Stronger Than Skin

by Stephen May

  ‘Five minutes,’ Jake says. ‘Tops.’

  He swallows, making a furry noise in his throat. And, without looking at either of us again, he crosses the room in a couple of steps and takes the stairs two at a time.

  Lulu stands up. ‘Come on then,’ she says. Her voice is a fierce whisper. I follow her down the hall, I feel dazed, though I remember to pick up my bag. As she opens the front door she yells at the top of her voice.

  ‘You heard Jake! Just get lost!’

  I’m confused because now she steps outside pulling me with her, slamming the door shut behind us. ‘He’ll think I’m chucking you out. Might give us an extra minute. Come on, car’s round the corner.’

  She sets off down the path and into the street. As we move away from the house she says, ‘I’m always going to go where the action is, you should know that.’

  It seems to me that we are going painfully slowly. I want to break into a run, but we can’t of course. I am conscious of the spitting rain and the stinging wind whipping around my ears. The moon is smudged by racing clouds and lights the wet street intermittently, turning the sky itself into a spinning light of the kind you find on police cars. Somewhere, not too far away, a siren wails. Doesn’t have to be for me. London is a city of sirens. Could be going anywhere and it’s probably an ambulance anyway. I force myself to keep calm.

  As we reach the car, I can hear a dog barking and I imagine that soon there will be deep voices shouting orders at me, the firefly glimmers of torches in the hands of burly men. It’ll all be over soon.

  I’m almost relieved.

  Lulu is in the driver’s seat, the engine is on. She looks across at me. Her face is shining.

  ‘Well, this is all jolly exciting, isn’t it?’

  39

  Ella wakes suddenly from confused dreams. There’s the dull throb of a diesel engine outside her window. An unfamiliar light. She slips from her bed and crosses to the window. The police car across the street is manoeuvring its way out of the tight parking space. She watches until it is finally free and away from the cars that hemmed it in. As it moves down Haverstock Street, she sees the flashing lights come on. The siren pulls the night apart.

  Her heart beats wild in her chest, the panicked wings of a trapped bird. She pads down the landing to her brother’s room.

  Jack twitches in his sleep. She shakes him awake. Pinches him.

  ‘Ow. That really hurt me.’

  ‘Your face really hurts me.’

  She hisses at him that the police have gone, that they are not being watched anymore and what does he think that means? Jack rubs his eyes, makes her say it all again slower this time. ‘Means the police have gone. It means they know where dad is.’

  ‘We should tell mum.’

  But when they go to their parents’ room, they find that mummy already knows, she was woken by the siren and looked outside and clocked the empty space in the street. But it’s okay, she seems sad, but not too sad, just kind of quiet and she’ll make them both warm milk and honey if they promise to go straight back to bed afterwards.

  ‘What about our teeth?’ says Jack.

  Ella rolls her eyes.

  ‘After you’ve cleaned your teeth again obviously.’

  They sit in Ella’s room playing the game of dreaming up good names for the baby. Jack does the boys’ names, Ella does the girls’.

  ‘Paul David Chadwick.’

  ‘Quorra Moon Chadwick.’

  ‘Caleb Liam Chadwick.’

  ‘Rhythm Nixon Chadwick.’

  ‘William Edward Chadwick.’

  ‘Sea Pixie Chadwick.’

  ‘Wyatt Jesse Chadwick.’

  ‘Sparrow Chia Chadwick.’

  ‘You’re not doing it right, they’re not real names.’

  ‘They are so. They are all better than Paul. Better than William, better than Edward.’ She twists her face as she says these names, makes it like the sound of them hurts her mouth.

  ‘Well, I’m not playing anymore.’

  Ella makes him go back to his own bed and so, when their mum hauls herself upstairs – it’s really getting to be an effort to carry this bloody baby around now – with two mugs of warm milk sweetened with locally grown honey, the children are in separate rooms, both of them crying, both of them pretending not to be.

  40

  Lulu has got us clear of the tightly packed streets of South Camden and out on to the Euston Road. My heart rate is returning to normal after the shock of almost running Jake down. We had just turned out of Inkerman Close when we’d seen him standing in the middle of the road, shouting words I couldn’t hear, but not nice words that’s for sure. Words Lulu would definitely think were unimaginative. She had gunned the engine and headed straight for him. Jake held his nerve pretty well, only throwing himself out of the way at the last possible moment, banging on the side of the car as we went past, howling with impotent rage, like he was some kind of crazed matador and the car was a blind and desperate bull.

  ‘Would you really have run Jake over?’

  Her voice is airy, light. There’s fizz in it. ‘Oh I knew he’d move. He knows better than to play a game of chicken with me. Anyway, where to?’

  ‘Felixstowe.’

  ‘Seriously? I don’t even know where that is.’

  ‘Suffolk.’

  ‘What? You mean beyond zone five? Out in the actual country? Jesus.’

  It might be the early hours of a Thursday morning but it’s slow going even after we get out of London and onto the A12 heading east. There are cones, narrow lanes, temporary speed restrictions, lorries aiming for the port and the continent, overtaking each other while going exactly the same fucking speed. Lumbering towards the boats that will take them to the Hoek van Holland and beyond. Plus there’s the rain and the spray on the road. It’s like driving through a cheerless – endless – car wash.

  Lulu needs to concentrate and so do I because I could easily throw up if I wasn’t mindful about my breathing – in-and-out, slow, slower, there we go, nice and steady – and if I wasn’t keeping my eyes closed against the flicker of halogen lights through water. So we don’t talk much.

  Round about Romford, Lulu says, ‘Well, I think that’s Jake and I done. No wedding bells I fear.’

  I think for a moment about all the morning sex and the late at night sex I’ve been forced to hear over the last few days, the grunting and the crying out, the thud of headboard against wall. How desperate it had seemed.

  ‘A shame I guess. But there it is,’ she says now.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. I think we’d reached the end of our rainbow or whatever. I’d taken him as far as I could.’ As if she were a CEO and he a company she was leaving.

  It is a long, straight drive to Felixstowe. After Romford there’s nothing much. The anaemic lights of commuter towns – Brentwood, Shenfield, Ingatestone, Chelmsford, Witham, Ipswich – flicker beside the road like clusters of faintly glittery midges as we follow the HGVs to the coast. And, as the rain finally stops, we’re climbing the almost defiantly unspectacular concrete bridge over the River Orwell and then, under impassive moonlight, we see the cranes of Felixstowe docks. Massive Meccano structures that belong in some much bigger place. Shanghai maybe or Rotterdam. They look alive and menacing, blind metal dinosaurs black against the velvet midnight blue of the night, striding through the sea like some Victorian imagining of an alien invasion – like a scene from War of the Worlds.

  We drive through the empty streets of the town before stopping in a car park down by the seafront, where we use the public toilets.

  ‘Hey, we really are in the country,’ Lulu says. ‘It’s only 20p for a piss here.’

  We have breakfast in Ken’s Koffee Kabin in the town’s main shopping street. A very old school caff. Lulu places an order for two veggie breakfasts. The fat bloke in charge – Ken I guess – turns to the nervy looking girl working alongside him.

  ‘Told you,’ he says, smiling, triumphant.
Turns out he’d had a friendly bet with his cook that we’d be vegetarians. Said that he’d known the second we’d come through his door. Said that he could always tell.

  He’s wrong of course. I’m not actually a vegetarian, just can’t take the idea of bacon, sausage and black pudding right now. But I don’t tell him this. Let him have his small victory, everyone needs those from time to time. In fact, that’s what a successful life is: tiny victories strung together.

  The actual breakfast is a decent one and very good value at £3.95.

  ‘You forget, don’t you?’ says Lulu, ‘that there’s a world outside London where things don’t have to cost a fortune. I wonder what the house prices are like?’

  So now she is googling Felixstowe. While she’s doing this her phone quivers again. It’s gone off dozens of times this morning. It makes an outraged buzz. A desperate hornet caught in a small boy’s jam jar. A meat-crazed bluebottle. I’m guessing it’s Jake, though she doesn’t say. She ignores it anyway.

  ‘Did you know the suffix stowe marks a holy place?’ she says.

  She goes on to tell me about the town’s founder. It seems St Felix was one of the less interesting saints. A quiet kind of bloke as saints go. Set up a school, did a bit of writing, did some sitting around contemplating eternal mysteries. No one was raised from the dead. No snakes were cast out from the kingdom. No martyrdom even. Felix trundled to his threescore and ten years before dying quietly at home surrounded by old friends. The patron saint of keeping your head down and getting on with it. A far better saint for modern England than George with his dragon-slaying and maiden-rescuing.

  ‘You need to get rid of your phone,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your phone. You need to get rid of it. They can trace it. Even when it’s off it’s like a homing beacon.’

  She doesn’t protest and so we walk from the cafe down to the sea and Lulu throws it as far as she can into the swell of brooding water.

  ‘Freedom!’ she shouts as it arcs and plummets into the wet murk, a thin silver seagull diving for a fish.

  We find the gallery easily enough. A double-fronted shop in what seems to be the main shopping street with a large canvas in the window. It’s a bucolic scene of cows grazing in a field and so faithfully rendered as to be almost photorealist, only the cows are neon pink and toothpaste white, the sky is a metallic green, the grass is a stinging yellow. It’s a fun idea. The painting is priced at £12,000. In the bottom right-hand corner of the window there’s a small poster advertising the fact that tonight there’s a private view.

  ‘Ooh, I do like a private view,’ says Lulu.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Free wine, free snacks, good-looking people flirting, what’s not to like?’

  There are two buttons beside the door of the shop, one for the gallery itself and one for the flat above and I ring the one belonging to the flat and wait.

  Somewhere a baby starts crying.

  ‘I actually don’t think this is such a great idea,’ says Lulu. ‘It’s seven-thirty in the morning and you look like shit. Your eyes are all red and you have a bit of a mad look to be honest. Is it the right time to have serious conversations?’

  I press the bell again. And again. And again. I knock. Hard. Harder. The baby cries get louder and then the door is opened by a hard-eyed teenage girl in a piebald onesie with a fat, red-faced and very angry baby on her hip. The girl is not happy. She is almost as pissed off as her kid.

  ‘What the actual fuck?’ she says.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ I say. ‘I’m looking for Bim.’

  ‘What the fuck is that?’ says the girl.

  ‘It’s a person,’ says Lulu. ‘It’s his name.’

  ‘Fucking stupid name. Do you know what time it is?’

  ‘He doesn’t live here then?’

  ‘No he doesn’t fucking live here. It’s just me and Jezebel.’

  ‘Now that is a great name,’ says Lulu. The girl doesn’t reply though her eyes maybe narrow slightly. She’s suspicious. She shifts Jezebel’s weight on her hip. The baby stops crying. She hiccups and then stares at Lulu with an intense curiosity. Seems to be drinking her in. Maybe she’s surprised to see someone react to her name with such genuine enthusiasm. Lulu waggles her little finger in front of the baby who buries her face into her mother’s shoulder.

  ‘Aw, she’s feeling shy.’

  ‘No, she’s fucking mad because she’s been woken up. Is that it? Can I go back in now?’

  Afterwards, Lulu says it’s probably a good thing we haven’t found Bim yet, means we can get ourselves a bit presentable because it looks like we’ll be going to this private view, doesn’t it?

  41

  When men and women first get together they often revert to childhood. The first stages of a romance are a deliberate return to innocence. A couple just starting out play all sorts of chasing games. Tig among the trees as they stroll through parks. Hide and seek. Every game a kind of kiss-chase. They are as giddy as hares in March.

  They giggle at silly jokes. They tickle one another. They imagine exotic future lives for themselves in the same way that children do. They plan dangerous adventures they will never have, but that are thrilling to think about. Dangerous adventures like setting up home and being together for ever. To make this seem real they might play house, have a go at being mummies and daddies.

  This is one reason why new lovers are often surprisingly happy to babysit, or to take young nieces and nephews to the cinema. This is why they go to the zoo, not just to laugh at the antics of the monkeys, but to see the eager faces of toddlers light up as they see those monkeys for the first time.

  This is the sort of thing Anne and I begin to do once Dorcas is dropped off in Selwyn Gardens by her grandmother.

  It was me that drove it. I got the poster paint and the glitter. I bought the Airfix kits and the frisbee. I made meals that were also faces. The sausages were thick lips, upturned into a superior smile. Oven chips were sandy-blonde hair, button mushrooms were serious grey eyes, a juicy half of a grilled tomato was a drinkist’s nose.

  ‘It looks like my dad,’ said Dorcas and I laughed because it did actually. Kind of.

  I took her to galleries and was unnerved by the girl’s sophisticated understanding of the tubercular glamour of the pre-Raphaelites. Her frank delight in the sick, pale, dying faces of market girls dressed up as medieval queens and biblical temptresses.

  We went to the local museum where Dorcas was fascinated by the way there was room after room of stuffed wildlife. The foxes and martens, the owls and the badgers. The bears and the reindeer. The entire aviary of stuffed birds, some of them looking decidedly threadbare and dusty. She stared agog at all the unseeing eyes staring blackly back at her.

  We played bowls and French cricket in the garden. Dorcas and Anne tried to teach me how to do handstands and cartwheels. We made swords from sticks, and I had us all pretending we were the three musketeers training to take on the cardinal’s men.

  I thought we were all enjoying this time, but on about the fourth day, just after Dorcas had gone to bed, Anne reached for her wine and sighed.

  ‘Not long now, thank God.’

  ‘Not long till what?’

  ‘Till the little princess is back at school. I don’t know about you but I’m finding all this hands-on parenting bloody exhausting.’ I asked what they usually did during school holidays and Anne had to think for a long time before she shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know. She has her sketchbooks and her dolls and there is always television isn’t there? Television is a pretty good babysitter I find. Pretty educational. Sometimes Philip takes her with him to the lab. She seems to like that.’

  I had to admit that Anne had more on her plate than I did however. A lot more stress. There was, for example, the daily row on the phone with her husband. The daily row had to be followed by the daily post-mortem on the row with her solicitor. This in turn was followed by time spent working out how much that second phon
e call had cost her. The numbers were astonishing. A single fifteen-minute conversation represented the entire profits of a busy Friday night in the Blue Pig.

  No wonder she sometimes found it hard to concentrate on Lego, or to properly appreciate the dress designs her daughter was sketching.

  I was in the children’s playground spinning a shrieking Dorcas on the roundabout when I had the unnerving sense I was being watched and turned to see – of all people – Professor Sheldon’s paramour, Mish.

  She looked utterly out of place here. She was dressed neutrally enough in jeans and sweatshirt, her pregnancy just beginning to be obvious, but she had that curious stillness about her that set her apart from the other adults, the tired mums and the restless dads. That was before you properly took in her freakish Hollywood looks. Looks the glasses did nothing to hide.

  Those cheekbones, those lips.

  As I walked towards her I wondered about her heritage. What collisions of DNA gave skin that particular buttermilk sheen, gave eyes the subtle grey-green of a field under frost? Helsinki by way of Tehran maybe? Or was she the descendent of both Irish kings and Pathan warrior princesses?

  ‘This is a coincidence,’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ she said.

  She nodded towards Dorcas who had now moved from the roundabout to the swings. ‘She seems like a happy little girl.’ I followed Mish’s gaze and actually I thought Dorcas didn’t look entirely happy now. Instead, she looked both watchful and wild, kicking herself up as high as she could, but keeping her eyes fixed on where Mish and I were talking. I waved and then sat down on the bench.

  ‘How are you anyway?’

  ‘I’m fine. Mostly fine. Not too sick.’ I had forgotten how thin her voice was. I strained to hear her. There was another pause before she smiled suddenly. Those teeth, the way the light shone from them. Plainly she remembered the last time we had met, remembered her little jump away from me as I was overcome by punch. As I fell puking at her feet.