The Loosening Skin

by Aliya Whiteley

  Rose had suspected it was building to this. ‘What if I get caught?’

  ‘Easy answer to that one: don’t get caught.’ The foam had been licked clean; Petra picked up the glass and drained it. ‘Look, it’s a warehouse on the outskirts of Slough at six in the morning. There’s going to be nobody there. You keep your hood up in case of security cameras, you take a few photos, you leave. You don’t take anything, and if it doesn’t feel right you walk away. I wouldn’t drop you straight in the deep end. This is a long-term training process. One step at a time.’

  Rose sipped her coffee. ‘But why train me?’

  Petra sighed. ‘I keep telling you, I fancied some company.’

  Recently she had begun to feel a vexation building in the older woman, transmitting itself in the way Petra moved around the office, asking questions and seeming unhappy with the answers. Rose suspected she was disappointed in her.

  ‘I am trying,’ Rose said.

  ‘I know. It’s fine.’

  ‘I enjoy the work.’ Which was true, although the part she enjoyed was the moment when each case could be called over. The burning of the manila file, the ritual of it, pleased her beyond words.

  ‘Do you ever wonder if you would have been better off staying with Max?’

  ‘How could I? You know about my condition.’

  ‘Yeah. Your condition, I know. But people do, all sorts of people. They just pretend to still love someone, after that skin comes free. Not just for a comfortable life, although in your case I could have understood it. To live in that world.’

  ‘That’s world’s not real.’ Honesty prompted her to add, ‘Nothing is, though, is it?’

  ‘This is,’ said Petra, and pinched her hand.

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Snap out of it. I know you still check up on him. You read the gossip columns. You watch all the movies. You still have feelings for him.’

  ‘I really don’t.’

  ‘That’s you all over. It’s only real when you say it is.’

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘I want you to really commit to this life,’ snapped Petra. ‘I’m going to the loo. Think about what you’re going to do. You’re going to get into that warehouse and take those photos, and when you come out of the warehouse you’ll be a tiny amount closer to being a proper private investigator.’

  After she had gone Rose took a sugar cube from the bowl and crunched it. The sweet shards of the cube dissolved in her mouth to nothing, so quickly, so she ate another and sucked it this time, trying to make it last.

  2013. Sewn up.

  Back at the Sussex mansion the weather is not right for filming, so Max has given everyone the day off. The gate guard – not Mike this time but an unfamiliar face – tells me that lots of them organised themselves into cars and left for London. Others are ensconced in their trailers, no doubt moaning or playing cards or swapping tips about skin treatments, as actors do.

  But Max – Max is in his home, and Taylor is nowhere to be seen.

  ‘You’re not meant to be left unprotected,’ I say. It seems there’s a little bit of the bodyguard left in me after all.

  ‘I sent her out,’ he says. ‘On an errand.’

  ‘Dry cleaning?’

  ‘Listen, I don’t want to discuss who does what for me any more. I just want one final thing from you. That’s the only reason I agreed to let you in.’

  We are standing in his living room, on the dark wooden floor. He is nervous; his hands move over the material of his jeans, stretched tight over his thighs.

  ‘One final thing,’ I echo.

  ‘The skin. The skin I paid a fortune for.’

  It’s that sinking realisation that I was right. I was right about him, oh God, I was right. I didn’t realise how much I was hoping I was mistaken until I heard those words.

  ‘It’s my skin,’ I say, carefully.

  ‘I paid for it.’

  ‘I’ll pay you back.’

  ‘With what? With the money you earn in that place in the middle of nowhere, with that teenager hoping you’ll take pity on him and fuck him? You could never afford it, and you know it, so don’t bullshit me, Rosie. Have more respect for me than that.’

  ‘Stay calm,’ I tell him.

  ‘I’m calm. Give me the skin.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’ He is so tense, his hands rubbing at the denim.

  ‘Have you burned it?’ It’s as if his world could turn on my answer.

  I shake my head.

  The tension seeps out of him, through his shoulders and his hands. ‘Oh thank God,’ he says. ‘Thank God. I had to know. I had to know if you could do it.’ He bends over at the waist and takes in long deep breaths.

  ‘If it’s so important to you, why did you let someone steal it?’ I ask him.

  Slowly, he straightens. He locks his gaze on mine. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  A line.

  ‘I’m guessing your own skins never left this house,’ I venture. ‘Probably back in your safe room by now, locked up tight. Am I right?’

  ‘You’re crazy. I lost them all.’

  ‘Is that so? I saw your face when you heard my skin had been mutilated. That was the shock, for you. Nothing else. That was all you cared about.’

  He raises an eyebrow at me, and that gesture pushes me into action. I run from the living room, down the hall, and take the steps two at a time to his safe room in the basement. The door is open, as is the wardrobe.

  Hanging within are a selection of light summery dresses in many colours. And next to them, touching them, are his skins.

  I hear him close the door behind me, the sliding of a bolt, and I know in that split second that I never have been, and never ever will be, a proper investigator. I am an idiot, and he knew it, right from the beginning. He knew it. I look at the door, and see his face through a slot that has been made in the wood. He was having renovations done, when I first came. He had a plan in place.

  ‘The pills by the bed,’ he says. ‘Take them.’

  The room has been decorated, turned into a bedroom for one: a single divan, a small table on its right and an upholstered chair, green, on its left. A black and white photograph, large, framed, hangs over the bed; it’s that shot of Paris again. That dream of Paris. The bedside table holds a plastic jug of water with a matching glass, and two pink pills.

  ‘Let me out,’ I say. ‘This isn’t funny.’

  ‘Take the pills and I’ll let you out.’

  And I think – why not? The pills never worked. The endless pills.

  I cross to the bed, quick, and swallow them down, without water. ‘There. Let me out.’

  ‘Oh Rosie,’ he says. ‘There’s nobody like you.’ He closes the slot in the door.

  I call out. I hammer on the door. Eventually I start shredding his skins; millions of pounds and memories, turned to strips with each touch reminding me of how good he once was. But he doesn’t come back, and I’m only halfway through destroying the third skin when the pillskick in and take the world away.

  › • ‹

  My skin is loose.

  I feel it, feel it slipping from me, separating out from the layer beneath.

  It’s too early. I should have years yet, but that itch, that building itch, I know it. Intense and innate. I move to scratch, and as I dig my nails into my stomach and thighs, finding the skin there already hard and white, I look around the room and place myself with it. It used to be thesafe room, and now it’s my personal prison, complete with bed, sink, and pictures of trees in blossom, the Eiffel Tower rising above them, on the wall.

  He’s been planning this from the start.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, close by, above me.

  I’m lying on the floor. I’m naked. I’m naked, and I can see him now, sitting on the bed only a few feet away, looking not at my face but at my hands as I scratch. He is fully dressed, in a different shirt from the last time I saw him.

 
; How long was I unconscious?

  The itching has turned into pain – needles under the skin. I can’t scratch long enough, deep enough. I can’t think any more.

  ‘No,’ he says, over and over, and he moves to me and pins down my hands. ‘Not so hard, Rosie, not so hard.’

  ‘The induced moulting will make it painful,’ says a different voice, a woman. I’ve heard that voice before. ‘Sedation’s an option, but it can affect the emotional transfer.’

  Max frowns. I dig my nails into his hand and he flinches, but he doesn’t let go. I’m on fire, knock me out, take me away. Everything is alight.

  ‘I need her to let it all go. To be clean.’

  ‘Restraints, then. Can you manage?’

  ‘Taylor,’ he calls, and another voice replies, ‘Yep.’ I don’t see her, but I think she’s at my ankles. Max grabs me under my arms and together they take me to the bed, and then hold me down as my wrists and ankles are placed in the prepared restraints.

  ‘How long?’ says Max.

  ‘At least overnight,’ says the disembodied voice.

  ‘Christ,’ he says. He is unhappy. I need to scratch. I twist and turn, and rub myself against the sheet upon the mattress.

  What do I love? What will I lose, this time?

  Nothing.

  That thought reassures me. I love nobody, have loved nobody and nothing since my last moult. I have nothing important to lose.

  I laugh.

  I can’t stop.

  ‘Get out,’ says Max. Then he sits beside me as I laugh and squirm, and lose myself all over again.

  › • ‹

  I am here, and I am whole.

  My latest moult is nowhere to be seen. I can’t remember the act of shedding it. I’m no longer in restraints, either. My wrists bear two red circles, like bracelets, but the marks don’t hurt. I wonder if I’ll wear them throughout this skin.

  I feel—

  I don’t know what I feel.

  Max is not here. I get up and walk around the room, in circles, for a while. I pour myself a glass of water from the bedside table, and savour it in my throat, and then I get the feeling that I’m not alone.

  The eyes are watching me through the slot in the door. My first response is to throw the glass at them, but it’s plastic, I forgot. The plastic simply bounces off, and the water splashes over the floor.

  The eyes return.

  They are brown, and in this letterbox form they are empty of any expression I can read. They are rimmed by thick orange glasses.

  ‘Sit on the bed please,’ says Anna Mallory.

  ‘Where’s Max?’

  ‘He’s gone for some rest. He was exhausted. He watched over you for days.’

  ‘Days?’

  ‘This is for the best. We’re going to help you. With your condition.’

  There are so many things I could say to that, but I think carefully, and settle for a question instead. ‘Why?’

  ‘No doubt Max will want to explain it. He’ll be here in a moment. If you’ll sit on the bed and wait, please.’

  Footsteps ring down the corridor.

  ‘Bed, please,’ she repeats, and I retreat to it.

  The door opens and then Max is here, looking tired and dishevelled and movie-starrish. It’s in the way he holds his head; this is a moment he’s rehearsed. Anna and Taylor enter after him.

  ‘She’s awake,’ he says, over his shoulder, to his audience.

  ‘She’s fine,’ says Anna. ‘Good to go.’

  ‘You sure you can do this?’

  ‘Nothing is risk free. But this is what we’ve been working for all these years, right?’

  That seems to reassure him. He steps towards me and I shrink back; it’s an automatic reaction, but one that gives him that disappointed look.

  ‘Okay,’ he says. I don’t know if it’s to me or to Anna. ‘Let’s do it.’

  ‘Rose, I’m going to sedate you again. Are you going to let me, or shall we hold you down? It’s up to you.’ She has that medical manner –This is for your own good is written through her.

  If I open my mouth I would beg, and say all the things that desperate people say. So I say nothing. If I don’t say it, then I can’t be here. It can’t be true.

  She comes to me, and injects me just over the crook of my elbow, and the new skin is so soft that the needle glides in easily, like a friend, invited.

  › • ‹

  My name is Rose Allington.

  My name is Rosie Allington.

  Max is holding my hand. I smile at him, and he smiles back, and then I realise I can’t breathe properly. My skin is suffocating; it has been sewn up tight into a sack that I can’t escape. It presses up against my legs, my arms, my stomach, my head. It adheres to my cheeks and nose and forehead, and to the edges of my mouth.

  My hands and feet are tied to the bed once more. Max is sweaty.

  ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘You gave me a scare. We nearly lost you. The anaesthetic, we think.’

  ‘Don’t be scared,’ I say, to me and to him. I don’t want either of us to suffer any more. ‘Just help me. Help me take this off.’

  ‘But it’s working,’ he whispers.

  The pressure is stifling. I lift my head from the pillow and look down the length of my body. I’m not clothed. Yes I am. I’m stitched into a skin. My own, used skin. The skin that loved him.

  Two diamond patches are missing over the breasts; I can see my own nipples. They have a reality that everything else in this room does not. They are mine.

  ‘I couldn’t get them back, Rosie,’ he says, squeezing the dead skin that is wrapped around my hand. ‘I’ve made them pay for it though. That was never part of the deal, but no, they had to try to get even richer. These people are scum. That’s why I phoned your aunt, put on a phony accent, tried to get an earlier skin of yours so I could at least replace what was missing, but no dice.’

  ‘You should have burned it,’ I say. My lips tickle.

  ‘I could say the same to you. But you didn’t, did you? I had to know if you could. I figured, if you were prepared to track my skins down, and if you couldn’t burn your love for me when you got the chance, that you’d want me – deep down – to go ahead with this. To make you better. Make you happy again.’

  ‘Love?’

  ‘Yes. You can love me again. Like I still love you. I’m still in the same skin, Rosie. I’m here in the same skin.’

  I shake my head, and hear the dead skin crackle against the pillow. ‘No, you’re different.’

  ‘I funded Mallory Peace. I heard about Anna, and the breakthroughs she’d made, and I set her up in business. I’ve been taking their pills since the beginning, and they work. The pills work. I’m still the same person I was. The person you loved.’

  But my love, the memory of it stitched tight around me like a shroud, says otherwise.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘You’re not.’

  He frowns. He lets go of my hand.

  ‘It takes time,’ says Anna Mallory, unseen by me. She’s close by. ‘The new skin takes roughly seventy-two hours to become impregnated by the old skin.’

  ‘But she’s suffering!’ he says.

  I concentrate on each breath as they argue. This pressure on my chest; it’s not the skin. It’s dead love.

  › • ‹

  ‘Do you like this room? I had it decorated for you. I thought you’d like it. It’s always the first thing you notice, isn’t it, Rosie? How a room is decorated.’

  ‘No it’s not,’ I say, but he’s right. I’ve never noticed it before. I’m always checking out the room: the positioning of objects, the angle of the furniture, as if it means something. I’ve done it all my life.

  ‘You used to hate that fish tank I owned, do you remember? You said it made the place look like a drug baron’s palace. I suppose that’s what I am, now, in a way. But it’s for you. Working on a cure, for you.’

  ‘I don’t want to be cured.’

  But he talks on, as if he can talk love
back into me.

  ‘Remember when we met?’ he says. ‘I loved you straight away. I never told you that before because I knew you’d laugh at me.’

  He has created a scene of it in his head. He played one character, and I played the other. But he didn’t love me straight away. He looked me up and down and said to Phineas Spice, ‘That’s fine.’ I wasn’t even a she to him then. I was that. And I liked it, to be an object of business. He was certainly an object of business for me, right up until Paris.

  Paris sneaks from my old skin to the new. I feel it permeating me. If he mentions Paris he will see that emotion in my eyes, and I don’t want to give him that. I want to hurt him, this stranger who hurts me while wearing that familiar face. The face that never did love me straightaway, no matter what the mouth says.

  He talks on. ‘You made a list.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of your skins.’ He pulls a piece of notepaper from his pocket. ‘I found it in your backpack, with the skin. A list of all the times you changed, and you never told me. You never would tell me.’

  I picture myself on that train; why do I always seem more complete in the past? My concerns, my thoughts, were solid on the train, sitting in that forward facing seat with the slice of early morning sunlight falling on the sticky tabletop.

  Already it seems an age ago.

  ‘Age sixteen. First moult,’ he reads.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I want to know what it was like. I’ve always wanted to know.’

  ‘I never wanted to – it wasn’t about hurting you.’ I can’t bear the thought of his pain. It must be working, this process, this sewing up into old skin.

  ‘You’ve been protecting yourself,’ he says. ‘But there’s no need, now.’

  I laugh at that. And the funniest part is his hurt expression; he really doesn’t see it.

  ‘Sixteen. You were sixteen years old. Tell me.’

  ‘It’s none of your business.’

  ‘I’m in love with you,’ he says, as if that explains everything.