Skin Lane

by Neil Bartlett

  “I just thought I’d give it one final comb-out. You never can tell with fox, not until you actually see it on the customer. See that?” He flicked the comb across the right shoulder, just where the fur crested a seam “You can never be sure it’s going to lie right at the top of the sleeve. It’s the way it falls — just here — ”

  Whatever had been going through his mind when he thought he was alone, Mr F now seemed completely absorbed in the fur itself. He ran his hand back and forth across the seam, trying to settle the guard-hairs to his satisfaction. The boy couldn’t see what, if anything, was wrong, but obviously something was; Mr F had stepped back from the dummy and was now flicking his eyes from shoulder to shoulder. The boy did the same, but he still couldn’t see it.

  “Here — ” said Mr F. “I’ll show you.”

  He put his comb down on the corner of the bench, lifted the coat off the dummy by the shoulders, and held it

  open for the boy to try on. He did this as if it was the most obvious and natural thing in the world.

  “What?”

  “Slip your jacket off, and I’ll show you. Come on.”

  Beauty did as he was told, crossing the workroom to hang his jacket on the coat-hooks by the door and then coming hesitantly back in just his shirt-sleeves. Mr F was still patiently holding out the coat.

  “Let’s be having you,” he said.

  Beauty turned round, and reached clumsily back with his hands to find the armholes. He’d never had someone hold a coat out for him before, and wasn’t quite sure how it was done.

  “Careful your cuffs don’t catch on the canvas, she’s still not been lined, remember — ”

  But Beauty needn’t have worried; Mr F had done this a thousand times. Once his cuffs were through the armholes, Mr F slipped the unlined skins up his arms and dropped them across his shoulders in one elegant, well-practised move. A big old full-length mirror was propped against the far wall of the workroom, and he led the boy over to it. Standing behind him, and watching what he was doing all the time in the glass, he worked as firmly and quickly as a seamstress with her mouth full of pins. As a dresser in the wings, when her young man’s just been given his three-minute call.

  The light was just catching the gilt of the mirror-frame, turning the boy into a picture; but he ignored that.

  He ran his hands along the top of each shoulder-blade and then up and down the top of each arm in two deft, separate strokes, flicking his hand away at the end of each outward or downward stroke, persisting until the fur over each of the shoulder seams finally hung in one soft, rounded, unbroken fall.

  “See?” he said.

  All the boy could see was how extraordinary he looked. Seeing himself framed in scarlet and gold, he couldn’t help but be impressed. He reached up with both hands and ran them slowly down through the luxurious fur of the lapels, pressing his palms to his chest, watching the hairs divide for his fingers. He let out a low whistle.

  “Lucky bloody tart,” he said, softly. And then grinned at Mr F in the mirror.

  Mr F met his eyes, but only very briefly. He walked back to the bench to retrieve his comb.

  “That front still needs some work,” he said. “Come back over here, where the light’s better.”

  The boy did as he was told — but the coat felt strange. It was both too heavy, and too light; he didn’t know how he was supposed to walk.

  “Stand straight for me, then.”

  Mr F moved round in front of the boy, and, keeping his eyes well away from Beauty’s face, started working on the lapels and the front of the coat with his comb. Of course, he was gentle; but again, he worked systematically and quickly, lifting and smoothing the hairs of each pelt in the pattern in turn, imperceptibly encouraging the fur to respond to the body it was now draping. As he worked, the barest beginning of a breeze from off the river started to come in through the open windows — but no sound at all. The City goes quiet very quickly on a summer evening.

  The light thickened.

  When he was finally satisfied with the hang of the front of the coat, Mr F moved back behind Beauty again in order to give the shoulders one quick last comb. He was concentrating so hard on his work that he didn’t notice quite how close behind the boy he was now standing; not, that is, until he saw the fur of the collar move. It was his breath, catching it just where it touched the nape of the boy’s neck.

  When he saw that, he stopped what he was doing.

  Just for a moment.

  And in that moment, he became aware of a very odd sensation — an ache, almost — in the down-turned palms of his hands, which were hovering just inches above the fur on the boy’s shoulders. It was as if they ached, literally, to touch something. He knew what it was, of course. He’d worked so hard to shut down his mind — ever since the warm, sudden shock of hearing the boy’s voice in the doorway like that — that it came as no real surprise that his body was now thinking for itself. It wasn’t the fur his hands wanted to touch; they’d already done that. It was the boy’s hair.

  As he stood there, trying not to breathe too hard, and grateful that there was no mirror in front of them now to reveal his face to the boy, all of Mr F’s inchoate desire suddenly came down to this one wish; to this one, simple, longed-for gesture. And of course, standing as close behind him as he was, he could so easily have made his wish come true. The back of the boy’s neck was only inches away. He could simply have leant forward, blown the fur aside, kissed the waiting skin, and then run the spread fingers of his hand (his right hand) up the nape of the boy’s neck and into his hair. Nothing was stopping him from doing just that. Nothing at all. Nothing.

  The boy didn’t notice the breath on the back of his neck; but he could feel the growing heat of the fur. He found himself thinking about how much it was going to cost the man who was buying it, this coat — his uncle had told him the price — and then thinking about what it must feel like, being able to do that for your girl.

  He started imagining her, putting the coat on.

  The way it would look on her.

  The look on her face.

  As the distant smell of the dark river came in through the windows, the boy’s cock began to stir. He would have liked to have gone and had another look at himself in that mirror, if only Mr F would stop fussing with his shoulders.

  Mr F knew he had to do something to save himself, so he gathered himself, and made his move. Stepping round to the front again, he then took two paces back, as if to assess his handiwork, putting some much needed distance between himself and the boy. Once safely there, however, he almost undid himself. As he looked across from one shoulder to the other, trying to judge if the fur was lying absolutely correctly, his eyes couldn’t help but graze the boy’s face; and the third time he did it, their eyes met.

  Nothing happens. The two them stand quite still, eye to eye, and barely three feet apart. Both of them seem to be holding their breath, and this time, there is no mirror between them.

  The pause seems to go on for ever; how long it actually was, I couldn’t say.

  It is the boy who breaks it first. Still looking Mr F straight in the eye, and just (Mr F is sure he sees him do this) just slightly raising one eyebrow, he says, quietly,

  “Christ, you get bloody hot enough in this then. She won’t be keeping this on for long, will she?”

  Still, Mr F can’t tear his eyes away. He knows this feeling. There is no sound in the room at all.

  The boy’s eyes have never been this black.

  “But then,” he says, grinning, “I suppose that’s the idea.”

  The eyebrow rises.

  “Eh, Mr F?”

  The silence continues. Mr F’s mouth is dry; but he has a sentence in his head, and eventually, he manages to start saying it;

  “Well — ”

  But now there is a sound; of all things, Mr F thinks he can hear the ticking of his kitchen clock, getting louder. He holds out his hands, as if — well, ostensibly as if to take the coat, but that’s
not it, actually, not it at all — and as he does this, he completes his sentence, raising his voice slightly to cover the sound of the clock

  “ — then you’d better take it off, hadn’t you.”

  As he holds out his hands towards the boy, one of them — the one with the scar — shakes. Just slightly. Just as it does when he slides the key into the door in his dream. And he is suddenly very aware of how much the back of his throat is starting to ache. He knows he can’t say anything else now, not a single thing more; and anyway, the boy must be able to see the expression on his face in this fiery evening light. And he must know what it means. He must.

  Why else would he slowly, gently grin at him like that, as he begins to slip the coat off, looking him right in the eye, saying —

  “You’re right, Mr F. I better had. Don’t want to wear it out, do we?”

  Beauty slipped the coat off in two distinct movements. The left shoulder was peeled back slowly, carefully (pulling open the collar of his shirt just ever so slightly) — you might say, deliberately. The right, however, was slipped off so easily and apparently carelessly that anyone watching the scene would have thought the boy was trying to prove something — trying to prove, for instance, that nothing at all had just happened, or almost happened, there in the strange golden twilight of that silent room. Or at the very least to prove that whatever it was that might have happened or have been allowed to happen, its moment had definitely just passed. Handing the coat to Mr F as if it was some discarded rag, he collected his jacket off its peg by the door, shrugged it on, hunted briefly through the pockets of his hanging white work-coat till he found his cigarettes, tucked them away in his jacket, and turned to go. At the very last minute, he seemed to suddenly remember something he thought he’d better say before he went; he turned, and framed himself in the doorway exactly as he had done when he’d first appeared.

  “And I’d better get off bloody home anyway — ” he said, cheerfully, “My mother, she’s dreadful if I stop out late.”

  He flashed Mr F one last shadowy grin, and nodded towards the coat.

  “So goodnight, Mr F, and like you said — that’s bloody perfect, that is.”

  And with that, the boy turned on his heel, and went.

  As he clicked the front door of Number Four shut behind him, and jumped down the front steps, Beauty couldn’t help but laugh. It was remembering that look on Mr F’s face when he’d said that line about the coat coming off in a hurry that did it — he knew it was wicked, teasing the old boy like that, but honestly, he just couldn’t help himself. Talk about helpless!

  Beauty has just learnt something, you see; he’s often wondered about Mr F and his funny looks, and now he knows. Oh yes — he knows that feeling, that feeling when your two faces are just a few inches apart, and there’s too much blood in your head, and the next thing that happens has to be a kiss. He’s not stupid. Well, well, well; the randy old goat, he thinks, as he pauses on the bottom step, smiling; I wonder how long that’s been going on. The smile splits into a grin — he couldn’t believe the way the old boy had swallowed that old story about meeting his “friend” up at Aldgate again. She’d been there alright, just as arranged. She couldn’t stop long, because her sister was waiting at home, or something like that — he hadn’t really paid much attention. Not that he’d minded — he was seeing her Sunday anyway. After she’d gone (it must have been that last kiss at the bus-stop that did it) he’d just felt like a cigarette — and reaching into his pocket, had discovered that he’d left the packet at work. Which is why he’d come back.

  He stops, and as he reaches into his pocket for his cigarettes, unconsciously gives a swift tug at his still-half-stiff cock on the way. Pulling out a fag, he starts to whistle — and the sound is echoed down Skin Lane by the high walls of the church. He turns the corner, and starts his walk up the Hill to Mansion House tube station; if there was a tin can lying in the gutter, he’s feeling so bloody good, he’d kick it.

  Up in the workroom, Mr F hears the whistling drift in through the open window.

  Standing there in the middle of the room, he too knows that he’s just learnt something. He knows that he has just had his chance, and that he didn’t take it. Still holding the empty skin of the coat, he strokes it, one last time, and then presses it to his body. Fur absorbs scent easily — it will hold a woman’s perfume, for instance, for days. But now, even when he buries his face deep in the collar, and breathes as deeply as he can, there is no smell of the young man’s hair there at all.

  Mr F looks across the workroom at the naked wooden dummy. At its unfeeling wooden breasts.

  nine

  The black front door clicked shut behind him. He locked it, pocketed the key, and walked down the steps. The palms of his hands had stopped aching — and they’d stopped shaking, thank God — but when he got out on the Lane he noticed that they still felt

  Felt what? What was it, this sensation? Emptiness. The palms of my hands feel empty. Was that it? He tried clenching them into fists, marking his palms with his nails, but it was no relief.

  It was all he could do to keep on walking. He hated these cobbles, sometimes.

  On his way home that night, Mr F tried, but he could think of nothing to help him make sense of what was happening to him. As he turned down All Hallows Lane, past the dying thickets of buddleia (when had it last rained?), the thumping of the blood in his head was amplified by the dull thump of a pile-driver working on the foundations of the wharf, preparing them for the long-threatened demolition work on London Bridge. The sound was as slow and heavy as his heart. How were they ever going to break all that up, he thought, looking up at the bridge? It was impossible — granite, wasn’t it? Not to mention all those hundreds of great slabs he trudged over twice a day. The ones that never wore away, not in a hundred years, not even under all those thousands of feet — thousands of them, every Monday morning… If they were going to do it, he wished they would stop talking about it and just get on with it — tear it down, smash it — but the thumping, as it faded away behind him, sounded interminable. Hopeless.

  The blackened maw of London Bridge Station, looming up to greet him with its stopped clock and screech of train brakes and gunfire of slamming doors, seemed infernal. Like he always did, he snatched a late copy of the Standard, but as he squeezed into his seat on the train, he knew he was going to keep it folded shut. What would be the point? The last thing he needed was all those grubby words chattering and droning away at him again. Who did they think he was — one of those dreadful people they were always writing about, one of those unfortunate girls, one of those men? He felt sorry for them, frankly. The front page of the paper had a big picture of some city going up in flames, (this was the night of July 27th, and the city was Detroit) but that had nothing to do with him either — the last thing he wanted was ink all over the palms of his hands, thank you very much. He sat and stared out of the train window at all the baking roofs of all the houses of all the people he didn’t know.

  When he got home, he let the light from the bloody window wash right over him on the stairs; he didn’t care. Inside, the flat was stifling, even though he’d left the windows open in the bedroom as well as the bathroom; getting ready for bed, he knew that with the air as warm as this, he would have to sleep with just the one sheet to cover him, which he hated. He pulled the coverlet off, and threw it against the wall.

  The sight of the empty bed made him think about the boy.

  He imagined him framed on the blank rectangle of his sheets with some girl — not Maureen this time, but that little girl from Scheiner’s who was always hanging around. He imagined them entangled, tied up in each other — touching each other all over. Sweating. Touching each other like he could never touch him — no, he could never touch him like that. Never touch him in any sort of way at all. Not even his hair. Didn’t he know that if he touched him, he’d hurt him?

  He wished there was something else he could throw against the wall.

  T
here was a thin film of sweat on his back now, and he couldn’t face getting under the sheet. He knew exactly how it would twist and knot round his legs, so he decided to sit out the heat of the night at his kitchen table.

  Sat there with his hands pressed flat on the table to take away the ache in his palms (did someone once tell him to do that when he was a child, keep his hands on the table? Haven’t we seen him make that gesture before?), Mr F decided that he might as well do something useful as just stare at the kitchen wall. He’d smoked enough for one day, so instead of rolling another cigarette, he decided to try and get some of the sentences hammering round his mind out of his head for once and write them down. It was almost the middle of the night by now, and his mind was so tired with the heat and the newspapers and the boy that at first he couldn’t for the life of him remember where he kept his pen or the notepaper and envelopes, but then, after some searching, he found them right where he realised they were supposed to have been all along, which was in the middle drawer of the living-room sideboard. He brought them back into the kitchen, put them down on the table, picked up the pen, sat down, put it down again, thought for a moment, then picked it up again and leant over the paper and started.

  Mr F writes like children write; with that same look of fierce concentration. He screws up his face and breathes heavily through an open mouth, holding the pen so tight that his hand begins to sweat, and cramp. This is a big thing, you see, for Mr F to write his sentences down — to get them out of his head and onto a piece of paper. His wrist aches.