Stronger Than Skin

by Stephen May

  ‘Enjoy that, did you?’ But she gives me no time to answer. ‘This is a mistake, Mark. What you might call a strategic blunder.’ She rallies, becomes brisk, seems to decide to take charge. The old authoritative voice is back. The languid smile hiding in it, just as it always did. With the old voice comes an old question. ‘Coffee? Or shall we have wine?’

  55

  We have wine. Of course we do. There’s a rack in the kitchen next to the kettle where most people keep their tea and coffee. Anne tells me that down in the cellar there are still a few bottles of the professor’s really good stuff, the stuff they were drinking all those years ago.

  ‘Saved a couple of bottles for a really special occasion,’ she says. I don’t know if I believe her.

  She sits compliant in the living room while I light the stove. She doesn’t seem intimidated by Lulu. She just ignores her. Pointedly addresses no remarks to her as she tells me where to find candles.

  Once they’re lit it’s weirdly cosy. We even do small talk. Of a kind. I tell her she looks well. She tells me that I look fucking old. Knackered. That I’ve let myself go and no mistake. I don’t rise to it, because sticks and stones and all that. Words will never hurt you. She sits opposite me on the sofa now, wrapped in a blanket, savouring her wine like a duchess. I notice that all the sculptures have gone. No obsidian ladies or babies. No orbs and cubes. The house could be any suburban home now.

  ‘Almost romantic,’ she says. Her eyes shine with mischief and I feel some of the old tug at my heart.

  From her chair in the corner Lulu snorts.

  I don’t say anything. But I feel sort of hopeful now. I’m wondering if this – getting me here – was maybe the whole point of the confession in the first place, like a child having a tantrum to get attention. I can imagine that. As the light dies you want to be noticed, you want your former lovers to gather around to reassure you that, hey, you were quite something once. You broke hearts, made strong men cry. Had boys queue to carry your books. You want to call out into the dying light and have people, men, come running like they used to. Just another way of crying for help.

  She’s cried out and here I am. Now we can sort it.

  First, I apologise for breaking in. For hurting her. I tell her I’m just desperate. There’s a silence. She coughs wetly into her hand. Sighs.

  ‘You didn’t hurt me,’ she says.

  ‘Good. Good,’ I say.

  ‘You can’t hurt me now. No one can.’ She coughs again, takes another sip at her wine, makes a face.

  I don’t answer. Instead I ask how she’s been.

  ‘Didn’t we have a rule once? About not telling each other sad stories?’ she says. I tell her it’s a rule we’ve maybe outgrown. She sighs and says if I’m going to insist, then she’s going to need a cigarette. Not a real one. An eFag.

  ‘Absurd, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘I’m trying to give up and these digital dummies, they’re meant to help.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Her story is a sad one, though she tells it matter-of-factly, without self-pity. Twenty-odd years of bad luck and bad choices. The men who are happy to go to bed with her but cagey about living with her. The men who are desperate to live with her, but whom she can’t bring herself to go to bed with. Her French husband was in that category actually.

  I hear about the jobs she gets easily, but can’t be bothered to actually do. The jobs she loses. Then there are the illnesses. The disorders. The breakdowns. Not hers – her daughter’s.

  Dorcas begins with self-harm before her twelfth birthday and moves steadily through the phases like she’s following some carefully worked out timetable. A demonic twelve-step programme of her very own. Anorexia, shoplifting, drinking, dope, expulsion from a string of posh schools, the running away, Ibiza, the wrong men, the hard drugs, the hard men, the wrong drugs, the stays in hospital, the therapy that encourages her to blame her issues on her mother.

  Anne tells me all this with a resigned, ironic tone that implies her main problem with this series of fuck-ups is that they are so predictable. That she is disappointed that her daughter has bought into all the clichés of contemporary crashing and burning. That it is just embarrassing more than anything.

  ‘After having been away fuck knows where, doing fuck knows what with fuck knows who without a word for nearly three years – she ends up back and she’s so angry, Mark. Really angry. All the time. Unbearable.’ She sighs. ‘Except when it’s your children you sort of have to bear it. One night she tells me that she is sure I was responsible for Philip’s death.’

  I remember a child’s face at an upstairs window. The solemn look, a little hand waving.

  ‘Of course we were drinking. I tried not to when Dorcas was around but you know sometimes…’ her voice trails off. She sits staring into the stove as if there are answers in the glowing coals. I prompt her a little, taking care to keep my voice paramedic-mild, bereavement counsellor-soft. The way I’d practised with Lulu. I don’t want to spook her now I’ve got her this far.

  ‘What happened then?’

  Anne looks at me reluctantly, like it takes her a real effort.

  ‘Well, it just spilled out, the whole sorry fucking mess. Next morning Dorcas said I had to go to the police but I didn’t, not then. I told her not to be so bloody stupid. But after she’d disappeared again and the months passed without a word from her I thought… I thought...’ she tails off, then makes an effort. ‘I suppose when I got my diagnosis I thought maybe it had been what I did – what we did – that was making me ill. That keeping a secret like this had become corrosive, become a disease.’

  So there it is. Voodoo. She thinks that it is her secret that is killing her.

  It’s all too much for Lulu. There is an explosive breath from the dark corner where she sits. We’d forgotten about her.

  ‘How dumb. How utterly, utterly stupid.’

  ‘What?’ Anne’s voice is sharp and I am reminded of all the times she mocked me for using this word. The way she once told me it was my catchphrase, the way it should be on my gravestone. What? What?

  ‘Makes me furious when people say things like that. Makes me sick to my stomach,’ Lulu says.

  I try to throw her a warning look, try to will her into silence. But she won’t be stopped. ‘Cancer doesn’t care about secrets like it doesn’t care about stress or worry or your memories. Cancer is not psychosomatic. It’s not a psychological illness and it’s not punishment for sins. It’s caused by genetics, or poor diet or bad luck. It has medical causes. Christ. I was told you were clever.’

  I know Lulu is right. Secrets can be damaging, of course they can, but only if they are handled recklessly. They aren’t corrosive in themselves. They react with air. They’re like cyanide, sarin, smallpox – potentially lethal, yes – but safe enough if properly stored.

  ‘Charming girl, Marko,’ says Anne. ‘Where did you find her?’

  I know I need to go carefully now. Because if I do the thing about my wife, my life, my lovely accomplished children, it could do more harm than good. I’ll be asking Anne not to rock the boat so my children can go to grammar schools, drama clubs, oboe lessons while she is busy dying and her own child is maybe trading blowjobs for ketamine in some rat pit somewhere – and well, that might not be good politics. I need to be subtle, nuanced. I need to undo the damage done by Lulu’s intervention.

  ‘Maybe you can boil a kettle, love,’ I say.

  ‘Don’t you “love” me.’ But Lulu heaves herself up from her chair and moves out of the living room with a petulant toss of her head. I’m irritated at her taking offence because I only called her love to avoid saying her name out loud.

  Anne laughs, which annoys me. Maybe this little spat with Lulu has disrupted my concentration or maybe I’ve been made stupid by stress, by driving, by adrenalin, by tiredness, by all the fucking listening I’ve done. Whatever, something makes me forget where I am, lose sight of what I’m trying to accomplish here. />
  ‘Only it wasn’t actually the whole story that spilled out, was it Anne?’ I say.

  There is a long silence. A suck on her glowing tube. Little puffs of non-toxic water vapour. An anxious ducking towards her glass. Sip. Sip. Sip. In the old days she was never a sipper.

  She tops up our drinks. Her hand shakes so that the bottle neck taps an erratic rhythm on the glasses. Her wrist is as delicate and as fragile as a sparrow’s leg. There is a red mark on it where I held her. A spreading bruise. She is, I see now, still very beautiful. Her skin might be webbed with a mesh of delicate lines, but she’s still beguiling. She still has that power. She looks up at me quickly. It’s as if she has noticed a new charge in the room, a quickening in the atmosphere.

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ she says. ‘I maybe did downplay my role in things for Dorcas’s sake. And maybe I did build your part up. He was her father after all. You and I Marko, we were in it together, weren’t we?’

  Does she really think that? Can she really think that?

  ‘Where’s Dorcas now?’ I say. I am bone tired, shivery, depressed by the thought that there is still quite a lot of negotiating to be done. But I need to keep the conversation going.

  ‘God knows. On past form I should see her again sometime in late 2020. Or would if I was likely to still be around then. Earlier maybe if she gets herself busted, or pregnant or sick. I was hoping she’d maybe hear about our arrests and come back then.’

  Sip. Suck. A long breath out.

  ‘I don’t want to die without seeing her again.’

  ‘Kids. Always a worry.’

  She laughs. ‘Thanks for that insight Dr Spock. You got children?’

  ‘Two. Nearly three.’

  Now’s the moment: I explain about the Bump. I’m about to tell her – carefully – about my life, about to seize the opening she’s given me, about to appeal to her better nature, when her eyes flicker to a point behind my left shoulder.

  I turn my head, just in time to see a small black shadow moving fast. I have time to see the wild-eyed bearded face behind it. A moment later the speeding shadow hits me full in the face. The world explodes into all the colours of flame.

  I am on the floor. I am being struck over and over again with savage force, my body is revealed as nothing more than a leaky bag of liquids. From the remote place my consciousness has been flung to, the blunt force of the weapon hitting my flesh becomes a strangely distant, abstract thing. Between the frenzied blows I still somehow have time to try and work out what it is he is hitting me with. A golf club from the cellar maybe? Or one of those heavy pans from the pot rack? A cricket bat?

  My ribs, my head, my back, my hips, I am hit everywhere. Impossible to imagine I will ever get up again.

  I am certain I am going to die. I have my arms over my face. I’m all curled up but still I can feel my bones crack, my skull splinter, my skin rip. I bite my tongue, taste hot blood in my mouth. The blows keep coming and all I want to do is sleep. Weird.

  ‘Jimmy. That’s enough.’

  Seems like the beating keeps on for a while though. I can’t tell how long exactly this Jimmy keeps it up – could be a minute, could be ten. He hits me so fucking hard. I can feel the blood running into my mouth from my nose, see light bursting behind my eyelids like fragmenting wishes, like missiles falling among fishermen’s shacks.

  Suddenly there is the beautiful floating weightlessness of the cessation of pain. The sudden blue sky of it. The rainbow of it. Maybe I am actually dying now.

  When Anne speaks again it’s like a voice is coming from a far-off galaxy. No disguising the triumph in it, however.

  ‘Marko. You remember Dr James Masterson. Still looking out for me.’ The sound of a kiss. ‘Never considered that I’d have a lover did you, Mark? I won’t lie, I’m a bit insulted by that.’ And, brusque now, ‘Hold him there my sweetheart, while I call the police. Where’s your phone?’

  I’m lying there, running through my options, thinking that there’ll be some faff, that the phone won’t work. There’ll be confusion. If I can just get a breath then I can get up, fight Masterson off, make a break for it. They won’t catch me. You see, it’s hard to kill off hope. Hope is really fucking resilient.

  Where’s Lulu? I hope she’s already out of the house, back in the car, already leaving this place behind her, already taming the night into a harmless story, a quirky anecdote. I hung out with this guy who was on the run once. Only there’s a whirr above me, the sudden whine of metal through air, and another effortful grunt, another explosion on the side of my face.

  No point doing anything now. It’s over.

  I lie back on the dark teak of the floor, put my stinging cheek against the beautiful cool of it, the welcoming dust of it. How old was the tree when it was felled? Five hundred? A thousand? Just to make this floor. The dust, all that’s left of our ancestors. Our ancestors and their pets. How we all end up.

  I remember something now, Anne crouching above me on this very floor, maybe on this very spot. Lowering herself carefully onto me while telling me quietly but firmly what do with my hands.

  Another sharp crack and then my face is on fire again.

  ‘James!’

  ‘Okay, okay. I’ll stop now. Just, ah, feels so good.’

  I open my eyes, see the world as if through a thick reddish fog. I hear Anne breathing heavily close to me, it’s definitely her, I know all the rhythms of her breathing, even after all this time. I can smell the spice of her. She cradles my head. Her touch is light.

  ‘You stupid boy,’ she whispers. ‘Exquisite, but stupid. Philip always said you had a third-rate brain. Never quite thinking things through.’

  Nothing to do but wait. To wait for the end of everything. Relief comes over me like a second duvet on a chilly night. Like your wife snuggling up against your back on a Sunday morning. I burrow into the comforting warmth of it. I am beyond fighting now. Sleep. Please let me sleep.

  My face is wet. Blood and tears.

  Anne says, ‘Oh, and Jimmy, he has an accomplice in the kitchen, if she hasn’t made a run for it. A slip of a girl.’

  ‘Not in the kitchen. Right here. Come on big man, let’s see what you got.’

  Through sticky, half-closed eyelids I can see the outline of Lulu standing in the doorway, arms by her sides gunslinger loose.

  Turns out Dr James Masterson doesn’t have all that much. She might be a slip of a girl – and one with limited mobility at that – but Lulu is too quick and too fierce for him. I can’t see clearly, the fog in front of my eyes refuses to lift, but I can hear well enough. A series of gasps and grunts sounding curiously sexual, like the noises we heard on the badly dubbed and grainy Scandinavian pornography we all watched back in high school. Like the noises I heard coming from Jake and Lulu’s bedroom not three days ago. Seconds later, there’s the sound of a grown man crying.

  ‘She’s broken my wrist, Anne. She’s broken my bloody wrist.’ No gloating in the voice now.

  Uneven steps across parquet. Laboured breaths.

  ‘Well, this is all a bit of a mess, isn’t it?’

  Lulu’s voice is resigned. She could be complaining about a dropped teacup. I raise my head, try to speak. Fail. Try again. Fail again. Don’t fail better. Fail worse.

  ‘Come on, Marko, you’re going to have to work with me here. Up you come.’

  ‘No,’ I say, as firmly as I can. ‘No. Get the fuck out of here. Go on, go.’

  The last I see of Lulu is her face frowning in disapproval of my unimaginative use of language, before she walks carefully, so carefully, back towards the kitchen.

  ‘Arrivederci,’ I say. I close my eyes, try to think of nothing. It hurts. Every single part of me hurts. A concerto of pain played by a bad amateur orchestra. When I open them Lulu has gone, instead there are two police officers – an Asian woman wearing smart casual and a pale uniformed bloke with a straggly beard. Syima and Alex I presume. The police, anyway.

  ‘Mr Chadwick,’ says the woman.
‘You’ve been leading us a merry dance I must say.’

  56

  A&E to get my injuries sorted. I have some broken ribs, a shattered nose and several cuts on my face including a particularly nasty one under my left eye, which needs fifteen stitches. These are put in by a jolly nurse who reminds me of Mrs Boyd, my old cleaner from university, much younger but same open-hearted manner. She’s unphased by my being accompanied into the treatment room by the police.

  ‘You’ll have a scar I reckon. Pretty big one. It’ll give your face a bit of character.’ She frowns in concentration. I tell her what I know about scars, about them being stronger than skin.

  She puts me straight. ‘Actually, that’s not true. Scar tissue has around 70% of the tensile strength of unwounded skin. Although there is more collagen in a scar, it isn’t efficiently structured, and the skin’s elastin fibres are not regenerated at all.’

  That’s me told. Wrong about this, like I’ve been wrong about pretty much everything my whole life.

  The hospital wants to keep me in, but the police officers, well, they’re not keen and to be honest I don’t care much either way. A bored doctor says he’ll discharge me if I’ll sign a waiver saying any fits, seizures, strokes, aneurysms or embolisms will all be my own stupid fault – and I find I’m happy to do this.

  When we get back to the London nick there’s breakfast. Porridge with golden syrup. Then toast and marmalade. Lots of coffee, as many refills as I like, as if I were a customer in a decent unpretentious caff, as if I were somewhere like Ken’s Kabin. There is banter, chat about football, some moaning about the weather, the government, how things today are all going to shit, about how everything is broken. Same old chat you hear everywhere. Then I’m left alone in a cell with the newspapers and the information that someone will be along to talk to me in a while.

  It really is quite a while. It is the afternoon before we get started. The police read me my rights. All the stuff about not having to say anything but how it will harm my defence if I rely on something in court that I haven’t mentioned to them first. They tell me that if I do decide to remain silent a jury will have the right to draw ominous conclusions. I don’t really take in the actual words. In fact, I almost giggle. It sounds so fake. It sounds so TV. The carefully neutral, breathily monotone intonation of the reading of the rights sounds borrowed from one of those shows about jaded cops battling crime while dealing simultaneously with complex home lives. But I guess the police learn about how the police are from crime dramas just like everyone else does.