Beneath the Skin

by Sandra Ireland

  ‘No. I’m okay.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m fine. You get a black bag. The best thing we can do is just sweep ’em up and put them in the bin. I’ll get the dustpan.’

  Mouse flipped on the main light. The place flooded with an awful certainty. All those fragile victims, concave under cold feathers and stiff claws. There was something horrifying about the way they were arranged in those neat rows. It was like the aftermath of an execution.

  Not knowing where to start, Walt set to with the brush.

  ‘Wait!’ Mouse grabbed his arm. ‘Which one’s the wren?’

  He glared at her. ‘You’re winding me up. You want me to check every one to find a fuckin’ wren?’

  ‘It’s what she was working on. If we chuck them out, she’ll go mental.’

  They stood looking at the mess, trying not to breathe in the stink. Mouse’s eyelashes were wet.

  ‘Honestly,’ she whispered, ‘if she comes down and finds them all gone, she’ll trash the place. You have no idea what it’s like.’

  Walt put down the brush. He wanted to loop his arm around her, offer a bit of comfort, but he was afraid she might take it the wrong way, so he just said, ‘I do, bonny lass. I know what it’s like.’

  Mouse nodded. ‘Oh God, we’ll just have to dump them. Can’t stand that smell.’

  They worked in silence, Mouse holding the bag and Walt scooping up the corpses. He took the bag and knotted it. Mouse told him to stick it in the bin, but to make sure it was the right bin and not Mrs Petrauska’s. The thought of Mrs Petrauska’s reaction to finding dozens of rotting birds didn’t bear thinking about. Walt found a red baseball cap lying on top of the bins. Was it William’s? He held it up. It was grubby, well worn, with a peak that had once been white underneath but was now mushroom-coloured. He didn’t think Mouse would let the boy wear such a thing, but he decided to take it with him, just in case. As he was about to walk away, a glimmer of something caught his eye. The funny little window, the one he’d noticed the time he’d come out to inspect the pipework, was ominously dark, and yet . . . He could have sworn he’d seen movement, or the ghost of a movement, like the flitting of a moth across a beam of light. He peered closer, but the grimy square remained stubbornly blank. Imagination plays tricks on you all the time; he knew that firsthand. Still . . . Whirling the dirty red cap around his index finger, he walked uncertainly back to the house.

  18

  In the kitchen, Mouse was hugging the kid. Smothered in her jumper, he was standing patiently, one eye visible between his fringe and her sleeve.

  ‘The birds are gone,’ Walt announced. ‘Extinct.’

  She didn’t get the joke. ‘You definitely put them in our bin?’

  ‘I put them in the one marked “Dance Studio”.’

  ‘What?’ She swung around, realised he was trying to lighten the mood and rolled her eyes. William escaped. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Just up to my room,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t go near Auntie Alys’s room. She needs to rest.’

  ‘Here, kid. Is this yours?’ Walt held up the cap by its grubby peak.

  ‘It is not,’ Mouse said straight away. ‘Look at the state of it!’

  William gazed at it with interest, but knew better than to touch it. ‘I could keep it though. For my collection.’

  ‘No!’ Mouse glared at Walt. ‘You should have put that in the bin too.’

  Walt shrugged and hooked the offending article onto the back of a chair. As William scurried off, Walt went over to wash his hands at the sink.

  ‘Is she sleeping?’ He turned on the tap and scrubbed his hands with liquid soap.

  Mouse folded her now-empty arms and hugged herself. ‘No. She’s lying quietly though, staring at the ceiling.’

  ‘Should I go up?’

  ‘Why should you?’ She looked at him sharply.

  He shrugged. ‘Because she’s my boss? I feel responsible.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘You heard what she said to me. I shouldn’t have left her.’

  ‘You don’t need to feel responsible, and Walt . . .’ She looked him full in the face, sternly, as if she were scolding William. ‘Don’t get too close to her.’

  ‘I wasn’t. I’m not.’

  ‘Good. Alys is very vulnerable. She may look all flirty and confident, but underneath, she’s her own worst enemy.’

  ‘I get the picture.’ He dried his hands slowly on a towel. He had the picture in his head: Alys giving him the come-on, touching her mouth to his. Maybe he’d been on his own too long. Mouse was eyeing him as if she’d just found a stash of porn under his bed. Turning away, she started rummaging through the cupboard under the sink, pulling out cloths and rubber gloves and bleach. He felt dismissed but something made him linger, a strong sense of injustice. He’d drifted in here for his own reasons. The job had suited him, and the room. He could go to ground for a while, living with these two strange, distant sisters, each with their own stuff going on and not much caring what he did or didn’t do. Not asking about his past.

  But he was getting pissed off with the way they only gave away so much, though the irony was not lost on him. He was living with them – surely he was entitled to more than a few crumbs of information?

  Mouse flushed hot water into a basin. Steam surrounded her like mist as she snapped on yellow Marigolds. He wasn’t going to let her blot away what had just happened like an inconvenient stain.

  ‘So what’s Alys’s problem then? Bipolar? Autism? What?’

  Mouse hefted the basin from the sink and made for the freezer, slopping water in her hurry to avoid the question. He followed her.

  ‘If I’m working with her I need to know.’

  ‘I don’t know what it is.’ She kneeled down and opened up the freezer drawers, releasing a faint whiff of death. ‘She’s always been like that. I suppose she’s on the spectrum, somewhere. When she was little she was just a handful, like most kids. She was wilful, disruptive.’ She sat back on her heels, pushing aside her hair with one clumsy yellow rubber hand. ‘She was always in trouble at school, for breaking things and fighting.’

  Walt came to stand right behind her. ‘Maybe it’s that attention deficit thing.’

  ‘Don’t know. Mum might have had her assessed, but Dad was a bit old-school. He didn’t want people coming around prying, so it just got left, like a lot of other things.’

  He couldn’t see her face but the bitterness was unmistakeable.

  ‘So is that why you stick around? To look after her?’

  ‘Can you imagine how she’d cope on her own?’ He could hear the threat of tears in her voice. The sound hurt him, and he reached round and pulled her up by the elbows and folded her into his arms. She stood there, not moving, like William had done, trying not to touch him with the wet rubber gloves. He moved back to look into her face, but she wouldn’t catch his eye. She looked miserable, wet cheeks, red nose.

  ‘You know what? I’m going to do what all good Brits do in a crisis.’ He moved her firmly to the table and made her sit down. She pulled off the gloves with an air of defeat. Walt went over to the worktop and switched on the kettle. ‘I’ve made tea all over the globe and I have a theory.’ He’d got her interest, albeit reluctantly. ‘All families have a tea triangle.’

  ‘A tea triangle?’ She looked at him like he was trying to sell her snake oil.

  He demonstrated obligingly. ‘Look, kettle here. Along the worktop, mug rack. And above the kettle . . .’ He flung open a cupboard. ‘Teabags. I rest my case.’

  ‘It’s an isosceles.’ She perked up a bit, resting her chin in her hands.

  ‘Correct. Now my mother favours the obtuse triangle. Kettle here, teabags here, near the sink, and mugs overhead in this cupboard.’ He flipped open a different door.

  Mouse shook her head. ‘Yeah, but what about the sugar? And the milk?’

  ‘Ee, now you’re just making it complicated, like.’

  She flashed her wide grin. ‘All this prove
s is that you’ve spent far too much time drinking tea.’

  ‘True. Unless . . .’ He opened the fridge with a flourish. ‘There is alcohol to hand. I see wine. Fancy a glass?’

  She sat up straight, batted the idea away with a hand. ‘No way. I’ve a kid upstairs and a sister who . . . No, I can’t. Just make tea.’

  ‘So you have a packed Saturday night, do you?’

  ‘No, not exactly.’

  ‘You’ll be sitting watching The X Factor like everybody else. Have one glass.’

  She sighed. ‘Just one. A small one.’

  ‘I’ll stick on this pizza, to soak it up.’ He laughed at her scowl. He didn’t know why he was suddenly in a good mood, not with the way the last couple of hours had gone. He ripped open the pizza box and switched on the oven. The wine was a dry white, nice and chilled. He found two glasses and poured. The anticipation warmed him.

  ‘So Alys was the wild one . . . when you were bairns?’

  Mouse smiled. ‘We were both wild. We lived in a castle, back then, so we had plenty room to be wild.’

  ‘A castle? I’m impressed.’

  ‘Don’t be. It was a dump. Crumbling about our ears. Mum hated it but it had been in Dad’s family for ages and I don’t think he saw what she saw – the damp and the mice and the endless cleaning. We didn’t see it either, as wee ones. We just enjoyed the space.’

  ‘So tell me about it. I’ve never met anyone who lived in a castle before.’ He sat down and took a sip of his wine. She coloured a little, flattered by the attention.

  ‘Oh God. There were draughts and leaks and it was dark everywhere, and most times when you put the light on, the bulbs would blow. Dad said it was the damp and the old wiring. Alys said it was the ghosts sucking up all the energy. She has a great imagination. I suppose my favourite place was down by the old cow byre that Dad used as a garage. I used to hide there, in amongst the weeds. I can still smell the crushed nettles and dock leaves . . . I loved the foxgloves. You could make the little purple bells pop if you squeezed them the right way, or you could wear them on your fingers like fairy thimbles.’

  She looked suddenly very young. ‘I remember my mother pegging sheets out on the rope. She’d prop it up with a forked pole, and the laundry used to dance in the wind.’

  Her eyes sparkled when she looked at him, but there must have been something in his face – she stopped and raised the glass to her lips, taking a cautious sip. ‘Sorry. I’m being boring.’

  ‘No, no. I was just thinking of my mother’s washing line.’

  ‘Not your mother?’ she teased.

  ‘Nope. Just the washing line.’ He drained his glass in one gulp and got to his feet. The chair scraped harshly on the floor. ‘I’ll check on the pizza.’

  19

  Mam’s washing line is wrapped so tight around a limb of the old tree that the rope has rubbed a gall in the bark. Robert isn’t that good on trees; not like Steven who can name trees, garden birds and movie stars like he’s eaten an encyclopaedia. The tree smells like the green disinfectant Mam puts down the bog and its bark . . . He loves its bark. It’s thick and scabby, like a pine cone, with deep cracks you can stick your fingertips in. Sometimes it flakes away and the wood beneath is all smooth and dewy like new skin.

  They’re all up in the tree: Robert and Steven and Tom, perched in the lower branches like cats. Tom’s a ginger tom, but you can’t say that or he’ll clout you. They’ve been watching a Western; the villain had been hoisted into a tree and hanged, his dusty spurred boots jerking in mid-air. Mam had come in and turned off the telly and they’d all groaned, and she’d snapped, ‘Get outside and play. Watching all that rubbish.’

  So they’d fled to the back garden. Sitting up in the tree with legs wrapped around branches they eye the washing line and wonder what hanging is like. Robert is worried about how tight the rope is around the branch.

  ‘It’s making it bleed, look.’

  ‘That’s sap.’ Steven peers at the wound over his glasses. ‘Tree blood.’

  ‘I think we should untie it.’

  ‘Mam’d kill you,’ says Steven, screwing up his nose.

  ‘Do you bleed when they hang you?’

  ‘Man, Robert!’ Tom groans as if everyone knows the answer to that. ‘You ask the dumbest things!’

  ‘You don’t bleed but you pee yourself,’ Steven replies gravely.

  ‘Oh, gross!’ There’s general fidgeting at the grossness of it.

  Tom eyes Steven suspiciously. ‘They don’t show that on the films.’

  ‘Our mam turned it off before the peeing part.’

  ‘We’re going to see The Goonies tonight,’ says Steven, changing the subject. ‘Wanna come?’

  ‘Awesome! I’ll ask me da.’ Tom slithers down from the tree and the others flex their elbows.

  ‘I’m fed up out here,’ Steven huffs. ‘This tree don’t do anything. I’m away in to play wi’ me Star Wars stuff.’ He hops down too, leaving Robert alone, lodged in a bum-bruising ‘V’ between the branches.

  It is so quiet without the others; it’s like listening to the inside of a big seashell. He can hear tiny things: the shivering of the leaves, a hornet buzzing, the far-off bleating of a sheep. He presses his cheek against the rough bark and pretends to be Invisible Tree Man. He plays this game often, imagining his skin turning the colour of compost and the tree soaking him up until he is part of it, invisible, so well hidden that Mam will never find him at bedtime. He could stay out all night in the velvety midnight and take down the rope so the tree stops bleeding. Though Mam would be sure to find him at some point and if it meant she’d had to leave Coronation Street to come out after him in her slippers she’d throw a huge wobbler and they’d be in the bad books for days. Reluctantly, he peels himself away from the bark and jumps to the ground.

  20

  He’d gone to bed about nine, only because Mouse had made it plain she wouldn’t sit downstairs arsing booze with him. Once William had come down to get his share of the pizza she’d determinedly washed up and wiped the surfaces down with something strong and lemony, leaving him feeling about as welcome as a ketchup smear. Fuck, did she ever stop cleaning? What was she trying to wash away? He’d retreated upstairs, taking the remainder of the bottle with him, but not the glass. She’d already washed it. He took off his things and lay on the bed in his T-shirt and boxers, necking wine from the bottle and wishing there was a telly in his room, or music, or anything that didn’t require him to think.

  He must have finished the bottle and drifted off with the light on, because one minute he was contemplating the shiny walnut wardrobe and the next he woke with a sick start, not knowing, in the way that you do, whether this was a dream or real. Corpses in neat regimental rows, like birds. They didn’t die like that. They died untidily, with parts missing. Sometimes he could still see the parts, coated in sand, dangling from trees. He never saw his own foot, but he dreamed about it often.

  He was suddenly aware he was being watched and every hair stood up on his body, every nerve stretched. He reached for his gun but found only the duvet bunched beneath his fists. By the time he’d realised it was William, his breathing was coming in shallow gasps and his heart was hammering in his ears.

  ‘For fuck’s sake! What the hell are you doing?’

  William’s blue eyes widened. They were fixed on his legs, or at least on the space where his right foot should be. He’d taken off his prosthesis when he lay down.

  ‘Mum wouldn’t want you saying the F-word in front of me.’ The boy wandered to the end of the bed.

  Walt lay there like a landed fish, still trapped in his own panic. ‘She wouldn’t want you coming into a strange man’s bedroom either. You shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘You’re not strange.’ The kid peered at his stump and asked the obvious. ‘What happened to your leg?’

  ‘IED blast. I was one of the lucky ones. And it was just my foot. That was lucky too.’

  ‘You’ve still got your knee.’
William looked solemnly at his stump, like a doctor. All he needed was the white coat and a pen to point out the damage to his students. He was close, head bent to examine the scar.

  Walt sighed, lay back again and covered his eyes with his forearm, waiting for the questions.

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Not so much now.’

  ‘It looks like you never had a leg there, the skin is healed up so good.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Walt lowered his arm. He’d stopped obsessing about the stump. It was there, deal with it. The physio had been tough, but it was something to pit himself against, and the lads in the centre . . . most had been worse off. The damage was colossal, but the comradeship, the black humour, had kept him going. It was only when he got home, when he realised he was on his own, that the hurting began.

  ‘It’s kind of all stitched up neat like you never had a leg. Skin’s amazing.’

  Walt swallowed, half smiling at the ceiling. A tear had gathered in the corner of his eye and it slid a wet trail down his cheek to the pillow. ‘Skin hides a lot,’ he whispered.

  ‘I’d better go back to bed. I thought I heard a noise. Did you hear it?’

  Walt propped himself up on his elbow to check his watch on the bedside table. ‘What time is it? Jesus, it’s nearly midnight. What are you doing out of your scratcher?’ He registered that the kid was in his pyjamas, his hair sleep-ruffled.

  ‘I just told you – I heard a noise.’

  ‘Probably your mad auntie stuffing kittens.’ He rolled over to the side of the bed, sat up and rubbed his eyes. ‘Forget that. I shouldn’t have said that. Go on up to bed.’

  William stood there, dumbly.

  ‘Scoot.’ Walt made walking movements with his fingers.

  ‘I’m scared.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I heard something. What if there’s someone in the house?’