Skin Lane

by Neil Bartlett

  Where else in this man’s life should we look for explanations of this impression that it was always lived more or less to one side of everybody else’s? His experiences in the war? People often think that men of Mr F’s particular age must be hiding some invisible wound, some secret damage that means they could never be quite the same man again after 1945 — but actually the clean and orderly life, the regular pay and food, and above all the anonymity of the army had all suited him; the foul things, the hours of panic and squalor, had if anything only made him more self-reliant. Those years left him with two harsh lines drawn under his eyes, which for some reason never faded, but apart from that he came back to his life determined to resume it exactly where he’d left off; he put his self-contained habits back on with his brown worsted suit.

  No; scrutinise him as they occasionally may, as he approaches his forty-seventh birthday there is nothing obvious to explain to his colleagues (or to you) why this man should seem so separate. Nothing in his history marked him out as different from any other single man of his age; his clothes and manners were no more or less old-fashioned than those of most of his generation. If you had been walking two paces behind him in the morning rush hour you would have noticed nothing unusual — no twist in the spine or built-up shoe, no tell-tale disfigurement or limp. If you’d found yourself sitting opposite him on the 5.49 train home to Peckham Rye, you would have had no reason to either stare or avert your eyes; there was no scar or bloody blotch of birthmark on his face that I’ve failed to mention. He was nearly six foot tall, had large hands, pale blue eyes, a short-back-and-sides and a brown worsted suit that had perhaps seen better days — but that was all. The pallor of the eyes was perhaps a bit unusual, and the skin on the hands unusually soft, but not by any stretch of the imagination could this man be said to have any of the physical peculiarities or deformities that are usually held to explain why some men are left well alone by their fellows; the reasons why, in stories like this one, men turn violent or strange — why they become, or are deemed to be, unlovable. But

  But there is something, of course.

  Something nobody can see, but which I can tell you about.

  There is something about Mr F that sets him apart from his fellow commuters on the 5.49 train, something which most of us — certainly now, and, I think, even then — would, if we were being honest, think of as a deformity. In all of the nineteen years since the first night when he sat there testing the springs of the mattress and smoking a thin celebratory roll-up (he knew how lucky he was; one-bedroomed flats for single men were in short supply in the hungry, still-shabby London of 1948) from the age of twenty-eight to the age of almost forty-seven, he has never invited anyone to join him in that single bed of his.

  How do some people miss it, sex? How has this man missed it? Shall we say by accident? After all, a very few words can do it; a few tiny hints. If his older brothers had still been living at home by the time the little boy’s body had started to sprout its own mysterious patches of dark hair, he would probably have been taken into their confidence —when he was watching them get dressed on a Saturday night, he would have heard who that dirty wink in the mirror was being practised for, whose eye the clean white shirt was meant to catch; what the half-whispered words of that song could lead to after the last dance of the evening. But both of his brothers had already left home by the time his tenth birthday came around — and his father’s bedroom was forbidden territory for advice as much as for affection. When he was taken to the older of his two brothers’ wedding (a grim, hurried affair, with a white-faced bride and the two families barely speaking to each other) he was surely old enough to have been told why the marriage had been arranged so quickly — but there too, nothing was explained to the boy. By the time he was what we would now call a teenager, his father, never quite sure what a widower was meant to do with children anyway, had taken to spending every evening alone in the front room with the evening paper; this meant that although by the age of sixteen Mr F knew how to contribute a week’s wages to the household budget, how to scrub and bleach and to cook, no one had ever taught him how to feel. Indeed, the only real lesson his father had ever taught him was that feelings should never be spoken of; his dead mother, for instance, was never mentioned, and there were no pictures of her in the house. When the younger of his brothers was killed, it was Mr F who went to the door to get the telegram, and when he had given it to his father to read, the old man (men were old at fifty in those days) had done nothing but sit stony-faced in his usual armchair, never saying a word, waiting until night had fallen and the house was dark before walking slowly upstairs, closing his bedroom door behind him, and shouting out his lonely, foul-mouthed, brokenhearted grief to the empty bed on which his children had been conceived. That night, Mr F again found himself sitting on the stairs, with his head on one side, wondering what the noises meant. Wondering why the door had to be closed before they could be spoken.

  It is the words that do it, I think. The words that men use to each other. Those muffled howls of his father were not the first obscenities the boy had ever heard, not by any means; but they were the ones he never forgot. There were other phrases, too, that he heard later, in an army bunk, when the other men were smoking and talking about the women they’d left behind, about what they were going to do to them when they got home. And of course there were the very earliest ones, the words from way back, from so far back he’s forgotten them now, as we all do: Don’t look. Don’t be silly. Hands straight down by your sides now, like a good boy. Lights out. These are the words that none of us can quite remember being used on any particular occasion, but which we know — and knew, somehow, even then — all add up to a warning, a prohibition. Stone by stone, they place all the things we wish we could see and touch on the other side of a high, forbidding wall.

  And perhaps even more than the words, it is the silences. They aren’t necessarily sinister or malicious in intention; no one means them to maim or deny. When he was little, for instance, eight or perhaps nine, how Mr F used to stare all the time at his older brothers — O, how that little boy used to love being allowed to stay up and watch them getting dressed on a Saturday night! He’d stand in the bathroom doorway in his pyjamas, keeping quiet like he’d been told to, and stare, fascinated, while they took it in turns to strip down to their vests and shave. He loved everything about it; the unwrapping of the brand-new razor blade from its mysterious little paper envelope; the careful whipping up of the soap with the little badger-bristle brush; the silent concentration. The way the white suds were mysteriously flecked with black when the razor got wiped on the little squares of newspaper. The way they smiled at him and said You wait. You just wait, our kid. You‘ll find out… one day. Sometimes he thought they looked so splendid, when they were all done and dressed up, that he wanted to clap. They’d sweep him up, kiss him goodnight (cologne and soap on a smooth chin; the smooth dazzle of a white collar), call him our kid again and tuck him in and leave him alone in the dark, whistling and singing their way down the stairs and out of the front door. Then, on Sunday mornings, he’d try his very hardest to wake up while it was still almost dark, so that he could sit up in his bed in his pyjamas and stare at them while they lay side by side in the early morning half-light, sleeping off their big night out. He always wondered how they’d managed to creep back into his bedroom and get undressed without waking him up — they were princes, he decided, princes who’d been out dancing all night like in one of his stories, and now they’d come back again and cast off their magic robes and changed back into ordinary, exhausted mortals. He’d sit there for a whole hour, holding his breath lest they wake up and catch him, trying to read in their blurred faces and dishevelled hair the details of their nocturnal adventures. He loved the quiet, and the half-light made by the still-drawn curtains, and the sound of their breathing — even the faint stink of cigarette smoke from their clothes on the back of the chair was a mystery. He wondered if their slack, half-open mouths were about to tel
l him something.

  Yes; maybe it’s in the silences, the silences in which we imagine the answers to the questions that we never dared ask, that the damage is first done. Who knows.

  Of course, all around this man, because of the year in which this story takes place, the city he lives in is far from silent. In fact, it’s getting noisier by the week.

  Because it’s still early in January, the copies of the Evening Standard which he buys at London Bridge station on the way home still have all their usual “New Year” articles, articles headlined The Year Ahead Of Us, or So What Can We Expect In 1967? This year, they all seem to agree that great changes are imminent. They are cheerfully strident about overcrowded roads, and the preposterous cut of youthful suits and skirts and hair; they are littered with the phrase these days. Mr F is kept informed about young people who live in the shadowy half-light of an illicit world, and he wonders what exactly it means when the article says that an estimated 800,000 young women are now believed to be regularly taking the contraceptive pill. He looks at the adverts for all the new films, but rarely recognises any of the faces.

  When people look back — people like us, I mean — they’re going to point to this hubbub and chatter and to all the music and the films and they’re going to agree that everyone in London must have known that this was one of those years when nothing was ever going to be the same again. But Mr F, carrying his copy of the Standard home on the 5.49 train, doesn’t know that; he doesn’t know that any more than he knows it is going to be an exceptionally hot summer this year. He reads his newspaper every day, as most people do, but, like most people, he thinks the things described there are happening in somebody else’s world, not his; that they are happening to other people, but not to him. Sometimes he will look at the page which lists the television programmes for that evening and wonder if perhaps he should buy himself a set and try it; but in the end he always decides that he’s happy with just the radio. He notices, amidst the regular items on strikes, deaths, robberies and actresses, the news that a ranch mink coat has been reduced in the Harrods Sale to £895. He reads the whole of a half page advertisement with an odd little photograph of a grinning couple in swimsuits pretending to be on a beach, informing him that this summer he can choose between spending Two weeks in Sorrento for forty-one guineas, or One in Switzerland for only twenty-nine and a half! — but he never thinks for a moment that he might ever be the sort of man to put his arm around someone’s naked shoulder like that, or to smile like that, or indeed that he might ever go to Italy. He reads his horoscope (he’s an Aries), which on Thursday the thirteenth of January 1967 tells him that Though you may have good cause for feeling mad about something or someone, it would be best to disguise your feelings for the time being. You will only make matters worse if you speak out. He looks forward to getting home.

  But it would be a mistake for you to think of Mr F as unhappy. If anyone had ever asked him if he felt old-fashioned or lonely or hidden away, he would have never have dreamt of answering yes. Far from it. He believed in keeping himself active. Every weekend, for instance, he would always be sure to make at least one trip out. He had tried the cinema — had even gone as far as the Odeon Leicester Square one evening, to see a new film which had been in all the papers and which he’d thought from the sound of it that he might, unusually, like. He’d chosen Leicester Square because he could remember being taken there once as a child, but the whole experience was very different to how he’d remembered it, and he’d found the whole thing too noisy, too crowded and not at all — well, not at all improving. His preferred treats were the galleries and museums; they were just more him, really. The quiet, and the fact that it was considered perfectly normal to stand and stare at things you didn’t really understand, and to be alone while you tried to work them out, all suited him. If he felt like a bus journey, the National Gallery was always a reliable favourite; if he wanted a walk, then the Dulwich College pictures were only a determined uphill half-hour away. It wasn’t that he loved pictures, especially; if he was walking, he was just as likely to choose the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill as his Sunday afternoon destination. It was the atmosphere, really; the quiet. There was something about all those neatly labelled cabinets of curiosities, the long, gloomy galleries of birds and beasts, each one perched or prowling under a thin coating of dust, that both fascinated and calmed him. He often stayed until almost closing time, waiting until the galleries got dark and empty and mysterious. Perhaps it was the odd life in all those pairs of staring, artificial eyes that he liked. Perhaps it was the way each specimen was alone in its cage of glass.

  The peacock, forever displaying to an absent mate: the shambling, stupid rhino. The black panther, forever screaming on its dusty forest branch.

  All of them, so quiet.

  five

  Two whole weeks of dark January nights later, Mr F still had no answer to his question — this, despite the fact that his dream was now returning more or less every other night. Every time it came, he still found himself starting awake with his throat jerked back in a scream; but as the second week turned into the third, and then into the fourth, his attitude towards his uninvited guest began — inevitably, perhaps — to change.

  As he got into bed each night, he would still find himself straightening his limbs under the sheets in preparation — but now it was not so much to defend himself against what he knew or feared was coming as to brace himself for it. The moment when he finally let himself close his eyes became not unlike that strange moment when the car reaches the top of the roller-coaster, and pauses; the moment when you find your legs involuntarily stiffening and your hands holding on tight because your body, despite itself, knows the thrill that is coming. Of course, in the moment of waking, there was no pleasure for Mr F, only fear — the truly horrible fear that comes with a thumping heart and twisted sheets — but when the dream began, as the pictures which heralded his nocturnal visitor’s arrival began to repeat themselves in predictable, stately succession — the blood, the key, the door; the mirror — there was no getting round it: the fear was definitely starting to be mixed with anticipation.

  I suppose you could say that Mr F was simply getting used to living with his dreams. Men do, of course. No matter what you see them actually doing by daylight, it is nothing compared to the ferocity and oddity of what they imagine when their eyes are closed.

  Another thing that began to change was that instead of trying to shake the details of his dream out of his mind — to not dwell on it, for instance, on the train into work — he now found himself making much more deliberate efforts to recall them. Especially in the few minutes just after he had woken up. Before, he had always turned the bedroom light on straightaway, to reassure himself that he was still lying safely in his bed, with his bedroom walls all reassuringly close, and his watch still lying just where he’d left it on the bedside table; but now, he doesn’t do that. He sits there, panting, in the dark, eyes screwed shut, trying to replay what he has just seen stretched across the blank, black screen of his eyelids.

  Of course, Mr F didn’t — I suppose I should be kind, and say couldn’t — Mr F couldn’t admit to himself the obvious reason for these changes. He told himself that he had to dwell on the details of his dream like this, because that was the only way he was ever going to find an answer to his question: the only way he was ever going to work out where this naked man had come from, and who he was. How else was he ever going to make him go away?

  There was a problem with this plan, however. To know who someone is, obviously, you have to be able to see his face.

  And Mr F can’t.

  No matter how many times the dream comes, and no matter how many times he screws his eyes back shut and replays it in his mind, he can’t ever seem to see the young man’s face.

  Perhaps it’s because he turns round too quickly, he tells himself. Perhaps he ought to try and look in the bathroom mirror longer. Or perhaps it’s just that he screams too soon — he really should try a
nd hold out longer. After all, it’s not as if he doesn’t know what’s coming. But what with his heart racing like that, and that terrible, animal need to get out of the room, that awful useless scrabbling behind his back for the door handle (the way his fingernails slide over the smooth surface of the paint makes his stomach lurch) — it’s no use; he just can’t help himself. And then, by the time he’s got his breath back, it’s no good. It’s too late. The young man’s face just isn’t there. It’s gone. Even with the light kept off and his eyes screwed shut to preserve the darkness, Mr F just can’t see it.

  That is why, late on the last Sunday of the month, instead of putting the radio on after he has finished his supper, he makes himself a cup of tea, collects his Golden Virginia and his rolling papers, goes into his living-room, turns on his gas fire and the living-room lamp, sits down in his armchair and prepares himself to really concentrate. Even though he knows this is going to take quite some time, he leaves the lights on in the kitchen, and in the hall — which is odd, because he is normally very careful about not leaving any lights on in an unoccupied room. I don’t think he is aware of doing this; perhaps it reassures him. He lays out his tobacco and his papers next to the cup and saucer on the arm of his chair and then, starting at the beginning, he tries to make the whole dream come back as clearly and slowly and completely as he can.

  He tells himself that he knows how to do this; it’s just like staring at something in a gallery or the museum. And since they’re all closed, it being a Sunday evening, he’ll just have to do his staring here at home. And since he’s at home, he’ll be able to have a smoke while he does it — three cigarettes, he’s going to allow himself. He doesn’t want to get morbid about it. Doesn’t want to find himself staying up all night with it, for instance; that wouldn’t be right. Tomorrow is Monday, after all.