Skin Deep

by Liz Nugent

  ‘Sweetheart,’ he said, ‘please don’t insult my intelligence, you know nothing. Your Matisse story is well rehearsed, but my dog knows that story better than you. Even if you could be the face of my gallery’ – he pointed at the right-hand side of my face – ‘I need someone who has heard of contemporary artists and can tell the difference between a César and an Arman. Your short skirt will only get you so far. The Russian oligarchs are here of course, but you are too old for them. From what I hear, you are the wrong side of nubile for their tastes.’

  My humiliation was complete. My face flushed.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘you are not going to cry, are you? I can’t bear crying women.’

  For the whole of February, I continued to hide my unemployment from Christian. I left the apartment every day at the regular time, and went job hunting. Tourists were thin on the ground at this time of year and nobody was hiring. My French was perfect, and my English accent was crystal. I thought I could get a job showing houses for an estate agent, but they all wanted to know who I knew, who my contacts were among the ex-pat British community, so I made up names that did not check out and did not tell them that I was Irish. I don’t know if they knew I was a fraud but they knew that I must have fallen from grace, if I ever had it. The job in the gift shop had been a favour. I knew I’d been lucky to last as long as I did there. I lowered my sights, but unfortunately Carrefour was fully staffed. When the rent was due in early March, the game was up.

  Most of the time, when you anticipate somebody’s bad reaction to bad news, it is rarely as awful in reality, but this time it was worse.

  ‘What are we supposed to do? You think I am going to pay for you to swan around, eating my food, sharing my bed, acting like a princess? I took you in when nobody would even look at you, as a favour to my uncle. I gave you a job, and a home … and you repay me with what? You are a fucking ice queen and I’ve had enough.’

  He upended my handbag and took my last francs out of my purse. He threw the coins at me. ‘Why can’t you even cry like a normal woman?’ He grabbed me and held me close to his body. I should have put my arms around him, said some soothing words, for self-preservation at least, but I slapped him and then let my body go limp, expecting the blows to rain on me. To my surprise he released me, and I slumped on to the sofa. There were tears in his eyes. ‘You make me crazy, you know? But I will teach you. You will learn the hard way.’ He left the apartment then, and I was confused. His rage was white hot, but he had not struck me. Maybe this was progress in our relationship? I composed myself, made a pot of coffee and watched the sea.

  A few hours later, Christian’s friend Louis let himself into our flat without ringing the doorbell. I did not like him. I knew only that he was senior to Christian in the pecking order of their pathetic little gangster world. I had always avoided him.

  ‘What are you doing here? Who let you in?’ I asked nervously.

  Louis smiled and dangled a key from his forefinger. His gold necklace flashed in the fading sunlight. ‘What kind of welcome is this for one of Christian’s best friends? I am here for you, chérie,’ and he reached out and pulled me roughly towards him. The smell of bad breath and body odour was sickening. I struggled away and backed up until the sink was behind me.

  ‘Stop! What do you think you’re doing? Don’t you dare touch me! I will tell Christian. He will kill you.’

  Louis waved his finger in my face. ‘No, chérie, I don’t think so’ – he spoke in a sing-song voice – ‘you must behave yourself. You must be nice to me now. Get to your knees so that I don’t have to look at that face.’ He roughly pulled my hair so it covered my scar. He grabbed me around the throat and began to push me downwards to my knees, as he unbuckled his belt.

  I was choking and trying with both hands to release his grip, but as I slid downwards I quickly grabbed a pair of scissors that was on the draining board behind me and plunged it into his thigh, which was as high as I could reach. He screamed and roared and kicked me in the stomach, catching my left hip too, and ran from the room, blood streaming down his leg.

  ‘You fucking whore!’ he screamed, as he half fell down the stairs towards the front door.

  A number of doors off the stairwell opened, and Madame Tissot shouted up at me, ‘What is it this time? You are nothing but trouble! I am complaining to the propriétaire again! This used to be a respectable building until you moved in.’

  I shut the door on her angry tirade with my elbow. I was trembling from head to foot. I could hardly stand up, I had been so winded by the kick. I crawled to the icebox for ice to numb the pain, and in it I found a bottle of Russian vodka that I hadn’t known was there. I rang Christian but he did not answer. I almost felt sorry for Louis. Christian would tear him limb from limb when he caught up with him. Christian loved me. His problem was that I did not love him. I took the vodka bottle out and poured a glass. I needed something for the shock. But vodka wasn’t it. Pouring the glass down the drain, I decided to make some strong coffee. I lit a cigarette and looked into the flame as I struck the match.

  I sipped and waited for Christian’s return, ready to fall into his arms, but when he arrived, he was in the foulest of moods. ‘What the hell did you do to Louis?’ he demanded. I was bewildered.

  ‘He was going to rape me! He had a key. He tried to force me –’

  ‘I know, I gave him the key. I told you I would teach you a lesson. You were supposed to do whatever he wanted. Don’t you understand anything? I owe him thousands, you were a holding payment, are you stupid?’

  ‘You … you sold me? To that animal?’

  ‘What else are you good for?’

  I grabbed the vodka bottle by the neck and swung it towards him, but I was still shaky after what had happened with Louis, and missed. This time, Christian showed no mercy. Instinctively I held my elbows over my face, but he punched and kicked and stamped on me until I passed out.

  I woke later in the Saint-Roch hospital, in a crowded ward, with Christian stroking the smooth side of my face. Christian, who only ever wanted me to love him back. Everything hurt, but it was a distant kind of hurt, as if a cloud were protecting me from the real teeth of the pain. Blessed morphine. I slipped in and out of consciousness and sometimes, when I woke, I thought I was in London, after the fire, and was surprised to hear people speaking French around me, and further surprised that I could understand them. My left arm was in a plaster cast, my fingers splinted. When I moved my head painfully to look down, all the parts of my body that weren’t swathed in bandages were swollen, red and scraped, blood close to the surface of my skin.

  ‘Baby, what has happened to you? Who did this?’ Christian was speaking more loudly than usual. A nurse hovered nearby, and I remembered through the fog that Christian had done this, and I knew immediately that though he may have been genuinely contrite, my job was to play along. His face was creased with sorrow as he leaned in and whispered, ‘Darling, I am so, so sorry, I was angry. It was just business – I should have told you he was coming.’

  I remembered Louis then, and the snap of his belt as he pushed me to my knees. I opened my mouth to speak, but my tongue was parched. Christian passed me a paper cup of water. ‘He’s after me now. I’m going to have to go on the run, but I’ll come back for you in a week. We’ve been evicted from the flat. I couldn’t save any of your stuff – they threw it away. Sorry, my darling, but I’ll sort it out.’ He kissed me gently on the forehead, and my ribs hurt as I tried to incline my body away from him. He cupped my face in his large rough hand. ‘I’ll be back for you, chérie, just give me a week.’

  I had nothing, nothing but pain and a violent boyfriend who didn’t think that selling me to a business associate to settle a debt was anything to apologize for. I should have told you, he’d said, as if it were just a tiny oversight. Even through the morphine-induced mist, I knew this was beyond wrong.

  Our neighbour, Madame Tissot, visited a few days later. She told me she did not want to get involved in our
domestic rows but I was better off without Christian. She said the flat was being rented out to new tenants at the end of the week. She, at least, had grabbed some of my things before they were dumped. A handbag, a hairbrush and, most importantly, my passport. I was tearfully grateful. She wished me well.

  As time went on, the morphine dosage decreased and the pain bit hard as physiotherapy began. The nurses were no fools; they knew who was responsible for my injuries. A surgeon spoke to me about my face and I told him the old nightclub-fire story. They offered to call my family, but I didn’t have any – none that wanted to hear from me, at any rate. They told me I must report Christian to the gendarmes and that a homeless refuge would take me in, but those places were like prisons, with curfews and fights among women who identified themselves as victims. They were no place for me.

  I told them that Christian’s version was correct: a stranger had broken into my flat and attacked me. A policewoman came to take my statement. I told her the same story, and watched her face harden towards my lies. All of my possessions were gone, except the contents of my handbag. Christian had, of course, taken my ATM card. I waited for him to come back.

  A week passed, and I could walk slowly with the help of one crutch. My legs were miraculously not broken, but I could not do simple tasks like buttoning my shirt or combing my hair. They would not discharge me until I could walk unaided and, until Christian returned, there was nowhere for me to go. Élise came to visit. She had heard through the grapevine what had happened. ‘He’s a pig. You cannot go back to him and that life!’ She did not understand that I had no choice.

  Christian did not return. Three weeks after my emergency admittance to the hospital, I was deemed fit for independent living. I could walk, slowly, but my badly fractured fingers were still swollen with infection. They prescribed further antibiotics. On my last evening in the hospital, I was in deep despair. I had telephoned Élise and begged her to let me stay on her sofa, just for a few days, but she did not want to help me. Élise was the kind of friend who would be happy to meet for a coffee on a Friday afternoon, but she had never invited me to her home and one evening, when I had been with Christian and his friends outside a bar in the Port, she had spotted me and walked on, pretending not to hear me calling her name.

  ‘I’d love to help, you know I would, but my sister is coming from Lyons today, and I have no room.’ She had never mentioned a sister before.

  No matter what happened on the island, Happy MacDaniels would smile and laugh his way through it. He was the most amenable and easily pleased man. The mainlanders might take him for a simpleton, but back in the days of the chieftains it was known he was a shrewd and fearless worker.

  Happy had a small abattoir out the back of his cottage, and he’d slit the throats of the lambs and the goats and grin his head off as they thrashed and twitched their way out of life, the blood draining into the buckets below them. It was a savage kind of work, and even the hardy island men were wary of the way a lamb might fix its eye on you as you sharpened your knife. Happy MacDaniels never let it bother him.

  There came a day when a storm reared up so violent around the island that everyone stayed indoors for four days as children were whipped into the air and dragged over cliffs and dashed on the rocks below. Twelve fishermen were lost at sea that week. The island went into deep mourning, and, as was the way of those times, ate naught but grass or thistles until the burials had taken place of the seven bodies that could be recovered.

  Happy MacDaniels’s glee could not be contained, however, and his laughter proved too much to take for the islanders. When the last corpse was interred in the graveyard, the islanders turned on Happy and threw him in on top of the remains of a child who had been decapitated by a loose slate. Then they hurled mud in after him with such ferocity that it swallowed him faster than he could climb out of it.

  And all the time he was giggling, until a clod of earth smothered his last smile.

  Daddy took me around that graveyard when I was a small girl. We lay on the ground and Daddy said, ‘Listen!’

  We put our ears to the sodden earth, and I swear I heard a chuckle rising up through the clay.

  ‘There you are,’ Daddy said, ‘being agreeable does not suit everyone. People who go through life smiling miss out on the dignity of sorrow.’

  28

  I sat in the armchair beside my bed with my handbag and other belongings in a plastic bag: the bloodstained dress, my underwear, a toothbrush and facecloth provided by the hospital. I wore a shapeless smock dress that some other patient, probably dead, had left behind. The doctor came and signed my discharge papers. I rang the bank from a free payphone in the hall. They told me my account was empty. Every centime had been withdrawn, the day after the last deposit from Peter two weeks previously.

  A social worker came and gave me the name and address of a homeless shelter. I had never felt so low and so awful. I thought that was the lowest point of my life, but there have been so many, it is hard to know. In a zipped pocket of my handbag, I looked for Freddie’s card. I asked the social worker if I might make an overseas call. Reluctantly she agreed, and I was brought to the nurses’ station to make my phone call.

  ‘Hello?’ A woman, upper class. Marjorie.

  ‘Hello, could I speak to Freddie, please … I mean, Mr Baird?’

  ‘Who is this, please?’

  ‘It’s Cordelia, from Nice.’

  ‘Oh, Cordelia.’ There was a slight pause. ‘Yes, right, hold on.’

  I could hear a muffled conversation, as if her hand was over the receiver, and then:

  ‘Cordelia, what can I do for you?’ It was Freddie.

  A nurse standing beside me tapped her watch. She was doing me a favour.

  ‘Freddie, I’m in trouble, I’m sorry –’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Still in Nice, but I’m in hospital, just getting out, but I have nowhere to go.’

  ‘Why? What happened? Are you all right?’

  ‘No, yes, I have no money, I was … attacked by a str—’

  He didn’t wait to hear the lie on the tip of my tongue. He knew.

  ‘Go to the airport,’ he said. ‘I’ll book you on a flight home.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said, ‘I can’t go home. There is nobody …’

  The nurse glared at me again and tapped the phone with her biro.

  ‘Freddie, I’m not allowed to stay on the phone much longer.’

  There was another muffled conversation between Freddie and Marjorie.

  ‘Marjorie says you are to go to the Negresco Hotel. You know it? We will book a room for you. I’ll telephone you there later.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’

  I hung up and walked in a daze from the hospital down to the Promenade des Anglais, then made my way along the seafront to the Negresco Hotel. It was a hotel I had never dared enter before, notoriously expensive and upmarket. The doorman looked me up and down but held the door open. I went through to reception, where a concierge immediately stepped out from behind a desk. I thought he was going to hustle me towards the exit.

  ‘Miss Russell? We have been expecting you. This way, please.’ He took me to the elevator and held me loosely by the elbow, courteously I thought, as if he knew I might faint. He punched a number on the wall, and I felt a small lurch and then heard the hum of the machinery as we ascended. ‘Is there anything we can get for you?’ He looked down at my handbag and the opaque hospital plastic bag that contained my worldly goods. I shook my head. ‘Mr Baird has told us to give you anything you require. Do you need a doctor, medication?’

  The hospital had given me boxes of tablets and lists of instructions. It was everything else that I needed. ‘No, thank you.’

  I wasn’t in a fit mental state to take in the opulence of the room, but I gravitated naturally towards the window and the view of the sea right across the road. The concierge told me about lights and switches and minibars, but I was grateful when he left and closed the door
behind him. I put the Do Not Disturb sign on the outside of the door and climbed into bed. Hours later I was awoken by a telephone on the bedside table.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Cordelia, I am glad you have settled in.’ Freddie.

  ‘Freddie … I …’ My voice broke.

  ‘Now, look here, there is nothing to be upset about. You are perfectly safe. Marjorie and I are flying into Nice tomorrow, as it happens. We decided to buy a place down there so we were coming anyway, to finalize the sale. You stay put and we’ll see you tomorrow. They have room service, you know. Order anything you like.’

  ‘But I don’t have … I won’t be able to pay you back.’

  ‘Nonsense. You already have. See you tomorrow.’

  I had no idea what he meant, but I was in no position to argue with his act of charity. That evening, I ordered a lobster salad and some chicken soup and the food was delivered to my room and revealed from a silver dome as if the delivery girl had conjured it out of thin air. I had to ask her to cut everything into bite-sized pieces. After she left, I opened the minibar and looked inside. How tempting it was, as I peered at the small bottles of gin, vodka, whisky. I could have drunk them all. But I made the choice not to. I am not an alcoholic. I selected a cold can of Orangina and a bottle of water.

  At night-time, I left the hotel, walked across the road and descended the steps on to the beach. I kicked off my shoes and walked into the sea up to my knees. It was cold enough to numb my feet. I wished that it could numb the rest of me.

  Marjorie Baird was a fiercely competent no-nonsense English woman of breeding and kindness. Matronly and grey, like a storybook headmistress.

  ‘Oh dear, you have been bashed about a bit, haven’t you? Did they catch the blighter who did this? You are much better off without him. Tell her, Freddie.’

  Freddie didn’t have to tell me. She wanted to know how I had ended up homeless without any possessions. ‘But what about your family? You must have somebody?’