Skin Lane

by Neil Bartlett

  He’ll get cold.

  He’s going to go into the kitchen and get his knife from the drawer (why his knife from Scheiner’s should be here in the flat he doesn’t know — and he doesn’t care; this is just something he needs to do). It shouldn’t be hard — even the thickest of ropes will part like butter if you use a fresh blade, and take it strand by strand. He supposes that the only really tricky part will be making sure he doesn’t catch the skin on his ankles — and then making sure the boy doesn’t slip through his arms when the rope finally gives way of course. He thinks he knows how he’ll do it — he’s never taken the whole weight of somebody else’s body before, but he’s sure he’ll manage. He’ll have to stand on the toilet seat with one foot either side of him, and then hook his free left arm firmly around the back of his knees while he’s working on the rope; that’s it. Then, when he sees the final strands of the rope starting to give way, he’ll wrap both arms tight around his legs — it’ll be fine, he knows it will — and then, slowly, taking his time (bending his knees, bracing himself, using his back properly) he’ll lower the boy down until he’s got him safely laid out in the bath. Just like he usually does, he’ll talk to himself all the way through it — just quietly, under his breath, nothing too loud. That’ll help. It’ll reassure the boy, too. Let him know that everything’s all going to be alright. I’ve got you. Daddy’s got you. That’s it. I’ve got you — there we go… that sort of thing. Lowering him down, safe and sound, and then laying him gently down in the bathtub.

  When he thinks about staring down at him like that, gazing at him lying there stretched out on the cold white enamel of the bathtub, Mr F forgets all about taking him into his bedroom. He thinks of something that he once heard as a child, in church, the phrase to have and to hold, and he finds himself wishing that his back wasn’t aching like it is now, because then he could get down on his knees and find a way of picking him up somehow, of reaching down into the bath and lifting him up and cradling him in his arms — warming him up a bit. He knows that the boy is dead (that’s another phrase that comes to mind, dead weight; he thinks he understands it now) but nonetheless he wants to hold him tight; to hold him tight and rock him back and forth and whisper gently in his ear I’ve got you. I’ve got you. That’s it; I’ve got you; sssh.

  Mr F sits there in his chair, thinking all of this, until it is dark. Eventually, of course, he nods off.

  It’s gone seven when he starts awake. He’s cold — shivering, still naked under his wet dressing-gown. He knows he ought to get dried off and get himself off to bed before he makes himself ill. Oddly enough, as he gets up and starts doing all the things he has to do before he can turn the lights out and go to bed, Mr F is quite sure that the dream won’t visit him again tonight. Why should it? Whatever message it had to give him has surely been delivered. Half-heartedly, he begins to lay the kitchen table for his supper — plate, knife, fork — and even gets as far as putting some water on for the potatoes, but then he turns the gas out again. It is still only eight o’clock, but he knows he is going to need all the sleep he can get. He also knows that he can’t deny it any longer; he had been right first time. It was him. It was Beauty in the dream.

  At the moment that he admits this, Mr F is standing at his kitchen table. He sits down. He places his hands, palm down, either side of his empty dinner plate, and then balls them into fists. He takes a deep breath. Then, with his fists balled and his eyes closed, he finally says out loud the sentence that has been running silently round his head for six days and nights now, the sentence he first heard whispered in his ear back there in the upstairs workroom. If the question he needed to ask the stranger in his bathroom was Where have you come from, then he now has his answer. He hears it sent back to him by the close walls of his kitchen.

  You were here all the time.

  In this strange manner, and with no one there to hear him, Mr F spoke of his love for the very first time.

  2

  “Those who suffer this disability carry a great weight

  of loneliness, guilt, shame and other difficulties.”

  Evening Standard, July 4th, 1967

  Come the first week of May, something extraordinary happens to the streets of South London — even to the shabby ones like those through which Mr F made his way to work. Anyone would think some royal princess or beauty was about to arrive, the way those front gardens behave. Roses which have spent the winter as a tangle of dead thorns suddenly remember themselves, and bud; the honeysuckles wriggle free from their twists of rusty wire, and hurry up the trellis to secure a good vantage point. Red and yellow tulips form up in clumsy ranks beside the front paths, splashing their colour around quickly before the grass chokes them; purple and white lilacs ruthlessly elbow the privet hedges out of the way. As the air gets warmer, and big white clouds begin to pile up in the bright blue sky, neighbourhood after neighbourhood gives itself over to a frenzy of expectation. Mothers scrub their children in preparation for their very first outings to fragrant parks and blooming beauty spots; special trains are laid on to see the bluebells at Kew. Swifts and swallows begin to scream and twitter as they circle the domestic eaves, and in the windows of the haberdashers, rolls of floral prints presage the joys of imminent summer. Even the humble dandelions take their chance, and crowd the pavements. No space is wasted. Where the soil is too starved for a cherry or magnolia, there is at least a dog rose; where no rose, at least an elder or a white-flowered bramble. Buddleias claw their way out of the brickwork lining the railway tracks; by London Bridge Station, the bark on the plane trees splits open like sclerotic skin, as if the ancient wooden limbs were stretching in anticipation. One monster has grown so old that it has finally overcome the black iron railing encircling its trunk, enveloping it; as the bark strains to cover the metal, it flakes away in great sooty plates, revealing the pale pink flesh of the new life underneath. Everywhere, the blood quickens.

  Some people, however, seem to notice nothing of all this. As they walk to work, their eyes stay down. They don’t even appear to smell the lilacs. Clearly, something is wrong with them — but what, exactly?

  I have a suggestion.

  In the middle pages of the story, which were the ones which Mr F always more or less ignored when his father read it to him as a child, there is an elaborate description of the gardens which the Beast has built around his magic castle. These are stocked with every rarity his army of gardeners can obtain — arbours of roses foaming and tumbling in every known colour, tulips gleaming like jewels between hedges of clipped box — and so on. But the Beast himself takes pleasure in none of this. As the gravel of the long esplanades is raked by the setting sun, and he begins his evening round of inspection, he hears no birdsong — not even the scarlet macaws shrieking from their great gilded aviaries. For him, the evening is punctuated only by the lonely padding of his solitary paws. When he pauses to survey his domain, all he can ever see amongst all those fountains and marble statues is the absence of the one living figure he looks for; Beast that he is, when he lifts his muzzle to the air, it is never to catch the perfume of the jasmine, or a rose. Every night, he hopes the wind may bring him fresh news of the one whom all of this has been so cunningly constructed to lure. The sights and sounds of the spring are wasted on him; he lives only in his mind.

  My point is that the little boy should have been encouraged to pay more attention to this passage. At least then when he grew up he would have had something to help him recognise his symptoms.

  one

  It may seem strange to us now, but at the time in which this story is set, people thought it was very important to be neatly dressed if you had to go and visit a doctor. It was the done thing; a mark of respect; a measure of the gravity of the occasion. There was also doubtless the lurking feeling that nearness — cleanliness — might in itself somehow ward off any possible bad news; news, for instance, that the infection had taken hold; that no, the tumour was not benign.

  Perhaps that was why, on the mo
rning of the second Monday in May, 1967 (which was a warm and sunny one), Mr F took such care with how he dressed for work. Such great care, in fact, that he almost made himself late; anyone would think that something in him would have preferred not to go. He shaved himself as close as he could, twice, with a new blade, chafing the skin on his neck quite badly in the process; then he scrubbed under his fingernails with carbolic until the quicks were nearly raw. Moving into the bedroom, he faced himself squarely in the wardrobe mirror, chin up, and knotted his tie as tightly as it would go — too tight, in fact, even for him; he had to relent and loosen it slightly. Then he sat on the end of the bed, and did the same with his shoelaces. Standing again, he worried that his brown suit was beginning to show some signs of wear, so took the jacket off and brushed it down. Then, having checked his appearance several last times, he collected his hat from the hallstand, locked his front door behind him and walked to the station with his most military stride. A casual passer-by, seeing him all dressed up and striding out like that in the warm spring sunshine, might have guessed he was a nervous lover, eager to create the right impression when that all-important pair of eyes caught their first glimpse of the day — they might even have wondered why he wasn’t carrying a bunch of daffodils. But we who know him better will notice that the set of his jaw is too defensive for that, and that he is carrying both his hands ever so slightly clenched. Especially the left one, the one disfigured by a small but fresh scar. No, it’s definitely not good news that this man is expecting.

  Still, credit where credit is due; a brave face is always best, don’t you think?

  All the way to work that morning, Mr F really had only one thought in his mind: Is it going to show? Standing on the platform at Peckham Rye Station, he could feel the sunlight striking his face, showing him up. Every time he imagined or even tried to imagine what might happen the first time he found himself face to face with Beauty, his stomach turned, and his nerve almost failed him — indeed, if his feet hadn’t been so used to the journey, he would have surely turned tail. There was a particularly bad moment on the train when he thought he heard the woman sitting next to him muttering Just go home under her breath at him, twice, and for a split second he even found himself considering pulling the emergency cord. But then he took some discreet deep breaths, and told himself not to be ridiculous — that was something people only did in films. He knew he was in danger of starting to talk out loud again, so he concentrated on keeping the sound turned down in his head. Fortunately, he was good at that. The fusillade of slamming doors at London Bridge Station sounded as if it was coming from a battle several miles away; once he was safely across the bridge, he managed the whole of the walk from there to Skin Lane in more or less complete silence. All he had to do, he decided, as he turned left out of All Hallows Lane, was concentrate. Concentrate on the big consignment of collars and cuffs which Mr Scheiner had insisted they needed to have ready for collection by the first tea-break. Gradually, a plan began to crystallise. If he left the job of parcelling up the order to one of his colleagues, he could surely legitimately spend the first part of the day downstairs in the office, checking the paperwork. That way, he probably wouldn’t even have to wish the boy good morning.

  It was stupid of him, in a way, to have headed down the stairs when he did. Having successfully got through the first half of the morning without seeing him, he had then debated with himself whether to stay put in the office or to risk smoking his mid-morning cigarette out on the front steps as normal for far too long. If he’d had the sense to just dispense with his usual timetable and go for his smoke ten minutes early, he’d have been safe; as it was, by the time he’d made up his mind the tea-break was nearly over, and the boy was just coming back up.

  As I told you, the staircases at Number Four were narrow; so narrow that two people couldn’t really pass in comfort. As soon as he saw the boy, Mr F stopped where he was; Beauty, of course, didn’t. He had no reason to. This meant that in just a few moments their bodies were going to be only inches apart, and that the boy was going to have to brush right past him. Mr F couldn’t quite believe that this was going to happen; but it was.

  The sun, ridiculously, was streaming in through a landing window, and shining straight into his face. It really was a beautiful morning.

  He pressed his back against the wall, and instinctively looked down at his feet (anything to avoid the boy’s eyes). As he did it, he felt his stomach muscles contract under his shirt — he never liked to be touched, as you know, but this was different. Whatever he’d imagined, it certainly hadn’t been this.

  You or I might have experienced his sensations as exhilaration — or even pleasure. But for Mr F, they could only be panic. Terror. The stairs were just too narrow; there wasn’t room to breathe — and where in God’s name was he supposed to look?

  Anywhere; just not at his face.

  Especially not at his mouth.

  Here he comes.

  The extraordinary thing about these situations (I have no option but to assume you know what I’m talking about) is how very calm one manages to be. As the boy squeezed past, Mr F found himself saying, with that peculiar kind of mock-camaraderie that often infects a workplace on a Monday morning,

  “Alright there?”

  — to which the boy replied, in a cheerful grumble, and without pausing in his journey up towards the bright window,

  “That tea-break never gets any longer, does it, Mr F? Still, nice to see the sun.”

  And that was it; the boy was already safely past and continuing up the stairs. There had been no contact; Mr F should have been able to unclench his stomach and start breathing normally again — but instead of concentrating on that, he found himself helplessly continuing the conversation. It was as if his idiot of a mouth just couldn’t bear to let the boy go; as if it wouldn’t do what it was told. It even shaped itself into a peculiar sort of half-smile as he called out — still not daring to look up at Beauty’s retreating back —

  “Yes it is — and no, it certainly doesn’t. No peace for the wicked, as they say.”

  (Was that the sound of a laugh?)

  “Too right, Mr F,” the boy called back, after stopping for half a stair. He reached the landing, walked past the landing window (the sunlight flashed once from his hair — Mr F hadn’t been able to resist looking up) and disappeared. If he had noticed the rather forced — indeed, half-strangled — sound of Mr F’s voice, he didn’t show it; if he thought there was anything odd about Mr F instigating such an uncharacteristically relaxed conversation — and on a busy Monday morning, too — he didn’t show that either. As far as he was concerned, this was just another Monday morning. Rather a fine one — but apart from that, nothing special.

  Mr F, however, had to wait fully two minutes before he got his breath back. He leant against the wall, closed his eyes (the sunlight was so strong he could see the blood in his eyelids) and took the time to realise the truth of his situation. For the boy, nothing at all had changed. But for him, everything had.

  Bloody everything.

  Jesus.

  Given this change in his circumstances, it was perhaps unfortunate that on this particular Monday (on the first day; I almost said, of our hero’s new life) Mr F should have had to spend so much of his time in a small room crowded with people. Just when he badly needed time to think, he was given none. This is how it happened.

  On the Friday, Mr Scheiner had been seen hovering in the upstairs workroom, rubbing his hands together while he inspected the progress of the work. His visit was ostensibly to see how the big order was coming on, but also, he said, he wanted to have a quick word with Mr F. He was pleased to see that he’d got young Ralph hard at work, he said — and after he’d jokingly asked Mr F if the boy was behaving himself, he took him to one side and explained there was a job he wanted to discuss — a slightly delicate one. He was sorry to have to burden him with this at such a busy time, he said, but he was sure Mr F was understanding; a cousin of his wanted to b
ring a young lady in to choose her furs for a new coat, and she was, as Mr Scheiner put it, in a wincing half whisper, not his daughter, Mr F No great favours were being requested, or done, in the matter of a discount — costs are still costs, even for family, Mr F, as you well know — but the cousin wanted to show off his connections in the trade a little … bring the girl in, show her some styles and some samples, let her think she can choose whatever she fancies — make her feel special, Mr F, that’s the idea. Obviously it wouldn’t be suitable to bring this young lady up to the cutting-room, so what Mr Scheiner proposed was that Mr F should bring a selection of skin samples down to the office for lunchtime on Monday. The boy could help — it would do him good to watch his uncle working a customer — and Mrs Kesselman could be there to chaperone and take measurements when required. Fox, plenty of top-range mink and a couple of the fancier skins just to impress her, that was what was required.