Original Skin

by David Mark

  She reaches down and picks up something from the floor. “Oh, this was in the pocket.”

  She throws him the mobile phone.

  McAvoy had almost forgotten it. He colors as he looks at it.

  “Fancy model, that,” says Roisin, mid-yawn. “You going to try and get it working?”

  McAvoy runs his tongue around his mouth. Opens his mouth to justify his interest, and realizes Roisin does not need him to. Just nods and enjoys her smile.

  • • •

  AN HOUR LATER.

  An Irish voice, made snappy by tiredness.

  “He fecking is.”

  Roisin McAvoy is pronouncing that the man on the television is an arsehole.

  McAvoy looks up, wondering whom his wife is talking about. He has been lost in concentration, safe in focused hard work. He takes off his reading glasses and lets his eyes focus on the giant flat-screen TV that stands in the corner of the room. He gives a shudder. It’s the Thunderbird. Mr. Popple-head. Wanchorman. That Arsehole, to give him his full title. A Hull institution, he has somehow been elevated to the status of a local legend without appearing to have a single fan. He is a slight, creepy, weaselly-looking chap with a head too big for his slim frame and a mustache that has been shaved bootlace-thin and skin that has been sunbed-tanned to the color of damp sand. To McAvoy he always appears to be trying to remember whether he has left the gas on. How he got the gig presenting the local news has been open to speculation for some time, but there are suggestions it involved a complicated ritual and the sacrifice of a goat.

  “Oh, God, turn him over,” he says, wondering how he has managed to blank out the man’s voice until now.

  “Can’t,” she says. “Help!”

  Roisin is feeding Lilah, one breast flopping over the top of her nightie, poking out from the folds of her leopard-print dressing gown. “The buttons are over there,” she says in mock desperation, nodding at the remote control. It sits taunting her at the other end of the sofa. “I’m stuck.”

  McAvoy takes the hint. He has a tea tray on his knees, and the mud-caked mobile phone and an assortment of screwdrivers, cotton buds, and brushes laid out on the arm of the chair. He moves them all to one side and stands, padding barefoot to Roisin’s side. He retrieves the buttons and hands them to her. She takes them gratefully, but does not yet change the channel.

  “How’s it going?” she asks, nodding at his tools.

  McAvoy pulls a face. “I don’t know. It’s almost clean. I’ve got an adaptor and I can charge it through the laptop. The battery from my old Nokia should fit it if that one’s fried. SIM’s clean, so maybe. I don’t know. Wish I’d never found it.”

  Roisin laughs. “No, you don’t.”

  McAvoy returns to his chair, and Roisin, careful not to dislodge Lilah, fumbles with the controls. Before she can change the channel, Wanchorman introduces a story about changes to the makeup of the Police Authority.

  “How did it go?” asks Roisin, remembering.

  “It went,” says McAvoy. “The new chairman has some interesting ideas. He could go far.”

  “Sounds like you would like to throw him there.”

  McAvoy shakes his head. “I can’t make my mind up. I guess it makes no difference what I think.”

  Roisin laughs. “You don’t mean that, either.”

  McAvoy pokes his tongue out at her and turns his attention back to the broken phone, tuning himself out again as his wife makes herself comfortable and settles into her soap opera. He vaguely remembers that he has a cup of tea on the go, but figures that wherever he left it while bathing Fin and telling him his story, it will be too cold to bother about retrieving.

  Ten minutes later, satisfied that the phone is as clean as he can make it, he disappears through to the kitchen and out of the back door to the shed. It stands on the nine-slab patio, next to the sandbox and mini-trampoline, and its mingled scent of sawdust and poster paints, linseed oil and solder, reminds him of his father. He has to cling to such links. The two do not speak.

  McAvoy’s tools are neatly arranged on the wall, each piece of kit outlined in black marker so he can know instantly when something is not in its proper place. He pulls open a plastic drawer and roots through the collection of wires and leads. He has a habit of collecting random things too interesting to be thrown away, and a testament to the hardship of his youth.

  He picks up a handful of wires and carries them back to the living room, stopping on his way to retrieve his laptop from where it is charging in the kitchen. Were his hands not so full he would scoop out another handful of lemon meringue pie from the foil tray that sits next to the microwave, but before he can consider sticking his face in the dessert, Roisin’s voice cuts through from the living room.

  “Leave it. You’ve had two slices.”

  He comes back to the living room, his head bowed: busted.

  “I wasn’t going to have any more . . .”

  “Fibber.” She raises an eyebrow, catlike. “Am I not feeding you?”

  McAvoy looks down at his barrel torso, his chunky thighs and calves, bulging against his cutoff denim shorts and rugby shirt as if he were halfway through a metamorphosis into the Hulk.

  “It’s soooo good . . . ,” he says, a child demanding more cake.

  “I’ll make another one at the weekend. You can’t have everything you want all the time.”

  The way she says it is enough to make them both laugh without need for a reply.

  Some time later, after some gentle cursing and a skewered thumb, McAvoy has managed to create a makeshift adaptor out of an old phone cable and is plugging the phone into his laptop.

  “Here we go,” he says and holds down the ON switch on the keypad.

  Roisin, who is yawning and trying to keep her eyes open for the final credits of her program, can barely find the strength to pretend she is interested. “Working?” she asks as she shifts Lilah into a more comfortable position on her lap.

  McAvoy is too engrossed in fiddling with the laptop to reply. He has not used this software before, downloaded from a specialist site dealing in data retrieval and recommended by a colleague in the Technical Support Unit.

  “Aector?” His name ends in a slur.

  McAvoy looks up. Roisin is starting to doze off, sliding into a half-seated, half-lying-down position, her legs drawn up childlike beneath her. McAvoy carefully moves the computer to the side and crosses to her, taking Lilah from her unresisting grasp. His daughter wriggles and grimaces a little, letting out a tiny cry of disapproval at being disturbed, but McAvoy presses her to his chest and shushes her back to the lightest of sleeps. He slides back into the armchair and watches the screen as the phone’s memory is transferred to his desktop.

  “Look what Daddy did . . .”

  The flickering screen reflects on his daughter’s face, turning her apricot cheeks and smooth, almond-colored brow into a shimmering collage of images, words, numbers, names . . .

  Lilah wakes again. Reaches up and grabs her father’s ear. She holds it, as if deciding whether there is anything to be gained by giving it a yank, and then lets go as she feels the backs of his knuckles stroking her jaw.

  McAvoy props his daughter up so she can see the screen.

  “I think this might have worked,” he says softly in her ear, as if sharing a secret. She looks at the screen wide-eyed, puzzled but fascinated. McAvoy smiles, starts to read. “What have we got?”

  He clamps a hand over Lilah’s eyes. The movement is unexpected and Lilah gives a gasp of fright that turns into the motorbike rev that signals her intention to cry.

  On the sofa, Roisin sits bolt upright. She sees her husband with his hand over their daughter’s eyes, blushing furiously and signaling at the laptop with frantic nods of his head.

  “Jaysus . . .”

  Yawning, exhausted, too tired to sugarcoat, Roisi
n rolls onto the floor and crosses to him on her knees. She pulls Lilah from his grasp and holds her close, managing to croak a few words of song. With some rocking and a few soft shushes, Lilah settles, and Roisin achily maneuvers herself upright.

  “I’ll take her up,” she says, and there is more honey on her tongue than before. She meets her husband’s eyes and manages a bone-weary wink. It’s her apology for her sharpness, and McAvoy, never truly convinced of the source from which she draws her love for him, wishes she did not feel compelled to give it.

  When the door closes, he looks back at the laptop screen. At the handful of legible messages he can make out among a fog of scrambled numbers, letters, and computer code. The blush is getting redder. He feels the need to lock the door and pull the curtains tight.

  “Bloody hell . . .”

  A minute later Roisin slips back into the room. Her eyes find his and she raises her arms wide, indicating that she is all ears.

  “The phone . . . ,” says McAvoy.

  “You got it working? Well done.”

  “Yeah, but . . .” He stops. Pulls an impish face.

  “What?”

  “‘I want to take you inside me. Want to arch my back like a yawning cat, pushing back against your hardness, your manhood so deep inside me that it feels as if I am breathing for you . . .’”

  “Fecking hell!”

  Her tiredness momentarily forgotten, she all but runs across the room and throws herself over the arm of the chair and onto his lap, knocking loose the lead that connects the phone to the laptop. McAvoy doesn’t care. This is fun.

  “Is there more?” she asks, looking at the laptop.

  McAvoy raises a hand to point at the screen and then stops himself. His wife, bright, witty, beautiful, and gifted, had a traveler’s upbringing. Her schooling was sporadic and disjointed. She is not a comfortable reader, despite the patience with which he has helped her develop a love of words. Instead, he picks another phrase at random and reads it to her.

  “‘I am yours to abuse. I am a toy for your pleasure, a piece of meat to be pounded, clay to be molded—a waiting receptacle for your frustrations and rage . . .’”

  Roisin giggles and presses herself against him. They are two teenagers reading a friend’s diary; naughty, wrong, and loving it.

  “‘Want your breath against me, the cord biting into my skin . . .’”

  “She’s good,” says Roisin appreciatively. “Bet he bloody loved it.”

  “‘Want my mind to sculpt your face; your identity to remain the desperate fantasy that first brought your tongue to my shoulders, your hand to my cock . . .’”

  McAvoy stops short, and Roisin catches her breath. She gives a snort.

  “It’s two blokes?”

  McAvoy catches himself pulling a face, and a guilty blush thunders from his brow to his neck. His liberal self-loathing grabs a handful of his guts.

  “Well, there’s nothing wrong with . . .”

  Roisin is giggling. “You were loving it,” she teases.

  “So were you,” he protests, and then accepts there is no way to escape this with any dignity, so just starts laughing and buries his face in her chest.

  “Did it get you going?” she asks seductively, trying to get a hand inside his shirt.

  “No!” Then, sheepishly, “A bit.”

  “Me too,” she says, and presses her face to his.

  “SLUTTY,” he’d texted, when pressed for a preference on how she should dress. “A dirty girl.”

  Suzie hadn’t really known how to interpret the instruction, but figured it didn’t include her Disney scarf or Care Bears rucksack.

  Still, she has enjoyed playing dress-up, and her reflection pleased her when she looked in the mirror on the back of the wardrobe door. She has managed to find an outfit in her explosion of clothes that, to her at least, qualifies her as vaguely whorish.

  She is shivering in a short blue dress and a secondhand leather jacket that reaches to her bare knees. Her hair is tied back and her makeup is thick enough to ensure there will be no facial damage in the event of a sudden fall.

  The high heels her new playmate had insisted upon are on the passenger seat of the Fiat Panda. The stiletto points kept getting caught in the mat when she pressed the accelerator, so had been whipped off at the last set of traffic lights. She is now driving barefoot, unsure whether or not she likes this sensation of damp dirt and metal on the soles of her feet.

  It is a miserable night. The rain is a damp net stretched across the black road. It does not seem to fall, but instead hangs, ghostlike and bone-soakingly omnipresent, in the chill, oil-dark air.

  Suzie wishes Simon were here. She can picture him with no effort of will; can see him now, smoking a roll-up in the passenger seat and telling her she looks beautiful.

  Such a wish is nothing new. Suzie’s yearning for his return has become almost a prayer. But tonight it is more through some vague sense of unease over her safety than her usual eagerness to giggle and chat with her best friend.

  It’s almost nine p.m. This is her third visit to this location, but the first time she has driven here alone.

  She remembers Simon’s message when she first told him she had heard there was a popular spot for couples and singles on the coast road up to Bridlington.

  “Coniston rest stop—where dreams are made.”

  Ten miles from the city center, between two midsize villages, a little side road has become, in certain circles at least, notorious. Though she does not particularly like the word, it has made the papers as a “dogging spot.” Here singles meet, and couples put on participatory shows for the handful of guys who like to spend their spare time sitting in their cars in the dark: each hoping the next set of headlights in the rearview mirror represents a blow job rather than the police.

  “What are you doing? Seriously, Suze?”

  She asks herself the question as she slowly maneuvers the tiny, battered car into the isolated pitch-dark of the entrance to the rest stop.

  It is at least a mile from the nearest house.

  There is a nervousness, an excitement, in Suzie’s stomach and thighs, but to call the feeling arousal would be inaccurate. In truth she does not do this for the sex. Not really. It is perhaps just to prove herself alive. It is to be somebody who does not just fantasize, but who makes things happen. She does it because she thinks it is weak to deny oneself excitement.

  In her years with her fiancé, sex was simplistic and routine. Life was okay. Middle-of-the-road. Safe. When her heart was broken, Suzie lost herself. Did things she could never have previously imagined. Found reserves of lust and rage in equal measure, and made mistakes that catapulted her into a new way of being. She engaged in one-night stands and office flings: sweaty unions in nightclub toilets and in the backs of cars. She read and watched erotica. Bought herself toys with which to pleasure herself when she could not find a partner. Made it clear when starting conversations that she was not just a tease. That she was willing to play.

  One such rendezvous introduced her to an attractive older man, who spotted in her a hunger for the unknown. He had introduced her to the websites and forums where like-minded people were able to enjoy grown-up fun. And she had thrown herself into the life. Had quickly come to view ordinary sex as somehow lukewarm and insipid in comparison. Had so grown to love the sordid nastiness of these couplings and triplings that she found herself turning down nights out with potential boyfriends in exchange for late-night assignations with strangers.

  Simon was the only friend who knew about it all. Something had happened, shortly after they met, that bonded them together in a friendship without judgment. Both were free to be themselves, whatever that might be. They joined in each other’s games and laughed about their adventures. She could not talk to her other mates about such things. Could not stand to be judged or, worse, analyzed. Would not
want to hear their aghast musings on what hole in her heart or bump in her brain forced her to subject herself to such abuses and degradation. She does not really want to think about any of that. Just knows that it makes her feel as if she were living life in color after so many years in black-and-white.

  “Wish you were here, Si. What am I bloody doing?”

  There are two cars in the rest stop. A large estate car is parked up to Suzie’s right in the shadow of the mound of shingle and earth that blocks the area from view and gives it such appeal. Its lights, and engine, are on.

  In the distance she can spot the shape of another car. It is dark and bulky, lights off, its occupant obscured.

  Suzie has been halfheartedly listening to the radio. There has been some sort of accident down at St. Andrew’s Quay. A police van has been petrol-bombed and two officers have been taken to hospital. She wonders if it was the speed-camera van and rather hopes that it was.

  She takes a deep breath. Parks up on the opposite side of the rest stop to the estate car. Wonders who she is about to fuck.

  In the beam of her headlights she can make out that the driver is quite tall. From this remove she guesses he is middle-aged, but cannot be sure. In truth, it doesn’t really matter.

  She closes her eyes and tries to calm herself. She has done more devilish things than this. She has played more daring games. But in the past Simon had been there to hold her hand.

  “God, I miss you.”

  The first few weeks without him she had had no appetite for such things. She didn’t log on to any of the websites that used to bring her such fun. Didn’t send a filthy message or put a single kiss at the end of an e-mail. But as grief became bearable, so desire began to return. There were tears when she attended her first swinger party without him, but they had not flown so freely as to inhibit her. The night had gone well. She had enjoyed herself. Had made new friends. Had promised to return for the next gathering. Had even told today’s playmate how much she hoped he would join her.

  The phone on the passenger seat beeps and Suzie jumps. She picks it up and reads the message.