Stronger Than Skin

by Stephen May

‘Fuck off,’ I said. He was right of course.

  ‘We’ll go places,’ said Anne. ‘There’s so much I want to show you, Marko. Berlin. Paris. Venice. Wouldn’t he suit Venice, Bim?’

  ‘He’d need some new clothes,’ said Bim.

  So there was sex, drink and clothes. Anne bought shirts and shoes at places she knew just off Saville Row. She made me have my hair cut at Blow on Vauxhall Bridge Road and then she whispered that she had a room booked at the Langham Hotel and she’d like to be in there and naked by sunset if I didn’t mind.

  It was in that room that she taught me to roll spectacular joints.

  ‘I thought all young people knew how to do this,’ she said. ‘I thought you were taught it at all comprehensive schools.’

  ‘Not me,’ I said. ‘Not at my comprehensive school.’ Until that moment I had been pretty much just-say-no about drugs of any kind.

  The art and the plays, the music, the food and the clothes. The drink, the joints. All of it helped sharpen the appetite for the unwrapping of each other, the journey towards the centre of each other.

  It was Katy who attempted to bring mundane reality back into my life. I hadn’t really seen her or Danny for weeks, I had left them behind the way I’d removed those band pictures from my walls. One minute they were there, the background to every day – the next they were gone, binned without sentiment. Yet here she was, appearing in all her wholesome sixth-formy beauty at my room, telling me that the exams were almost here and what was I going to do about it?

  She was breathless with her news. It was as if she were predicting the imminent end of the world, as if she’d had advance notice of Armageddon, that we were on a collision course with an asteroid.

  ‘Chill, Katy. It’ll be fine.’

  ‘Really? So you’re all prepared, you feel confident? Because this is Cambridge, you know Mark. These examinations might be quite hard.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t got a revision timetable if that’s what you mean by prepared, but I think I’ll be okay.’

  ‘Good. So that’s all right. Silly of me to worry.’

  There was a pause and to be honest I was sort of hoping she’d just go home but instead she told me her exam dream. A hundred frowning girls in a sports hall, all of them writing. Except her. None of the others even pause to think. But she can’t get started. The gym is full of the frantic scratch of cheap biros, the brisk reverbed click of the teacher’s shoes hurrying up and down the rows giving out sheets of A4. It’s an essay on the end of the slave trade and the minutes are ticking by, but in the dream all she can do is stare at her lucky Pippa doll, paralysed. Her head filled with the roar of the ocean, the crying children, the whips cracking. All the desperate seasick mothers trying to soothe their babies right up until the moment they are wrenched from their arms and thrown into the freezing sea. She can’t breathe. She can’t write anything because her heart’s too full. She wakes in a panic. Her face wet. Sick with the sense that everything – all these drowned kids – it was all her fault somehow.

  I thought of Eve. I could imagine her having a dream like this and not just at exam time. Could imagine her crying about it for days. Could imagine her leaving school because of it. When Katy finished telling her dream I wanted to hold her, but I didn’t. Instead, like a prick, I just told her that dreams don’t mean anything. Told her that other people’s dreams are always boring.

  She didn’t stay long after that. When she left her body was clenched like she had an ache somewhere.

  I told the story of Katy’s visit to Anne. We were listening to La Traversee de Paris. We were in the biggest of the living rooms, wrapped around each other, sort of watching a black and white film with the sound down, something to do with a spy plot in wartime France. John Mills as the lead.

  ‘But you were completely correct – other people’s dreams are boring. They don’t mean anything. She’s right about the need for study though, isn’t she?’ said Anne.

  ‘I’ll be okay.’

  Anne sat up. I reached for her but she put a firm hand on my chest to keep me down and away. She was frowning.

  ‘How long till the exams?’

  ‘I don’t know. Couple of weeks. Three maybe.’

  ‘Fuck, really? Well, this won’t do.’ She stood up, zapped off the film.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You have to go.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh do stop saying what like that, you know I hate it. It makes you sound retarded. You need to go because you need to be with your books.’

  ‘I’ll be okay, really.’

  ‘Yes you will, because you’ll be studying every breathing second of the next two – maybe three – weeks. You’re not to come here, Marko. Oh don’t look like that.’

  Anne explained that she wanted me back in Cambridge come the autumn. She wasn’t going to be the cause of my being sent down. ‘So I don’t want to see your sweet, heart-breaking face until the day the exams are over and then…’ she tailed off.

  ‘And then?’

  She closed her eyes as she thought for a moment, inspiration seemed to strike and she smiled happily.

  ‘And then we’ll have a party.’

  ‘A party, like the one you had before?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, a party like that one only much better. I think you’ll be able to hold your liquor now for a start. Now, get your pants on and scoot. We’re taking no chances.’

  At the door, Anne’s briskness faded and she seemed uncharacteristically smoochy. She could hardly let go of me. Kept covering my face in kisses.

  ‘I know. I’m being stupidly bloody sentimental. It’s only three weeks. But you had better pass, Mark Chadwick. You had better bloody pass.’

  I was amazed to see her eyes were glistening with the beginning of tears.

  ‘Now, listen,’ she said, ‘I have the mother of all house parties to plan so I’m going to go inside. I’m going to shut the door and you are going to walk away without looking back.’

  I was nearly at the end of the drive when I heard my name being called.

  ‘Mark! Marko!’

  I turned and was rewarded by the sight of Anne on the doorstep, jumper pulled up, no bra, showing her breasts. Flashing me for a full five beautiful seconds. She pulled the jumper down again.

  ‘Three weeks!’ she called. ‘Just three weeks!’

  I started back towards her. She was smiling, but still she held up a warning finger. I stopped.

  ‘Or less!’ I shouted. ‘Three weeks or less!’

  But she was already closing the door.

  19

  Eve had a thing about people talking a lot less and listening a lot more. She was especially keen on men talking less. She thought that men should mostly just shut up for a change. By shutting up she meant not just that they should stop blethering on about stuff all the time in places like the Blue Pig, but that they should stop writing books, stop making records or films or TV shows. They should stop writing articles or plays, they should stop performing comedy. They should stop exhibiting their art. They should refrain from making speeches and getting themselves elected. They should stop putting their opinions forward in any forum whatsoever.

  ‘It needn’t be forever,’ she said. ‘Just ten years or so. Twenty maybe.’ Her thing was that this would be good for women and men. It would be good for art.

  ‘Think about the stuff you lot would have to say after a decade of silence,’ she said to her brother, her father, her teachers. ‘There would be some proper amazing work.’

  Sometimes some reckless bloke in the public bar or at school would try and argue with her, would try and say that it didn’t seem right that they should have to shut up just because other more privileged men had taken up more than their share of airtime in the past.

  Eve would just smile and shrug. ‘Can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’

  Of course it was about herself really, not about men at all. Eve was full of things to say and was worried no one would get to hear t
hem. She also worried that she herself was too self-absorbed, that she was too selfish, that she took up too much airtime. It annoyed her that the men and boys she knew never seemed to struggle with this. Not the boys at school, not the regulars in the pub, not her dad, not her brother.

  She always said that she was going to get a tattoo on her forearm of a heart with an arrow through, with the initials LM in the middle of it. People would wonder who LM was, but it wouldn’t be anyone. It would stand for Listen More and it would remind her to shut up occasionally.

  She also said that all men should have this tattooed on them when they were babies. ‘Less painful than circumcision and more useful,’ she said.

  20

  The exams weren’t that bad in the end. They didn’t really touch us and why would they? Exams were, after all, what we knew. They were what we did. We had aced exams all our lives.

  We were children who had walked early, talked early, who had finished the Biff, Chip and Kipper books before anyone else. We had always been in top sets for everything. We had kicked the living shit out of GCSEs, given the A-levels a right slap. We had taken RE and General Studies and Latin in our spare time just a little while ago. In our lunch breaks. We were not going to let these ugly little first year college exam bastards trip us up. Even if they were ‘quite hard’. No sir.

  It got so I was almost enjoying them. I’d look at a question and be all oh puh-lease, not that old chestnut. Is that all you got? Is that really all you got? I went and tore the very arse out of that paper. Across town, Katy and Danny did the same. We were on fire. Yeah, we had superpowers. We could do magic.

  That’s what it felt like, only it wasn’t really magic. It was hard work and organisation. We were well planned. We drew up study schedules – even me – and we stuck to them. We were as disciplined as athletes. As focused as ballet dancers.

  Part of the discipline for me was that I really did keep completely away from Anne for three weeks.

  Instead I sent postcards. One every day on the back of which I scrawled any inspirational quotations that I came across while cramming. Sometimes I sent whole poems. Lines from Keats, Shelley, Coleridge. Marvell. Donne. Yeats. The big guys. The real heavy hitters. If we had world enough and time. Tread softly lest you tread upon my dreams. The liquefaction of her clothes – all that. I missed her way more than I’d expected to. Missed her with a fierce and ever-present ache. Missing Anne was a thirst.

  I got just the one reply. On the same lavish blue paper as before, a note came telling me to be at Selwyn Gardens for 6.30 p.m. for drinks on the day of my final exam. There was no poetry, but there was a little sketch in Chinese ink of a tall skinny boy and a full-breasted woman naked and embracing, each with a bottle in their hand. I smiled when I saw that. It was going to be a hell of a party. It was going to be legendary.

  After that it would be May Week, the ten days of officially sanctioned misrule. In June of course, not May – oh, that Oxbridge sense of humour – a time when it was officially okay for everyone in Cambridge to go mental, when every college and department had balls and parties and drinks and croquet and stuff like that, and I felt the time had maybe come for Anne and I to be seen together amongst the students, to be at least a bit semi-official about the fact that we were an item. Dr Sheldon had his muse and now his wife had hers and the world should see that and take notice.

  21

  I was in my room changing from the jeans and t-shirt into the new suit when from my window I saw a battered fawn Sierra nosing its way into the courtyard. I was startled for a moment because it looked like the battered fawn Sierra my dad drove, only it couldn’t be. It was a fact that there were lots of battered fawn Sierras in the world. But I kept watching.

  The driver’s door opened as a serious-faced porter approached the vehicle. Ted. His very bald spot seemed to be quivering pinkly with indignation. Whoever was in this car would be left in no doubt that they couldn’t park here. Even the Vice-bloody-Chancellor wouldn’t be allowed to park here.

  A middle-aged woman got out. My mum. My mum who never drove anywhere if she could avoid it. The porter and my mother exchanged a few words and began to walk towards the entrance to the college, by which time I was out of my room and running down to meet them, taking the ancient stone steps two at a time. A wonder I didn’t break my neck.

  Mum looked like she hadn’t slept for a week. Her face seemed all bones, her skin somehow dusty and dry. Flaky. She had grey roots showing. My mother never let her roots show. Her smile flared briefly when she clocked me, lighting her up for a second, but it faded just as quick.

  ‘Mark, your dad’s in hospital. His heart. Went in last night. It’s – he’s very poorly, Mark.’

  ‘Shit. You should have called.’

  ‘We did, left a message with the porters. Did you not get it?’

  ‘No. No I didn’t.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not going to be a great holiday for you.’ She peered at me, seemed to see me properly for the first time. ‘My goodness, you look very smart.’ Then she was in tears. I was suddenly furious. I wanted to belt someone. I wanted to punch the person to blame for breaking my dad’s heart. I wanted to punch Eve.

  We had never fought as kids but right now I wanted to slap her hard and over and over. When I was too tired to slap her any more, I wanted to ask her what she thought she was doing. But I couldn’t. She’d cheated me. She’d cheated us all. Right then I couldn’t see her as a risk-taker, or a pathfinder, or a strange mix of sass and sensitivity, right then she was just a selfish brat. Spoiled rotten.

  ‘I’ll get my things.’

  As I packed my cases, as I loaded the Sierra, I thought about how I was going to tell Anne about missing her party, should I run round to Selwyn Gardens, take a precious hour to say goodbye? Should I just swing by as we drove out of Cambridge, drop a note round? Either of those things would mean explanations to my mother, explanations I was too frazzled to make.

  Lucky, then, that Danny and Katy should choose this moment to come round on their bikes. They murmured sympathy. Katy hugged my mum – the first of thousands of hugs she would give her over the years. And yes, yes of course they would pop round to Selwyn Gardens. They might not stop for tea and a chat, but they’d certainly put a note through the door. Of course they would.

  ‘I’m sorry to make you miss your party, Mark.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it Mum. Just a party. Let’s get going, shall we?’

  ‘And that girl, Katy, she’s very considerate. Very lovely too.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose.’

  ‘She’s crazy about you. That’s obvious.’’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  She sighed. ‘You’re your own worst enemy, you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Whatever. Now, can we get going? Please?’

  22

  What sort of people run pubs? Desperate dreamers, that’s who. Those who want to be their own boss. Those who can’t hack nine-to-five jobs. Those who like being in pubs basically. Drinkers. Or drinkists as Eve had called them. She said it implied a kind of devotion to their art. Anyone could be a simple drinker, but you had to have dedication to be a drinkist.

  My dad and people like him.

  My dad didn’t drink the profits of the Blue Pig. But only because there weren’t really any profits. He drank the losses. He drank the overdraft. He did it while working ninety hours a week, always with a fag on the go. If he ate anything it was a bacon sandwich. The only exercise he took was changing barrels and he even smoked while he did that.

  Of course the fact that one night while he was wiping tables and collecting glasses, his daughter was bleeding to death in the bathroom, having first medicated herself with brandy she’d half-inched from behind the bar, well that didn’t help his health any either. Didn’t curb the need for a drink.

  It was no surprise that he’d got sick. The surprise was that it hadn’t happened before this.

  We went to the hospital before we got home. I was shocked. Th
e wheezing, snuffling little bloke in the bed seemed not to have anything at all in common with the shouty man I’d known just a few months ago. My father had always been burly, overweight but carrying it well. The bloke impersonating him in this narrow bed seemed insubstantial, the only noticeable thing about him was the yellowish skin loose on his face.

  He was asleep when we got to his bedside, the racing chuntering away on a telly high up in one corner of the room he shared with an octogenarian who was altogether more sprightly than Dad. A man who introduced himself as Harold Thorne, lungs.

  We didn’t wake Dad. We just stood and stared. Mum squeezed Dad’s hand, and he made a sound halfway between a sigh and a snort, but didn’t stir otherwise.

  ‘Funny, he’s usually livelier when it’s not visiting hours,’ said Harold Thorne. The old man seemed surprised to find that this didn’t cheer us up.

  23

  One thing was clear: May Week was out. I would be in Colchester all summer. The Chadwick family would be struggling together to keep the Blue Pig going. There was no spare cash to pay for additional bar staff, so it would have to be me that stepped up.

  The Blue Pig was a classic traditional boozer. Small saloon bar. Even smaller public bar. Tiny snug. A group of regulars, men who could be any age from thirty-five to sixty-five, red-faced and paunchy in puckered apologetic shirts. Men who knew a lot of facts. Men who laughed a lot at not very much. Men who were deeply unhappy. Brave men in a way. At least they kept going. At least they never gave in. They didn’t, as a rule, cry for help, though perhaps they should have done.

  They were all dead proud of me too. I was like a mascot in the Blue Pig. They were prouder of me than my dad was.

  My dad would tell the regulars about anything I did, but he took care to do it as a piss-take not a boast.

  ‘He can speak Anglo-Saxon you know. He’s done it on the phone for me just now. A whole poem in Anglo-bloody-Saxon. What’s the use of that?’