Stronger Than Skin

by Stephen May

  The pint is £3.90. Cheap for round here. I give the barmaid a fiver. I take my change across to the pool table, put the quid on the edge.

  ‘I’ll play the winner, shall I?’ I say.

  The lads are finishing up their own game. They look at each other uncertain, wrong-footed. These boys must be in their early twenties, hard-looking with their severely cropped hair, their Maori style tattoos that snake around powerful biceps, the names inked in Gothic script on the forearms of the lad nearest me. Brandon, Elona. His children presumably.

  They’re tall too. All young guys seem tall now – that eighties and nineties diet has been much derided but it has produced big, big lads that’s for sure. All that mechanically recovered red meat, all those hormones – it will kill them off eventually, but first it turns them into giants.

  But, despite their size, despite the aggressively decorated skin and the shorn hair, despite the unblinking eyes, I feel quite safe. It isn’t just the confidence cheap whisky will give you either. Any halfway decent high school teacher knows that young men are mostly sweethearts really. The little boys they once were are close to the surface. You don’t need to dig down very far to find them.

  ‘No, you’re all right,’ says the nearest lad softly. ‘We’re going in a minute.’

  Across the table, his mate pots the black with a tricky shot from one end of the table to another.

  ‘Get in,’ he says, then straightens up. ‘I’ll give you a game, mate. If we make it a little interesting.’

  So suddenly we’re playing pool for money. Twenty quid. I am on fire. I haven’t played pool for years, but I played hours every day when I was young and it’s one of those things you don’t forget how to do.

  I pot a yellow from the break and almost clear up from there. By the time I only have the black to put down, my opponent still has five balls on the table. None of them in easy positions either. Truth is, either he isn’t very good at this game, or the prospect of real actual money has made him tense up and in pool, like in any game, like in life, you need to stay loose if you want to succeed. You need to be fearless. You can only win if you don’t care that much about losing.

  I am lining up the black when it occurs to me that I don’t actually want to win. Getting twenty quid from this lad absolutely isn’t the point. Winning isn’t what I’m playing the game for. This is meant to be about a kind of companionship. Yet I’ve raced to a winning position and haven’t exchanged any words with these lads except, ‘Good shot.’ And, more often, ‘Bad luck.’

  I look at the faces of the lad I’m playing and his mate. Both of them are closed and hard. Yes, young men are simple. They just need to be loved unconditionally by everyone they meet. That’s all. They need to be joshed and joked with and given attention. Not too much to ask really.

  But they’ve learned that the world doesn’t want them, instead it fears them. The world views young blokes in the same way it views dangerous dogs, as creatures needing muzzling and neutering. The world crosses the street when it sees them coming. No surprise it makes boys want to destroy things. To break their toys. I get it. Tonight, of all nights, I get that.

  I haven’t given them any of that joshing and joking. Any of that love. Instead I’ve unthinkingly set about crushing them. Destroying them. I’ve done what the old always want to do to the young.

  I decide to miss.

  For the next fifteen minutes or so I bang the black ball about, while my opponent painstakingly reduces the disparity between us. While we play our parts I find out that he’s called Baz, that he’s a landscape gardener, that he plays guitar in a metal band but he doesn’t have as much time for that now what with the kids and that.

  ‘Family life is more important to me than music,’ he says.

  His mate is called Darren and he works in Sainsbury’s and it’s okay for now. He’ll probably give it up to go travelling quite soon. Not much to stay here for now he’s split up with his girlfriend. He suddenly looks like he’s going to cry.

  Baz covers the embarrassment of his mate getting all choked up by asking about me, and I tell them I’m a teacher on sick leave with stress. I invent a recent divorce. Baz says he’s sorry. I tell him there’s no need to be.

  ‘No, it was the best thing,’ I say. I look over at Darren. ‘It gets easier, mate. Time heals. It really does.’ I wonder about how easily this imagined life is coming to me.

  Then Baz pots his last red and then the black, we shake hands and the barmaid calls time and rings the bell as I fork over a twenty. Money well spent. Baz and Darren get their coats. I get the feeling that they are both happier now than they were at the start of the evening. So I guess I’ve done a decent thing. Hurray for me. Hurray for Baz and Daz.

  People – women – often say that one of the problems with men is that they don’t talk about their feelings with one another. That they don’t share their worries, their hurt. In some way it seems to suit women to believe that. Seems to provide a kind of comfort. But it’s wrong. My experience is that, when it’s safe, men talk all the time about the same stuff women talk about. Only they like to do that confessional stuff with something in their hands. They like to open up while they’re doing something else.

  When men open up to one another they do it while playing games. They like to multitask, if you like. Men talk to each other in rooms with dartboards or with pool tables. The darts, the pool cues, they are not always the surrogate weapons they appear to be – sometimes they are simple props designed to encourage intimacy. Sometimes a pool game is just a prolonged hug for people who don’t get enough of them.

  Before he heads out into the night Baz says ‘You had me beat right up until the end. You need to work on your killer instinct mate.’

  Then the barmaid is calling last orders and the fat man, now the only person in the pub besides me, lumbers off his stool. He nods at the barmaid.

  ‘Mind how you go, Rodney,’ she says.

  The fat man grins so wide he suddenly looks like the cheerful child he must once have been. He has just two teeth. Both top incisors. The rest of his mouth is a dark wet cave and his tongue pops out briefly, a small, blind, pink creature coming out from its nest to sniff the air.

  I know with the sudden clarity of the drunk that the barmaid is the only person that ever tells Rodney to mind how he goes. I know that he loves her. He is old and ugly and lonely and yet he loves with the same ache with which the young and handsome and popular love one another. Think about that, amazing isn’t it?

  When all the corner pubs are finally gone, when all that’s left are vast warehouses for the curation of vertical drinking, or gastro-pubs selling roast dinners at forty quid a head – who will bring light into the worlds of all the Rodneys then? Who will make them smile? Who will suggest that they mind how they go?

  It occurs to me that pub games are being squeezed out to make space for diners. By the time my children are old enough to order pints in bars maybe pool tables will seem as quaint as skittle alleys. Lots of pubs have got rid of them already. Soon there’ll be nowhere left for lonely men to talk or play.

  Men who like to pass the time in games and chat, they take up too much goddam room. It’s no longer a country for them.

  Ten minutes after Rodney leaves, I am also drinking up, am also advised to mind how I go. My God, am I on the way to becoming Rodney? Twenty minutes after that, without remembering anything of the walk back, I am fumbling for borrowed keys in Chaney Street.

  38

  In the kitchen Lulu cracks open a beer – she’s back on the Steinbrau Blonde, I notice. She must actually like it – and she silently hands me one. She gets out a beef Pot Noodle from one of the cupboards.

  ‘I’ve just got in myself,’ she says.

  ‘That stuff will kill you,’ I say. ‘I thought you were a vegan.’

  She smiles briefly. ‘I am. There’s no animal products in a Pot Noodle, not in this flavour anyway. I am, however, probably the wrong sex to be eating this stuff really.’
<
br />   ‘How come?’

  She reads out the cooking instructions and it is funny the way that Pot Noodles are blatantly aimed at the hunter presumed to lurk inside every red-blooded man. Consumers are urged to RIP the tinfoil of the lid, TEAR at the little sachet of soy sauce, and GRAB a fork to DIG in. Ripping, tearing, grabbing and digging. Eating this concoction of dried soya becomes the very essence of a manly life.

  Lulu says, ‘Isn’t that mad?’

  She rips the lid, pours boiling water into the container. Pouring is not mentioned as a step, I note. Pouring water clearly not male enough to be included in the instructions. Ripping is for men, but pouring is for ladies. Lulu meanwhile gets on with the tearing of the sauce sachet with her teeth. ‘Grrr,’ she says.

  We move into the tiny living room and she puts on the gas fire, plonks herself down on the sofa, switches on the TV and pats the space next to her. There are no other places to sit in this room in any case. So I go and sit down. I feel oddly shy.

  The telly is showing the results from yet another talent competition. There’s a boy – maybe ten years old – murdering In the Midnight Hour. This kid should be sleeping in the midnight hour and doing nothing else. This kid has school in the morning.

  Lulu picks her phone up off the coffee table and taps at the screen.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I say.

  ‘I’m tweeting what you just said.’

  ‘You’re tweeting about this show?’

  ‘Yeah, look. Bloke next to me thinks only place #Marlon should be at midnight hour is in bed asleep. He has school in morn. I’ve tweeted that.’

  Fucked up as I am, I start a bit of a row. A pointless one. I find myself saying that all these programmes they should be banned, that I am amazed she thinks they’re worth talking about. That I thought she was a serious, intelligent girl. A photographer. An artist. Can’t she see what a waste of time these shows are? And to tweet about it, well how inane is that?

  Lulu gives me a hard look. There is a flush creeping into her neck. She says that it is funny how it’s only ever men who try to shut women up about these programmes. She says that men’s leisure interests – football, say – well, they are talent contests just as unimportant – and much more boring – than this one, and they’re on the bloody news for chrissake. She says that no woman who was a guest in the house of someone they hardly knew, would accept their host’s hospitality and then slag off how they like to spend their time. Only a man would do that. Only a man would be that disrespectful.

  ‘I’m tired,’ she says. ‘I’m hungry. My leg hurts. The house is cold. I have been working my blinking butt off. I’m skint. Tonight I want to forget all that by watching crap TV with a beer and a Pot Noodle. And for your information I am thirty-two. I am a serious, intelligent woman. Not a girl.’

  Without looking at me, keeping her eyes on the screen where little Marlon is now in tears and being hugged by a gaggle of toothy kids – fellow competitors at a guess – she says that right now social media provide places where women feel free, where they can be vocal, where they can have a laugh with their mates, and so of course men try and say it’s a waste of time.

  Then she asks me why my hand is on her thigh.

  I move it quickly into my lap. ‘Shit. Sorry. Sorry.’ Because it’s true, my hand was on her right thigh, sort of. Lying alongside her leg anyway, definitely touching it. I can feel the heat in my face, feel myself blushing.

  She laughs. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘It’s a small sofa,’ I say.

  She turns her eyes away from the screen now. Looks right at me. But her look is not hard now, it’s soft. I could imagine it’s fond almost. It’s shockingly intimate, she seems to be seeing right into my head.

  ‘Not that small,’ she says. She keeps her eyes on mine. There is a long pause, a silence that begins to grow almost tangible, clammy, like mist. She keeps looking at me, eyes the colour of bark. A wet and muddy brown.

  ‘Do you fancy me, Marko? Do you want to shag me?’ Her voice is conversational, bland. For a moment I wonder if she’s said it at all, wonder if I have maybe imagined it. But she waits patiently for an answer.

  No, no is the answer. I don’t want to go to bed with Lulu. I want to go to bed with Katy. I want to go to bed with my wife. Want to feel her hands around my shoulders, on my back, in my hair, her shallow breaths in my ear. Her legs wrapped around me, heels on the backs of my thighs, urging me into her. More than this, I want to wake up with Katy. To bring her coffee and while she drinks it I want to have her tell me that there were no other men, that it had been a story made up to hurt me and that she was sorry she’d done it. Maybe I wouldn’t even mind if it was the apology that was the lie. Whatever, we’d never mention it again. I’d eBay the bloody bike.

  But also yes. Yes, of course I want to go to bed with Lulu. Christ, I don’t know what I want. I am drunk and lost. I am a man with no place in the world. A man that can’t see straight. A man who has found out there are no certainties in the world and no one you can rely on. I feel like dying. I feel impossibly old.

  ‘You don’t mind about the leg?’

  No. I don’t mind about the leg. I haven’t even thought about the leg.

  She chuckles deep in her throat. She sounds genuinely delighted. Now she puts her hands on each side of my face. They feel hot and dry. She rests her forehead on mine. Her smiling eyes are on mine. I can smell the Steinbrau on her breath.

  ‘You know what you really need is toast,’ she says. She releases my face and moves back away from me.

  ‘Toast. Yes. Great.’ I say, my voice hoarse. I feel a sudden relief. Yes. Toast. Toast is exactly what I need. The very thing. Toast and tea. Not sex. While Lulu goes to the kitchen to make it, I stumble upstairs for a piss and remember that the last person to call me Marko was Anne, a lifetime ago. No one else has ever done it. Not Katy, not Eve, not anyone.

  The fire warms the small room and it grows cosy as we munch toast with damson jam and Lulu tells me about the trip Jake has booked for them. They’re going to Majorca. I tell her they should make sure they go to Deia. It’s where Robert Graves lived. The poet who believed that men were in thrall to the Goddess. That they were at the mercy of witches. Turns out Lulu knows this already. Lulu knows about The White Goddess and The Golden Ass, knows all about Good-Bye to All That.

  ‘Well, we might visit his house I suppose, if we have a cloudy day, but you know, we might also just stay on the beach getting ripped on sangria if that’s all right with you. We need to reconnect I think, me and Jake.’

  The buttered toast works its magic and we grow easier with one another. She tells me about her childhood in Cheltenham. About her mum the social worker and her dad whom she hasn’t seen since she was nine, but who did at least buy her first camera. Her dad, the man who ran off with his wife’s sister, her aunt. People, eh? The things they do.

  She tells me about her work, about how she sits sketching or reading or practising her Italian while watching CCTV screens of empty warehouses that are destined one day to become luxury apartments for foreign billionaires to leave empty.

  She tells me about her life before she lost her leg. How she used to be a good girl, how she once needed to get merits, smiley faces, A stars. How, a lifetime ago, she cried when she failed to get a distinction in her grade 8 cello. Imagine that, she says.

  She tells me how nothing makes her cry these days. She tells me she doesn’t need a career, a pension, a mortgage or any of that bollocks. She doesn’t care about gold stars or good marks. These days she wants to have experiences not smiley faces.

  ‘People worry about security,’ she says, ‘when there’s no such thing. Not really.’

  We clink mugs. I can drink to that.

  We drink more tea, and the telly provides a chirruping soundtrack of nonsense while she talks about her new project which will be a photographic study of siblings.

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ I say.

  ‘Well it was that or a study of hot
guys with baby animals and I think someone might have done that already.’

  Now I find that I am telling her about my own sister, Eve, everyone’s favourite. Telling her how Eve devised a whole language for all of us to speak when she was seven. Insisted we used it all the time for several weeks and how it drove our parents mad. I tell of the little handmade books she made, clumsily stitched but full of stories about a family of blind children who lived without adults on an island beyond the edge of the map.

  I tell of the way she always stood up to bullies, how if she saw someone throwing their weight around in the playground then that person was going to get a smack, or, at the very least, get a verbal hammering that would reduce them to tears. I tell Lulu about Eve’s song writing, about her painting, about the way she loved to wear hats. How she always looked great and how the camera always loved her.

  ‘Sounds like we’d get on,’ she says.

  Yeah, I think they would.

  Without warning, the room is filled with the looming presence of Jake. Neither of us heard him come in, and I see him take in how we’re sitting, the toast, the beer, how snug we are. How the air is heavy with confidences and shared stories. I see the hurt flash across his face, the same look I saw years ago when I told him that the wounded and abandoned owlet wouldn’t survive in his school locker.

  ‘Jake,’ I say.

  ‘Hey, babe,’ says Lulu.

  Jake has his phone in his hand. ‘I’m going upstairs to the bog,’ he says and his voice is thick and choked. ‘Then I’m going to call the police. I think you’ll have about five minutes.’

  ‘Jake,’ I say again. I stop. What can I say?

  ‘Don’t be a plonker, Jake,’ says Lulu. She is chewing on her fingernail.