Isabel's Skin

by Peter Benson

  So I took precise, deliberate steps. I wished I knew the game of chess, but I did not. I wished I knew about climbing mountains, about the careful steps climbers take. I thought about books I had read. Books where people who did not want to but were forced to had to get rid of bodies they were not responsible for and did not want in their bedrooms, barns, gardens or fields. I remembered the stories, but could not remember what they were called or who wrote them. Usually I am good at remembering titles and authors. I have to be, but in my garden I was not.

  First, I fetched his horse. It was standing where he had tied it, head down, dripping, steaming from its flanks. I led it around the back of the house to the barn, opened the spare stable door and tapped it inside. It snorted at my horse, but was grateful for the dry. Then I led my own horse to the gig, harnessed it and whispered in its ear. I had heard that horses know English but cannot understand a word of French or German. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I’ll be back.”

  I went to the garden shed, chose a spade from the wall, put it in the gig and then went back to the garden. I felt sick. I gagged. I held myself in, took a deep breath and pulled Hunt across the grass, through one of the flower beds and some of the borders and onto the path. He was heavy, and the rain made the job difficult, and when I reached the gig I had to heave him up like a sack of rocks and push him onto the seat with my feet. As I pushed him, little popping noises came from his nose, and he groaned. I jumped, fell out and landed on my back. The rain did not stop. I opened my mouth, let it fill with water and stood up. He did not groan again, but he started to leak. He leaked on the seat and floor, slime, water and blood. The horse started to whinny and stamp, so I soothed it again, and then went indoors.

  Isabel was sitting in the kitchen. She had blood on her hands and my father’s coat was covered in blood, and blood was on the floor. She said, “Is he dead?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s a lot of death.”

  “Yes,” I said, and I went to the bathroom and washed my hands. I went to the bedroom and packed some fresh clothes in a bag – trousers, a shirt, a pullover and a coat. When I came back I said, “I’m going for a drive.” I looked at my watch. “I’ll be an hour or two. Maybe longer.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Where do you think?”

  “I don’t know, David! I can’t read your mind!”

  “I’m going to get rid of him!” I pointed out of the window. She looked at the gig. “And while I’m doing that, you can clean the mess up!” I pointed to the blood on the floor. “And you can give me that!” I pointed at my father’s coat.

  She ripped it off. A button popped, flew across the room and clattered against the window. She threw it at me, ran to the bedroom and slammed the door. I stood and held my father’s coat in my hands, put it to my nose and smelt the edge of something he had once said to me. Something about being true to yourself and never allowing pain to take you over. And then I thought about yelling something at the bedroom door – but I did not, and I left without pouring two cups of tea and fetching some biscuits.

  How many times in your life do you find yourself with a leaking corpse in a gig? Never. Or, if you are unlucky, once. And if you are unluckier, you think too much about what you have to do. You think and your thoughts crinkle at the edges, gather in the centre and end up pulling at the loose ends of your mind. Your mind spins out and the bits wrinkle until they spill. You pull in the opposite direction but it does not help. It does not help at all, but maybe you did not want it to. Maybe all you wanted was sleep, and the poor desperate love you felt drowned like roughed feathers in ink.

  I drove west, through Blakeney, towards Wells. The wind was still blowing, but the rain had stopped. The clouds raced, and here and there streaks of lit blue sky showed through. I drove carefully, and concentrated on not thinking. I did not think about Hunt and I did not think about Isabel, and I did not think about the time when I used to be pleased and thought I was so clever. I did not think about my father and his reading. Nothing could make me shift my focus. Everything I saw seemed bright and clear and sharp. A bird. Another bird, brown with white wings and a crest on its head. And I was calm. I surprised myself, but not enough to make me jump.

  I had propped Hunt so he looked asleep, covered him with my father’s old coat and laid a blanket over that. I did not look at him. I looked straight ahead and breathed. When I reached Wells, I kept my head down, but everyone I saw was walking with their backs bent and their own heads down, or hiding from the weather. Shop canopies flapped, signs were swinging and wet birds huddled in rows.

  A few miles beyond Holkham there was a bend in the road. I slowed down until I found a narrow track that ran into the damp land between the verge and the sea. It was not marked or signposted – if you passed it at speed you would not notice it – but I remembered it from the previous year. I turned off the main road and drove down the track until I reached a kink where it split in two, and this second track disappeared into the marshes, narrowed, twisted and dropped into a hidden dip.

  I stopped the horse in the middle of the dip and stared at a curtain of reeds. A few spots of rain blew into my face. I turned and looked at Hunt. His head had slipped out of the blanket, blood had dribbled onto the floor, and even dead he did not look relaxed. He looked as though he was taking a break between angry sentences and would sit up in a minute, wipe the blood from his mouth and shout something about fools.

  “All right,” I said to him, but he did not move or say anything. “Are you ready?” Nothing.

  I heard a carriage on the main road – the wind, the drag of waves on the shingle, bird calls. Once I had wanted to identify every bird I saw, but now I was not bothered, because all the birds I wanted to know anything about had flown away. All my senses were tuned like needles to what I was doing there. I felt no panic or alarm. The noise of the carriage faded away, the smell of mud and salt rose in the wind, and the taste of salt filled my mouth.

  I jumped down from my seat and stepped into a puddle. I cursed, spat and then I pulled Hunt down and laid him in the mud. There was blood everywhere, and I said a word of regret to my father’s coat. Regret is, I suppose, inevitable, but I did not like to think about it, dwell on it or wonder. There was no time.

  I took the spade and went to the middle of the dip of land, and I started to dig. I suppose you could say I was lucky, for the sods came away easily, and the ground was soft. I worked for half an hour and had the grave about three feet deep when the sides started to collapse, and water started to fill the bottom. There was nothing I could do, so I carried on, heaving the mud out and piling it in a ridge above me.

  At some point – I have no idea when – a break appeared in the clouds, and a thin cut of sunlight fell on the marshes. As it crept towards me, I stopped digging and watched, and made some sort of connection between the sky and dead Professor Hunt. I do not know, but maybe madness is contagious and I had caught a dose. I was not going to let it touch me, so when the sunlight faded away and the clouds rubbed the place where it had been, I went back to my digging, deeper and deeper until I thought I was six feet down.

  How does a grave-digger climb out of his graves? A ladder, I suppose. I propped the spade against the side, stepped onto its handle and hauled myself out, lay down, picked the spade out and looked at my work. Maybe it was too narrow, but I had no choice and no time. I stepped to Hunt’s body and, without stopping to think, put my foot against his waist and pushed him in. He rolled easily and dropped into the grave. He stuck about two foot down, his arms jammed against the sides. There was nothing I could do, so I took the spade and smashed it against his shoulders until he fell to the bottom, his head twisted to one side, his arms splayed and his legs crooked. He looked less like a dead man, more like a collection of parts someone had put together and left to rot.

  Now I stripped off my clothes, tossed them over the body and changed into the clean trousers and shirt and jacket. Then, aching and tired and feeling desperate
with fear and more fear, I started to shovel the earth back. As the first clods hit the body, they made sickening thuds, and as the weight of earth started to push down, I heard the last wheeze of the man’s death. I can hear it now – a low, lonely whisper, something from the hell he made, and I had to walk away and empty my guts before going back and finishing the awful work.

  Nothing was out of place. I laid the broken sods over the grave and spread reeds around, and when I stepped back, even the marshes looked right, the way they waved in the breeze and the way birds rustled through them to the sea. I went back to the gig, whipped the horse around and started to drive away from the place, eyes right and left, right and left, and then I was on the main road and clipping back towards Holkham with the wind at my back and the sting of the first drops of a new storm on my neck.

  I do not know how long it took me to get home, but I did not stop, did not look over my shoulder and did not care when my clothes were soaked with freezing rain and I felt my muscles chattering. I just pushed the horse on, head down, through the marshes, down the road, around the bend, into Holkham, through Holkham, out of Holkham and into Wells. I wanted to stop, I wanted a cup of tea, a plate of biscuits and a view through a steamed window, but my eyes would not let me stop. I looked ahead.

  As I was taking the road from town, my heart began to scream. It started quietly, but by the time I could see the track to my place it was bursting my ears and twisting in my chest. It scraped like a wheel against a rock, going nowhere but wishing to be everywhere at once, from a place on a warm beach to a seat beside a gentle Scottish river. A florist’s stall on Leather Lane, bookshops on the Charing Cross Road, a mews house in Stoke Newington. A little public house in Edinburgh. Places my heart wanted – and it screamed louder; I put my head down, gasped, turned onto my track and stopped. I fell out of the gig, collapsed in the mud, opened my mouth and let the rain fill me. My heart skipped, and stopped for a moment. I lay back and listened to my body think about dying. It thought for a second. I heard it whisper to my feet, and my feet moved. My heart kicked in my chest and I took a huge, gasping breath. Water fountained out of my mouth. I looked towards my house. It looked quiet and waiting. The marshes thrashed and sucked, and when I was ready I stood up again, unhitched the horse, led it to the stable and piled some hay in the crib. I went back to the gig. The rain had washed most of Hunt’s blood away, but I tossed some buckets of water on the stains that remained, wiped them clean with a cloth and went indoors.

  The sweet sickly smell hit me as soon as I walked in. Isabel was sitting by the fire, her head between her knees. The kitchen table was covered in the smashed remains of phials, and the stuff she had to inject was dripping on the floor.

  “Isabel?”

  “What?”

  “What has happened?”

  “My grandmother used to tell me – never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.”

  I went to the table, dipped my fingers in the stuff and sniffed them. “Oh God.”

  “And she was a wise woman.”

  “What have you done?”

  “What does it look like?”

  “But I thought we were going to wait until we had word from William. We were going to…”

  “You thought, David, and that’s all it was. A thought. I said nothing.” I went to the sink and washed my face and hands. It made no difference. I couldn’t get the smell off my skin. When I came back she said, “And what did you do with him?”

  “I buried him.”

  She smiled. “Good.”

  “What did you do with the knife?”

  “It’s in there.” She pointed to the fire.

  I picked up a poker, sifted through the ashes and found the blade. It had turned blue and grey, and the handle had burned away. I pulled it out, picked it up with the tongs and took it outside. As I stepped off the veranda, the rain hissed on the metal. I dunked it in a water butt, carried it to the shed, wrapped it in a bag and hid it in a gap between the roof and the walls. When I went back to the house, I started to spoon some of the potion off the table into an egg cup. Before she had a chance to ask me what I was doing I said, “I’m not giving up.”

  She stood up, smashed the egg cup out of my hand, fetched the kettle from the stove and splashed water over the table. The substance diluted and ran away in streams. She filled the kettle again and poured it over the remains, said “I have” and went to the bedroom. I heard the bed springs go and the sound of sheets rustling. I followed her, sat on a chair by my mother’s dressing table and said “So that’s it, is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to die?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s pointless. Useless. I’m a freak, I’m going blind, I’ve killed someone and I hurt everywhere.”

  “You’re going blind?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t tell me that.”

  She shrugged. “Everything’s going pale. I feel like I’m looking at things through milk.”

  “I don’t want you to die.”

  “And you have a say in this?”

  “I saved you.”

  “Saved me?” She laughed. “I don’t think you did.”

  “I helped you get away from Hunt.”

  “And what good did that do?”

  “I… you…”

  “Yes?”

  “You flew a kite.”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Oh yes.” She rolled the words around her mouth like they were food, and her eyes softened towards me. “The kite. Thank you for that.”

  I was going to say something else, but did not bother. I went outside, stood in the sodden garden and stared at the place where Hunt had died. The rain had turned to a whipping drizzle, and the daylight was fading as I walked out of the gate and into the reeds, down to the shore and the place where we had flown the kite. The sea fumed, the shingle crashed and the sails of a distant ship winked through the spray. I looked west and I looked east, and suddenly all my weaknesses collapsed around me. I watched them fail, crumble and die, and I sat down, put my head between my knees and felt that nothing mattered any more, nothing in London or in Norfolk, or in my head as I turned and spun and let the sea smash me down to the end.

  The storm was failing in the morning, and when I sat up in bed and listened I could hear the shingle being pulled and torn as if it was the edge of a dress in a fight. I turned and looked at Isabel, and she looked at me. She had cried in the night, cried at herself and me and the weather, and now she said, “Was I ungrateful?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “I’m sorry if I was.”

  “You’ve got much to be ungrateful about.”

  “I’ve got more than much to be ungrateful about.” She stretched out her arms and rubbed them together. A few scales dropped off her elbow.

  “I know.”

  “And I want to see my grandmother,” she said, and she turned away from me, buried her head in her pillow and whispered, “Grandmother… I wanted to help her.”

  “I know,” I said, but my words were foolish and weak, so I went to make a pot of tea. As I stood at the window I looked north, waited for the water to boil and waited for retribution. I waited and I lived and listened to the wind finger at the place I had mended on the roof. It was working its way under the felting and trying to pop the nails. This place – I thought – this place does not need to be made from wood and nails, but this place is. And this place – I thought – does not need to hold us like a fist.

  I made the tea, took her a cup and said “I’ve got to go out today.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve just got to get away from this place.”

  “I’ll come,” she said.

  “If you want.”

  We dressed without talking, and while I fetched the horse and harnessed the gig, she stared at the sky and wept. We were desperate and sad, angry and silent.

  I did not drive fast. When we reached
Salthouse, I whipped the horse past the houses and carried on to Weybourne, and when we were past Weybourne I drove on to Sheringham. I took the road to Pretty Corner, and when we reached a clearing I stopped and we sat and looked down from the ridge to the sea, and watched the waves rolling in. The sun broke through the clouds and spread shafts of bright, clean light on the world, and as birds came out to sing we went for a walk.

  She wore her coat, a scarf and boots, and as we walked she took my arm. She squinted at the path and rubbed her eyes. “Why can’t I see?” she said, but I did not have an answer for her.

  The woods were thick and wet. Beech, birch, ash and fir trees covered the ridge, damp dead leaves were deep along the path, and the air was dark with regret. There were places we passed that reminded me of places I had seen in Somerset, but I did not say anything. Maybe Isabel was reminded of somewhere in Dorset, a place where she used to play when she was small, but she did not say anything either. Only the pad of our footsteps, the call of late birds and the last gasps of the storm disturbed the silence, and when we reached a clearing with a view of the ocean we sat down on a fallen log.

  The waves rolled in and the clouds swirled over our heads, and after a few minutes she said, “When I was five, I found something in woods like this.”

  “What?”

  “We were on holiday in Cornwall, staying in a cottage on the side of a hill. Mother and Father love walking, and it was lovely there. We used to go out every day. One day they found a forest trail.” She pointed down the path. “I ran on ahead.” She squinted at the path. “I always used to do that.”

  “So did I.”

  “I remember… I came to this clearing. There was a little stream I had to jump across, and a circle of trees. I could hear Mother calling for me, but I didn’t stop walking until I was in the middle of the clearing. There were flowers growing in the grass, little yellow ones shaped like stars. I sat down and started picking some. I wanted to make a posy…” She stopped, turned and looked at me. A fly had landed on her forehead. It was walking across the scales, picking at the gaps between them. I reached up to brush it away and said, “And?”