Under Your Skin: A Novel

by Durrant, Sabine

  I’m smiling, but still backing toward the door.

  “Please,” he says.

  “I’m sorry, I’ve got nothing to say.”

  “Please?” He pushes.

  I’ve got my key out. “Another time maybe,” I say. “When things are quieter.”

  • • •

  Philip rings at 8:00 PM He won’t be home for supper. He’s had a difficult day. He can hardly speak for exhaustion, or stress. His words are stunted and cold.

  We haven’t spoken much since Sunday lunch. He was so rude to his parents I could hardly look at him. He spent the meal either fiddling with his phone, or leaving the pub to make calls, or staring at the table, as if he couldn’t bring himself to engage with any of us. I love Philip’s parents, but Margaret, his mother, is no good at confrontation. She just kept smiling as if nothing was wrong and Neil, a retired headmaster from the days when erudition was more important than charm, plowed on with his disquisition on the history of pub names while I desperately tried to compensate for Philip’s distraction with an enthusiastic stream of Oh reallys and No, I didn’ts! It was heartbreaking. Margaret and I were the last to leave the table. “Sorry about Philip. Lot on,” I said. She looked at me, and for a moment I thought she was going to ask more. The urge to confide, to feel her reassuring arm on my shoulder, was briefly overwhelming. I wanted to tell her what I’m actually scared of: that Philip is drifting away from me. But she smiled again, and gave a cheerfully clipped laugh. “Philip will be Philip.”

  “The police have been,” he tells me now from his desk at work. “I had to come out of a meeting.”

  “The police?” I say.

  “It was about the dead woman.”

  “Why?” I ask. “Why did they need to speak to you?”

  He doesn’t answer immediately. He has put his hand over the receiver or has put it down on the desk. I want to scream to get his attention, but when he comes back on the line, I force myself to sound calm. “They’ve been here, too,” I say. “They know who she is. A woman called Ania Dudek.”

  “Yup. They said.”

  “What did they want with you?”

  “Routine. Because you found . . . her.”

  He goes again. Or I think he does.

  “And?” I ask when he comes back.

  “Er . . . Just questions, Gaby. Okay? About where I was. Where you were.”

  “Please don’t sound so irritated. I’m sorry you’ve been disturbed at work, but can you just tell me a bit more? Please?”

  He lets out a deep sigh. His voice sounds distorted with the effort. “Sorry. Yes. I can’t believe this has happened to you . . . Why you?”

  “I know,” I say.

  “You said she was a teenager.”

  “No, a woman.”

  Another silence. Is he actually talking to someone in his office at the same time? “The policeman was checking what you told him . . . about finding her and . . .” I can hear a distant clicking, like a ballpoint pen being retracted and extended. “Basically checking details of time and place.”

  “My alibi, you mean? They’re checking on my alibi?”

  “Sort of. Not that I’m much good to you.” He gives a bitter laugh. “It was back-to-back meetings, followed by work drinks, followed by work dinner. I’ve got a list of alibis as long as my arm. Pity you can’t have one or two of mine.”

  • • •

  I long for him so badly to come home, I find myself pretending to be asleep when he finally does. I want him to wake me, to nudge me; I want him to want to. But he doesn’t. He slips in almost silently. And later, in the early hours, when I wake of my own accord, he’s not there; his side of the bed is still warm, tepid at least. I wait for a while, but when the sheets have gone properly cold, I tiptoe quietly down all four floors of the house. I reach the basement and pause in my bare feet by his bike, which he has had time to hoist carefully onto its special rack.

  Philip sometimes works out when he can’t sleep, but tonight he is slumped in a chair in front of his screens—Bloomberg, CNN flashing holograms onto his blank face. He’s so wrapped in his own thoughts, he doesn’t even hear me.

  TUESDAY

  “Sex. You need a weekend away, and you need sex. All that money people spend on psychotherapy and couples counseling and CBT, I’m telling you there is no marital issue that can’t be solved with a good shag.”

  “You’re right,” I say

  “Honestly. You’ll have to sit him down and make him see sense. Do you still have the hotel room?”

  I nod pathetically and say, in a squeaky voice, “Freestanding bath. Obstructed view of sea.”

  “Force him. Use your wiles. And if he won’t go with you, I will.”

  Clara and I are in a café in Exmouth Market—it’s so trendy up in this corner of northeast London, the coffee is “artisan-roasted.” I have no idea what that means. Perhaps they have an artisan roasting it in the basement. Clara is having a short white, and I have ordered a long black, just to make her laugh. Cake is also being eaten (a yuzu-vanilla ginger loaf: seriously). It’s Tuesday afternoon—Clara’s half day—and I have taken a cab here from the studio instead of going home. I feel like I’m playing hooky.

  Clara is small and slim, her face full of character: deep blue eyes, a pointy nose, the dips and shadows thrown by prominent cheekbones and a wide, bony forehead. She is the coolest person I know, and the least vain. Next to her, I am just boring. Sometimes I gaze longingly at her A-line corduroy skirt, or old lady’s tweed jacket, or French fisherman’s bag and think, Why doesn’t wardrobe put me in something like that? But I know why. It’s not the item under scrutiny that’s hip; it’s her. She has natural hipness.

  “You all right?” She’s studying, head cocked, searching my face. On the phone to her yesterday, waiting for Philip to come home, our meeting seemed so panicked, so urgent. I cried: nasty, grotty tears. Now I feel bad that I have rallied. The awful truth is extreme emotions can be hard to sustain. I have a memory of Clara turning up on my doorstep after a row with Pete. She sobbed so much in my kitchen, she began to hiccup, like a baby. In the morning, I got her up and gave her coffee, and she toddled off to the Tube, vowing to be back that night, but the next time I saw her, weeks later, Pete was moving in and everything was fine. A friendship can change so gradually sometimes you don’t notice, until moments like that come along and define it. Once Pete was on the scene, I realized, Clara and I would be “there” for each other when needed—for “a heavy,” as we used to call it in our teens—but not every day, not like it used to be.

  “What about Easter?” Clara is asking. “It’s so early this year. Are you skiing again, or . . . was it Jamaica last April?”

  “No. Philip has dropped his obsession with exotic holidays, thank God. Work.” I think about the cottage in Peasenhall, which Philip bought with his first bonus, the snug kitchen, the bedrooms with their wonky floors, a house solid and real enough to have a proper family life lived within its walls, sitting empty, waiting for us like an old dog abandoned on the hard shoulder. “Why don’t we all go to the cottage at Easter? Why don’t we all go together?”

  “Suffolk. Oh, I don’t know . . .”

  “We could go for walks, trips to the sea. We should fill the house with fun, laughter.”

  Clara smiles. It’s a noncommittal smile.

  I try not to feel deflated. I’m a bit too dependent on Clara. I know that. “How’s Pete?” I ask lightly.

  “He’s ow’right.” She does a little dingle-dangle with her shoulders. Pete is an artist. He creates installations, but mainly he cooks, and creates washing-up. He and Philip used to be friends. We did lots of things together—we surfed in Cornwall, cycled in Surrey, got pissed in Soho—but things change. Lives go out of sync. And now, well, I feel I have to lie a bit. I skip over the skiing holidays, the trips to Jamaica (actually, it was Nevis), things that cause tight ripples of tension at the top of my rib cage. Recently, over supper at a local Chinese restaurant, Pete rip
ped into academy schools and how they were “just a means of privatizing state education and handing it to local businesses.” Millie’s precious prep school, the one Philip insisted upon, with its prissy uniform, its swimming pool, its fleet of bustling blue buses, danced above our heads like a fantasy sequence in a Disney cartoon. I avoided Clara’s eyes. I know what they both feel, that Philip and I have lost touch with what really matters. And I know they are right. I’m weak and easily led. I should stand up to Philip more. But I’m scared of annoying him, I suppose.

  It’s raining outside; a flurry hits the windows with a rattle. The café has floor-to-ceiling doors, which open wide in summer. They are closed now and the lights are on—trendy fittings, which dangle down like naked bulbs, each golden orb throwing a wobbly reflection on to each wooden table. It’s stark in here, but cozy. “Real daube weather,” I say, a reference to our A-level set book, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

  We cackle with laughter and then, when we stop, Clara asks how I am feeling about my mum.

  I look out of the window. Two women are walking by, bent double under umbrellas, as if forgetting they could raise them if they wanted. Clara doesn’t often ask. She knows I would rather not talk about it. It’s not that I shy away from the subject; I just don’t want to be one of those people who is still in a bad mood from their childhood. I take a glug of water. The dry pain rises, despite my efforts, the ugly murkiness. I swallow hard. “Fine,” I say, as indifferently as I can. “I’m trying not to feel guilty. I know it wasn’t my fault, that I did everything I could to stop her drinking. I’m resigned. Or I think I am. I still feel responsible. I keep thinking, I must go down and check, before realizing that I can’t. In some ways it’s a relief.”

  Clara is making a face, pulling her lips in, and it’s an expression I’ve seen somewhere else. It’s the expression PC Morrow made the previous day, and I realize, with a shock, that I had taken it to express solidarity in view of something that was about to happen—DI Perivale’s endless questions—whereas actually, as here, it might well have been a hopeless sympathy for something that had already happened, that kept on happening, something I could do nothing about.

  “Do you remember the plum chutney the woman next door to you used to make? She used to call us over and give us cheese sandwiches. Double Gloucester and chutney.”

  It’s not the words that matter, but the connections, the threading of time, the fashioning of cheerful childhood memories out of what for me wasn’t always very cheerful.

  I smile. “She was always trying to feed us up, wasn’t she? The plums were from her garden. You had to cook them; they were too bitter to eat raw off the tree. And I should know—I climbed over and tried enough times.”

  I ask after Clara’s parents—still going strong, a reproach to all those parents who aren’t. And we talk about Justice and Anna—old friends I haven’t seen for ages. “Anna sends her love,” Clara says thoughtfully. “She said she left a message . . .”

  “I know. I’m terrible,” I say. “They just live so far . . .”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  But they don’t. Not that far. Not really. It’s just Philip didn’t really like them and . . . well, it’s my fault really. I’ve let myself become sucked into Philip’s world. I’ve let my own friendships slide.

  Changing the subject, I ask after her kids, lightly: it’s important not to sound too envious. Her daughter, eleven, has recently discovered boys. Her elder son needs to have a stab at getting enough “points” or they won’t let him stay on for A levels. The younger one is driving her mad with his mess. She makes the face of a gormless teenage boy. “ ‘Why’s my frickin’ Topman top still dirty? I left it on the floor and it hasn’t frickin’ self-washed!’ ” Hamming up the awfulness of her children is her way of telling me a big family isn’t everything.

  We move on to work—some political stuff going on with her head of department; a year-ten group is playing up. She asks if I have heard from Robin—everyone in our life loves Robin—and I say she’s doing a brilliant job and that I’m hoping to see her at Easter. “You could, too,” I say, “if you come.”

  Clara wonders if I have got to the bottom of Marta.

  I sigh. “I wish I could. I really want to. I want to be her friend. I keep thinking here she is on her own in a foreign country; she must be so lonely . . . But every time I try to talk to her it goes wrong. I get this feeling she doesn’t want anything to do with me.”

  “Maybe your expectations are too high. Robin’s a hard act to follow.”

  “She is unbelievably tidy.”

  “That should be a good thing, no?”

  “I know. It should be. It is. And Millie seems not to mind her. She’s obviously different with her. And that’s what counts.”

  “Except you can’t live with someone you don’t get on with. It’s impossible to sustain.”

  “I should try harder,” I say. “Though actually trying seems to make it worse.”

  A woman near the bar with very long hair and zips at her ankles keeps looking over. She can’t quite place me. It’s driving her mad. She’s wondering if I’m the woman who goes to the gym with her sister. They stare less when they recognize you outright.

  Clara hasn’t noticed. We’ve finished our coffee and cake. It is getting darker out there. Clouds are gathering, swirling, lowering, like a call to arms, or home. I pick my bag up from the floor. It’s the posh bag Philip gave me for Christmas and I have been slightly hiding it from Clara, in case she knows how much it cost, and put it on my lap under the table, a precursor to departure. Clara has still got a question, though, I can tell.

  “What’s it like?” she says. “A dead body. What does it look like?”

  I study her with interest. “No one has asked me that. They’ve all been more delicate. They’ve all asked what it felt like to find it, not what it actually looked like. Maybe that was what they were after and I’ve just been being dim. It looked like flesh, not like a person, just flesh. In this case, horrible battered, bruised flesh. But nothing else. Everything they say about the spirit leaving the body is true. I think, anyway.”

  “Was it scary?”

  “No. The dying are scary. You know, zombies—arms reaching out of graves—but I don’t think the dead are.”

  “That’s something, then,” she says.

  We say good-bye in the street. She is so much slighter than me; her shoulders feel fragile when I hug her. An old man is pissing against the wall of William Hill, but we are standing by a shop that sells jewelery in the shape of jumping rabbits, and lampshades with birds on. It has stopped raining for a moment—long enough hopefully to grab a black cab—and I feel as if my “nightmare,” as Clara called it, is over, that I can sort out my marriage, and put the dead woman behind me.

  • • •

  But he’s there again. At the back of my mind, I thought he might be, and it’s almost a relief—as things you’ve been dreading often are.

  I should have listened to Clara. She told me to take the Tube. Once you lose the swing of public transport, it’s hard to get back in. It took forever in a cab. The taxi driver took some mad route, up to Westway and down through Earls Court. Steve, now safely home with his wife in Wallington, would have told him what for. London glittered and blurred through the window. Rain came in flurries, in waves; wheels hissed and sprayed; the windscreen wiper scraped. My optimism drained, along with the rain. Fulham Broadway, where I had my first flat, looked dismal, the worst kind of urban—veg from the market rotting in seeping gutters, commuters scurrying from the Tube in damp suits. Under Battersea Bridge, the river churned, beige and pockmarked. Nearing home, on Trinity Road, the common stretched bleak and gray. As the taxi ticked, idling in the bottleneck beyond the prison, I could see over to the tennis courts, where small figures huddled under trees: an after-school All Stars group lesson halted by rain. The police cordon must have been lifted, then.

  He was sitting in his car and he got out as soon
as the taxi drove off. I was rummaging for my keys—why can I never find them?—and he came up behind me and said, so politely, “You won’t be needing those, if that’s all right.” I pretended to be startled, though I had seen the car the moment the taxi pulled up.

  “I’ve spoken to your help, and she says you’re not needed for an hour or so.”

  “Marta, you mean.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind, we would like it if you came to the station with us. It’s easier down there. Just so we can ask you a few more questions, properly.”

  “I’ve told you everything. I don’t know anything else.”

  “I know it might seem unnecessary to you. I know you’re busy, but I’m sure you understand we need to pursue every lead we can. Nobody—you more than anyone—wants to think there is a killer out there for any longer than there need be.”

  He’s right, I can’t complain with a killer on the loose, and he has to follow procedure. “I am at your disposal, then,” I say, and we climb into the back of his car. It’s a beaten-up Volkswagen Golf, not what you imagine for an unmarked police car. It smells of air freshener—there is a cardboard pine tree dangling from the rearview mirror—and of old onions. That’ll be all those Big Macs, I think.

  Perivale gets in next to me—there’s another man behind the wheel, the “thuggish” man from the other day. He has short-cropped hair, the kind that grows in dark whorls at the back of the neck, and broad shoulders.

  I talk too much on the way. I always do when I’m nervous.

  “Do you like sitting in the back?” I say. “Does he drive you around like a chauffeur?”

  “Very funny.”

  “So you’re just keeping me company?”

  “Something like that.”

  “All this rain,” I say after a bit. “Must bugger up a crime scene,”

  “Can do so indeed,” Perivale replies.

  At the police station, we hurry straight through past the desk and down a corridor. The room we enter is smaller than the smallest rooms you see on Vera or Scott & Bailey, and if there is a two-way mirror, it’s extremely well concealed. It’s not very well insulated either, like one of those 1980s conversions. Sounds of the station drift through the plyboard: laughter, talk, a voice saying, “I’m sorry, but if she thinks she can talk to me like that, she’s got the wrong woman.”