Stronger Than Skin

by Stephen May

  But it’s clean and there’s a minibar. Ready mixed G&T in cans. Complimentary crisps. Jalapeño and cracked pepper, and something called poshcorn. A paper packet in pink and cream that claims its contents are light and fluffy butterfly-shaped morsels that are both savoury and sweet. Made by popcornnoisseurs, apparently. 119 calories per bag.

  There are dinky bottles of kelp body wash in the bathroom. There are oatmeal cookies by the kettle. The kind of pointless luxuries designed to make you feel pampered and to forget you’re paying £150 for a night in a bedroom half as nice as the one you’ve got at home. There are twin bathrobes as white and fresh as Jake’s smile. As light and fluffy as a poshcorn morsel. It just makes me yearn for the cheerful mess of my house where there are fingerprints on the walls, dirt in the bath, and toys and books and clothes scattered everywhere.

  I liberate a can of G&T and, lying on the big bed, I google Anne Sheldons. There are thousands in the UK and narrowing my search down by age doesn’t help much. There are still dozens and they are scattered across the country from the Shetlands to the Isle of Wight. There are none at all in Cambridge. So she has left there and she could have gone anywhere.

  Tracking down Anne seems like it’s going to be hard, but maybe I can find her through Bim. Finding Bim turns out to be easy. Once you have filtered out all the many millions of references to Building Information Modelling – the key free resource for the construction industry – there is only one contender.

  The Bim I need is almost certainly the owner of the Orwell gallery in Felixstowe, but just to make sure I do some further digging. On the About Us section of the Orwell Gallery website there are pen portraits of the staff and yes, turns out that the Bim who runs this gallery is an acknowledged expert on the Vorticists.

  Bingo.

  I phone and listen to that unforgettable voice tell me that unfortunately the gallery is shut for staff holidays and will reopen on 1st October with an exciting new show by a Turkish abstract artist. I click off before I hear the name. First October. Bollocks. I take a breath. A week. Only a week, but still. Of course I should have known. Nothing is ever easy. Nothing is straightforward. I shut my eyes. Take a breath. Count to ten slowly. But I have heard Bim speaking for the first time in over twenty years and it was okay. I didn’t faint or anything. It didn’t seem to touch me. That’s something. A decent something.

  I check where Felixstowe is and how to get there and then I’m left with the problem of how to stop myself thinking. I open another can. It’s actually quite hard to detect the gin in these drinks.

  Katy has told me not to go back home tonight but I can’t stay in this room either. I have to go somewhere. I have to do something.

  I have a shower. I use up an entire bottle of kelp body wash and head off out of the Castle into the night, smelling like the sea.

  I seem to cycle around most of North London, music loud, still trying hard not to think.

  There’s a breeze spiteful enough to keep people off the streets, but even so London seems freakishly quiet. Whatever the weather a London night should be raucous, should be mixed martial arts meets burlesque. It should be theatre. London at night should be all pissed up street-poets bobbing restlessly through the streets like discarded plastic bottles down the Thames. But not tonight. Tonight London is pensive, aloof and grown up. Things on her mind.

  I stop once at an all-night cafe and the cabbies and the call girls and the foreign students chat together in a way that seems strangely small-talky. The weather, the football, the economy – how since the internet no one wants to pay the proper rate for anything. How we’re all working harder for less, running to stand still. It reminds me of the staffroom. When did London get as banal as this?

  Every half hour or so I make a stealthy return through the chill drizzle to the end of Haverstock Road but there is always that bloody police Astra outside the house.

  I wonder what they think, the police. Sitting for hours in the sweaty cubicle of the car, waiting to nick a guy who hasn’t had so much as a parking ticket in twenty-odd years. Do they really believe this is a good use of police resources? They should be angry, they should be wanting to chase real criminals: muggers, burglars, rapists, terrorists. If they joined the force because of the hope of making a real difference to how things are, then they’ve been cheated.

  Five times I come back, and the last time – at gone midnight – hanging back in the dark, I see our master bedroom light go off. I wait around another twenty minutes to see if the team in the panda car give up, but they seem pretty dug in. Not going anywhere. No getting past them.

  I’m going to text Katy a last goodnight, only I realise I’ve left my phone back in the Castle. But at least I’m maybe tired enough now to sleep. Time to go back.

  When I get back to the King George Suite I’m going to make the most of the facilities, I’m going to drink the minibar dry. I’m going to dive into the poshcorn. I’m going to warm up with a long bath. If I find myself crying, then a bath is the place to do it.

  I wonder how safe it would be to email Katy from the hotel. Best not. It’s not just mobiles they monitor these days. Funny, if a postie tampers with the snail mail then he goes to prison – but the electronic postmen, they seem immune. They get rewarded, even. These days you never know who is reading your stuff. Some googlenaut in Motherfuck Nebraska, some minimum wage Amazon drone hunched over his algorithms in Idaho, some spook in Murmansk, all of them getting a bonus for each piece of intel they extract. People forget: an email is not a private letter. It is a publication. It is the magazine of you carelessly discarded in the waiting room of the world.

  I am just outside the Castle about to swipe my key card when the door opens and Jake Skellow hurries out, takes me by the arm in a strong-fingered grip and hustles me into the shadows whispering urgently as he does so.

  ‘None of my business Mr Chadwick, but the old bill. They’re waiting for you. In your room.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, they came about twenty minutes ago. I’ve been looking out for you.’

  ‘I wonder what that’s all about?’ I say. I’m trying to move my features into a frowning picture of professorial puzzlement. I’m cursing myself for not switching that bloody phone off, or for not throwing it away even. Jake straightens himself to his full height. This pretence has irritated him. He’s lost a bit of respect for me maybe. He’s come out from behind his desk into the cold night to give his old teacher a heads-up. I should be a little more honest. There’s a pause. What do I do now?

  ‘You know, Jake, I’m really not up to facing questioning by the police. Not tonight.’

  Jake smiles. Another quick happy flash of those big white teeth. I have seen this before with kids at school, how they love to turn the tables, love to become the teacher themselves. The way they like to educate you about how the modern world works. About phones and computers. About pop or fashion. About how to escape from justice too it seems, because he has an idea.

  ‘You could go to my place. Kip the night there. If you wanted.’

  Now I remember some staffroom talk about the troubled background Jake comes from. Some gossip about how his family were at war with the authorities, of the Skellows being involved in all sorts of dubious businesses – believable rumours of loan sharking, cigarette smuggling, buying and selling of knock-off goods, the breeding of banned dogs. It’s fair to assume that Jake has not been brought up to respect the forces of law and order.

  Obviously it is ridiculous to think of staying at Jake’s, only I can’t seem to think of any alternatives. Jake gives me the address. ‘Key’s under a pot by the front door,’ he says. ‘You’ll need it ’cause Lulu won’t be home. She’s on nights.’

  ‘Lulu?’

  ‘My girlfriend.’

  ‘Unusual name.’

  ‘Yeah. It suits her too somehow. She’s a bit bonkers but you’ll like her. She’s pretty sound. She’s an artist, a photographer.’ This said as an afterthought, with the studied casualn
ess of someone who is very proud of the fact. He tells me she does shifts for security contractors, keeping an eye on empty buildings. He says it’s easy work, good money and she finds lots of good locations for her photos that way.

  I ask him if he’s not coming back to his house with me and he tells me that he always stays in the Castle Friday nights. He is the manager after all. It’s the biggest night of the week. Things go to shit if he’s not properly hands-on. I ask him one more time if it’s okay to stay at his. I need to be sure.

  Jake shrugs. ‘Just call it payback for not phoning my mum when I was pissing about in your class. She’d have battered me.’

  He puts out his clenched fist. We fist bump, grinning awkwardly at the strangeness of it. Who’d have thought? Jake Skellow, class fuckwit of 2008 in cahoots with Mr Chadwick, Head of Year Eleven, both of them taking on the forces of law and order.

  ‘If they ask – the police, I mean – I’ll say you just didn’t come back to the hotel.’

  ‘Thanks again, Jake. I’m just.’ I stop. I’m just what? I’m not sure how to finish the sentence. But Jake doesn’t care.

  ‘It’s okay, Sir – nice to have a bit of excitement.’

  ‘I think excitement is a tad over-rated actually, Jake.’

  He smiles. It’s exactly what a teacher should say. Something a bit jokey but a bit lame. I think he finds it reassuring.

  5

  You could say it began with a bike too. A bike, two boys, a girl, a butterfly, a fast car – a 1964 Daimler Dart – not that I knew that’s what it was at the time. At the time, it was just an indigo blur. A panic of screaming brakes.

  First week of the summer term 1990 and Katy, Danny and I were doing what students at Cambridge did in their first year. Certain students anyway. We were riding through the ancient streets with our college scarves streaming out behind us. It was also – though I wasn’t thinking about it then – the first anniversary of the death of my sister.

  Cambridge students have done this since forever and by 1990 it had become all very self-conscious and knowing. A kind of joke. Yeah, we still do this stuff, this bike stuff, this scarf stuff, but at least these days we’re aware how ridiculous it looks.

  It was especially ridiculous in my case. Me, with my stripy mohair jumpers, my distressed jeans, my battered converse high-tops. Me, who in those days sound-tracked bike trips with noisy American alternative rock on the Walkman. Your Nirvana. Your Mudhoney. Your Sonic Youth.

  But it wasn’t just a joke. It wasn’t just about irony. We wore those hornet-striped scarves with a complicated pride too. At least those of us who came from ordinary comprehensives did. God knows there were few enough of us who’d done that. We were a small group, though our lack of numbers did not give us special status in Cambridge. We were by no means an elite.

  All around us the other kids seemed to consider it entirely normal to be there moving through all that venerated stonework, it’s what they expected all along, whereas people like us were astonished at ourselves. Our eyes popped every time we passed Kings.

  But I was dissatisfied somehow. It was like there was another Cambridge out there, one I hadn’t got into, one whose selection criteria was nothing to do with exam grades, UCAS forms and personal statements.

  Somewhere behind the colleges I could see, there was another secret university where the real stars gathered. In the festival of Cambridge some people had VIP wristbands and backstage passes and it wasn’t me, Katy or Danny. Hence the trying too hard to belong. Hence the scarves. Hence the bikes.

  A strange, sudden flicker of orange and I blinked, maybe wobbled slightly. The butterfly. A warning shout. Engine noise. A horn blaring. A fierce purple streak of metal. Close, too close. Way too close.

  I saw a gawping face of a man on the pavement. A man in a pork-pie hat, his mouth a wide soundless O. A woman with a pushchair, her hand to her mouth. The incurious eyes of her baby.

  There was a long second of silence where I was suspended between bike and road. That was the moment I remembered about my sister and that was also the only moment where I actually thought I was going to die too and it was not my past, but the near future that flashed before me. My parents being brave all over again, heads bowed as that useless vicar intoned something or other just as he did at Eve’s funeral. I will lift up mine eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help.

  Only there’s no help, not really. Just another dead child, and dead children happen every day. Yea, though I walk through the shadow of. Then the old songs. And did those feet in ancient times. My father trying to form the words, though the shapes of them are as awkward as stones in his mouth.

  Time zigzagged forward again and there was a series of sickening jolts – to my hip, my back, my elbows. I was rolling in the road, my bike turning a somersault in front of me. A long, low groan. My voice. Or a version of it. It faded out and I was trying for another breath but it wouldn’t catch. I was drowning, my lungs were splitting.

  But then – somehow – I could do it. I remembered the trick of breathing. I forced down shallow gulps of thick, petrolly air. There was the silence again. I relaxed into it. All I was conscious of was the hard road beneath my back and I knew I was going to be okay.

  Sometime later – a second, a minute, a lifetime – I became aware of noise again. A high anxious hum, like a disturbed beehive might make. Above that, a keening, the strange foreign music of someone moving from anguish to anger.

  There was a woman yelling obscenities, her voice familiar, but it took a while to place it. A young voice, the words loud but incoherent. Choked and tearful. I was groping to fit a name to it. Finally, it swam out at me in waves of colour. Katy. Katy.

  There was relief at being able to drag out the name that fitted that voice, but now, most of all, I wanted her to stop. The sound she made was jagged, raw, ugly. Somebody make her stop. Please. I opened my eyes. Coughed.

  The shouting stopped. There was, unbelievably, a ragged round of applause and I became aware of faces – lots of faces – peering down at me, looming towards me. Faces loosening and relaxing. Lips, teeth, hair. Shining eyes. The man in the hat, his mouth shut now. Lips pursed. The woman with the pushchair, her baby waving red mittens, the fat moon-face all smiles now. Suddenly, I needed to be where all these faces weren’t.

  I stood up. Too quick. The world slipped sideways. All these people, they were sliding away. I put my head between my knees. There was a voice hot and sudden and too close to my ear. A woman. Her words popping.

  ‘There’s no air down there. You need your head up. Up. Stretch up. Like this.’

  Anne. The first words she said to me and already she was showing me a way to live.

  There was a hand on the small of my back now, another on my shoulder, gentle but determined. Irresistible, pulling me vertical, straightening me up. There was a little moan from somewhere. A long, whispery exhalation. I knew I was the source of it and I was embarrassed.

  ‘I think you’ve done enough bloody damage, don’t you?’

  Katy, recovered and completely coherent now, her voice as hard and as icy as it had been watery and hot before. Danny had his hand on her arm, pulling her away.

  ‘Katy, come on. Don’t make a scene.’

  She didn’t seem to hear him. ‘I’ve got your number you know.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ I said. I was. All right covered it, more or less. The buildings were the right way up anyway. There was throbbing from my back. But it would be okay.

  The people around us began to disperse, distant voices telling me to get checked by a doctor, telling me I was bloody lucky, telling the woman whose hand was still on my back that she was a bloody maniac, a menace, and should be in jail. I moved away from her, turned so I could see her properly. There was a long still moment. She moved her hand from my back, held it out for me to shake, just as if we were being introduced at some function. A village fete perhaps.

  ‘Anne,’ she said. ‘Anne Sheldon.’

  Anne Sheldon. The L
ady Anne.

  What did I see that first time? Was there any special radiance? Any inner light? Was I enchanted and lost instantly? Because that would be an excuse, wouldn’t it? One a detective might get his head around. One a jury of twelve honest, averagely compassionate men and women might understand. I was bewitched. Beguiled by beauty. I didn’t stand a chance, your honour. I couldn’t help myself.

  Only I didn’t see beauty, not at first. In any case, Cambridge then – like Cambridge now and always – was full of beautiful girls. Beautiful boys too. Beauty in that late spring of 1990 when I was nineteen was utterly commonplace. Katy was beautiful. Her long blonde hair. Her serious grey eyes. Even Danny was beautiful too, in a way, with his floppy indie rock fringe, his big geometrical face.

  Youth, optimism, hope – that stuff is always beautiful, isn’t it? In Cambridge in 1990 there was more of all of that than in most places. Probably because we knew less about the world than people in most places. Nothing keeps you fresh-faced like ignorance of how the real world works.

  So what I saw when I looked at Anne that first time was just a well-groomed woman on the verge of middle-age. She was, in fact, all of thirty-seven at the time, but I was nineteen – a kid, with a kid’s ignorance of the gradations of age. At nineteen all proper adult ages are more or less the same. Thirty-seven, forty-five, sixty-two, a hundred and three. It hardly matters. They are all strange, faraway places you can’t believe you’ll ever visit.

  She was short, compact. Heart-shaped face. Dark hair in a loose, artfully mussed bob. Cool wide-set eyes, the colour of bitter chocolate. Long drop earrings with some kind of green stone. Blue sweater. Nothing too out of the ordinary, nothing too beguiling. All that stuff came later.

  One thing did stand out, however. Whenever I think of that moment I see her with an elusive smile playing around a generous mouth. But that can’t be right, can it? She wouldn’t have been giving me that characteristic amused look then, would she? The look that said: isn’t this all just so utterly absurd? Not then. Not with everyone glowering and tutting at her. Not with Katy fierce in her face and threatening to sue, to take her to the cleaners.