The playground is full of people I recognize—parents from school, neighbors I’ve seen around. Most of them notice me and glance away. I’m not very good at making friends. I’m busy, not there at the right times, and even when I am—those hanging around moments, like school pickup, I’m self-conscious. More to the point, Philip isn’t keen on meeting new people. He doesn’t have time, he says, to put in the effort—the getting-to-know-you conversations, the dinner parties . . . . We have enough friends already he says. He may well be right, but such intractability has its drawbacks at moments like this. I wish Millie still needed pushing on a swing, or guiding up the steps of the slide, so I would have something to do with my hands, an object to lean on, but she is horsing about in the bushes with a gaggle of others. Climbing frames pall by the time you are eight. I can understand that. Who needs modular outdoor play when there’s a real tree to dangle from? I sit on a bench, leaning forward on my knees, trying to look perky.
I catch others’ eyes and smile. I do up a little girl’s shoelaces. A toddler tumbles into a puddle next to me and I scoop him up and put him back on his feet.
“Gaby!”
Phew. It’s like being picked last in school games. It’s Jude Morris, mother of a child in Millie’s class. I don’t know her well, but I like the look of her. When we first met a few months ago, she told me she used to be a corporate lawyer. “And now I channel all that energy and education into powder paints and playdates and PTA events. I’m that woman. I’m that sad.” She is the first person I’ve met in ages who hasn’t immediately told me how moved they were by some interview I’ve just done—possibly because she’s had the sense never to watch one—or make me think, by being a bit standoffish themselves, that I need putting in my place.
She plonks herself down next to me. “So,” she launches, in a semiwhisper, “what a thing to happen. Here! I expect you’ve heard. Have you seen the police tape? I mean, horrendous. I’m so shaken up.”
It hasn’t occurred to me that anyone else might be shaken up.
“I know,” I say, smiling. “Extraordinary.”
A couple of other women sidle over. I remember both their names—Margot, who has a sporty boy in Millie’s class, and Suzanne, whose daughter is a natural actress—I’ve seen her in drama club. They probably know who I am, too, but they do this thing of addressing Jude, not me. They know her better, I suppose, but I find myself trying hard to make them talk to me. I like the look of them, too. I realize I want them to be my friends.
Margot, a neat German woman with wonderful cheekbones, tells Jude she’s heard it was a man walking his dog who found the body, on Friday afternoon. She screws up her face. “I think the dog was rolling in it.”
“No!” I say.
“It’s true,” Suzanne tells Jude. Round her neck is a series of colorful Tibetan scarves, which she adjusts, disentangling an avalanche of hair. “My dog rolls in awful things—dead rats and fox poo. Anything disgusting he can find.”
“Ughhh!” I say.
They talk about dogs and their habits for a bit. Then Jude mentions auto-asphyxiation, and someone else ventures prostitution. Margot, pursing her lips, says she heard the corpse was naked.
“Oh!” I say. The word corpse is not one that has entered my mind. It is so absolute, so removed from life and humanity. Dead flesh. Dryness. Finality. A naked corpse, disengaged from my experience, my moments with her.
“I know,” they both say, acknowledging me for the first time.
“I can’t believe she was naked,” I say. “What do you think happened? God, it is almost unbearable, isn’t it? And so close to us.”
Margot looks at me. “You never think it, do you? You always think this stuff happens somewhere else.”
Suzanne says, “Perhaps it’s good for us to be shaken up once in a while—we can all be so smug. We don’t live in the real world.”
“It’s true,” I say. “It’s like a wake-up call.”
And Jude says, “Second that.”
And Margot says, “Third it.”
And we all laugh.
Is it terrible that I don’t mention my part in the discovery of the body? The more they chatter, the harder it becomes. I should have said something at the get-go, but now it’s too late. I didn’t because . . . why? In my line of business, one whiff of the wrong kind of publicity and a career can implode. Just look at the presenter John Leslie. The accusations of sexual assault may have been unsubstantiated, but he never worked in TV again. Stan the Man has an agent, his own media machine. I’ve always tried to avoid that sort of thing. It seems so grand and self-important. Philip handles the legal side of my contracts, and the production company has a perfectly good publicity department. But now, well, I can see how useful another person would be. It occurs to me with panic that I should have contacted Alison Brett, who deals with Mornin’ All’s PR. I should have asked DI Perivale to keep quiet about my involvement, secured a seal of confidentiality. It seems more urgent now that I have sat here and listened and not said anything. I care less about my career, I realize, than about what these nice women think.
I look across at Philip, who is standing by the gate, hopeless and stiff. He is wondering, Why do I have to stand by this gate? What is my purpose here? Why can’t I be back at my computer, watching Samsung tank? I take a moment to watch him. I see him notice Millie, high in some branches, and his face brightens. I feel a swell of hope. I get to my feet and help her down, clinging on to her legs, catching her wellies as she scrambles. Jude reminds me about the charity auction I have promised to host at the school quiz in April, and I say good-bye to everyone as if they were my proper friends, trying hard not to mind too much that they aren’t, and the three of us set about our family day as if nothing were out of the ordinary at all.
• • •
At dusk, I see a man outside our window. He is on the other side of the road, behind a car, so I can’t catch the whole of him—just a snippet of his head, an arm, the change in light and texture as he moves behind glass, a tarnish of the silver, a mottle of the steel. I’m not imagining it. I stand and watch from the drawing room, wait for him to move. I am hyperaware these days, my nerve endings alert to every encroachment.
They haven’t caught “my stalker”—it sounds a bit showy-offy to call him that, I know, but I don’t know what other word to use. It could be a ghost, really, a figment of my overactive imagination, a sense of a person. Once, I told PC Evans, the policeman assigned to the case, I thought someone had been in the house. I smelled a sickly aftershave. Other times, I tried to explain, I feel watched, or shadowed. But it’s true I’ve never seen an actual person. Enquiries after Millie on Twitter: “How’s the little one’s nasty cold?” Presents—a pair of slippers from Toast, a CD of random songs (Ben Folds: “You Don’t Know Me”; Joe Jackson: “Another World”), a book (Dear G-Spot: Straight Talk About Sex and Love) from Amazon. “Maybe someone is being kind,” the policeman said, “looking out for you.” I asked him if he had ever dreaded the post, the clatter of the letter box? Since I withdrew from Twitter, the gifts have become sporadic.
I’m standing just to the right of the bay, concealed by the shutters. I can tell it’s a man from his height. It could be a smoker, banished from a nearby house. An estate agent waiting for a client. A neighbor locked out. Or what? What am I dreading?
Millie yells from the kitchen. She’s starving. When’s supper? Can she have a snack?
I sort her out—make a sandwich and a hot chocolate. I look for Philip, though I can’t find him. I’m not long, but by the time I get back to the window, the figure has gone.
MONDAY
It began yesterday. I was woken by the phone. It was a journalist called Jack Hayward asking for an interview.
“What’s your peg?” I asked warily, as politely as I could manage, considering I was still half-asleep.
“You know, this unfortunate incident with the dead woman: two worlds collide sort of thing.”
“That’s a
very complicated concept for this early in the morning,” I said, my mind working fast. So it was too late. My involvement was out there. Had the police held a press conference? Or alerted “their sources”? Either way, the information had been released. There was nothing I could do. “Surely you just want the dirt on my marriage, my infidelities, my teenage bulimia?”
He laughed, and it was a nice laugh, a laugh that had seen a few cigarettes in its time but was trying to cut down. “Give us a break,” he said pathetically.
I apologized gently, said I was sure he understood.
“Can I leave my number in case you reconsider?” he said.
“I won’t,” I said, but I took it all the same.
I rang Alison Brett, the press officer, at home. I hope I didn’t wake her. She was immediately efficient if so. “Avoid talking,” she said. “But if any of the paps turn up, give them what they want. They’ll go away then. Pose a bit. I know it’s a pain, but this sort of off-duty shot can be good for ratings. You know the drill. Casual, stylish, approachable. Cool but not too cool.”
Well, I could certainly manage the last bit. I had opened the door yesterday to pick up the Sunday papers in “natural-look” makeup, i.e., quick dab of lippy, and jeans, i.e., what I was wearing already. Two photographers, straight from central casting—short, stocky, red of face—were already out there. They stubbed out their fags when they saw me. “Give us a pic, Gaby,” “Come on, Gaby,” and “Smile, Gaby.”
I waited for a bit, holding the papers under my arm. Afterward, I thanked the photographers—which always surprises them—and closed the door.
That was that, I thought. But the papers were full of it. In the car, on the way to work, I learn about “TV Gaby’s Secret Horror” and “Gaby’s Mournin’ Pall.” Most of the details are there, plus new information about the woman. Not her name, but the fact that she was Polish and apparently lived “nearby.” An employer is quoted, her sadness squeezed into tabloid platitude: “She was a lovely person who will be much missed by everyone she touched.” None of the articles included pictures of her. She’s an absence. I’m the presence, mournful but plucky, on my doorstep. It’s so wrong, that.
In one of the photographs, a shadowy figure hovers behind me, in the hallway. It takes me a moment to work out it’s Marta.
Steve looks at me in the rearview mirror. “You all right?”
“I’m fine,” I say. I drop the newspapers to the floor, beneath my feet. “How’s your wife? Any ob-gyn news?”
“Nothing serious,” he says. “Polyps.”
“A polyp?”
“No, polyps.”
For some reason we both laugh.
• • •
Terri accosts me at the door to the production meeting. Boris Johnson, booked to come and talk about his “estuary airport,” has begged off with a gippy tummy. She needs something serious, something “current affairs-y” to plug the hole.
I head her off. “What else have we got?” I say, sitting down. It’s quiet in the room, tense with a feeling of anticipation.
Dawn, the assistant producer, consults her clipboard and reads out what I remember from Friday: a flirting master class from the presenter of a new dating show; Simon Cowell in the kitchen, doing his signature lamb brochettes; India’s ’Appening Apps; Kate Bush, recently back from the dead (“It’s me. I’m Cathy. I’ve come home”) with a new album; three pretty actresses from Downton in to talk about . . . well, Downton.
I am racking my brains. I made a mental list on the weekend and I run through a couple of my ideas—they’re not brilliant: the rise in flash mobs (a rock choir in Berkshire is taking over a shopping mall in Basingstoke); a blind high-street coffee test (Starbucks, facing dire quarterly figures, has gone for double shots).
A silence descends. No one looks at me, apart from Terri and Stan, who has his feet up on the other end of the table.
“It’s just . . .” Terri begins. She pushes the bridge of her black thick-framed glasses—fashionably unfashionable—farther up her nose. “I was thinking . . . you know, the big story from this weekend is . . .”
“You.” Stan has taken his feet down off the table. “You, sweet pea, are the story.” He doesn’t sound as confident as he might. I wonder if he is working out what’s in it for him, whether he’s weighing up the pros and cons, whether his publicity consultant has suggested he get caught up in a police investigation.
“I was thinking,” Terri says again, “an item about what it felt like to have gone through your terrible experience. You talking directly to the camera, telling your side of the story. We could get a psychologist in, sit them next to you on the sofa, to explain what sort of aftershocks to expect. ‘My trauma,’ that sort of thing.”
Alice, the new researcher, looks up. “Adam Phillips says he can get here by ten a.m.”
“It’s not my trauma,” I say. “I just found the body. It’s not my tragedy. It’s not about me.”
“I don’t know much about the dead woman,” Terri continues. “What was she—some Polish cleaner turning tricks on the side?”
I wince. “I’m not sure . . .” I begin.
“Whatever. I just imagine that her life wasn’t that close to yours, that she moved in”—she shrugs, as if even she is aware of dangerous assumptions—“different circles.”
“Two worlds collide,” I say, “that sort of thing.”
“Exactly.” She rubs her fingers quickly back and forth at the top of her head, as if making pastry up there. She has short hair, bleached at the tips. She often does it. It’s not an itch, but an impatient gesture, conveying a desire to get things going, to hurry things along.
“The outrage you feel,” Dawn suggests. “You among many.”
“I’m not outraged,” I say.
“Maybe we don’t know enough, but it has definitely shaken up the middle-class enclaves of . . .” Terri, who is Hackney born and bred, tries to remember where I live, “New Malden or wherever.”
“I don’t think so,” I say, thinking protectively of Jude, Margot, and Suzanne.
“Come on,” she urges, like someone coaxing a child into a coat. “It’s good. We need you. It’s fascinating.”
“I don’t care,” I say, trying to stay calm and focused, trying to block out swathes of panic by visualizing Longman’s timeline of the Second World War. “I don’t feel comfortable with it. I’d rather not do the program at all rather than exploit her.”
“My horror.” Stan has put on a deep, gravel-scraping dramatic voice. “My heartbreak.”
I probably wouldn’t have reacted, except that I see him court a look from India. She’s curled up in her chair, twisting her hair, trying to keep out of it. He winks. And perhaps it’s priggish of me, perhaps in different circumstances I’d be finding it funny, too, but I feel something snap.
“I don’t feel horror,” I say. “I don’t feel heartbreak. A poor woman has died.”
I’ve raised my voice. Embarrassed, no one looks at me. Stan smirks.
Luckily Dawn, who has been tapping away on a laptop while this has been going on, saves me. With a satisfied click of her fingers, she says she’s checked and we can bring forward Britain’s fattest woman, on a video link from her home in Tyne and Wear. (She hasn’t left the house in four years.)
“The live feed,” Stan interrupts, in another movie-trailer voice. Later, of course, he will be the model of anguished sympathy.
Alice suggests we get Adam Phillips in regardless—cue him up for psychological insights into obesity—and Terri, panic suppressed, seems at least placated. I’ve got away with it for today, and with any luck, tomorrow my story will be stale.
I have five missed calls after the meeting, and a heap of texts, including one from Jude Morris. “You dark horse! Why didn’t you say? You must think Margot, Suzanne, and I are idiots!” Clara has phoned twice, and Margaret, Philip’s mother, once. Our dearly beloved, dearly departed ex-nanny, Robin, has left a voicemail: “Hi, hon. Blimey, what’s going on?
Can’t leave you guys alone for a minute!”
I ring Clara on the way to makeup, but she must be teaching because it goes to voicemail. So then I try Jude instead. “Do you hate me for not telling you?” I say when she answers. “It’s complicated. I will explain.”
She says of course she doesn’t hate me. I tell her I’m sorry, that I am the sorriest of sorry things—a construction Millie and her contemporaries use all the time—and she laughs. “But no more lying.”
I’m just about to put the phone back in my pocket when Stan catches me. “Yeah,” he says. “Well done. Right decision, bro, I think.” His breath is an unpleasant cocktail of garlic and mints.
“Thanks, bro,” I say.
“But you’re mad not to take a couple of days off to recover. Don’t feel you can’t, or that you would be letting the side down. It might go against the grain. I know you soldiered on when your mother . . . whatever . . . and only took two weeks off when you had your kid all those years ago.”
“Back in the distant mists of time,” I say.
“But we would all entirely understand. I was saying to Terri, India’s desperate for the experience on the main sofa. Be interesting to see what kind of chemistry we whip up. I know you’re an old pro, but you’d be doing her a favor.”
“That is so kind, Stan,” I say, saving the “old pro” up for later. “I really appreciate it.”
• • •
I ring Robin from the car on the way home. She wants to know what’s happened—Ian’s mum brought the Mail up this morning “and we were all, like, what?” But a day is a long time in the life of a new mother. My shenanigans have been swept off the agenda by the bewildering complexities of a four-month-old body clock. Robin is trying to get the baby’s nap “home and hosed” before Ian’s “rellies” arrive for supper.
“Sometimes,” I tell her, “I can’t believe you’ve lived here eight years. You sound like you’ve just lugged your backpack off the Tube from Heathrow.”
Under Your Skin: A Novel Page 5