The Loosening Skin

by Aliya Whiteley

  ‘It feels creepy.’ A group of five, living together in love. She had asked him not to tell anyone, and he hadn’t, but he felt as if it might have helped to describe it to somebody else. What words would he use? A commune? A gang-bang? A live-in orgy? Years in a British boarding school, sent there on the behest of his rich Anglophile father after his first moult, had given him enough language to have a few descriptive alternatives for Nicky’s arrangement, but none of them quite seemed to fit.

  ‘Mik,’ said a voice from the aisle; in the shuffling after the first set of departures from the carriage, a fellow student from his Business Management course had ended up standing beside him. ‘Did you take notes for Clark’s two o’clock on Organisational Behaviour?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll be in the library tomorrow morning, if you want to have a look.’

  ‘Great, thanks.’

  He wanted to get Nicky to run through all the names and personalities he would be meeting again, but the presence of the student – whose name he couldn’t even remember at that moment – stymied him. It was only after the next stop, and the desertion of another raft of bodies while others fitted themselves into the freed seats, that the aisle was clear and Mik felt able to ask.

  She rattled the names off, and provided neat little descriptions that amused him, including exact details such as a favourite film or a predilection for olives. They passed out of his head upon the instant of hearing them.

  ‘And you really love all of them?’

  ‘Yeah. I can’t explain it. We all bring something different to it. I don’t have to be everything to one person. It relieves the pressure.’

  ‘But would you love them if they came as individuals?’

  She thought about that for a while, her hand still on his knee. ‘I don’t know. I met Howard and Liz first. They were a couple, and I rented a room from them in my second year at uni. Sunetra was already living there, and then I realised they were all together, and I guess I fell for Sunetra, and it grew from there. Then Dan came to mend the boiler one day.’

  ‘That is bizarre,’ said Mik. ‘It’s amazing, though. I’ve never heard of anything like it before, not in Russia, not here. Does it happen a lot, do you think, secretly?’ He often felt that life was not exactly how it was represented to him by the older generation, and suspected one day he would discover the real facts that everybody else was already in on.

  She shook her head. ‘Only in romantic literature. But all those stories end in tragedy.’

  He changed the subject after that. The next three stops passed through Birmingham’s centre; the students left and the shoppers boarded, and by the time they got to Erdington he felt a little ashamed of his long, loose hair and tight, ripped jeans. Nicky, in a flowing skirt and sky-blue top, swept slowly from the train, and she left a trail of lavender for him to follow.

  He had complimented her on her perfume when they first met. It had been at a drama club audition for roles in a turgid play of skin atrocities and pornography written by one of the postgraduates. The declamatory style insisted upon by the director got them both giggling, and later, in the Union bar, she had told him that she took a bath every night, dropping lavender essence in the water. If it had been a deliberate come-on, it had seriously worked. He had pictured her alone, soaping a leg in her tiny student-rental bathroom, but now he wondered – does she bathe alone? Perhaps they had an enormous decadent tub and washed each other’s backs.

  But walking through Erdington, in Nicky’s aromatic wake, it seemed to Mik that it was not the kind of place to hold a vast palace in which the five of them lived. She stopped on the street outside one house in an unremarkable row of tall houses with steep sloping roofs, and squeezed between two cars parked close, bumper to bumper, in a long line of cars that all faced the same way.

  ‘Here we are,’ she said, and took his hand to lead him inside.

  The immediate impression was of unseen activity. ‘Want a drink?’ called a man from the end of the hallway, and a woman immediately shouted, ‘Tea please!’ from upstairs. The man appeared, a blue mug in hand. He was dressed in a business suit and wore a gold tie, loosened at the knot. He was heavy-set, his fingers meaty around the mug, and his sandy brown hair was unkempt. Mik felt a surge of awareness. I know him. I will know him.

  ‘I wasn’t talking to you!’ the man called back up the stairs, but he was smiling. ‘Right. Coffee, Nick?’

  ‘Yep,’ said Nicky. ‘And Mik drinks coffee too.’

  ‘Milk? Sugar?’

  ‘Both,’ said Mik.

  ‘I’m Howard.’

  ‘He knows that,’ Nicky said, rolling her eyes, and the dynamic of the house felt so clear to Mik in that moment, sketched perfectly in this first meeting with daily life, small actions given and taken, teasing and talking, knowing each other so well. Surely this was the ideal way to have a relationship; it was so different from his parents’ dry silences, long after moulting had taken place but they had made the decision to not ask for anything further from love. But here was an excess of love, and it was risky, and beautiful for that. When their skins loosened it would fall away.

  It would be worth it, though. To have felt so cherished, and to have that memory. Yes, it would be worth it.

  ‘We’re just popping upstairs,’ said Nicky.

  ‘Cool,’ Howard said. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, but he acted like a much older man. Perhaps it was the suit. ‘I’ll leave the coffees outside the door. Don’t let them get cold.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Dinner at seven,’ he called, as she pulled Mik up the stairs, and another smiling face craned around a door on the landing, and murmured something that he didn’t catch; this woman’s eyes were bright, calculating, and her close-cut black hair caught his attention.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  He felt the same pull to her, too – as if he already had knowledge about her, about what was going to happen next.

  Before he could speak Nicky pulled him up the next flight of stairs and into the first room on the right. It was wood- panelled, the ceiling sloping, a skylight letting the sun pour through on to the double bed, giving it a hot, close feeling like a sauna.

  She took a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign from the small bedside table and hung it on the door before closing it.

  ‘Is this your room?’ he asked. It was impersonal, undecorated.

  ‘We don’t have rooms. We just have signs when we want to be left alone. Like, right now. I want to be left alone with you.’

  She undressed him, pulled down his tight jeans before he had removed his shoes, and left him in an awkward tangle, which seemed to take ages to sort out. It was, crazily, the first time he had been alone with her. It felt to him that she and her companions, fate included, were rushing him along to a preordained destination.

  But it felt good. The speed of the journey, and the hands that wanted to hold him, bring him along, as they travelled.

  She finished removing his clothes and then reached up under her skirt to remove her knickers, placing them on the bedside table.

  ‘You’re mine for now,’ she said, ‘just for now,’ and knelt on the bed, gathering up the folds of her skirt to her waist.

  ‘I don’t know if I can—’ he said, but it was a lie and he was already hard. He knelt face to face with her, crushing the material of the skirt between their upper bodies, and found her so eager for the taste of his skin, her lips finding his shoulder, sucking at his neck, moaning without shame of being overheard.

  When he heard Howard’s steps on the stairs, measured, deliberately loud, he timed his strokes to each footfall. And the placing of the mugs, and the soft knock on the door – that was when he came, his senses filled with the house, the presences who were listening to their fucking, who would be part of it if he let them, and if they wanted him. He was desperate for them to want him.

  Saturday, 20 July 2022, 7:31pm.

  Rose: So it was about the sex, for you?

  Mik: Of course it
was about the sex. I was nineteen years old. We were all under twenty-five. Sex was a huge part of it. It was also the part that got the press hot under the collar. That’s how we came to their attention, actually. One of Nicky’s conquests had a brother who worked for a newspaper.

  Rose: Nicky had other lovers?

  Mik: She was in love with us. She fucked other people on a regular basis. She used protection and we understood it, as a need. Sex is just sex. It was the least interesting thing about us, in a way.

  Rose: The film glossed over that part.

  Mik: I said, it’s not that interesting. Plus the other producers wanted a 12 rating. What is it you want to know? We rarely did it as a big group. That stuff just looks good for porn movies but somebody always ends up feeling left out. Usually we did it in twos or threes, depending on who we felt close to. That changed all the time. Personal preferences are none of your business, no matter how much you threaten me over Gwen.

 

  Rose: You make me sound like a monster. I thought this was give and take. I help you, you help me, you know. I’m not, you’re not—

  Mik: I know. I can leave at any time.

 

  Rose: So that’s it. I’ve become a monster now. I get it. Perhaps it was bound to happen. But I need to know, it’s been years of not knowing, I didn’t realise how it would feel, and then Petra died because of me, because of my problems—

  Mik: She tried to stop Suscutin production because of you?

  Rose: Did you know Max was one of the original investors in Suscutin? He took it for years. Long before it passed regulations. He gave it to me too. As an early guinea pig.

 

  Mik: Why you?

  Rose: That’s difficult to explain. Love does strange things to people. Perhaps the easiest way to explain it is to say that I have Extreme Moult Syndrome.

  Mik: EMS? I heard Suscutin cures that.

  Rose: I didn’t want to be cured. I still don’t. Max thought I should be whether I liked it or not.

  Mik: He didn’t want you to suffer.

  Rose: There are worse things in life than suffering. You fell in love, all six of you. You knew it would hurt when it ended. Knowing hurt is always coming, is only ever one layer of skin away, is not some evolutionary mistake. It happens for a reason.

  Mik: I’ve heard that argument before, but it sounds a bit too close to a religion for my liking.

  Rose: Losing your skin is not the tragedy at the heart of the human condition. Feeling the same way forever, that’s the worst.

 

  Mik: So Petra agreed with you, about the tragedy of the human condition, as you call it. She tried to burn down the Suscutin laboratories because of it.

  Rose: No. I don’t know what she felt about Suscutin. I asked her to burn it down, and she tried. She’d done it before. She was good at getting rid of things and people that shouldn’t be allowed to exist.

  Mik: Who are you to make that call?

  Rose: She burned down empty office blocks that were being used to hold skin fights between trafficked slaves, and she burned down houses where teenaged girls were being groomed to fall in love with men who would then flay off their skin in videos. She burned down factories that specialised in clothes made from— look, however young and untouched you are, you can’t claim there’s any grey

  area here.

  Mik: I, I— Yes, the world can be a horrible place, I know that, I know that. I’m sorry you’ve seen stuff like that.

  Rose: That’s not the point. Don’t make it about me. This is about you. You helping Taylor, when she deserves some

  sort of justice.

  Mik: Is that what your friend Petra provided? Justice?

 

  Rose: Petra tried to help me, just as you keep trying to help Taylor. What makes her so special? What makes her worthy of your help?

  Mik: I made her a promise.

  2013. Flush.

  ‘You’ve just insulted the love of my fucking life,’ said Max, and smiled. He dealt the cards, flicking them across the

  green baize of the tabletop.

  Mik smiled back, although he didn’t know why. Was it a joke? Nothing Max said could ever quite be believed; working together on the script and now spending time together during the shooting process had taught him that. Max liked to manufacture moments, saying or doing things for effect, even when there were only the two of them present. The mystery of him – the idea that somewhere under the Hollywood persona there was something more meaningful and less pretty that stayed smothered under the unrelenting need for personal perfection – was one of the things Mik liked best about his new friend. It was a battle he had fought himself, when the papers started to construct their own narrative of him as the toy-boy of the Stuck Six.

  But it did make Max difficult to trust. Mik couldn’t spend long periods of time with him, in case he lost his own reality, so hard fought for. So he had refused the offer of a room of his own in Max’s Sussex mansion, and had instead opted for a trailer on the grounds once filming started. It gave him distance, and a space of his own. He found he needed that so much more after living as one of the Six. He struggled with concepts of his own possessions, and what sorts of embellishments he should make to his own living area; it was difficult to be totally responsible for himself and his surroundings, but necessary.

  Friends were also necessary. Uncomplicated friends, if such a thing existed. If not – fuck it. Beer and poker, and a damaged superstar for company.

  The third hand of cards sat next to a beer, before the seat Gwen always took, facing the door. Max regularly dealt her in whether she was present or not; he seemed reliant on the idea that they came as a team and her protection extended over him. She, in turn, insulted him in public, and was an attentive, maternal figure when it was just the three of them. Mik couldn’t imagine what they were like when they were alone – soulmates who discussed everything, or an old married couple who rarely exchanged words?

  They played a few warm-up hands until Gwen arrived, her cheeks red.

  ‘It’s all clear,’ she said.

  Max checked his watch. ‘That usually makes it – yup. Time for meds.’ He left the games room as she unbuttoned her jacket and draped it over the back of her chair. He took medication every night, and often sent Gwen out to fetch it. Mik never raised it as a subject. If it was an ongoing illness, a skin condition maybe, it wouldn’t have fitted with Max’s carefully guarded self-image and he never would have told the truth about it to another person anyway.

  Gwen took a sip of her beer. ‘It’s really warm in here.’

  ‘No, it’s just cold outside tonight.’ But she was right, the room was very warm, the windows shut up tight and the green silk walls oppressive. It was not to Mik’s taste, but he supposed it was a traditional take on a games room, with a snooker table, and its own bar in matching mahogany with a row of optics to match. Above it, there was a painting of a chestnut horse with a sturdy body and elongated legs that Mik found disturbing, as if reality had skewed.

  ‘I’m really tired,’ Gwen said.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yeah. Fine. I could have done without the cross-examination over my working methods today, that’s all.’

  ‘Who was that? The woman who was asking you about stuff earlier?’

  ‘Forget it,’ she said, and took another sip from her beer.

  ‘Listen, we get on well, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She was matter-of-fact, always serious with him, giving lots of eye contact in a way that seemed to him to be a plea for honesty on his part. It led Mik to think that she was very honest with him, as an act of reciprocity.

  ‘Do you think we only get on because of Max? Like, he’s the linking factor?’

  ‘If that was true,’ Mik said, ‘it would be really awkward every time he left the room. Which he does a lot. And, to be honest, I quite look forward to those moments.’

  ‘Me too,’ she said.

  �
�Okay, so what is it?’

  ‘Do you think love is very different from friendship?’

  ‘Wow. I wasn’t expecting that. Um… Yeah. It’s different. You can feel it. In the skin.’

  ‘I’ve never been in love,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve been in love a lot.’

  ‘I don’t want to be in love. Ever. It causes so many problems.’

  He took a swallow of his beer, and said, ‘That sounds like a bad childhood talking.’

  ‘Not at all. I just— I’m content. As I am. I wish everyone could be.’

  ‘Do you mean Max?’ said Mik.

  She nodded, and leaned back in her seat. ‘He’s my responsibility. He’s so desperate to try to understand love. Through the Stuck Six, through his own experiences. I wish I could get him to give up on the whole thing. All his plans and projects.’

  ‘What, like the film?’

  ‘Yes, like the film. Like anything do to with love. All his crazy ideas. He spends so much money, he wastes so much time.’

  ‘We should start a celibacy club.’

  ‘Are you celibate?’ she asked him, all astonishment.

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘God, no. I just don’t ever confuse love and sex.’

  ‘You get laid? What, a lot? When? With who?’

  ‘That’s my business.’

  He didn’t believe it. ‘Well, you’re not responsible for Max, or his happiness.’

  ‘Maybe not, but when I took this job I decided I was going to do the best I can. And that involves doing whatever it takes to help him.’

  It was a ridiculous statement, casting herself as his nurse, mother, friend and manager. What a pairing they were: the handsome actor/director who lived in a land of his own imagination, and the very serious bodyguard who was determined to let him.

  And what did he bring to it all? He couldn’t think of a thing, apart from being there when the pieces inevitably needed to be picked up. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘how about in that case I’ll do the best I can to help you, if you ever need it. Deal?’

  ‘Deal.’

  ‘I thought I already dealt,’ said Max, from the doorway, and Gwen said, ‘Oh, shut up and sit down.’