Original Skin

by David Mark

  Everett swallowed his story about wanting to warn Councillor Hepburn about the newspaper investigation. McAvoy had even been commended by the tall, ferrety man for his diplomacy and foresight, and had managed to keep his mouth shut about Simon Appleyard. He had been starting to let himself think he could still make it home in time to bathe the little ones when he had been asked to cast his expert eye over a speech Everett was due to present. It took hours. McAvoy has many times rued the day he first put together an expenditure report for a committee briefing. It had been coherent, simple to follow, and correctly spelled. In Everett’s eyes, it had marked him out as a borderline genius and the go-to guy for any job that required somebody who doesn’t move his lips when he reads.

  “How was it?” Roisin asks quietly, leading him into the kitchen so as not to wake Fin. “You a naughty boy?”

  McAvoy manages a little laugh. “I think Hepburn has friends in high places,” he says.

  “Let’s hope they’re going to jump,” she replies, setting to work making him a sandwich with fresh bread and homemade jam.

  “I can’t have been out of there thirty seconds before he made a call,” he says, taking a swig of the glass of milk she hands him. “He was okay when I was there.”

  “Arsehole.”

  She hands him his sandwich. Watches him take a bite. Seems pleased with his grunt of appreciation.

  McAvoy notes she is wearing the same clothes she had on this morning.

  “I could bathe you,” he says through his dinner. “Candles. Wash your hair. Shave your legs. Paint your nails.”

  Roisin grins. “Sounds lovely,” she says. “But let’s just go to bed. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  McAvoy wonders if he has the strength to keep pace with whatever surprise she has planned. He is about to suggest they just hold each other when she gives a bright smile. “Wait here,” she says, and runs from the kitchen.

  Puzzled, McAvoy finishes his sandwich. Drains his drink. Takes a chocolate biscuit from the tin by the microwave and polishes it off in a bite.

  Like a deflating bouncy castle, he folds himself into the kitchen chair and drops his head to the table. He closes his eyes. Treats himself to a moment devoid of thought.

  It hits him then. Just how reckless he has been. How disloyal and vain. He has been pursuing proof of his own instincts. He has been trying to vindicate a feeling. While he has been trying to prove that he can sense a crime the same way his father can smell the nearness of snow, a real investigation has gone tits up, and the only colleague who truly believes in him has been attacked by dogs.

  Simon Appleyard.

  He decides it’s time to make the case more official. He will approach one of the detective superintendents in regular CID tomorrow. Tell him there is a case to be looked into. Take the withering looks and jaded sighs and simply insist that the investigation is carried out, and properly.

  “Don’t be cross.”

  Roisin is standing in the doorway. She is smiling and has changed into a silkier nightdress. Her hair is piled high on top of her head, exposing her dark, scented neck.

  McAvoy blinks a few times, muzzy-headed. He smiles as he takes her in.

  She holds out her hands.

  On her left palm is a mobile phone.

  “You got him one, did you . . . ?” begins McAvoy, then stops, his smile freezing, as a picture surfaces in his addled memory.

  “I’m sorry I was so mean,” she says, and walks toward him, waiting for her hug.

  McAvoy’s mouth falls open and the color bleeds from his face.

  His wife is holding an unfamiliar mobile phone.

  He doesn’t know whether it is instinct, or simply the hopeful, helpful look on his wife’s face, but he knows at once it belongs to Councillor Hepburn.

  • • •

  “THAT’S HIM,” says Suzie, pointing through the railings. “Trevor, say hello.”

  Beside her, in the dark, she can hear Anthony smiling. It is an odd feeling. She can sense him staring. Grinning at the side of her face. He has been looking at her with affectionate bemusement much of the evening, and now appears to be enjoying the note of sleepy drunkenness that has entered her voice.

  “That’s where I sit,” she adds, pointing at the bench in the courtyard garden. “Every day. Me and Trevor, setting the world to rights. I do most of the talking but he’s a great listener.”

  Anthony scratches his stubbly chin and gives her an encouraging smile.

  “He’s a lovely tree,” he says, and then has to stifle a little grin. He has never really imagined having to use such a phrase, and wonders what his mates would think of this strange, colorful girl. He finds himself hoping they will find out.

  Their date has gone relatively well. Suzie called him from the work phone midafternoon to apologize for being weird and to reassure him that she wasn’t mental. He had laughed and insisted she could only make it up to him if she met him for a drink.

  It is now just gone eleven, and they have the Old Town to themselves. The endless rain seems to have swept the city clean, and there are no raised voices or passing cars to break the perfect silence that exists here in this darkened pocket of Hull.

  Suzie is wearing a long blue dress onto which she has embroidered a large felt heron. She is wearing a beret and her earrings are owls in cages. It took her a long time to get ready. She was excited and scared, and wished she had somebody standing behind her telling her she looked nice, would have a good time, and that there was very little chance of having to jump out of the way of a speeding four-by-four while mid-fuck.

  The alcohol in her system coupled with the bracing night air is making her feel teary and tired. She is overemotional. Confused. She has talked endlessly. Managed to keep the conversation away from one-night stands and casual sex without really knowing why. She wonders if she is ashamed. Or simply cautious about driving away this nice man by revealing who and what she really is.

  She had been pleased he wanted to meet Trevor.

  “I tried to persuade myself he was Simon,” she says suddenly. “But he couldn’t be, could he? Trevor’s been here for years. Simon hasn’t been dead long. What do you think? Could it have sucked up his soul?”

  As she asks the question, she leans her forehead on the damp brick. She closes her eyes. She has drunk too much, eaten nothing, and feels truly intoxicated on the newness of this evening. She has enjoyed talking. Letting her mouth run away. Unburdening herself. She feels somehow free tonight. Anthony is nice. He seems to find her interesting.

  Anthony puts an arm around her shoulders and gently pulls her back from the wall. He bends down a little to better look into her eyes.

  “I’m sure he’s happy, wherever he is.”

  Anthony has not followed her stories perfectly. Suzie is not the most linear of narrators. He understands that her best friend died some months ago and that, since then, she has felt isolated and alone. He is not sure how to ask more without prying, or what he would do with the answers.

  “Do you think?”

  He nods as solemnly as he can.

  “You’re nice.”

  She wonders if this is what dates are usually like. Her life has not been like this. She was with her first boyfriend from childhood, and segued into promiscuity at the relationship’s end. She has never been romanced. Tonight, sharing a couple of bottles of wine in the attractive Russian vodka bar at the bottom of Whitefriargate, has felt pleasantly bizarre. She feels more nervous, here and now, than during her countless trips to sex clubs. In that environment, she has never found herself timid or unsure. Each patron came with one goal in mind.

  Here, on a regular date, with a nice man who wants to know more about her, she feels twitchy and confused. She doesn’t understand what he wants.

  “I’m nice?” he asks, pretending to be offended. “Just what every man wants to hear.”


  Suzie smiles. She is feeling tired. “Nice in good ways, I mean. You wanted to see my tree . . .”

  “It’s a grand tree.”

  “He.”

  “He’s a grand tree.”

  Drunkenly, impulsively, she leans forward and kisses him. She catches him just below the lips, and presses too hard, hurting both of their faces.

  “I’m sorry,” she says as she pulls back.

  “Don’t be,” he replies, laughing and rubbing his lips.

  They look at each other, awkwardly, for a moment. Anthony is thirty-nine years old and, up close, it is clear he shaves his head because he is balding anyway. He is wearing the same tan leather jacket he had on in the bank, and smells faintly of some kind of aftershave balm. He is an attractive man, and had looked embarrassed while telling her that he makes his living hiring out play equipment for children’s parties, and renting out mobile discos. He has two children from a failed marriage, and lives alone in an apartment on Victoria Dock. They are walking distance from his home.

  “I’m sorry I’ve prattled on,” says Suzie, suddenly unsure what to say next.

  “I like the way you talk. It’s soothing.”

  Suzie looks at him again and wonders what to do. If this were a club night, she would simply take him by the hand and lead him to a private room. She is willing to have sex with him. But this feels different. She would quite like to kiss him, too. Wants to know how it would feel to have his arms around her and her head on his chest.

  “I have more wine at home,” he says with a slight smile. “It’s not far . . .”

  Suzie looks down at her feet. She is wearing her flip-flops and is standing in a puddle. It feels nice. If she wriggles her toes, she can feel grit on the soles of her feet.

  The sensation feels familiar.

  She is suddenly back on the rest stop at Coniston. She is being fucked over the bonnet of a car by a stranger, while somebody slams his foot down on the accelerator . . .

  She is at the sex club. She is on the floor; one man inside her, three more waiting their turn. Simon, leaning against the wall with a rolled-up cigarette, talking to a handsome man with gray hair and a flamboyant shirt, open to the waist.

  She is crying into her phone, unable to hear Simon’s auntie’s words of condolence as she tries to digest the news that her best friend is dead and had never trusted her enough to share his pain . . .

  Suzie flops back against the wall. Her eyes fill with tears. She does not know what she wants or who to be. She just knows she misses her friend and that her life has felt empty and lonely ever since he hanged himself in his kitchen.

  “Nobody understands,” she murmurs.

  She needs to feel alive. She needs to close her heart and open her legs. She does not need love, she tells herself. Does not need to be held, or kissed, or praised, or romanced. She needs to take her pleasures and please those who want her, and she needs to close herself down to all the anguish that threatens to spill in and out of her if not controlled.

  “Suzie?”

  “I’m sorry,” she says, with her eyes closed. “I’m not ready for a relationship.”

  Anthony’s face flashes with confusion. “I didn’t think I was offering one,” he says, and when he realizes how harsh that sounds, adds, “I just offered a drink.”

  Suzie cannot really hear his words. The blood is rushing in her head, and she is feeling dizzy. Sick, suddenly. Her whole sense of self has become a finger painting; all intermingled swirls of contradiction and insecurity.

  Anthony is a nice man. She has enjoyed his company. He is funny and charming and seems to care. And she knows he could do so much better. She knows that she is not right for him. Not built for satisfying the heart.

  “Just do what you want,” she says dozily, and turns her back on him, pulling up the hem of her dress and then stumbling to one knee.

  She lies there, face against the brick, tears rolling down her face.

  Anthony looks down at her, bare leg and thigh exposed, dirt and brick dust streaking her pale skin; the tail end of a tattoo upon her flesh.

  For the briefest of moments desire fills him. The sight of bare, youthful skin thrills him. And then it is gone, replaced by pity. More than that. Tenderness. Affection.

  He sits with her and strokes her hair until the taxi arrives. When he tells it to take her to her own home, and not to his, it is with only a hint of regret.

  He hopes there will be other times with this odd, kooky, pretty girl, who talks to trees and mourns dead friends and draws peacocks on beer mats with tears in her eyes.

  In her drunken sleep Suzie knows there will not.

  • • •

  11:18 P.M. The Kingswood Estate. The kitchen of a cookie-cutter house made wedding-cake white by three days of rain. Aector and Roisin McAvoy, angry and disappointed with each other for the first time in their lives.

  Even as they argue, their voices are whispers. Their row does not get loud enough to wake the baby. Their tempers do not supersede practicalities.

  “I’m a policeman! This is theft. It’s burglary. You robbed a member of the public . . .”

  “You said he was a suspect! You said . . .”

  “But I don’t tell you things so you can go and do this! I tell you because I’ve got nobody to talk to . . .”

  “I wanted to help. I’d been so grumpy and you’ve been working all these hours, and I thought if you caught somebody maybe you could come home . . .”

  “But I’m a policeman!”

  Roisin’s face is flushed. McAvoy cannot tell if she is angry at him for being so pathetically moralistic, or for not just saying thank you and giving her a kiss.

  He is trying to control his panic. He feels as though the back door could be kicked off its hinges by internal affairs officers at any moment. He tries to picture himself as anything other than a policeman. Wonders whether he will be kept in a special wing in prison to save him from the other inmates . . .

  “I’ll have it taken back,” she says sadly, and McAvoy realizes she is upset purely because she had tried to do something nice and he does not like his present.

  Even now, his heart thundering in his chest, his hands trembling, he cannot maintain his anger at her. He crosses to her. Pulls her in close. Feels her resist and then acquiesce. She looks up at him.

  “I’ll phone my pal,” she says. “He’ll drop it off.”

  McAvoy gives a nod. Tries to calm himself. He wants to ask her who took it. Wants the name and address of this criminal whom his wife seems to have no compunction about contacting.

  “I don’t understand,” he says softly, moving away. “I never ask, Ro. Never ask you what you do to make money or the people you know. I’d never want to hear the answers. But I wouldn’t know who to ring to get a house broken into, and I’m a policeman . . .”

  Roisin shrugs and moves herself onto one of the kitchen chairs. When she raises her head, she is looking at him as though she is talking to a child. He is a decade her senior and has spent his adult life chasing killers, but sometimes he thinks she sees him as extraordinarily naive. He suddenly questions whether she stays with him not because he is her big, strong protector, but because she pities him as an unworldly innocent.

  “Everybody knows somebody who can do that kind of shite,” she says. “It’s just a phone. He took it from his pocket . . .”

  “He?”

  “My pal. It was supposed to be a nice surprise.”

  McAvoy cannot help but smile. He pinches the bridge of his nose and looks again at his wife. She has put the phone on the kitchen table. It sits there invitingly.

  He bends down and kisses the top of Roisin’s head. Turns her face and kisses her pouting mouth.

  “Next time could you just make me a lemon meringue?”

  Roisin giggles.

  “I k
new you’d be a bit mad,” she says, still grinning. “But go on, admit it, you’re pleased.”

  McAvoy pretends to look indignant, then gives in.

  “I can’t look at it,” he says, and wishes he were somebody else.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Aector,” she says, exasperated, and picks up the phone. She starts pressing buttons and pulling faces. “Ooh. Wow. Wait until you see this.”

  Laughing despite himself, he takes the phone from her hand. “Go on up,” he says, nodding in the direction of the stairs. “Five minutes, I’ll join you.”

  She raises an eyebrow. “I put this on for you,” she says, gesturing at her short nightie. She puts her bare legs and feet on the kitchen table. “Don’t let me fall asleep.”

  McAvoy blows her a kiss as she stands, and feels a wonderful warmth inside as she flashes him her bum on the way out of the door. He loves her enough to go to jail. Would die for her. Would rather break the law than let her think he doesn’t appreciate her present to him.

  He takes a breath. Locks the back door and moves to the living room. Checks on Fin, still snoring peacefully on the sofa. Removes his coat and sits down in his armchair. Closes his eyes, as if in prayer, then turns his attention to the phone.

  It is an HTC Wildfire, its touch screen as awkward as all others McAvoy has tried to get to grips with. His big fingers prod at the surface, and he navigates his way to the phone’s message facility.

  He reads through the last few texts Hepburn has received. There is one unopened; obviously sent since the phone was taken, sent from a contact named Gwen. He flicks through those that have already been opened. Reminders about a meeting the following day from somebody named Carl. A query from Tim about whether he can run an Artois Cidre promotion at the club. A thread of half a dozen messages for P.

  McAvoy reads backward, from apology to insult.

  I’m sorry. So grumpy. Not your fault. Too much pressure, sometimes. Talk soon. Xx

  You don’t give a damn about anybody but yourself.

  I have so much wrapped up in you. I couldn’t just stand by. What are friends for? Xx