The Loosening Skin

by Aliya Whiteley

  ‘What do I have to do to make you believe that? I’ll tell you about my first moult.’

  ‘I know about that.’

  ‘I didn’t tell you everything. Listen. I was in Manhattan. My father’s apartment. He was away on a shoot, and I was watching a movie.’

  ‘I know,’ I repeat. ‘One of the movies he’d directed. It triggered something. You told me before.’ I’m ashamed to say I’m bored of it.

  ‘It wasn’t one of his. I lied. It was a dirty movie. I was whacking off when I got that itchy feeling, all over.’ His eyes are on my stomach, on the join where the skin has been sewn up around me. ‘The skin came off in my hand. The skin on my dick.’ He shrugs and blushes, like a little boy.

  ‘I screamed. The maid came running. Found me that way.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t you tell me that?’

  ‘It’s hardly flattering.’

  ‘Does that matter?’ But my real problem is that I much prefer the other version of the story, when his father the famous director makes a film that leads to a reaction in his only neglected son. It has more pathos. This story is ridiculous – the story of the maid and the boy caught withhis trousers round his ankles. It suits him less.

  ‘Your turn,’ he says, with a cheeky smile. ‘You were sixteen

  years old.’

  Oh, Max. What a creation he is.

  ‘I was sixteen years old,’ I say, and the words come from that start, and flow from the memory. There I am again, the solid me of the past. The one version of myself I can understand.

  1986. The first time.

  ‘Mine wasn’t that bad,’ said her mother from the seat beside her. ‘It just came right off. I don’t understand it.’

  All emotion had left Rose since her first moult, but here they were, back in a sudden rush; she hated her mother, she hated her, she hated her, the loud voice, the drone of it, the fact that her mother could discuss such an intensely personal thing in front of a collection of strangers in a doctor’s waiting room. And the strangers: she hated them too. Listening and pretending not to, hearing and not really caring either way.

  The open-plan stretch of the waiting room from sliding double doors to reception desk was light and airy. Rows of chairs were bookended with small pine tables bearing magazines, and people sat in their own patterns, leaving spaces where one group ended and another began.

  Her mother had chosen the front row, before a large poster. Block lettering listed the warning signs of serious skin conditions, from misshapen moles to constant itching.

  ‘At least it came off in one,’ said her mother. ‘But it took so long, and you don’t look right. I think we really should just get you checked out.’

  Shut up, Rose said in her head. Shut up.

  ‘Soon be over and done with.’ The pat of her mother’s hand on her knee appalled her; she couldn’t help but flinch.

  ‘Is it still tender?’

  Unable to raise her eyes, Rose nodded.

  ‘Rose.’

  There was no escape. She had to look up, and meet her mother’s eyes. Why was it unbearable, to see and be seen this way? She felt as if she had lost herself, sloughed off every emotion that made her who she was. In its place, fast expanding to take up the emptiness, was black, viscose hatred of everyone who had ever lost their skin and thought it no big deal.

  She stood up, and walked fast. Walked away.

  Her mother called her name. Rose’s walk turned into a run.

  › • ‹

  ‘You made up with her, right? Your mom?’

  ‘Of course. It was just… I don’t know. The triggering of the disease. But it didn’t affect the Bond for long. The Bond is different.’

  I don’t need to say that it was never quite the same, though, do I?

  ‘So that’s why,’ he muses. ‘Why you ended up working for that Skin Disease Clinic in Lincoln. To make up to your mom. On some level.’

  That’s too neat and tidy. It’s ridiculous.

  ‘This EMS, it makes you want to push everyone away. You can see that, right? It needs a cure. Think how many people we can help, if we get it right. With you,’ he says.

  I close my eyes.

  The thing is it feels good, to tell it, to talk of it, and to have his verdict, his summation. Why should that help? It’s almost an act of erasure. It takes out so much of what I’ve felt and discards it as unimportant. Simply a part of my illness.

  And if Max does manage to remove the illness, what will be left?

  › • ‹

  He feeds me tangerine. The dead skin pulls at my neck as I lift my head for each segment. After that sweetness there are more pills to swallow, and if I take them without a fuss he smiles. I feel better, when I see him smile.

  Afterwards, I say, ‘You’re hurting me.’

  Still smiling, he says, ‘It can’t be worse than how you hurt me.’

  ‘It’s revenge, then.’

  ‘No, it’s not that. That’s not part of it.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Because I’m giving you a gift.’

  My new skin, underneath, has been rubbed and rubbed by the old. It’s as tender as a blister. But my breasts, they remain free. I focus on my nipples; on the air upon them.

  ‘Tell me about Steve. Your first love. You were twenty-one.’

  ‘I was twenty-one,’ I repeat. Steve, who moulted me off.

  ‘You got kicked out of college for him.’

  ‘University. And I wasn’t kicked out because of him.’ Not exactly.

  ‘So tell me how it was.’

  1991. Starting a fire.

  Rose folded her skin up small, and put it at the bottom of the metal bin.

  It was late. Most of the students were out, drinking and clubbing. She had gone to the pub and drunk too much without feeling it, telling everyone she had just moulted and it had been fine. An easy one. But back here, in her room with its single bed, single desk, single chair, lone Dalí poster covering cracked paint, she couldn’t pretend. Her hands were clumsy. It took her four attempts to light a match.

  Steve no longer loved her. Well, she no longer loved him, so that made them equal. All the love had seeped out of her with this moult, and now she was clean and new – emptied of love. Yet the memory of him saying – I’ve shed, this can’t work any more – hurt so much. She couldn’t understand it. She never wanted to touch the skin that had loved him again.

  It caught quickly. It crackled. She fed the fat little flame of it, fed it photographs of the two of them, then the poems he had written for her:

  Our skins entwine

  and rub

  and bleed together

  so our love sinks deeper

  deeper to the bones

  the bones

  and beyond

  It deserved to burn; all the untrue, stupid sentences of the world should burn. She hoped he was burning the things she had written to him, those long letters telling him every thought that came to her, every feeling she had experienced about her life so far. And when the fire began to die she fed it her lecture notes, her painstakingly careful handwriting on the subject of Ancient Greece, she gave those to the firetoo, and felt better, and better, with each lick of heat along the sharp white edges, curling them over, twisting them to ash.

  I’m not a child any more, Rose thought. I will never give away so many secrets about myself again. Then she pictured the days ahead. The days of building up emotions only to have them crumble away with each moult. The lovers who would be taken away. The husband, maybe. One day she would wake and find she had left him behind, and she hadn’t even met him yet.

  She reached for the bottle of vodka, a quarter empty, and tipped liquid freely over the flames. The flames followed the trail, leaping up to the bottle. She dropped it as an automatic reaction; the flames began to spread across the carpet and she knew in that moment she had gone too far, that she still wanted all those days and lovers ahead even if they could not last forever.

  She st
umbled from the room, screamed ‘Fire!’ up the stairwell, ran to the lobby and dialled 999 on the payphone as a few students emerged from their rooms, sniffing at smoke. They filed past her as she gave their address, and wearily began to assemble on the pavement opposite the hall of residence.

  When she joined them, their expressions seemed to say to her: if it’s not one thing, it’s another.

  How adult they all were, now. How boring it was, to feel.

  › • ‹

  ‘How much longer?’ I whisper.

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘I smell.’

  Max laughs a little. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘you do. Once we get you out of that old skin you can have a good long bath. How do you feel?’

  That’s a difficult question to answer. I understand him better. I’ve seen his desperation to reel back time, to make us what we were again. I care about him, I do. I don’t know if that’s the fault of the process, or of being kept here; could it be some sort of Stockholm syndrome? Whatever it is, it’s making me hate myself a little more every minute.

  ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘You look tired, though.’

  ‘I feel like we’re getting somewhere, and I can’t sleep for thinking about it,’ he admits.

  ‘Do you still hate to be touched?’

  ‘I don’t hate it. I just prefer to be the one doing the touching. Tell me about Cyprus.’

  ‘The third moult.’

  ‘You were twenty-eight years old.’

  ‘I was in the RAF. But it wasn’t how you think.’

  ‘Did you see action?.’

  ‘No, Cyprus isn’t— It wasn’t… I was… I was…’

  1998. Heat.

  Rose was a soldier second and an administrator first: working on the logistical side, ordering supplies, marking movements on maps. She knew how to use a gun and could run five miles in forty minutes, but mainly she could use a computer and keep a lot of other people running in the right direction.

  The poster behind her desk bore a quote from Frederick the Great:

  An Army Marches on its Stomach.

  And so she was organised. An organised, proper person.

  When she felt the first signs of her time approaching she informed her CO and got signed off for two days, then checked herself into the Moulting Ward.

  It was an issue of temperature; the heat could cause problems in moulting for people who weren’t used to it. The ward was temperature controlled, and it was pleasant to sit in the communal area, listening to British Forces Radio, feeling the itch build.

  A Flight Lieutenant she didn’t know came in, and they chatted for a while about home and family, but his moult was moving faster than hers. He left for a private cubicle to get the process over with, and then the overhead strip lights kicked in as day dimmed outside the window.

  Why was it taking so long?

  She was a woman now, grown, doing a job; she was responsible. It had been seven years since the last moult, so the timing was right. The stress of getting accepted into the RAF, training, being posted overseas: none of those had triggered a moult. And this time there was no Steve, no love to be lost. She wanted it done with, gone in a day. She wanted to prove how easy this process could be.

  Forces Radio closed down for the night, and still there was only the itch.

  At some point during the dark hours a member of the medical staff put her head around the door and looked surprised to see Rose still sitting there.

  ‘Go get some sleep in one of the private cubicles,’ she suggested, but Rose shook her head. She couldn’t face a small white space, or a medical bed with the sheets pulled tight, if it wasn’t about to happen.

  ‘It’s a quiet night,’ said the medical officer, and left.

  Slowly, the itching intensified.

  Rose dozed in one of the new plastic stackable chairs that had been flown out from home; she had put through the order herself. So many things here in Cyprus had been transported, hundreds of miles, to make this recognisable, to ground the troops in familiarity.

  A sharp sting pierced her lower back. She jerked up from the chair and touched the sore spot through her uniform. The skin was pouching out, heavy with liquid. Not an insect bite, then, but a new facet of the moult. The thought triggered a realisation: the itching had become pain. She was in pain, all over, but strong on her back and buttocks, and it was growing, this pain; it would eat her up. Wherever it touched the skin puffed, as if injected with it, and the lights were too bright, the uniform too rough. She couldn’t stay here.

  Rose walked out of the communal area and passed the medical officer in the corridor, who threw her a quizzical look, but said nothing. She walked on, out of the building, into the night air, so clean – and then the urge swept over her to run.

  Running through the dark, quiet base, she imagined running right out of her skin, leaving it behind as a ghostly outline. The green buildings passed by, all the same, big as barns, holding sleeping soldiers, and she accelerated, outstripping the urge to be counted as one of them. She no longer wanted to belong.

  To belong – why should that emotion abandon her?

  Belonging was a form of love, perhaps.

  The perimeter of Akrotiri base was demarcated by a tall fence. Rose reached it, pressed her face to the holes, and willed herself through, as if she could be poured from her skin on to the rocky ground beyond, and from there to the sea. The uniform held her back. She stripped it off, and the night air was so cold, so cold.

  Lights swung down upon her; a voice said, ‘Stay still, stay still.’ She reached through the fence but only her fingers would fit. The pain redoubled and her skin was loose upon her. She wriggled free of it, not caring who was watching, then tried to bury it in the dusty ground. She dug with a frenzy.

  ‘Christ,’ said a thick voice, disgusted by her. She didn’t care. A blanket was placed around her shoulders. More lights arrived, and she was lifted, taken to one of the identical buildings, and a bed.

  The next day the RAF began the process of ejecting her from their ranks as a liability. It was fine. Her urge to be there had vanished, and all that was left was shame that she had ever wanted to take part in the first place.

  › • ‹

  ‘I thought you were this hard woman,’ says Max. ‘A killer.’

  ‘I pushed paper for a while.’

  ‘Did Phineas Spice know? That you were an administrator?’

  ‘It never came up in conversation.’

  Max laughs.

  I can’t help but wonder how he could have known me, held me, and thought me a killer? Didn’t the truth of me shine through?

  ‘What is it about me that you love?’ I ask him.

  How odd it is to be having this conversation. I should scream and cry, and he should say scary things about what he’ll do to me if I don’t at least try to love him back. That’s how captors and captives speak.

  ‘You want a list?’ he says.

  Those wide, playful eyes take me back to the tone we used to stretch between us, like a net in a game.

  ‘Yeah, I want an actual list. To make up for the list you stole from my bag.’

  ‘Right then.’

  ‘Come on then. Don’t tell me you have to think about it.’

  ‘You’re unique. I’ve told you that before.’

  ‘You’re wrong. But okay.’

  ‘You make me feel cared for,’ he says.

  I don’t correct him, although he has to know he should say it in the past tense.

  ‘You’re so beautiful.’

  I lie still, sewn up, knowing I am anything but. There’s no need to reply to this one either.

  ‘You give it meaning,’ he tells me.

  ‘What?’

  He wets his lips, then says, ‘My life. You give my life meaning.’

  ‘How do I do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just one of your many mysterious talents, which now, apparently, include running away from doctors and hospitals, and being an administrator.’r />
  ‘So you like my mysteries?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he says, smoothing my hair back from my face.

  ‘Then why are you trying to solve me?’

  › • ‹

  ‘You were thirty-eight, working with Petra, and you shed early,’ he says, as he holds the glass of water so I can sip through a straw. ‘You ran away from London. Why?’

  I have no idea how much time has passed. I have been here so long, cocooned, while he tries to form me. This is his script. Everything in life has been revealed as a script, so how can I blame him? It’s in the wink of a receptionist underneath a poster that reads Love is a Warm Layer; it’s in the knowledge that whatever you are will come free in the next layer of loosening skin. Nothing can penetrate me beyond that.

  I shake my head.

  ‘We’re so close to being together. Properly together. No secrets. Tell me this last thing.’ Max’s eyes hold tears. ‘I know it was terrible. It must have been something terrible.’

  ‘Are you crying for me, or for how bad you feel?’

  ‘Both, Rosie,’ he whispers. ‘This world. This whole world.’

  ‘No,’ I tell him. ‘Not your world. These things aren’t in your world. How can you bring them here? How dare you keep me here, and make yourself like them?’

  ‘No, it’s for good, Rosie, for good, for you.’

  ‘Max—’

  ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘Imagine. Imagine a world where love doesn’t live in the skin alone. Where it’s deep within you, all the time. No skin trade, no incinerators. That world would be a better place, because love could never be bought. Don’t you understand that I’m living that dream, right now, and my love comes from that place? That’s how you can love me too, if you’ll just hold on and take the pills. Remember Paris, walking by the Seine, and I was so nervous when I reached for your hand. But you let me hold it. You let me hold you, and that’s when I knew. I loved you beyond my skin.’