistcoat. His shoes are imitation animal skin. I remember how I used to rely on my instant judgements, back when I was trying to learn this stuff as an occupation, and I would have said with no hesitation that this man was a petty criminal, dressing in the hope of getting better at it. Do I trust my judgements any more? I keep my face blank, non-committal, as I stand.

  The receptionist, an older woman who keeps knitting on the desk next to the phone, eyes us both with interest. ‘Rose Allington?’ he says. It’s an Eastern European accent. ‘Petra said to wait for you. She said you would come today, but I have other buyers. There’s a line for this one, I can move it—’ He snaps his fingers at me.

  ‘I’m here. I want it, if it is what you say it is.’

  ‘It is. But you don’t need to take my word for it.’

  ‘Of course. Where is it?’

  ‘This way.’

  The receptionist’s head has been snapping back and forth during our exchange like a spectator at a tennis match.

  ‘Margot,’ he says, ‘hold calls.’

  ‘Of course.’ She turns to me and winks. It’s unbelievable. She thinks she’s in a stage play, or something – that her life as a gangster’s receptionist is not real. Maybe she moulted and woke up with the urge to leave her comfortable life behind, and this is the result; enjoying the seedy workings of a company that the world would be better off without.

  I follow him through the door and down a long corridor with peeling paint and exposed pipes, my mind taken up with that wink. Is that how it gets, after one too many moults? Everything becomes an in-joke?

  His office is at the end; it’s a small room, with a painting placed to draw the eye above a single high-backed velvet armchair, the seat worn shiny. The painting is meant to look very old but something tells me it’s not. It’s a reproduction of a suffering saint who wears a white robe, diaphanous, that shimmers around him – no, it’s his skin coming free. He’s in the death throes of the final moulting. His eyes are raised to heaven, and radiance comes from him as he sloughs off his last skin, and leaves this mortal life.

  An alcove is curtained off; the man, name still unknown to me and I’d like to keep it that way, pulls back the thick purple material. There, folded neatly upon a long trolley, is a skin. It looks as light and ordered as a sheaf of papers.r />
  ‘Full out,’ I say. I know the tricks.

  ‘You don’t want to touch first?’

  ‘Full out.’

  He lifts it and arranges it, to make it into the shape of a body once more, and I know instantly that it’s not one of Max’s.

  ‘You’re wasting my time.’

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘It’s not even male.’ The breasts have been cut away and the remaining material sewn together to create a flatter chest that would fool nobody in the skin trade. I could leave. I should leave.

  ‘Just touch it,’ says the nameless man.

  I put my fingers to the long, flat tube of the nearest arm and let the emotion come to me.

  Yes, that’s love, the remains of it, the whisper that dies away from the shout and can never quite be silenced. Love for Max, specifically, undeniably; I’m getting it clearly now, the feeling as precise as a signature. Not fan adoration, not a crush, which is different. This is the real deal. Deep, and reciprocated. Requited love, soaked into the skin.

  I see Max for a moment as I once saw him. He’s the bridge of the song, the voice of happy ever after. He’s how to live, and why.

  The feeling fades.

  He was my reason to write bad poetry; thank God I never was one for recording my emotions. I can’t quite believe how I felt about him, just as I can’t believe that anybody else ever did.

  This is my skin.

  My skin, here, in this crumbling back office, the breasts mutilated in the name of money. Max told me he’d burned it. I watched him walk it out to the bonfire.

  I pull back my hand.

  ‘See? Not fake.’

  I can tell from his expression that he doesn’t know it once belonged to me.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ I say. ‘What’s your price?’

  He touches his tongue to his top lip and names a huge sum. Max’s very first moult itself wouldn’t cost more. We haggle, and I knock him down a little, but nowhere near as much as I should. I have no taste for this. I need that skin, and that’s all there is to it.

  But I also need one more thing, and I have to time it right, so I wait until the deal is struck and the skin has been refolded and wrapped in brown paper, and the money is about to be transferred from Max’s credit line, before I say, ‘I’ll need the details.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Provenance. Who sold it to you?’

  ‘That’s not— I don’t—’

  ‘Details.’ I plant my feet squarely, make it clear I won’t move without it. ‘It’s necessary. Or we can cancel.’

  He’s already pictured the money in his account; he’s not going to lose it now. ‘It was a charity shipment. Random bag. I have people who go through, checking for pure ones. We got lucky.’

  ‘You did,’ I agree, although I know nobody gets that lucky. But it’s not his bluff. My instincts, long unused and struggling to surface, tell me that he really believes in this random bag story. Which means he’s part of the setup.

  ‘We’re done,’ I tell him, and I complete the transaction on my phone. He leads me out, a different path this time, down a flight of stairs and through a warehouse with thin, dirty windows where women and machines are hard at work. Skins are being sorted, pressed, scissored and stitched to make skimpy underwear. Love is a warm layer, indeed.

  Back out on the street I find a familiar franchise of cafe and call Petra, who asks me if her tip was good. She doesn’t question me when I ask her instead where it came from. She was once my partner; she knows who to trust, and when. We worked together every day before this last moult of mine, and we were good at it.

  ‘Don’t drop me in it, Rose,’ she says.

  ‘It never came from you.’

  So she gives me a name – a name that I’ve already heard today. I finish my call and eat a slice of cake, savouring the sweetness. I have gone soft; I’m running on caffeine and sugar. A text message comes in.

  Max: Either u found them or that’s a big dinner allowance you just gave yourself.

  Rosie: Not one of your skins. A necessary purchase. Will explain later.

  Max: Looking 4ward to it. Where are u?

  How strange it is, to see our names next to each other on the screen.

  I don’t reply. I open my leather backpack and look at the brown paper package inside. To buy it cost more money than I’ll ever make in my life. Luckily, it’s not my money. And I had to have it; Max will understand that. Particularly because this is his fault. If he had burned it as I asked, as he told me he had, it wouldn’t have been sitting in his skin room when the thieves took the lot.

  So now I have to carry my old skin with me until I can find the time to dispose of it properly. I don’t want to be close to it, but there’s no choice. It’s now become part of this puzzle.

  And the man who holds the next piece is Phineas Spice.

  2006. Lighter.

  London wasn’t so much a place as a mismatched mosaic of a city. The buildings looked sturdy enough, but the colours weren’t coherent. One backdrop was bright, the next clouded, and the pieces of people were dotted so randomly, an arm here, a head there. Rose never felt that she saw a whole person, only glimpses of expressions in a sharp-edged cut-out compilation.

  She saw it differently to Petra, she knew. Petra found form and shape in everything because of the way it settled around her; she was her own centre. But Rose, sitting in her sleeping bag on the floor of the dark office, waiting for Petra’s return, worried she would never learn how to be that way.

  She leaned her head against the wall, and the manila folder slipped from her lap to the cream carpet, the documents and photographs splaying out like a fan. There they were – what Petra would have called the worst things.

  The only way these kinds of pictures, this kind of knowledge, made sense was if a person said to herself – some people aren’t right. They aren’t right in the head.

  Them and us.

  Or Rose could say – I’d never do a thing like that, but how could she be sure? What lay under the next skin, and the next?

  But no, easier to say she’d never pay to watch people rip each other’s skin to shreds, and call it entertainment. The folder covered most of the details of skin fighting in the ring they had been investigating: the betting system, the location, the weapons specially designed to rip and scar. One of the fighters’ managers would call time, eventually, afraid of what might happen next. Because if you damaged the skin enough, the next shed wouldn’t be clean, or easy. The pain could send a person out of their mind, or kill them, and only a very specific crowd wanted to bet on that kind of thing, Petra had told her.

  Pictures of scars, of skins in shreds, making London’s mosaic pieces, lay scattered upon the plush cream carpet of the office.

  No, it made no sense. Except to Petra, who had investigated it on Phineas’s behest, and made a decision about what needed to be done next.

  Call the police? Rose had said, almost hopefully. The police would give everything shape, for her. See this bloke? said Petra, pointing to a shot of the crowd in cinema-style seating, close to the cage. He is the police.

  It was like a line from a film. Too slick to be true. But maybe, sometimes, life could be like a film. For some people.

  It was getting late. The concertina of traffic on the Hammersmith road was down to a soft squeeze. Rose leaned forward in her sleeping bag and gathered up the documents. She put them back in the file.

  Everything was in its place except for the silver lighter that lived on the mantelpiece. Petra had taken it with her. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, but it was the first time Rose had asked to go along. She had been given a look of bemusement in return. Did it mean she wasn’t ready?

  Enough questions.

  She slid down the wall to lie flat on the carpet. Petra would take the chaise longue when she came back in; unspoken rules stated it was her sleeping spot. The weekends they spent back in Wiltshire, compartmentalising with a fair amount of success. Sometimes work
spilled over into the conversations, but mainly they ate sandwiches and ran over the fields with the pace and purpose of escapees.

  It was good.

  One weekend, a few months ago, Petra had said, I’m due a moult, I think I’ve started, and sure enough there was a skin to be taken to the nearby council-run incinerator the next morning. Nothing changed, and there was no drama to it. Petra was the same.

  It doesn’t bother me much, she said. Worse if I’ve got a partner, obviously, and then there’s breaking up and all that, but they’ve never turned nasty on me.

  Of all the pieces that made no sense, that was the one that made Rose suspect that if there was a God, he had it in for her personally. But that was not a good, or a true, thought, she constantly reminded herself.

  Sleep came from nowhere and left just as suddenly, to the sound of the downstairs door opening. The grainy light of early morning, followed by Petra’s feet on the stairs, their quick rhythm: and then she was in the room, just visible, with the smell of smoke unspooling from her black clothes. She moved to the desk, then to the mantelpiece, searching through the piles of paper.

  ‘You okay?’ whispered Rose.

  ‘Yeah. I can’t find—’ She spotted the manila folder, beside Rose. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘I was just looking through it.’

  ‘What for?’ Petra squatted and picked up the file. The smell of her was appealing in its thickness. It had its own presence in the room, speaking of an action completed.

  After a pause, Rose said, ‘I don’t know.’

  Petra patted her leg, through the sleeping bag. She took the file to the fireplace, and laid it in the grate. The silver lighter, produced from the pocket of her black leather coat, was flicked into life, and the file caught fire easily.

  ‘Done,’ said Petra. She stood, and stripped away her clothes. Her sports bra and pants were also black, sensible, and she looked lean. Fit for purpose, whatever that meant.

  ‘How did it go?’ whispered Rose. It was impossible to talk at a normal volume in the half-light.