Second Skin

by Wendy Perriam

‘Thanks,’ said Nicky, reaching for the Guardian. ‘There’s a teapot in that cupboard over the sink.’

  Catherine refilled the kettle, then collected up the dirty mugs and washed them. The water was running warm now, so she began working through the whole pile of washing-up – it was the least she could do in return for her free bed. A comfortable silence had descended on the kitchen. The other three were leafing through the papers; Darren smoking, Nicky munching biscuits. It must be getting on for midday, yet no one seemed in any rush to go anywhere or do anything. It felt a bit like being a student – not that she’d experienced college life first-hand. She had gone straight from school to marriage and had her first child at eighteen. How odd, she thought, for Nicky to say she ‘wasn’t ready for kids’. Surely she was leaving it rather late? When she was thirty-five, Andrew was practically grown up, sitting his Cambridge entrance exam, and Kate was doing GCSEs. She’d had four pregnancies altogether, two, alas, ending in miscarriage. She and Gerry had always wanted more children, though looking back she wondered how they would have managed. As it was, pregnancy seemed to have taken up a huge chunk of her youth (morning sickness, swollen ankles, backache), or recovering from a labour or miscarriage. And she had always been an adjunct to the rest of them – Gerry’s wife, or the children’s mother, or the receptacle for a baby – not a person in her own right. At Andrew’s playschool, they had even referred to the parents by the children’s Christian names, so she’d been ‘Mrs Andrew’; yet another suppression of identity. Of course, at the time she hadn’t seen it in those terms – only now, faced with three single independent people, was she beginning to reflect on what she had missed. Or gained, perhaps. Did she envy them or pity them? Their freedom was certainly enviable: freedom not to cook or clean, freedom to put off having kids until they’d enjoyed a life of their own. And yet …

  ‘Cath, leave the washing-up.’ Darren exhaled a lazy plume of smoke. ‘It’s Saturday. Come and read the papers.’

  ‘Okay, I … I’ll just make the tea.’ Andrew and Antonia never read the papers till the evening. Work came first, or chores. But she wasn’t Mrs Andrew any more; she was Cath – a party girl, a single. She left the bowl half full of greasy dishes, then made the tea their way: no sugar basin or milk jug, no matching cups and saucers.

  ‘Tea up,’ she said, putting the pot on the table with four assorted mugs, two of them still badly stained inside.

  ‘Great!’ said Jo. ‘Here, have a pew.’

  Catherine poured the tea and sat back contentedly on a battered kitchen chair, with two chocolate biscuits and The Face. She had never read The Face before. There was a man on the cover with a dozen silver spikes through his tongue, and the blurb for an article on drugs. She turned to the drugs feature straight away – it was time she broadened her outlook.

  Can you feel the rush? she read, sucking the chocolate off her biscuit. You’re on the elevator, going up. Think big. Go wild. No compromise. You’re off your head. You’ve arrived!

  I’m not sure about that, she thought, but I’m jolly well going to be a hedonist for once, and enjoy a day of utter self-indulgence.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘Hi, Nicky! How’re you doing?’ A curvaceous girl in frayed jeans and a tatty sheepskin jacket came bouncing up to their table, almost falling over Darren’s kite, propped precariously against his chair.

  ‘I’m fine, Liz. How about you?’

  ‘So-so.’

  ‘Want to join us?’

  ‘Love to, but I can’t. I’m meeting Greg and I’m late.’

  ‘’Bye, then.’

  ‘’Bye.’ Once she had gone, Nicky turned to Catherine. ‘That was Elizabeth O’ Neil. She’s only thirty-one and she’s just set up her own production company. Two years ago she was still a runner, would you believe.’

  Catherine hoped she didn’t look too blank. Much of the discussion over brunch had needed an interpreter. Apart from the advertising jargon, there were names she’d never heard of, and strings of initials – HHCL, GGT and so on – which she found terribly confusing. And wasn’t it odd that a girl who owned her own company should look so down at heel? Nicky, in contrast, was dressed to kill, in a leopard-print micro-skirt and clumpy patent shoes with silver buckles. And Darren had changed from his shabby dressing-gown into black leather trousers (wickedly expensive, judging by the cut) and an oversized black sweatshirt with DESTROY printed down one sleeve in bold white letters. Yet Jo – like many others in the café – was dressed, workman-style, in old jeans and heavy boots. She came somewhere in between, in a denim skirt of Jo’s, shorter than she had worn in years, and Nicky’s angora jersey – pistachio, striped with pink and white, and apparently known as her ‘ice-cream top’. She felt a childish pleasure in wearing fancy dress – she was a multi-coloured cassata melting gloriously in the heat. And in borrowed clothes she could be someone else; slam the door on the last dark depressing months.

  ‘Another drink, Cath?’ Darren asked, moving the kite to safety under the table.

  ‘Do you think I ought?’ she laughed, draining the last inch of neon-red liquid in her glass – a concoction called Blast-Off, which she had chosen on the strength of its name (although Saturday Siren and Love Byte had also sounded tempting). It tasted innocent enough – lemony and fizzy – but it had gone straight to her head. The others were drinking lager, which seemed, frankly, unadventurous in a setting like this. Alfredo’s looked more space-age than Italian, with its magenta-coloured walls, spangled 3-D mirrors and silver metal chairs. The place was heaving with people and noise – an excited buzz of conversation rising above the thump-thump-thump of the music; its insistent beat pulsating through her body like an electrical charge.

  Darren glanced around for their waiter – a young Armenian with one large silver earring and a sleekly shaven head. Like most of the staff, he had only a smattering of English, yet somehow the right order always arrived at the right table, and in record time. Catherine watched in fascination as the waiters sped in and out of the kitchen at an almost dangerous pace, while the barman juggled glasses and bottles with nonchalant skill. Darren, on the other hand, was indolence personified. He had abandoned his blinis after only a few mouthfuls, evidently preferring to smoke, and was lolling in his chair, his legs stretched out in front of him and a lazy arm draped along the back of Jo’s chair. He spotted the waiter and ordered more drinks by sign-language, holding up his glass, then pointing to the other three. The Armenian nodded and pranced off.

  Nicky took the last bite of her bagel and cream cheese and looked longingly out of the window. ‘You know, on a day like this, we should be down at the coast.’

  Jo had just forked in a frill of designer lettuce, but she shook her head vigorously before swallowing it. ‘Let me warn you, Catherine – steer clear of Nicky’s trips to the coast! She’s a windsurfing fanatic. And I mean fanatic. She’s got certificates and things to prove it. I’m hardly the world’s best swimmer, but she talked me into going last September, and God, I practically drowned.’

  ‘Rubbish. You were brilliant. You should take it up, I told you.’

  ‘No way! I like keeping warm and dry – and staying upright.’

  The waiter was back already with their drinks. Darren helped him clear a space on the table, then took a gulp from his brimming glass. ‘Cath, have you ever tried it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Windsurfing.’

  ‘Er, no, I haven’t.’ There were so many things she hadn’t tried which they had: Ecstasy, flotation tanks, playing in a rock band, trekking in Kashmir. Never mind Kashmir – she hadn’t even crossed the Channel, although she wouldn’t dream of admitting it in such cosmopolitan company. They’d be shocked, if not incredulous, to hear she’d never been abroad.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re missing, Catherine. It’s the nearest thing to heaven.’

  ‘Bar sex,’ grinned Darren.

  ‘No, not bar sex. How could any mere man compare with a cross-shore force five and peeling waves?
’

  ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but you’ve met the wrong men, obviously.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re probably right. Anyway, I’m going to the Virgin Islands at Easter, to put in some serious practice. I decided last night. Sebastian’s just come back from Virgin Gorda and he said the conditions were ideal.’

  ‘It’s okay for some,’ groused Darren. ‘Leave me stuck in the office, slaving over a layout pad, while you’re lotus-eating on some tropical island.’

  ‘Windsurfing’s bloody hard work, I’ll have you know.’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ said Jo. ‘My idea of a good holiday is lying in the sun doing bugger all.’

  ‘Talking of sun, let’s drink up and go. It’s a crime to waste this weather.’ Nicky waved to the waiter and made a scribbling movement. The bill arrived in seconds, but provoked a heated discussion about who owed what and how big a tip they should leave. Catherine sat in silence, embarrassed by the arguments and alarmed that a few drinks and snacks should amount to such an exorbitant sum.

  ‘Let me do this,’ she offered, in a burst of guilty gratitude. She could always economize next week – next month.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Nicky. ‘We all pay our own way. And take no notice of the bickering. We wouldn’t enjoy going out together if we didn’t have a good bitch about the bill.’

  ‘D’you realize,’ Darren said, extracting a twenty-pound note from his wallet and laying it on the table with a flourish, ‘we haven’t been out for at least a month – not all of us. What with Christmas and New Year and then that hassle with Kendall’s Krisps. You won’t believe this, Cath, but Nick and I had to go into the office every single Saturday in December, including Christmas Eve. We were working for this nightmare of a client who rejected six campaigns on the trot, then sodded off to another agency.’

  ‘I suppose we were lucky not to get the chop,’ Nicky murmured. ‘I mean, Rebecca was fired from BML after they lost that big car account.’

  ‘At least she was given three months’ money and allowed to stay in the office for a few weeks.’ Darren turned to Catherine with a wave of his cigarette. ‘Often you’re out the same day. This friend of mine who worked in computers had a really gruesome experience. They invited him and a dozen others to breakfast at a swanky hotel – silver teapot, starched white napkins, the lot. Then when they’d finished noshing and were expecting some sort of promotion, or at least a pat on the back, the company solicitor waltzed in and gave them this spiel about “downsizing” and “restructuring” …’

  ‘ “Delayering’s” my favourite,’ Jo put in. ‘It sounds like a postmodernist haircut.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Darren, ‘the bottom line was they weren’t allowed back into their offices – not even to fetch their things. It was tea and toast, then out into the cold.’

  ‘Don’t.’ Nicky gave a dramatic shudder. You’re spoiling the weekend.’

  ‘Let’s go and see Greta,’ Jo suggested. ‘She’ll cheer us up. And anyway I want to buy a hat.’

  ‘You’ve got a hat,’ said Darren. ‘In fact, you’ve got hundreds of hats.’

  ‘Yeah, but she’s making these fake-fur ones and she said they’d be ready today.’

  ‘Great!’ said Nicky. ‘Perhaps she’ll have one to match my skirt Catherine, fancy a leopardskin hat?’

  ‘Mm, maybe.’ Catherine struggled with another pang of conscience about the state of her bank account. Hedonism certainly didn’t come cheap. Well, never mind. Tomorrow it would be back to Stoneleigh in all its Sabbath lethargy: empty streets and no noise beyond the occasional dutiful purring of a hedge-trimmer and The Archers in the background.

  A far cry from Camden Town. They had stepped out of Alfredo’s into a blast of sound, a shriek of smells; the High Street exuberantly alive. Swarthy-skinned men were frying sausages and onions on makeshift pavement stalls, or making sizzling crêpes. Music throbbed and pounded on all sides: lush-stringed ballads, haunting blues, and more aggressive types of music she couldn’t put a name to. The whole world seemed to be concentrated in this one area of London – all ages, types and skin-colours; Jamaicans jostling Japanese, Arabs cheek by jowl with turbaned Asians. Catherine gazed around. She couldn’t remember seeing a non-white face in Manor Close and its environs – well, apart from the black labrador’s, at number twenty-eight. It was as if she’d gone abroad at last and touched down in some exotic bazaar: a maze of bustling stalls selling everything from rugs to incense, beneath a dazzling sun. This surely wasn’t England – or midwinter.

  She stopped at a candle stall, entranced by the array of styles and colours – an army of tall phallic towers, a squad of smaller cones, and ingenious novelty shapes: half-peeled bananas with curled-back yellow skins; shiny black hob-nailed boots. The stallholder had a ring through his nose and a row of studs along one bushy eyebrow. Her eyes were drawn to the nose-ring as she imagined him at one of Antonia’s formal candlelit dinners, lighting a fat wax phallus in place of her non-drip Easi-flow. She dismissed the thought hastily. What was wrong with her today and why did she keep criticizing Antonia? She was a perfectly good daughter-in-law. Yet occasionally and secretly she wished her son had married someone else. Both the children had grown up to be so serious – Andrew committed to his career, Kate to high ideals. Sometimes they had made her feel quite frivolous, even when she was working for Gerry and had been the soul of conventional virtue.

  ‘This is mostly tat,’ said Nicky as they fought their way through the crowds. ‘But up at the Lock you get a lot of craft stalls – people like Greta who sell their own stuff. She was at art school and she’s talented. We’re nearly there now. See that bridge – well, that’s the canal.’

  ‘Oh, it’s gorgeous!’ Catherine exclaimed as they turned off the tacky High Street and on to cobblestones. Her magical mystery tour had transported her from Eastern bazaar to quaint rural English scene. Water was foaming through the lock-gate and, beyond, graceful willows cascaded in green fountains over the bank.

  ‘The residents don’t think it’s so gorgeous,’ Darren said, tossing his cigarette-end into the water. ‘They’re always bitching about the noise and the drug-pushers and the danger to their precious kids. The local papers are full of it. Apparently someone’s twelve-year-old daughter was sold crack on her way to school last week.’

  ‘Well, that is awful,’ Nicky said. ‘Suppose it was your child?’

  ‘I don’t intend to have any, thanks. Besides, I doubt if it was true – grass, perhaps, but not crack.’

  ‘Come off it, Darren, you’ve been offered stuff enough times.’

  ‘Yeah, but I’m not twelve.’

  ‘Stop arguing, you two. I’m going to say hello to Greta.’ Jo disappeared into the melee of stalls which stretched beyond the canal. Catherine followed at a more leisurely pace. She was still wearing her purple suede boots, which tended to slow her down a bit. Anyway, what was the point of rushing when there was so much to see and enjoy? Having gorged herself at Alfredo’s, she was now feasting on colours: sherbet-lemon yellow fizzing on her tongue, claret-red exploding in her stomach. Her eye moved from stained-glass plaques to glittering mosaic tiles, brightly painted wooden toys and, finally, to Greta’s stall, where Jo was already trying on hats. And what hats! Every type of fake fur from ponyskin to zebra, and other styles in coloured felt, adorned with plastic grapes or huge silk flowers. She was introduced to Greta, who wore a sunflower-trimmed black stetson above her ancient duffel coat and tracksuit-bottoms below.

  ‘Hello, you people,’ she called, rubbing her mittened hands and shivering extravagantly. ‘I’m absolutely frozen.’

  ‘But the sun’s quite warm,’ said Nicky. ‘Especially for mid-January.’

  ‘I’m not in the sun. And anyway, you’re walking about. I’m just sitting here, and honestly, I can hardly feel my feet.’

  ‘Shall I fetch you a coffee?’ Jo offered.

  ‘I’d rather you kept an eye on the stall. Would you mind – just for a few
minutes? So I can go and get a sandwich.’

  ‘Sure. No problem. It’ll be practice for next Saturday.’

  Once Greta was out of earshot, Jo grabbed Darren’s arm. ‘She’s asked me to run the stall again! She’s branching out into waistcoats. She says she’s made dozens already and wants to see how they go in Portobello Road, while I hold the fort for her here.’

  ‘I can’t think why you’re so excited. She only pays you peanuts.’

  ‘That’s okay – it’s all she can afford. Besides, it’s not the money, stupid. I want to write a piece about it – you know, Camden Market from the stallholder’s angle. I should have done it the first time, but I was too busy working out people’s change and making sure the stock wasn’t nicked.’

  ‘We’ll come and give you moral support.’ Nicky tried on a zebra beret and inspected herself in the mirror.

  ‘If we’re not working,’ Darren said morosely. ‘We can’t expect two weekends off in a row.’

  ‘God, you’re gloomy today.’ Nicky turned her back on him. ‘Found anything you like yet, Jo?’

  ‘Yeah, this one.’

  ‘Mm, it suits you.’ Nicky unpinned a leopardskin hat from the back of the stall and held it against her skirt. ‘How much are they, by the way?’

  ‘Only ten quid.’

  ‘I’ll have a couple then – the zebra and this leopardskin. Catherine, how about you?’

  ‘No, I don’t think …’

  ‘Let me buy you one – I’d like to.’

  ‘Oh, no, honestly. I wouldn’t hear of it.’

  ‘Why not? I’m flush today. I haven’t spent my Christmas bonus yet.’

  ‘But you’ve already put me up for the night and …’

  ‘Oh, come on! It was only a grotty bedroom that wasn’t being used. Jo, what do you think for Catherine? Fur or flowers?’

  Catherine stood there, grinning like a kid, while Jo and Nicky picked out half a dozen hats, debating which would be best for her. It was like having sisters, or being part of a big family – something she’d missed out on. Her childhood had been solitary and her father always distant, emotionally at least.