Skin Lane

by Neil Bartlett

A man’s body, hanging upside down, with the torso twisted across the seat of the lavatory, twisted sideways so that the head is tipped back over the rim of the bath and the hair and both arms are hanging down into the bathtub and the hands are lying palm up, lifeless and defenceless, right there on the chilly, medical-looking white enamel: the hanging, lifeless, naked body of a white-skinned, blackhaired, athletically well-built young man.

  Yes, that’s right; there are now two men — two men’s bodies — in the confined space of Mr. F’s bathroom, one standing (his eyes opening wide with shock as he stares in the mirror — he would if he could, but he can’t seem to take his eyes off it — ), and one hanging; one in a brown worsted suit, the other as naked as a beast on a butcher’s hook. And now Mr F suddenly can’t bear to look in the mirror a minute longer, he needs to know if it’s really there or not, this body; he spins round — and of course it’s there, it really is — and the weight of all that hanging flesh in such close proximity sends him stumbling back against the washbasin, so hard that he hurts himself, and then backwards, back towards the door, which is just as well really because he badly needs to get out of this room now, to just get out of there (he can hear himself beginning to whimper) — except that of course fear is making him clumsy (it does that), and his back slams against the bathroom door, slamming it shut, and he starts to slide down it, starts to go sliding down it as his feeble white hands scrabble uselessly for the door-handle behind his back, as he tries to close his eyes to shut out what he’s seeing, but can’t believe he’s seeing, but for some reason he can’t, he can’t shut them, they just won’t close, and

  Don’t men sound funny when they scream?

  three

  The first time it happened, after the terrible initial panic of waking up in the dark had subsided and he’d lain there for a bit and got his breath back, Mr F’s first really conscious thought about this dream of his was to wonder if any of his neighbours had heard him making that peculiar noise. He couldn’t quite be sure if he’d actually screamed out loud, or if that was only the effect of the sound coming back on in his dream. Either way, real or not, he was sure he’d never made a noise like that before in his life. It wasn’t like him. He wouldn’t want anyone to think he had been -

  He collected himself, sat up, put the bedside light on and looked at his wristwatch on the bedside table. Ten to four — just time enough to go back to sleep and get some proper rest before going to work, he thought. Two and half hours, in fact.

  In other words, despite the screaming, the dream disturbed him less on its first visit than you might imagine it should have done. Three hours later, once he’d used the toilet, washed his face and cleaned his teeth, he was able to tell himself that the memory of how dreadful he’d felt in the middle of the night was nothing that a strong cup of tea and the first cigarette of the day couldn’t put right. It was probably just something he’d eaten — that was it. On the way into work on the train, he read his morning paper a little more thoroughly than usual, and by dinnertime Mr F really had forgotten all about it.

  This shouldn’t really surprise you. As you probably know from your own experience, the ease with which the daylight mind explains away or erases its own nocturnal wanderings is extraordinary, but commonplace.

  The second time the dream came, two days later, perhaps because his sleeping mind recognised the sequence of events as soon as he saw the key going into the door, and therefore knew what was coming next, it didn’t seem quite so terrifying. His memory of it in the morning was hazy enough to suggest that perhaps its images were already beginning to fade. Perhaps because of this, he even felt a little reassured, rather than threatened, by this first return -he told himself it was just his body flushing something out of his system. He was sure that was normal. Healthy, even. It was only after the third time, when he suddenly looked up at his face in the washbasin mirror in the middle of shaving himself the next morning and found that he could remember everything, could remember exactly and in vivid detail what he had seen reflected right behind him there in the mirror last night, that he actually started to wonder what was happening to him. The razor paused in mid-air; he

  He had to physically stop himself from turning round to check there was nothing there.

  As you have probably (and rightly) assumed from the way I have talked about him, Mr F was not the sort of man who was given to thinking about himself a great deal. Mostly, he just got on with things. And he would certainly never have thought of discussing such a personal matter as this with anybody else; even if he had had somebody else with whom he could have talked about his dream, nothing in his upbringing would have equipped him to begin a conversation which would inevitably have had to include a description of exactly what it was that he saw in it. In the absence of talking, all he could do was think; but reflect as he might, he could come up with no possible reason why this strange dream should have come to him three times in a row at this particular point in his life. Nothing about that life had recently changed, dramatically or otherwise; there had been no discoveries, no strange meetings. No one he knew had died. He did briefly wonder whether it was only coincidence that the dream had first appeared on New Year’s Day — but then he told himself that from where he was standing, there was nothing very different about the first days of 1967 as compared to the last days of 1966; the pavements were still icy, the mornings were still dark and the trains were still crowded. Everything was as it had been; routine.

  Even the dream itself, for all its outlandishness, had, when he thought about it, an aspect of routine. As it became familiar — on the Thursday night I’ve just described, for instance, the fourth time the dream had come, he was sure he felt the peculiarly alarming sensation, just before he opened the bathroom door, that he was going to make a fool of himself in there again - he began to feel exasperated by it. He felt — what was the word - mocked. What right had it to wake him up night after night? Didn’t it know he had to work the next day? He particularly resented the fact that the dream was beginning to take away from how comfortable he normally felt in his bathroom — first thing in the morning for instance, or when he turned the hot tap on full for his bath. Tomorrow, he decided, he’d try scrubbing the bath out with bleach before he went to bed. He was not used to being disturbed like this, and he didn’t like it. He was not used to finding himself mysterious.

  He had no idea what the dream “meant”, or why it was plaguing him. The only thing that he was sure of was that he wanted it to stop. Consciously or not, he had started to defend himself against it; the way he arranges himself when he first gets into the bed now, for instance, at the end of the second week of his strange new affliction — lying on his back with his feet together and his arms straight down by his sides — he never used to do that.

  Not since he was a child.

  On the Friday morning after the dream had come for the fourth time, after he had lifted the screaming kettle off the stove with a teacloth, poured the boiling water over the leaves, stirred the pot three times exactly, put the lid back on and stood it to brew on the kitchen worktop, Mr F decided to try and tackle this dream of his by asking it a simple, straightforward question. He often did this — put his thoughts into actual sentences. Walking to the corner shop on the way back home from the station, for instance, the sentence would be Now, do I need milk?; as he went into the kitchen, it would be Now, shall I put those chops on? One of his favourites, which he invariably used when he had finished clearing away at the end of his evening meal, and was wiping down the kitchen table, was There, that’s better. Sometimes he even found himself saying it out loud.

  He couldn’t exactly see at first how to put his thoughts about the dream into a single sentence — he had two ideas he was juggling with, and he couldn’t quite get them to fit together. One idea was that perhaps the body in the bathroom was best explained away as being like finding a stranger on your doorstep; some sort of unexpected guest. Perhaps a stranger who you’d met somehow on the street the day bef
ore and who you could see needed help. Someone who you’d offered shelter for the night, perhaps -and then when you came home from work the next day, he was still there, and helping himself to all the hot water… The problem with this idea was that Mr F couldn’t really see how any of this could ever actually happen. Who was this hypothetical stranger he was supposed to have met, for instance; what did he look like? What did his voice sound like — and at what point on the walk home from Peckham Rye station was Mr F supposed to have met him exactly? And what sort of a desperate story would a filthy stranger like that have had to tell in order to talk his way into Mr F’s private bathroom? It was ridiculous.

  The second idea, which was more of a memory really, seemed more vivid — more precise — but was just as hard to put into words as a single question. It was a memory of something he’d seen once on his dinner-break, down by the river. A great baulk of timber, a great sodden log as thick as a telegraph pole and six feet long, had suddenly broken the surface of the water trapped in the dock at Queenhithe. For a moment, because of its size and shape, he had thought it was something truly dreadful bobbing and rolling there in the oily water, something rotten and stinking that the rivermen would have to come and drag out with their boathooks. Even when he had realised it was just a piece of wood, it still seemed terrible; dangerous, somehow, as if it had lurched up out of the stinking Thames looking for something to smash into. Why had it stayed hidden for so long? What had dislodged it from its filthy bed? Where had it come from?

  Mr F was pouring his tea at this point. As he looked down at the steady stream of undrinkable black liquid (it was bound to be stewed by now, and practically cold) he realised that he’d just found the exactly right sentence for his question. He stopped pouring just as the tea threatened to overflow the rim of the tea-cup; he’d got it. He’d found his sentence.

  Where have you come from?

  Yes; that was it.

  Putting down the teapot, and looking up at his kitchen clock to check his watch, Mr F was horrified to discover that he must have been standing there staring into space and thinking about filthy strangers for a good ten minutes now, and that if he didn’t get a move on, he might well be late for work. Leaving the breakfast tea-things unwashed on the draining-board (something he never did), he collected his rolling papers and tobacco, quickly buttoned a scarf under his overcoat, slipped on his gloves (it was a raw morning, barely getting light; he’d need them) and walked briskly to the station, striding out (but still taking due care with that ice) and repeating his question over and over in his head all the time to make sure he didn’t forget it. Once he’d got his ticket and was on the train, the rhythm of the repeated sentence began to soothe him; he wasn’t going to be late at all. And now that he’d found the right question, he was sure that finding the right answer was only a matter of time.

  Where have you come from?

  The words started to jiggle comfortably against the rhythm of the train, and he checked his watch again; everything was fine.

  Where have you come from

  Where have you come from

  The January of 1967 was a cruelly cold one, and the warmth of the crowded carriage was welcome. Queen’s Road and Bermondsey stations slid past behind the misted windows. He decided he’d have plenty of time for a proper hot cup of tea when he got to London Bridge.

  Where have you come from

  Where have you been…

  As his body relaxed in the warmth, the sound of the question began to fade to the back of his mind, and as he sat there, he congratulated himself on the fact that nothing about him made him look any different to anyone else on the train. In particular, nothing of the previous night’s adventures showed on his face. Not even the people sitting directly opposite him could possibly have known that this was a man who had woken up screaming just three and a half hours ago. You see, people say that what happens to you in bed at night shows in your face, that people can always tell: but it doesn’t, and they can’t.

  four

  Mr F may well be busy asking himself questions about this bizarre night-time visitor of his, but I’m sure he’s not the only one; I’m sure that by now you also have a few questions you’d like to ask about our Mr F. Why does this man have such a strange, abbreviated name, for instance? Where is he actually going, when he sets out on this circuitous journey of his each morning? What sort of a job does he have that he always gets home early on Fridays — but only in the winter -and why this curious business of scrubbing and anointing his hands for so long each night?

  The answers are all connected. Let me start with the scrubbing of the hands. There is nothing untoward about this. As it happens, Mr F is a fastidious man — for instance, he always leaves the sash window in the bathroom open after he has used the toilet in the morning, despite the fact that the window is easily big enough for someone to climb in through, and the cast-iron fire escape is right outside. No; the reason why he washes his hands so thoroughly when he gets home in the evenings is simple. At the end of the working day, and before he starts to prepare his evening meal, he wants to get rid of the faint but distinctive smell that clings to them. It isn’t a particularly unpleasant smell, but it is unusual; dusty, pervasive, oddly animal — hard to place until you realise what it is.

  The destination of Mr F’s morning journey should provide the necessary clue. The last of the network of narrow lanes on the north bank of the Thames into which we have watched him disappear rejoices in the slightly sinister name of Skin Lane; it is so-called because, together with the other five streets leading off Garlick Hill — Great St Thomas Apostle, Upper Thames Street, College Hill, Trinity Lane and Miniver Court — Skin Lane is the heart of the London fur trade. Mr F’s business is the slicing and stitching of skin; he is a furrier.

  According to the British Fur Trade Directory for that year, there were still over three hundred businesses handling fur -mostly commissioners and importers, but also some dressers, furriers and finishers — on these seven adjacent streets in 1967. Together, they made up an entire and self-contained world; because every single step of the business was still represented — from the first unpacking of the stinking pelts to the final immaculate hand-stitching of the silk linings — a skin could complete its complex journey from broker to dresser to dyer to furrier to finisher — from beast to beauty — without ever leaving the confines of the parish. Commissioners worked next door to pattern-cutters, importers were crowded onto the same staircases as workshops. The neighbourhood had its own distinctive smell (Mr F’s stained hands were only one pair amongst hundreds) and even its own arcane vocabulary; urgent telephone conversations were punctuated by trade names and terms that no customer would ever have recognised, and in the workshops themselves you would have overheard strange talk of things being dropped, drummed, and pointed; of something (a skin; a person — a cheque?) being fleshed, and faced, and stayed. The streets themselves had their own peculiar and local names: Garlick Hill, to its inhabitants, was always just The Hill, while Skin Lane, to Mr F and his colleagues, was only ever The Lane.

  This world was, in effect, a secret one; as is often the way, few outsiders had any idea of the outlandish transactions and transformations that made up its daily business, despite the fact that the Lane, for instance, was (and is) only three minutes away from the busy and familiar tube-map destinations of Cannon Street and Mansion House. This shouldn’t really surprise you, though — in London, it’s all a question of whether you turn right, or left, isn’t it? You live in this city for years, and then one day you turn an unfamiliar corner to keep an appointment with a stranger -and suddenly you sense that behind the doorways and blacked-out shop-fronts of the particular street on which you’ve found yourself are the workings of a business that you know nothing about; one, indeed, that you may not even have known existed. And they are never fixed, these secret back-street or High Street worlds — the infamous “Hidden Worlds of London” which tourist guidebooks like to dismiss on behalf of their readers in one sh
ort, picturesque paragraph (the worlds that the guidebook writers have heard of, that is; believe me, there are others); they appear, flourish, and then mysteriously remove, only to reappear elsewhere. The Hill is a case in point; the most remarkable thing about the streets that Mr F was heading for each morning is not that they once held such a unique concentration of one trade, but that having once been synonymous with it, they have now been so completely abandoned. Not a single one of those three hundred businesses now remains, and the first word of the old black-and-white cast iron street-sign for Skin Lane affixed to the corner of College Hill is perhaps the only physical reminder of the commodity these streets once dealt in.

  Even though the businesses have gone, I still think you will (especially if you arrive from the west down the wide modern canyon of Cannon Street) get a strong sense of stepping down into an older, darker — a separate - part of the world, should you choose to interrupt your journey to wherever it was that you were meant to be going, and ask the driver to turn right down Garlick Hill. This is one of the rare parts of the City that the Blitz left almost untouched, and you’ll find that most of the lanes here are too narrow for your taxi. Perhaps it is the cobbles that you’ll suddenly find under your feet that make these streets feel different; perhaps the memory of the strange life that once teemed in them still lingers.

  The Hill is a steep, dark street, hemmed in by nineteenth-century office-buildings and warehouses, and it seems to lead nowhere. At the bottom of the hill, the tower of Wren’s church of St James Garlickhythe closes off the view to Upper Thames Street, and here, at the bottom of hill, on the left, is where you’ll find Skin Lane. It too is dark; now as then, the south side of the Lane is dominated by the great bare wall of the church, and the bottom two storeys of the business premises which still make up its north side are kept in almost permanent shadow. The first of these, on the corner, is the building where Mr F worked — at least, the address is the same, if not the actual building. The block which now occupies the site dates from a couple of years after the events of this story, but it is the same size and shape — indeed, the outer walls at least are more or less a reconstruction of the building of a hundred years earlier which Mr F would have known. To judge from a photograph of the earlier building taken on the Lane in 1962, showing the nineteen staff of the firm which he worked for assembled outside their workplace, he would still recognise the front door. Just as it was then, it is still painted black, and still set back from the Lane at the top of a steep flight of eight stone steps. The bottom four of these seem to be of a much older and darker stone; I assume they must be survivors from the original building. The people in the photograph are assembled in two distinct groups — the men at the top, all in their white cutters’ coats (most of their faces are in shadow; I have no idea which of them might be Mr F himself), and the women on the bottom steps in their pinnies. The black-painted front door appears to be unnumbered, and there is no brass name plate to announce either the name or nature of the business. This doesn’t entirely surprise me; on these streets, everyone must have known more or less everyone else’s business. Looking at that door, at the top of its flight of dark steps, I get the distinct impression that, as with certain other highly specialised businesses that the City still considers are best conducted well out of sight, it was expected that anyone who needed to seek out the services on offer on the Lane would already be in the trade; in the know. If they were a customer, they would certainly have been given directions — if not a personal recommendation.