Thin Skin

by Emma Forrest

  But I remembered, of all the classes I never paid attention to in school, biology was the one I went out of my way to block completely. I mapped out my emotional fate then, when I decided that it was too frightening to try and understand how one’s own body works. Because if you know how it works then it is not too hard to figure out how it can fail. And the best way to pretend you don’t know you’re failing is to pretend you don’t know you are competing. When people are vocally modest, you can tell they’re very frightened. For ‘What, me, little old me? No one is interested in little old me’ delete and read ‘Why is nobody interested in little old me? Am I really so little? How do I get big? Wait, let me cover my ears, I don’t want to know.’

  I told myself that if I went out tonight, and if I was recognized by a fan, I would ask them to help me, or try to. But then remembered that people who ask for autographs are very rarely fans and very rarely interested in the celebrity they’re requesting a part of. They don’t really want anything to do with the individual. What the fan wants is celebrity the entity, the whole messy cloud, which hovers above New York City like a spaceship.

  ‘Take me!’ people plead to the ship. ‘Prod me! Probe me! Pick me, motherfuckers!’

  But the spaceship just sits there.

  last chance

  As luck would have it, no one recognized me in any of the four bars I hopped. It’s like wanting to find a boyfriend – you never get one when you’re looking. And because I wanted so desperately to be looked at that evening, everyone turned their eyes away. The last bar I hit was on Ludlow Street. As I walked over some gratings, the sound of the keyboard surged dully beneath me. I sat across the street and smoked a cigarette. I prayed to my mother and got a couple of drinks. There were streaks of hot pink tearing strips out of the sky as the sun began to set. Aslan appeared. I didn’t recognize him at first, out of context. I pictured a make-up girl blotting his forehead with powder as he fumbled for his Marlboro and it made me gasp. I settled my check and followed him across the street and down the stairs.

  He told me what I needed to know. I hurried home to get on with it.

  bad room-mate

  Cyrinda was not there when I got home, although she had taken the Cinamint toothpaste that I thought was now mine by default. There is no default with Cyrinda. She had taken other things that were mine too. A bottle of my bubble bath, a tube of scarlet lipstick she had been coveting.

  I took fifty pills from a jumbo bottle of aspirin. I laid them out on my desk and popped them in my mouth one by one. Om. Yum. Good girl, Ruby. I drifted into unconsciousness, calm and content, because I was doing the right thing.

  ‘Listen,’ whispered the thought of suicide, which was lying beside me with its arm around my torso.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I answered dreamily, letting it nuzzle my neck, grateful, at last, for contact, even if it was not human.

  ‘Listen,’ elaborated the thought of suicide, ‘Liev wants to talk to you.’

  the other side

  The ambulance man kept prodding my arms to keep me awake. Irritated, I closed my eyes and went back to the other side for another forty winks.

  sebastian sorts it out

  I floated back up to the surface to find myself in a hospital bed with tubes in my nose and something sticking into the back of my hand. A male nurse was standing over me and asking, scar by scar, in a heavy Indian accent, ‘Is this recent? Is this recent?’

  ‘That one?’ answered Sebastian helpfully. ‘I haven’t seen that one before. Oh, that one on her upper arm is at least a year old.’

  ‘Why you do this?’ asked the nurse cheerily. ‘You won’t be pretty for husband.’

  ‘I’m not concerned with prettiness,’ I replied sternly. The first living words out of my dead-asleep mouth, they worked their way up my throat past phlegm soaked in black calcium.

  ‘Bullshit!’ laughed Sebastian, squeezing my hand.

  ‘No. Beauty, I’m obsessed with. Ugliness too. But what the hell is pretty? Who could possibly be interested in that? Doesn’t it suggest,’ I paused because my throat was raw from the tubes that had been shoved down there to pump my stomach, ‘the desire to please? Have I ever, so long as you have known me, exhibited any desire to please anyone except myself?’

  ‘No,’ he said solemnly. ‘I guess that’s why you’re here.’

  He pulled up a chair and sat beside me. He traced, with his eyes, the tubes in my nose, the tube in my hand, adding, as best he could, a protective force field to the ones in plastic, already in place. I knew what he was doing, even if he didn’t, and I was grateful for his effort.

  ‘Sebastian,’ I breathed, ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you too,’ he answered, although I could tell, in a flash, that he no longer did.

  When, standing by my ER bed, Cyrinda and Sebastian were told that I would pull through with no physical damage, they both left, Cyrinda to attend a party at Lot 61 and Sebastian anywhere at all, so long as it was the hell away from me, forever and ever amen. Though their destinations were different, Cyrinda and Sebastian opted to share a cab and clung to each other within moments of the ride. When Cyrinda got out at Lot 61, so did Sebastian, determining, correctly as it happened, that that was the last and final stop on the ‘Away From Ruby’ bandwagon.

  eastern european irritation

  I was transferred from ER to the intensive care unit, where I was put on constant, around-the-clock watch. The first six hours a middle-aged Polish lady sat on a chair by the foot of my bed and watched me sleep, watched me breathe, watched me joylessly consume a packet of Saltines and a bowl of tomato soup. I felt pangs of middle-class guilt as I tried to work out how much she might be getting paid to stop the princess from doing it again.

  ‘Hey, Daddy, I wanna pony! I wanna go to Miami! I wanna bracelet from Tiffany! Hey, Daddy, I wanna die! Hey, everybody, watch me die! Ya ready?’ On tiptoes, tan legs, white bathing suit, no breasts yet, forcing everybody to watch a fairly ordinary dive. ‘Did you see it? Did you see me dive?’

  Did you see me die? Did you see me die? Are you watching?

  The sense of profound irritation I felt transcended the period of spiritual questioning one expects to enter following an unsuccessful suicide attempt.

  ‘Why can’t I even go to the bathroom without you watching me?’ It was the first question I asked of her and the first answer she gave me. With less of an accent than I had expected, but with much stronger anger, she said, ‘You know why.’

  ‘No –’ squealy, squealy princess voice ‘– I don’t … oh, wait. Yeah, okay,’ I conceded, ‘I know,’ although until just then I had forgotten ‘… but listen, it didn’t work and so I’m not going to do it again, am I?’

  ‘We don’t know that.’

  In ‘we’ I saw not the hospital establishment, the doctors and nurses on the emergency ward, but a phalanx of middle-aged Polish ladies, watching me from every angle.

  ‘Oh come on. Any sensible person must know that it’s too grand a gesture to fail at and then immediately attempt again. You’re missing the point.’ I looked at her. ‘Or maybe you’re getting the point and I’m missing it completely. Forget about it. You can watch me pee.’

  At that, she turned her back.

  Thus reprimanded, I crept back into bed and, pulling myself under the covers so my head was covered too, I pretended to go to sleep. Soon I was asleep. When I woke up, it was late at night or early in the morning and the lady was gone. In her place sat a withered white nun. She was staring at me, or attempting to. Her eyes were unfocused, tripping her up somewhere in the middle distance. There was a beatific smile on her splotchy face. There was a sweet smell in the room that wasn’t sweets and wasn’t goodness either. It was bourbon. The nun was drunk. As she registered me, I tried to pretend I was not awake, but winking at me, she cooed, ‘Ahm praying for you, little girl.’

  She didn’t look like she was praying.

  She tilted forward in her chair. ‘Are you a good Christian girl?’


  ‘No,’ I answered, peering grumpily out from the corner of my sheet, ‘I’m a good Jewish girl.’

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked, although I knew, from the way her red ears perked up, that she had heard me perfectly well the first time.

  ‘I said, I’m Jewish. Sorry I can’t be of more use to you.’

  She moved toward my bed. I thought, in a moment of sheer terror, that she was going to strangle me with her bony hands for murdering our Lord Jesus Christ. But, leaning into my face, she whispered, so the bourbon on her breath stung my eyeballs, ‘Then you are my cousin. And ahm praying for you hard!’

  The day passed as had the previous one: Saltines, soup and staring. I was unhappy when I realized I was awake because I was so worried that I would have to look at the nun – worse still, talk to her. Unable to keep my eyes from opening any longer, I raised myself up onto my haunches and let the lids spring open, preparing myself for the worst.

  ethnic wisdom

  Sitting in the staring chair was an African-American lady of considerable age and girth. She was not staring at me. She was doing her knitting, pulling together a scarf in tones of aubergine and pink. Aubergine and pink! Side by side in sweet harmony! Her face was generous, so I knew that she was not making the scarf for herself. But, glancing at her clothes, yellow, green and orange, I saw the taste was her own and that the scarf would be appreciated by her and her alone. ‘Um, thank you,’ some disappointed kid would stammer and the maker would never, ever know it wasn’t the kid’s best gift ever.

  Seeing me watching her, not bothering to watch me, I was pleased when she did not act as if she had been caught out.

  ‘Well, good morning, girl who does not love her own life! Today you will learn to love it!’

  ‘What is happening today to make me love life so much?’ I asked nervously, my tummy rumbling in support of my anxiety.

  ‘Today you meet Jesus!’

  My eyes burst wide in my slack gray skin. ‘What are you saying? Am I going to die? Will I not pull through? The doctor said I was fine.’ I started to cry, sorry, sorry, sorry for what I had done, wanting it to become undone as much as I had once wanted to be famous.

  ‘What you talk about, chile? Of course you going to live. You be alive until he come to take you. No choice in it for you. Today he is stopping by to remind you of that. It is not in your hands, chile, so just you lay back and relax.’

  Embarrassed and a little angry, I dried my eyes on the back of the hand that didn’t have a broad bandage, from where a tube had been detached as I slept. No tube and no sense of humor.

  ‘Should you be saying all this? I mean, isn’t this against hospital policy or something? Why am I being indoctrinated?’

  I imagined my new life as a terribly serious person, easily offended but, unlike in the past, offense acted on, rather than forgotten in the glint of a hot-fudge sundae.

  ‘What you mean, indoctrinated?’ she frowned, jabbing the air with her knitting needle, the aubergine and pink work done, flying from the needle like the official flag of the psychiatric ward. God bless this psychiatric ward, home of the gibbering, land of the nervous, hand on heart, stand up tall. I am very brave when I am completely alone.

  ‘There was a nun here last night, talking about God.’

  ‘That ol’ fool’

  ‘You’re calling God a fool?’ I gasped.

  ‘No, chile, I callin’ that old fool a fool. She don’t got no brains in her head, going around gettin’ drunk and then assaultin’ patients with prayer. She make God sound like a man rubbin’ up against you on a crowded subway.’

  Her name was Marcelle, just as it ought to have been. Delighted, I forced myself awake proper, pulling on the smiley foam slippers the hospital had left by my bed, and walked over to peer out of the window. New York was shining in the heat, and I was glad that I was not down there in it, but that I could watch it from a sanitized perch. We were on the tenth floor and, gazing down, I watched the streets filled with people who had not tried to kill themselves. They had tried, and were still trying, with tremendous effort and strain, to live.

  They were the ones who had to be in the hundred-degree heat, on filthy streets, sneering and spitting at each other, the spit sizzling on the sidewalk like hatred. That was their reward. Rich people rent apartments that are high up and have huge windows so that they can look down and get a clear view of just how dismal it is not to be extremely wealthy.

  ‘If this were a room in an apartment complex, it would go for $3,000 a week.’

  Marcelle laughed. ‘Don’t you get used to it up here. You going to be back down there with all of them soon enough. Only this time you going to know how to handle it.’

  ‘How? How?’ I spun away from the window, imploring her to tell me fast and loud.

  ‘The Lord!’ she sang. ‘Jesus!’ – fast, loud, wrong.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, making little attempt to mask my dissatisfaction with her answer. ‘Him.’ She might as well have given me a hand-knit aubergine and pink scarf.

  ‘Yes, him. He’s going to help you.’

  ‘Great.’

  I slouched back to bed. She knew not to talk about it anymore and entertained me, instead, with tales of her adolescence in the south and how she had been married to a man named Garfield, but that he had drowned in a fishing accident. Her eyes never once teared over, even as mine cried buckets. The doctor who came to take a blood sample gave me a quizzical look and Marcelle made herself interested in her knitting.

  When he left, she looked at her watch. ‘We gotta get you some breakfast. It ought to have been here by now. You skinny enough as it is.’

  ‘I look skinny to you?’

  ‘Well, in all honesty, I can’t tell. You lyin’ flat on your back in a bed, after all. And if it’s so, I ain’t sayin’ it’s a good thing. You white girls take skinny as a compliment. That’s funny. Even the word, the way it sound, makes it pretty plain it ain’t an attribute to be encouraged. Skinny as a snake. You not a snake.’ She eyed me, as if I might be.

  ‘No, I’m not a snake. I’m a cat.’

  ‘A cat!’ she beamed. Folding up her knitting, she placed herself plump on the side of my bed and started to pet my hair. ‘You is a little cat.’ I curled and wriggled at the soft touch of her rough hand. I was glad I was there with her. I was glad I had done what I did if it meant that I could lie in a slim white bed and have a large black lady stroke my cheek.

  She moved her chair so that it was next to my bed, in order to underline the fact that she would no longer be watching me, but that for the rest of my stay she would be being with me. I asked her, later, as I ate my lunch, whether she was this nice to everyone she was assigned to watch.

  ‘First off, I take assignations from no one but the Lord. Second, I’m cordial to everyone, but nice to the people I think are nice in their bellies …’

  ‘Nice in their bellies or nice in their hearts?’

  ‘Down in their bellies, because the heart can be worked on with music, film and books.’

  ‘That’s true, for sure. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Your belly be the only organ you cannot fool.’

  Agreeing wholeheartedly, I stuffed it full of jello, a truthful dessert if ever there was one, and waited for my next blood test. Soon enough, the results were back and the doctor announced that I was all clear.

  ‘No liver damage. We’ll let you go around lunchtime tomorrow.’

  i used to be frightened of flowers

  There was a knock at the door and Rachel came striding in to see me, bearing flowers in tones of purple and red, royalty and blood. ‘Thank you,’ I nodded, as she bent to kiss my cheek. She was wearing high-heeled sandals made of snakeskin. Through the open toes, her nails shimmied in their pearlescent pedicure. The nail on one of her big toes was in a better condition than my entire life.

  She shook her head. ‘Really, Ruby. This is not,’ she said, motioning to the hospital bed, ‘the best way to begin a friendship.’

>   I stretched my arms above my head, coquettish, ridiculous in my hospital smock. ‘You want to be my friend?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure.’

  She changed the subject. ‘Scott is very upset. He wanted to fly in and see you, but I stopped him.’

  ‘Thank you. You did the right thing.’

  ‘I always do the right thing.’

  ‘No. You let me into your house. I think, perhaps, that that was wrong.’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Thank you for the flowers.’

  ‘I’m glad you like them.’

  ‘I don’t really!’ I laughed, hoarse. ‘I like them because they’re from you. But, to be honest, flowers have always kind of scared me. I worry about the bugs they could be hiding.’

  She ran her manicured hand across the heads of the flowers, which rubbed themselves against her touch. ‘See, nothing nestling in here. Except the very best wishes for the very best girl. Is there something I should have brought you instead? Chocolates? Fruit?’

  ‘Nah. I don’t really feel like eating. I figure this, all this, can at least be utilized as a successful diet. Fuck Dr Atkins. Screw Weight Watchers. If a person is serious about losing weight, they should prove it by trying to kill themselves. And if they survive, then they deserve to be thin. And their hospital recuperation period will play host to a transformation.’

  ‘Very good, Ruby. Shut the fuck up.’ She kissed my forehead. ‘I’m glad that you’re still on the planet.’

  The phone rang. It was Sean. At first I couldn’t place him, without his big head in front of me. He was so excited that he forgot, for a few minutes, where it was he was calling me.

  ‘Ruby! Great news!’

  ‘About my suicide attempt?’