Snakeskins

by Tim Major

  “If you’re making pancakes, Ian?” Evie called out.

  Ian bowed. “Certainly, your ladyship. You too, Cait?”

  Caitlin shook her head. She tugged on Evie’s leather jacket. Evie was supposed to be here to give her support, let her moan a bit, not to hang out with her family. Evie brushed her away and took the seat opposite Tobe, who watched her warily. He rubbed at the skin under his right eye, even though there had been no evidence of a bruise since his rejuvenation at the shedding.

  “So,” Evie said, thumping her elbows on the tabletop, “tell me everything.”

  Tobe swigged his coffee and shrugged.

  “Come on, Evie,” Caitlin whispered. “Come upstairs. I’m not going to say please.”

  Evie ignored her. She kept her eyes on Tobe. “How long did he last?”

  “Who?” Tobe replied after a pause.

  “The Snakeskin, genius.”

  Tobe waved his cup vaguely. “Not long.”

  “Was it more or less than the last time around?”

  “Dunno. About the same.”

  Caitlin’s dad had been bending before the oven, trying to decipher the numerals on the dials. Now he stood and turned. “I don’t think so, Tobe. I reckon it was about half the time. Thirty seconds, if that.”

  Tobe shot a look at Ian’s back.

  Evie giggled. “You know what they say about the length of a Charmer’s Skin.”

  “What do they say?” Tobe said, scowling.

  Evie pushed back her chair and tilted her head to look at Tobe beneath the table. “You know, the shorter the Skin lasts, the shorter the—”

  “Evie!” Caitlin hissed.

  Evie held up both hands in surrender. Tobe looked at the door, maybe judging his ability to escape. These days, he spent most of his time in the oversized garden shed at the foot of the garden, with his Commodore 64 games and his porn mags. He’d never been a people person.

  With a sigh, Caitlin slumped down in her chair. Ian placed a cup of coffee before her. He squeezed her shoulders and then retreated to the stove.

  Evie leant forward. “Did it hurt?”

  Tobe shook his head.

  “Not a tickle?”

  Another shake.

  “How about in here?” Evie put a hand over her heart.

  Tobe stared at her breasts.

  Evie gave Ian a thumbs-up as he passed her a cup of coffee. “You know what, Tobester? You’re going to be a big help when it’s Cait’s turn. Your support and understanding will mean a ton to her.”

  Caitlin stiffened.

  Ian swore at the frying pan, which had begun to spit oil. He called over his shoulder, “We don’t need to talk about that yet. Don’t rush her, Evie.”

  Evie glanced at Caitlin. “It’s only like four days from now.”

  “The paperwork’s all sorted,” Caitlin said. “There’s nothing I need to do but wait.”

  “Paperwork’s hardly the issue here. I’m talking about making yourself ready. I might be charmless, so to speak, but I know sheddings are a big deal. And your first one? You’re not going to tell me that you’re not fretting about it. I’ve seen those self-portrait sketches you’ve been doing up in your room, Cait. It’s been on your mind for months.”

  Caitlin blushed furiously. As usual, Evie had read her immediately. It was true that her bad mood was directly linked to Tobe’s shedding yesterday evening, and to her own shedding too. But Evie had got one thing wrong: her seventeenth birthday – and therefore her first shedding – was only three days from now and counting.

  “I’m not worried,” she said, trying to hide the quaver in her voice. “Shedding’s no big deal. If my whole family can do it, so can I.” She glanced over at her dad, who continued pouring batter into the frying pan. “Sorry, Dad. You know what I mean.”

  He turned. “It’s all right.” He flipped the pancake high and caught it in a single smooth motion. He looked absurdly pleased with the achievement. “We all have our skills. Not everyone needs to be a Charmer.” He slipped the pancake onto a plate and handed it to Caitlin. “And you know your mother would be feeling so proud of you right now.”

  Caitlin thought of her mum’s handwriting in the crimson notepad. In a faraway voice she said, “My earliest memory of Mum is of her telling me about Hexts going all the way back. Just names, but it was her tone of voice that I remember. I must have been only about five or six. She was trying to hold it together but I swear she was crying. I guess being from a line of Charmers was the most important thing in the world to her.”

  Ian shook his head. “Important, yes. The most important thing in the world? Not even close.”

  His eyes were glistening. Caitlin bit her lip and wished that Evie and Tobe weren’t there.

  Tobe yawned noisily. “She’s right, Ian. Janet played it down for your sake. You should have seen her at uni, before she met you. Charmer rights were all she talked about. Bloody shame how it all turned out.”

  Caitlin caught her dad’s eye. She shook her head.

  Nevertheless, Ian rose to the bait. “Tobe. You’ve had enough warnings. Don’t go making insinuations.”

  “Oh, I’ll insinuate all I like.” Tobe pushed back his chair. He rubbed at his healed eye. “And I’ll be ready for you if you try to sucker punch me again. You hear?”

  The two men looked ridiculous, glowering at each other with the full length of the kitchen table keeping them apart. Evie started a slow handclap, until Caitlin froze her with a look.

  “I’m just saying,” Tobe grumbled, “Janet was a live wire until she lowered her standards. And now she’s not a live anything. No offence.” He patted his pockets, picked up his pager, nodded and plodded through the back door, as if no argument had taken place.

  Caitlin could always tell when her dad was rattled. He turned to the kitchen window and gazed at the field behind the house, where blue tarpaulins marked the site of the proposed Blenheim retail park development. Her dad’s and her uncle’s relationship had been icy since Caitlin’s mum died, but it had never boiled over into anger before. Things were changing. She realised that her hands were balled into fists.

  Evie let out a low whistle. “You know what? It should be a party.”

  Caitlin nodded.

  “For your mum,” Evie continued. “And for the others. You owe it to the rest of you to make a big thing of it.”

  Caitlin glared at her. The rest of you. She’d had a few comments like that at college, too. More and more, the closer she got to the shedding, her friends had actually started referring to her in passing as a Charmer, first and foremost. There was no escaping the fact that her life was inevitably going to end up on a different track to theirs. She was a different breed.

  “We’re people, Evie, not another species, or aliens, or whatever.” Abruptly, everything seemed desperately unfair, this pressure of expectation that built up more every day. Evie and her other friends at college could never understand. “Don’t you fucking dare start making it all ‘us and them’, Evie. I won’t stand for it.” The last part was something her mum might have said, which only made her feel worse.

  “Cait!” her father snapped. “We don’t use that kind of language here. All right?”

  Caitlin gritted her teeth. The phrase ‘us and them’ repeated in her mind. If it was ‘us and them’, then the only person she really had on her team was her uncle. The thought made her feel sick.

  “Well, we fucking well should use that kind of language,” Caitlin said. She ignored her dad’s look of dismay. “We’re dying out and it sure as hell isn’t our fault. So, Evie, you can take your snooping and your Charmer-wannabe curiosity and you can shove it up your arsehole. I’m the way I am and I’m stuck with it—” she tugged at her ginger hair “—and I’ll deal with it the way I need to.”

  She pushed away her uneaten pancake, rose and stormed to the door. She turned before leaving.

  “But you’re right about one thing. I’m going to have the mother of all shedding ceremonies.
I’m proud of who I am. And I’m going to make sure nobody can ignore it.”

  ***

  Gerry rested her chin on her folded arms and let out a deep groan. A couple of the other pub customers looked her way, but only for a moment. Each of them was sitting in a separate snug. Anyone who drank alone at five-thirty on a Tuesday afternoon had plenty on their mind already.

  “This seat taken, miss?”

  Without looking up, Gerry freed her right arm and swept it across the beer-puddled table to indicate the seat opposite.

  “I think I know why you invited me here,” the voice continued. “You realise you adore me and you want me back. Am I close?”

  Gerry raised her head and managed a weak smile. “Thanks for coming, Drew.”

  “Always on call.”

  She looked up. Drew was dishevelled, as always. His stubble never quite became a beard. He had let himself go a little – maybe working from home just did that to people – and his neck had thickened. His dense mass of curls gave him a dark halo. Seeing him made her feel instantly better.

  “So,” Drew said.

  “So.” She sucked in a deep breath. “So it’s finally over. I’m out. Gerry Chafik and Folk no longer enjoy a professional relationship.”

  Drew snorted. “I’d say that ship sailed months ago. Still, I’m sorry, Gerry. Is that the right response? Or should I be congratulating you?”

  Gerry chewed her lip. Part of her did feel a little happier for having at least clarified the situation with Zemma. Deep down, she had known that this would happen, sooner or later.

  Drew pointed at the drinks on the table. “Using my powers of deduction, I’d say that a pint of bitter and a – what? – coffee liqueur doesn’t signify a celebratory mood.”

  Gerry sat upright and downed the liqueur in two gulps. “That one doesn’t count. I thought it might help with the heartburn that strip-lit sweatshop of an office gave me.”

  “I always said the trick was to keep as far away from any workplace as humanly possible. That, and being so inoffensive as to be impossible to sack.”

  “It’s all right for you. Folk will always need a cartoonist. Good career move.”

  “Yeah. Well, no. I was a crappy journalist, Gerry. You knew it, our first editor – McKendrick? – knew it. Anyone could see it. And I’m not much of a cartoonist either, especially now. Zemma would be happier with illustrated ‘knock, knock’ jokes than anything that threatens to appear satirical.”

  “It’s true,” Gerry said. “You were crappy.” She reached across the table and squeezed his hand.

  Drew sipped his pint of Guinness. “So who was it who pulled the trigger in the end?”

  “Me.” She paused. “Zemma. Oh, who the hell knows.”

  “And it was about…” He held up a hand. “No, let me guess. Snakeskins.”

  Gerry exhaled and nodded. “I’m that predictable?”

  “Some people would say so, but not me. This is what I’m talking about, Gerry. I was crappy because I never cared all that much. I don’t have the fire in me. I’m happier watching soaps than the ten o’clock news, and my main research tool for my cartoons is what I overhear at the bus stop outside my bathroom window. You, on the other hand, you can’t let it lie. In most professions that’s a liability, but in journalism it’s a necessity. You’re tenacious. You’re a bulldog.”

  Gerry pulled a screwed-up face. “Firstly, if you ever wondered why we never lasted longer than two one-night stands, then you could do worse than analysing that statement. A bulldog? Cheers. Secondly, in what way is my tenacity not a liability, given that it just lost me the only regular work I’ve ever had?”

  “Fair point. But don’t beat yourself up. You don’t want to be working for Cormorant.”

  “Ah, the mysterious Cormorant.”

  “Mysterious? Depends who you talk to. The word is that it’s a government proxy, and not all that well disguised.” Drew finished his pint and shuffled sideways along the bolted-down table. “I’ll get a round in. I’ve got some catching up to do.”

  Gerry groaned. That would explain a lot. So Folk would simply become the tabloid equivalent of the Daily Counsel, another mouthpiece for Party-approved information. No wonder Zemma was so incurious about the machinations of Charmers in the government. The GBP would tolerate the front-page images of sheddings – it would be fruitless to try and stifle interest in Charmers entirely – but would itself remain immune to scrutiny.

  Drew returned and slumped into his seat, slamming down two fresh pints and producing twin fountains of froth. “Right. If you’d like to recline on the couch, then we can begin today’s session.”

  With a sigh, and after another slurp of bitter, Gerry spun and lay down on the bench.

  Drew’s voice continued from above. “So, how long have you been experiencing this fixation?”

  “Sod off.”

  “I’m serious. The first of those one-night stands, when I first saw inside your flat? I was a bit taken aback by the books on your shelves. I figured you must be a Charmer yourself.”

  “I’m just interested. It’s interesting.”

  “Answer the question please, Miss Chafik.”

  Gerry huffed theatrically. “All right. You’ve got me. Since I was a kid. I mean, everyone’s been fixated on Charmers at some point or other in their life, right? The concept, at least. There was this cartoon on LWT—” She swivelled and sat up again. “What was it called? Champions of Eternity, something like that. Ever see it?”

  “Didn’t have a TV. Principled parents.”

  “Poor sod. That probably explains your current addiction to VHS box sets. Anyway, these Champions of Eternity were superheroes, doing good, the usual. Except they lived nearly forever, and each episode would follow one or two of them – there were hundreds by the end – through different eras. Helping a single family across the generations, or guiding far-flung nations through wars and out again. That sort of thing. It was pretty thinly veiled. I looked into it a few years ago, and of course the lead writer was a Charmer. It was propaganda, though hardly what you’d call corrosive, but it was the best they could do in those days when Charmers and Snakeskins were something you just didn’t discuss on TV.”

  “Yeah. I preferred those days, all things considered.”

  Gerry leant forwards. “But don’t you see? We’re right back there again. Except now everything’s theoretically ‘out in the open’, yet nobody’s talking about Charmers, not in any meaningful way. You can interpret that in one of two ways. Maybe everybody got sick of hearing about them as soon as we hit the twenty-first century, sick of the chat-show confessions, sick of the equal-rights campaigns, sick of the dawning realisation that not only were Charmers real, they were basically running the whole bloody country. What proportion of the Great British Prosperity Party are Charmers? Three-quarters? More? All of them?” She took a gulp of her drink. “Or alternatively, nowadays people are being affected in more subtle ways. Investigations suppressed, communication prevented, no access to the technology that I swear must be out there somewhere. And the ban on mass gatherings is a huge deal, Drew. If you’re right about Cormorant, it only goes to show the hypocrisy. I mean, what’s the use of a theoretically free press if the free press is owned by the government? Capitalism is doing the dirty work of a totalitarian government that prefers to keep its head down.”

  “And you think people shouldn’t be tired of hearing about Charmers and Skins?”

  “I think both are endlessly fascinating. And yes, like all bores, I think that everyone else ought to be as fascinated as I am.”

  “And you always wished you were one. A Charmer.” It wasn’t even a question.

  Gerry puffed out her cheeks. “Who doesn’t wish that?”

  “It’s more than that, though. Everyone wishes they could win the lottery, but not as many people spend every penny of their wages on scratch cards.”

  “You think that’s what I’m doing? That I’m trying to capture some dream by chasing
the story, as if that’d make me the same as them somehow? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Drew leant back and put his index fingers to his lips. “I’m not here to judge. I’m here to listen.”

  “Oh, piss right off, Drew. It’s important. Somebody has to report what’s actually happening. Take the Party truism about Britain inspiring a global peacetime of a hundred and fifty years. It’s utter, utter bollocks. Sure, there might have been no wars right here on our soil – nobody would ever get past the coastal defences. But there have been wars, and I mean big ones.”

  “Is this the point where you trot out the urban myth about the European war?”

  She glared at him. “I happen to think it’s not a myth and that ‘European war’ might even be underselling it. Call me a conspiracy nut if you like. Anyway, there’s the odd source that has an inkling about the world beyond the British Isles. Non-Charmer pilots who occasionally take ministers out of the country on jaunts, that sort of thing. And they won’t talk, but you still end up with hints of what’s out there. And those hints are the truth, because otherwise why would I have faced prison time for chasing sources with access to Europe or America? Anyway, the common denominator is the suggestion that there are dozens of conflicts going on right now. There is no world peace. It’s only here in Britain – and even that’s a mirage entirely dependent on the total suppression of civil unrest every couple of decades. The reality is simply that Britain is isolated from the world. Who knows what everyday life is like in other countries, what kinds of developments they’ve achieved while we’ve been navel-gazing? But of course we have our Charmers and we’re not letting them or anyone else out of the country, for fear of… what? Losing some competitive advantage? Utter bullshit. The Charmers in power are afraid, that’s all. And they’re letting the world pass us all by in their determination not to lose that power. The Counsel likes to bang on about Britain being the ‘policeman of the world’, but I bet you anything it’s a lie. This idea of British naval fleets squatting off the coasts of foreign countries, maintaining the peace… all lies. We’re being left alone not because we’re powerful, but because we’re irrelevant.”