Beneath the Skin

by Sandra Ireland

  She was probing the base of his thumb with her fingers, nipping his bones and ligaments like a dog that wouldn’t stop biting until its teeth met. He pulled his hand away. He thought she looked vaguely amused. Whatever that expression was, it didn’t seem appropriate, and the young lad, down by his elbow, saw it too and his eyes shuttered. ‘Could be a fracture of your distal phalange,’ she said. ‘It happens. But more likely to be severe trauma to the pulp surface. Did you know the distal pad of the human thumb is divided into a proximal and a distal compartment? The proximal is more deformable than the distal and allows the thumb pad to mould around an object. Lucky, really.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘Well, there’s a bit of “give” in your thumb. They’re hard to break. You’ll probably lose the nail though.’

  ‘How come you know so much about thumbs?’

  ‘I’ve stuffed plenty.’ She grinned when she saw his face. ‘Not any human ones. Yet.’

  ‘I still think you need a plaster,’ William said.

  8

  The last night on patrol is always the longest night. If you’re going to give in to your fears it will be then, in the dark hours, between sundown and the welcome roar of the Hercules that’s going to take you home. Your psyche is jumping with tales of those who bought it on their last day. That’s got Sod’s Law written all over it: to dodge bullets for six months and then stumble into an IED tripwire on the final night of your tour. Nobody mentions it, but the thought is there, buzzing around you like a fly. Prayers are imagined a little louder, charms fingered for luck. Walt’s amulet is a Saint Christopher medal that belonged to his granny.

  Your whole system is tuned to the slightest movement, the faintest sound. Shadows trick you; the air is sticky with tension. Your training kicks in and you realise there’s a certain balance in dodging bullets, a law of averages. You can fire back. You are a leveller. It’s the IEDs that scare you shitless. You’re fighting ghosts.

  That’s how it was for Tom – a roadside blast on his final night; the night before he was due to go home to Sara and the kids; due to stride off the plane and engulf them in bear hugs. The army medics radioed it in as ‘significant damage’. Walt could see that Tom wasn’t going to stride anywhere in a hurry. Two mortars had detonated, making a mess of Tom and little Deano, a young squaddie of eighteen, first tour. Both of them were conscious as they loaded them into the Chinook. The lad was screaming for his mother and Walt would never forget how Tom reached out to him with his one remaining hand. Come on, bonnie lad. You’ll be home before you know it. By the time Walt and the rest of the unit had made it back to base in the armoured vehicles, Tom was dead, had slipped away into the dark night high above the desert. The young lad had survived, minus his legs. Walt was still trying to decide who was the lucky one.

  9

  The pharmacy was a family-run independent a fifteen-minute walk from Alys’s house. Walt was unsuited to walking with a child and it was a long fifteen minutes. His gait was all wrong for a start; it was impossible to match it to William’s. He’d been proud of his military stride, the way it covered the terrain, the way it got him noticed on Civvie Street. Old soldiers bought him pints and clapped him on the back; girls gave him the eye. But nothing was scarier than feeling the kid’s hand worm its way into his at the junctions. There was a warmth to it, a comfort he’d thought he could live without. At the second set of traffic lights he started to get paranoid. Were people looking at him? Speculating? An adult male with a kid that wasn’t his. Did they know? William tugged on his hand – ‘the man’s at green, we can go now’ – like a little guide dog.

  The boy kept up a steady stream of chatter, as if his words had been stoppered up for ages and Walt was the only one who could listen. The lad was a magpie: a collector of other people’s thoughts, snippets of conversation and throwaway comments. He picked them all up and added them to the scrapbook in his head.

  By the time they’d reached the pharmacy on Raeburn Place, Walt knew that the pharmacist was called Galen, that he kept a house in France and tiny scissors in his wallet with which he neatened his beard in the staff toilet. Mouse had apparently worked for him for seven years and was worried that he was becoming overfamiliar.

  ‘What’s overfamiliar mean, anyway?’ William asked as they reached the shop.

  Walt realised he was still holding the kid’s hand and dropped it. It had gone all warm and sweaty the way kids’ hands do. His own thumb was pulsing, getting worse the way a toothache does at the thought of the dentist.

  ‘Sounds like he’s an old lech.’ Walt shoved open the door with his shoulder, nearly tripping over a girl who was unpacking a box of loofahs. She shot him a wide smile. Black-framed, ultra-cool glasses dominated her face.

  ‘Who buys loofahs any more?’ she said. As a chat-up line it didn’t work, so she turned to the kid. ‘Hi, William.’ Her expression clearly said, ‘Who’s your friend?’

  William jumped in with the story, polishing it up a bit: the downpipe; the ten-tonne drain cover; the thumb that was going green. His mother appeared suddenly behind the counter, managing to look shocked and annoyed all at the same time. Galen the pharmacist – the beard was neat salt-and-pepper – was hovering beside her shoulder, ready to jump in at the slightest hint of trouble. Walt judged him to be just short of retiring age; a trim figure in a dated brown suit. Mouse was wearing a navy coat over her white uniform. William repeated the tale again, but neither of them seemed particularly interested in an injured thumb.

  ‘We don’t really have a protocol for first aid,’ said Galen.

  ‘You shouldn’t even be doing stuff like that. Did Alys ask you to do that? You should have said no, and William . . .’ Here she paused for breath. ‘You shouldn’t be running around the streets. Does Mrs Petrauska know you’re here?’

  ‘Auntie Alys said she’d tell her.’ William’s face remained downcast; he was closely examining the floor, burrowing his toe into a hole in the faded lino.

  ‘Ha!’ said Mouse. ‘As if Alys will remember to tell her! I’ll check my phone. Mrs Petrauska is probably tearing her hair out and you are going to school tomorrow.’

  ‘What about Walt’s thumb?’ William muttered. The kid had a stubborn tilt to his chin, like his mam. Galen began to stutter something about X-rays, ‘just to be on the safe side’.

  Mouse’s anger seemed to melt a little. ‘Show me your thumb.’

  ‘It’s after two, Maura,’ Galen reminded her. ‘You get away and I’ll see to this. You’ll be late.’

  But she was already examining the bruised digit, her touch firm and warm – capable, Walt thought. He gazed at the top of her head. Her hair was as shiny as conkers in the clinical light, and he wondered what she was late for. The pain had subsided a little, but the nail was now the colour of charcoal, with a darker line across it where the drain cover had got him. Mouse made a low whistling sound. ‘I wouldn’t bother with the hospital. They won’t be able to X-ray it while it’s so swollen. I’d just keep it out of trouble for a while. You’ll lose that nail.’

  ‘I can live without it.’

  She pursed her lips and nodded, releasing his hand. ‘Take some ibuprofen.’ She slanted her head towards the medicine shelves behind the counter. ‘Galen will get you some. I have to go.’ She glanced at William. ‘Look, Robert – Walt – could you take William back to Mrs Petrauska’s? I have to go somewhere and I’ll be about an hour.’

  ‘Are you going to see Granddad?’ said William. ‘Can I go?’

  Mouse looked at Walt, and there was the faintest flicker of pleading her eyes.

  He shrugged. ‘I’ll take him home. I’ll get him something to eat and plonk him in front of the telly.’

  William brightened immediately, though his mother looked nervous. Galen coughed discreetly from behind the counter. Either buy something or bugger off.

  ‘It’s okay. I am babysitter material.’ He shot her his special lopsided grin. She was caught. She couldn�
�t make a fuss here, in her place of work. Although she smiled politely, her eyes remained cold, as if she’d somehow been outmanoeuvred.

  ‘Fine.’ She fiddled with her coat. It was a soft blue woollen one with one of those tie belts, and she pulled the belt so tight she must have cut off her breath. ‘William, behave. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’ And she stalked off to wherever she was going.

  No doubt William would fill him in on the way home.

  10

  ‘Families are funny things,’ said Alys. She worked in an intense sort of silence, her movements economical and deft. She’d been putting the finishing touches to a toucan, if toucans can ever look finished. Walt, attempting to tidy up around her, admired its glossy beak, which glowed in the spotlight like a Tequila Sunrise. The bird was destined for a new bar off the Royal Mile, and Walt was glad. It seemed like an escape somehow.

  ‘Families are funny things.’ He nodded in agreement, slowly wiping something sticky from the blade of a knife. Walt’s role had turned out to be very fluid. As well as the endless admin, real live customers sometimes found their way to the studio, and then he would put on his best sales face and enjoy a bit of banter. It was a bit of light relief, actually. Alys didn’t do banter. She couldn’t stand him making any noise when she was working: no whistling, no humming, no jokes. When she was prising the skin from a dead carcass, he became a sort of squeamish theatre nurse, measuring solution, cutting wire, handing her the most wicked-looking tools he’d ever seen. And thinking, time after time, why am I doing this? What am I doing here?

  Sometimes, when she came to the end of some project, like this toucan, she wanted to chat. It was like turning a pillowcase inside out, all the silky coolness giving way to the fraying, hidden bits.

  ‘We get put in boxes,’ she was saying. She ran a finger round the curve of the bird’s beak. ‘And we behave the way we’re expected to. Look at Mouse. She hides from things. That’s how she got her nickname. She hides and watches. She was always getting me into trouble when we were kids.’

  He didn’t know what to say, so fiddled awkwardly with bits and pieces on the workbench: a carpenter’s pencil, a pair of spectacles. He wasn’t sure what had brought this on, or where it was going. Alys had such a good memory. She used it as a weapon, an excuse to fester with old slights. He opened out the legs of the spectacles. They were the type of wiry, scholarly men’s glasses that made him think of Galen. He’d never seen Alys wearing specs, but maybe she needed them for close work. He folded them up and replaced them, deciding it might be safer to change the subject.

  ‘So what’s the label on your box then? Tortured artist?’ It was meant to be a joke, almost, but Alys didn’t do jokes. She turned away from him, dusting her hands on her backside. He liked her backside, what he could see of it beneath the white shirt.

  ‘If you’re finished I have an errand for you to run,’ she said over her shoulder.

  He’d allowed himself a brief flare of lust; irritation quickly snuffed it out. He wasn’t convinced he’d signed up to be an errand boy.

  She disappeared into the shop. Her voice drifted back to him: ‘But before you do, you can sweep up the fag ends outside.’

  His lips twisted. She knew she had the upper hand and she liked it, and her liking it sent a depth charge through him that he couldn’t ignore. He was not the submissive type, but he had to admit that Alys was getting under his skin.

  She sent him to see someone called Moodie.

  ‘He’s a carpenter,’ she had said. ‘He’s making something special for me, for my Walter Potter tribute.’ She fizzed with excitement when she mentioned her work. He could almost see the shadows of long-dead birds flitting around in her head. She told him how she’d been planning it for ages, had designed the glass case and the backdrop herself and it was going to be epic. She’d even selected a title. Did he want to know the title? He said no, not really.

  He had no idea whether ‘Moodie’ was a surname or a first name or one of those names that people use to single themselves out as unique. He’d once had a maths teacher who simply signed himself ‘Fox’ on his report cards. Years down the line Walt still visualised the man as a smart-arse ginger predator. ‘If Robert expended as much energy on algebra as he does on forging parental notes he might yet go a long way.’ He probably hadn’t been thinking of Helmand Province.

  This Moodie had a lock-up on Hamilton Place. ‘Turn right, before you get to the river,’ Alys had said. ‘It’s squashed between the public toilets and the bus shelter.’ He figured it wouldn’t take him long, and he didn’t mind walking. Walking was meditative. He supposed it came from years of patrolling with blisters and an eighty-pound kit. Mind over matter. When he couldn’t walk, in that black time, his head had been all over the place, like the black had got in there too.

  Now as he walked, taking the same route as he’d taken with William, his thoughts turned to the little lad. The previous afternoon he’d taken the youngster home, as promised, while his mother went on her secretive mission to visit the grandfather.

  ‘He lives in a care home,’ William had confided. ‘He can’t remember stuff. Mum gets really sad about it because they stick him in front of the telly and don’t cut his nails.’

  ‘Typical.’ Walt had automatically grabbed the child’s hand as they’d approached the pedestrian crossing.

  ‘I think that’d be okay though, don’t you?’

  ‘What, being in a care home?’

  ‘Getting to sit in front of the telly all day.’

  ‘Daytime telly stinks, believe me.’ He could sense William looking up at him, and when he’d glanced down the kid was giving him the full-blown how-could-you-say-that treatment, with the wide eyes and the brows disappearing into his spiky fringe.

  ‘But all the good programmes are on! Cash in the Attic, Flog It!, Dickinson’s . . .’

  ‘Are you for real?’

  They’d stopped in the middle of the pavement. Walt quickly dropped the kid’s hand as shoppers bustled past.

  ‘I like all that stuff.’ William stuck his lip out.

  ‘You’re ten years old, for Christ’s sake.’ He wasn’t sure why this bothered him so much – surely the lad should be out climbing trees or something.

  The pout thickened. ‘I’m eight.’

  ‘Eight. Okay.’ Walt had turned to move on, with William trailing after him. ‘When I was eight I was a tearaway, not a founder member of the David Dickinson Fan Club.’

  ‘But I like collecting things. I’ll show you.’

  And he had. They’d gone in and turned on the telly in the cold green sitting room. Green was supposed to be a fresh colour, a colour of springtime and new growth, but in Alys’s house it seemed mossy and damp. The long velvet curtains were always half drawn, like it was too taxing to make a decision either way. There was an upright piano in one corner, piled with dusty magazines, a sad-looking rubber plant and a stuffed owl. The owl looked like he’d rather be anywhere else. The three-piece suite, also green, had been shredded by the cats. The whole place smelled of cats. Opening a window might have helped, but he couldn’t bear the thought of being invaded by the outside cold. There was a grand fireplace, inset with those tiles that depict toffs in hats and crinolined ladies. The grate was sealed off with hardboard. Maybe Alys trapped some of her subjects in there. It was a brave pigeon that flew down Alys’s chimney. The television was, by comparison, a fairly new flatscreen. William had tuned in to his channel of choice before racing up the stairs to bring down his treasure trove.

  Walt had collapsed onto the couch. He was unsure of what to do next. Could he knock off for the day, or was he expected to take over babysitting duties? That was surely not part of his remit, but he could hardly walk off and leave the kid in front of the telly. There were probably laws about that. The sounds of daytime TV washed over him. A grey-haired baker with twinkly eyes and a Mediterranean tan was turning steaming cakes onto a wire rack – ‘and there you have it, carrot and cinnamon muffins. What
could be easier?’ If the kid didn’t make it as an antiques guru maybe he could be a pastry chef. The credits rolled and the voiceover trilled, ‘Next, David Dickinson discovers some real deals – but first the news headlines.’

  Walt leaned forward. The music came on, loud and important – cut to a female presenter in a smart yellow blazer.

  ‘Good afternoon. In today’s news: Northumbria Police have asked for help in tracing . . .’

  Suddenly, he was grappling with the remote control, pressing buttons wildly, willing the newsreader to disappear. Words punctuated his panic: Missing . . . Extremely concerned . . . Any information, call this . . . William returned at the very moment the channel changed. Walt flung away the remote, his heart banging in his chest.

  ‘Hey!’ William placed two shoeboxes carefully on the easy chair. ‘David Dickinson is coming on!’

  ‘But this is The Simpsons. Who doesn’t like The Simpsons?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘Look, kid, show me your wares and I’ll stick Dick on again.’

  ‘It’s David.’ William had dropped grumpily to the floor and prised open the first box.

  Moodie’s workshop was like a Tardis that had landed on the banks of the Water of Leith. As soon as Walt entered, the pithy stink of sawdust transported him back to his father’s shed; his dad, methodical, silent, sanding something on the workbench. Pain twisted in his gut like a living thing.