“Yes thank you, Mr F,” and then added, as if it was the most ordinary question in the world, “And you?”
Mr F, looking down to check his last button, was determined to prove that conversation was a game he could play too. Given the question, it was perhaps not surprising that his answer came out with a slightly strangled sound to it, but he was sure no one noticed.
“As always. Now,” he said, looking back up and rather triumphantly handing the boy a small brass knife-handle, “let’s see you fit a blade into that. Time to get cutting.”
As he smoothed down his coat for the last time and checked that the rest of the tools were all in order, Mr F felt that at any minute now normality would be restored. Quite soon now, everyone would be hard at work. Every head would be lowered over a bench. Just as it should be.
That’s better.
Even though the blade was of course a new one, fresh from its paper packet and freshly split in two, he told the boy that for this particular lesson he wanted to see him sharpen it. Beauty found the grindstone, oiled it, and then, having dutifully checked that the steel sliver was securely fitted into the brass handle (he intuited correctly that this morning, it was important to do everything by the book), began to flick the blade carefully across the stone, left right, left right, like a thrush with a snail. Just like he’d been shown.
Even though Mr F could see he was doing everything right, he insisted on reprimanding him.
“Now slow down. And watch what you’re doing, please.”
The boy stoops to his task. He is actually rather pleased that this day has finally come; if he passes the test (which, of course, he will), it should mean he won’t be quite so closely watched in future. His shoulder curves slightly under the white linen of his coat, and he presses conscientiously down on the blade. He can just feel the sunlight coming in through the long window and touching him; it’s the first real warmth of the year. The patient, repeated whisper of the blade across the stone seems oddly satisfying.
Mr F, meanwhile, turns away and takes a look round the rest of the workroom, ostensibly to make sure that everything else is in order. It has the desired effect; everyone looks back down at their work and concentrates very hard on what they’re doing. Mr F checks the buttons on his coat again, starting with the bottom one, and with each button he feels more calm; he feels safe. The panic of the last fifteen minutes recedes, and begins to seem like something from another world entirely. The sunlight coming in through the window overlooking the church roof is strong and calm and steady; his breathing is now perfectly back under his control. He can concentrate. When he turns back to the boy, he notices that his hair, just where the shirt collar is lifting away as he bends forward over the blade, where the sun is catching it, is getting so long that it is starting to curl on the back of his neck, and I really must talk to him about that, thinks Mr F. Indeed, he is just about to say something to him, something sharp — but not too sharp, because he bears the boy no ill-will, and he really has got rid of the last lingering trace of this morning’s foul temper now, really everything is as it should be, but then
Ah.
Here it comes.
but then, as he stares at the hair curling over the nape of the boy’s neck, and at the exact way the individual vertebrae show through the skin just above his collar, and the way that the corded muscles on the side of his neck are just beginning to show as he cranes it forward and slightly to one side — just then, and for no good or particular reason that he can identify, Mr F begins to have the odd sensation (it is hard to say where, exactly — perhaps in the pit of his stomach) that everything in the workroom is coming to a gentle but conclusive stop. It ceases to matter. The sounds — for instance, the sound of a pincher methodically tapping on a nailing board somewhere behind him — are beginning to fade, and after all the noise and the crowds and the stairs and the rush of his morning so far, this is a great relief. They are replaced, inexplicably, by the reassuring and familiar sound of his kitchen clock. He feels oddly still. He finds that instead of worrying about how the boy is managing with the blade on the stone, about the angle of the blade and whether there is any danger of the stone slipping as he steadies it with his other hand, he is suddenly able, exactly as if he was working on matching a pair of particularly tricky pelts, to concentrate exclusively on the exact colour and texture, the density and lustre, of the dark hair curling on the back of the boy’s neck.
Remember, it all comes down to choice of skin.
He wants to touch it.
The important thing is, touch.
But he knows that that wouldn’t be a good idea.
If he was matching pelts, of course, he would reach out and run the his hand firmly over the skin and then drag it back against the grain, to feel the exact quality of the guard-hairs’ warm, soft resilience — but he knows he can’t do that to the back of a young man’s neck. But then he also knows — quite suddenly, and to his great surprise and almost, I should say, to his relief — that he doesn’t actually need to. After seventeen previous attempts, you see, he knows that he’s just found the exact match he’s been looking for — and right here, would you believe: right here on his own cutting bench. Right where he least expected to find it. Yes; Mr F has just found the answer to his question — the question that he has been carrying to and from Skin Lane for weeks now, chafing away at him, nagging at him like a memory or a back-ache does — the question that now joins the clock ticking in his mind with all the clarity of a chiming hour;
Where have you come from:
Where the hell have you come from?
As always with Mr F, the answer to his question also comes in the form of a sentence. He can actually hear it — whispered, right in his ear. Because, you see, suddenly, everything fits. This young man is exactly the right size, the right build and the right shape. The hands sharpening the blade are just delicate enough, and his hair — well, you always need a good working light when you’re matching pelts, and fortunately the light from the long window is strong this late April morning, and as it catches his hair just where it curls slightly above the collar, it makes it clear that it is an exact match; an exact match for the hair Mr F sees spread across the harsh white enamel of his bathtub at four o’clock every other morning of his strange and tortured life. Even under the glare of that naked bathroom bulb, and here again in the sunlight pouring through the cutting-bench windows, it has those same elusive shadows. Look: Sable. And no ordinary sable. Imperial. The darkness that is never quite black; the lustre that no dyer can ever convincingly counterfeit. How odd, thinks Mr F — and he knows that he has plenty of time to think all of this, even in the short moment it will take the boy to finish the last sweep of the blade across the stone, because not only has that small staccato whisper faded away with the rest of the sound in the room, but the ticking of the clock has died away now too, and he feels sure that if he was to look down at his watch, that too would have stopped — How odd, he thinks; when this boy next looks at me — when he turns to me and looks up and asks “D’you think we’re ready now, Mr F?” — I will finally know what the face of the man in my dreams looks like.
What will I say to him, I wonder? What?
Actually, when the boy turns and says that, Mr F controls his voice perfectly. Oddly enough, he knows exactly what to say. He replies
“Well, let’s find out, shall we?”
Mr F takes the knife, tests the edge of the blade against his thumb, and prepares to show the boy how to make the first cut. He worries that his right hand might start to shake if he doesn’t do it straightaway — ever so slightly, just as it does sometimes in the dream when he has just walked through the blood from the window and is slipping his front door key into the lock — and he knows he is being watched, and he doesn’t want the boy to see his teacher hesitate. So he doesn’t; he picks up the first of the pelts they are going to be working on today, a bundle of plain ranch mink being cut for the collars and cuffs of a big retail order, and lifts the
point of the blade above the waiting skin. He takes a deep breath, and calmly reiterates the lesson for the day:
“The first cut on any skin is the most important,” he says. “A mistake made now cannot be corrected later. The blade needs to move swiftly and firmly, and at the correct angle. If it swerves in the wrong direction, the exact alignment of the seams required by the pattern will be spoilt; any hesitating or snagging, and the fur will be bruised by the knife.”
Mr F knows all this, of course; he knows it better than anyone. After all, he has been doing this for years. And the boy has heard this passage from the manual several times before — but it needed to be said. Just as he always does, Mr F stretches the skin of the pelt ever so gently with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, so that it will part readily as soon as the blade touches it. All he has to do now is move the blade. He has done it a thousand times before. He looks down.
People say that the sound of a pelt parting under the knife is like paper or parchment tearing, or like the whisper of a turning page, but actually it is like the sound of nothing else; it is the sound of skin. Perhaps it is in anticipation of this sound that, as he prepares to lower the blade, Mr F looks down for a moment, and sees, or thinks he sees, not the delicate leather of an animal pelt stretched there between his thumb and forefinger, but something human. Specifically, he sees the taut white skin of the young man in his dream; he sees the blade about to open up the thick, meaty muscle covering the ribs directly above his heart. Of course, seeing this, he flinches. The blade jumps — just a quarter of an inch — and for the very first time in all his years at the cutting bench, Mr F feels the icy bite of the knife on his own flesh.
As if to punish him for the stupidity of his error, the blade catches him on one of the tenderest parts of the body, the taut web of skin where the thumb branches away from the hand. The cut is a nasty one, down to the meat, and like all wounds to the hand, it immediately begins to bleed profusely. Without hesitating, the blood — real blood — wells up as clear and bright as the very best quality rubies. But Mr F is quick too; he drops the knife as quick as you’d drop a red hot saucepan handle, then digs into his right-hand trouser pocket and whips out a clean handkerchief and clamps it on the wound straight away, just like you’re supposed to. However, his blood won’t be denied its newfound freedom; it soaks through the handkerchief in less than a minute, turning the clean white linen into a scarlet mess. To make matters worse, Mr F knows that to staunch bleeding from a wound to the hand, you have to hold it up above your head; he is forced to show the bloody rag to everyone in the room. Though he doesn’t curse or shout, everyone stops what they’re doing and watches him, so that when the blood begins to run down his forearm, everyone can see it. Small nicks to the thumb or forefinger are nothing unusual in the workroom, but a deep cut like this one, with a real flow of blood — that never happens. No wonder everyone is staring. Seeing their faces, Mr F now does begin to shout; at the boy, of all people, first, but then at everyone. He wants him out of the way, he wants him downstairs now, he wants Mrs Kesselman up here with the iodine straight away, he wants everyone back to work: What the bloody hell do you think you’re all staring at, he shouts. They’ve all seen him deal with accidents before — when it happens to someone else, he is quick and quiet and methodical — but they’ve never, so far as they can remember, ever heard this man raise his voice as high as this. One or two of them, as they reluctantly lower their heads back to their work, do wonder what exactly is going on with Mr F these days.
In all this, the precious fur on the bench is forgotten. Unwatched, the first three drops of Mr F’s blood soak slowly into the pelt. As it happens, the fact that the first cut is slightly awry won’t render this particular skin useless — once Beauty has finished trimming it, one minor adjustment in the fitting of the underside of the finished collar, and the fault will be invisible. In a way, this means that this anonymous fur collar — one of nearly a hundred in the order — will be the very first work from their two shared hands. Hidden away inside it, unbeknownst to the customer, these three drops of Mr F’s blood will always be there — like a pledge signed in blood in some old story, or like a signature on a painting, hidden from sight under layers of darkening varnish.
I saw a painting once where the artist had actually done that — signed his work in blood. It wasn’t in a gallery, but in a church. Unnoticed down in a corner, there was a strange streak of scarlet running across the filthy floor of the prison yard where the scene in the picture was supposed to be taking place. If you followed it back to its source, you realised that this was a ribbon of blood, running from a butchered saint’s neck. And then, when you looked closer, you realised that the blood was resolving itself into the scrawled letters of the artist’s name. When I saw that, I thought it was as if the man who had painted the picture wanted to say to me, Well, you did ask what this actually cost.
Surprised by the blood, and even more by the stony sound of Mr F shouting at him, the boy did as he was told and ran downstairs for Mrs Kesselman immediately. She, seeing the look on Mr F’s face as he stood there in the middle of the room with a bloody handkerchief clamped to his hand, knew as soon as she walked in through the workroom door that he’d lost his temper with someone, and suggested diplomatically that since Mr Scheiner was out this morning, why didn’t they inspect the damage in the downstairs office. She’d never seen him quite like this — positively white-faced. Sitting him down while she got the iodine and lint and needle and thread ready, she did her best to calm him down; when Mr F told her that the accident had all been that bloody boy’s fault, she clucked her tongue and said she was sure there was no need to be quite so hard on our young Mr Scheiner, we all had to start out in this business somewhere. Mr F felt himself about to hiss at her, Actually there’s every fucking need, Mrs Kesselman, since you mention it, but fortunately at that point she had got the handkerchief off and was starting to dab at his wound with the iodine, so he had a legitimate reason to clench his teeth and hold his breath. The rest of the stitching, dressing and bandaging was done in silence.
The thought of going back upstairs and being asked by the boy if he was alright was intolerable, so when Mrs Kesselman told him she’d just get one of the girls to make him a good strong cup of tea before he went back up, he said no, he’d rather she just went up and told the boy to take the rest of the day off, and that they’d carry on tomorrow, if she wouldn’t mind. He’d just sit here for a bit. Not quite sure what to make of the news that Mr F of all people was sending someone home early when there was a big order to be completed by the end of the week, Mrs Kesselman nevertheless thought better of enquiring exactly was upsetting him like this, and did as he asked.
Mr F sat in that office for a full ten minutes before deciding that the coast was clear. However, once he got back upstairs, he soon discovered that there’s not much a cutter can do with only one un-maimed hand. By two o’clock, the silence in the workroom (nobody was saying anything), coupled with the steady tapping of pins into nailing boards, was driving him mad. By half past, he’d had enough, and when it got to the afternoon tea-break, without telling anyone he was going, he hung up his white coat and left.
At first he told himself not to pay any attention to his wound and just get on with things. But now that he was on his own, sitting on an almost-empty 3.02 train and feeling completely out of place, he couldn’t help it; the ache from the cut was beginning to deepen and spread. He closed his eyes, and let the sensation work its way across the back of his hand and into his wrist. That way, at least he had something to concentrate on. Something to keep at bay the sound of the sentence that he’d heard whispered in his ear back there in the Skin Lane workroom, and which had now wormed its way into the front of his mind and was beginning to run insistently round and round and round his aching head. The train rocked its way along the long slow bend from London Bridge Station to Bermondsey, from Bermondsey to the Queen’s Road, and from Queen’s Road Station to Peckham Rye. As the
train pulled into his stop, Mr F screwed his eyes up tight. He didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to hear it.
Wasn’t ready to think about that at all.
By the time he got home, at the peculiar hour of half past three on a Monday afternoon, the cut was hurting badly. Because he always kept his front door key in the right hand breast pocket of his jacket, and his left hand was now pinned into a tightly wound crêpe bandage, it took him some time to get the key out and into the lock. Getting his jacket off and hanging up his suit and rolling up his shirtsleeves also proved awkward. Scrubbing his one good hand properly proved practically impossible — and the wound was beginning to really throb now. A pot of strong tea and three cigarettes (rolling them wasn’t easy, either) did nothing to calm it. By half past eight that evening, he gave up; he cleared his supper away uneaten, left the dishes unwashed and decided to turn in early. Before getting into bed, he went to the bathroom and took two aspirins. Then he lay stiff-backed in the dark and hoped that the pain would begin to wear off soon, and that he might get some sleep, and that the sentence hammering round his head would go away.
After half an hour, he was sure he could feel the blood beginning to seep out into the bandage again. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if the sheets were spotted in the morning.
Skin Lane Page 12