Skin Trade

by Reggie Nadelson

  SKIN TRADE

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Also available by Reggie Nadelson

  Introduction

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part Two

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781409007531

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published in the United Kingdom by Arrow Books, 2006

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Reggie Nadelson 2002

  Reggie Nadelson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  First published under the title Sex Dolls in the United Kingdom in 2002 by Faber and Faber, London

  Arrow Books

  The Random House Group Limited

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  Random House (Pty) Limited

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  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Papers used by Random House are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin

  ISBN 0 0994 97840

  Typeset by SX Composing DTP, Rayleigh, Essex Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire

  For

  Alice, Fred and Justine,

  with love

  SKIN TRADE

  A journalist and documentary film maker, Reggie Nadelson is a New Yorker who also makes her home in London. She is the author of seven novels featuring the detective Artie Cohen (‘the detective every woman would like to find in her bed’ Guardian), most recently Red Hook. Her non-fiction book Comrade Rockstar, the story of the American who became the biggest rock star in the history of the Soviet Union, is to be made into a film starring Tom Hanks.

  Also available by Reggie Nadelson

  FICTION

  Bloody London

  Red Mercury Blues

  Hot Poppies

  Somebody Else

  Disturbed Earth

  Red Hook

  NON-FICTION

  Comrade Rockstar

  London

  New Year’s Eve

  The fireworks light up Lily’s face so bright she looks like a ghost. London crackles with the light and noise, the showers of gold, red, blue, white lights that spray from the cold black sky and tumble in waterfalls into the river. As we lift off, there’s music from bands, some along the promenade by the river, some on barges or dinner boats named for exotic fish and jammed with people. Cubans somewhere play a lilting tune. The glass capsule we’re in seems to sway in time to it and we gaze out at the lights, the city, our arms tight around each other, rising above the ground on the big wheel, dancing in the air to the Cuban music, me and Lily.

  From above, London is a jewelled city. We’re alone in our private sky-pod, this see-through spaceship that ascends slowly on the rim of the amazing wheel. I managed to pull some strings and reserve a capsule just for us. It cost me a bundle and, when we arrive, Lily says I’m nuts to have spent the dough, but I think she’s pleased. Under my jacket is a bottle of Champagne; a couple of glasses are in my pocket.

  An announcement over the intercom informs us that eating and drinking on board is forbidden, but I wink at Lily. What are they going to do? Haul us down from the top because we’re sipping Champagne? Call the cops? I’m feeling great. I’m a little bit high. We’ve been drinking Champagne all night. Maybe when we get to the top I’ll propose, try to get her to marry me. Ask her again. She always turns me down, but it’s New Year’s Eve.

  Before we board the “flight”, as they call it, we’re hustled, all of us, the whole merry crowd, into a makeshift building where we get our pictures taken. They do it by computer, blue-screen the ferris wheel in later, so you appear to be on board. You can buy the pictures after the ride. Everyone poses and jokes and cheeses it up for the camera. A guy, he’s wearing a silly Beatles wig, is getting his photo taken at the same time; he stares at Lily, then disappears. I don’t blame him; she’s looking gorgeous; I’d stare at her, too. I do.

  We get lucky that night. Most of the capsules have official attendants, like aircraft, but not ours. The guy who should be on ours is late and we see him running towards us just as the wheel moves up. We’re alone together. I smile at Lily like a lunatic.

  The riverside promenade is spangled with white lights. All night long, everyone dances, strangers kiss, laugh, link arms, sing “Auld Lang Syne’ before and after midnight, and anything else they can think of: “Rule Britannia”; “Yellow Submarine”; “The Star Spangled Banner”; “Satisfaction”; it doesn’t matter. Happy New Year.

  It’s still early as the buildings below us along the river fall away. The hard drunks will come out later, but for now everything is sweet. Then I see Lily’s face against an ecstatic waterfall of green-gold fireworks.

  I can see her too clearly. The faint down on her upper lip seems to flutter nervously, the odd dots of dark color in her light blue-gray irises tremble, her eyelids snap open and shut too fast. Most of all, there’s some kind of repressed terror on her face that’s so pale it seems the noise, light, music, crowds, have drained the life out of her. Only the tiny diamonds I got her for Christmas sparkle in her ear
s. Lily has these little ears, too small for her head, very pink and polished. Her right earring catches the lights. In our glass cabin, I list in her direction, grinning. “What’s wrong, sweetheart? What is it? Tell me.”

  “Nothing.”

  It’s not the wheel she’s scared of. Not the heights. Lily climbs mountains. Literally. It’s me who hates high places normally, but it’s New Year’s and, until I see her terror, I’m happy – happy as I’ve ever been.

  “Is it this?” I gesture at the wheel. “You’re not scared, are you?” I tighten my arm around her waist.

  “It’s nothing.”

  Inside my arms, she’s stiff with tension. Her body’s rigid. Her eyes move in every direction. I think about that plane where the oxygen shut down. After that it flew for hours without a pilot, drifting, up, down, changing altitude, flopping over. When a couple of Air Force jets caught up with it, the pilots saw the windows were frosted over and they knew everyone inside had frozen to death. Later, in South Dakota, the plane crashed. It was all on TV and the whole four hours, Lily had stayed glued to CNN. “Sometimes I feel like that plane,” she’d said.

  I said, “Frozen?”

  “No.’ She tried to laugh. “Adrift.”

  But that was years ago. Things are good. Ever since we met in New York on a hot summer night when we shared a smoke on the sidewalk like conspirators, she made me want to please her. I don’t know, she just got to me, right away I felt it. She got under my skin from the beginning and I wanted to please her. In bed. Out. Maybe too much. She’s self-contained and vulnerable, smart, sexy, curious. Lily’s interested in the world, and she makes me better. She makes me laugh. Most of all what I fell for was her lack of guile.

  I was born in Moscow and if, like me, you come from a place where everything is secret, masked, half-said, it takes years to shed the duplicity; it’s bred in your fucking bones. Even after I got to feel American, even now after twenty-five years in New York, I can feel the corrosions of Russia and I hate it. With Lily there are never any smuggled messages. Until now. Something’s happening now. I don’t understand.

  We got to London after Christmas. She was a little moody once or twice, preoccupied, but I figured it was a minor outbreak, like the flu. Lily keeps things under wraps. She gets scared sometimes, mostly by her own demons, then everything shifts back to normal. When I asked her, she’d shrugged it off. “Call it hormonal,” she said. “I’m fine, OK?”

  In her hand now, Lily clutches a Champagne glass hard enough to break it. I take it away from her, swallow the rest of her wine, but it’s warm and flat. “Lily? Talk to me. Sweetheart? Please.”

  “Let’s just watch.’ She stares out of the window.

  So I hold her and look down. I’m happy being back in London because it makes her happy and because now I have a smell for it. I never thought I could love any place except New York City. London ruffles my certainty. There are things here I love, the river most of all. I love the way they speak the language, ice maidens on the radio and TV who make the language spin like cut glass, cabbies with the ripe nasal whine. London is endless, huge, bigger than New York, open all night, gridlocked with traffic, buzzing, hungry, a city-state teeming with people from everywhere: Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, Ethiopians with their exquisite carved faces, American tourists lumbering around in good-natured groups, the French looking svelte and shouting at each other, the Japanese scurrying behind a leader with an umbrella held over his head.

  London is low-lying, so when you ride in a taxi you can look right into apartments and houses, some of them out of magazines with drop-dead chic stainless-steel kitchens., Others, with dusty plants on the window sills and sheer white curtains gray with age, could be set pieces out of my Moscow childhood. And all of it spread out below us now, the detail invisible, the outlines sharply etched – I can see the dome on St Paul’s – as we rise into the night sky.

  Almost at the top, four hundred and fifty feet up into the New Year’s sky, the almost imperceptible motion of the wheel seems soothing, makes me feel secure. This is lovely, or should be.

  Under my breath I hum “Moonlight in Vermont”, a tune I’m crazy for. Sinatra’s version. And Stan Getz. Most of all, Stan Getz. Sometimes I ask myself, usually around New Year’s when I’ve had too much to drink, what I’d trade to be Stan Getz. Would I trade it all in? Lily? New York? How would it feel to be able to make his kind of a noise?

  Lily wants me to love London so I’m loving it. I got a job working a paper chase for Keyes Security that would keep me in London for a couple of weeks. London and Paris. A missing persons deal, a bank account that had gone unclaimed, nothing special, but the job pays well. And it’s in Europe.

  The London she shows me is a boom town, streets crammed with people, bars full, restaurants packed, parties all the time. The hot young girls who crowd the sidewalks around Soho at night have bare legs and tiny skirts even in the middle of winter. There’s money, but not much public violence, not like America, not yet. It’s coming, though; you can smell it in the alleyways, under the bridges, the sleazier clubs. You can hear the rumble, the subterranean noise it makes before it surfaces full force, and there are the signs – the racist episodes, the bad cops, the hopeless refugees and the resentment towards them. Hospitals are short of beds and old people freeze to death in miserable apartments.

  On the surface, though, it’s fabulous, surprising, giddy-making. Crowds eddy up out of the ancient buildings, cling to the narrow sidewalks, drive fast cars down streets where there was only horseshit the day before yesterday, they jam into pubs and clubs in little buildings hundreds of years old. Thrilling. Over-ripe. Sometimes I wonder if it will burst suddenly. It almost happened a few years ago. I remember. I was here. The infection is spreading.

  Looking down, I see the crowds like a single heaving body. Out of the dark mass of people, hands stick up with lighters, with sparklers, like a rock concert going on far below.

  Somewhere I read even if the wheel fails, even if something goes wrong, the bubble is safe, the glass can’t break. I’m not crazy about heights, but Lily wanted this, so I want it. A light buzz hits the back of my neck, anxiety opens a small cold pit in my stomach, but it’s only Lily’s nerves I’m catching. It’s safe. We’re safe.

  She holds on to me so hard I can feel her straining through her thin silk shirt. She raises her arms to pull the heavy red hair off her pale, freckled neck the way she always does when she’s nervous, scrapes it up, pushes it onto the top of her head, then lets it fall back. The pale-green silk on her arms looks almost white against the glass and the lights. She smells of Chanel and Swiss honey soap. Pressing against the glass wall, her face reflected in it, Lily blinks her eyes. “I want to go home.” “As soon as we’re down. We can skip the party.” I still have her Champagne glass in my hand. “Of course, sweetheart. We’ll go right back to the apartment.”

  “I want to go home,” she says again and I know she means New York.

  As we reach the top of the wheel, the glass pod shifts up into place, stands proud of the wheel and I hold Lily as hard as I can. London spreads out for miles, the river a silver-black snake of water, the sky dappled with fireworks, the skyline, and beyond it the dark country-side, foreign places, alien places.

  I say, “Happy New Year.”

  She leans against me and looks out.

  Slowly, we begin the descent, the bubble slides down, hanging to the side of the wheel now. “Happy New Year, Lily.”

  Whispering, her voice so tense it makes the hairs on my neck prickle, she says, “I hope so.”

  Then the wheel stops moving.

  Ten minutes later we’re still hanging in the air on the rim of the white steel wheel. Lily’s face is wet with cold sweat. She’s shaking, the muscles working under the pale skin of her face, like frogs jumping. She whispers, “What’s going to happen to Beth?”

  It’s the first time she’s left Beth since the adoption, the first time she’s been away. Beth is safe with friends i
n New York. “She’s safe, sweetheart,” I say, over and over. “Lily? You hear me? Listen to me!”

  “She’s only six, she’ll be all alone, I want to get off this fucking thing.” Lily’s looking at the ceiling like she’s caged.

  “It’s probably a power cut.”

  “There’s an intercom.” Frantically, she’s pushing the button.

  “Let me.” I lean on the button and yell into the intercom, but it’s dead

  It’s only a power cut, I’m sure. I tell Lily it’s a power cut. In the glass pods above and below us we see other people, waving, laughing, holding up Champagne bottles. Along the river, the lights from emergency vehicles flash. Nothing moves. Too many people, heaving bodies, drunks. A wind comes up, it makes us seem to sway. It’s an illusion, but the thing feels as if it’s swinging.

  Distract her, I think. Keep talking, talk her down as if she’s a woman on a ledge wanting to jump. Talk to her!

  “Remember The Third Man,” I say, because it’s Lily’s favorite movie. She loves this movie, she wanted to come up here because of it. “Remember the scene in the big wheel in Vienna with Harry Lyme and, what was his name, the other guy, the naive American?”

  She humors me, but her voice is numb. “I used to think you were the naive American. You were so in love with New York and America. Holly Martins. His name was Holly Martins, Joseph Cotton played him. Orson Welles was Harry Lyme.”

  “Yeah, and where Holly gets all sanctimonious and Harry Lyme says, look down at the people, they’re just dots, would you really care if the dots down there stopped moving. Remember? What if I gave you twenty thousand for every dot that stopped moving, he says, how many could you afford? Tax-free, old man. Great scene. Right? Lily?”

  Come on, I’m thinking. Please. Lily. Talk to me! Talk to me about this movie or about the fireworks or give me a kiss. She doesn’t answer. Just stares out at the sky.

  “That’s one of the two or three million things you did for me, Lil, that movie, remember? You dragged me to the Film Forum when they released a new print and I said, Oh, God, not another old movie, and you said, be quiet, this is great. It was great.”