Things moved quickly. Within a few weeks I asked if she wanted to move in (she was having difficulties with a landlord dispute, I remember) and she agreed. Liz was overjoyed, and love grows naturally from pleasure. I say naturally – I know this is a point about which many people have an opinion. How can love between three people (let alone six) be natural? Wel , nature is a strange thing. If you let it run wild it strangles itself: haven’t you ever noticed how weeds overpower flowers? I think what I’m real y trying to say is that just because a thing is natural, doesn’t mean it should grow untended.
I tended to my love for Liz, and I cultivated it. Because I did that it became easier, not harder, to fall in love again, and again, and again, and those loves never turned into a tangled mess. I made choices in the best interests of my loves, and I know the world would be a better place if we all did that.
After Sunetra moved in we began to rearrange our schedules so that we would still have time as couples as well as a three, which was, frankly, hilarious to try to organise. Looking at our diaries, sitting around that same kitchen table, pencil ing in quality time – we laughed but we learned. One morning Sunetra and I got our wires crossed and ended up both turning up to a picnic for two Liz had organised at the—
I stop reading and put the book down. This oversimplified description is not a love I recognise. What kind of film will Max make of this? Is this how he rationalises what we felt for each other, with trite analogies of flowers and pizzas and growing and learning?
When the train pulls into Temple Meads I leave the book on the seat.
I grew up in Bristol. It’s one of those cities that feels individual, personal, no matter how big it gets and how many smaller places it swallows up. From Temple Meads I take a taxi to the suspension bridge, and walk from there to my aunt’s house. It amazes me how the bridge stays the same, no matter how many times the crew of workmen replace every single nut and bolt. The cars thunder over and the bolts shake loose, shake loose, and yet it remains somehow itself.
I suppose finding any hint of permanence in my life will always continue to surprise me.
Listen to me. Maybe deep inside, under all the skins, I’m a stand-up comedian.
The walk gets rid of the remains of my hangover. It’s a bright day, warm, so Alice is probably in the garden. I ring the doorbell a few times and get no answer, so I head around the back. The garden gate is unlocked, and she has her back to it as she weeds the borders to her gravel path, kneeling upon the mat I bought her last Christmas.
‘Hello Rose,’ she calls, without turning around.
‘You should keep this locked.’
‘Why? Only you come around this way.’
‘Burglars.’
‘That’s the job talking.’
I kneel down beside her and watch her pull out the dandelions, digging her fingers deep into the soil to reach the root. They come out white and twisted, and I think of maybe burying that old skin instead, right here. Alice would let me. But I don’t ask her. Instead I say, ‘I’m not aninvestigator any more, remember?’
‘That’s right. You work in a shop.’ She says it without inflexion, but somehow that makes it worse.
‘People change,’ I say. ‘They change all the time.’
She nods. I look at the pouched skin of her neck, and the way her small quick head sits upon it, as if the two don’t belong together. ‘Well, I’m pleased to see you anyway, even if you have changed. At least the face is the same.’ She lifts her bright eyes from the ground for the first time and scans me. ‘Yep, the same. Beautiful.’
‘Come on,’ I say, and I help her up. She’s so light, as if she’s down to her last skin. The bungalow has been redecorated: painted, primped,the furniture rearranged. There are framed photographs on every wall, faces cut out in circles and grouped together to make merry collages of emotion over time. I can’t help but think of all the old photos that now have head-shaped holes in them. No doubt she’s kept them somewhere.
‘I moulted about a month ago,’ she says, ‘and that pink and mauve colour scheme had to go. This is nicer, don’t you think?’
I walk the length of the long wall of the living room, behind the sofa, and find some familiar faces. My dad, my mum, together. Alice has cut around them with irregular sweeps of the scissors, giving them strange curves. Dad moulted only a few months after Mum got pregnant with me but I saw them both regularly throughout my childhood. They remained polite, if not exactly friends; I think this is the first time I’ve seen them captured as a couple in an image.
Alice is on the wall, young and free, snipped to stand next to nobody. She has lived in this house for so many years, only feeling the need to change the paint and the position of the furniture when she changes her skin. If she’s had lovers they have come and gone unknown to me.
‘How are you feeling?’ I ask her.
‘Fine. A bit of a sore shoulder. Doctor Whitmore said less gardening, give it a chance to rest.’ She shrugs, and looks cheeky and guilty and shamefaced, all at once, like a child.
‘You can tell me off, it’s fine. I won’t mind.’
‘No thanks. If you can’t be bothered to look after yourself…’ Then I realise that’s just another parental trick, the long-standing alternative to the classic telling off, so I don’t finish the sentence.
‘You’re here for the skin,’ she says. ‘The first one of yours. Aren’t you?’
‘How did you know?’
‘I wish you wouldn’t take it. I can take good care of it. Your mum asked me to, when she got diagnosed. It was very precious to her.’
‘I know, but I can’t. I need to know it’s gone. Done with. What made you think I’d want it?’ It seems such a leap of intuition.
She brushes her cheek with her fingers, an old nervous gesture of hers. ‘Someone phoned, a few hours ago, and they were offering quite a bit of money for young female skins, they said. They were quite insistent about it and the price kept going up, and I just got this feeling, like they knew there was one in the house and they wanted that one in particular. I thought, afterwards, I bet Rose turns up looking for that old skin. I don’t know why.’
‘You got the feeling that someone wanted my old skin and you didn’t tell me, and you’re still swanning around in the back garden with the gate unlocked?’ She’s so unaware at times I could scream.
She gets up from her favourite armchair, which has been moved to the other side of the room since my last visit.
‘You’re here now anyway, aren’t you? You’re going to take it no matter what I say. Here.’ From underneath the television cabinet she pulls out a brown paper package, flat and square and tied with string. ‘See? Nobody would have looked there.’
‘That’s not the point.’ I take the package and am glad it’s wrapped up tight. Who wants to touch their teenage mind once more?
‘Anybody would think you were the grand old lady,’ she mutters, ‘the way you nag.’
‘Just— I’ll feel better if you lock the gate. And if you get another phone call, will you let me know? Straight away?’
She nods. I put the package in my bag, next to the other skin, and close the zip. ‘Did they say anything about who they were? On the phone?’
‘Not really. Money Moult, maybe? Not one of those from the television. It was a man. A nice voice. He called me by name.’
‘Alice?’
‘Mrs Stacey. He had a posh accent. Upper class.’
‘All right.’ Maybe it really was just a fishing phone call from one of those companies. They can be pushy, particularly with the elderly, who always seem to have old skins squirreled away. It’s one thing to burn your own moults, but the first moult of your child – that seems to be an entirely different matter. That’s the Bond. So much stronger than love, the way a parent feels about a child, that’s what the stories say. The Bond is the only eternal attachment; I read that somewhere.
‘Listen,’ says Alice. ‘When your mum and I were little, our mum – your Gran
Stacey – told us that shedding was a necessary thing we all have to do to take away the bad thoughts. She said we all feel better afterwards, and it only removes the things that should go. Love, the romantic stuff, that’s just a trick to make you make babies. It’s not meant to last. But other things are. The Bond is. It’s not skin deep. The people you meet, and love, and,’ she purses her lips, ‘have relations with, they’re here today, gone tomorrow. But family isn’t. Look at us, we get along, don’t we? And that’s just a shadow of the Bond, from aunt to niece. Come and move in here, and if you find someone to love then love them, and let them go. Maybe even make a baby with them, and we can take care of it. Then you’ll know what forever means, Rose. It means a child.’
‘Until they turn into a teenager and get their first moult.’ I peruse the walls once more. I don’t like this conversation, and we’ve had it often enough before. She was never brave enough to have a baby and now she wants me to do it for her. But that first peeling away – the absolute need I felt to escape my mother and her consuming, eternal need for me – I don’t want to experience that from the other side. How I hurt her, when I left.
Alice returns to her armchair, stiff with age and indignation. ‘It doesn’t affect every child the way it affected you.’
‘So I might get lucky, is that it?’
She shakes her head. It strikes me that she looks like me. Or, rather, I will look like her, one day. Alone, in my own bungalow, with weeds to pull and young faces on the wall.
‘Do you wish you’d done it, now?’ I ask her. ‘Had a baby, I mean?’
‘Of course,’ she says, but now I find, hearing her say the words, that I don’t quite believe her. She’s still scared of it.
‘It’s just nature. The Bond. You said it yourself. A way to make babies get born, and cared for longer than just one skin.’
‘It’s all just nature,’ she says, her tone brusque. ‘What difference does it really make to any of us, whether it’s natural or not? You worry about the strangest things.’
I’ve annoyed her, I can tell. Coming to visit her always does end in annoyance, on one side or the other. Usually both.
I find my own face, small and grainy, in a large clip-frame of many cut-out people. I look very young. Next to me, tilted so that the sides of our heads are touching, is a glossy photo snipped from a magazine. It’s Max. Max’s professional, smiling face.
I point at it. ‘What’s this?’
‘What?’
‘You know very well what.’
She sniffs. ‘It’s my wall. I’ll put what I like on it.’
‘Take it down.’
‘Rose,’ she says, in her reasonable voice. ‘He belongs there. He was the love of your life.’
So we have an argument, which is, I think, what we both wanted.
After the argument we pass another hour in silence, watching quiz shows on television and eating biscuits from the tin. Then we make up wordlessly, as families do, and she says she’ll drive me to Clifton’s Public Incinerator, if that’s what I really want.
As families do.
› • ‹
How I hate car journeys…
There’s a long queue at the Incinerator, the cars moving slowly, people taking their time to drive up to the chute that leads to the flames. The machine is transparent so you can watch the voyage of your old skin as it slides down to go up in smoke. The authorities leave no room for doubt. You see it destroyed with your own eyes.
Alice sighs beside me. The radio is playing old songs and she hums along, knowing maybe one word in ten, mumbling at the rest.
With the heat of the afternoon sun hitting my side of the car, and the music at work upon me, I can’t help but think the worst thoughts. The things I saw that will never go away, no matter how matter times I shed, no matter what Alice tells me about Gran Stacey’s old sayings. The skins discarded or taken by force; the sweat and the smell of bad people doing bad things; the empty shining of the studio lights on Max,making him seem a little bigger, a little flatter, like nothing more than a white smile that had nothing to do with me. The bathroom floor. Then playing at being detective, and the warehouse in Slough, next to a patch of scrubland, the people driving by.
Being a private investigator wasn’t about helping people. I realise now that I wanted to know how bad this world can be, and I got an answer. I found basements and gambling rings and hospitals and cemeteries, and so many ways to buy and belittle love. To cut it, to measure, sew it and dress it and grind it up small and put it in those endless lines of pills.
I know why Max keeps buying the pills. It’s an act of optimism, and I can’t blame him for that. He never sees the worst of the world. So many people are employed to keep it from him, and the rest happily do it for free because of who he is and what his handsome face on the screen gives to them all. That moment of escape from reality.
We’re nearing the front of the queue. The two brown paper packages sit in my lap. Shall I open them, touch them one last time? The thing that stops me is the mutilation that was performed upon one of them: the removal of the breasts and the sewing up of the slits. It’s the thought of someone else touching it, cutting it, that is too hard to bear. The thought of someone profiting from my skin, although it makes nosense that it was mutilated as the price would have been so much better for the complete skin. And nobody would have been fooled to think it was a male skin, not for more than a few seconds. The seller had to know that.
Max’s face, when he learned about the removal of the breasts. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so surprised.
There it is.
The thing I should have worked out straight away. I know who took my skin, and Max’s skins. But I don’t know why.
We reach the front of the queue and the open mouth of the incinerator chute is on the driver’s side of the car. Alice winds down her window and holds out her hands.
‘Come on, then.’
I shake my head.
‘Are you doing it or not, Rose?’
‘Not,’ I say, sounding like a child. Like nothing more than a baby.
‘Right.’ She sets off, through the gateway, and I can’t tell if she’s pleased or not. We travel for a few miles before she says, ‘So what will you do with them?’
‘Would you keep the old one? My first one?’
‘I was doing that anyway.’
‘I know. Thanks.’
She hums along to the latest song on the radio for a moment. It’s a ballad I’ve not heard before about how the shortest love is the sweetest love, and a day together is better than a lifetime alone. Then she says, ‘Do I still need to make sure the back gate is locked to protect your precious skin?’
‘You should do that anyway. But no, I don’t think anyone is bothered about it now. Or, at least, they won’t be. I’ll sort it.’‘I don’t like the sound of that.’
‘I’m sorting it,’ I repeat. ‘Then I’ll come visit. For longer. When it’s done.’
She considers this, her eyes on the road, then says, ‘Don’t end up like me, Rose. Don’t end up alone. I know you have this thing, this moulting problem and it makes you want to leave everything behind because it hurts so much, but try to hold on to something. You don’t always have to be the one that leaves.’
I don’t say anything. I feel her words sinking into me and I hate it, I hate it. If it was a choice I would have already decided to be different. I would scratch this out of my skin myself if I could.
‘Can you drop me at the station?’ I ask her.
‘I thought we were going home! The station’s in the other direction.’
‘Then I suppose it’s time to perform a U-turn,’ I say, and I catch, on the side of her face, the flicker of a smile.
Part Two
2008. Spoonful.
Petra’s car was one of those contract jobs, set up to be changed every seven years or with a new skin; some customers liked that freedom, although it sounded more like a flashy extension to an existing jail block
to Rose. This car or that car: the deal remained the same.
But Petra said she liked her green Volvo, and had felt no need to change it after her last moult. The back seat was piled high with discarded bottles and wrappers, and the large boot was crammed with electronic devices and more traditional methods of applying brute force. The camera zooms and the hammers, all mixed up together; it was a wonder nothing got cracked.
As they drove along, silent in the early morning, it occurred to Rose that this was a car worthy of Mary Poppins, and it amused her to think of Petra, so capable, so practically perfect in every way, in that role. She hummed ‘A Spoonful of Sugar’ under her breath as the low sun began to gain in strength.
‘Really?’ said Petra, ‘Musical numbers? You kept that quiet.’
They stopped at a service station, drank lattes in tall glasses and ate doughnuts, choosing one table at random from a sea of them. It was early enough to feel that the place was theirs, and the few people who came and went were just passing through their territory. Men in suits, mainly, getting ahead of the game. Rose watched them stride to and from the blue signs of the toilet block, or order takeaway coffee from the dark wood and chrome counter, and wondered if each one was neck deep, drowning in some terrible form of business. Skin business.
All skin business was terrible, she had decided, from the creams and salves to the cutting and slicing. Inescapable and everywhere, looking like a quiet man in a suit, going about his day, until she looked closer.
‘We’re just checking this place out,’ said Petra, skimming the milk foam from the rim of the glass with her finger and licking it clean. ‘It’s off all the books. I reckon it’s a holding place for skins this guy is trying to move on the side. We get a few photos of the product and the setup, give them to Phin, and then Phin has leverage.’
‘Right.’
‘It’s straightforward.’
‘Yep.’
‘Great,’ said Petra. ‘So you can do it then. I’ll wait in the car.’
The Loosening Skin Page 6
