Stronger Than Skin

by Stephen May

  I am careful to make a long, determinedly cheerful-under-the-circumstances statement at the beginning of the interrogation about how I am happy to co-operate with the police investigation and will do everything in my power to help, and that if I say no comment to any question it is not because I am being difficult, but because I am taking the advice of my solicitor, or because I genuinely can’t recall the answer and need proper time to think. That it is important to me not to give the police a bum steer, or unintentionally mislead them in any way. I know they are just doing their jobs.

  When it comes to court, I want them to have to tell the judge and jury just how goddam co-operative I’ve been.

  I steadfastly no comment my way through the next seventy-two hours.

  It’s hard. Harder than you’d think. Much harder. Human beings are programmed to speak, to tell stories, to communicate with each other. Seventy-two hours of silence when people want you to talk is a very tricky thing. I only manage it by imagining that I am doing something for school. That this is a sponsored no comment to raise money for a new minibus.

  My solicitor is Katy’s friend, Amanda Campbell. The last time I saw her we had been sipping peach Bellinis from plastic champagne flutes at the Latitude Festival while our kids roamed the site, happily free-range for an hour or two. That was only a couple of months ago. Imagine that.

  Amanda has twins the same age as Jack. She has always seemed flaky to me but Katy always said that if she was ever in trouble, then out of all her solicitor friends Amanda would be her go-to girl.

  Here she is, professional in her bible-black trouser suit, giving the steady hum of competence – her very presence irritates the detectives – she gave me a hug when she came to see me in the cell and I almost cried. She asked me how I was and I said fine, about as well as, etc.

  I asked about Katy and the kids.

  ‘They’ll be fine, Mark. Let’s worry about you for now, shall we?’

  Amanda’s view is that I should plead guilty but argue youth, infatuation, a man led astray, and also play up what a bully and a brute Philip Sheldon was. I ask her what she thinks I’ll get and she is brisk in confirming what I have always known.

  ‘Outlook is not good, Mark. I won’t lie. Best scenario? Could be ten years. A little less maybe. If you’re lucky. Depends on the judge. If they’re feeling really vindictive they could even go after you for murder. Joint enterprise.’

  She feels the need to explain the concept of joint enterprise. A concept fetishised by the modern courts and hard to beat, no matter how smart the lawyer. At one time – a less viciously unforgiving time, a more nuanced time – it was different. There was room to argue about these things. Nowadays everyone connected to a crime is as guilty as the worst offender. If a bunch of career robbers go into a bank and one, defying orders, packs heat and shoots some dumb have-a-go hero, then everyone from the brains to the getaway driver faces the consequences exactly as if their hands were on the trigger too. How can that be fair?

  I know all of this of course, but I let her talk. It’s just nice to listen to a more or less friendly voice. Someone on my side.

  ‘I don’t think they’ll go for that in this case, but they might.’

  I’m left thinking whoopee, out by the time Ella is twenty-one. When the Bump is fretting about going to high school.

  That’s if I’m lucky. If the judge is particularly soft-hearted.

  I’m meant to be grateful for that.

  Back in the interview room, back to the resolute no commenting, and I think how arrests may be more civilised than they once were, but the sentences – different story. Thirty years, even forty years. At some point in the future there’s going to be a substantial cohort of very old men in our jails. Every prison will be a kind of overcrowded Spandau. Full of men who need treatment for Parkinson’s and dementia. Men who need oxygen cylinders in their cells, who need wheeling from cell to shower block and back. Men who will need a special class of prison officer to wipe their arses for them.

  Maybe that’s the future for all those retiring without pensions. Jobs wiping the arses of child-molesters. Doesn’t seem right somehow.

  These are the kind of thoughts that drift through my mind as I say nothing for hour upon hour. Not productive. I should be thinking hard about finding another way out.

  The trouble is – I can’t think of it and after a while I stop bothering to try. Instead I dream of escape, of daring breakouts from court.

  Even while the detectives are asking me about the events of September 1990 – even while I am steadfastly no commenting – I am running through the plots of every prison breakout film I’ve ever seen. I am fantasising about hiding in the laundry van as it leaves prison. Of manufacturing files on the prison lathes. Of helicopters landing on the cell block roof. Of riots and shootouts and hostages. Of tunnels, of ladders and grappling hooks. Of waking up and suddenly finding I am able to fly. The guards’ amazed faces as I soar into the clouds from the exercise yard. Suddenly from where I am, up in the sky, they look like frightened little boys.

  I’m getting close to the seventy-two hour no comment target – the imaginary minibus almost paid for, hurrah! – when they tell me they’ve got another forty-eight hours to question me. What do I think of that? It almost breaks me.

  They show me some of the press coverage of the story so far. I have been properly monstered.

  I am, say the papers, a weirdo loner. I am someone the kids at school all knew was a wrong-un. Creepy. I have no real friends, apparently. Where are Anthony? Jim? Raj? Where are the colleagues I play five-a-side with? Nowhere, that’s where. Instead there’s the bank guy, Ian, saying how my presence gave him chills, how he knew there was something not right about me. Dead behind the eyes, that’s Ian’s phrase.

  There’s the girl from the flat above the Orwell gallery, Jezebel on her hip, apparently my face made her baby cry. And of course I hear Ella saying, ‘Your face!’ to everything we say. Your face needs to practice; your face needs a good tidy up. Your face is all over the papers.

  They say I am aloof, stand-offish, arrogant, odd. There is a photo, taken God knows when, where I am staring straight at the camera unsmiling, eyes slightly bulging. I look like Ian Brady. The neighbours – and they have names I don’t recognise – wax lyrical about Katy and the children, how lovely they are, but they also damn me by saying how quiet I am, how I keep myself to myself and that looks bad, doesn’t it? Keeping yourself to yourself in this day and age? Why would anyone do such a thing?

  The papers point out that I don’t even have a Facebook page. More damning evidence of pathology right there.

  There are two detectives questioning me. Syima, the young woman who did the arrest in Selwyn Gardens, and an older guy who introduces himself as Jeff (‘with a J’). Jeff points out that once I’m charged it’ll all calm down.

  ‘Has to, mate. By law. They’re not allowed to prejudice a trial.’

  Syima asks me how I feel about my kids reading this kind of stuff? Tells me that I should take the opportunity to tell my own story. It’s as if she is a red-top journo herself.

  I get so tired, I can feel myself fading, disappearing into a greyish smudge in the slow air and dead light of the interview room where it always feels like it’s 3 a.m. There are no windows in this room but somehow there is a fly. A fly literally on the wall, high up. An elderly fly I guess, doesn’t move much. Maybe it’s not old, maybe it just finds the air as heavy and thick as I do.

  Amanda Campbell sits next to me through most of the interviews, but her presence is not comforting. Somehow I begin to sense that she’s just going through the motions, that she too can’t wait for all this to be over, to get outside, breathe some fresh clean air and get back to defending ordinary decent rapists or whatever.

  It’s like she knows this is what I’m feeling because she puts her hand on my arm and I’m so grateful that I almost lose it. Almost burst into tears, but I don’t. I keep it together. Just.

  Suddenly I
know I am about to crack. So does everyone else. They all sense it. Amanda Campbell rustles next to me. Jeff and Syima sit up that bit straighter. There’s an expectant pause. Now. I’m going to do it now. I know it. They know it. I’m about to break. I can feel the anticipation of the detectives building. Their hearts must be thumping, pulses racing, but they maintain an admirable calm.

  Once I’ve done it, admitted it, volunteered to make a statement, signed a full confession, all that, well, then they can gather their papers, step outside and hug and high five. Maybe they’ll go for a pint or ten. Maybe – carried away by the moment – they’ll sleep together, they seem like the kind of colleagues that might share those kind of benefits – but whatever they’ll do later, for now they wait with exaggerated patience, keeping quiet so as not to spook me. Keeping their breaths small.

  Yet, still, somehow, I hold out, delaying the inevitable. The fly takes to the air and I decide that when it lands again, that’s when I’ll start confessing. The long seconds tick past. Until the tension is broken by the door to this faceless interview room being opened. Both detectives exhale noisily and spin round with a scraping of chairs. I lose track of where that fly zigzags to.

  It’s Syima’s sidekick from the arrest. Alex. Amanda sighs.

  ‘What?’ says Jeff, tetchy.

  Syima remembers the protocol. She says ‘For the benefit of the tape, PC Alex Matthews has entered the room.’

  Matthews asks for a word and all three of my companions get up and leave the room. I feel strangely bereft.

  Alone I wonder if they still use actual tape, or if it’s just an expression. It must all be digital now surely? The break allows me to harden my resolve again. I decide that, actually, I won’t confess. Not just yet. I’ll ask Jeff and Syima about the tape business. That might piss them off, pass a minute or two. Pissing off the police, passing the minutes, that is pretty much all I have left.

  I have sat there on my own for over thirty minutes and when the door opens again it’s just Amanda. No Jeff. No Syima. I stand up, which is when I notice the weird look on Amanda’s face. Half puzzled frown, half smile.

  ‘You’re free to go, Mark,’ she says. ‘Congratulations. You can collect your belongings at the front desk.’

  She tells me what she’s been told and I feel my legs go from under me, I flop back on my plastic seat. The dead light hurting my eyes. The fly lands on the desk in front of me.

  57

  The officer at the desk is giving me back my possessions with an ill grace. The cheeriness extended towards prisoners has disappeared now that I am a free man. I get my wallet with a crumpled twenty and about 80p in change. I get the last of the Cash Converters phones.

  ‘Stroke of luck for you, wasn’t it? Very fucking convenient. Sign here.’

  The pen is broken, I just scratch the paper with it, which won’t do. She rolls her eyes as she gets another, which works for the time it takes to scrawl a signature, but then leaks a sticky black blob onto my fingers. Her mouth twists and she doesn’t offer me a tissue, leaving me with dark, coagulating ink over the back of my ring finger. It looks like the blackest, thickest blood. She smirks sourly. She has something else to say. ‘We were never really chasing you, you know. Your case was never really a priority.’

  She’s saying don’t get above yourself, don’t go thinking you’re important.

  Anne Sheldon is dead. A fall down the stairs in Selwyn Gardens while drunk. A broken neck. She was ill, she was shaky on her pins, she was an accident waiting to happen. Amanda Campbell reckons she might even have done it on purpose, who knows?

  I try to decide what I feel. I won’t weep for Anne, I know that, but I also know that she’ll be with me always. Her crooked smile. Her lunatic driving. Her flashing me her breasts one summer’s day a lifetime ago. An earring dangling against her perfect neck. Her kiss. The secret paths she showed me. The ones that took me from the world I’d been born into to a brighter place. Even if it was a place I was too afraid to stay in. Every time I pour myself a glass of wine I’ll think of her. And I know a part of me – not the best part, but an important part – has died with her.

  Amanda is still talking. In a few dry sentences she tells me that by the time poor James Masterson discovered her Anne was already stiff, already cold. She tells me that without her evidence the CPS have no realistic prospect of conviction. Or to put it another way, ‘The old bill have fuck all on you and they know it.’

  ‘What about Dorcas? What if they find her?’

  ‘She was a child back then. Her evidence would have been useful back-up to her mother’s testimony, but on its own? Thin, very thin. Decent QC would dismantle that no bother.’

  ‘What about the other charges?’ I mean the breaking and entering, the assault rap the police had been very keen to pursue along with the murder just a little while ago.

  ‘Again, chief witness is no longer with us. The only one who got hurt was you. You might even have grounds for a civil case against the boyfriend. I think you could argue he used disproportionate force in restraining you.’ She gives a tired smile. ‘I don’t recommend it, though. Judges and juries are pretty anti-those-who-break-in-to-property. They tend to think people who do that deserve all they get.’

  I get the feeling that this is her own opinion too.

  She tells me she has to go, that she has other cases, but before she click-clacks off in her lawyer’s shoes she has time to tell me that I’m not to worry about Katy. ‘She’s nails, Mark. Really. A tough cookie.’

  ‘I know,’ I say.

  ‘Ella and Jack will be fine too. Wherever they end up. They’ll come through all this. Kids are resilient.’

  Which is what people say, but I have never really believed it. Previous generations of kids might have been resilient, but not this one. What does she mean wherever they end up?

  Amanda turns to go, then turns back. Hugs me again. Tells me that if was up to her she wouldn’t bill me for her time, but you know how it is.

  I do. I also know that I won’t ever see her again. There will be no more festivals. No more peach Bellinis in plastic flutes.

  58

  I wake just as the boiler fires up. I wait under the yeasty duvet while the radiators clank and all the old wood in the house groans as it expands. These reclaimed floorboards, these salvaged doors. The whole place sighing as it stretches and wakes. Since I’ve been back I’ve been keeping the house tropically warm.

  As the heat spreads through the empty rooms it brings with it the smells of my missing life. The biscuity smell of children. The sharp, gingery tang of the shampoos Katy likes to use. It’s already fading, but for now, if I work at it, I can still catch a hint of them. Concentrating hard I can get a sense of something like the scent of freshly washed school uniforms drying.

  While the heating is on, they’re still here somewhere, though just out of reach. When the heating’s on, the house has the illusion of life.

  That’s something I’m learning, that if you want to keep a dead house fresh, you keep it warm.

  I put the moment off for a while – of course I do – but eventually I find I am slipping out of bed and walking down the landing.

  Yes, time to get up now, it’s been days and there’s stuff I need. Basic stuff. Proper coffee, eggs, bacon, bread, for a start. Toilet roll. No more wallowing. Days of dozing in this nest of quilts, only getting up to piss, or to fix myself some cereal, or to make a cup of instant coffee. It’s definitely enough.

  I am just wearing boxers and a random t-shirt I’ve had since uni and I smell as rank as the den of an urban fox. So that is something else I will do today. I will have a bath. The house doesn’t smell great either. I take a breath. I notice now how the place smells. How the sly stink of unemptied bins and stale milk has crept into all the corners.

  I pause at the door of Jack’s room. As the damp light seeps in through those thin blue curtains we never got around to replacing, I begin to make out all the figures on the floor. I’ll pack them
away today. Whatever story Jack was in the middle of, it ends here. I peep into Ella’s room and I am hurt by the reproach of its tidiness, this ordered oasis amid the dust and the debris of the rest of the house.

  There’s a spider in the corner. A garden spider come in now the weather is turning colder. I’ll be a spider, a butterfly, a moth, a wasp. I’ll be the annoying insect that won’t leave you alone.

  How ridiculous.

  In the living room I light the stove. The radiator alone never seems to warm this room. Maybe it’s because its effectiveness is muffled by being behind the sofa, maybe it’s simply dodgy plumbing, maybe it’s a bit of both. But I like having the stove on anyway. I like the fizz and crackle of the logs, the orange glow behind the glass.

  I cheat of course. I’m not using proper wood that I have collected and chopped. I’m not even using logs bought from the shops. I’m not messing around with kindling and rolled up balls of old newspaper. I don’t even need firelighters. I’m using something called a home fire heat log. High-calorie, long-lasting, made out of real recycled wood pulp that’s been treated in some special way. Mess free, fuss free. You simply put your safety match to both ends of its wrapping and voila. Fire. From rubbing two sticks together in an ice age, to a home fire heat log. From Prometheus to every 7-Eleven. As a species we’ve come a long way, baby.