Skin Lane

by Neil Bartlett

  He slept late that Saturday morning, until gone eight — he must have been more tired than he’d known. He did it again on Sunday, and even on the Monday morning, didn’t open his eyes until nearly twenty-five to seven.

  He knew it wasn’t over though. As he hurriedly drank his tea and worried about catching the train, he had to suppress the obvious thought that his nocturnal visitor had probably just gone elsewhere for the weekend, and was just as probably already planning his return. Walking to the station, he decided that since he just had time to stop at the newsagents, he should — a newspaper might take his mind off things. The placard with the Sunday paper’s headline had for some reason been left up outside the shop in its wire-fronted case, and was still announcing Missing Body Finally Found — this was the spring of a famous murder case, and the reports of any development always made the front pages. As he stood in the short queue, ready as always with the exact change for his paper in his right hand and trying not to worry about the train, Mr F found that the first word on that poster was snagging at his thoughts. Missing. Surely, he thought, there can’t ever really be a person who nobody misses — somebody must always know who they are. Know where they’re from. Obviously the police hadn’t been asking the right people. Or hadn’t been asking the right questions. By the time he got to the front of the queue, he was worrying that he’d done the wrong thing in stopping for his paper, and really was anxious now that he was going to miss his train — but for some reason, instead of just handing over the newspaper, the newsagent, who normally never said anything beyond “Thank you” or “Good morning”, felt moved to conversation. As he took the offered change, he said to Mr F

  “Well, at least they’re at peace now, eh?”

  Mr F didn’t say anything, because it was now gone quarter past, and he didn’t have time; he simply snatched his paper from the pile on the counter, turned, and went, not caring if the man thought he was being rude or not — but he wanted to. For just a moment, as his hand reached for the paper, he wanted to look the newsagent right in his stupid eye and snap right back at him Peace? What’s that then? Is that what you call what I’ve never had? Out on the pavement, he took a deep breath, folded the paper and tucked it neatly under his arm. He walked the fifty yards to the station as briskly as he could without actually breaking into a run, and as he walked, he started talking to himself under his breath again. The morning air was just cold enough to fog his breath as he muttered What on earth are you talking about? That’s not true, is it? Not true at all. You’ve had a good life. A good life. A good life.

  Fortunately, I don’t think anyone heard him. Like I said, he must have been tired.

  nine

  The walk to work that morning did nothing to improve his temper. As he made his usual detour along the river, the wind that came slicing across the water was a cold one, and he couldn’t for the life of him remember why he didn’t take the sheltered route west down Cannon Street like everybody else; the uphill cobbles of All Hallows Lane seemed steeper and less even than he ever remembered them being before. Arriving at Number Four, he barely said a civil good morning to Mrs Kesselman, and once at his bench, sliced and cut his way to the first tea-break of the day in determined silence. Mr F always took the opportunity the tea-break presented to be alone for ten minutes, and would usually smoke his cigarette and drink his tea standing out on the front steps — they were reasonably sheltered, even on a cold or wet day — so as he made his way downstairs at ten o’clock with his tea, feeling in his pocket for his papers and tobacco, he was not best pleased on this morning of all mornings to be prevented from reaching his usual smoking post (on the fourth of the stone steps leading to the front door) by Mr Scheiner, asking would he mind stepping into the office for just a moment.

  The time had come, Mr Scheiner explained, for his nephew to move upstairs. The boy had done well in the machine-room, he said, but it was no proper place for a young man down there with all those girls, and he might as well start learning the tricks of the trade now as anytime, what with his sixteenth birthday just passed. So would Mr F please take him upstairs and get him started at the cutting bench.

  “I have told the young man” he said, “I am putting you to learn with the best. The best: so any trouble, and he is straight back downstairs in this office, Mr F. Straight back down.”

  Mr F, of course, had no choice but to accept his new apprentice. He had overheard one of his fellow cutters saying a young man with that attitude was lucky he was family, because they’d never’ve given him the job — but apart from that, he couldn’t remember having seen or heard too much of the boy. Being downstairs, of course, he had really been Mrs Kesselman’s department. He could remember the dark blue suit he’d been wearing when they were introduced, and thinking it far too flash for a work-day, but after that, hadn’t paid his presence in the building any particular attention.

  I was right about that suit, he thought, as he watched the boy hang up his jacket on a peg by the cutting-room door. And he was; it was a copy of the kind of fashionable outfit Mr F had only otherwise seen in pictures of television actors or singers in his newspaper. The dark blue jacket was high-buttoned, and cut as close as possible across the shoulders and under the arms — Tight in all the wrong places, thought Mr F, looking the boy up and down. Just the sort of thing that makes you look as if you ’re trying to find the nearest mirror. Not to mention that hair.

  “Good morning,” he said, as the boy crossed the room towards him.

  “Good morning, Mr F,” said the boy, rather ostentatiously cheerfully, holding the white cutter’s coat he’d helped himself to.

  And forward with it, thought Mr F.

  “Get that on properly, and we’ll start,” he said.

  The boy did as he was told, and buttoned himself up into the long white coat with its cutaway front. He left the top button undone, showing a little more of his smart, narrow tie than was strictly necessary; Mr F noticed this, but decided he wouldn’t say anything unless the boy did the same thing again tomorrow morning. Without explaining anything, he walked straight over to his place at the cutting bench, and pushed aside the bundle of smoke-grey mink he’d been in the middle of sorting. He was clearly not best pleased at having to stop what he was doing and start showing a junior around the place instead, but equally clearly thought they might as well get straight on with it. Without a word, he collected the instruments of his trade from where they were scattered around the bench, and began to lay them out in an exactly spaced row for the boy’s inspection.

  “Right,” he said.

  The tools of the furrier’s trade are strange ones, and seem at odds with the delicacy of the material they are used to handle. The blunt, black, wide-jawed metal pinchers used to nip and stretch the skins as they are nailed to the boards; the knife-like steel combs; the wooden bats which are slid like letter openers into the stomachs of the uncut pelts when they are first razored open; the pins and nails; the whetstone with its anointing oil and the heavy leather strop — even the strange fish-shaped brass handles of the tiny cutting-knives themselves — they all look as if they are designed to pierce, or wound; to damage, or, indeed, to hurt. Laid out together in a row, they couldn’t help but look like the preparations for some scene of torture, or like the emblems held aloft by the stony-faced angels attendant on some cruel martyrdom or passion. Last in the row, incongruous amongst all this metal, was a small and innocuous-looking cardboard box. This, Mr F picked up and opened; then he tipped its contents out across the bench. Razor blades, each one wrapped in its own protective paper. He selected a blade, unfolded the paper, extracted it, broke it diagonally in half using a strange sort of hinged wooden box which snapped shut like a mousetrap, and then fitted one of the two fine-pointed slivers of steel into a brass handle. He did it all in four quick moves, as if he wanted to prove to the boy how expert his large white fingers were in handling something that could so easily slice them to the bone. Then he picked up one of the pelts he’d pushed aside. H
e slid a wooden bat into its stomach, and picked up the knife again — but before making the incision, he paused, and pointed the blade at the boy; the strong sunlight from the long window caught the edge of it.

  People sometimes say that knives look wicked, and these blades do. They look eager.

  “Now,” he said, “look, but don’t touch.”

  Look, but don’t touch unless I say so: isn’t that the sentence with which the education of a new boy always begins?

  Although he has ingratiating good manners when he needs them, this sixteen-year-old (whose name, by the way, is Ralph Scheiner) has little or no time for older men, starting with his own father. Being the youngest child, and an only son, he has grown up secure in the knowledge that all will always be forgiven him — and this has not made him especially kind, or wise; although he gives the impression of always doing what he is told, the world, as far as he is concerned, is his oyster. This is 1967, after all, and like his two older sisters, who are eighteen and nineteen respectively, he can surely scent the new-found freedoms of the coming decade. They, of course, have already to face the prospect of imminent marriage — both their mother and their father have already told them as much; but the boy is still all smiles. He is quite sure that he has all the time in the world. Much as he hates having to turn up for work every day on time, and being constantly told what to do, he has decided that he may as well give his new profession a run for its money — that he may as well behave himself so long as he’s on his Uncle Maurice’s premises. He knows how to handle him. His sisters have been teasing him, and asking spiteful questions at Friday night dinner about how he’s taking to the family business now that he knows how much sweeping is involved; but he has shrugged all that aside. After all, hasn’t he been moved upstairs already? He knows that this so-called apprenticeship is just a preliminary; knows that once he’s worked his way around the different bits of the building they’re going to take him to one side and talk to him seriously about whether he’d like to join the firm. His father has already boastfully hinted as much. Six months, he’s decided he’ll give it, before deciding whether the place suits him. Who knows; he might just decide to branch out in another direction entirely.

  He doesn’t know what that direction might be, as yet, but he wouldn’t be at all surprised if he thinks of something.

  Yes, he tells his mother as she passes him his supper-plate; he does much prefer it upstairs, with the men.

  With a trace of fine dark hair just becoming a regular feature on his perfect top lip, and his broken voice already well settled, this smartly dressed young man is as dangerous a creature as he looks. In theory, his position as a junior on the Lane ought to mean that he is at the bottom of the building’s pecking order, but in practice everyone in the workrooms at Number Four knows that this so-called “apprenticeship” of his is meant to equip him for one day being their boss. This privileged position is further compounded by his sixteen-year-old good looks; not only is the boy the youngest male in the building, he is also by some stretch the best-looking. Quick, dark and bright-eyed, with striking collar-length nearly-black hair, he is one of those neatly built young men who not only knows exactly what they look like (Mr F was right to assume his fondness for mirrors), but is already well-versed in the uses such looks can be put to. Those dark eyes may give very little away, but they are expert at quickly sizing up everyone and everything that surrounds them; while they do it, their proud owner smiles at almost everyone, almost all of the time. He believes in first impressions, you see. As a result, in the six weeks since he first made the Monday morning journey from Hendon to Skin Lane, even those who might naturally be inclined to treat their employer’s nephew with suspicion or even hostility have been systematically charmed. In particular — as much as his father and uncle’s joint decision that the best way for him to learn his way round the family business would be from the bottom up had initially rankled — the boy has made a great success of playing fox amongst the chickens of the downstairs workroom. Just as they usually did, his hair, his dark eyes and his suit had all won him immediate approval amongst Mrs Kesselman’s girls (if not from the lady herself.) The more whispering he heard at tea-break, the more jokes were made at the expense of him and his tightly cut trousers as he bent over to get at the fur-scraps caught under the treadles of the machines with his broom — the more he liked it. He was used to women making a fuss of him — it was all they ever did, at home — but this kind of attention was new. It had distinct possibilities.

  He especially liked the nickname the girls had chosen for him. One of them in particular had been trying to knock him back a peg or two — to wipe the grin off his face for once — but her irony had backfired, and the name had stuck. Mrs Kesselman, who’d seen far too many young boys like him come through the building to fall for this one’s charms, always referred to him rather disapprovingly as Our Young Mr Scheiner — reminding him every time she did it that he was only there pushing a broom round her machine-room because of who his uncle was — but everyone else downstairs called him just Mr Schein.

  The nickname doesn’t translate, exactly. There was an Andrews Sisters’ song that some of the older girls still used to sing at their machines, just to make fun of him, which had a line in its sing-along chorus that ran Bei Mir Bist Du Schein, Bei Mir Hast Du Chein — and that’s where the pun had first started. I suppose it more or less meant he was Mr Handsome, “Mr Beautiful”; The Beauty. Or just Beauty, really. That’s what I’m going to call him, anyway. The name fitted the boy like a glove, and oh, did he know it. Everything about him — the way he looked, the way he carried himself — well, the way he got treated in that downstairs workroom, he may have been pushing a broom, but you’d have said he was less of a dogsbody, more of a mascot. Even Mrs Kesselman, when she overheard her girls chattering about him, didn’t blame them. With those looks, she thought to herself as she watched him bend over his broom, I should be surprised? She knew he was a danger, and that she’d have to watch him, but was sure she was up to the task. She also of course knew something that the younger women in the room didn’t yet know; that the bloom on the boy’s looks would soon go, as it does in all fine-skinned, dark-haired young men of his type. Still, she thought to herself, watching the way the younger of her girls especially darted glances at him from out of the corners of their eyes, from now until his fifth wedding anniversary… good luck to them.

  The first afternoon after he’d been moved upstairs, the girls found themselves free to discuss the boss’s nephew with even more than their usual candour. Radio London was playing at top volume, as always — and as always, the afternoon sing-along to the chorus of Miss Vikki Carr’s impassioned rendition of “It Must Be Him” had quickly descended into a mayhem of more or less single entendres. Joining in the laughter, Mrs Kesselman gave that indefinably suggestive-yet-dismissive shrug of the older woman who knows exactly what she’s talking about. Raising one painted eyebrow into an even higher arch than normal, she turned to the girl who’d just shrieked out the most obscene suggestion of the afternoon, and said

  “Listen; with a mouth like that, who wouldn’t?”

  “Listen,” said Mr F, who wasn’t used to talking to young men, but certainly knew how to address a cutting-room junior: “They used to call this business a mystery back in the old days, apparently; a mystery. But I can tell you now there’s nothing mysterious about it. Years of application, and concentration, that’s what it takes. Concentration, especially; that’s the trick. Eventually, I’m going to show you how to use this — ”

  He showed Beauty the knife again, hafting it lightly in his hand so that the steel point danced in the light.

  “But now, to start with… touch.”

  With one light sweep of the blade, he opened the pelt. Discarding the bat and the knife, he offered it to the boy.

  “So go on; touch it.”

  Beauty took it, and was surprised by how light and supple it was. Dry as a piece of paper between his thumb and foref
inger.

  “Now the other side. Use your hand like a blade, up and down, up and down; like this.”

  He showed the boy how to lay the pelt on the bench and brush the fur using the side of his hand, once up and once down in two swift strokes, with and against the grain, leaving all the guard-hairs standing.

  The boy did as he was shown.

  “Now leave your hand resting on it — no; palm down.”

  To Beauty’s great surprise, the furred side of the pelt was immediately warm to his touch. He didn’t understand how this could be, from a dead thing; in fact what he could feel was the heat of his own body, returning to its source.

  “Tell me what you feel then.”

  “I couldn’t say, Mr F. Warm. I can’t really describe it.”

  “Thirty-three years, and maybe you’ll be able to. Right; basics; the most important thing in this business is choice of skin, and that — ” he took the pelt off Beauty and blew on the fur to part it, then used his two thumbs to keep it spread and show the boy the tiny hidden split in the pelt his fingers had somehow detected with that one quick and apparently perfunctory stroking action, “ — that is exactly the sort of weakness that if it gets past you at this stage can spoil a whole garment. Never waste time working on a spoilt skin — ” He emphasised his point by pointing the blade of the knife at the boy’s chest, then, placing the pelt fur down on the bench, he sliced it carelessly across with the knife and threw the two pieces to the floor.

  “Oh and never try and conceal a spoilt skin, either,” he added “Even if it means more work matching a new one. There’s not much gets past me.”