Under Your Skin: A Novel

by Durrant, Sabine

  I keep the shutters closed and dress in the light that slips in around them, a set square of luster. In the kitchen, I eat breakfast—a bowl of muesli—standing up, looking out. Philip didn’t ring. Perhaps, if he didn’t get my message until after breakfast, he didn’t want to wake me. He’ll ring in a bit. I know he will.

  The hornbeams and the taller trees in the gardens that back onto us block the lower windows of the houses behind, but if you were standing on the upper floor, you could see into my kitchen. Once, I saw a man at that top window, half naked, no details, a blur of flesh, monochrome, pale against dark. Our kitchen wall is all glass. What was it the architect said? “Inviting the garden into the kitchen.” Well, the garden can bugger off. I’m getting blinds.

  I’m early for Steve, and so I sit on the bottom of the stairs, looking at the front door, tensing for the tinkle of the gate, the sound of his footsteps. The newspapers stare reproachfully up at me from where they have fallen on the doormat, half curled, half splayed, like rolls of defrosting pastry. I wish I could thrust them deep into the bin, or hide them, as Millie did with Struwwelpeter, that gruesome collection of cautionary tales, which I once found tucked behind the bath. I have to read them, though. It’s my job. Current affairs, or the flotsam and jetsam that follow in their stream, are my life. I’ll go through them in the car, Steve as moral support. I shall incorporate them, and whatever cautionary tales they contain—“The Dreadful Woman Who Found a Body”—into the bustle of the day.

  Work. Work will help. I’ll feel better at work. But Steve is running late, each extra minute agony. Five minutes . . . ten . . . fifteen . . . Where is he? Then a niggle, a thought blooming like a bruise. Terri had given me her number and said to call.

  She answers on the first ring. “Terri,” I say quickly, “only to say I’m fine. I’ll be with you shortly. Just waiting for Steve to roll up.”

  “Gaby,” she says, in a tone I don’t like: too friendly, too surprised, “Gaby, honestly, as I said in my text, take the day off. Take a few days.”

  “Not necessary. Tell you the truth, I need to come back. I’m ready. Oh, and don’t text, I’ve lost my mobile, remember?”

  Her voice fades slightly as if the phone has slipped, or her mouth has turned. “I think you should have a few days at home.”

  “Honestly, I’m totally fine. I haven’t read the papers yet, but I’m going to get on to them in the car. I am going to be hot with ideas, I promise.”

  “What about the police?”

  “I’m on bail!”

  She doesn’t answer. I hear clattering in the background, cameras moving, doors shutting. A long, uncomfortable silence in which my hand clutches the banister so tightly I hear it creak, feel the post beneath it shift. I think of India, with her bright, white smile. Something inside me cracks open. Finally, Terri says, “I’m sorry, Gaby. The big cheeses don’t think it’s right for you to come in, not just at the moment, not while the enquiry into this murder is still ongoing.”

  My mouth is dry. “If you want me to be the story,” I manage to say—“ ‘The Foolish Woman Who Thought She Was Safe’—then I’ll be the story.”

  “Gaby, I really . . .” She can’t say it. She’s too embarrassed. The silence gapes between us. I imagine her perched on a desk, staring out the window, staring at the wrinkled surface of the Thames.

  I think back to before this phone call. How did I imagine I could go to work, carry on as if everything was normal? “You’re right. It doesn’t matter that I’m innocent. It’s the wrong type of publicity. The show must come first,” I say. A list of statements, not questions.

  I can hear her relief. “Have a few days’ rest, clear things up with the police, speak to Alison Brett, do some damage control. I’ll keep you in the loop.”

  • • •

  “TV Gab Loses Cool,” “Gaby Mortimer in Police Investigation,” “Mornin’ All Presenter in Dawn Arrest.” Worst of all: “Gaby Lashes Out.” My teeth are bared in that photo, like one of those Rottweilers that mauls kids. An insert pic provides a close-up of the shin with which my “vicious foot” made contact: a plum of a bruise, plus a nasty nick. The reporter in question “sought medical treatment.” Bless.

  I go back to bed. I don’t know what else to do. My life, so solid, so impermeable, is dissolving, slipping between my fingers. Was it ever solid? Was it ever impermeable? I feel like I am falling, with nothing to cling on to. This murder enquiry has affected everything. It has stripped me down to nothing. Who am I? Who are my friends? I thought I was a nice person, kind, the sort of woman people liked. I thought I was safe in that. And it matters to me. I realize that now. I care what people think. I really do. I’m generous to the people I work with, the receptionists and the ADs and the stylists. I bite my lip with Stan. He has nothing on me. Nothing. I’m fucking charming. The effort I have gone to maintaining my poise, my cheerful, unruffled stance, smiling for the photographs, p’s and q’s, and all it took was those few blinding seconds outside the house. A personality, a persona unraveled. I’ll never be “that nice Gaby Mortimer” again. Even when they have all forgotten poor Ania Dudek, when she has slipped from the public memory, I’ll be the TV presenter who may or may not have killed someone, and attacked a photographer.

  I try and sleep, but I fail. I cry a bit.

  At 10:00 AM, I ring Alison Brett in publicity. Her assistant answers and says she is in a meeting. I turn over in bed, lie on top of my hands, bury my face in Philip’s shirt. It’s 6:00 p.m., the end of the working day, in Singapore. Philip will have got my message eight hours ago at least. Why hasn’t he rung? I know I didn’t say what had happened, but he must have heard from someone else—a text from a friend, a snippet on Sky News? Surely. And then, not to ring? He could have been in meetings, I suppose, in a world of numbers, cut off from Daily Mail gossip, and he thought he’d ring me later. I should have been less cool in my message, but then that’s how he likes me: cool, poised, successful. His celebrity wife. Would it be so wrong to break that?

  I think about how things are between us—the distance, the lack of connection, the dark ravines and jagged edges. I search my brain—the day he came to surprise me after work. I saw him in reception before he saw me, leaning forward in his city suit, a fish out of water, a look of slight confusion on his face. Or the time another cyclist knocked him off his bike at Waterloo. He limped home, stood in the doorway calling for me, his elbow at a funny angle, blood pouring from his knee. My heart turns. The distance between us doesn’t seem so gaping.

  I pick up the phone before I can stop myself. He doesn’t answer. I should hang up, but I don’t and I do everything I have told myself not to. I leave a garbled message, begging him to ring, my voice choked with tears, thick with need and panic and self-pity: all the things he hates.

  After I hang up, I realize too late that the intimate memories that gave me courage were about his vulnerability, not mine.

  • • •

  And then Clara calls.

  I will be bobbing on a raft in an ocean, shipwrecked, my skin blistered, a seagull for lunch, and Clara will eventually find me.

  “Gaby!” It’s all she has to say. Her tone tells me she has seen the papers, that she knows I’m in a state, that here she is, my friend, ready to give me what I need.

  “I texted you yesterday. Ken, head of physics, told me you hadn’t been on Mornin’ All and I thought you were ill, but then when you didn’t reply, I thought maybe you and Philip had gone away or . . . I’ve been in lessons. I had no idea, Gaby, until I saw the papers in the staff room just now.”

  “I’ve lost my mobile . . .” I wail. “I rang you at home . . .”

  “I’m so sorry, Gaby. We took the kids to the theater. If I’d known I—”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does, though. I can’t imagine what you’ve been going through. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” It comes out high and artificial.

  “What are you doing?”

/>   “I’m tidying.”

  “Are you? Are you really?”

  I swallow hard. “Just emptying the dishwasher.”

  “Okay, good. Domestic tasks, always more absorbing than you think. The other day, the cat tangled a ball of wool round a chair leg . . .” She gabbles for a while about the pleasures involved in untangling wool, how it took two hours and they were the “happiest two hours” of her professional life. She is giving me time. When we were growing up, I would just turn up at her house sometimes, and she would always know, by instinct, when I needed to talk and when the best thing was distraction.

  I hold my hand over the receiver and blow my nose on a piece of tissue I find snailed under my pillow.

  “Ken says your replacement, the girl who does the tweets, isn’t half as good.”

  I clear my throat. “Really?” I say.

  “Not a patch.”

  “Is he a fan?” I ask, a little squeeze of vanity to show her I’m all right.

  “Everyone’s a fan,” she says softly. “You know that. So, Gabs, what’s been happening? What’s going on?”

  “How long have you got?”

  She answers literally. “Fifteen minutes.”

  I tell her everything—almost. I explain about the arrest and the interview and the smallness of the cell. I don’t mention the credit card or the Italian mud. I don’t give many details about Perivale’s questioning. When I get near that point, everything inside me tightens. I realize he makes me feel as if nothing about me as a person matters, that he can mold me into anything he wants, and that that is his aim.

  “Did the cell have a loo?” Clara asks gently after I have fallen silent.

  “One of the cells did.”

  “Did you go?”

  “I had a wee. Couldn’t keep it in. I didn’t have anything else.”

  “Loo roll?”

  “No.” I laugh. “I had to give a little shake.”

  “It’s inhumane! No loo roll in Battersea police-cell shock! You should write an exposé.”

  “I think a different exposé might be in the pipeline.”

  “The tabloids still outside your house? I can see the olive trees in the corner of the pictures—they’re looking good.”

  “Yes.”

  She says, now the police have “seen the error of their ways,” I should talk to one of the hacks, do an exclusive, so the others go away, like they do when they come out of the Big Brother house. “Mystorymyagony,” she says, turning it into a single word. “Go on, do it. Get it done. Mention the lack of loo roll while you’re there. Lobby. Get questions asked in Parliament.”

  “I could become known as the woman who reintroduced Andrex to the arrested masses.”

  “Or Cushelle,” she says, enjoying the name. “Or those tissues with aloe vera built in. Or quilted. Or bloody hell, why shouldn’t felons be allowed Wet Ones?”

  We both laugh. My eyes feel tight and small. When my chest contracts, I feel an ache like a stitch.

  “When are you going back to work?” she asks finally.

  “Terri has given me a few days off. India, the tweeter, has been longing for the opportunity to take my place. Did Ken in physics really say she wasn’t any good?”

  “Yes.”

  “I feel so pathetic.” My voice catches. “What am I going to do, Clara?”

  “Don’t do anything. You’ve had a traumatic experience. You’ll be back at work before you know it. You need to rest. Spend some time with Philip.”

  The bell goes. She’s got Resistant Materials with her year nines. She’ll ring me later to see how I’m “faring.” It is a good choice of word, “faring.” It calls to mind sea voyages and fair, clement weather. It has optimism built in. She doesn’t know Philip is away.

  “You’re a survivor, Gabs,” she adds, with a concern that has been there all along, underneath the joking. “All that stuff you did on your own when we were growing up. You’ll get through it. You’ve got through worse.”

  After I hang up, I get out of bed and wash my face. It stares back at me, hollow cheeked and red eyed. I get dressed. I can’t find my favorite jeans, so I put on tracksuit bottoms and a sweater. I peer out of the bedroom window, through the slats in the blinds. The clouds have shifted and it looks like a sunny day—sky the color of Aertex shirts. How many are still down there? I look down at the tops of heads. Bodies leaning against cars. Camera equipment splayed on warm slabs. Puddles in the gutter. Boredom. Cold hands. Pop music from someone’s iPod. Idle chatter reaches up, the possible convolutions of tomorrow’s game: “Yeah, they should put McEachran in midfield, give the kid a chance.”

  Should I choose one to talk to, I wonder, as Clara suggests? I’ll ask Alison Brett when she calls back.

  And then I see him.

  Perivale. And I realize I have been so acutely dreading this moment that I feel no real surprise at it actually taking place.

  He is standing across the road, by the alley to the common, leaning against an ivy-clad wall. His hands are dangling by his side, the low crotch of his jeans foreshortening his legs, head tipped back. He looks, with his hangdog demeanor, his hanks of thick hair, like a character from a Dickens novel. He is scuffing the ground, turning something over with the toe of his shoe. And then he looks up and stares straight at me.

  I dart back into the room. The mattress sighs. I lie flat, stare at the ceiling without moving. It’s not over. The police haven’t seen the error of their ways. It’s still going on. My stomach muscles contract, wither in on themselves, shrink into my pelvic floor.

  I wait for the air around me to still. It is ridiculous. The slats are closed. He can’t see me. I am clenching and unclenching my teeth again. As soon as my legs can take my weight, I creep out of the room and go downstairs. I pause in the kitchen and then I let myself out into the garden—a whole house stands between us now, but it doesn’t seem enough. I can still feel his eyes, but he can’t be there, out the front, and simultaneously up there, in that top window in the street behind us. It’s impossible. He has just spooked me. I move under the cover of the apple tree, where I can’t see any windows at all. New growth is fizzling, the cherry knotted with buds, the ivy unfurling against the wall, each leaf a little clawlike hand. A robin perches on a lower frond, head hopeful.

  It’s cold. From inside, it looks like summer, but out here, it’s as bitter as midwinter. In the shadow of the house, the grass is sodden.

  There is a door in the back wall behind the hornbeams and the tree house. It leads on to a passage, where the street used to keep the bins. A few years ago the council—or rather the company contracted by the council—declared the passage too dangerous (too much bending, or ivy negotiation), and many of our neighbors, concerned for “security,” have bricked their back doors in.

  I fought for ours. I imagined Millie as a teenager, nipping out there for an assignation or a secret cigarette. I felt in touch with the history of the house, in tune with coal deliveries and milk in metal urns, for a time when Serco was just a twinkle in the public service market’s eye. Philip agreed back then, but last year, when we redesigned the garden, he fell in line with the neighbors, and I was too preoccupied with my mother to fight. The door is still there, but buried behind the tree house; you have to arch to reach it, contort round a wooden corner, bend your neck, bash your elbows. To bother, you’d really have to want a cigarette.

  The damp seeps through my sneakers. I wriggle through the undergrowth, raindrops scattering, and stretch my arm far enough to draw back the bolt. I bash the door about a bit, tearing beards of ivy from its joints, until it opens.

  • • •

  Millie is home. I rang Marta and she brought her back along the alley, through the secret door. Neither Perivale nor the tabloid journalists will have seen her come in—a pathetic little triumph, a wresting of control, a spark. I hug her and hug her, breathe in the smell of pencil sharpenings and floor wax and that particular form of processed garlic they use in school dinners. She is all t
hat matters. I tell myself that over and over. She pulls away. “Too tight,” she says, “and you’re dribbling on my neck.”

  Marta is watching from the door to the kitchen. She has an expression that is almost distaste, but not quite. Perhaps she is feeling homesick. “Listen,” I say, turning to her. “As I’m here, have the rest of the day off. You probably have lots of things you’d like to do.”

  She is standing very rigid. She pushes her shoulder back. “But Millie and I, we had a plan to go swimming,”

  “Do that another time,” I say kindly.

  She still doesn’t move. “But I told her we would go.”

  “I’m sure she won’t mind. Mills? Do you?”

  But Millie, searching the cupboard for biscuits, isn’t listening.

  I turn back to Marta and smile. I’m expecting her to smile, too, but she doesn’t. “It is the pool with the wave machine,” she says. “You want to come, don’t you, Millie.”

  I feel a little bit lost for a moment. I look back at Millie. “Sweetie, Marta’s talking to you. She’s offering to take you swimming, or you could stay here with me.”

  Millie has a mouth full of Jammie Dodger. “Are you working?”

  “Nope.”

  “I’ll stay,” she says.

  The wind must catch the door because as Marta leaves, it closes behind her with a slam.

  • • •

  Millie and I sort through her end-of-term schoolbag. We marvel at paintings of trees on brown crumpled paper, chocolate eggs from her teacher, a bit bashed from the journey home, a project book, containing stuck-in pictures of bread and vegetables, “A Food Web,” a letter to Santa left over from Christmas, a wonky elephant made of clay that has lost an ear. We lie these treasures out on the floor and sift through them like Howard Carter and his young assistant in the Valley of the Kings.

  She plays in the garden, swings a bit from the struts of the tree house and watches some TV. She reads to me and I read to her. We make complicated creatures involving plastic laces and metallic beads. We talk about Izzie Matthews and whether her hair is longer than Millie’s or not. Even as I am engaging with the issue—perhaps Izzie’s hair is very slightly longer, but I’m sure Millie’s is thicker—I am worrying about why Philip has not rung back. Or, a different sort of anxiety, Alison Brett.