Second Skin

by Wendy Perriam

  ‘Could you mind the stall for a moment?’ she asked Derek, who had pulled a magazine from his pocket and was busy ogling the pin-ups with Brad.

  It was Brad who answered, giving her a friendly punch on the arm. ‘Yeah, ’course – off you go. And don’t look so worried, darlin’! Nothin’ terrible’s goin’ to ’appen just because you turn your back for five minutes.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she grinned, draining the whisky too fast and gasping as it burned her throat. Still, it provided good central heating and a few minutes later even her hands were warm. She had taken Greta’s tip and thawed them under the hand-dryer in the toilet.

  Outside again, she bought three bags of chestnuts and crammed them in her pockets, keeping her hands cupped over them as another form of heating. The crowds were beginning to dwindle with the light, but there were still enough people around to give the market a buzz. She stared in fascination at a gruesome black spider’s web tattooed across the neck of a man of roughly Andrew’s age. His girlfriend’s hairstyle was equally dramatic: the front of her scalp was cropped to a fuzz, but at the back her hair was long, reaching almost to her waist The traders were as varied as the customers – sharply dressed, fast-talking spivs; frail young Japanese girls; blowsy women in moth-eaten furs; Rastafarians; ageing hippies; earnest bearded Asians. Why should she feel an outsider amidst such a wealth of different types? Surely there was room for her as well. After all, she had proved herself today, learned the ropes in record time and sold a lot of hats. And far from being tired, she felt energized by her achievement – not just the sales, but the heady sense of entering a community so unlike anything she knew.

  She stopped to smile at a baby lying in a milk-crate at the back of a cassette stall. It was wrapped in what looked like an old curtain and surrounded by boxes of tapes, and seemed completely unperturbed by the raucous music blasting from the speakers overhead. She felt a sudden bond with its mother: a skinny waif with dark circles under her eyes and bare skin showing through the holes in her blue jeans. She must have looked as young as that when Andrew was an infant, and he had slept just as soundly not in a plastic milk-crate but in a battered wooden drawer. (They didn’t have a proper cot till Kate was born.)

  On impulse, she decided to buy a cassette. She wished she could afford the lot, to finance some warm new clothes for the girl and a decent shawl for the baby. She chose a rock band Darren liked, although she’d never heard of them till this week. Never mind – it would be a challenge, another way of broadening her horizons. She might have left school early, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t catch up now, though in rather different subjects from reading, writing and arithmetic.

  ‘Enjoy it!’ the girl said, handing over the tape.

  ‘Thanks, I will,’ said Catherine. That was the key – enjoyment. It had never figured high on her agenda, but she had a chance to change that, to break with her dutiful past.

  She strode towards the canal, her feet picking up the catchy rhythm still booming from the stall. Several other kinds of music were playing, which added to the general festive air. Christmas might be a fading memory for the rest of sombre London, but Camden Lock retained some vestige of it, if only in the brilliant colours, the strings of twinkling lights.

  She stood leaning on the stone parapet, gazing down at the canal. Litter floated on the surface of the water – empty cans and cartons, fag-ends, paper cups – yet far from looking sordid, it had a strangely magical glitter in the fiery light of the sunset. The sky was a deep golden-red; nature eclipsing the traders’ displays with its own magnificence.

  She checked her watch: four-thirty. She had been away longer than five minutes, yet she wasn’t even worried. It might be the effect of the whisky, or maybe just relief at having survived the bulk of the day without mishap. Whatever the reason, she felt remarkably at ease, even – dare she say it? – happy.

  ‘No, this round’s on me,’ Greta insisted, picking up the empty glasses. ‘You did bloody well today.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Catherine, flushed from the wine and the compliment. Although she had taken off her coat and thick wool cardigan, she was still perspiring in Fiona’s mohair sweater. Despite its tatty decor, the pub exuded a cheerful glow, partly from the coal fire crackling in the grate and partly from the scores of bodies jammed into too small a space – laughing, talking, smoking, drinking, and generating their own heat. Many of them were Greta’s friends; fellow traders unwinding after their long day in the market who appeared to have accepted her quite happily as one of the crowd. In fact she felt more at home in the Stag’s Head than in Andrew and Antonia’s local, the chi-chi Rose and Crown. That was all bronze warming-pans and frilled cretonne at the windows, whereas here the drab brown curtains had uneven saggy hems and looked as if they might disintegrate if you were unwise enough to pull them. But the very shabbiness was endearing in a way, displaying a heroic disregard for normal commercial considerations such as cleanliness and modernity. The plain wooden floor was stained and scuffed, the Bisto-brown wallpaper peeling off in places, and little pools of sawdust had leaked from the torn covers of the bar-stools. From the outside, indeed, the place looked almost derelict, as if thumbing its nose at the public with a defiant ‘Take me or leave me’ air.

  Yet more new arrivals were streaming in, many of them Irish, attracted by the music – a fiddler and an accordionist playing jaunty reels. They all seemed to know each other, calling out greetings to their friends and joking with the Irish landlord, Mick, and his flame-haired daughter behind the bar.

  ‘This is Lynne,’ said Greta, returning with a tray of glasses and a small fair girl in tow. ‘She’s been helping me make the waistcoats. I’ll miss her. She’s starting a new job on Monday.’

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ Catherine smiled, hoping she’d remember all the names. Both Brad and Greta had introduced her to various people, but after a couple of glasses of wine everything was blurring slightly. Brad had moved to the next table now and was talking to a tall black guy with dreadlocks. Lester, he was called, and the stunning girl beside them (also black but with straightened hair dyed blue) was Bina? Bita? – some name she hadn’t quite caught. Sitting at her own table were Rosie, Stan and Gareth. Rosie was a single parent whose husband had walked out two days before their baby was due; Stan sold fifties clothes (and looked a fifties relic), and Gareth was studying photography at Brighton University and eking out his grant by selling his own framed photos at the weekends.

  She squeezed up to make room for Lynne on the ancient wooden bench. It was quite a squash already, what with Gareth’s thigh pressing into hers and Rosie’s cigarette smoke drifting across her face. Still, all part of the family …

  ‘What sort of work do you do?’ she asked Lynne, who was now armed with a pint of Guinness and licking a foam moustache from her top lip.

  ‘Well, they’ve just taken me on as a wardrobe-mistress at Sadler’s Wells. I can’t believe my luck! I’ve never worked in a theatre before.’

  ‘Not very lucky for me, though,’ Greta wailed. ‘I’ll never find anyone who can sew as well as you, Lynne.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. ‘Course you will. And those waistcoats are dead simple. No sleeves, or fitting, or complicated patterns.’

  ‘Come off it, they’re not that easy. The buttonholes are awfully fiddly and it’s a bugger getting the lining right. Anyway, time’s my main problem at the moment.’ Greta turned from Lynne to Catherine. ‘I haven’t told you yet,’ she said, ‘but I had a special order today. This American girl fell in love with the waistcoats. She’s getting married in June – a big fancy do in Oregon – and she wants the bridegroom and her father and the half-dozen little pageboys all to wear them for the wedding. She’s obviously got pots of money, so it’s too good a chance to miss.’

  ‘Oh, I say,’ said Catherine. ‘That’s wonderful.’

  ‘Yeah. The thing is, though, she’s going back to the States on Monday week and I haven’t even bought the fabric yet. She wants a special brocade to match
the bridesmaids’ dresses and it may take a while to track it down. Then I’ve got the actual sewing and all the buttons to cover and …’

  ‘Maybe I could help?’ Catherine suggested, emboldened by her third glass of wine. ‘I’m afraid I’m not quite in the wardrobe-mistress class, but I used to make the children’s clothes and even some of my husband’s. And I’ve got a machine at home with a buttonhole attachment and all that sort of thing.’

  ‘You’re mad!’ grinned Rosie. ‘Greta’s a frightful slave-driver. She’ll have you working all night.’

  ‘Shut up, Rosie,’ Greta said, opening a bag of peanuts and offering them around. ‘If you could help, Catherine, that would be fantastic. I’ve been wondering how on earth I’d cope. You see, I run a stall here four days a week, which doesn’t leave much time for sewing. And on top of everything else, my mother’s broken her wrist, so I’m having to flog to Greenwich and back every other day.’

  ‘Well, I’m free at the moment, luckily,’ Catherine said. ‘I’ve got to find a proper job, but another week won’t hurt. And anyway I’m not exactly panting to get back to office work.’

  ‘Are you a secretary?’ Stan asked.

  ‘No.’ She hesitated. ‘I’m, er, well … nothing really. I used to work for my husband, but …’

  ‘Pissed off, did he?’ Rosie said in a bitter tone. ‘D’you know, I’d never trust a bloke again – not after Pete and Jim.’

  ‘Thanks very much,’ said Gareth. ‘Just because you married a couple of bummers, there’s no need to damn the entire male sex.’

  ‘Oh, you’re all right, Gareth,’ Rosie said, patting his arm maternally. ‘I don’t mind the under-twenty-ones.’

  Stan bristled. ‘And what about the over-fifties?’

  ‘Dodgy!’

  ‘When you’ve all quite finished,’ Greta said, ‘I’m trying to talk to Catherine.’

  ‘Watch it, Catherine,’ Rosie said in a stage-whisper. ‘She’s notorious for her starvation wages.’

  ‘Lynne, did I pay you well, or not?’ Greta demanded indignantly.

  ‘Yes, love. I’m so flush, I’m off to Barbados for the winter.’

  ‘Hey, look,’ said Stan, pointing at the television mounted on the wall. ‘The lottery’s about to start. Maybe you will be off to Barbados, Lynne.’

  ‘No chance. I’ve given up. I mean, what’s the bloody point? All these weeks and I haven’t won a thing.’

  ‘It’s all right for them with full-time jobs at poncy Sadler’s Wells,’ Stan said in a hoity-toity voice.

  ‘Anyway, that’s not the spirit,’ Brad remarked, returning to their table. ‘Life’s, a gamble, innit? You gotta get in there and ’ ave a go, otherwise you’ll never change your luck.’

  ‘So how many lines did you do?’ Gareth asked him.

  ‘Me usual – fifteen quid’s worth.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got no chance then,’ Catherine moaned, getting out her ticket. ‘I only did a pound’s worth.’

  ‘That’s all it takes, love,’ Brad insisted, leaning over to see what she had marked. ‘Six little numbers to turn your life around. This mate of mine won two grand last week, and that was just for a quid. And the very same day ’ e backed a six-to-one winner at Aintree.’

  ‘Quick! Give me his phone number,’ Rosie said. ‘I can’t wait to meet him.’

  ‘I thought you was off men, Rosie?’ Stan put in. ‘Not blokes with luck like that. The trouble with me is I always fall for losers.’

  ‘That’s negative though, innit?’ said Brad. ‘It’s like if you tell yourself you never win, you don’t. You gotta will those balls to come up, do a Mystic Meg on ’ em.’

  Stan snorted in derision. ‘You can’t do worse than her. She’s bleeding useless!’

  ‘Well trust yourself, then. But you gotta really really concentrate.’ Brad closed his eyes melodramatically and spread his hands out in front of him, as if groping for an invisible force. ‘Put the ’fluence on them balls.’

  Catherine hid a smile, imagining how Andrew would scoff. Neither he nor Antonia had gambled in their lives, beyond buying a few safe blue-chip shares. Yet she was attracted by Brad’s optimism, his cocksure confidence. Maybe it was irrational, but willing things could work. The power of the mind was gaining respect even in scientific circles. There was that extraordinary piece in the Guardian about a group of cancer patients who had successfully willed their malignant cells to dissolve, and another recent study which seemed to prove the power of prayer.

  She closed her eyes, like Brad, and fixed her full attention on her numbers. It wasn’t so much the money she wanted as the achievement of winning in itself, which would be a hopeful sign. As Brad had said, she had to turn her life around, especially at this crossroads, poised as she was between a past of missed opportunities and a future still uncertain.

  Eyes still closed, she was vaguely conscious of the wave of sound swirling through the pub – manic cheers and drum-rolls from the television as the pre-lottery hype exploded to a climax; shouts and laughter from the Irish contingent clapping along to the band, and Brad’s strident voice continuing to extol the force of willpower.

  ‘Let me choose right,’ she whispered, without the faintest notion as to who or what she was addressing. ‘So I can become the person I was born to be.’ God! she thought, I sound worse than Mystic Meg. Yet that choice seemed really vital. Did she settle for continued stagnation, or commit herself to something new, where she decided what to do with her life?

  ‘Ssh!’ Gareth ordered Brad. ‘They’re starting.’

  A hush fell over their table as the first ball rolled down the chute, followed by a shout of triumph from Rosie. Catherine let out a despairing wail, remembering only now that she had chosen her numbers around Simon. How could she even expect to win after that disastrous Monday evening?

  ‘Don’t give up yet,’ Brad urged her. ‘You’re still in with the shout. Hey, look, you got the next one.’ He seized her ticket and jabbed number 23. ‘Come on, come on! Psych ’em up! Five and a bonus and you’re away. Yeah, seventeen! You got two now. It’s workin’, babe! Keep willin’. There you are – what’d I say? Three’s a definite tenner.’

  Catherine stared at her ticket in disbelief. She had never had three numbers up before. Coincidence? Or could Brad’s system actually work? She concentrated hard, determined to win again.

  ‘Shit!’ Brad groaned, as 42 rolled into the slot ‘Never mind. A tenner’s better than nothin’. ‘Old on – ’ere’s the last. Gor blimey!’ he shouted. ‘Would you believe it? You got that one, too. Bloody ’ell!’ He shook his head. ‘Four numbers on one fuckin’ line. And I’ve got sod all on fifteen. Well, that’s the way it goes, babe. Mind you, I probably lost because I was ’ elpin’ you. All me brain cells was goin’ in the wrong direction.’

  Catherine sat in stunned silence, embarrassed to be the centre of attention as a crowd of envious faces tried to get a glimpse of her card. No one else had any winning numbers except Rosie, who had got the first but nothing subsequently. ‘Oh, B … Brad,’ she stammered finally, ‘I’ve done it – we’ve done it. I feel I owe you a share.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. Enjoy it! It’ll only be about forty quid, in any case. Mind you, it all helps, dunnit? And I got a feelin’ it’s the start of a lucky break for you. I ’ad these vibes just now and they was comin’ through really good and strong.’

  ‘Well, I’d better stick around with you,’ she laughed.

  ‘Yeah, stick with me any time. I’ll change your luck – you wait and see.’

  She clasped the ticket in her hand. Her luck was changing already. Not just the forty pounds, but the sewing job for Greta, which meant she could keep in touch with these new friends. Their informality appealed to her; their capacity for enjoyment. She thought of Andrew and Antonia’s guests, who would be discussing heavy issues like human rights abuses or the British penal system. And the ones with children would be deploring the lack of nursery schools, or comparing their offspring’s progress in
cutting their first milk teeth or passing Grade 3 clarinet. Okay, such things were important, but she sometimes felt she’d been serious her whole life, from the time of her mother’s early death and her father’s almost monastic regime. Some secret part of her was longing to rebel; not to care a fig whether she was a credit to her family; not to feel ashamed of her lustful thoughts about Brad. She glanced at him now, his legs splayed wide apart, the clingy cotton fabric of his trousers leaving little to the imagination. Though, in fact, her imagination had been working overtime. They had already been to bed together; she tentative at first, stroking his shaved head, flicking an exploratory tongue across his silver nose-ring, then gradually working herself up, roused by his sheer noisy thrusting energy.

  Her eyes moved surreptitiously to Lester. He was in bed with her now; his dramatic dreadlocks a black cascade on the pillow; his long muscular legs twined around her own. Never before had she been so aware of men as males. The pub was overflowing with them – men in dirty work-clothes she was mentally undressing; total strangers slipping warm sly hands beneath her jersey; tangled hairs on brawny arms, stubble-roughened chins, broad shoulders, deep bass voices. Seeing Simon naked had made her realize how pathetically inexperienced she was. And although the affair had been a fiasco, it had aroused her curiosity; left her eager to see other men – do more than simply see them. Her recent talks with Nicky had influenced her too. Nicky and the others were so frank, so matter-of-fact. Sex for them wasn’t tied to holy matrimony or hedged about with restrictions and anxieties. Not that she could be so free – not while she lived at Stoneleigh. Andrew and Antonia wouldn’t dream of mentioning sex, and she never heard them making love, or caught them staggering from the bedroom looking well-shagged (as Nicky put it graphically). Besides, in Manor Close she was still the virtuous mother, the conventional mother-in-law – a profoundly inhibiting role, which put an outright ban on steamy fantasies.