He didn’t want to stop looking at it, you see. Not just yet.
The man had been right, you see; it was marvellous. The way the flesh was done. The finger going into the wound, all the way in like that, gentle but firm. Inside.
Mr F stayed looking at this picture for several minutes. He even tried taking hold of his own right hand by the wrist, and stretching out his index finger just like the man in the painting was doing, and wondered how it would feel to do that; wondered if, when you touched somebody like that, he would feel cold or warm. Thinking about the young man in his dream, he wondered if he would still be warm. Inside.
Even if he was, he thought, even if he was still warm inside, surely that white skin of his would be stone cold to the touch by now. Hidden away in the dark like that. Lying stretched out on the cold enamel like that, all day long and half the night, waiting for Mr F to come and turn on the light and find him.
This experience in the National Gallery had an odd effect on Mr F. It was the picture that did it, probably — the way that it seemed to be waiting for him there in that dark final room, as if it knew he was coming. As if it was expecting him. Or perhaps it was the way that that elderly stranger had stared at it so blatantly, as if he had a perfect right to. Whatever the reason, Mr F now began to keep a close but discrete eye on all the parts of men’s bodies that their clothes left visible on his way to and from work every day. To put it bluntly, he too began to stare.
We all do it; we pretend not to, of course, but we do.
In order to keep it in its proper place (he wouldn’t have wanted anyone to think he was doing anything untoward), Mr F told himself there was a perfectly good reason for this new habit of his. If he could only find some detail from his mysterious dream on an actual body — the right shape of hands, for instance, or the right colour hair — then that might give him just the clue he needed as to the features, the face — to the person, if you like. He knew of course that he was never going to find an exact match; that he was never going to suddenly discover that the missing face in his dream belonged to some complete stranger who he’d look up and see walking towards him across the forecourt of London Bridge Station — that would be ridiculous; but nonetheless, he felt compelled to search. I suppose he must have thought that if he could only find something to jog his memory, then perhaps the part of his dream that was so mysteriously missing would somehow come back to him.
He was still after an answer to that question of his, would be another way of putting it.
It was a particular kind of colouring that most often caught his eye. A patch of especially white skin exposed to the morning cold above the black velvet collar of a Crombie overcoat, just where the dark hair was razored high on the nape of the neck; a bare right wrist, just flecked with one or two dark hairs, famed between a pristine white shirt-cuff and the handle of a black leather briefcase — Probably left his gloves on the train, thought Mr F, when he saw that; his fingers must be getting cold in this raw air. To make his search more thorough, he took to using the more crowded eastern pavement to cross London Bridge in the morning, and even tried to walk where the stream of dark-suited and over-coated men was at its thickest. He still had to take care not to bump into anyone, of course, which meant that he couldn’t spend his entire time scanning the people around him — he had to watch his step, you might say — but nonetheless his searching was at least partially rewarded. Between his visit to the gallery and the end of March, he reckoned there were at least seventeen occasions when he caught a glimpse of something which reminded him of his dream.
Out of these, the closest he came to finding what he was looking for was probably on a Friday night towards the end of the month. The cutting-room having closed early for the Sabbath, it wasn’t yet rush hour proper when he got to London Bridge Station, and he had no difficulty getting a seat in his preferred second carriage. Once he’d settled, he took a quick glance round at his neighbours, tucked his Evening Standard down by the side of him on his seat, and then started to have a good proper stare at the hands of all the men sitting near him.
He always started with the hands. He’d noticed in the course of his searching that people — men, especially — don’t guard their hands like they do their faces, and especially not when they fall asleep. I’m sure you’ve seen it happen yourself; when a man starts to fall asleep on a train (and Mr F had recently started to notice just how often this does happen, even on a relatively short journey like that from London Bridge to Peckham Rye), first his head lolls forward, but then, as he starts to fight it, jerks back up again as he frowns and tries to pull his features together as if to prove to whoever might be watching him that nothing at all untoward is happening — but all the time, he leaves his hands lying unsupervised in his lap. On this occasion, Mr F found himself sitting directly opposite a young workman who’d already lost the battle; he must have closed his eyes almost as soon as he’d got on the train. As Tower Bridge slid unnoticed past the windows, the young man’s neck relaxed vertebra by vertebra, and his chin sagged right down onto his chest. He began to snore, very quietly — and all this time, his hands lay undefended in his lap. Quite open.
Palm up, with the right hand held gently over the left.
Cupped by it.
Mr F looked away, disconcerted — when he saw that, for just a moment he thought he could feel the hairs going up on the back of his neck. But then he had to look back; he had to check. It was the fingers, you see. The fingers of this sleeping workman were curving softly up and away from the palm of his right hand in exactly the same way as the fingers Mr F saw spread on the white enamel of his bathroom every other night did. Exactly.
Since the man was so deeply asleep — and since everyone on a homeward-bound Friday afternoon train is always too tired to take much notice of their fellow passengers anyway — Mr F knew he was quite free to stare. The copy of the Standard remained folded and unread down his side. He let his eyes travel from the palm of the young man’s right hand up across the veins on the inside of his wrist, to the spot where they were cut off by the worn cuff of his paint-stained overalls. Since he knew so much about clothes, and how they can either disguise or fit the body — how the cut of a jacket across the shoulders can straighten a man’s back for instance, or the set of a collar lengthen his neck — Mr F found it quite easy to imagine how the young man’s arms must look under the dark blue cloth. His forearms; the crooked elbows; and then the long thin muscle of the upper arm. Then the shoulder. The set of the collarbone, and above that, just where the corded muscles of the neck met the line of his unshaven chin —
Suddenly the train lurched to a halt at Queen’s Road station, and the young man woke up with a confused start, looking wildly around to see if he’d missed his stop. Mr F immediately snatched his eyes away, because obviously he didn’t want to be caught staring, not at someone’s face — but even so, he couldn’t help but see what the young man looked like. And at once, he could see that he looked nothing like what the man in his dream should look like at all. Nothing like him. He was too
He was too what, exactly?
Mr F was bewildered. How could he be so sure, just from that one quick glimpse, that this young man’s face was the wrong one — so sure that he couldn’t be him? After all, it wasn’t as if he had ever seen the face he was trying to compare it to. It wasn’t that this workman was too old — in fact he was just the right age, he must have been nineteen at most; so what was it? Mr F risked another look. As the young man peered out through the steamed-up window to try and see which station they had stopped at, he could see that his eyes were wild with tiredness, and his blue-stubbled cheeks hollow and grey-skinned. It was Friday night, after all, and whatever it was he did for a living, his week had clearly worn him out. The tenderness with which his sleeping face had sunk down onto his chest was deceptive; in that odd moment which we all know, the moment after we’ve started awake but before we’ve remembered to compose our features, he looked completely brutalised. Exhaust
ed. His lips were drawn back over discoloured teeth, and there were broken veins under the plaster dust smearing his cheeks. That was it, thought Mr F; he looked finished.
It wasn’t that the man he was looking for necessarily had to be young, Mr F decided in that moment; it was just that he had to be somebody who was beginning, not ending. Somebody who wasn’t used up.
He had to be unmarked; that was it.
Just before he got off the train at Peckham Rye, Mr F looked again at the young man’s hands (he was safely asleep again by now), and he noticed for the first time that the fingernails were all split and blunt, the fingers calloused and paint-stained. Which wasn’t right. Not right at all.
He’d just have to keep looking.
I said we all do it; but there was of course a very particular quality to Mr F’s staring. A particular hunger, I should say. After all, he had a much more specific template he was trying to find a match for than the ones that most of us carry in our heads; his morning journey often came only three or four hours after he had been woken up by a vision of a body of almost hallucinatory clarity. Indeed, we might compare these seventeen “sightings” of Mr F’s to the seventeen visions of poor deluded Bernadette Soubiroux, the girl who claimed she saw the Blessed Virgin — that elusive creature whose face no one else but her could ever quite, somehow, see; or perhaps to the row of paintings with which the Beast, in one version of the story I’ve read, lines the Long Gallery of his fabulous palace, each one commissioned from a different painter and each one, supposedly, granting him a glimpse of the features of his long-dreamt-of bride. In both of these cases, however, the hapless dreamer was eventually rewarded with the absolute certainty that the face they’d once only imagined did finally look down on them and smile — the miracle happened — whereas all Mr F felt he’d ended up with, by the time he’d got to the end of the last week in March, was a collection of a few tiny dislocated pieces of skin. As the spring began to thaw, the crowds on London Bridge began to discard their gloves and scarves — but still all he got was a quick glimpse of a wrist or nape, or at best the suggestion of the line of a shoulder under a heavy overcoat. It wasn’t much to work on. Of course, he did his best — tried to stitch all these fragments together in his mind — but it was no good. Most of them had to be discarded as unsuitable; even with the workable ones, he knew he was never going to end up with a whole body, with something recognisable. He felt the same sort of frustration as when the machinists at work were set to stitching together all the scraps and off-cuts into what the trade called plates — panels of mismatched fur-scraps which the cutters then had to work up into the cheapest possible capes or coat-backs. To his way of thinking, a garment made up from scraps like that was never going to hang properly, not even on the shop-rail. All you ended up with was a big piece of dead skin, not something that was ever going to move properly. There was no suggestion of a living person there at all.
No life to it.
All through these five weeks, despite this strange and growing preoccupation of his, once he got to Skin Lane each morning and went upstairs and got his white coat on, Mr F did by and large manage to keep his promise to himself not to let his mind wander at work. He’d finished the special order in ocelot, all to Mr Scheiner’s satisfaction, and had now moved on with the rest of the cutting benches to a big retail order of plain dark ranch mink jackets, all with the new season’s wide lapels. He was glad of the routine, frankly, and only once did he find himself thinking anything untoward. Late one afternoon, as he was finishing cutting a batch of skins destined for shoulder pieces, he found himself trying to imagine what kind of woman would end up wearing the jacket he was working on. What she might look like. He wondered what she’d be wearing underneath when her husband gave her the big box to open and she tried her present on for the first time. Probably something a bit special — one of those dresses with the thin straps, he thought. Jewel-coloured. As he imagined this woman feeling the growing sensation of heat across her bare shoulders (people are often surprised by just how hot a mink can get next to the skin; you wonder what they think the animals have fur for) he had a very odd thought, one that didn’t quite make sense to him. Thinking about the expression on the woman’s face, about her parted lips and the flush spreading slowly across her shoulders, he found himself wondering for the very first time in his life why am I doing all this for someone else? Why am I making this for someone I don’t even know?
eight
Even though none of his colleagues noticed any changes in his face or manner, it is important to remember how very tired Mr F must have been during these first three months of our story. Carrying a secret is tiring; having to keep an eye on every other man you pass in the street is exhausting. And on top of this, remember that his dream was still visiting him — not quite so often, perhaps, but still every third or fourth night of the week. Just as his gratefully unconscious body was beginning to drift out over the shallows of the early hours, beginning its descent into the deep, dark salt-water of true, deep sleep, the dream would seize hold of him and shake him awake. Every time it came, the pictures were still the same; and every time, he’d wake to find himself suddenly in the dark, twisted in his sheets, shouting at the top of his voice. He was sleepless in the same way that a pregnant woman is sleepless — kicked awake, thumped in the stomach.
I told you that Mr F was nearly forty-seven; well, on the twenty-seventh of March, 1967, which was a Wednesday, he was. This was just two days before the incident with the young workman on the train. He had never made a fuss of any kind over his birthday, and his colleagues at Scheiner’s didn’t even know when it was, much less help him celebrate it. His horoscope in the paper that evening — there was always a special entry for people whose birthday it was — was so ludicrously optimistic, it made him wince: A spectacularly fulfilling year lies ahead of you, it said, especially if you have reached, or passed, the age of forty. It seems you cannot go wrong.
This would be a good time to form alliances and try out experiments, starting this evening. Oh yes? Pull the other one, he thought.
The only event that usually marked the day was the arrival of a card from his older brother, who was now living in Canada. For many years the envelope had used to include a brief note, with phrases like Maybe we’ll come over some day, who knows? — or, It would be great to see you and the old town again, brother, but latterly, there had just been the card, signed, he assumed, by his sister-in-law, his brother’s second wife, a woman he had never actually met. This year, even that failed to turn up; when he pushed open his front door, thinking perhaps it might have come by the second post, the mat was still as empty as it had been when he’d left for work that morning. Not that that’s unusual, he told himself, hanging up his jacket, and rolling up his sleeves.
When the card did finally arrive, two days late, there was no note; just the two names, both in the usual handwriting, and, underneath them, in blue biro, the scribbled phrase Hope this finds you well as always. Recognising what it contained from the stamp, Mr F hadn’t bothered to open the envelope before going to work, and so it had still been lying on the kitchen table when he got home. It being a Friday, Mr F felt so tired that night that he even considered not cooking himself any supper, but just going straight to bed instead. For want of anything better to do, he sat down at the table, opened the envelope, and read the card. Nothing particular happened when he read the scribbled message, but a few moments afterwards, the silence in his kitchen seemed to suddenly thicken; the ticking of the kitchen clock became almost deafening. The thought that it was still not even five o’clock became somehow intolerable to him. He stood up, scraping the back legs of the chair against the lino, but then the thought of going and getting undressed at that hour, of climbing between the sheets and lying there and watching the light fade through the curtains and waiting for it to get dark, seemed impossible. He sat down again.
Talking to yourself is something that few people will admit to doing, but most people who live on
their own do it often — nobody likes to live in silence, after all. Mr F did it rarely; usually the things he said to himself stayed inside his head. But this one came out — it had to — and it came out good and loud. As if there was some other noise in the room that he had to raise his voice over, as if for instance the kitchen clock really had started to tick inexplicably loudly, or as if he was calling an instruction to Mrs Kesselman over the sound of the machines and the radio in the downstairs workroom, Mr F said, very firmly and definitely, If I’m going to be by myself then I want to be on my own, thank you very much. And then again, after a short pause, and this time even more firmly, he pronounced the sentence This has got to stop.
Later that night, as he lay in bed, he tried talking to himself again, repeating the same few phrases over and over. But now, even though he knew it was his mouth shaping the words, it somehow wasn’t his own voice that he heard speaking them. It was somebody else’s; whose, he had no idea. The voice was quiet — gentle, even — and it seemed to have something to do with another bedroom, and with the way things had been years ago — yes; that was it. Something to do with lamplight, and the feeling of the sheets being drawn tight around you; and the sound of a man’s voice saying gently in your ear That’s better. There we go. All done. All over now: all done.
Whoever’s this voice was, it worked its magic. As if at this man’s command, the dream left Mr F in peace that night.
Skin Lane Page 8