Stronger Than Skin

by Stephen May

  When I got out, I wrapped myself in a large white towel and when I opened the bathroom door I found Anne had put my rucksack just outside. I put on clean boxers and a fresh t-shirt and padded back down the landing towards the master bedroom.

  ‘Hey you,’ she said, softly, fondly. She took her glasses off and dropped them on the floor. She did the same with her book.

  Anne wriggled under the covers, she turned towards me as I climbed onto the bed and her face was full of shifting shadow. Her eyes gleaming with black light. She looked at me for a slow minute, while I struggled – and failed – to think of something to say.

  ‘Well,’ Anne breathed. ‘Here we are.’ Her voice was low, full of heat.

  It was gone midnight and the house grew expectant somehow. Like it was keeping quiet, trying hard not to disturb us.

  We lay in silence for a few minutes, our arms just touching, ghost touches, until we were startled by anguished screeching nearby. We both jumped, then we both laughed. Outside in the garden, in the flower bed beyond the bay windows, beyond the blinds, something was killing something else. Killing it or fucking it. The tamest and tidiest of gardens is a warzone at night, where kill or be killed, fuck or be fucked is the whole of the law. Where nature feeds herself just like she always has.

  Anne wrapped herself around me. I breathed in the smoky heat of her.

  She said, ‘Last night poor old Jimmy’s little chipolata was pressing into me all night and I felt no temptation at all. Not even any curiosity. I was just irritated. And, you know, when he did finally fall asleep, he snored.’

  In our weeks together I had only once stayed with Anne the whole night. That was that time at Langhams and neither of us had really slept at all that night. Sleeping hadn’t been what we were there for.

  ‘I might snore,’ I said now.

  ‘You won’t. Somehow I know you won’t.’ We kissed. It was strange because we were clumsy now, whereas when we had been new lovers we had been pretty graceful. Now our teeth clashed. Now our mouths – hungry, greedy, ardent – didn’t quite fit. Anne tasted of toothpaste, but she hadn’t managed to rid herself completely of that enticing undertow of cigarettes, wine and whisky. We kissed more and touched, she reached for me, squeezed me none too gentle and then she broke away.

  ‘Phew,’ she breathed. She raised herself up, clicked off the lamp. Turned away on her side. I listened to her breathing, to my own heart pumping, to the blood pulsing around my body, to the house, which was holding its breath again. ‘Thank you Mark,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you’re here. I know everything is going to be fine.’

  We lay together like that for a while. In the dark, me pressed into her back, holding her shoulders. It took me a while to realise she was crying.

  ‘What can I do?’ I whispered at last.

  ‘You’re so sweet,’ she said.

  This was too much. I gripped her shoulders, dug my nails right in. ‘I’m really not,’ I said. ‘You have to know that.’

  She was startled by my vehemence. I heard her sucking at the thickening air. ‘No, you’re not sweet. Not at all. I don’t know why I said it.’

  Minutes passed. The wood-smoke scent of her seemed to fill the room. It seemed to be getting warmer too. Then, in a low flat voice she began to tell me what she wanted to do to Dr Sheldon. Told me how she had been dwelling on it while I was in the bath. Told me he needed teaching a lesson, a painful lesson.

  Was she serious? Was I meant to offer to help, volunteer to be her enforcer? I didn’t really think I was enforcer material, didn’t think it was in my skill set. Bim was her man for that stuff. Best to say nothing.

  There was quiet again. She sighed, a long desperate exhalation, and when she spoke it was as if to herself.

  ‘Forget it. It’s all right. I’ll be all right. Honestly. Don’t worry.’ A pause, another sigh. She squirmed against me. ‘That’s not going away, is it?’

  She reached back, grabbed me with her hand. ‘No chipolata either.’

  35

  I woke early, my head thick, my throat dry, my bones aching. It was like I was coming down with something, but more than this I had a feeling that there was something profoundly wrong with the world. Anne lay with her back to me. I put my hand on her shoulder, tentative. She growled, shook it off.

  Despite it being summer, the house was chilly. I dragged my clothes on. Anne didn’t stir. I had a piss, splashed cold water on my face, went downstairs, drank three mugs of water. It tasted metallic, faintly rusty. I went through the rituals of making coffee – another thing Anne had shown me – Ethiopian beans in the grinder, the ground coffee in the little tray in the stovetop coffee pot, the water in the reservoir at the bottom, the whole thing screwed together and placed on the hob to begin its magic.

  I clicked the radio on, found I was listening to a recording of a piano concerto recorded live in New York in 1956. It occurred to me that to be a DJ on a classical station was surely to have the easiest job in the media. You read out the sleeve notes from the back of the record cover. You dropped the needle on the disc. You then had twenty minutes or so to read the paper or whatever, before it was time to cue up the next thing. What a great job. Maybe I could do that after Cambridge. Become the hip young gunslinger of Radio Three.

  After I’d had coffee, I went down the road to the Spar. I got bread, eggs, orange juice, The Times. Croissants. I paid with a twenty and so had half a ton of loose change given back to me. I stopped at a phone box and called home. Bim answered: everything was fine, everything was great and, no, he didn’t mind staying on for a few more days.

  ‘Absolutely not. I’m having a ball. I find the role of mine host surprisingly congenial. How’s everything where you are?’

  I told him everything was fine, everything was great in Cambridge too. Anne was getting herself sorted.

  ‘Good-o, knew you’d be just the ticket.’

  ‘But I might need a few more days here.’

  ‘As long as you like. I’m having fun and I’ve nowhere special to be. The Vorticists will wait forever if they have to. Here, have a word with your gorgeous mother.’

  Mum told me how nice it was to have Bim around, how popular he was with the customers. How they hadn’t seen Andy Hemingway since Bim had a quiet word. I laughed at that and Mum did too. Some quiet. Some word.

  I asked about Dad and she said that he seemed to be improving slowly, though he was driving everyone nuts with this drug thing. It seemed everything was getting better. So why did I feel so hollow when I put the phone down?

  When I got back Anne was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking and coldly furious.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  I lifted the bag of shopping. ‘Breakfast.’

  ‘Aw. Isn’t that nice? Isn’t that sweet?’ Ugly sarcasm, a nastily deliberate deployment of the word sweet.

  I didn’t say anything. I was baffled, uncertain about what I’d done wrong, but clearly there was something.

  ‘You left me on my own.’

  ‘For five minutes.’

  ‘Twenty-five minutes. And it could have been hours for all I knew. It could have been forever. No goodbye. No note. I thought you’d left without telling me. Again.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that. You were sleeping. I was being considerate.’

  ‘Fuck that.’

  ‘Fuck considerate?’

  ‘Yes. Fuck considerate. Fuck nice. Fuck breakfast too actually.’ She flapped her wrist at me. ‘I have coffee and I have a cigarette. Sets me up for the day quite nicely.’

  ‘Not very healthy,’ I said. It was lame but I was trying to keep things light.

  ‘Fuck healthy.’

  ‘Okay, okay someone’s clearly got out of bed the wrong side today.’

  ‘No someone just wants to be informed if her lover is leaving the house.’

  She rose from her chair, back very straight and moved from the room with exaggerated grace. Head high. Imperious. Careful not to stomp, careful not to hurry.

&nb
sp; I swallowed two paracetamols. Made toast. I loved toast. It was my favourite thing. Left to myself it would be more or less all I’d eat. I found butter and jam, made more coffee, poured juice into whisky tumblers. I found a tray and took it all upstairs, a packet of pills perched on the side like an exotic condiment.

  Anne was back in bed, curled up under the covers, the only part of her visible a copse of dark hair. I put the tray down on the bedside table. She didn’t stir.

  It was gone ten already, maybe I should make a start getting back to Essex after all. Maybe Anne needed time on her own. Maybe I was getting on her tits.

  She sat up now. She wouldn’t look at me. Took the pills, washed them down with juice. Nibbled the corner of a piece of toast.

  ‘This is it, isn’t it?’ she said, mouth full of crumbs. ‘I won’t see you again.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  ‘You just want to have sex with me.’

  ‘No I don’t.’

  ‘You don’t want to have sex with me?’ She was smiling now, and I thought the clouds might be passing, that things might be okay.

  ‘No. No. I mean. Yes, of course I want to... do that. I just meant that’s not all I want to do.’

  ‘What else do you want to do, Marko?’

  ‘I want...’ I stopped. What did I want? ‘I want... I want to, you know, hang out. To watch films, go to plays, exhibitions. To see bands. To go to dinner. To talk. You know, all the usual things.’

  ‘You want to be my boyfriend? A proper boyfriend?’ She smiled. She was definitely cheering up now. She might even be laughing at me, though not in a horrible way. ‘You know, I haven’t seen a band since 1973,’ she said. ‘Not since I met Philip.’

  ‘Oh. Who was it? The last band you saw?’

  ‘T. Rex.’

  ‘You saw T. Rex in 1973? I’d have loved to see them.’

  ‘They weren’t so special. I prefer music you can dance to. Philip only likes classical music of course. But you see Mark, there’s a bit of an age gap here isn’t there? I’m nearly forty. I’m a mother. I’m someone who saw T. Rex on the Electric Warrior tour and you’re... Well, you’re just a boy.’

  She drank more juice. Her hands were shaking again. She saw me looking and held her hands up. ‘I’m in a bad way, aren’t I? I told you right at the start that you don’t want to be mixed up with me. I’ve become old, Mark. I’ve become properly old and I’m going to become invisible the way old people do.’

  She looked inexpressibly sad. Her eyes filled with tears. I couldn’t bear it.

  ‘But last night,’ I began. ‘Last night...’

  ‘Last night was... last night. This is this morning. That was then and this is now.’

  I thought about going back to the Blue Pig, about Bim asking how Anne was and having to say that I thought I might actually have made things worse.

  I wanted to hold her but I didn’t know how. There was silence. Then she said, with exaggerated casualness, ‘My mother is bringing Dorcas back today.’

  So that was it. The return of the kid.

  ‘Do you want me to go?’

  Her eyes widened. ‘No! Really no. But I assumed you’d want to go home. I mean, nine-year-olds aren’t the most interesting company, are they? Women are at their least attractive when they’re with their children. All that nagging, all that nose-wiping.’

  ‘It’ll be fine. Really. It might even be a laugh.’

  ‘You think we can play happy families, Marko? Go to the park? Eat ice cream and jelly?’

  ‘I love jelly.’

  ‘Of course you do.’

  ‘What about Dr Sheldon? He won’t like me being around while Dorcas is here, will he?’

  ‘No. Philip will hate it. It’ll make him crazy. So there’s the bonus of that I suppose.’

  ‘You know…’ I stopped. Perhaps I shouldn’t say what I was going to say. Perhaps it wasn’t my place. But she was ahead of me as ever.

  ‘Yeah I do know. I need to sort things out with my husband. Properly sort things out. I will, very soon I promise. Guide’s honour.’

  ‘Maybe I could help. Be a sounding board or something.’ It was definitely more my thing than beating the shit out of him was.

  ‘Mediate between Philip and I? You think you’re up to that? You’re very ambitious all of a sudden Mark Chadwick.’ A thoughtful pause. A steady look that was making me blush. I knew it. I could feel the heat in my cheeks. ‘Just be here, Mark. That’s all I need. You can’t stay in my actual boudoir any more of course. You’ll have to have one of the attic rooms. We’ll tell Dorcas that I’ve had to resort to taking in lodgers since her daddy is spending all his money on his bit of fluff. Might mean we have to do some tip-toeing around in the night of course. Some creeping up and down stairs. But that’ll be all right, won’t it? Might even be exciting.’

  Our eyes met. The exact same thought struck us at the same moment.

  ‘How long till she gets here?’

  ‘An hour at least. Could be two. Could be three. What do you think? A properly noisy fuck in the living room? Shall we make hay while the sun shines? Seize the carp and all that?’

  ‘What?’

  She laughed. ‘That’s my boy.’

  36

  10 p.m. and I’m back in Chaney Street. As I approach Jake and Lulu’s house I decide I can’t face them. Tonight, whatever the risk, I can’t be watching TV or lying on my bed in that tiny damp cave of a bedroom. I need to be out and I need to be drinking.

  In the little shop I buy a half-bottle of value scotch. It’s a brand called Claymore and sure enough it chops at the guts like the rusty blade of an unwieldy sword. Fact it’s not really a brand as such, it’s what you might more accurately call an unbrand, and it tastes the way I imagine plumbing chemicals might. Sink unblocker, something like that. It’s perfect. The first swallow makes me splutter and spit, and a passing dog-walker asks if I’m all right.

  At first I just mean to walk and think and drink on my own, but it’s a cold night and worse than this it is unbearable to see the lights behind the curtains and imagine all those people happily doing nothing important.

  Curtains drawn or not, I can see it all so clearly: the watching of box sets. The buying of crap on eBay or Amazon. The Facebooking, tweeting, emailing, snapchatting, texting. The skyping of loved ones overseas. The instagramming. The placing of logs into the wood burning stove.

  I see homework and the ordering of the weekly shop. Couples arguing with each other, some bickering good-naturally, others squabbling nastily, trading spite. Others, well, maybe they’re making love or at least thinking about it.

  I see flowers in cheap vases. Late suppers. Ham and Branston Pickle. Slices of shop-bought cake. Battenberg. Fondant fancies. I see coats hung up in hallways, umbrellas propped up ready for use if necessary.

  I see animated conversation in rooms where ornamental plates are displayed on old-fashioned dressers. Photos of graduations. Framed certificates.

  I see a young woman in a tracksuit with her head on her boyfriend’s shoulder as they sit close together on a sofa. Maybe she’s just back from her spinning class, maybe he’s moaning about the restructure at work. She’s making sympathetic noises, barely listening. Maybe they’ve just moved in together and are still learning how to get along. Enjoying the grown-up novelty of a shared dishwasher.

  All of this mocking echoes my life with Katy, and it makes me want to smash my fist into someone’s face over and over and over.

  I’m not an idiot. I know that there is also real pain among the muddy shadows that flit behind these curtains. There must be children who can’t sleep, who call out for their mummies, who can’t find their moppets - their Benjis or their Fluffys. Kids who need a cuddle, or who have wet the bed.

  Yes, not everyone is sitting in the wood burner glow of human warmth. Behind some of these curtains sit the lost and the lonely, the suicidal and the heartbroken, the weary and the sick. Someone is sitting there with no one to text, email, skype. There are peo
ple in these houses for whom even music means nothing. People that even alcohol no longer helps.

  But tonight I have no sympathy for them. They should buck up. Pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Just get it together. Are they looking at fifteen to twenty years in jail? Have they lost Katy? Ella? Jack? The Bump? A sister? No? Well, then. Fuck them. They don’t know they’re born. It’s in this mood of truculent self-pity, with my stomach fizzing with bad bargain booze, that I somehow find myself in the Neptune.

  37

  The Neptune is a kind of Blue Pig. A pub like the one my parents ran in Colchester a lifetime ago. A pub of the kind that is dying out. Two bars, neither of them huge. A quick glance into the one with a brass sign reading ‘saloon’ on the heavy oak door reveals a modestly proportioned room with a viciously acrylic carpet.

  The walls are painted cream over woodchip and there are paintings of animals. Disappointingly there are none of those pub classics – the ones of dogs playing cards or snooker, instead there are merely faithful representations of woebegone spaniels, dignified black labradors. Sly cats. Horses. A seventeenth century sheep cuddled by a moon-faced boy in a smock. On a shelf that runs all around the room close to the ceiling are dozens of dusty china water jugs.

  There is no one in this room. No one behind the bar either come to that.

  I go to the other, equally heavy door, the one where the brass plate reads simply ‘BAR’.

  There’s a bit more life in here. If two young blokes playing pool count as more life. If a fat geezer on a stool, steadily munching crisps while watching the rolling news on the TV high in the corner counts as life. If the stutter and blink of a fruit machine counts as life. For me, for now, it will do. It’s all the life there is. All the life I want. I stumble into a stray chair on the way to the bar and only then do I realise that the Claymore at least has done what it was meant to do. I am actually already quite drunk.

  Now I order a pint of London Pride. A good, bog-standard working beer. The fat man on the stool next to me turns and gives me a long look. He seems to be thinking about saying something, but then thinks better of it and turns back to the telly. The lads playing pool laugh at something. It is probably nothing to do with me. I worry that my situation has made me paranoid. It’s only been a few days. What will I be like after a year? After ten years?