Thin Skin

by Emma Forrest

  ‘Oh, shit. Oh, yeah right.’ He paused to think of an inspiring piece of wisdom to impart but then decided against it. ‘Listen, you daft bitch.’

  ‘I’m listening,’ I said.

  ‘There’s a bidding war for Mean People Suck. I screened a cut on Sunday and Lions Gate made an offer straightaway. Then Miramax got wind of it, right, but then Sony Pictures Classics offered more. Things are looking great. And you know what else? It’s you that hooked them. They’re all saying that it’s the best performance by a young actress since Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘No joke.’

  ‘Does that mean you’re the new Scorsese?’

  ‘It means that I already have financing for my next film. I’m writing it for you.’

  ‘I don’t know that I can go through all this again.’

  ‘It’s a comedy.’

  ‘Can we talk about this when I get out?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ A baby started to gurgle in the background. ‘So, Ruby, I just wanted to say thank you.’

  Rachel leaned over and kissed me on the forehead.

  ‘No problem,’ I said, waving goodbye to her as she left.

  time to get up now

  Marcelle brought my dinner on a tray without a word, then went back to her chair and her gaze which I followed out above the traffic to the cinema on Greenwich Avenue.

  Looking at the cinema, I suddenly had the desire to leave my cosy bed and my soothing babysitter. I wanted to get out. I wanted to be alive, in the world. I wanted to pay to see things, pay to hear things and pay to read things. I wanted to pay to wear things on my body which had, morphed into a more pleasing shape in the time I had been away from the world.

  As the sun set over Manhattan, Marcelle clicked out of her silent reverie and back into language.

  ‘Ohmigod. God is love. It is so wonderful to know him. He is with me every minute of the day, talking to me, listening to me.’

  ‘That sounds lovely, Marcelle.’

  ‘It is the most beautiful thing. And it is the most normal thing too, for he never leaves my side. Sometime I don’t even realize he is there, because he is so quiet, looking after me.’

  I guess it doesn’t make a lot of noise to look after someone. I guess you just make noise when you need looking after. I liked her description of this quiet man who supported her in every way. Head melting into the pillow as sleep began to caress my face, I asked, ‘Does He always forgive you?’

  ‘Yes! I’m forgiven a thousand times. And so are you! That is why you is sitting here, talking to me right now. Because you is forgiven. It is going to be all right. It is going to be fine, because He saved you. He got a special plan for you.’

  She closed her eyes in ecstasy and sang out loud, ‘Jesus loves you!’

  Thank you. Thank you, Jesus. I did not love him back, not at all, but I was so grateful for His love. I will always remember Marcelle as the first and last person who made me believe in God. For a few short hours I was a devout believer. But I think it was really her I believed in. When she left during the night, my belief was gone too. I woke up in the morning, an atheist again. Between my sleep and waking, I saw someone I did believe in.

  you again?

  Her eyes sprang open and she knew enough, instinctively, to shut them tight again. There was a stirring in the corner of the room. Ruby was frightened, the first time she had felt the rapid car-alarm heartbeat since she had tried to dull it altogether. Peering under her lashes, she watched a shadowy figure leaning against the window, staring out into the night.

  ‘Marcelle?’ she asked foolishly, for she knew it was not her.

  Again, hopeful, like opening the fridge only five minutes after last looking, ‘Marcelle, is that you?’

  When no answer came, she closed her eyes again, gripping the sheets. ‘Just because I tried to kill myself, Lord,’ she prayed, ‘does not mean I want to die.’ A heavy footstep toward her bed, then another, then more. In five steps, she knew he was beside her. Tasting blood on her tongue as she bit into her lip, she opened her eyes, wide as she could, attempting to convey courage, feeling none at all.

  A man, maybe six foot tall, maybe dark, maybe foreign, maybe a man.

  ‘Ruby?’

  The blood from her lip trickled down her chin, the metallic taste mixing with the fear on her tongue.

  ‘Ruby, is that you?’

  She raised her hand from her side and brought it slow to her mouth. With the back of her hand, she tried to wipe the blood away, but managed only to streak it across her cheek, onto her neck and back down to the white hospital sheet. It was more blood than a lip ought to contain and she wondered if perhaps it were fake and she were being filmed, her terrorizer an extra hired by Sean to get a true reaction.

  ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘You did once. I doubt you would remember me. I used to be a friend of your family. I lodged in your house for a few months.’

  Ruby gasped, a rivulet of blood passing back into her throat so that she almost gagged. This was not how it was supposed to be. He was never meant to see her like this. Or maybe he was? Maybe that was the whole point of the past week. That this was the only way to see him again. Not certain how to proceed, she leaned over to the night table and gargled with the water in the plastic cup.

  Holding the water in her mouth, she eased herself out of bed and went to the bathroom where she spat into the sink. Wiping her face with a wet paper towel, she looked for the answer in the mirror, as she always did. As ever, the answer did not came. She padded past him without a glance, and hauled herself back into bed. Fluffing her two sad pillows as best she could, she leaned back, ready to talk.

  ‘I think I know who you are.’ She did not want to say it aloud in case the words chased him away. He did not want the words said in case they obliged him to leave. Her own Scottish Play? And all this time she had imagined him her good-luck charm. He was heavier. The thick hair had continued to sprout, in new, uncalled-for places: his nostrils, the nape of his neck, his ears. He had a black and white beard, neatly trimmed, and his mouth sat like a red interloper inside it.

  The Star of David was no longer around his neck. In its place were a couple of hippyish beads on a beige leather string. His flannel shirt was undone several buttons from the top down and two from the bottom up. It was too heavy for the summer heat. She thought, perhaps, he was hiding a messy body. Then she wondered what he was thinking about her body, her face, her hair? As though he could hear her thoughts and was determined to be truthful, Liev, because it was Liev, not ghost of Liev or son of Liev, announced, ‘Your skin is green.’

  ‘Greenish. It’s the pills. Not fabulous for the complexion. Sorry.’

  ‘I didn’t say that you looked bad. I think you look beautiful. It’s just that, right now, you are beautiful in the key of green.’

  She thought about how many times she had heard the word ‘beautiful’ since she had been in the hospital and how many times she had heard it in the last year, how many times in her life. How often had she thought of the word without saying it out loud. And if you think such a word, but don’t expel it with your voice, does it turn to poison in your brain?

  Her thoughts began to swim, struggling against the waves in the room, falling now and then, beneath the waves completely.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she shook her head vigorously, ‘I don’t know if I’m still me. I’m not sure that you’re you.’

  ‘Do you believe I was there all those years ago?’

  ‘Yes. Of course you were there.’

  He watched her with brown eyes, the depth of the darkness in them sucking out the phosphorous overhead light in the bathroom. It blew out, silently. He was, in the darkness, a man in the shape of a man. She was a girl in the shape of a girl, beneath her sharp starched sheets.

  ‘I am here now.’

  ‘How do I know it’s you?’ she queried, stern as a schoolteacher.

  ‘How do I know it’s you, Ruby?’ he an
swered, with the flip drawl of a schoolboy who knows that Miss has a loveless home life.

  ‘Of course it’s me. I look the same.’

  ‘No you don’t.’ He edged toward the foot of the bed, where he laid his fingers on the sheet that encased her toes. He traced the sheet upwards, as she lay, still as a mummy, eyes darting furiously in the dark.

  ‘You didn’t have hips before,’ he journeyed gently up the bed. ‘You didn’t have breasts before.’

  Her eyes came to rest as she asked, tremulous, ‘Now that I do, I suppose you don’t love me anymore.’

  Still gentle, not looking up, he moved his hand away and walked back toward the window. Talking to New York, he told the city, and its one other inhabitant, ‘I’m not a fucking pedophile. I loved you because you were you. You don’t think it destroyed me that you were a little girl?’ He traced the New York skyline on the window with his finger. ‘Do you know where I’ve been for all this time?’

  He waited for New York to answer, but Ruby piped up, instead: ‘No. I have wondered every night. It’s been the first thing I’ve asked myself every morning. It’s what I always thought about during sex with Scott or love-making with Sebastian. I used the thought as others count sheep, only it didn’t soothe me. Where have you been?’

  He looked sideways at her. ‘Do you remember when you looked up at me and said, “Baby, I wanna fuck”?’

  It sounded far more shocking coming out of his mouth than it had from hers as a little girl. She covered her ears but it didn’t stop her hearing him when he whispered, ‘I was inside the answer.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she hissed, moving her hands to cover her mouth, her words unmuffled by them.

  He pulled a red pen from his pocket and drew her mouth over the back of her palm, pulling back as he spoke to admire his work.

  ‘When you said that to me. You trapped me inside a sheet of glass. That’s what happens when a little girl says “fuck” and knows what it means.’

  She moved her hands, and her mouth, flesh and blood beneath them, tinged blue. ‘My mother told me what it meant. Years before I met you.’

  He sat down against the wall, legs crossed in lotus position, and tilted his head back. ‘You sort of look like Lila, you know.’ Liev stared at her until she had to look away. When she looked back, he was gazing at the skyline.

  Irritated by mention of his ex-girlfriend now as she had been then, she turned on her side, so they were both looking out of the window. She tried to look at the same thing as him, but it was difficult to pinpoint in the dark. His voice trailed again, like a velvet ribbon rolled out from the corner.

  ‘You never met Lila, I don’t think. But she had watched you sleep one night, after a dinner party at your parents’ house, before I was there. I told her how I felt about you and she said that she had only glanced at you, but she thought she understood. Lila’s dead now. She was strangled in the shower by a homeless artist she took home one night.’

  ‘My father didn’t tell me. We don’t speak. I’m so sorry. You must really miss her.’

  ‘I miss a lot of people.’

  She felt the velvet ribbon real and rubbed it against her nose. ‘Me too.’

  She thought she could hear him smile. He felt his lips ease back over his teeth as if this were the first time. It hurt. He rubbed his teeth with his thumb and wondered whether or not he should show her. Since there was very little either of them could see, this far away from each other, he decided he would tell her about it.

  going-home present

  ‘I have a drawing for you. I’ve kept it with me,’ he paused as he put his hand in the pocket of his flannel shirt, ‘just in case we ever ran into each other again. I think it is my finest work.’

  He popped open his wallet. It was thick with bills which he pulled out one by one. They looked like dollars, but some of them had pictures of her mother on them where Presidents should have been. With the last one laid out on the floor, he unfolded, from miniature, a scrap of lined paper just under A3. It was ripped from a jotting pad of low quality, a ninety-nine cents bodega job. Moving back toward the bed as though on wheels, he placed the picture in her hand.

  ‘I drew it on a plane back from home a few summers ago. First I drew my tray of airplane food, beaten and bruised in its plastic coffin. Then I drew the view from the window, clouds and clouds and clouds, and who cares for clouds when they aren’t lying on their back? Then the man with the headphones, sleeping beside me, the deep, clean sleep of the dull. I had more success drawing the miniature bottles of wine on his tray. Things in miniature tend to be pretty convincing, whether they are children or bottles of alcohol, don’t you think?’

  She didn’t answer. Leaning across the bed, to the lamp on the side table, she brought white back into the room. Sitting up straight, she pulled her hair out of her face and saw the other face on the lined notepaper. Ruby looked at the little girl, rendered in pen strokes of love and defeat, the girl’s eyes huge with playful questioning, the artist’s strokes small with answers unspeakable.

  ‘How did you remember how I looked, Liev?’

  ‘I don’t know that I did. I remembered you, that’s true. But I’m not sure you did look like that. All these years, I wanted you to check for yourself. Did you look like that, Ruby?’

  She followed the sweeps of the pen. The ink was so solemn, and yet the girl inside the troubled black ink was not troubled at all, but mischievous and excited.

  ‘Yes. I think I did look like that.’

  He leant over the bed and she steeled herself not to flinch when he kissed her forehead. His beard felt smooth, the cartoon beard of a kindly grandfather. She touched it and it grew in her hand, curls wrapping themselves round her fingers. He smelled of clean-cut grass, mixed with a pinch of the other kind of grass, more heady, not unpleasant, although the connotations were of Aslan and other little boys she had encountered on the Lower East Side. Both scents were glaringly inappropriate in the hospital, the former making a mockery of all the ‘fresh scent’ disinfectants splashed along the hallways. The latter just making a mockery.

  ‘What are you doing here, Liev?’

  He shrugged his shoulders and the curls snapped back. ‘I have been assigned to watch you.’

  ‘You always were,’ she thought.

  ‘I really missed you,’ he said, … no longer able to fake froideur.

  She almost laughed. ‘I really missed you’ made him sound like a school friend reconnected with after a summer camp apart. She did not know what to say. She was trying not to breathe too hard.

  He lay beside her. She sobbed, as ever, but the tears did not leave the ducts and the ducts began to multiply under her skin, until they were lining every vein and string of flesh inside her. They formed, twofold, along the wall of her uterus and down along her vaginal passage. They covered the darkness that Aslan had discovered, but that Sebastian had chosen to ignore and the darkness turned, not to light, but to sweet pink, sad tears, spread out, turned juicy, happy, sensual.

  She knew a doctor would be back to check on her soon. Inspired by relief, she moved his hand to her mouth, to her breast, between her legs and then she reached up under his flannel shirt and unbuckled his belt, touching him as he touched her. It was done in under a minute, but she kept his hand under her hospital gown, holding it in protective place with her own. He was gasping now, harder than she had been, and she tried to shush him. He snatched his hand away and leapt across the room.

  ‘What have I done? What have I just done? I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Please don’t tell your father.’

  ‘I don’t talk to my father anymore. And besides, I’m twenty years old, you understand that, no?’

  ‘No.’

  He went to the bathroom to wash his hands. There he took a few deep breaths, looking at his reflection in the mirror, where hers had been a few minutes earlier. Ruby’s face was still there, just under his own. It floated to the surface within a few seconds and, screwing up his eyes, he ducke
d his whole skull under the cold faucet.

  ‘I’m going to have a bath,’ said Ruby, head bowed in mock shame.

  ‘Of course. Just leave the door open.’

  Ruby inched the taps into action, opening the hot tank wide. Presently, she dipped her toe into the water and, finding it just this side of bearable, stepped into the tub, where she sat with her knees up by her chin. Captain of a synchronized swimming team consisting of one, she suddenly kicked her legs up into the air and let her torso fall back into the water until her hair was submerged, but her face hovered prettily above the water level. Then her arms stretched back behind her head, her hands resting on the rim of the tub, her toes on its southern counterpart. Arching her hip she raised her tummy up into the air. It glistened, rounded, like the body of a prepubescent child.

  She stayed that way as long as she could hold it and then flipped onto her tummy. Taking a deep breath, she ducked her face beneath the surface. She felt her newly grown-in hair take flight on the water, just long enough to float behind her pale neck like a fashion accessory. Beneath the water, she blew out bubbles. In one bubble was Rachel, dressed in pink, like Glinda the Good Witch. When Rachel had floated so far into the distance that she could no longer be discerned by the naked eye, Ruby came back up for air. She shook her wet hair, splashing water across the room, and then stepped, neatly, precise and purposefully, out of the bath. No one was there to hand her a towel. She handed herself her own towel and went back outside.

  She imagined what she had gone through since she was a kid, experienced by a grown-up man about to hit middle age. She felt suddenly sickened by him and envisioned, in a flash, all the people who had felt sickened by her.

  Aware that she was thinking deep thoughts, but unsure what they were, he guessed quick and wrong. ‘We could try and make this work, Ruby. When you get out of here.’

  She imagined Liev brushing his teeth, the two shiny front teeth that rested on his wet lip coated in Colgate. She imagined him pissing in the toilet bowl. Well, yes, she had touched his cock, with her hands when it was hard. But to look at it when it was soft. How could she not laugh? She never wanted to laugh at him or be embarrassed by his body.