Skin

by Tobias Hill

  I put down the cloth. ‘Yes. We spoke yesterday.’

  She shrugs. ‘Maybe.’ She reaches back, over her shoulders, tying up tendrils of her hair as she talks. ‘I remember you from a long time ago. We were lovers, no?’

  I nod. She laughs, eyes bright half-moons. ‘I knew it. I knew we were.’ She leans towards me. ‘We were married. In the cathedral in Rio. The stained glass made my white dress green and blue and yellow.’

  ‘No. We were never married.’

  ‘We were. You can’t change it if that’s what I think.’

  I take her hands. My forearms are trembling. I am exhausted already. I am so sick. And she is so full of life.

  ‘Listen to me. We went to Rio because of what you did in Salvador, to your father. We had to leave. And in Rio I took you to the doctors, to cure you. Do you remember that? You are not well, Mercedes.’

  She is looking out of the window. Rain patters against the glass, catching light as it runs down.

  She touches her forehead. ‘They hurt me.’

  ‘Yes. They gave you electric shock treatment. For a while you remembered everything. But you relapsed. I came back to the hotel and you were gone. I have been looking for you since then.’

  She twists round towards me, fierce. Out of order. ‘I can do anything I want. They were wrong, I don’t want memory. I can dream anything.’ She sneers, challenging. ‘What do you dream?’

  ‘I have never dreamed, Mercedes. I don’t need to. My sleep is peaceful because I have nothing to learn. I know about your father. More than you know. Shall I tell you?’

  Our voices echo in the tiled room. Terri looks over. ‘Oy, what are you two jabbering on about?’

  Without realising, we have been talking in Portuguese. I feel pain and look down. Mercedes is gripping my arms with her nails.

  ‘I know better than you,’ she says. ‘My father is a New Yorker. He sells sports cars. Diablos and Jaguars. They cost too much for people like you.’ I shake my head as she talks.

  ‘Your father was a pimp and your mother was a whore.’ She punches my face hard. Neville laughs and slaps his thigh. The skinhead goes on eating, head down.

  ‘Every night your father’s restaurant was full of his whores. He was greedy and stupid, like my own parents. Then one day you killed a chicken, just for kicks. He was angry when he found out and he beat you, for the first time. It’s all true, Mercedes.’

  She is shaking her head, narrow-eyed, as if I am trying to sell her something rotten. I keep talking.

  ‘So you did what you wanted to do. You followed him into the restaurant toilet and cut the wire on the electric fan in there and left it against the metal wall of his cubicle. The fire that started with his body burned down the whole restaurant. They say his ashes stank of shit.’

  She slaps me again. I don’t feel it. I’m smiling. ‘You killed your father like you killed the chicken, Mercedes.’

  She smiles brightly. ‘But I don’t remember.’

  ‘That’s why I am here. To remember for you. I promised I would. We are like two halves, Mercedes. I am your conscience, and I have come back to be with you forever.’

  I find I have nothing more to say. At the periphery of my vision I can see Neville standing, Terri with her arms folded, the skinhead eating. I can smell the fumes of the chip vats, oil vaporising at boiling-point. Mercedes has the handle of the strainer in her right hand. The knuckles are white. She is crouched slightly against its laden weight, ready to throw. Her face is snarled around the nose and teeth.

  ‘No. Oh no.’ Tears shine in the wrinkles of her skin. ‘Oh no.’ Her tears soak together with her sweat. I touch her arm and it falls to her side.

  ‘I’m sorry, my love. I am only here to help. Come here. Come.’ I hold her. She hangs broken in my arms. It’s a long time before she stops crying. The rain has eased off. Over her shoulder I watch a wasp drone in with its yellow cargo of vindication.

  Brolly

  ‘Why can’t they play indoors?’ says Rebecca. ‘Why don’t they just play on the damn computer till they drop? Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do now? There’s satanists and god knows what in the woods, even when it’s light. Foxes nailed up and hedgehog skins where the tinkers eat them. Ripped-up porno mags.’

  ‘And no one gets raped in virtual reality, do they? Anyway, you know what they’ll be doing in there. Safe as houses.’

  ‘What’ll they be doing?’ Pam looks up at her husband, handsome in his casual holiday clothes. Who would’ve thought it, she thinks. Me and him. Let his kiddies get lost. All the more of Kent for me.

  ‘Oh.’ Kent waves his hands like a conductor, fetching up words. ‘One of them has the brolly and a blindfold and has to get home. Tappity-tap, crashing into bushes. The others stop the poor bugger from falling down manholes.’ He taps a knife against the dishes on the garden table. It chimes delicately on the translucent willow-pattern of the cups.

  ‘We used to play a similar game when I was young,’ says Lily. ‘There was an uncle on the Dublin side of the family who was killed by a toothbrush. He bit the head off and it lodged in his windpipe. I suppose he must have been tipsy, don’t you think? And the object of the game was to find an object that couldn’t kill.’ She smiles with her overbright dentures. ‘Awfully difficult.’

  ‘That’s completely different, mummy. That’s a theoretical game,’ says Rebecca. ‘And they do not all help, Kent. One of them spends the entire afternoon scaring the others sick.’ She clicks open chrome-tinted sunglasses, puts them on. They effectively conceal the extent of her anger. She shakes her head and lights a cigar. The smoke is warm against her skin in the cold autumn sunlight. ‘They should be indoors. Why are they so bloody violent?’

  ‘I suppose they just make do with what they have until they find the words,’ says Kent. ‘Isn’t that what we did? Heavens, there’s nothing wrong with Brolly. Fine game, family tradition. Morally sound, too. Help thy neighbours and all that. You used to love it, Becky, before you got all those dear little responsibilities.’ He looks down at the five children sprawled in the long grass. Rebecca’s three, his two. Talking.

  ‘You should patent it, love,’ says Pam.

  Kent grins. ‘Absolutely. Make a mint.’ He leans back in his wicker chair with a creak. ‘There’s something about cousins, don’t you think? Family but not family. They might end up getting married and having monstrous children. Very interesting power politics. Mother, will you pass those sandwiches? The ones with the fishes in.’

  ‘“Fish”, and they’re anchovies, Kent. Don’t pretend to be ignorant. Here. I don’t know what you mean about the children. What strange ideas you have recently,’ says Lily. She moves with great care, since her bones are as fragile as the chipped and mended teacups on the table. It lends her grace. Her daughter and daughter-in-law watch her with benign envy. Little cows, thinks Lily.

  ‘All the better to see you with, ma,’ leers Kent, and Pam scoffs a laugh, cake crumbs tumbling across her chin.

  ‘Pam,’ says Kent, ‘if you’re going to laugh then do it properly, for Christ’s sake.’

  He turns away from his wife, from all the women, shielding his eyes against the sun. The children have finished their own picnic. Now they lie talking in a circle. Roman emperors, thinks Kent. Between them, the black spear of Kent’s City brolly leans from the turf. Lily’s red silk headscarf trails from the curved handle. Like a pennant. ‘What are they waiting for?’ Kent asks.

  ‘Not noon yet, stupid,’ says Rebecca. Her younger brother winces in his broker’s shirtsleeves. ‘Brolly game starts at noon. Don’t you remember anything?’

  Kent squints up at the sun, high above Lily’s rambling limestone house. He hopes that Jeremy is Dog.

  Pam peers down at the children. ‘What are they up to now?’ she says.

  ‘Talking,’ says Kent. ‘Just talking.’ Bargaining, he thinks. Raising the stakes. He feels a rush of adrenaline. Jealousy working outwards like a hormone from some small and twisted glan
d. Rebecca sighs, missing London, its isolation. The tea cools as they wait.

  They lie in the sun and bargain to be Dog.

  ‘Rachel just wants to help whoever’s Mixie,’ says Matthew, rolling down his shirtsleeves. ‘That means it’s between us four.’ Pulls the shirtsleeves over his hands and begins to tear nettle leaves from their waspy stalks.

  ‘Everyone can be Dog or Mixie. That’s how it works,’ says Jeremy. He rolls a cigarette from a horse-chestnut leaf. Its sap feels cold and sticky on his fingertips. He looks across at Karen, flat on her back in the sun. Black hair fanned and tangled in the thistles. ‘No one changes Brolly rules.’ Unrolls the flat green knife of the leaf. Rolls it again. ‘We’ve got fifteen minutes till noon. And everyone gets a spliff if I’m Dog. I’ll roll them up on the way and we can smoke them by the bird-bridge. Best Brolly ever.’

  Matthew isn’t listening, has wandered away. ‘I’ll be Dog,’ he calls. ‘A hundred nettle leaves.’

  Red-cheeked, like a bloody cub-scout, thinks Jeremy.

  ‘Fuck off, Matt,’ says Karen. She turns her head towards the rape fields below the woods. Sick name for flowers, she thinks. ‘Nettles are for kids. Last year was the cat-in-the-box. This time has to be worse than that. And weed’s boring. Leonard’s too young, anyway. He’ll get stoned out of his skull and puke up.’

  ‘But it’d be nice, in the woods,’ says Rachel. She sits beside Leonard with her dress yanked down over her knees. If I help him, Jeremy won’t make me be Mixie, she thinks.

  Karen sits up. Graceful, like her grandmother. She pulls tares and thistledown from her hair. ‘It won’t be nice. Leonard’ll fall down a rabbit-hole and we won’t get to play until next year.’

  Leonard watches his sister with bruised-looking eyes, washed-out face. I’m too big to fall down rabbit-holes, he thinks. He takes something out of his parka pocket and holds it in his lap.

  ‘Let me be Dog,’ he says softly, making it a question. He has been waiting to say it for three days. He holds the object in both hands, as if it is precious and delicate.

  Like Dad’s hand was in the hospital, thinks Karen, and looks uphill at her mother. She has put on her sunglasses, which means she is sad or angry. Karen hopes that she is sad.

  ‘Whoever eats this can be Dog,’ says Leonard. ‘I’ll eat it.’ He is holding a Sesame Street pencil-case, floppy imitation leather. Big Bird and the Cookie Monster are eating the moon.

  Jeremy swears and laughs. ‘What’s in it, fucking Smarties? Shut up, Lenny. I’ll be Dog and we can all have a nice smoke down in the hollow, OK?’ He stands up, brushes off his black jeans.

  ‘I think Jeremy should be Dog,’ says Rachel.

  Smart little sister, thinks Jeremy, and: Look at me, Dad. I’m the king of the castle.

  ‘What you got in there, little Len?’ Matthew squats down by his brother. ‘Sweeties?’ He takes the pencil-case, feels its weight. Soft and dense, like a bag of frogspawn. He drops it at the thought, picks it up quickly. Unzips it carefully and wrinkles his face. Savagely, an animal’s snarl.

  ‘Bloody Jesus, Leonard, what is this shit?’ Jeremy leans over to see. The case is brimfull with an ivory foam, flecked with tiny threads of emerald. The threads twist slowly in the murk. Dying, thinks Jeremy.

  ‘It’s spit and greenies,’ says Rachel shrilly, and bursts into giggles.

  ‘No it ain’t,’ says Leonard angrily.

  Karen comes over, bored. ‘“Isn’t”, Leonard. Talk properly if you’re going to talk. It’s cuckoo-spit.’ She sounds surprised. The green larvae twist in their protective wombs of white froth. ‘Loads of them. Where did you get them, Matt?’ Her brothers both look at her guiltily.

  ‘Me?’ says Matthew. ‘I’ve never seen this before. Never seen so much cuckoo-spit in my life.’

  Leonard stands up. His grey hair brushes the bottom of Jeremy’s bomber jacket. ‘It’s mine. I found it,’ he says. ‘I got it in the fields yesterday and the day before and I’ll eat it. That’s better than spliffs.’ He darts a look at Jeremy, a tiny current of electricity. A threat.

  Jeremy hoists the umbrella out of the ground, across his shoulders. Drapes his hands on it. ‘There’s no way you’re going to be Dog. Who’s going to be scared of you? What are you going to do, howl? You’ll sound like a fucking poodle.’ Matthew and Rachel laugh in their thin church-choir voices. ‘No one can eat that crap. It’s poisonous, otherwise the sparrows’d eat it. I’m the Dog. Now let’s go to the bird-bridge and choose the Mixie.’

  Leonard stares down at the pencil-case held to his chest. ‘I’ll eat it,’ he whispers. ‘If I eat it, I’ll be Dog.’

  Rachel puts her arm over his skinny shoulders. ‘You can’t eat it, Lenny. It’s poison. You’ll die. You’ll go green like the little worms and then you’ll die.’

  Leonard throws her arm off. He watches the others with his sleepless owl-eyes. ‘If I eat it, I’m the Dog,’ he says.

  ‘Jesus,’ says Jeremy, too loud.

  ‘Don’t swear, Jeremy,’ Lily calls from the hill.

  They all look up at the people, high up at a white table and dark against the sky. Then Jeremy throws the brolly down and rakes a hand across the stubble on his cheeks. He remembers last year. The cat-in-the-box. They had caught it and hidden it by the bird-bridge, starved it for two days. Karen had almost put her hand in but the animal had hissed like an adder in the scratching and darkness. Jeremy had done it, so he had been Dog. It didn’t hurt because the day before he’d closed the cat’s mouth with chicken-wire, round and round. Afterwards he’d shot it in the rape fields. It took seventeen shots with the air-rifle. Red blood in the yellow field. Got to be the maddest, he thinks.

  He looks down at the thin little boy with the Sesame Street pencil-case. ‘I think it’s poison, Lenny,’ he says softly, ‘but go on and do it. You might go blind like the rabbits with myxomatosis, with the moony eyes. The Mixies. But if you’re alive, you can be Dog.’

  Leonard kneels down, like in church. Matthew crowds in behind him. He looks down at the pencil-case. The Cookie Monster leers at him with a crazy grin as he pulls debris from a blue cookie-moon. Leonard brings it to his lips and thinks, Is it poison? He closes his eyes. It doesn’t seem important. If the poison is slow, he can be Dog first. He begins to drink the warm, bitter fluid in swift, deep gulps. Smells its decay, three days old.

  ‘Oh my God,’ whispers Karen. She gazes down at her little brother with a smile on her lips. Rachel sneers with disgust. It is over in a few seconds. Leonard leans back against Matthew’s thighs.

  ‘Are you OK?’ says Matthew. ‘Lenny? What was it like?’

  Like poison, thinks Leonard. He tries not to cry. A sourness like grass-blood stings his guts. He draws a breath and feels it shudder in and out, the body’s reluctance to accept it. There is a rushing in his ears like a strong wind in the heavy trees of summer.

  The cuckoo is a monster, he thinks. It kills its cousins and hoots with laughter. Its heart is rotten with green worms and it spits them in the fields. Birds fall dead from the sky when they eat the cuckoo’s spit.

  ‘Don’t fucking die on us, Leonard,’ says Jeremy, high above.

  Leonard’s belly contracts, his eyes fly open. He rolls forward onto all fours and vomits into the long grass. Hears Rachel laughing, laughing.

  Karen pulls a tiny lace handkerchief out of her denim jacket. She wipes her brother’s mouth with it. ‘How are you feeling, soldier?’ she asks.

  Leonard staggers up. ‘I’m Dog, ain’t I?’ His voice is clogged and nasal. He gives a sickly grin.

  ‘You puked it up, Lenny,’ says Jeremy. He shrugs. ‘Maybe if you’d kept some down, but you spilled your guts. There’s nothing in you, so you didn’t eat it. Sorry, mate.’ He stands up and stretches, the brolly in his upraised hand.

  Karen walks up to him, too close. The soiled lace is balled in one fist. ‘You don’t bloody well decide, Jeremy. We all do.’ She looked better last year, thinks Jeremy. When she was Mixie. He smiles brightl
y. Fox-teeth, like his father’s.

  ‘Well then, we’ll have to vote on it, won’t we?’ He points the umbrella at Leonard. ‘How many for this sick little prick?’

  Rachel watches, braiding her hair, uninvolved. Matthew raises his hand until he sees that Karen has turned away. He lowers it, wipes his nose self-consciously. Karen kicks at a bank of cow-parsley and feels the anger build inside her. She wants to leap on Jeremy, scratch out his eyes and she may, in the woods. She knows Leonard is too weak to be Dog. She looks away from him, towards the bracken and the gloom of the pines.

  ‘That’s that, then,’ says Jeremy to Leonard. They have been left facing each other. The older boy looks briefly up the hill, then takes out a packet of ten Benson & Hedges. Lights up, blue smoke drifting up towards the sun’s apex. ‘Next year, yeah? Benny Hedgehog?’

  Leonard takes one miserably. His hand shakes a little and he tries to hide it. The heavy tar numbs his throat, burns away the cold poison. ‘Yeah. Next year. Thanks.’ He tries to smile but his inarticulate white face only grimaces.

  Jeremy looks at his watch to hide his distaste. ‘One minute to noon!’ he shouts.

  Matthew jumps up, shocked, and grins. ‘Race the lot of you,’ he calls. ‘To the bird-bridge!’

  Rachel screams and runs after him. Jeremy puts out his cigarette on his heel and smiles at Leonard. ‘Come on then, you nutter.’

  He jogs towards the bracken. Leonard stands, the excitement rising inside him. Brolly, the only game that never changes. He sways a little.

  Karen grabs him from behind. ‘Come on, Leonard. Race you!’ and he does. Into the echoing cave of elders and beeches. The world is fragmented with tears but he blinks and it comes together again. He smiles. Over the woods their shouts and calls reverberate and vanish.

  No One Comes Back from the Sea

  December

  ‘“Sing me one of your songs, commanded the Captain as they drove off together, with Bumpy at the back, licking Noddy’s ear every now and again. So Noddy sang.