Stronger Than Skin

by Stephen May

  I looked in my mother’s eyes, eyes that were the colour of dust and clouds, and knew that our family was finished really, though none of us would ever say so.

  We were quiet for a while, and around us the pointless noises grew: glasses slammed on the bar, people kissed and hugged and cried. The fruit machine paid out with a frantic rattle. Somebody laughed, somebody else shushed them.

  ‘Don’t tell your dad, will you?’ Mum said.

  ‘He won’t care, Mum. Not now, not after all this time.’ But I wasn’t sure, maybe he would.

  10

  Of course I didn’t really have to do it. Not actually go round. Maybe I couldn’t afford to fill a room with flowers, but I could have sent a letter. I could have been gracefully abject on the kind of high end stationery I knew Anne appreciated. That would have done.

  But I suppose I still had that sense that Anne and her professor had the key to a more vibrant life than the one I was living, and that with persistence they might still unlock it all for me. With patience, perseverance and charm I might just get a second shot. All hindsight of course, at the time I just acted without thinking too much.

  If anything I was even more nervous standing on the doorstep this second time than I had been on the evening of the party, but then Anne was opening the door, welcoming me like we were old friends, like she had been thinking I might pop round. Like it was a completely natural thing for me to do.

  She was dressed in a man’s striped shirt, sleeves rolled up to above the elbow on both arms. Designer jeans expensively ripped at the knees. She ushered me in, offered me tea.

  As the kettle boiled she told me that she hoped I hadn’t come round to apologise for my behaviour, that she hoped I wasn’t one of those sensitive, hand-wringing types. She told me that she preferred men who were never sorry for anything. Men who never apologised. I didn’t rise to it. I asked where the professor was and she said she didn’t know but that she assumed he was with the new muse.

  ‘This one does seem to have got her claws into him rather.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘Oh. Right?’ She was laughing at me. ‘For a student of English literature you’re not all that brilliant with words are you Marko?’

  She put her cup down. Stood up quickly and yawned showing the neat white picket fence of her teeth. ‘You know what? I’m all tea’d out. Do you fancy a spin?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There you go with the razor-sharp repartee again. I’m asking if you fancy getting out of the town. I’m bloody bored of this house and it’s a nice day, car’s full of petrol and who knows how long I’ll have it. Costs a bomb to run. But seeing as it was a present to atone for Phil’s last little dalliance it seems fitting to try and get the most out of it while he’s busy with this one. We could have a picnic.’

  ‘So there are some kinds of apologies that you don’t mind. Some ways of saying sorry are better than others?’ I held my breath. I could feel the heat on my cheeks, knew that I was blushing. But Anne just laughed.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said, ‘that’s the way. You mustn’t let me push you around. I’ll just take advantage. Walk all over you. Yes, very expensive apologies are the most bearable I guess. So? You up for it? Do you have any other plans?’

  No, I had no other plans.

  The 1964 Daimler Dart. Anne Sheldon’s car. Professor Sheldon’s expensive apology. Fibreglass body, four-wheel Girling disc brakes, and a 2.5-litre hemi-head V8 engine designed by Edward Turner. The car that had almost killed me and the most beautiful mechanical object I had ever seen and, until that moment, I hadn’t thought I was into cars.

  Anne relaxed once we were moving. The driver’s seat of that open-topped monster – that beast – was clearly a place where she felt at home.

  ‘Gets a bit noisy, I’m afraid. We won’t be able to chat much,’ she said.

  She was not wrong. We growled and belched our way out of the town. Every gear change accompanied by a bluish mist, the car snarling at being held up by the senseless irrelevancies like traffic lights, roundabouts and other drivers.

  No, we didn’t talk. Even if we’d have been able to hear each other over the noise of engine and rushing wind. I saw her lips move as she swore at fuckwits who kept to the speed limits, the morons who followed the highway code. I had to guess at the exact words but it wasn’t difficult.

  She got several hoots and it was impossible to tell whether she was being hooted at for her driving, which was ostentatiously reckless, or simply because she was a good-looking woman in a sports car.

  Probably she got both kinds of hoot.

  I couldn’t tell you the route we took. I wasn’t really concentrating on road signs. I was watching her hands. Anne had tiny hands with slender wrists that were nevertheless firm on the steering wheel. Her nails were a translucent cream. There were fine golden hairs standing up on her forearms.

  She was wearing the same long drop earrings she had on the day we met, the day she knocked me down. They were swinging wildly in the wind as she drove. Like little green men doing the Tyburn jig. I reached out to touch the one nearest me. I felt the need to steady it, to stop its movement.

  ‘Romeo Gigli,’ she shouted. ‘Four hundred pounds.’

  I took my hand away. Those earrings cost as much as my term’s rent. She laughed.

  The grace of her throat. Her long, white neck. The necklace in coral and pearls. I wondered what that cost. And yes, I noticed the full swell of her breasts beneath her shirt. Of course I did. Yes, I noticed the way the sharp spice of her expensive scent slugged it out with the smell of old tobacco smoke. I noticed the way her small, pointed, pink tongue poked from between her lips as she concentrated on intimidating the other, lesser road users into getting out of her way. They did it too. Those yappy Fiestas, smug Saabs, arrogant Beamers – they might toot but they all moved over for Anne, her earrings, her throat, her necklace and her indigo Dart.

  She must have noticed me staring, but she didn’t turn my way once. She just maintained that subtle smile. It was as though she had been expecting this kind of examination and found it somehow quaint. Sweet, almost.

  Once we had made it through the sweating metal of other traffic to the emptier B-roads outside the town, Anne put her foot down a bit and frightened me sufficiently for me to stop looking at her, and instead sit back against the hot vintage leather bucket seat and look at the rare optimistic blue of the sky.

  I closed my eyes. I could feel all the little bumps and ruts of the road just inches beneath me. The rattle of stones against the chassis.

  I couldn’t tell you now where we went. A large piece of elevated common land on the edge of the city. A stretch of green that had, in the distant past, been quarried. A place full of dips and holes where people spelled out their names and romances in large, butter-coloured rocks. JENNY LUVS HARRY. FRANK 4 JO. Or where boys used the rocks to name the male parts. BALLS. KNOB. COCK.

  Maybe it’s no longer common land. Maybe it’s no longer all long grass and cow pats and benches commemorating people who always loved this view. Maybe it’s a housing estate now, an eco-town perhaps, or a science park. But then, that day, it was everything good about England. There was an ice cream van. There were people flying kites, walking dogs. There were misshapen trees. There was a Saxon barrow, which ought to help pinpoint it, but doesn’t really. The Saxon nobility seem to have littered the whole area with their dead.

  We didn’t speak while amid the noise of the car, but we didn’t talk much once we were out of it either. I carried the plastic bag I was given, while Anne walked fast, always just a little ahead of me. It was clear that she knew exactly where she wanted to go.

  There was a large tree under which she spread the blanket. I thought it was an oak but could have been an ash, an elm or a beech. I didn’t know about these things. But it was definitely ancient and substantial. A tree that had seen a lot.

  Anne took the plastic bag and set out the picnic. In its entirety it consisted of two bottl
es of fizzy wine and some olives.

  ‘All I’ve got I’m afraid. Maybe I should have made sandwiches or brought crisps or sausage rolls or something as well. I expect you’re hungry,’ she said. ‘I hear teenage boys are always hungry.’

  I laughed.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ she said.

  ‘Is that how you see me? As a teenage boy?’

  ‘Well, aren’t you?’

  ‘I suppose. I mean I am, I guess, technically. But I don’t think of myself as being one.’

  ‘What, because you’re at the University? Because you know who Hegel is? Because you’ve read Roland Barthes?’

  I was embarrassed because I had only the vaguest idea who Hegel was and I hadn’t read any Roland Barthes, though I intended to one day. But Anne didn’t seem to notice. ‘Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with being a teenager,’ she said. ‘If I were you I’d stay one as long as you can. Men can, you know. Some men can spend years being nineteen. Or younger. They can be fifteen if they want. Hell, they can be thirteen forever. Harder for women. Open this, would you?’

  She handed me a bottle and watched as I struggled to pop the cork. It was the first time I’d ever done this. The Blue Pig was not the kind of establishment where people routinely ordered bubbly. And, though I’d had plenty of champagne at Cambridge – some people drank nothing else – others had always done the honours. So it took a while, the fat end of the bottle wedged in my groin while I sweated away at the cork, and then the foam shot from the angled neck all over my hand. It looked comically suggestive. Anne laughed and I blushed.

  There was a charged moment, a stir in the air, while I filled glasses and we raised them to each other.

  We talked about a lot of things that I couldn’t really remember afterwards. I told some funny stories about growing up in a pub. I heard about her life as a child of the Empire, as the daughter of an army officer in Kenya, which she pronounced Keenyah.

  I told her about discovering the library as a sanctuary from playground bullies in my first year of high school, about Mr Butterfield who saw a spark of something that no one else saw, the man who insisted I try for Cambridge. I asked her why we’d come here, to this particular spot.

  ‘Because I was happiest here.’

  She told me how, nearly twenty years before, an old boyfriend had brought her here to this tree and proposed and she’d said no, though up till that moment she had thought she might love him.

  ‘That’s when you were happiest? Turning down a marriage proposal?’

  ‘Yes. Funny, huh?’

  She explained that her suitor was a sweet boy – charming, clever, funny, good-looking, recently graduated with a first, a badminton blue, perfect really – but that she knew in the instant of his asking that he wasn’t for her. That she needed something more. Something else, anyway.

  ‘So it’s here – in this very spot more or less – that I first began to know who I am. Or rather, I began to know who I’m not.’

  ‘How did he react, your boyfriend?’

  ‘Oh, in the usual way. Shouted a bit. Called me names. Spread some disgusting rumours about me around the university, only one or two of which were true. Basically, he reacted how men always react to women who won’t give them what they want. He threw a tantrum. Then he tried to punish me.’

  She took an olive. Spat the stone on to the grass. ‘He’s married now. Three kids. He’s ambassador to somewhere. Ecuador. Or Ethiopia. I forget which. Somewhere like that.’

  ‘What a git.’

  ‘Yes, funny to go from being adored to being reviled in the space of a few minutes. Quite an eye-opener. But even when he was yelling in my face, I was filled with a kind of happiness. Because I was finally, absolutely certain about something. To be certain of things is a total joy.’

  I could imagine that, I who had so rarely been certain of anything.

  ‘Anyway, it means this place – this tree – is special to me. The place where I discovered that sweet, charming, funny, badminton – all that – it’s absolutely not my thing.’

  ‘Sacred ground then. In a way.’

  ‘I suppose so, yes.’

  The day grew very warm, the sky remained that relentless blue. We had a competition to see who could spit an olive pit the furthest. I won, though not by much. Everything seemed to shimmer slightly, while around us was sculpted a soundscape of a romantic summer England. An insistent cuckoo, the drone of a biplane towing a glider high in the sky, a distant dog barking. A farmer calling his sheep. A child laughing. Church bells. All we lacked was the sound of a village cricket team applauding a catch on the boundary.

  She told me about meeting Professor Sheldon. About the merry dance they led each other.

  ‘We had such fun at first,’ she said. ‘Still do now sometimes. He’s so clever, so funny. Cruel as fuck of course, but that is a big part of his charm.’

  I asked whether they had an open relationship and she laughed.

  ‘Gosh, Mark. You do like to think in clichés, don’t you? Open and closed are words to be used about shops, not about love.’

  She told me their four simple rules for a happy marriage. No sneaking about. No germs. No bastards. No leaving.

  ‘Maybe it’s not for everyone but it works for us. Philip says that monogamy is a failed experiment and I think he’s probably right,’ she said. She drained her glass, refilled it. ‘Tell me about your love life. Tell me about the fiery girl on the bike.’

  ‘Katy? She’s Danny’s girlfriend.’

  ‘Really? That cloddish fellow with the gigantic face? I think she’d rather be with you.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  She laughed. We were quiet for a while. When we spoke again it was about things that didn’t matter, about books we’d read and places in the world where we might like to live one day.

  Anne drove us home, me clutching the bag with the blanket, the cups and the empty bottles tightly on my knees. If anything, she drove faster on the way back, throwing that car around with an even wilder grace. She was quite pissed after all. We had drunk two bottles between us, and she had matched me plastic glass for plastic glass. Reckless. Stupid. Desperate. Insanely exciting.

  When we reached Selwyn Gardens, she turned to me. She took a careful breath.

  ‘Coming in?’

  ‘All right. Yeah. Okay.’

  ‘Oh, you honey-tongued seducer you. You Casanova.’ She smiled and took my hand as she led the way up the drive.

  Then we were in the hallway and somehow the space between us vanished. The air around us grew still and heavy. The house seemed to hold its breath. then her arms were round me. I was folded in the smoky-sweet spice of her.

  ‘Oh Christ.’ She was whispering against my chest. She sounded sad. Her face turned up towards mine and we were kissing, passionate, urgent, neither of us awkward or shy. Hands everywhere.

  I couldn’t tell you how long we were wrapped around each other before she pulled back, her hands on either side of my head. She was smiling up at me, close enough for me to see that the skin beneath her eyes was bruised looking with fatigue. It suited her.

  She wiped her mouth with her hand. ‘Crikey. You exquisite boy. You strange and exquisite boy.’ She looked right at me now, eyes as dark and as infinite as a starless night. ‘Fair warning, Marko. I love my husband. I won’t leave him and he won’t leave me. I fear I am going to be very bad for you. You should run.’

  I could see that, yes, this woman was dangerous. Exactly the kind of dangerous, I realised now, that I had been hoping for ever since I applied to Cambridge. I felt my heart cramp. Whatever was coming, I could take it.

  ‘Have you got anything to drink?’ I said.

  She smiled. ‘Yes. Yes, there’s always lots to drink.’

  11

  Jake’s place isn’t far, Chaney Street in South Camden. Ten minutes by bike. A redbrick Victorian terrace of the kind half the population live in. It’s like my own redbrick terrace in fact, though half the size. At the front there’s
a low wall and a garden of sorts, a scrubby patch of long grass and dead leaves that provides a home for a wheelie bin. There’s a cracked and mossy concrete path to a cheap PVC door with swirling frosted glass. By the door a big brown pot containing a nondescript and dying plant.

  It’s the kind of plant pot that only exists to put the spare key under. Lots of houses have one. Back in Haverstock Road we do too. It’s a wonder people aren’t burgled all the time. Except I have read somewhere that young Britons are giving up on burglary as a profession. It’s not worth the candle. Goods are either too big to carry easily, or not worth anything second hand. Or householders are too likely to rise from their beds and batter you senseless now that they have legal impunity to do that.

  Every few weeks you read of junkies killed by professional types wielding cricket bats or golf clubs.

  The house is cold and smells of chips, damp washing and cigarettes. The walls of the narrow hallway are an institutional pale green. The carpet a worn beige. The lightshade one of those cheap paper orbs you see everywhere. A couple of quid from Wilkos.

  The small kitchen is tidy though, no dirty dishes piled up in the sink. Just a few cups on the draining board. There are three flying ducks above the gas fire where, in a more gentrified terrace, there would be a contemporary art print above a wood burning stove. Who put the ducks there? The landlord? Or is it an ironic homemaking statement by Jake and his artist girlfriend?

  Most of the kitchen is taken up by a battered but sturdy-looking table on which sits a fat, half-melted church candle in a plain white saucer. There’s not much worktop space for peeling and chopping, but there’s room for a vivid Moroccan blue earthenware bowl containing a lemon, a pear, a greenish banana. There’s a fat butternut squash, a bag of nuts, a not quite empty wine bottle. A heavy Chilean red, 14.5 per cent. The kind of wine Katy and I never touch now. These days our criteria for choosing wine is that it costs more than eight quid a bottle, but less than twelve. That it’s no more than 12.5 per cent.