Stronger Than Skin

by Stephen May

  ‘How long is there to go now?’

  ‘Till the baby? About twenty weeks.’

  ‘You’re looking forward to it? And the move to the States and everything? To the ranch with the lovely fig trees or whatever.’

  ‘I’m okay with it. Look, there’s no need to be so hostile.’

  ‘I’m not being hostile.’ Except that maybe I was. I hadn’t meant to be but maybe there was a spikiness to my questions that I hadn’t been aware of.

  We sat in silence, both of us watching the hypnotic back and forth of Dorcas on the swings. Mish didn’t look at me as she spoke again in that hesitant papery voice.

  ‘It’s inconvenient that Phil and I fell for each other so hard, I know that. I almost wish it hadn’t happened. I never meant it to happen. I worked hard at not letting it happen but in the end…’ she tailed off into a sigh. Now she did turn towards me, perfect brow crinkled into a frown. Eyes searching mine for some sympathetic warmth. I was careful to keep my face blank. ‘You know, he’d been miserable for years. And Anne, well, she’s quite nuts you know. You must know that.’

  ‘How’s Dr Sheldon’s work going?’

  She seemed surprised by the question. She frowned. ‘It’s very stressful at the moment actually.’

  Yes, I could imagine that it would be. What with the world beginning to acknowledge that his precious drug was lighting the blue touch-paper of suicidal thoughts in the minds of the very people it’s meant to help. Yes, I could see that work might be a bit on the stressful side.

  Mish finished by saying that she was just wondering if there was some way that she and I could help somehow. Get the two of them round a table, stop them destroying each other.

  ‘There are children to think about.’

  ‘If you’re thinking about the children, why do you have to take Dorcas with you to America?’

  ‘Maybe we don’t. Maybe we can work it out. I do think that, as a general rule, children should be with their mothers. But it’s for Phil and Anne to talk about. They need to speak to each other properly.’

  ‘They speak to each other every day.’

  ‘No, they don’t. Not really. They try to score points off each other for twenty minutes and then they swap abuse for an hour and a half and come away wanting to smash up the furniture.’

  I smiled at this. It was a spot-on analysis of the way Anne and Sheldon’s phone conversations went. I’d remarked on it himself.

  ‘Afterwards they spend another hour on the phone to solicitors,’ I said.

  Mish clapped gloved hands together. ‘Yes! Yes, that’s right! All those heart-to-hearts with lawyers. As if your solicitors can ever be your friend. We’re all going to end up in the poorhouse at this rate. All going very Jarndyce v. Jarndyce.’

  This is what life should be about, I thought, conversations where people just drop in Dickens references expecting you to get them.

  It was then that Dorcas leapt from her swing while at the highest point of her arc. She landed on her feet. She bowed in our direction, every inch the regal ballet lead, and headed off to the slide.

  ‘Impressive balance,’ said Mish. ‘I wonder where she gets that from?’

  In the ten minutes it took Dorcas to finally tire of the delights of the playground, by the time she had come over and said a shy hello to Mish and asked me for an ice cream, I had agreed that we would try and arrange a face-to-face meeting between the Sheldons which we would referee if necessary.

  ‘When it happens maybe we should lock away the booze?’ I said.

  ‘Good luck with that,’ she said.

  I watched her as she walked away. She had a loose easy stride, strong, confident. Too late I realised I’d forgotten to ask her where she was from.

  Dorcas was tugging at me.

  ‘Let’s go home, Mark. Let’s go home and do something fun.’

  ‘You big bully. Oh, and Dorcas, do you happen to know where Mish comes from? What her background is?’

  ‘Yes. I do.’ She recites, ‘She grew up in Crawley in Sussex but her dad is from Kettering. He is an accountant. Her mum is from Redditch and is a primary school teacher. Mish says she is as ordinary and as dull as it’s possible for anyone to be. But I don’t believe her. Anyway, is that enough information? Why do you want to know?’

  ‘No reason.’

  ‘Daddy says Mish is living proof of the galvanising effects of boredom on the young.’

  ‘He says that does he? What do you think he means?’

  She looked at me scornfully. ‘He means that she was so desperate to get away from home that she worked really really hard at school. That’s obvious isn’t it?’ Sometimes it was very easy to see that Dorcas was her father’s daughter. ‘Can we play Monopoly when we get back?’ she said. Mish was apparently forgotten already.

  ‘Okay.’ I reminded her that I wouldn’t go easy on her. No allowances just because she was eight. No letting her off parking fines or jail sentences. I’d made that mistake before.

  ‘Excellent. I’ll be the banker,’ she said.

  42

  Getting Anne to agree to a sit down with her husband was surprisingly easy. I had expected a battle, but there just wasn’t one. I brought her coffee and croissants and scrambled eggs the following morning, told her Mish was going to try and coax the professor into agreeing to hash things out in a grown-up way. I was all prepared for fury, and she did go quiet for a few moments, glowered into her coffee. But when she looked up she was smiling.

  ‘Come here,’ she said. ‘You’re my own diplomatic corps, my very own Kissinger – you’ve heard of him, right?’

  I had, of course, but decided to play along. It always delighted Anne when I affected not to know the basic stuff of recent history. I asked her if he was a Russian General-Secretary. The first West German Chancellor after the war? That composer who did a concert for peace in Tel Aviv recently?

  ‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘Come back to bed.’ And, with her hands deft and busy beneath the covers, she explained, unnecessarily, that Kissinger was the US Secretary of State who brokered peace between the US and China, and also the man who first said power was an aphrodisiac. ‘So are croissants of course,’ she said. ‘Or at least they are in this house.’

  Which is when Dorcas stumbled in rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

  ‘Hello, munchkin,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t call me that,’ muttered Dorcas.

  I could see her point. Who would want to be a munchkin? Tiny, squeaky, powerless and living under an unnecessarily bureaucratic and ineffective system of government. That’s before you got to thinking about the worry of wicked witches.

  It wasn’t long before I realised that she’d agreed to meet up with Professor Sheldon so quickly because she had been certain that he wouldn’t countenance the idea.

  I spoke to Mish on the phone.

  ‘He won’t do it.’ Her thin voice was tinier than ever, I had to strain to hear it. ‘I thought I could persuade him but I can’t. He’s adamant.’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘Right, indeed,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll sort it out,’ I said.

  She laughed. I hung up.

  43

  Cromwell College was not among the finest examples of university architecture. By 1990 it was already looking very tired, very much in need of a makeover. It was on no guided walks, no bus tours. It was on the indistinct edge of the city, its windows looking out across the car park, past plasticky fencing to the salty green of the fields where a few dust-coloured cows flicked their tails in a desultory attempt to keep the flies away. In another town there would have been light industrial units here, or one of the malls which were then beginning to plonk themselves beyond the final hedges of home counties towns.

  Unlike the more historic colleges there were no ex-police service porters guarding Cromwell. I simply strolled in, consulted a list blu-tacked to the wall of who occupied which office, and set off up the stairs to find him. Inside, the college building remi
nded me of my high school. It had that smell that is part cheap sausage, part industrial Shake n’ Vac and part sweat which so many schools share. The older colleges didn’t smell like this. Their hushed hallways were rich with the pungency of flaunted history. Maybe they had special plug-ins ensuring that the reassuring and woody notes of power permeated all areas at all times. A gadget set to somehow evoke the piney coffins of all those junior officer alumni killed while forging the Empire or fighting the Kaiser.

  Professor Sheldon’s door was closed, but I didn’t knock. Just turned the handle and walked in. I think I had assumed that he’d be out, that the door would be locked but it opened and there he was, sat at a utilitarian desk in a creased white linen shirt writing in what looked like a school exercise book. He looked up, made a big thing of rolling his eyes.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ he said, determinedly unfazed. ‘If it isn’t Kid Galahad. Annie’s young white knight. Drink?’

  ‘You’re all right.’

  ‘Am I indeed? I’m all right? Well, that’s nice to know.’

  He took a half-empty bottle of Glenfiddich from a drawer of his desk, unscrewed the cap and half-filled a tumbler that was next to a neat stack of exercise books just like the one he was writing in.

  Other things on his desk. A copy of New Scientist, an old jam jar full of cheap biros and pencils, a calculator, an anglepoise lamp, a box of tissues. That was it.

  The rest of the room was just as drearily ascetic. Heavy books in uniform brown spines on solid shelves. Just the one print on the wall. A standard issue Rothko print like you see in offices everywhere. Art for people who can’t really see the point of art.

  Often a tutor’s room at Cambridge was like an extension of their home, full of knick-knacks. Comfortable mess everywhere. Saggy armchairs, sweet wrappers, a record player, over-flowing ashtrays, pictures of gap-toothed children or grandchildren, their drawings even – colourful pictures of grinning stickmen sellotaped to walls between posters chosen to demonstrate the breadth of the occupants’ interests. Something from the Spanish Civil War maybe, or an advertisement for a long-gone free festival. Dylan. Ginsberg. Country Joe Macdonald And The Fish.

  Maybe there would be ethnic instruments leaning in corners. A ginbri. A djembe. A worn but vibrantly patterned rug on the floor. Tea. Sherry.

  None of that nonsense here. This was the opposite of the professor’s erstwhile home. The complete rejection of it. No sculptures, no anything. The only thing that wasn’t grey or brown in this room was the egg-yolk yellow body of the fat and sluggish wasp crawling up the closed window behind the professor’s head.

  ‘What can I do for you then boy? Because whatever it is I suspect the answer is no.’

  I looked down at him and I saw the fear that was creeping up on him like water rising on a man trapped in a cave, saw that there were shadows at the edge of his vision. He wasn’t afraid of me, but he was growing afraid of life and this was a new thing for him. Meanwhile I was sharp, strong. I could feel my blood and muscles singing, ready to do whatever I wanted. I felt light as sunshine. Just as fear was a new thing for Sheldon, so this confidence in my body was a new thing for me. Exhilarating and strange.

  This man becoming old in front of me, I felt some sort of compassion for him. He was just like a regular in the Blue Pig. He was just another sad middle-aged man wondering where all the years went. I didn’t like him, but I understood him.

  I opened my mouth to ask him – nicely I swear – if he couldn’t consider having a rational, sensible, business-like conference with his ex-wife? If maybe they could just sit down, have a cup of tea. Or wine even, if it would help. On neutral territory, with Misha and I there as seconds if need be.

  But I didn’t say any of that.

  ‘You killed my sister,’ I said.

  It was only as I said the words that I knew that it was true. I don’t think I had really believed this until it just spilled out like that, thoughtlessly, almost accidentally. But the professor’s reaction confirmed it. I could see the hard truth of it in the way he flinched as if slapped, the way he blinked, the way his eyes widened. I saw it in the curl of his lip, in the exasperated sigh he gave, in the way he didn’t yell or shout or try and physically hurl me from his office. In that moment it had the force of revelation. A moment where I saw all the shoddy research, the hidden results, the massaged figures, the sloppy hurry of the whole process.

  Then and there I saw the way my sister – and God knows how many others – had been sacrificed. And for what? Not for anything real. Not even for money, not really – though someone would have been making proper money somewhere. Someone always is – but Sheldon had been driven by something more nebulous, something less honest than avarice. By a desire for reputation, for prizes, by a need to win some sort of competition with himself.

  I didn’t feel compassionate any more.

  When he found his voice it was quiet, without heat.

  ‘I’m sorry you feel that way.’

  He didn’t ask why I was accusing him like this. He didn’t need to. He believed it too.

  I said nothing, kept my eyes on his face while he looked anywhere but at me. Eventually he stood, turned to look out across the fields, out to where the cows grazed amid the drowsy late summer sunshine. I watched that wasp crawl up the glass, its buzzing suddenly loud.

  The professor moved to pick a book from the shelf and squashed the insect between it and the glass with careful, deliberate force. He took a tissue from the box on his desk and wiped the book carefully before putting it back on the shelf. Then he rubbed away the small smear of gore from the window.

  ‘Sorry, old girl,’ he said, addressing himself to the tissue. ‘But had to be done.’ He dropped the tissue into the small wastepaper bin. He looked at me. ‘Fascinating creatures, wasps, but that doesn’t mean you want them around. Only crazed females at this time of year of course. The males will be mostly goners by now, fucked to death by the women.’

  He turned back to face me. He licked his lips.

  ‘So. What do we do now?’ he said, ‘because from I’ve seen I don’t think you’ve got it in you to be one of those dogged campaigners who keep after big corporations for years and years. I can’t see you popping up at shareholders’ meetings, making a fuss, shouting your infantile accusations and then being carried kicking and shouting from the hall. I can’t see you delivering leaflets, smashing the windows of pharmacies. Maybe you’d write letters to your MP? Or the newspapers? Is that your plan? Because I have to tell you Fluxin passed all the tests set for it. Not just for the UK, but over most of the world. Maybe you think the tests should have been more rigorous, and maybe I even half-agree with you, but also, Mark, here’s the thing: it’s doing real good. For most people it really works. Maybe if you’re looking for villains you should look somewhere else, maybe at the doctor who proscribed Fluxin for your sister, and maybe even closer to home than that. Maybe you or your family should have noticed your sister’s distress? Have you considered that?’

  Listen more.

  This speech seemed to have taken what energy he had right out of him. He sat down heavily, his face flushed.

  My arm itched. The teenage apprentice and her shaky hand. But I hadn’t known what to do before and now the professor had just given me the plan. All the things he’d said I wasn’t up to doing, they would be exactly the things I would do. I should thank him.

  It wouldn’t just be me, either, my dad would be on the case too. He’d make quite an impression on television I think, all that passion, all that publican charisma and I’d like to see them carry him out of a conference hall when he was back to his fighting weight. My mum, with the quiet sorrow in her eyes, up against a shifty weasel-wordy PR man in a too-sharp suit. The regulars would help find any necessary money. They’d love that. Always up for an excuse to launch a fundraising campaign are the good old boys from the Blue Pig. Justice for Eve would be something we all could get behind, as a family, as a community. Had a ring to it.

/>   At the very least we could irritate and needle and annoy. We could make the executives and shareholders of drug companies and their backers twitchy and nervous. We could have them looking over their shoulders. We could be like a mosquito in a tent, almost invisible but a powerful nuisance all the same. We could give quite a few people the sleepless nights they deserve. We could be wasps too.

  Maybe the campaign would take the rest of my working life, but that would be okay. It would be better than whoring myself out in the City, or doing some pointless doctorate on some rightly forgotten minor poet. It would be a useful life. As useful as anything else anyway. What else are our days for, if not to upset the powerful and avenge the weak?

  So I gave him the essence of this. How maybe he was right, maybe I wasn’t the type yet, but maybe I would be. I was up for giving it a go anyway. Maybe that’s how you build a life: you decide who you are then you become that person.

  I said all this and then I found I had one more thing to say.

  ‘Does Mish know?’

  He looked up at that. ‘Does Mish know what?’

  ‘About the dodgy research.’

  I was that certain. Technically, I suppose, it was a guess – but not really. If you look hard enough at how a man sits in his chair, you can learn everything you want to about a person and how they’ve lived their life. Doesn’t take long. Another thing you learn from formative years spent standing behind a bar watching men sitting over pints.

  Sheldon sighed again, took another swallow of his drink. I looked at the window, I could just see a mark where the wasp had been. A grubby smudge where there had once been a spirit that was focused, tenacious, mean... He took another heavy breath. The man looked so tired, all ominous shadows around the eyes. I wondered about the state of his vital organs. I was, after all, very used to the signs of poor liver and kidney function. He bowed his head, everything about him seemed to sag. He may not have been sure if I was up for the fight, but we were both certain that he wasn’t.