CAROLINE ENGLAND
Beneath the Skin
Copyright
Published by Avon
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2017
Copyright © Caroline England 2017
Caroline England asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008237523
Ebook Edition © October 2017 9780008215064
Version: 2017-08-25
Dedication
For my three gorgeous girls, Liz, Charl and Emily. And, of course, Jonathan. Love you all.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Part Two
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Part Three
Chapter Forty-Five
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading…
About the Author
About the Publisher
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
‘Antonia, Antonia. My name is Antonia.’
It’s been her name for many years. But sometimes, like tonight, she forgets.
Lying in the bath, she stares at the naked razor blade. The tiny distorted reflection of a girl gazes back. If she was brave, if she was very brave, she’d use it on her wrists, two deep final lines. Then she’d close her eyes and let this masquerade slip away.
She removes a curl of damp hair stuck to her cheek. The thought of all the fuss her death would create is unbearable. Even in death, the notion of being the centre of attention, the talk of the town, even for fifteen minutes, is excruciating.
And she knows the pull is there. She can feel it inside, somewhere deep and hidden. That tiny pulse of life, drawing her back from the overwhelming desire to disappear, to become something, somebody. To live, to really live, instead of hiding in this bathroom, this house.
Rocking her head from side to side, she tries to expel the memory of the unexpected telephone call this afternoon. She doesn’t want to think of it now. She doesn’t want to think about it ever.
She adjusts the position of the razor blade, watches the imprint of her fingers disappear and takes a deep breath before slowly slicing into the soft flesh of her arm. Closing her eyes, she smiles, a small sigh escaping her lips. There’s always a moment, a throb of expectation, then the sharp pain sets in, taking her back to a moment of acute pleasure. Crisp and clear: the still of a film. Antonia and Sophie, Sophie and Antonia, smiling, naked and drunk. But today it’s of a girl on a swing, laughing with sheer happiness, her daddy pushing her high into the clouds.
But of course that wasn’t her.
Seconds pass and the intensity of the moment ebbs away to a moderate stinging sensation. She opens her eyes, shame and disgust replacing the delirium. The bath water has cooled, the mirrors weep with condensation. Her dark nipples skim her legs as she leans forward to drain the tepid water, now tinted salmon by blood. She covers the wound with a flannel, then steps on to the bathmat and into the chill of the newly tiled bathroom.
A cutter, she thinks, remembering the pretty girl in the razor blade. Cutting to cope. To forget the past. To replace the pain inside her head with one she could see. To watch it seep away. But what of the woman? The one called Antonia? Cutting to feel. To stop the numbness, the isolation. To scar the perfection. She is addicted to the high.
Or perhaps she just wants to see what’s beneath her skin.
‘My Friday night treat,’ she mutters. She glances at the woman in the mirror, flawless and perfect, no history, no past. With a small sigh, she peels away the crimson-stained flannel to study her artwork, then she blows out the candles and reaches for a towel.
‘Where’s bloody Sami?’ David Stafford asks, looking at his watch. ‘With his flunkeys, do you think? Mo and Salim and the rest of his ever-changing entourage?’ He scrapes back his chair across the slate floor as he stands. ‘Same again?’
Mike Turner glances down at his third pint: it’s hardly been touched and he already feels pissed. Bloody hell, David’s going for it tonight, he thinks. David’s breath has the acrid smell of an all-day session. But that isn’t particularly unusual.
He looks up and smiles. David appears as he always does. Tall, slightly overweight, tanned. Jeans with a stripy shirt tucked in. But something’s not quite right. His eyes, he decides. David’s eyes seem lifeless.
‘No, you go ahead,’ Mike replies. ‘I’m pacing myself. You’re a thirsty man tonight. Everything all right?’
‘It’s nothing that another pint won’t cure. Come on, Mikey, it’s the start of the weekend. I’ll get you one in.’
A busy September Friday night at the Royal Oak pub, composed of the usual mix of students and the long-standing faithful. Not a convenient venue for any of them now, but David, Mike and Sami have all lived in the leafy Withington area of South Manchester at some point in their lives. ‘Probably the only thing we have in common,’ Sami once joked, which wasn’t entirely true.
David walks away, slightly unsteady, and dips his head to evade a low oak beam. He lifts his arm and wafts his empty pint glass above the heads of several people already waiting at the bar.
‘Yep, I’ve still got the famous left foot.’ Mike can hear the deep tone of David’s voice from the bar despite the clam
our of the heaving pub. ‘I’ll be there on Sunday as usual. Of course they’d be lost without me. Are you having another? I’ll get you one in.’
David can never hide for long, the boom of his voice betrays him. The benefit and the curse of a private education, Mike has decided.
‘Another two pints of your best, Mrs L. You’re looking as beautiful as ever, might I say? Off to Barbados for Christmas as usual?’
Mike turns his glass in his hand, wondering if he’ll finish this pint, let alone another. The conversation drifts around him. ‘Mrs L’ is so David. She’s Misty to everyone else, flame-haired bar manager and wife of the affable and obese landlord, Seamus. For a moment he wonders whether Misty is her real name – it seems such a cliché for a woman who once was a model of some sort but whose battle with the booze is evident from the slur of her voice to the tremor of her expensively ringed fingers.
‘So you were thirsty,’ David says, back in his seat. Mike’s pint glass is empty. ‘Been off with the fairies again, Mikey?’
Mike shakes his head, laughs and wonders where he’s been without the dog, the black dog of depression, christened when it first snuck up on him at sixteen.
A black dog, he thinks, not a stork.
‘Probably,’ he smiles, shaking the unwelcome thought away. ‘How’s Antonia?’
‘Fine, she’s fine,’ David answers, glancing towards the bar, the sparkle back in his bright blue eyes. ‘At home with a DVD and guacamole. Jennifer Aniston’s my bet. Actually Mikey, I wanted to ask you. Her birthday’s coming up and I want to buy her something special, maybe something different for a change. Got any ideas? What would you buy Olivia?’
Mike scratches his chin, still smooth from its second shave of the day. He laughs. ‘You mean, what do you buy the woman who has everything?’
‘He treats her like a bloody doll,’ his wife Olivia often remarks, spot on as ever. The statement reminds him of a cardboard dolly set his sister was given one Christmas. She asked him to play, and despite his desire to try out his new bicycle in the biting Irish winter outside, he knelt beside her and joined in the game at the warm kitchen table, detaching the paper outfits from the booklet, the dresses, the hats, the scarves and the shoes, then dressing the doll in different designs for each season of the year.
‘I’m serious, Mikey.’ David interrupts his thoughts. ‘What would you buy Olivia?’
Mike takes a swig of his beer, then wipes the rim of the glass with his thumb. David’s assumption that their respective wives fall into any remotely similar category makes him smile to himself.
‘Vain and vacant. The sort of woman I can’t stand,’ Olivia said of Antonia after meeting her for the first time at one of David and Antonia’s dinner parties. ‘But as it happens, she’s nice and I like her, which is really annoying.’
So what would he buy Olivia? What had he bought her last time? Mike can’t remember, probably something she’d asked for, but then they don’t make a fuss of their own birthdays, preferring to concentrate on their two lovely girls.
And there it is: like Winston Churchill’s dog, his own black dog of despair, bounding back into the pub and sitting by him. Close, comfortable and devastating. He hears his own voice not long after it happened, trying for rationality: ‘I didn’t even know him. It could have been so much worse.’
There are times when Mike wonders if he’s spoken aloud, made his words to the dog public. For a moment he’s forgotten the question, but he’s saved from an answer; David has turned towards the door.
‘What bloody time do you call this?’ he bellows, standing up and gesticulating towards the bar. Mike looks at his watch. It’s getting on for last orders but Sami Richards grins and shrugs, holding out his palms in a dismissively apologetic gesture. Elegant and handsome, he strolls past the Friday regulars clustered at the bar, the turned-up collar of his black leather jacket matching the sheen of his skin.
‘Why does he always look as though he’s walked off the page of a fucking magazine?’ David says, a little too aggressively, as he turns back towards Mike. He knocks back his pint, ready to get in more drinks.
‘Things to do, people to see,’ Sami replies easily as David walks away. He takes off his jacket and leans over the table to shake Mike’s hand, careful as always not to catch his crisp cuff on the spillages. ‘Hey, man, I bumped into Pete on site the other day. Sends his regards. He mentioned the Boot Room.’
Mike smiles. Bloody hell, yes, the Boot Room. It’s what they named Sami’s tiny office when they were working together as trainee surveyors. A happy memory. Before responsibility, marriage, kids. They’d spent lunchtimes in there: football talk over sandwiches, crisps and Coke in their city-centre office building, no women allowed.
‘Was he wearing his Liverpool cufflinks?’
‘Didn’t catch the cufflinks. But he’s just bought a Porsche 911. Lucky sod.’
‘Better dash out and buy one, Sami,’ David says, arriving back at the table with three pints and a whisky chaser. The whisky looks like a double.
‘Might just do that, David, my man. A call here and there. You never know. Are you still driving that tank? Nought to eighty in three minutes?’
Mike watches them quietly. He’s never quite worked it out, their friendship, if that’s what it is. Happy-go-lucky, water-off-a-duck’s-back, is David. Except when it comes to Sami. The barbed comments, the occasional belligerence. He becomes a different person.
Perhaps they’re a little too alike, he thinks. In their late thirties, both from wealthy families, successful in their careers. Married to childhood friends Sophie and Antonia. Both childless. But there the similarities end. David sits back and lets wealth and fortune fall into his lap, whereas Sami’s a hunter, a person who never rests on his laurels; he’s always searching for something bigger, something better.
From the day they first met fifteen years ago, Mike had detected Sami’s restlessness. He changed cars and hairstyles like a chameleon, but then, he could afford to. Yet as Mike gazes at him now, he seems happier, more grounded than ever before. Perhaps he’s reached a plateau in life, a level of contentment which can be sustained for longer than usual. He hopes so; he likes Sami very much. Sami’s one of the good guys.
He shakes himself back to the conversation, picks up his glass of Guinness, murky and dark beneath its creamy facade, and feels the dog’s gentle nudge at his side.
Antonia loves the silence of the countryside, the tranquility of her and David’s large home. It still feels pure and new. Yet she allows the telephone beside the bed to ring, insistent, loud and shrill, without answering. It’s late and she’s sleepy, drifting contentedly in and out of the final chapter of Wuthering Heights, another Brontë novel she should have read as a child.
She knows who’s fruitlessly holding on at the other end of the telephone. Most people call her on her mobile, but years ago she decided to hold back from giving the number to her mother. It made her feel guilty. It still makes her feel mean. But it helps her feel free of the past. Just a little.
CHAPTER TWO
‘I think it’s Monday so I’m coming over for a coffee,’ Sophie says, sounding groggy. ‘Put the kettle on.’
It’s what Sophie always says when she phones. Not, ‘Are you in, are you busy, is it all right?’ She expects Antonia to be in whenever she chooses to turn up.
It slightly irritated Antonia at one time, but it doesn’t bother her now. After all, she’s invariably in, alone in her huge home in the Cheshire countryside, going through the motions of being a housewife, whatever that is. Though she supposes cleaning and cooking pretty much cover it now the builders and plumbers and decorators have left. There’s the highlight of the supermarket, of course, but she and David shop for clothes and the house most weekends, so she’s content to stay in and order food online.
‘For God’s sake, what’s David bought you now?’ Sophie often jibes, pulling a face at the latest rug or vase or item of clothing.
‘It’s expensive,’ she r
eplies, feeling the inevitable and disappointing stab of Sophie’s disapproval.
‘That doesn’t make it tasteful, darling.’
‘Well, I think it’s nice of him,’ she says, leaving the sentence hanging. And Antonia does think it’s nice. She thinks her home and its contents are really lovely. It’s just that it’s all a little too much. David’s a little too much.
‘I do love you very much, my beautiful girl,’ he said as he left the house for work this morning, his grey pinstripe suit looking slightly tight.
‘I know,’ she replied, laughing. ‘I think you might have mentioned it once or twice this weekend. Get to work, you big softie.’
Once, long ago, Antonia counted the number of times David declared his love in just one carefree night and she wrote the number in her diary to record it forever. Exhilarating and exciting, she never expected to be loved so much. But now she worries why he repeats the words. She knows he adores the person she’s created, the one she sees in her reflection. But not her mother’s ‘Little Chinue’. He’s never met her.
Making for the stairs, she catches her face in the mirror. ‘Where’s the trophy wife, then?’ They were Olivia Turner’s words, whispered to her husband Mike at the first dinner party she and David hosted. She hadn’t heard the expression before, and as she hung back in the shadows of the hallway, she didn’t twig that Olivia meant her.
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