Stronger Than Skin

by Stephen May

  The only really odd thing is that everything is labelled. There are yellow post-it notes on every item giving the name of that thing in Italian. Tavolo on the table, frigo on the fridge, even a post-it with la anatre attached to the back of the leading duck. Even the wine bottle – bottiglia di vino – is labelled in this way, even the pears – pera, even the butternut squash – zucca violina.

  Suddenly, I’m ravenous. There’s not much in the fridge. Five cherry tomatoes on a vine. A cucumber. Some half-used up jars of posh jam. Plum. Damson and bramble. Two cans of cheap lager. A large bar of vegan chocolate. Half a carton of soya milk. Both of which explain the lack of meat and cheese. A hard kitchen to categorise. Kind of studenty, but not madly so. Grad-studenty maybe.

  I scout around the cupboards. Doesn’t take long and yes, in the last cupboard I find a packet of Frosties about a third full. Perfect. Turns out that Frosties are exactly what I fancy, the complete very thing, even with soya milk.

  We do have fancy cereals in the Chadwick house but they are only ever for during the holidays. School days it’s porridge, occasionally it’s scrambled eggs. Sometimes it’s Weetabix or Shredded Wheat with the absolute minimum sprinkling of sugar. Frosties are the sort of thing that Ella and Jack only ever get the first week of the summer holidays and not always then.

  I am in the cupboards getting a bowl and a spoon when something stops me. It’s only Frosties, but even so, it’s pretty much the only food in the place and if it wasn’t for Jake and his partner then I’d be in some squalid London nick for days of questioning. I should leave their food alone.

  I put the cereal and the bowl back in the cupboard. The soya milk back in the fridge. For the same reason, I leave the beer, despite cheap lager being suddenly another thing I fancy. Frosties and lager, that would have been great but I can’t do it, can’t help myself – I need permission. I open the fridge, take out a can, feel the heft of it in my hand. The beer is something called Steinbrau Blonde. A nonsensical mangling of languages that shouts crappy bargain booze. It’s not a G&T but it’ll do the same job more or less. Can I? No, I can’t. I just can’t.

  Tea though, I can have tea. People who have given you the keys to their house expect you to make yourself a brew.

  I make tea in one of those mugs that replicate those classic orange Penguin book covers. This one is The Invisible Man. I take the tea upstairs, taking care not to splosh any on the carpet as I go. It means it is slow going. My hands are shaking. My nerves are gone.

  At the top of the short, steep, narrow flight of stairs is a tiny landing with three closed doors. I open the first one. Jake and Lulu’s room. Male and female clothes strewn any old how. A king-size bed, red and black duvet half on the bed, half on the floor. The room smells sweaty, gamey almost. I guess that this is where Jake and Lulu spend most of their time.

  An old dressing table with bowed legs painted a vivid cricket pitch green is the only furniture, though there are photographic prints on the wall. Studies of faces and places in sombre black and white. Old warehouses coming down. New skyscrapers going up. A close-up of a laughing Jake. A mosque in some desert town. Dignified old ladies hurrying past East End betting shops. Babies.

  I click the light off and open the next door. A small bathroom and it’s exactly what you would expect. Not disgusting, but not clean either. A variety of his and her potions, a pair of scales. And, like everything in the kitchen, all labelled with their Italian names. Crema idratante, bilancia. There are books stacked by the bog. Some heavyweight academic books, political books. The Case for Animal Rights. The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s What Is Property? Not really toilet reading. Unless he’s changed a lot, I can’t believe they are Jake’s choices either. More predictably there’s also a well-thumbed Teach Yourself Italian.

  I sit on the toilet taking swallows of hot tea and trying, not very successfully, to think about what to do until Bim’s gallery re-opens in a week. Trying, also without success, not to think about what will happen if either Bim or Anne refuse to see reason. Wondering now if it might just be best to hand myself in, to take my chances in the courts after all. But I take another slug of tea and find I have the strength to think no, fuck that.

  When I’ve finished my drink my mouth feels icky, I’d love to clean my teeth, but using someone else’s dentrificio, even more than eating their Frosties and drinking their beer, seems like an abuse of hospitality, so I content myself with smearing toothpaste along my teeth and gums and rinsing with water. Rinse and spit. Rinse and spit. So much of life comes down to this: small repetitive actions done without thinking. Habits and impulses. So little that human beings do needs real concentration. We are animals really, and not majestic ones. Not lions. We are insects. We are insects who just happen to be cursed with self-consciousness, with the knowledge that we’ll die soon, probably in pain, and then we’ll leave everything we love behind us for ever. And, how do we deal with that? By distracting ourselves, by anaesthetising ourselves, by only thinking when we absolutely have to.

  In the tiny second bedroom there’s a single bed with a sleeping bag, but the rest of the space is filled with boxes. Books and clothes. There’s just one picture on the wall. A close-up of a toddler, mouth smeared in jam, but face closed and hard, giving a very deliberate finger to the photographer and so to the whole world.

  It’s even colder in here than it is in the rest of the house and I guess Jake and Lulu hardly ever come in here. They dragged in the boxes of stuff they didn’t immediately need, hung the picture and shut the door on it all.

  I take my shoes and my jacket off, lay them on a box and climb into the sleeping bag. It feels dampish, smells musty and it’s very nylony and chill. Nevertheless, I sleep, in a troubled, restless sort of way.

  12

  There is someone in the room. Someone standing a pace in by the door, at the foot of the bed, backlit by the light in the hallway. A prickly nest of hair, the face just a vaguely pointy grey shape beneath.

  ‘Eve?’

  As soon as I’ve taken in that she’s there, she’s gone and I hear the click of another light going on. The emphatic sound of a door being shut. Someone pissing. Taps running, the toilet flushing. The brushing of teeth. The click of the light going off again. The rattle and wobble of the door being opened again. All of it sounding as though it was taking place right next to my head.

  People who bang on about old houses being best should remember that using the cheapest materials to construct the thinnest of walls was a Victorian value. Funny how you can tell someone is not in the best of moods just by the way they open and close doors. Now that I’m properly awake I feel foolish for having said my sister’s name.

  I watch as the blurry wraith that must be Lulu moves past the open doorway of my room again. She doesn’t look my way this time.

  I think about getting up, introducing myself. But I don’t. Instead I lie staring at the ceiling trying really hard – and failing – not to feel sorry for myself. Distracting myself by thinking about what has made the police act now, what do they have? What have they been told?

  A memory comes to me. A solemn child’s face at an upstairs window. A child with a thin pale hand raised in salute.

  The TV goes on so there is then the murmur of voices, occasional bursts of laughter. Applause. Whoops and cheers. No sense lying here now. No chance of getting back to sleep.

  As I walk down the stairs, I am blinded by a flash of a camera.

  ‘Sorry.’ A voice that doesn’t sound all that sorry. As my eyes recover, I can start to take her in properly. Jake’s girlfriend is sitting on one of the utilitarian chairs, smoking. She must be at least ten years older than him, and as casual as he was businesslike. She wears a baggy black sweater over a thin frame, faded jeans, battered white trainers. Non-branded as far as I can see. She looks at me with a frank stare. Eyes the slow grey-green of a waveless sea.

  In the unflattering 100 watt light of the kitchen she looks knackere
d. Skin pouched with shadows. Hair cut short as short as a schoolboy’s and dyed a coppery red. Wide mouth. Long, sharp nose, with a discreet silver stud winking from her left nostril. She also looks fiercely irritated, brows knitted and frowning. She nibbles on the nail of the little finger of her right hand.

  ‘You got Jake’s text,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, apparently we are harbouring a fugitive.’

  Her voice is sharp, while her accent speaks of an expensive education, of tennis clubs and winters spent skiing. Reminds me of the voices I heard all around me every day at Cambridge.

  ‘Well, sort of I guess. I appreciate it anyway. I’m Mark by the way. I was Jake’s teacher. Ridiculously.’

  She waves her cigarette impatiently. Yes, yes, her gesture says. I know all that. I’m not interested in names or any of this how do you do shit. She looks at me for a long moment. It’s unnerving, uncomfortably forensic and also kind of sensual somehow. Hardly anyone ever looks at us closely, do they? Glances fall onto us then slide away, drift incuriously towards other faces, other scenes. But this woman looks properly, like she’s hunting for something she’s lost.

  ‘Bit of a coincidence bumping into Jake at The Castle,’ she says now.

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ I say. I tell her that if you add up everyone in my classes it means that every year I teach about two hundred students and I’ve been doing it for over twenty years. That’s more than four thousand ex-students out in the world, and they get around. I bumped into a whole hen party of ex-students once. In Bratislava of all places.

  ‘What’s your crime?’

  I am taken aback by her directness, by her lack of ordinary social graces, by the way she keeps her gaze on me.

  ‘Well, it’s complicated.’

  ‘I’m very smart. Try me.’

  I’m at a loss. I open and close my mouth. I must look like a simpleton. The silence seems to last for minutes. Lulu waits. And waits. Her dark eyes don’t leave my face. I’m going to have to say something. Somewhere church bells begin to sound, doleful and muffled as if coming through miles of fog. I count the clangs. Six. Lulu sighs now. She seems, finally, to lose interest in her question.

  ‘I hate night shifts,’ she says. She stands and stretches theatrically. ‘Do you want something to eat? I have to warn you we’ve only got Frosties in the house.’

  ‘You know, Frosties would be bloody great.’

  She raises an eyebrow at my eagerness, but doesn’t say anything. She gets the packet from the cupboard, she fetches the milk, bowls and spoons. I notice that she walks a little stiffly, a little carefully, as if the floor might give way.

  While we eat I confess that I nearly helped myself to the cereal when I first came in. I’m nervous and it makes me gabble a bit. I’m just making conversation, but Lulu’s face clouds over.

  ‘I think that would have been a very bad move. I was a bit dubious about having you here at all, even for one night and if I’d come back and found you’d nicked my Frosties – well, let’s just say there would have been consequences. It’s my favourite thing after a long shift. A bit of crap telly, some Frosties and a beer before I get my head down.’

  I’m a bit thrown by this, unsettled by her mood changes. Would she really have turned me in if I’d eaten her cereal? It makes me realise all over again just how precarious things are. How small things need thinking about. How even tiny decisions can have big consequences. Lulu, meanwhile, heads to the fridge and fetches the Steinbrau. She passes me a can.

  ‘Your last beer,’ I say. ‘I’ll get you some more before I go. More cereal too.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ she says. ‘Cheers.’ She takes a long swallow.

  ‘I will though. Least I can do.’

  She shrugs. We sip in silence for a moment.

  Lulu says, ‘So I’m thinking not theft then.’

  I am baffled. ‘What?’

  ‘Your big crime – probably not theft, what with you being so scrupulous about not helping yourself to our food and everything.’

  She’s not going to let up.

  ‘No, it wasn’t theft.’

  ‘You’re really not going to tell me, are you?’

  ‘I can’t. Sorry.’

  ‘How frustrating.’ She pulls at her lip. ‘Tell me what Jake was like at school then. That’s not a big state secret, is it?’

  I smile. Try to relax. Maybe it’ll be okay. I think about the young Jake Skellow. What should I say? I begin cautiously. ‘I suppose you’d call him high-spirited.’

  Lulu snorts into her beer. ‘High-spirited. Yeah, right. I bet he was a terror. A little sod.’

  ‘He had his moments,’ I say.

  ‘I can imagine.’

  So I tell her some classic Jake stories. The time he jumped from the first floor window in form period. The time he brought in a baby owl he’d found on the way to school, hoping he could keep it alive in his locker. The times I’d caught him listening to some terrible hip-hop on his headphones when we were meant to be reading Of Mice and Men. Other stories like this too, all of them about attempts to needle authority figures, to derail lessons, to discombobulate the teachers.

  But there are stories I don’t tell. For instance, I don’t tell her about the time I saw Kayleigh Harbinson touching him up under the desk while they were meant to be watching Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet. It had been quite blatant, but I had been sure it was much more to do with challenging the teacher than with pleasuring her boyfriend. Which is why I had refused to be challenged. Why I had let it go.

  As I talk Lulu allows herself a flicker of a smile every now and again. It lands on her face for an instant then it’s gone. When I’m done, she asks if I think Jake will make a good dad. I am taken aback.

  ‘Why – you’re not?’

  She smiles, shakes her head. ‘No, no but we’re thinking about it. That is, we talk about it sometimes when we’re feeling especially loved up.’

  I give it some thought – will Jake Skellow make a good dad? Impulsive but kind. Will jump out of a window to get a laugh. Will offer shelter to strays of all kinds. Has an endless supply of fart gags and funny faces. Yes, actually I think he’ll be great.

  ‘You don’t think he’s too young?’

  ‘Everyone is too young to have children,’ I say.

  She frowns. I just mean that everybody struggles as a parent – the fifteen-year-old schoolgirl living on alcopops and snapchat, yes, obviously, but also the forty-year-old fully zero-balanced, all yoga-ed up solicitor – doesn’t matter who you are, or how sorted you think you are, children knock you sideways in ways you can’t predict. I tell her this.

  ‘Yes, but that’s why you have them isn’t it?’ she says.

  Of course I think of Ella and Jack. They’ll be up by now. If this was a normal Saturday, I’d be making them a cooked breakfast. They’d be squabbling loudly – one of them would probably be crying or complaining about the other. Afterwards Jack and I would be off to judo while Katy gets Ella to ballet. I close my eyes. I could cry. Lulu sees. She chews on the nail of her little finger. She frowns again.

  ‘You got kids yourself then?’ she says.

  I just nod, I can’t do any more than that. I am too full of grieving to do anything else. We sit in silence for a minute.

  ‘There’s a 24-hour shop near here, isn’t there?’ I say, finally. I’d noticed it on the way over. ‘I’ll get those bits of shopping.’

  Lulu doesn’t protest. She can see I want to be on my own. Anyway, she seems lost in her thoughts. She doesn’t look at me as I pass her on the way out of the kitchen and into the hall. She just scratches at her freckled arms, sips her drink, nibbles on her fingernail.

  I walk slowly to the shop. I am trying to think clearly. What to do now? Now I’m awake and up, should I just take off again? Again I’m thinking I should just hand myself in. I’m just not suited for life on the run. I haven’t got the tradecraft to be a fugitive. Even for a week. Too soft, too polite. Too many staffroom flapjacks, to
o many 6 p.m. merlots.

  I’m away – what, twenty minutes? When I’m back Lulu is showered and changed. With wet hair combed down she is more boyish than ever. The jumper and the jeans have been replaced by an old and comfortable-looking wine-coloured dressing gown, loose over tartan pyjamas. Dressed for bed you can tell just how skinny she is, her collar bones delicate and fragile. She’s wearing one surprisingly old-ladyish beige slipper. She’s wearing one slipper, because she’s only got one foot. From the left knee down the pyjama leg hangs empty.

  I stare. Of course I do. As I’m probably meant to. Lulu arches an eyebrow, gives a frowning smile and exhales wearily.

  ‘Shark,’ she says. ‘Surfing in Australia ten years ago. All very dramatic at the time. Fine now, but yes, I can still feel the leg sometimes, as if it was still there.’

  This explains the careful movement up and down the stairs, the stiffness as she had fetched and carried things in the kitchen.

  ‘You’d never know,’ I say. I wonder why Jake thought it was important to tell me that his girl was an artist, but not about this.

  Lulu shrugs. ‘Good prosthesis,’ she says. ‘I have microchips in my patella and in my plastic ankle. I am bionic. I am the six-million-dollar woman. But a whole shift and it gets sore.’

  ‘It must do,’ I say.

  ‘So that’s my big secret. Now you should tell me yours.’ She smiles at the transparency of her own ruse. How can I refuse her now?

  I take a breath.

  ‘When I was eighteen my sister killed herself,’ I begin. I wait for the eyes to widen, for the murmured sympathy. Only it doesn’t happen. She simply nods. Her eyes drift to the ceiling and around the room and then settle back on mine. She frowns slightly.

  My mouth is dry. I begin again but stop. There is fumbling at the door.

  ‘Typical Jake,’ Lulu says, ‘blundering in at just the wrong moment.’ She shakes her head, bites her fingernail.

  Jake is all good cheer.