Skin Lane

by Neil Bartlett

  Once inside, he didn’t close the door behind him right away; he paused, and listened to the familiar silence of his hallway. Was it any different this morning? Yes, he decided; it was softer.

  When he did close the door, he pushed it closed slowly, so that he had time to relish that quiet, particular click as the mouth of the mortise accepted the tongue of the lock. Home, he thought.

  He went into the bedroom, and slid his jacket onto its waiting hanger. Then he went into the bathroom, took out his cuff-links, and rolled up his sleeves (the slight sound the links made as he dropped them onto the glass shelf by the washbasin reminded him of that chink of his father’s wedding ring; how odd, he thought, that he should still remember that, after all these years). He didn’t put the light on — not because he was scared of seeing anything untoward reflected in the mirror, but because now there was no need; the first faint glimmer of morning was just beginning to make itself felt outside the bathroom window. And besides, the half-darkness was kind. He didn’t bother to run the hot tap, but instead, just filled the basin with cold. Scooping it up with his big, pale hands, he began to wash them with that same wringing motion that he always used — but this morning the movement was gentle, and patient. Careful. He couldn’t help but recall the sensations he’d felt when he’d run his fingers through Beauty’s hair, and he didn’t want to wash all that away. Not just yet. While he worked, he watched himself, knowing that tonight, there would only be his face in the mirror. Goodness, he looked tired.

  “Still, thirty-three years,” he said quietly to himself. “Not bad.”

  He scooped up two palmfuls of the cool water, and splashed the last of the tears from his face. He even ran his two wet hands back through his hair to dry them, and looked himself straight in the pale blue eye.

  “There,” he said. “That’s better.”

  As he climbed into his bed, Mr F knew he was exhausted. For the first time in a long time, he didn’t even think about how he should arrange his limbs, or what he should think about once the light was off. He was content just to lie there with no pyjama jacket on, without even the sheet pulled up over his naked chest, and to watch the light slowly beginning to draw a definite line beneath his curtains. It wasn’t very long before his eyes closed, his head rolled gently to one side on the pillow, and he slid gently into a long, deep and dreamless sleep.

  4

  “If this is to be permitted, the next questions is:

  To what extent?”

  Hansard, vol.749, p. 1439 (Sexual Offences Bill, 1967)

  Why do they read them to us night after night, those stories — it can’t only be because we beg for them. Perhaps they hope their terrors will be tamed by repetition. Or is it because something in them wants to drum the lesson of that famous final sentence into our receptive heads: “ — and so they lived happily ever after, for years and years and many years to come”? If that is the reason, then their efforts are wasted; Mr F wasn ‘t the only child who was never really interested in or believed those words. To him, as to so many others, they were merely the necessary prelude to the smoothing of the eiderdown and the subdued click of the light-switch. He settled down to sleep each night secure in the knowledge that all the ordeals and tribulations and excitements would be repeated again tomorrow; as his eyes closed, he knew, despite those final words, that the story was not and never could be over.

  He was right, of course. Those stories never do tell you what really happened ever after, do they — or even what happened next. That is not their place; what happens next, as far as they’re concerned, is your affair. They will escort you out of the dark wood, but then you’re on your own. Which I suppose means that now that we’ve reached this particular point in the story, that image of Mr F lying there on his bed as the dawn breaks, eyes closed and head thrown back, asleep in peace at last — that really should be the picture at the bottom of the last page. That ought to be where we leave him.

  However, to soften the blow of his departure, I will tell you everything else I know.

  The most important thing, I suppose, is that Mr F never saw Beauty again. Not even in his dreams.

  Although none of the huddled knot of employees who gathered outside the ruins of Number Four that Monday morning knew it at the time, the preceding Friday afternoon had been the very last time when Scheiner’s of Skin Lane ever really existed as a family firm; certainly, that was the very last time when all our protagonists were ever assembled in the same building at the same time. As it turned out, the shattering of that pane of painted plate glass in the ground-floor window to the right of the front door — an inconsequential detail, you might have thought, amidst so much destruction — was to be prophetic; there was quite literally going to be no “And Sons”, no handing down of the business from one generation to the next. When a distraught Mr Scheiner had telephoned his older brother in Hendon in the early hours of the Sunday morning to tell him the dreadful news of the fire, he had assured him that the business would soon be back on its feet; that evening, however, Beauty’s mother had pointed out to the boy that there was little or no point in him going in to work on the Monday, what with there now being no office for him to actually move down into — he should let his Uncle Morrie get things sorted out with the insurance before anyone made their next move. As the week passed, the boy not unnaturally found himself beginning to think that he actually might be better off out of it, all things considered, and at that Friday night’s supper he announced to his parents that he fancied a change of direction — into men’s retail, for preference. There was some heated discussion across the table, but eventually both his parents conceded the wisdom of their only son’s wishes, and a suitable opening was soon found for him in another relative’s premises, this time at an address in Newburgh Street, Wl. He never went back to the Lane; not once.

  It also became clear, in the course of that difficult week, once the chastening details of his inadequate insurance policy had been explained to him by the bank, that Mr Scheiner was going to be obliged to go into partnership with an existing firm if he was going to stand any sort of a reasonable chance of resurrecting his business. 1967, in consequence, was the last year in which he was listed in the London Fur Trade Directory as trading under his own name. Mrs Kesselman’s stock of silk labels, each one proudly embroidered with that single word in an elegant copperplate, was never replaced — indeed, that red fox coat commissioned by his cousin must have been one of the very last garments to go off the Lane with a Scheiner’s name-tag stitched into its lining. So it wasn’t just the story of Mr F’s obsession or of Beauty’s apprenticeship that came to an end in the flames of that fire; everything that had seemed so tightly interlocked around those premises was, in the space of just a few weeks, dispersed. Since the new partner’s premises were up at Elthorne Road in Archway, and most of the machinists and cutters had already sought employment elsewhere by the time the move was made, almost the entire workforce had to be replaced; a lot of people never saw each other again.

  Mr F, for instance. After thirty-three years — no less — he never went back to Number Four either. Not to work, anyway. When Mr Scheiner asked if he’d be moving out with him to the new premises, he informed him (to Mr Scheiner’s’ considerable astonishment, it must be said; they didn’t part on the best of terms) that he was sorry, but he’d recently been offered a post as a senior cutter with a rival firm round the corner on Great Trinity Lane, and since he very much wanted to stay in the neighbourhood, had decided to accept it. Actually, the second part of this answer at least was a lie. Although he did end up working on Great Trinity, which was only a short stone’s throw’ up Garlick Hill from the Lane itself, the truth of the matter was that he didn’t much mind where he worked now, just so long as it was somewhere new — and so long as he could keep himself to himself when he got there. He didn’t want anyone thinking that they knew him, you see; not now. Not now that I don’t even know myself, was how he put it. He wanted to be able to concentrate on this pecul
iar but not unwelcome feeling of not really knowing what was going to happen to him next for as long as possible, and he knew that staying with Scheiner’s would stop him doing that. He wanted to start over — that was the phrase, he decided. Start a clean slate. For instance, he’d already decided that he was going to insist on everyone at the new premises calling him by his full name, from the very first day. Mr Freeman. It sounded right, somehow.

  As it turned out, the new place suited him. It was smaller, and he liked the fact that he could still take more or less the same walk to work every morning; but he also enjoyed discovering, at ten to eight on the Monday of his second week, that he no longer felt quite so compelled to take his old circuitous route simply in order to avoid the rush-hour crowds. That morning, as he reached the northern end of the bridge, he decided on the spur of the moment to try turning left and walking straight down Cannon Street just like everybody else — and finding that he rather liked it, he stuck to this way of doing things from that moment on. It saved him a good five minutes on his journey — not to mention the fact that that way, he didn’t have to walk past the corner of the Lane first thing every morning. It wasn’t that he was avoiding it as such (the first day he took his new route, he stopped for a moment on the pavement just outside Mansion House tube, and talked this all through with himself); no, he just didn’t want to be reminded of everything every single day, thank you very much. If he did go back, it was going to be deliberately — because he wanted to think about something, or to answer one of his questions. He would visit when he wanted to, and avoid the place without making any great fuss about it the rest of the time. Sounds to me like a good way of doing things, he told himself (standing there, deep in conversation with himself, with the commuters pouring up out of the tube around him — cursing him for getting in their way, some of them). Proper.

  Every time he did go back — which was usually as part of one of his lunchtime walkabouts, and I should say at least once every week, at least for the first few months — the thing he couldn’t help but remember was the way Number Four had looked that very first Monday morning after the fire.

  Although he had prepared himself, the simple fact of turning the corner onto the Lane at ten to eight in the morning and seeing that what had always been there to greet him no longer was, was still a shock. He stopped, dead, and stared.

  The walls of the building had almost entirely gone — and remember, when he had closed the black front door behind him that last time, they had still all been standing. To add to the devastation, the thunderstorms which had been looming over London for days had finally broken late that Sunday afternoon in torrents of rain, and in consequence, there was water lying everywhere. Despite the rain, the stink of burnt fur still hung in the air; because of it, the familiar cobbles of the Lane were coated in a sticky black paste of foul-smelling ashes. Picking his way slowly through the oily puddles, Mr F began to see how complete the destruction had been. Not a single roof-timber or window-frame remained.

  Nobody in the small huddle of people down at the end of the Lane was saying anything. Mrs Kesselman’s girls were standing helplessly around in disconsolate ones and twos, staring in disbelief at the hole where their workplace should have been. Mr F looked for the boy amongst them, but couldn’t see him anywhere; he wasn’t especially surprised, or worried. The feeling was odd — or rather, the absence of feeling; as he stood there, keeping his distance, he realised that in contrast to every other Monday morning of that summer, he didn’t much mind not seeing Beauty one way or the other. Like a lot of other things, Mr F thought to himself, that madness was probably all over now. Seeing the shell of the gutted building, so incongruously filthy and empty in that strong August sunlight, with the City of London scrambling to rush-hour life around it (the eerie silence on the Lane made the traffic up on Cannon Street seem very loud that morning) only confirmed his sense that he had done the right thing, drawing a line under things like that. Making an end.

  Nobody had seen him yet, and he was glad; he wanted to keep this sensation of standing up straighter than he usually did to himself for just a few minutes longer. He looked up at the empty space where the top floor of the building should have been, and thought about his white coat. It should have been hanging on its hook by that gaping door-frame, waiting for him to come and button himself up in it just as he had done every Monday morning for more years than he cared to remember — but he was glad it was now a sodden black rag, lying buried somewhere under all that filthy brick and timber. As he stood there, Mr F wasn’t at all frightened of being discovered or of betraying himself. He knew that no one had the slightest reason to suspect him of any involvement in the fire — and that the only person who knew for certain he had been there that Saturday night had every reason to keep his secret.

  When he finally stepped forward and made his way through the little crowd to the front, looking for Mrs Kesselman, one of the machinists spotted him, and asked him “Are you alright, Mr F?” — as if he should be feeling the loss more deeply than they were; almost as if this was a funeral, and he was immediate family while they were merely guests. This morning, his least favourite question in the world gave him no trouble at all; straightaway, he told her that Yes, thank you, he was fine.

  And he was; underneath the stink, there was an undoubted freshness to the air.

  He found Mrs Kesselman right at the foot of the shattered front steps, staring stony-faced into the sodden remains of her machine-room. Of the eight steps, only the bottom four were left, and even two of those had been split right across by the fierceness of the heat. The metal handrail reared up and away from its wall in a grotesque question mark. Above that, instead of the front door, was simply a gaping hole, giving onto a confusion of twisted metal and charred timbers; there was nothing left. Nothing. He went and stood beside her, thinking that she of all people might need comfort — but when he offered to put an arm round her shoulder she stopped him with a firm but gentle lifting of her hand. I suppose that when it came to twisted girders and scorched walls, Mrs Kesselman had seen a lot worse in 1941. She didn’t turn round — but she did manage half a smile.

  “God willing, all fires should be on shabbas, Mr F; that way, nobody gets hurt but the bank,” she said, quietly.

  “That’s right, Mrs K,” replied Mr F, staring over her shoulder at what he had done. “Thank God nobody got hurt.”

  The euphoria of that morning wore off, of course; Mr F didn’t suddenly forget about Beauty, or become a different person. Often, over the next year, he would catch himself wondering what the boy was doing, or wearing, or saying. But he never tried to find him. The new job suited him, as I said, and he worked at it patiently and silently for the rest of his working life, keeping himself to himself and staying on in the same small top-floor cutting-room until he retired. Everyone there respected him — and always called him by his full name; for some reason, his nickname never caught up with him again. Eventually, as the trade on the Hill began to fail and disperse, this Mr Freeman (as I suppose I should now call him) gained some notoriety at the very end of his career by becoming the very last fur-cutter left working in EC4; although some brokers and commissioners still survived through to the late 1970s, and a very few into the 1980s, his new employers had the distinction of being the last manufacturing furriers working in this part of the City. When he retired, you might say that that strange trade and all its secrets vanished from that dark, crowded nest of streets entirely.

  What happened to everyone?

  Mrs Kesselman — of course — went with her old employer up to Archway, and worked at the new premises until her retirement in 1985. She travelled on the Northern Line all the way up to N19 from her flat in Finsbury every single day; she got stouter, but she never once changed her make-up, her ferocious care for her girls or the colour of her raven’s-wing hair.

  Christine, not surprisingly, took the opportunity to move elsewhere. After three years as a junior machinist at Caiman Links up on Golden Lane, she ma
rried, and moved into a third-floor flat in one of the council blocks that went up at the beginning of the seventies on the top end of the Commercial Road. The young man she shared it with may not have been quite what she’d once thought she was looking for — he worked as an assistant caretaker — but even after her second child was born, she still thought they looked good together. Every weekend, when she dusted her framed wedding photograph, she would still stop and look at it before she replaced it on the sideboard — him in his best dark suit, and her in white duchess satin — and she would still, usually, smile.

  Mr Scheiner, although the fire was a terrible blow to his health, made a good stab at rebuilding his business. He was one of the first in the trade to take seriously the move towards synthetics and “fun” furs — coney, dyed mink, fake sheared beaver — that characterised the end of the decade. One of his first big earners on the new premises, only two seasons after the fire, was a mini-length coat in synthetic red fox. The garish colours, and the assembly-line work required, had almost nothing to do with the traditions of the firm; but the mark-up was fabulous. He finally ceased trading in 1977. (The original of that coat, by the way, was a great success during its short career; a couple of its nocturnal outings were even marked by the excited glare of flashbulbs. Eventually it was put into cold storage, having been replaced by something even more expensive — this one having been bought for its wearer by, it must be said, a man with real money — but even while it was locked away in darkness, its glamour and beauty continued to wreak their havoc. One photograph of Maureen wearing it to a first night made it onto page three of the Evening Standard, and was later widely reproduced as one of the defining images of the decade. You may be sure that over the years plenty of other young women noted the expression on her face as she stared so boldly straight into the camera out of that crowd, her flaming hair piled high on her head, and knew in their hearts that if she could do it, then so could they.)