Stronger Than Skin

by Stephen May

  Ella thinks that nearly everything she knows about the adult world comes from hearing her mum on the phone. Jack likes to listen just as much as she does, but it’s strange how he doesn’t seem to learn anything.

  3

  Katy is cooking. Leeks and onions and garlic turning translucent in the frying pan. That’s the trick with alliums. Give them lots of time, treat them gently, and they won’t go bitter on you. A large dome of grated yellow gruyere is on a plate on the table. Fresh fusilli sits in a pan waiting for boiling water. With both the oven and the pot-bellied stove going the room is warm, cosy despite the size of it. This is a proper dining kitchen after all. A room built for noisy family dinners and supper parties. This room is the reason why – ten years ago now – we nearly bankrupted ourselves to buy the house.

  The radio is on. Radio 4. The PM programme. A round-up of the news with Harriet Cass or Charlotte Green. One of the more comforting big-sisterly newsreaders anyway. There is war in the Middle East, earthquakes in South America, a multiple stabbing at a house in Manchester.

  There is a government spokesman defending something, attacking something, or patiently explaining something. Or maybe it is the opposition. I’m not really taking any of it in, but sometimes that is not the point of radio. Sometimes the point of radio is just to let us know that the world is still here, carrying on, that everything is pretty much the same as it was.

  I watch her as she concentrates on making a roux. We’re having a simple pasta au gratin. Perfect Friday night comfort food. God knows I’m in need of comfort. We both are. She doesn’t look at me. Doesn’t say anything. There is just the whisper of the onions frying in butter.

  ‘Katy,’ I say. ‘Katy.’

  She turns to look me full in the face. I am taken aback by how beautiful she is. I always am. Even now, after twenty-three years of being with her more or less every single day, it still catches me out, still makes me breathless. The frank stare, the serious eyes, the full lips, her rounded, ripened face, the face turned peachy by pregnancy. I want to touch the skin of her cheeks where two high spots of colour have appeared. I have a sudden urge to take her to bed.

  ‘I’m so bloody angry Mark.’

  ‘I know. Sorry.’

  She turns back to the cooker, pushes her hair back from her face. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘You said.’

  It is rare that we fight. We have none of the stories that our friends do. The wounding public joke at a spouse’s expense. The outraged confrontation about a too obvious flirtation at a Christmas do. The slanging match in the street, the discussion about who does more housework that escalates into the furious theatre of kicked doors, broken ornaments and hurled mugs. We have nothing like this in our history. We sometimes share a discreet smile when we hear about this kind of thing from others.

  When we were younger, we would marvel how great it was that we could have make up sex without all the tedious horror of quarrelling first.

  When we disagree, we do it respectfully. Katy will always talk things through, try to consider the thing from all angles, while I retreat into quiet. But if we were ever going to fight, now would be the time to do it.

  ‘Where are the children?’ I say.

  ‘Upstairs. Keeping out of the way. They’re not stupid. They can sense there’s something seriously the matter.’

  My attention is snagged by the radio again. They are saying that in some superstore or other beer is now cheaper than water. I wonder what my dad would have said about that. Katy turns the radio off.

  ‘Mark?’

  The door bangs open and the kids are in. Before he even says hello, Jack tells me that carp have teeth in their throats and can I believe that there is no word for brother or sister in Korean?

  Ella wants to play me the song they’ve been learning on guitar at school. As she weaves her tentative way through the melody to Eight Days a Week, she turns that peppy love song into a melancholy study in obsession. It becomes a stalker’s anthem, ominous in its new slow tempo and uncertain changes. On another day it might have made me laugh. Not today.

  There are tears in my eyes as I applaud. I can’t help it. Jack makes sure he has his moment too as he tells us that he has been picked for the school football team.

  ‘Really? That’s great,’ I say.

  Jack is timid in social situations but a ferocious competitor in games. He’s only in Year Four so the school must think pretty highly of his skills. I decide that whatever happens I am going to see him play.

  ‘When’s the match?’

  ‘Next Wednesday I think,’ he says. ‘We’re playing St James’s. They’re proper good.’

  ‘Yes, but Barton Street Academy have just signed a genius, a footballing wizard.’

  ‘Have they?’ Jack seems puzzled.

  ‘He means you, you plank.’

  I tell Ella not to call her brother a plank. I remind her that she’s nearly eleven, that she’s meant to be an example.

  ‘Your face should be an example,’ she says.

  Ella flounces off and, after a minute or two, Jack follows her. The Chadwick kids, they squabble and they bicker but they don’t like to be out of sight of each other. They’re a team. How great it must be to know you’ve always got support in the playground, that your back is always covered.

  In hurried whispers, before a child comes mooching back in wanting a drink, wanting to tell a joke, wanting to lodge a formal complaint about the other – before all that, I tell Katy the whole story. I do it quick but I try to leave nothing out. I spill it all from the first collision in Cambridge to the flight to Italy and all the madness in between. It’s all there. I don’t have to search my memory for details. No point, I know, in dwelling on the unfairness of it. Things just are.

  Through it all Katy chops, slices, pares, stirs and grates. She ices the chocolate cake she made earlier.

  When I’ve finished, her face is carefully neutral, impassive, impossible to read.

  ‘I’m the same person you know Katy,’ I say. ‘I’m the same person I was this morning. The same person you’ve known all these years. Nothing’s changed.’

  ‘Mark,’ she says. ‘Oh Mark.’

  I tell her what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to turn myself in. I’m not going to stand trial. I’m not going to have the whole mess of what happened raked over for the entertainment of tabloid readers. I’m not going away for years while Katy and Jack and Ella forget me. While the Bump gets itself born and all grown up without even knowing who I am.

  ‘Because that’s what I’d get Katy,’ I say now. ‘You know it. Even with one of your brilliant QC friends, even with mitigation, I’d be going away for years. I can’t do that. You can’t want that to happen.’

  ‘Can you open the wine?’ she says.

  I pour two large glasses of a mid-range rioja. Katy has never really given much credence to the idea that a pregnant woman should stop drinking completely. She’s always thought the odd glass did little harm to the baby, while being essential for the mental health of the mother.

  If the medical opinion seems to be ambivalent on this, the Mumsnet opinion formers are definitely with Katy. If anyone gets too fingerwaggy about it, she can point to her lovely, healthy, high-achieving and more or less non-behaviourally challenged children. Wine and pregnancy, it’s always worked for her and it works now. One swallow and she seems to come to a decision.

  She tells me it all seems clear to her. ‘Before we decide anything else, you need to have a word with Anne Sheldon,’ she says. ‘And you had better make it a pretty bloody persuasive one. And you had better stay away from the police until you’ve done it. Shall we eat?’

  As easy and as matter of fact as that. So decisive. Weirdly subversive too. Katy has been a solicitor for over twenty years. Shortlisted for the Law Society’s Excellence Awards three times. She usually professes a lot of faith in the English legal system. She doesn’t think it’s perfect, just that it’s better than all the alternatives. She is a fan of judges and
juries. It’s not that she doesn’t believe that there are miscarriages of justice, but she does think they’re incredibly rare and that they are always put right in the end. Almost always.

  ‘Sort it with Anne,’ she says again. ‘I don’t know where we’ll be at the end of it all, but that’s where you have to start. Isn’t it?’

  Put like that it does seem obvious. ‘I love you,’ I say. I kiss her neck. She tastes salty. I feel her spine stiffen.

  ‘I’m trying to cook here,’ she says.

  We are eating the cake when the knock at the front door comes. It is unmistakeably official. It’s angry, bullying, unignorable. A bailiff’s knock. A social services knock. A policeman’s knock. A sneaky trick to pretend to leave quietly and then to return at teatime when the quarry thinks there’s a moment of reprieve. Believes he has time to collect his wits, to make plans. We should have guessed it was coming.

  Katy is first to react. ‘Fuck,’ she says. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

  The children are startled. Both freeze, slices of rich chocolate sponge halfway to their mouths. Jack’s face is clown-like, a smeared brown grin of icing and crumbs covering most of his chin. Ella, always tidier, has only a blob on the tip of her nose. Her eyes flash and I can see that she can’t wait to use this powerful new weapon of a word wherever she thinks it will have most effect. Barbeques, parties, sleepovers, swimming, school – probably during assembly. Mummy says it, she’ll say.

  It is a word they’ve heard before – no one gets to the age of ten in London without hearing the f-bomb exploded several times an hour – but it’s different in your own home. When it’s your mother saying it.

  The knock comes again, Katy puts her head in her hands, her hair making a tent over her face and I put a hand on her shoulder as I rise, feel the heat of her through her shirt. My big words about not giving myself up seem ridiculous now. She puts her hand up and over mine. I am surprised by how comforted I am by this. How much I need it. I start to move towards the kitchen door. It’s over. I’ve told my story and now it’s over. There’s some relief there.

  Ella is on her feet. ‘No, Daddy. I do the door. You know that.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ I hesitate.

  The knocking again. Raised voices too now. ‘Mr Chadwick!’

  ‘Daddy?’ Jack says. His voice is barely there. ‘Daddy, I don’t think you should be here.’

  ‘No you shouldn’t.’ Ella, emphatic.

  Katy raises her head. Looks searchingly at each of her children. It’s as if they have become brand new to her. As if they are wearing skins she doesn’t recognise. Obviously they have picked up quite a lot of information while bickering and squabbling, while hovering around doorways. We should all think about this more. About how our children know everything. How they miss nothing. None of us ever have secrets from our children. Not ones that matter.

  More knocking. The voices louder, on the borderline of proper shouting now. ‘Mr Chadwick! Open the door please!’

  ‘Daddy, go!’ Ella sets off for the hallway. She sings out ‘I’m coming!’ Her voice is bright. It is pleasant, friendly and helpful. A voice that will keep the police in their place for a few moments longer, shuffling in their big boots rather than threatening to break down doors. Moments I can use to get out the back, get onto the bike, get through our garden and off into the alleyways that I know and the police don’t.

  Katy squeezes my hand. I squeeze back and already I know that it’s the memory of that gesture that will keep me going through whatever comes next.

  4

  A quietish, civilised, back street Islington pub, The Castle Hotel, a sparkling Pellegrino in front of me. Ice and a slice. Safe amid the soft murmur of long-established middle-aged couples, treating themselves after a hard week. One of those places where food doesn’t come on plates, but on little wooden chopping boards, fat chips in silver buckets.

  I am disgusted. Furious. These people. Do they know how thin the ice is that they are skating on? How fragile their worlds are? One lie, one bad call and they’re going under. There’s no call for this smugness, for this easy confidence. I want to burn the place down. Chips in buckets, Jesus.

  I swallow, take a breath. Close my eyes. I need to stay positive.

  I phone Katy. She doesn’t answer. I phone the landline too. No one picks up. The phone rings and rings until the voicemail kicks in. I listen to it all the way through. Like the indulgent parents we are, we have let Ella and Jack do the voicemail message.

  ‘The Chadwick family are not at home right now.’ Ella. Her voice plummy, like a child of the 1950s. Like a swallow or an amazon. Like a member of the Famous Five.

  Jack: ‘But if you leave a message…’ he collapses into breathless giggles.

  Ella is cross. There’s a whispered, whining, exasperated Ja-ack!

  They do the final line in a ragged chorus. One of them will call you right back. Byeeeeee!

  My stomach hurts.

  My phone quivers. A text. Katy. They’ve taken the address book and the laptops. They’ve taken the shoeboxes.

  Does passing on this information constitute assisting an offender, I wonder. Is she complicit now? An accessory? Somehow perverting the course of justice? Is she professionally compromised? I don’t know how I feel about that.

  My phone shivers again. It sounds loud to me. Like it’s sawing through the table it rests on. I read the text. Don’t come back tonight. Don’t call. I swear I can feel my blood begin to thin. My heart begins to shrink. I pick up my glass. The bubbles in the water make me cough. I look down at the glass, notice some tiny, unidentifiable midge-like thing has dropped in. A black speck against the yellow of the lemon. But it’s all right, fizzy water won’t help me now. I need something else, something more, something that kicks hard. That is what pubs are for. For people to marinade their anger in alcohol. Not for signature burgers on wooden platters.

  ‘Hello, Sir. Remember me?’

  Christ. The barman is Jake Skellow. He was one of those kids who make teaching a misery. A clown. A comedian without any decent material. A teenage Norman Wisdom – all pratfalls and gurning and silly voices. Bright enough when he wanted to be, which just made it worse. He was a right fucking pain in the arse. Yes, I remember him.

  ‘Jake,’ I say, ‘good gracious. How are you? It must be what?’

  ‘Five years, Sir.’

  ‘You don’t have to call me sir. Not after all this time. I’m not Mr Chadwick either. Mark, please.’

  We shake hands. Jake has a firm, dry grip. He’s taller than I remember. His hair cut into a classic rockabilly flat-top. His eyes are warm and brown as polished wood. I remember that when he was in my class he had a brace. His teeth look fine now.

  He seems pleased to see his old teacher, cheerful. Keen to show me how well he’s doing, because it turns out that he’s not just the barman. He’s only twenty-one and he’s the manager here. I’m pleased to see him because it makes me get myself together a bit.

  Something occurs to me. ‘Jake, is this really a hotel?’

  ‘We have a few rooms, yeah.’

  ‘Do you have any vacancies?’

  The police have got the laptop and the address books, so that means they know everywhere I might go to hide out. Because Katy is so good about Christmas and birthday cards and all that, and makes sure she has the up to date address of everyone we know, they’ll have the names of all our friends, all the relatives, even the distant cousins.

  Worse, they’ve got the shoeboxes. The shoeboxes are where we file bills, bank statements, insurance stuff, house stuff, car stuff. All the hard copies of a life in half a dozen or so of the green Clarks boxes you get when you buy sensible hard-wearing, professionally fitted kids’ shoes with three months’ worth of growing room.

  Getting these boxes means the authorities already have their fat thumbs on the artery that keeps the money going round. How long before they pinch that shut? I’ll need to do something about that too.

  Jakes clears his throat.
It’s very neatly done. A discreet tug at the sleeve of my attention. ‘So, Sir, Mark I mean. How many nights?’

  ‘Just the one for now.’

  ‘Right. One night in the King George suite.’

  ‘What’s the King George suite?’ I say.

  Jake smiles. A dazzling flash of white. Yes, his teeth are fine. ‘One of the Georges brought his mistresses here,’ he says. ‘We named our best room after him. The one with a balcony.’

  I tell him that I don’t want a suite, an ordinary basic bog standard room will be fine.

  ‘Bollocks, Sir. You’re getting the best room and it’s free. Least I can do.’ He pauses now and looks me straight in the eye. He’s smiling, but his eyes are anxious. ‘I need to apologise,’ he says, ‘for being such a dick in English.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ I say.

  ‘It isn’t, Sir – Mark – not really. I was out of order. I’m surprised you never belted me.’

  ‘I’m a consummate professional,’ I say.

  Jake smiles. ‘I always liked your lessons, Sir. Mark, I mean. You never shouted at me. Never called my mum. Never even gave me a detention. You should have done all those things really. Reckon I owe you.’

  I well up, eyes suddenly wet. But I think he doesn’t see this. When you’re desperate, random kindness can set you adrift, can unmoor you. I blink hard.

  For all its royal name the room is nothing special. I don’t think a king’s mistress would have been all that impressed. A simple square box painted in a dusky grey. That famous painting of a butler dancing on a beach. It’s true there’s a balcony. It has a view of a street of estate agents.