Stronger Than Skin

by Stephen May

He asks about me and I say that I’m okay, that I’m teaching actually, that I’ve got two kids with another on the way. Strangely, I don’t tell him that I’m wanted to help police with their enquiries, that I’ve found myself in the world of warrants, court orders. In the realm of the real cops. The hard cops.

  ‘I’ve got a son,’ he says. ‘He’ll be sixteen now, I think. About that anyway. I don’t see him of course.’

  Of course. How can men bear it when they don’t see their kids?

  Then he asks the one question that he really wants to ask. ‘Hey, do you ever hear from Katy at all?’

  ‘You could say that. We’re still together. We’re married, Danny, she’s the mother of my children.’

  For a moment he looks amazed, his eyes widen. He can’t help it, he looks stricken. His face darkens. Only takes a fraction of a second before he regains control of his expression, makes himself smile, and I notice how his gums are receding, how he is missing an incisor.

  ‘That’s great. That’s really great.’ There’s a pause and he looks up at the sky, as if assessing the chances of rain coming along to put a stop to his earning potential for the day. His eyes flicker back to me, and then away again peering up the river. ‘I suppose it means it was fate, the two of you getting together. That you were soulmates, that there was nothing I could have done to hang on to her. That’s good because it did mess me up. Her chucking me.’ Now he looks at me. His eyes are wet. ‘She’s really bloody special, Mark.’

  ‘I know mate.’

  We shake hands, his grip is weak and I remember how I read once that a weak handshake is an indicator of a possible stroke to come. I pull a crumpled tenner out of my back pocket.

  ‘Don’t you fucking dare,’ he says.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay. When you see Katy, say hello,’ he says.

  ‘I will,’ I say. I won’t though. It would make her too sad.

  I spend half an hour on the London Eye, looking at the frantic jumble of the city spread out before me, the muscled thrust of glittering chrome and glass. That foreign-backed newness, those shiny steel beanstalks pushing a way through the grubby brickwork of the past. All those cranes. There’s been talk about how London should become a city-state like Singapore or Hong Kong. How it should leave the rest of the country behind, the way an old-style spacecraft jettisoned the worn out parts of itself as it headed for the stars. We’re in orbit now, the city might say. We can make it on our own. We’re gone. See ya, don’t wanna be ya.

  Or maybe it would be a kinder farewell. London telling the country chin up, don’t cry. It’s not you, England, it’s me. Left behind, England would turn to El Boozo big style and end up like Danny, scraping by on making people feel guilty. Getting into fights with the scrotes trying to nick his pitch.

  I have been on the Eye before. We took the ride the night we decided to have children. How audacious is that? To look down at a city of eight million striving souls and think that we could add to it. That, actually, we had a duty to add to it. That there was room for a couple more, that preserving our DNA really mattered.

  I remember we spent most of the ride snogging in a way that we hadn’t for years.

  16

  When I get back to Chaney Street the house is throbbing to modern RnB. Which is okay, I don’t mind contemporary dance music, though left to myself I never seek it out. It’s certainly a whole better than what I had feared I might be listening to. I was convinced they’d be at it again. That I’d be cooking to a complete symphony of ostentatious sexual vocalisation. Better by far to be cooking to a soundtrack of Usher and Alicia Keys.

  I’m keeping it simple in the kitchen. A thick spicy lentil dahl and a bean stew with herb dumplings. Something Eastern, something Western, you could call it a fusion dinner. To go with it I’m doing rice cooked with garden vegetables, spices and nuts. All the ingredients from Borough Sunday Market where I also got amazing wholemeal bread and fancy condiments. Various chutneys and a demon chilli sauce so Jake and Lulu can sweeten or fire up the dishes depending on taste. Always tricky knowing how far to go with the spices when cooking for new people.

  For dessert we’re having a plain apple pie. Who doesn’t like apple pie?

  I know I’m doing all this to distract myself from the reality of things, of course I know that. But what am I meant to do? There’s only so much crying and fretting and worrying you can do. I think human beings are programmed to get on with things, to keep going, to put one foot in front of another and keep trudging on. Most of us anyway.

  It’s what we all did after Eve died – except my father couldn’t – and it’s what I’ve done since my parents went. Just kept going. Because if you can’t keep on keeping on then you just cause more pain to those around you. Too much grief is selfish, it’s like deliberately infecting yourself over and over with some horrible disease and then seeking out your closest friends to pass it on to them. Getting on, cooking dinners, doing chit-chat. It is better than giving your sickness to those closest to you.

  ‘Smells good, Sir.’

  Jake. Dressed in grey sweatpants and a pink t-shirt that carries the logo of the 1972 Munich Olympics. Fashionably retro. The Olympics where a dozen athletes got murdered. Interesting that something like this has become acceptable vintage wear.

  This ‘sir’ business is beginning to annoy me, because I don’t think it’s accidental now. I think it’s somehow satirical, but I decide not to correct him. That’s what years of teaching do for you: they show you the value of not rising to small provocations.

  Jake has a sleek, self-satisfied look – a roguish glint in his eye. This annoys me too. Well done you, Jake, I think. But we can all have sex you know, it’s not really that big a deal.

  I ask him if he wants wine or beer because I bought both.

  ‘Awesome. Let’s get proper arseholed,’ he says.

  We’re onto the second bottle and have demolished quite a bit of the bread before Lulu joins us. She is as subdued as Jake has been loquacious. He’s been giving me his thoughts on everything from cars, to business, to schools, to video gaming, to how to solve the problems of the Middle East.

  I paraphrase, but Jake’s views on these things are essentially that the Bugatti Veyron is the best car ever made, that British business needs to get its act together otherwise we’ll find we’re going to be left behind by the rest of the world.

  ‘Not just by big boys like China and India, but by Brazil and Nigeria and Vietnam, places like that.’

  Jake thinks that high schools should be much smaller, five hundred kids each, max., so that teachers can properly get to know all the students. He thinks they should teach video gaming which should be taken more seriously as an art form. He tells me that it is bigger than the movie industry and the music industry combined and has still only really just got started. He says the problems in the Middle East could be solved by the judicious application of a nuclear warhead or two.

  ‘We need to bang heads together down there,’ he says.

  He talks fast and confidently, as if everything he says is just good plain common sense and he hops from subject to subject unpredictably without noticing that I don’t say anything much except aha and yeah and really? Everything he says gets on my wick. It’s not just what he says, it’s how he says it. His bullish, authoritative, doubt-free manner. I’m not a big fan of certainty. I don’t trust it.

  He is in the midst of a detailed explanation of how the drinks trade could be reformed – which is obviously something I know quite a bit about, not that he bothers to ask – when Lulu comes in.

  She comes over and puts a finger on his lips. Strokes his cheek. Kisses him.

  ‘Hush,’ she says. ‘Shush now.’

  Jake becomes much quieter when Lulu is with us, lets her take the conversational lead – not that she seems inclined to converse all that much. She praises the food, she asks about my day. I say I bumped into an old friend – which is true enough I guess.

  ‘We had a good
day,’ says Jake. He grins. Lulu frowns. I pour more wine. ‘I popped the question.’

  Lulu sighs. ‘Oh, Jake.’

  ‘We’re going to get married, we’re going to be Mr and Mrs Skellow. What do you think of that, Sir?’ His smooth face is shining, his teeth gleam, his eyes glow.

  What do I think of that?

  ‘Congratulations,’ I say, and it sounds hollow and forced. Entirely inadequate. I need to amplify my response. I stand and shake Jake’s hand. I hug Lulu. She smells of soap, the skin of her cheek soft against mine. Her body firm and warm. ‘Bloody well done both of you,’ I say.

  ‘Thanks, Sir,’ says Jake.

  Lulu leans back to look me in the eyes, one hand around my waist, the other on my shoulder. ‘Whenever you’re asked to do something by someone close to you, you should always say yes, don’t you think?’

  No, no I don’t think that. Who could think that? It’s a mad way to live a life.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, of course. I’m sure you’ll be happy together. Marriage is a good thing.’

  ‘A good excuse for a knees-up anyway,’ says Lulu. ‘A bit of a do.’

  I break away from her to return to my seat.

  Yes, Jake, I think. Let’s get proper arseholed.

  17

  Anne liked sex best at twilight, in what she called the hour between dog and wolf when it’s hard to tell friend from enemy. Dr Sheldon would be at college still, in his lab, or with Mish. He’d be somewhere else anyway, and we would be exploring each other in Selwyn Gardens. We could be in almost any room, we weren’t fussy. Though we didn’t go into the kid’s room obviously.

  It wasn’t just that we were respecting her space, it was also that we both had the feeling that the Mein Kampf look of the severely pouting pop stars on the wall might be off-putting. Who can think of sex when being watched by a glittery herd of My Little Ponies?

  Sometimes we would be in my cramped college bed, on expensive all Egyptian cotton sheets that Anne had brought round the second time she came to my room. ‘From Beaumont and Brown.’ She’d said, ‘Good quality bed linen impresses a lady, Marko. A useful life lesson for you.’

  Or we might be in the countryside out near Great Chesterton and Whittlesford or one of the other villages around Cambridge, the murmurations of starlings wheeling and tilting above us. Both indifferent and somehow watchful. The bald miles of the fields stretching flat into the distance.

  Once or twice we even contorted ourselves so that we could do it in the Dart, laughing at the delicate, careful manoeuvring that was necessary to avoid getting a gear stick up the jacksie.

  Yes, we’d do it more or less anywhere, at more or less anytime, but twilight was definitely Anne’s favourite time, with the greedy dark closing in on the last of the day, the light thinning, bleeding away into dreams and shadow.

  I took to skipping lectures. This was my real education, this crepuscular cartography, these hours where Anne showed me all her hills and curves, her hollows and forests.

  She turned out to have so many secret places to introduce me to. I journeyed to her ankles, navigated her collar bones. I discovered her toes, battered out of shape by years of childhood ballet. I found her elbows, the kissing of which made her shiver. I found her hips, the kissing of which made her gasp or sigh or growl, depending on her mood. Her ears, the backs of her knees. The scars on her stomach.

  She had two, an appendix scar and a caesarean scar. They intersected in a ragged cross like someone in a hurry was marking where to find treasure on a map drawn on the back of a handsome envelope.

  One night, eight in the evening, naked, lightly sheened in sweat, we lay watching a moth trying to find a hole in the bedroom glass, both of us too heavy and sticky with love to get up and shoo it out in the night. My fingers traced a slow route from Anne’s neck to her thighs. When she spoke, she was thoughtful.

  ‘You know, when I had my appendix out I was worried about what boys would think of it.’

  ‘Think of what?’ I was only half-listening.

  ‘My enormous great scar, you idiot.’

  ‘It’s beautiful. They both are.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ She took a breath, shifted against me. ‘But you know what the doctor said once, when he came round to check that I was healing up properly?’

  ‘He said that you would grow up to be the best-looking woman in Cambridge? That you would become the wife of a top professor, that you would become a woman whose cruel beauty was notorious?’

  ‘Not quite. He said a scar is stronger than skin. I’ve always remembered that.’

  ‘Very profound.’

  ‘Yes, it is actually. A lesson for life. By the time I got the other scar I didn’t care what anyone thought. People should have scars. It’s how you know they’ve done some living.’

  But then she didn’t want to talk any more. And, gentle but insistent, she pushed my head lower. She had other lessons she wanted me to learn besides geography, and I was a good student. Diligent. Conscientious. I was, after all, a self-starter – in charge of my own learning. It’s how I got to Cambridge in the first place.

  Later – quite a bit later – she asked me if I had any scars.

  ‘Not that I know of, but you are very welcome to look.’

  She did. She moved over me an inch at a time. She inspected me very thoroughly but she didn’t find any scars. This was before the tattoo of course. I told her my scars were all on the inside. I meant it flippantly, as a kind of joke. But I found that I was suddenly short of breath, that my eyes were hot with unexpected tears. Anne didn’t comment. She refilled my glass. I started to do something I never did, I started to talk about Eve, the sister that never really got started, the funniest, sharpest, brightest of us all, but she stopped me. She put a cool finger to my lips.

  ‘She was a brave girl,’ she said.

  I’d never thought of what she’d done in that way before. That it wasn’t something out of the blue. That instead it was an action that fitted the story she was writing for herself.

  As a little girl, Eve had always been a tree climber, a risk taker. Her death maybe did come from the same impulse. She had been an adventurer, an explorer, from the beginning to the end of her life. Just someone running ahead of the rest of us, sprinting into the dark without fear, eyes open.

  We drank in silence for a while. Then Anne told me of her husband’s own cry for help.

  ‘At least I assume that’s what it was,’ she said. ‘Anyway, help came running. That is, I came running. I’ve kept the note. Not his best work, it has to be said.’

  I didn’t know what to say. Who keeps suicide notes? I hadn’t kept Eve’s though I could remember nearly every word, despite only reading it once all the way through.

  She wrote that she felt half-submerged, that her days were like walking in a fog that would never lift, through rain that would never stop. How she thought about running away but that the trouble was this: wherever you go, there you are.

  She wrote that she had a sickness – a leukaemia of the soul she called it. But her last lines had been swollen with a dumb kind of hope: don’t worry I’ll be there, I’ll be watching over you all. Expect me when you least expect me. I’ll be the voice in the wind, the bird on your window sill that seems strangely tame. I’ll be sending you signs from the universe. I’ll be that black cat that comes out of nowhere to cross your path. I’ll be a spider, a butterfly, a moth, a wasp. I’ll be the annoying insect that won’t leave you alone. Think of that when you reach for a heavy book to swat me with. I plan to be many kinds of ghost.

  Idiot girl.

  I picked up the bottle. It was empty. I went to the rack in the kitchen, selected another. I went for a heavy Malbec. Anne was teaching me about wine and I’d learned enough to know we needed something with a kick. When I came back I asked Anne why she thought her husband had made his cry for help.

  ‘Oh who knows? I think I said I’d leave him. Maybe his work wasn’t going so well. It was way before Mish anyway.’
She was quiet for a while, then she said, ‘Tell you what, Marko, let’s have a rule. Let’s not tell each other any sad stories ever again.’

  I agreed to this and we toasted our resolution.

  Later she said, ‘Mark, do you think we should be absolutely stinko absolutely all the time?’

  ‘Yes. Yes I do.’

  ‘Good. Because I think so too.’

  18

  But it wasn’t just sex and drinking. There was sex, drinking and art. Fast first class trains to London to private views. A show called Ghost at the Chisenhale Gallery, a show called Meaning and Location at the Slade and a show in an old biscuit factory in Bermondsey where the major piece was real maggots feeding on a real pig’s head.

  ‘The guy who did this is such a charlatan,’ said Anne.

  ‘Yeah, but a good one,’ said Bim, who usually came with us. ‘His phoniness is so well crafted it’s almost beautiful. It might even last.’ I never caught the artist’s name.

  There was sex, drink and the theatre. Dancing at Lughnasa at the National, Death by Beheading at the Royal Court. First nights and press nights and after-show parties, Bim discovering who was doing what to whom, or making a guess at it anyway.

  There was sex, drink and music. Opera. Gerald Barry’s Intelligence Park. Azio Gorghi’s Blimunda. There was also sex, drink and food. Fast drives to country pub-restaurants. Slow food joints with names like the Green Man and the John Barleycorn. Places that often challenged my right to buy or consume alcohol, which Anne and Bim thought was hilarious given that I had worked in a pub more or less since I was old enough to walk. I’d been asked for ID a lot since I’d been in Cambridge and my solution was to keep my passport on me at all times just in case.

  ‘You know what makes me sad?’ said Bim, the first time I had to produce it. ‘I bet that passport, battered as it is, has never been used for its real purpose. I bet Babyface Chadwick here has never actually left this sceptred isle.’