Blood and Grit 21

by Clark, Simon

  A crash – splintering glass – jolted the bar silent. ‘That’s one way of getting out of the washing up,’ observed the man with the dog’s tale.

  ‘Oh, you and your lip, Freddy. Another quip like that and you’re barred, luv.’ After scolding Freddy, the barman kicked the pieces of glass under the counter.

  Another voice, lyrical with alcohol, was raised. ‘A few months ago … five or six or so, I heard about someone who lives near us. It was a strange goings-on. His wife bought this big piece of steak. Like that, it was.’ He held his hand apart. ‘A steak as big as a plate. Anyway, she cuts the meat in half, puts one piece in the fridge, and has the other half for her dinner. Later that day she’s feeling off it. You know? Poorly. Liverish. So she tells her husband to get the steak and cook it for his supper. He goes to the fridge. Opens the door. And the meat … this piece of steak fills the plate again. He’s amazed to see it’s hanging over the side. And when he looked at the steak, he saw it was just … just moving. They took the steak to the public health office. And they found it was cancer. Cancer in the meat. And, later, this bloke checked the fridge again. And he found where the steak had touched some sausages, it had infected them, and they were bursting out … splitting their skins. Just think about that. The poor woman had eaten the meat. And it was just a piece of cancer … living cancer. And now that infectious meat was inside her.’

  The night was cold and still when she left the pub. A few people walked along the promenade. But they hardly strolled. There was purpose in their direction, and some speed to their stride. They didn’t want to dally in the frigid air.

  In the distance, the saline hiss of the ocean was subdued. The sky had begun to clear. The light disk of the moon duplicated itself in darkened shop windows. To her left, a number of stone steps ascended into the darkness. And twelve steps up sat a lad, his face as white as lard. He squirted something from a yellow tube into a paper cup. Then, wrapping his hands around it, as if warming them, he raised the cup and rested it against his top lip. He breathed deeply, drawing great drafts of cold air and fumes into his chest, which burnt his nose and throat, filling his lungs with fire. A fire that flooded through his body to numb his arms and legs and soul. Then he dropped back onto his elbows as the solvent fire dissolved his brain.

  Somebody coughed, then spat. ‘Want a chip, luv?’ Two men carrying bouquets of greasy paper stood by her side.

  ‘You can do better than that, Shillies. Have a bit of his fish. Best bit of cod in Scabs.’ The gleaming, white fragment of fish was clutched in his oil-glossed fingers. ‘She looks foreign to me. See? She can’t understand a word you say. Not a ruddy word.’

  The other tapped his own head knowingly. ‘No. I think she’s a bit … in the head. Even so, she doesn’t look bad.’

  A soft laugh padded into the night. ‘God knows. Yer can’t see her face for all that ’air.’

  The other’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Do you look at the mantelpiece when poking the fire?’ Throwing away the screwed-up papers that had contained their fish and chip supper, they each took an arm and led her up a darkly winding side-street. Parked cars lined the road. Here there was absolute silence. Black windows of houses, like blind eyes, stared hard against the night.

  ‘Here’ll do. It’s the back yard of that old chippie. No one’ll see us.’ Into the high-walled yard they guided her. Then drew her toward a bed-sized patch of grass.

  ‘It’s my turn first this time, Shillies.’

  Shillies relinquished his hold on her and moved out of sight behind a shed of sagging boards.

  The other man pulled her close.

  And her long arms wrapped about him like the thick, white tentacles of an octopus. She opened her mouth as he bent toward her. The silver-grey of her tongue moved, and her teeth were a tightly packed row of blue-black mussels set in white flesh. The shells opened. Mother of pearl flowers. Salt pricked his tongue. And the rush and hiss of the sea was in his ears.

  Bitingly cold brine flushed from her mouth into his. The torrent poured through him, cascading into his lungs. His mouth jerked open … and then it was as still, and as silent, as his cold, dead heart.

  Shillies was startled when she appeared at his side. Softly, he called his friend’s name. His voice failed. She was turning her face to his. Shillies saw a strange, flat immobile face; the face of a …

  No. No. It was the face of a girl. Her fingers – no, the wet, sucker tentacles of an octopus, touched his lips. And pressed.

  He could not resist. They slowly pushed into his mouth, probing his tongue. His jaws yawned wider and wider as the rest of the chill, white limb slipped into his mouth. And smoothly slid into his throat. No air reached his lungs as that limb, which was more tentacle than arm, and which was as long as death, continued its tight slide through the core of his body … eternally working its way along the winding path of his stomach. He could still feel its cold, unceasing journey through his saltwater being as he lay face down in a sea of discarded newspapers, spent matches, decaying cartons and crushed beer cans.

  Where the land meets the sea …

  The milk-white surf rolled up the beach toward the town. And waves moved across a crackling band of pebbles to swirl and bubble about her feet.

  Then, calmly, she stepped forward into the roaring darkness of the nighttime ocean.

  Three-fifths of the world’s surface is covered by water. Should the polar ice caps melt, then the sea level would rise dramatically, flooding many thousands of square miles of dry land.

  Where the sea meets the shore. The ocean surged up the beach – rushing, tumbling, cascading, falling, rising toward dry land.

  The tide had turned.

  21 Skinner Lane

  The Next Visit

  Skinner Lane was so named because that is where something called the Skinner lives.

  * * *

  They arrived. One by one …

  … some walking upright, some hopping, some limping, some rolling over the lush spring grass …

  … the long dead, the recent dead, their dry paper faces moon-kissed and awful …

  ‘These are the dead, Kenny. And they’re coming to hurt you …’

  * * *

  Skinner Lane. The Present Day.

  Kenny sat on his bed. He stared at the mirror on the wall.

  Kenny had only moved into the halfway house yesterday. This evening he felt forlorn, unhappy and incredibly lonely. His melancholy eyes gazed back at him from beneath a thick fringe of rust-coloured hair.

  ‘I want to go home,’ he told his reflection. ‘I don’t like it here.’

  From downstairs he heard raised voices.

  ‘Pincher!’

  ‘Am not.’

  ‘Pincher. Bloody pincher!’

  ‘Stop that!’

  ‘Pincher! You took my chocolate!’

  ‘Did not.’

  Georgo and Edith were both forty years old. They were his new housemates. ‘You’ll all become best friends.’ The man from the social services office had beamed a bright smile. ‘After a few months I bet you like it so much here you’ll never want to leave.’

  Georgo and Edith had argued non-stop ever since Kenny arrived here at the halfway house. They hated one another. Their endless shouting made his head hurt.

  ‘Pincher!’

  ‘Am not.’

  ‘Give it back. S’my chocolate!’

  The shape of their voices was all jagged and sharp: the pointy edges jabbed Kenny’s ears.

  Suddenly, the television boomed out from downstairs: ‘IT WAS FRIDAY NIGHT IN LUPI’S BROTHEL. IT WAS THE HOTTEST ONE THIS SIDE OF THE POISON DELTA.’

  Kenny heard a female voice outside his bedroom door: ‘Georgo. Turn the sound down. I’m working tomorrow. I want to sleep.’

  The TV wasn’t turned down. The raucous movie added to the din Georgo and Edith were making over the missing chocolate.

  Kenny sighed. He wished he still lived with his sister. After Michael died she’d bought a
hotel in Whitby. She’d invited him to live there. However, the guests had complained about the strange looking man with the red hair, who sat in the lobby pulling faces. Kenny realized that the guests were complaining about him. He was forty-one now. An adult. He knew he couldn’t continue living under his sister’s roof. So he’d been the one to search the Internet until he found the halfway house (for those of us with extra needs that still long for a little more independence were the words under the photograph of the property owned by the Richmond-Slatter Charitable Trust).

  But it was horrible here. He wanted to go back to his sister.

  Kenny went to the window. He could see the trees of Skinner Lane in the moonlight; the way they arched over the road: huge, dark, powerful arms; the arms of giants … or so it seemed to him. Kenny knew Skinner Lane. He knew what manner of creature lived there in the trees. Because twenty-one years ago the Skinner had saved Kenny.

  Tonight Skinner Lane was peaceful. In the last few years, plenty of building work had taken place. There were new houses over in the direction of Thorne Manor, where he’d once lived with his sister and nasty Michael, the man who’d habitually mistreated Kenny. Michael had tried to scare him with stories about a creature called the Skinner.

  When Michael was alone with Kenny he’d smile and murmur, ‘Kenny. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be skinned alive? You know, to be peeled like you were one big, ripe banana?’ Nasty Michael.

  Kenny shivered as he remembered those days of cold, calculating cruelty. He gazed out at the road in the moonlight. No traffic passed by. For a moment there was silence. Soon, however, he began to hear faint music. Presently, limping along the path, came a thickset, dwarfish figure. The man wore an old grey suit. His brown hair was neatly combed, and he carried an old-fashioned radio, which he pressed to the side of his head. The radio was the source of the music.

  The Little Man’s face was striking. One side was blotched purple with a birthmark; it looked as if someone had squirted him with red wine.

  The man’s face was expressionless. As he passed the house, he paused, stared up at Kenny for a little while, the radio still clamped to the side of his head. After looking him squarely in the eyes the man continued walking along Skinner Lane.

  Kenny had seen the same man last night, too. Then Kenny saw lots of things that might, or might not, actually be there.

  The others in the house were the same. Just tonight (before the chocolate argument had started with Edith), Georgo had insisted that he saw a big man standing on the high brick wall that ran alongside the back lawn. The big man, according to Georgo, had been reading aloud from a yellow book. And the words had been frightening.

  Above the din from downstairs Kenny heard a tap on the door.

  ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘Uh, hello, Augustine.’

  ‘Hello, Kenny.’

  Augustine had dark hair that was pushed back from her face by a silver Alice band. Her eyes were as bright and as blue as the gas flame in the water boiler under the stairs. She had such a pretty face.

  Kenny knew she was thirty-eight years old. That she worked at the garden centre, potting plants and sweeping the aisles, and until yesterday she had lived in a hostel. This was her chance of semi-independent living in the halfway house. If anything, as she stood there in her pink pyjamas, she looked even unhappier than Kenny.

  ‘Georgo and Edith are arguing again.’ Augustine sighed when she uttered the words. ‘I’ve got to catch the early bus to work tomorrow. I can’t sleep with them shouting.’

  Kenny liked the shape of her voice. There were no sharp points. Only softness. ‘They’re arguing about Edith’s chocolate.’

  ‘I know. Edith says Georgo stole it from the fridge.’

  They both paused as they heard Edith yell, ‘PINCHER!’

  Kenny shook his head. ‘I only came here yesterday and already I’m wishing I hadn’t.’

  ‘Same here. When the hostel manager told me I was moving here to Skinner Lane, I got really excited. 21 Skinner Lane – I was going to be living in a proper house for the first time. 21 Skinner Lane! I wrote it down in my diary where there’s black lines for your address. It felt nice writing the address.’

  ‘Where would you go if you move out?’

  ‘Back to the hostel.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And I don’t want to go back there, Kenny. There’s never hot water for baths. It’s always too noisy.’

  ‘It would be nice here if it wasn’t for Georgo and Edith yelling.’

  ‘Georgo’s got to stop pinching her chocolate.’

  ‘Georgo didn’t take the chocolate,’ Kenny said, ‘I did. I threw it over the wall.’

  Augustine’s blue eyes snapped wide with shock. ‘What did you do that for?’

  ‘Because.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ Her eyes opened even wider. In fact, she was so shocked she had to sit down on the end of his bed. ‘That’s wrong, Kenny. What if the police come? They’ll take you away.’

  ‘Augustine. That’s me doing a ha-ha.’

  ‘You were joking?’

  He nodded.

  She gave him an uneasy look. ‘What you joke about that for?’

  ‘Your face was like this.’ He pulled an unhappy grimace. ‘I wanted to make you smile. You look nice when you smile.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes. Really nice.’

  Augustine smiled. She blushed as well. ‘Nobody’s ever told me that I’ve got a nice smile before.’

  ‘Well, you have.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Now her face really did look happy. The shape of her voice changed. Sort of shivery … quivery. Happy.

  He liked her voice.

  He found himself telling her about the time he lived in the mansion on Skinner Lane. ‘It was over twenty years ago. Back then I had a stammer. I couldn’t really speak like I do now.’

  ‘People make fun of you if you have a stammer.’

  ‘There was a man called Michael … he lived there with me and my sister. He made fun of me. Michael could make his smile come like this –’ he used his fingers to pull his lips into an unnaturally wide grin ‘– it wasn’t a real smile. It was pretend. And he’d use the pretend smile when he tried to frighten me with stories. That’s why I wanted to see the smile on your face, because it’s a real smile, a happy smile. Not a pretend one.’

  She smiled. ‘Like this?’

  ‘That’s a real smile,’ he told her with an emphatic nod. ‘I like that smile.’

  ‘Didn’t you tell your sister about Michael?’

  ‘I daren’t.’

  ‘Oooh, Kenny. It must have been awful.’

  ‘He tried to scare me with a story about a monster called the Skinner.’

  ‘That’s nasty. I bet you were frightened.’

  ‘But it all turned out okay. Because the Skinner grabbed Michael and pulled off all his skin.’

  Augustine pressed her hand to her mouth in horror.

  ‘And it happened right here on Skinner Lane.’

  ‘Here?’ She shot a startled glance at the window.

  ‘The Skinner’s ten feet tall; he doesn’t wear clothes; he’s got grey skin; his eyes are dark … all dark like black chocolate. Augustine, I’ve never told anyone else what happened. You’re the first to know.’

  She’d begun to tremble. ‘I don’t believe you, you’re joking again.’

  ‘The Skinner got Michael here on Skinner Lane. Ripped him up! Tore off his face!’

  ‘No! You’re trying to scare me.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘I thought you were nice, Kenny. Now I know you’re not. You’re just like the rest. You’re trying to make me cry.’ Tears shone in her blue eyes. ‘You’ve made me so frightened I want to go back to the hostel, and it’s nasty there. They take money out of my purse.’

  ‘No.’ Kenny sat beside her on the bed and grabbed hold of her hands. They were shaking with fear, tears made her face wet. He felt awful about what he
’d done.

  He felt like Michael.

  Nasty Michael.

  ‘Let go of me, Kenny.’ She looked so unhappy. ‘I’m going back to my room.’

  He gripped her hands tighter. ‘Augustine. Listen to me. The Skinner is nice.’

  ‘No, he’s bad. He’ll get me, too.’

  ‘Augustine.’ The shape of his voice was like pillows – soft, gentle. Nice. ‘Augustine. Michael tried to hurt me. The Skinner protected me. I know he’ll protect my friends, too.’

  She stopped trying to pull away. She shot him a shy glance with those glistening eyes. ‘Are you saying you want to be my friend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re not joking?’

  ‘Cross my heart, hope to die.’

  ‘If we’re friends it will be nice here.’ Her face stopped being frightened. A little smile crept over her mouth.

  ‘My sister gave me a cake. Would you like some?’

  Before she could answer that’s when it started. Screaming. Shouts of horror. Something bad was happening.

  Kenny and Augustine ran downstairs. Kenny thought that Georgo and Edith had started a slapping, biting fight. But when he found them in the living room they were staring at the television.

  Georgo was a short man with a big, round face; he always had wet, dribbly lips – and an expression that was permanently fixed to one of dismay. As if someone was telling him off for something he hadn’t done.

  Edith always wore black leggings with a black turtleneck sweater. She had an unusually long, thin neck (she’s embarrassed by her neck; so that’s the deal with the turtleneck). Meanwhile, blonde curls seemed to explode out of her skull. People always stared at her neck and the blonde frizz.

  ‘What’s all the shouting for?’ Kenny asked.

  ‘Look!’

  Both Edith and Georgo were terrified. They pointed at the television.

  Silver letters blazed from the black screen: