Stronger Than Skin

by Stephen May

  From Kedington to Great Wratting. From Little Bradley to Brinkley and on through Balsham, all the ghosts of possible future lives crowd in and jostle me and are only dispelled by the outraged bellow of a car horn. I’d been drifting into the path of a tractor. Shit.

  I straighten up, get the car back on the right side of the narrow road.

  I look across at Lulu. She’s awake now and watching me carefully, as if she’s been reading my thoughts. She turns down the music.

  ‘This is Jake’s thing really. I’m more of a Fleetwood Mac kind of a girl.’

  A voice cuts in. That voice you don’t argue with.

  ‘In three hundred yards take the first exit and enter the roundabout.’

  There’s a moment of quiet.

  Lulu says, ‘Are you one of those men who think the satnav lady’s voice is hot?’

  I blush. I know I do. I can’t help it. Beside me Lulu chuckles. Chortles even. I’ve only ever heard one other person laugh like that. Eve. My heart turns over.

  ‘Why are blokes always so blinking obvious?’ she says cheerily, and settles down to kip again.

  53

  Jack is woken by the sound of shellfire. He scurries down the corridor holding Benji by the ear. Mum watching the news on her laptop. Warships blasting a pirate base on the East African coast. He is disappointed to find Ella is already in the bed next to her, he’d thought he might be first for once. But no.

  He looks at his mum. She is in tears.

  ‘Just kids trying to make a buck,’ she says. ‘No one told them they could be blown to bits.’

  Jack watches as a missile sends a cloud of dust into the sky. He knows what that dust is made of. It is bits of the bricks of houses, but it’s also bits of people. Bones and skin and hair.

  There’s a shot of the ship now. Tanned men in white t-shirts cheering as the rockets whoosh away into the sky. He’s excited because he knows about all this.

  ‘That’s a Type 23 Frigate,’ he says. ‘Duke class. Fires missiles called harpoons that can hit places eighty miles away.’

  ‘You complete spoon,’ says Ella.

  His mum is giving him a hard look, and he is concerned that she hasn’t tried to wipe away the wet on her cheeks, though she has a box of tissues next to the bed. ‘Jack, you worry me sometimes. Where did you learn that?’

  His heart sinks. He’s done something wrong, though he can’t think what it is. It’s good to know stuff, right?

  ‘At the library. They have a book there called Jane’s Fighting Ships. Dad told me about it once. It tells you about every warship there is.’

  ‘See, Mum, I’ve always said we shouldn’t go to the library. It’s dangerous. It’ll give Jack ideas. It’ll turn him into a freak like Dad.’

  ‘Hush now.’ Mum is frowning but she doesn’t look really cross. The news has changed too. It’s football now, which means Mum will switch it off soon, which is okay. Jack has decided he doesn’t care about football. He’s just going to concentrate on the judo.

  ‘Kids,’ Mum says. ‘How do you fancy a great big massive huge adventure?’

  ‘Yay!’ says Ella.

  ‘Before school?’ says Jack.

  ‘Instead of school,’ says Mum.

  ‘Double yay!’ says Ella.

  ‘All right,’ says Jack.

  ‘Well, don’t get too excited,’ says Mum. ‘Trust me it’ll be fun, now we got to get ready. Wesley is coming to pick us up in two hours.’

  Wesley? Wesley? Who is Wesley? They don’t know anyone called Wesley, do they?

  ‘You’ll like him,’ says Mum. ‘He knows a lot of facts too. Mostly about cycling, it’s true, but I’m sure you’ll get on.’

  ‘Is it like a holiday, Mum?’

  ‘Like a holiday, yes.’

  Jack wants to say that it’s not right to go for holidays in school time, and shouldn’t they wait for Daddy to come home? What if they’re away when the baby decides to come? But he knows this is the wrong thing to say right now. No point saying things that no one wants to hear.

  Ella is already out of the bed and heading for her room. She calls from the landing. ‘Mum, will I need my guitar and should I bring my swimming costume?’

  Mum gives it some quick thought.

  ‘Leave the guitar, bring your cossie,’ she says.

  54

  An hour before dawn. A brick through a window. A fire in the garden of an empty house three streets away from Selwyn Gardens. A young woman makes a 999 call from a phone box. She says there’s suspicious characters breaking in. The call handler asks her to stay on the line, but she lets the receiver drop. Walks away.

  It’s an old ploy, one Lulu heard about from Jake but, as she says, that doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t work. Lulu’s theory is that when they get the call they’ll send the nearest car and that will be our guys.

  ‘They’ll be wanting action. They’ll love the chance to put out a fire, to see if there are any vandals around to give a clip around the ear to, any tramps to bollock.’

  When they go to deal with this non-incident we’ll get in to where we need to be. When she suggests this as a plan I try to argue against it. It sounds flimsy to me, way too simple for a start. But what is the alternative? It is a relief to decide to do something.

  Anyway, she’s right. I see them go past me, the woman driving, her male companion rubbing his hands. Her serious, him gleeful, desperate to get stuck in. My fist closes tight around the key Bim gave me.

  I’m back in that garage. I’m fine. Really. It doesn’t unnerve me that much. Probably not as much as it should. It’s just another storeroom, a place that smells of rust and damp. A place to keep shovels and rope.

  It doesn’t even smell of exhaust fumes. Not really. A slight tang of petrol maybe, but all garages have that. No, it’s just a space full of junk like any other garage anywhere in the world. Old paint tins. A muddy mountain bike entangled with a girl’s shopper in shiny pink complete with basket. A broken chair, some plastic boxes of yellowing newspapers. An old washing machine. A stunt kite. A tent untidily crammed into its bag after some long-forgotten family holiday. A large bucket. Garden forks and spades. A hover-mower. A wheelbarrow. A chest freezer. A set of golf clubs in a battered tan bag. A cricket bat.

  Just stuff. Ordinary stuff. No ghosts.

  I am startled by a whisper in the darkness.

  ‘Now, switch off the electrics.’ I do as Lulu asks and we move into the kitchen, where I locate the landline handset by means of the pinprick of green light. A simple job to snip the wire.

  This James Bond routine is Lulu’s idea too. She’d told me I had to cut off the power to stop Anne alerting the police by switching lights on, and we sure as hell don’t want her making any calls. We want to be able to talk to her properly, really make sure she’s listening.

  It all makes me very, very tense. I am fighting to control my rising panic. It is lucky that Lulu had insisted I go to the bathroom before we began.

  ‘The one thing I know for certain about breaking into houses is that you always want to go for a dump the moment you’re inside,’ she’d said.

  Another gem from Jake, I guess.

  She’d shrugged. ‘No, actually. Got it from TV. Which is where everyone learns these things. Where even blinking spies learn them.’

  We move down the spacious hallway. Twenty-three years since I was last in this house. But I know my way around it seems. Don’t have to think too hard. Which is good.

  Lulu whispers, ‘You go upstairs. I’ll have a poke around down here.’

  I’m at the foot of Anne’s bed watching her sleeping. Again, I am surprised by how little I feel. Yes, it’s probably wrong that I’m here, that I didn’t find a way to ring the doorbell and just announce myself honestly. It’s reckless too. But I had to do something and, actually, reckless feels good right now. Feels right anyway.

  My sense is that the room is pretty much unaltered, though in this dark it’s hard to tell. I find I can’t really remember
the colour of the walls or the carpet, like I can’t recall where the wardrobe was, the chest of drawers, the mirror. I remember the bed though. This big bed, surely this is the same one.

  In this curtained pre-dawn gloom Anne’s hardly there. She’s not really recognisable as a person. She’s just a small, indistinct shape under the covers. The room is cool, like a chapel of rest. She could be dead already. I could be a distant family member come to pay my respects.

  I can hear the rain hiss outside. I can hear pipes murmur as they flex somewhere in this big old house. I can hear these things, but I can’t hear Anne breathing. I can’t see the rise and fall of her chest beneath the quilt. She’s just a shadow amid other shadows. Hardly real at all. A dream.

  In Italy, just after it all happened, I hardly slept at all, but when I did, finally, nod out, then I dreamed of Sheldon and Anne a lot. The two of them hand in hand. Looking at me and smiling, showing all their teeth. Like they had joint enterprises I would never be part of. I could never recall any other details after, but I would jerk awake, heart racing, covered in sweat with the sense of having narrowly escaped something terrible. But of course I hadn’t escaped.

  Now my eyes begin to get used to the murky light, which in any case is growing stronger by the minute. I have no idea of how long I’ve been standing here. The body in the bed is tiny. She takes up almost no space beneath the heavy cream of the quilt. Her face becomes a pale shiver in the night. From here it seems unlined and the only giveaway to her age is the hair that falls across it. It is expensively, carefully, blonded. She used to be so dark. For a second I have the lunatic urge to stroke that new hair, touch that face. To see her scars.

  Her eyes don’t twitch or flicker behind her lids.

  I have to make something happen. I can’t just stand here like this. There are some essential tasks as detailed for me by Lulu. The first of them is to cross to the bedside table where, next to a glass of water, a mobile phone is charging. Another of those winking green lights by which we measure out our life these days. I disconnect that. Take out the battery. Put the useless phone back on the table. Then the plan is to just be here when she wakes and somehow or other make her see the sense of withdrawing her statement.

  While we’d sat for hour upon hour in Lulu’s car eating crisps and listening to the full range of radio voices, she had asked exactly what I hoped to achieve from my meeting with Anne. What would success for this mission look like?

  I’d explained that I was thinking I could persuade her, even now, to retract her statement to the police. She could say she was having a breakdown, hallucinations, false memories. Maybe she could tell them that her cancer medication was – is – playing havoc with her thinking, that her oncologist warned her this might happen. We know, don’t we, about how prescription drugs can interfere with rational thinking.

  I’d told Lulu how I was hopeful that if Anne knew about the life I’ve built – about Ella, Jack, Katy, the Bump – she’d see sense. If I had to I’d tell her about teaching – the parade of lost boys who have ended up saved. Some of them more than saved, some of them proper success stories. The hoodlums who have become historians, the thugs who have become theologians. The truants who have become good teachers in their turn.

  If she withdraws her statement she’ll be helping herself too. Bim told us that she’s out on police bail right now, but if she sticks with her story then she’s looking at her final years or months spent inside and – despite what you sometimes read – prisons are no picnic.

  We had rehearsed the conversation, Lulu and I. She had taken the Anne Sheldon role, her job to be as intransigent as possible, and every time we ran it Lulu pronounced herself won over in the end.

  ‘But I still think you should have a plan B,’ Lulu said.

  She had more tips about how to approach Anne too. She warned me that I couldn’t just launch in. Said that if you wanted people to listen carefully to you, then you had to get them to open up first and you did that by listening to them. I told her, probably slightly tetchily, that I knew this rule already.

  At work, at home, with children, with everyone everywhere, listen before you talk. Listen more. Or, at the very least, look as though you are listening. My tattoo itches.

  ‘Knowing something and doing something can be very different,’ she said.

  It comes to me now that I haven’t checked the other bedrooms. Only now do I consider the possibility that there might be other people in the house. God, we are so useless at this. So unfitted for this kind of action. I can’t believe we’ve been so sloppy. But then I’m an amateur. Haven’t watched enough television. I listen hard. There is creaking from downstairs, rustling. Lulu probably, or it could be the house stretching and sighing the way that old houses do. I need to be sure. It could get very messy if there was a guest or a relative staying here, someone who could be alerted by a shout or a scream.

  I tiptoe out, complete a tour of the upstairs rooms. No posters anywhere now. I wonder what happened to the old adverts for the theatre shows and the exhibitions. When did they get binned?

  A few stealthy minutes and I’m back at the door of Anne’s room. Only this time the bed is empty. Shit.

  Back down the stairs, not worrying so much about noise now, heart beginning to race, my breath becoming shallower, sweat breaking out under my arms. My stomach cramping.

  Adrenalin. Just adrenalin. All it is.

  A hotly whispered conversation with Lulu who tells me that no one has got past her. She shows me that the doors at the front and back are both closed, and surely anyone escaping would have left them open behind them, would be up and down the street already, screaming for the neighbours. Yelling for the police who could be back at their station by now; there’s been none of that, so Anne is still in the house somewhere. She was probably still in the bedroom when I came back to it. In a wardrobe maybe. Or under the bed. Wasn’t it possible she’d been faking sleep while I did the business with the phone, while I did all that dumb standing and staring, while I was thinking about stroking her face?

  Back up the stairs. All this to-ing and fro-ing, all this up and down-ing. Too much. Painful. Almost comical.

  But if I’m methodical I will find her.

  It seems that Anne has reached the same conclusion because by the time I’m halfway up the stairs, she is there on the landing. She is wearing white pyjamas with some kind of design printed on them in pink. They don’t seem very Anne-like somehow. The 1990 Anne wouldn’t have worn them. She’s holding a pair of scissors in one hand and her useless mobile phone in the other. Her face, so peacefully closed as I was gazing down upon it minutes ago, is alive now. Alive and fierce. Cat-like.

  I move towards her. I recognise the distinctive spice of her scent. Still the same after all these years. I shudder slightly. I can’t help it, that fragrance will always take me back to places where I don’t want to go. Places that I never left.

  I keep my arms down by my side, make myself as unthreatening as possible, even while keeping my steps up the stairs purposeful and determined.

  Anne seems to make a decision. As I reach the landing, she darts forward, slashing at me with the scissors. She’s deft and she’s quick, I can feel the point of them graze my shirt. I lean back, have to grab at the bannister to keep from falling. She stabs up towards my throat now, the point scraping my neck.

  I grab her wrist as I step up onto the landing. It’s so twig-like I could snap it with no effort at all. I squeeze and twist. Not too hard, just a Chinese burn really, no more than that, but she gives a little gasp, just a sharp breath, and the scissors drop to the polished wood of the floor with a clatter. Too loud. Too fucking loud.

  Still holding her wrist, I grip the collar of her pyjamas and sweep her legs from beneath her fast with my left foot. It’s a judo move, one I picked up from watching Jack and Ella’s coach go through it on a hundred Saturday mornings. As she hits the floor, I see what the little motif is that covers her pyjamas. Love hearts. Little pink love hearts
. I have time to wonder if that’s who she is now. Is this what I’m dealing with now? A woman who covers herself in tiny love hearts? Do people change that much?

  She gasps again, but makes no other sound. She makes much less noise in hitting the parquet than the scissors did. Neither of us has said a word. There’s just been these quick hot breaths. It takes no time for me to have her on her knees, her arm bent up behind her back, my hand over her mouth and nose.

  I stop myself. I need to be careful. She is what? Sixty? Sixty-one? Not properly old but on the way to it. And ill. Even without cancer, soon she’d be entering the zone of routinely holding on to handrails, of not going out in the snow. I have to remember that she is fragile, breakable. I need her goodwill.

  Of course I remember now that we loved each other once, that we spent days and nights wrapped up in each other. That my skin carries the memory of hers in every movement I make.

  I am calm, soothing. I tell her she’ll be okay. I just want to talk. That there are things I want to tell her, things she needs to know. And, staying calm, staying soothing but keeping my palm tight across her lips, my voice as steady as rain, I explain that I can’t allow her to shout or scream and she should nod if she understands this. I feel a movement against my hand, probably an attempt at a nod, but I need to be sure.

  I keep my voice even as I tell her how desperate I am, how I will break her neck if I have to, that I could do it. That a hurt and angry part of me wants to do it. Does she understand me? If she does I need a proper sign. A proper nod.

  She makes sure there’s no doubt about it now. A fervent bobbing of the head. Still, I wait a few seconds before unpeeling my hand from her lips and moving it to her hair. I help her stand.

  Now she speaks. Her voice a tired whisper.