Skin Lane

by Neil Bartlett

  The first bits come back easily; the bloody light from the landing window as he comes up the stairs; the key sliding into the lock of the door; his frown in the wardrobe mirror. It’s only when he gets to the bathroom door that he has to start to really concentrate. He tries to slow everything down. Opening the door. Reaching in for the light-switch. Looking up and seeing the body reflected in the washbasin mirror —

  He pauses here, and has a drag on his cigarette. Then he closes his eyes.

  That’s better.

  The tiles are very white — too white. And the bulb’s too bright — it makes the flesh hanging there behind him look like there isn’t a single drop of blood in it. He can feel his stomach starting to clench in panic, but

  but he tries to turn round slowly — properly. Not spinning round and bruising his hip against the washbasin like he normally does. But it isn’t easy, staying calm. He tries telling himself that this is what it must be like in a mortuary, when they call you in to identify the body. The bright overhead light. The white tiles. The being allowed to take your time and stare.

  That’s right. Being allowed to stare.

  (It’s very cold, for some reason. Must be that bathroom window being left open. Good job he’s got the gas on.)

  He wonders if they really do leave you alone in the room with the body like this — surely, there must be an assistant or somebody, in case you get upset. That’s it, he decides; there’s bound to be somebody else in there with you. Somebody in a white coat. Somebody whose job it is to stand right close beside you, saying very gently It’s alright, sir, you can go closer than that if you want to.

  He does — but then he decides that before he gets to the face, he ought to make a conscious effort to search the body all over for any clues as to how it got there. He tells himself not to be embarrassed — after all, looking at skin, in a way it’s what he does for a living. If he doesn’t know what he’s doing after thirty-three years, what’s the point.

  He starts at the top, with the feet.

  What with the weight of the body, there is some slight bruising where the ropes are cutting into the skin just below the ankles. The feet are half-crossed — and very pale. White, really; no blood in them, I suppose —

  Wait a minute. He’s seen them before, those feet…

  Mr F gets up out of his chair, and goes and stares out of his living-room window, pulling the curtain aside. Of course, it’s dark outside, and there’s nothing to see but blackness. He lets the curtain fall back. Aren’t Jesus’s feet always crossed like that — though obviously not pointed up at the ceiling like these are. That’s it. (He sits back down again.) But where? Where has he seen them like that before? He isn’t a Catholic, and they didn’t have anything like that in their church at home that he can remember (not that they went very often) but he is sure he can remember seeing a pair of white feet like that. Yes; being a little boy, and staring up at a pair of white feet — at how very big they were, bigger even than his brothers’. It must have been outside that big red-brick church on the High Street he was always hurried past on the way to school. That’s it — yes. He can see them now. Pinned up on the end wall. White; white-gloss-painted carved wood, they were. And big, bigger than life-size, with a big metal nail through them. Bright splashes of red paint for the blood. Big, and shiny, and dead — and then when you looked up there was the whole body looming up over you, with that awful downward-sagging face with its closed eyes. Right out there on the street for you to stare at — except that you weren’t supposed to — he remembers that, too. He remembers being dragged past in a hurry even if he wasn’t late for school. He remembers the man’s hand, tight around his, dragging him away.

  He sits back down (without realising it, he has stood up and started pacing up and down in front of the gas fire) and rolls himself another cigarette — and then forgets to light it.

  This skin he’s staring at now is white, too — but it doesn’t have that hard, painted look at all. It’s soft. It soaks up the light. And it’s unbroken — there are none of the carefully painted holes that Jesus has. Mr F checks every inch of it, just as he would check every one of a bundle of skins at work. There are no wounds, splits, snare-cuts or shot-holes anywhere. Starting at the feet again, he moves his eyes slowly down over the whole body.

  He notices that the fine black hairs on the crests of the shins are so sparse that he could, if he wanted to, count them. Normally he would touch them, part the hairs with his thumb to check the quality — but he’s sure that’s not allowed. He can’t imagine the voice in his ear ever telling him he’s allowed to do that; Go on, sir, it’s quite alright. Do touch him if you want to. He notices how the insides of the two upside-down thighs — just — touch, and then, lower down, are pressed together. When he looks at the soft folds in the skin of the genitals (they look so peculiar, hanging upside-down like that) he thinks that the hair around them is like… like Persian lamb, he decides. The individual hairs glitter slightly in the light. Like black wires.

  He’s never stared at anyone like this; not even at himself in the bath. He’s surprised he’s being so calm about it. He lights his cigarette, and carries on.

  He notes the three creases across the stomach where the body is slumped and twisted over the toilet seat; the way the muscles are stretched across the upper ribs by the dead weight of the arms. The exposed fan of flattened hairs in each open armpit. The long muscle of the inner arm; the veins on the inside of each forearm, and then the wrists, and then, finally, the hands. The soft palms; the backs of the upward-curving fingers, resting on the cold white enamel (why do they unnerve him so, the hands? Is it their helplessness? The way they seem more dead than any other part?). Then, making sure he does it slowly — properly, because this is the point of the whole exercise — he runs his eyes back up the arms. Up the forearms: across the faint veined shadow on the inside of the elbow. Up across the open armpit: up the cording of the tipped-back neck-muscles to the line of the jaw, and then —

  He can’t see it.

  He can’t see the man’s face. It doesn’t matter how long he sits here in his armchair with the third cigarette burning unheeded between his fingers — he can’t see it. Which is ridiculous. He can’t even say for sure what colour his eyes are. Can’t even remember if they are open or closed. Except he knows when he thinks about it that of course they must be closed. They must be. He tells himself that somehow next time he should get down on his knees at the side of the bath and stare at it, really study it, make a deliberate effort to memorise it, but for now — what’s the sentence? — oh yes; I just can’t put a face to him. He’s heard Mrs Kesselman use that phrase to one of her girls when discussing some actor or other in a film they’d both seen; I just can’t… I just can’t seem to… (He reaches down and turns out the gas — it’s not helping him, that hissing sound.) He has one last go. He screws his eyes shut — so tight, that the blood in his eyelids sends strange patterns of smoke and shifting clouds across the screen.

  There is one thing, actually. Yes; he may not be able to see his face, but he can see his hair. It’s dark; yes, dark, definitely, and long enough to flop over his forehead and spread out on the enamel. Which is too long, Mr F thinks. Too long for a man. He can’t understand these young men’s haircuts, the way they let it grow down almost over their collars; he wouldn’t feel comfortable with that at all — he has to change his shirt every day as it is. Still, that’s the fashion these days, so they tell him; long — and dark. Definitely dark. He had thought at first it was black, but now that he looks closely, he can tell that it isn’t — he will say that for his bathroom, you get a good working light from that naked bulb, especially with all that white tiling round the bath. It’s almost as good as his workbench at Number Four. After closer inspection, he thinks the colour of the young man’s hair is much more like this so-called “black” fox which Scheiner’s is using a lot of for collars and cuffs at the moment, which isn’t a true black at all when you get it in the light, but s
till has a dark mahogany under-fur where the dye hasn’t taken. Or sable, of course. Yes, Mr F decides, that’s it; sable. Wild dark Russian sable, the kind you hardly ever see these days. Male skins, of course. With that beautiful shine to it, which not even the best of the dyers can ever convincingly fake. That beautiful lustre. Something special, that is. And the way it feels, under your hand…

  He opens his eyes, blinks, takes a sip of his cold tea and starts to roll a fourth cigarette. Sod it. Never mind the colour of his hair, what about the face, he tells himself. That’s what they’ll want to know about. You can’t just say “The man who did this to me had curly black hair, officer. Well not black exactly, but certainly very dark.” They’ll need a full description. Otherwise how are they ever going to identify him for you?

  If it had been real, of course, the body — if it had been a real, actual corpse in his bathroom — then his life would probably have been a lot easier, he knew that. There’d have been the unpleasantness of actually discovering it to get over of course, but once he’d done that, and scrubbed out the bathroom, and they’d taken the body away or whatever they do, then a couple of mornings later he’d be in the newsagents on the way to the station — or buying his Evening Standard from the kiosk at London Bridge on the way home — and there the young man’s face would be all over the front pages. They’d use one of those artist’s reconstruction drawings, probably, to make the appeal — and he wouldn’t be surprised if it was in all the papers, not just the Standard — shelves of them, all stacked up one on top of the other, whole rows of front pages, and all with the same caption: Do You Know This Man? And then somebody would come forward with the necessary information — some relative, probably — and then he’d finally have the answer to his question. He’d know.

  He wondered if the police would be able to tell him not just where the young man had come from, but how he’d got in there — how he’d ended up in his bathroom. Up the fire escape and in through the window, probably — and definitely at night. It was a wonder they’d managed to creep in and do all that without waking him up — because there must have been more than one of them, mustn’t there. More than one person involved. Yes; it would have taken more than one person to hoist the body up and tie it to the brackets with the ropes like that. And they must have had a reason, mustn’t they, though heaven knows what it could possibly have been. I mean they could have just put him face down on the bed, but no, hanging him up like that, like a beast or a piece of meat, they must have been making a point — they must have been trying to tell someone something, mustn’t they. Mustn’t they, officer?

  As the living-room grew colder, Mr F elaborated this story of himself talking to a policeman. He tried to work it all out, all the details — but he wasn’t very good at it, it must be said. He didn’t have a television, remember, and rarely went to the cinema, so his ideas about how to express bewilderment or to lie convincingly were necessarily sketchy. He did his best, however. He imagined for some reason that this interview with the police would take place in the downstairs office at Scheiner’s, not at his flat, and that they’d call him down from upstairs in the middle of the morning, so that he’d be standing there explaining himself still wearing his white coat, with his knife in his hand — and his hands all unwashed. That last detail bothered him — it seemed impolite to be bringing his smell into the room like that. He decided (he even went to the lengths of imagining himself pausing on the stairs outside the office and working all of this out) that he’d better tell them he’d been working late that night, and so hadn’t left Skin Lane until gone seven. Allowing time for the walk and the train, it would have been nearly eight o’clock before he’d slid the key into the lock of his front door — he thought he’d leave out the detail of the light from the bloody window staining his sleeve, because he didn’t see how that was relevant — which would mean that he’d discovered the body shortly after eight o’clock, officer. Then (he’d explain, carefully) he’d had to go into his living-room and roll himself a cigarette, just to calm his nerves — and then go into the kitchen and make himself a cup of tea with three sugars in it. To get over the shock, officer. In fact it must have been nearly a quarter to nine before he’d been able to summon up the nerve to walk back down the hallway past that bathroom door and go downstairs and ask in Number Two could he please use the phone as it was an emergency.

  That was it; he’d tell them how he’d had to have a little cough just before he spoke, just gently, seeing as how his throat was still slightly bruised from the screaming — just to open it up a little, so that he could speak clearly and in a relatively normal manner to that kind officer who’d answered the telephone at the station, but —

  But then his story betrayed him. His voice faltered, and he knew

  Mr F knew, as he sat there in the chill of his now-cold living-room, that he was only making up all of these details about having worked late and the cigarette and the cup of tea with three sugars in it so that he would never have to tell anybody — certainly not some young police officer who he’d never even met before — the real reason why it took him so long to go downstairs and make that fictitious telephone call. Which was that the sooner he made it, the sooner they would come and take the body away. He was afraid that when they did that — and he had to stand there in his front doorway and watch them carrying it down round the bend of the stairs, with the red light from the window catching the sheet or blanket draped over it — that the expression on his face would reveal his secret.

  Which is that he wants it to stay.

  Which is that far from wanting to be rid of it, he thinks the sight of this young man slumped in his bath, the dark target of his pubic hair set against the white marble of his unmarked flesh, is probably the most

  Well (Mr F gets up and starts pacing the room again), he knows that he doesn’t want anyone to come and take him away, that’s all.

  He has no idea at all what to do with this feeling.

  six

  Each year, as January turned into February, visitors to Skin Lane who weren’t in the trade themselves would often find themselves stopped in their tracks by one of the strangest sights that London’s backstreets had to offer. Great swaying, disembodied cloaks of fur, slung over porters’ shoulders, appeared to stagger from doorway to doorway of their own accord; the buried porter’s breath, rising in the winter air, completed the illusion that some hitherto-unrecorded species of beast was blundering, hunch-backed and wounded, through the narrow city streets.

  The annual appearance of these strange hybrid creatures is simply explained. These were the weeks when the previous year’s Russian and North American winter skins had to change hands as quickly as possible, so that the manufacturers could meet the retail orders of the new season. At Number Four, as on the rest of the Lane, the whole pace of the building would pick up. The ceiling of the cutting-room would be festooned with bundles of freshly bought-in pelts, while all along the length of the south-facing window the cutters in their white coats would be bent over their benches like hard-pressed, conscientious doctors. Downstairs in the machine-room, the women’s voices rose in volume as the needles raced to meet the weekly deadlines; the radio was kept turned up so loud, sometimes you could hear the lyrics of the songs they chose to shout along to even right out in the street.

  For Mr F, who was in charge upstairs, and Mrs Kesselman, who ran the machine-room, the new month had its own particular pressures. They usually met on the stairs first thing in the morning — they both made a point of always being at work in good time to monitor the prompt arrival of the rest of the workforce. One bitter February morning, towards the end of the second week, having bid him her usual good morning, she replied to his daily enquiry as to her health, And how are we, Mrs Kesselman, in a more than usually aggrieved tone.

  “Well, nothing gets easier, Mr Freeman.”

  Although he would just as soon have gone upstairs and made sure everything was ready, because he knew it was going to be a particularly bu
sy day, Mr F was always polite.

  “And why is that, Mrs Kesselman?”

  As she briskly unbuttoned her coat, she explained that in order to meet the extra workload, Mr Scheiner had asked her to take on two new girls who were, as she put it, not from the trade.

  “So now I have to say everything twice — and no offence, Mr Freeman, but these girls they are slow — slow. Not willing, I might say. Still, since the war, young people — yiddisher, not yiddisher — do they want the job or not, I sometimes wonder.”

  She hung her coat up, beating at the dyed marten collar with her hand to get the last of the morning damp off it.

  “And today of course we have Mr Scheiner’s nephew starting his six months if you don’t mind.”

  Mr F hadn’t heard about this, and said so, and so Mrs Kesselman explained. Apparently the boss’s sixteen-year-old nephew was being given a try-out with the family firm, starting as a sweeper downstairs. She reminded him that that was where he had started.

  “Who knows, Mr Freeman, if he’s keen this boy, maybe one day he’ll be in your shoes.”

  Mr F thought, but didn’t say, Well, let’s give him thirty-three years, shall we, and then we’ll see; he headed upstairs with just the reply

  “I think there’s a few more years still to go before I need replacing, Mrs Kesselman.”