I shiver involuntarily, and then do it again because it makes me feel better. A gray hoodie is knotted round my waist. I untie it and put it on over my T-shirt. I can feel the shock settling, becoming something more normal, explainable.
PC Morrow says, “Can I have your autograph?” and I turn, instinctively smiling, hand obligingly raised, before I realize she just wants me to sign my statement.
When I look up, DI Perivale is trudging back down the path and I can hear new sirens in the distance, coming up the Wandsworth one-way system, getting louder. Dogs and SOCO, people with cameras and things—what, sticks?—to prod through grass, to find evidence, to find out who did this.
It’s a peculiar feeling, and I don’t know if you’ll understand, but it’s like letting go. It’s no longer my body. It belongs to them now.
• • •
Snarled in traffic from Stockwell to Waterloo, incrementally delayed, forty-five minutes telescoping out into ninety, I miss the morning production meeting, which puts me on the back foot all day. If—as a person who has found a dead body—I’m not already on it.
Stan Kennedy, my cohost, is in the green room when I walk past, chatting up a couple of the guests—a midwife who has won the Pampers Award for Excellence, here to talk about childbirth in relation to a new sitcom, and a woman about my age whose teenage child killed himself a year ago after a period of Facebook bullying. Snuffling about under the table for dropped Danish-pastry crumbs is a lurcher, who, Dawn the assistant producer tells me, has “stolen the nation’s hearts” as the result of a YouTube clip in which he plays football with a chicken. Life, death, and a dog, it’s all in a day’s work here on Mornin’ All.
If Stan sees me, he doesn’t look up. Life would be easier if he and I got on. He is laughing loudly as I head for makeup, the throaty trademark guffaw that makes him so natural and likeable, in which his whole being seems concentrated on the person before him. Even the bereaved mother will be charmed, smiling down at her feet, smoothing invisible creases from her skirt. He does it to everyone except me. It’s war by omission. My friend Clara, who has met him a couple of times, says it’s the jaggedness of his eyeteeth that make him so attractive—the sharpness of his canines offset the slightly feminine features. His lower lip is much thicker than his upper lip—as if he’s been punched. Clara, the minx, says it makes you want to bite it.
I can still hear it, his affable cigarette-and-booze bellow, when I get down the corridor to my dressing room. Something about his laughter always makes me feel left out. Annie is waiting, edgy at my lateness, tubes lined up, BaByliss Big Hair Rotating Styler at the ready. I come in on an apology; I hate making her job more difficult than it already is. I don’t know if she’s been told why I’m late or not—from the car, I gave the producer a rundown of what had happened, and she might have passed the message on.
“You look like death,” she says when I sit down. Not, then.
I wish I had time to confess. She’s lovely to talk to: I’m always telling her that, trying to make her feel better about her job. Actually, though, I am probably just trying to make myself feel better about all this looking after I don’t deserve. It’s not the right time, though. It’s almost 10:00 a.m. Annie is too tense to chatter, and I’ve already put my head through a crimson Diane von Fürstenberg and now I’m ready for Bobbi Brown. I hold open my lips for Sangria or Old Hollywood, close my eyes for Wheat and Sable, Toast and Taupe. She’s probably right, though. I bet I do look like death—violet patches under my eyes, the lids creping more every day. My hair isn’t as thick as it was; the Titian is fading into—what, salmon? I think about Mother’s hair, so bright, so rudely vibrant when I was a child, and yet by the end a sort of dirty orangey pink. The dead girl’s hair was red, too. It can’t have been natural. Is it mad to say she looked familiar?
“There—” Annie says, standing back, “you look more alive.”
“You’re brilliant,” I say, though actually I’m the one who’s brilliant—all that shimmering pigment, all those light-reflecting microparticles. I’ll look decent enough out there. No one will be able to see the tiny muscle that’s twitching in my eye. It’s not me, though, this look, this big hair. To be honest—which I never would be to Annie—I think in the magnifying mirror I look like a tranny. Women turn into men when they get older, men into women. I can’t remember who told me that. Aging is a bugger. Still, as Clara says, the alternative’s worse.
Could I have taken today off? Was it enough? Even when my mother was sick, I hardly missed a show. There were nights when I didn’t go to bed; I just dealt with the horrors of her illness and hammered back down the M4 in the early hours. I stood in front of the cameras smiling, the whiff of vomit on my fingers. Do a lot of women feel this? That it’s only luck that has got us where we are? One slip, one lapse, and we’re out. But this morning, perhaps I shouldn’t have come in. When you get close to tragedy, sometimes, at first, it can be hard to see it. We had a couple on the show once who had been packing up at the end of a skiing holiday when their toddler was killed by a snowplow, suffocated by the displacement of snow. One unbearable detail: after they had taken the body of their tiny child to hospital, they drove across the Alps and took the ferry they had already booked. You can’t even begin to compare my experience with theirs, I know, but I suppose what I mean is, people do odd things under stress.
Annie wants my fingers so she can paint my nails scarlet to match the carnations in the vase on the coffee table in the studio. She has her instructions. These details matter. If she notices the shaking in my hands, she doesn’t say. I press my palms into the towel on the dressing table, feel the tremors up my arm.
The red nails. The red flowers. The long-sleeved red dress. I think about blood and death, bloodless death—those marks across the girl’s neck. I wave my red-tipped hands at Annie. “Am I not too red?”
“You’re jolly,” Annie says. “Uplifting on a gray old March morning like this. God knows we need it.”
• • •
I never intended to become a daytime television presenter. I was a researcher and a reporter and then the offer came up and Philip was keen and I said yes before I thought of saying no. It’s a funny old job. It’s not acting and it’s not journalism. You can’t really imagine it being high on anyone’s list of ambitions. No one respects a daytime television presenter. We’re assumed to be “vacuous,” even farther down the food chain than our colleagues on news—“Cute faces and cute bottoms and nothing else in between,” to quote Kate Adie. “When Mr. Blair starts to bomb Baghdad,” Richard Ingrams said, “we shall be informed of the fact by a smiling bimbo with a perfect set of teeth.”
When I see contemporaries from Oxford, serious players in publishing and academia, or bump into any of those bods I trained with on the BBC Trainee Scheme—now producers on Panorama or behind the scenes in policy—I am hardened to affront. “How’s the world of rudely bent bananas?” shouted some bloke across the floor at the National Television Awards the other night. I was a researcher with him on Newsnight. God knows what he does now, but he seemed to be wearing the same shirt. I smiled and said, “Pull down your trousers and I’ll let you know.” Everyone else on his table laughed.
I feel shifty remembering it. It wasn’t funny. They only laughed because I am (a bit) famous, a household name. Their chortles were worse than his jibe, really, because of that. Thing is, I know daytime TV is associated with the long-term unemployed, and the terminally depressed, and only marginally preferable to silence as an accompaniment to the ironing. “Household” is the right adjective here. But I also know there is a lot to be said for what I do and that not everybody could do it. It’s not about a set of perfect teeth, or the ins and outs of EU vegetable regulations; it’s about speaking to the viewer directly, one at a time, the common touch. We’re real life in your living room, Stan and me, and there is a skill to that.
Despite everything, I’m on the sofa today before him. Annie says he likes to get there first so he
can josh about my tardiness, “my busy, juggled life,” as he calls it. I’ve told her it’s all just joking, lighthearted banter, feeding into the faux-rude repartee between us that makes the show the hit it is; that he doesn’t “mean” a word of it. But behind the smiles, the claps on the shoulder, I fear he does, that it is a tiny little element in the one-upmanship, his campaign to replace me. He doesn’t know for sure that I earn more than he does, but he can’t bear the doubt.
I’m having my microphone fitted. Hal, the floor manager, is clipping it underneath the dress to my balconette, nestling it in my cleavage—and I’m thinking of the girl and her bra, that it must have been a style they call “multiway,” which adjusts to fit whatever type of shirt you’re wearing, or it wouldn’t have come undone at the front. I’m thinking about this, but it seems too intimate, so I’m trying not to think about it when Stan saunters in, chatting to Terri, the producer.
He sees me and holds up his hands in mock surprise. “Miss Marple. Solving a murder, helping the police with their enquiries, and still at work on time. Or do we find Miss Marple as a role model a little aging?” He twiddles an invisible mustache and adopts a Belgian accent. “Perhaps Hercule Poirot?”
I wonder if he planned to come in after me all along. It is always better to be standing up when putting someone down. In this context, the context in which my life has been taken out of the ordinary and the domestic, perhaps it’s important to him to look busier and jollier and more in control and more alive than me.
“Not solving a murder, Stan the Man.” I grin. I’d never let Terri see me crack. She’s tough and has no time for slackers, but as long as I stay dignified, she’ll stand up for me. “Just finding one.”
When he plonks himself down, the cushions beneath me swell with displaced air.
“Remind me never to run with you,” he says, to the room in general.
The Mornin’ All studio takes up the entire fifth floor of a tower on the South Bank. Out of the window behind me is a view of London and the Thames—as magnificent, as picture-perfect as an artificial backdrop. Our section, with its mock-up “warehouse-style” wall, its swirly carpet, its nestle of lounge, is in the middle of the studio. The lighting is rigged. We’re a glossy, brightly lit spot of loveliness, a ray of sunshine, but I’m sitting here and all I can think is how ugly Stan is. The music is playing, they’re running the intro, and he’s wisecracking away across the room—to the lighting and the sound guys, to the researchers, to pretty India in her corner, waiting for her Twitter and email and Facebook slot. He’s an uncouth rugby player on tour: “What do necrophiliacs call morticians? Pimps . . . What’s the difference between pedophilia and necrophilia? Eighty years.” He’s trying to unnerve me. I’m wondering if his words aren’t slightly slurred.
Then we are on air. I say my good mornings, give my own spiel, and he turns to the camera, engages it with his eyes, and stares into the viewer’s soul, like he is the only one who understands. His expression is somber, the corners of his mouth turning down, when he announces the sadness to come later in the show. “A year ago,” he says simply, “Maggie Leonard’s fourteen-year-old son, Saul, lost his life as a result of Internet bullying.” He gives me a look heavy with shared sorrow. I nod sympathetically, allow a doleful half smile. We’re in this together, him and me.
He rubs his hand across his jaw; I alone can hear the rasp of skin on bristle.
“A raw day,” Stan concludes.
• • •
A few weeks ago, when a cabinet minister was caught lying on Question Time, we invited a psychologist into the studio to talk about body language and the art of mendacity. Children, she said, often cover their mouths after telling fibs; grown-ups touch their chins with their hands or fiddle with their cuffs—an unconscious desire to cross their arms.
I work hard to control my body language during today’s show, because I feel as if I am lying all the way through. Today, the trivialities feel particularly shallow and vapid. I’m late with my prompt for India, have to apologize on air, make a “pratfall” face for the viewer. “No biggie,” India says in return. I coo over the lurcher—Billy, he’s called—tease Stan, wish I had checked the burglar alarm before I left home, told Marta not to walk across the common, but to take the long way round to school. I hadn’t been thinking straight. There are precautions that have to be taken.
During the interview with Maggie Leonard, I sit with my head cocked to one side. We know what vocabulary is permissible this side of midday and what isn’t. We say “passed on,” “lost his life,” “no longer with us,” “left you.” It’s insane, the efforts we make to stop ourselves from saying the word dead.
In the car on the way home, I lie my face against the window. It’s a relief to let my guard down. I think about that poor girl. The car stops and starts, jerks and accelerates. I bash my chin, knock my forehead. My neck has come loose. Steve, my driver, is chatting away about last night’s darts and the roadworks at Elephant and Castle. “Fed up with this weather,” he says. “It’s not cold; it’s not wet; it’s not hot. It’s just nothing, isn’t it? This year March is just a load of nothing.”
Shopfronts, corrugated iron, roundabouts, Tube entrances, building works—cranes and drills and graffitied awnings—it’s all still there. Horrible things happen to good people. Buses crash and children die. Women are raped and mutilated in the Congo—there was a program about it the other night. Friends tell you about tragedies—a young husband’s unexpected heart attacks, brave six-year-old with leukaemia. They touch your life, these terrible happenings. You wish they weren’t real, and your heart lurches in the dead of night, but then they slant away, and you carry on with your own little existence. But this, this death knocked everything sideways. It is too close. No one is safe. It’s a world in which people kill other people. Death isn’t just slow, stretched over months, years, like my mother’s. It happened in an instant. In a few seconds. A rope round the neck, a tug; it’s all it takes. Thinking this, I feel dizzy, as if I’m about to fall.
The car vibrates at the lights. My perfect life. What is it next to this? Nothing. I think of the girl’s mother. Father. School days. Summer holidays. Jobs. Family. Friends. Boyfriend. Have they been told? Have the police found out who she is? Was. Did she like her life, or did she long for it to be different? I’ve started shivering, even though it’s warm back here.
The BBC News app on my iPhone has no mention of anything “breaking.” Is this news? I don’t know. A torso bobbing to the surface at Limehouse, that bin bag of limbs found floating in the Regent’s Canal, that was news. But perhaps whole bodies are found, in patches of common ground, in other suburbs—Bexleyheath, Southall Green, Crouch End—every day.
The traffic cranks to a stop. A skip lorry, ratcheting into the junction from the Walworth Road, is blocking everything in all directions. Horns screech. Exhaust fumes bloom.
“Driven by morons, skips,” Steve says. “No respect. They’re all the same. Ex-cons, I reckon. The way they take speed bumps down my road—make a sound like a bomb going off. They have to be doing it on purpose. They need anger management,” he says.
Congestion eases. We slide unfettered down Kennington Park Road, the tarmac smooth beneath the wheels, and Steve, who had opened his window to release an angry elbow, is talking into the wind now as it whistles past his ears, past Oval Tube and St. Mark’s Church. I should ask him about his wife—she had her ob-gyn appointment today—find out if his daughter, Sammy, got her interview. I’ll do it in a bit, when the window’s shut. Now’s a good moment to ring Clara, she will be in the staffroom, as peaceful as her life gets.
“Hello, Gaby Mortimer,” Clara says, as she always does.
I can hear clattering behind her voice, like a slow train on a track, or a canteen worker clearing trays.
“You there?” she says.
I clear my throat and say, “Hello, Clara Macdonald.”
“God. Friday. Couldn’t come soon enough as far as I’m concerned. Just
want to get home, run a hot bath, sort out the kids—Pete’s cooking—and put my feet up in front of Mad Men. I’ve got a mountain of lesson planning, but I won’t feel guilty, because Sky Plus is getting so full I need to clear the list or it’ll start deleting itself, or is that just a myth? Anyway, if I watch a bit of telly, it’ll be like tidying up.”
Just hearing her voice is encouraging. We’ve been friends since grade school, and for me, Clara Macdonald is about as bloody close to perfect as you can get.
“What’s up?” she continues, reading my silence. “Who’s upset you? Is it Philip? Is he still in plonker mode? Or is it that handsome twat at work?”
“Both,” I say, half laughing. “The plonker’s being a plonker, and the twat’s being a twat, but also . . .”
I’ve been wondering how to say it, what order to put the words in, whether to begin with “You will never believe what happened to me today” in an upbeat, imparting-of-top-gossip sort of way, or whether to be earnest: “Listen, it will be on the news soon and I wanted you to hear it from me first.” I still don’t know. Neither seems right. The first, too blatantly callous. The second, well, there’s that tone, isn’t there, that slips into people’s voices when they are telling you awful things? A bit what my favorite aunt would have called “churchy,” a bit marbles-in-the-mouth self-righteous. I know, too, that Clara will be tear-prickingly sympathetic about my trauma, and I don’t deserve that. It isn’t fair. Not at all.
I visualize her in the staff room, colleagues bustling around her, a reading bag, slung across her shoulder, her Tube pass—quick pat to check—padding out her back pocket. She may already have her coat on—that tweed thing from Primark (“Primarni,” she calls it), her stripy scarf round her neck. I imagine the door about to open, a splash of thronging corridor, some nice fellow teacher offering a lift to the Tube.
Steve has wound up the window. I change my mind. I will speak to her later, when she is not in a hurry. I am probably overreacting anyway. In as upbeat a tone as I can manage, I say, “Just checking in before the weekend.”
Under Your Skin: A Novel Page 2