The noise accompanied him on the way down to breakfast next morning. Halfway down the stairs he stopped and said to Melanie, ‘Can you hear that?’
She looked at him blankly. ‘Hear what?’
To him it sounded like someone very close to his ear was screwing tissue paper into balls. ‘I don’t know. A kind of rustling sound.’
‘I can’t hear anything except the rumbling of my stomach. I can’t believe I’m still hungry after the meal last night.’
The waiter who had served them at dinner greeted them in the dining room. If anything he was even more attentive to Melanie than the night before. She responded to his attentions by being less coy and more openly flirtatious, a fact that was not lost on Sean who ate his meal in an expanding morose silence, watching the waiter with hooded eyes. The table for one had already been used.
Sean had dressed for their day at the beach in a light cotton shirt and baggy chinos, but the clothes could have been made of wire wool. They scraped his body mercilessly, making him itch and shift uncomfortably in his seat. When they went back to their room to collect their towels he stripped off and searched through the wardrobe, looking for something more comfortable to wear. He settled for a tee shirt and shorts, but as they walked along the promenade looking for an empty spot on the already crowded beach his clothes were starting to irritate him again.
They eventually found a space, laid out their towels and settled down to enjoy the baking mid-summer sun that poured down from a cloudless sky. Melanie stripped down to a black bikini and handing a bottle of sun cream to Sean said, ‘Do my back can you darling?’
The tide was out, the sea a silver strip in the distance. Close to the water’s edge children were playing, their whoops and screams of delight reaching his ears, almost drowning out the incessant whispering sound. Almost, but not quite, it was as if someone was standing just behind him rubbing sheets of paper together.
He took the sun cream from her, poured a little into the palm of his hand and started to smooth it over his wife’s back. He was conscious it was the first real physical contact of the honeymoon. The itching of his clothes was becoming intolerable, and with hands greasy with lotion he pulled off his tee shirt, dropping it onto the towel next to him.
‘You missed a bit,’ Melanie said, reaching over her shoulder and pointing to a dry spot on her back with a finely manicured finger. She was so lovely, devoid of any blemishes; he would try hard every day to ensure he reached her expectations.
‘Sorry,’ he said and squirted another pool of cream into his hand.
As he massaged her he thought about the boyishly handsome waiter and the fact there was a definite attraction between him and his wife. He knew it was only a hotel flirtation kind of thing, nothing real, but in the wider context how could he compete with such youthful virility? He was forty-six, possessor of a body that, while it might not have gone to seed, was certainly the victim of neglect. The incipient paunch he had noticed around his middle in his late thirties was now an unmistakeable bulge, and his muscle tone was suffering the ravages of age, and lack of use. His skin seemed to hang on his body like an ill-fitting suit. Damn, but it was so uncomfortable today. Whatever was irritating him wasn’t letting go.
‘Ow! Careful!’ Melanie pulled away from him.
He was jerked back to reality and noticed the blood on her back. There was also blood on his fingernails. There were four small half-moon cuts on Melanie’s skin, just below the strap of her bikini. His fingernails had done the damage, where he had rubbed too hard, too intensely, and his nails had punctured her. It was as if he had been trying to burrow under her skin. He realised she was crying, and immediately began to comfort her.
‘Oh my God!’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ He pulled a tissue from the beach-bag and dabbed the blood away. The damage wasn’t serious; the cuts were already closing, the blood clotting in the summer heat.
She kissed him gently on the lips. ‘It was an accident. But put your shirt back on. You already look like a lobster.’ She looked closer. ‘Good God, you’ve already started to peel!’
He glanced down at his arms. It was true. The skin was separating into papery layers and peeling away. ‘I think I’d better get out of the sun,’ he said.
Mel lay down on her stomach as he got to his feet. She squinted up at him as he pulled on his tee shirt. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going to find some shade. You stay here and enjoy the sun. I’ll only be over there.’ He indicated a beachfront café with shading umbrellas crouching over the white trestle tables.
‘I hate to think of you by yourself on our honeymoon,’ she said.
‘I won’t be on my own...’ he started to say, but she had already turned back onto her stomach before he could finish his sentence about the dozens of other people already at the café.
He found a small table for one, bought a cold drink and sat with a clear view of the beach. Shielding his eyes from the sun he searched the bodies for Melanie, finally locating her, still lying prone absorbing the rays.
He was worried about the appearance of his arms. The skin was peeling freely and they looked unsightly. He kept them folded, hiding most of the damage, checking to see no one was looking before taking a swig of his drink. He was content to sit there in the shade of the umbrella, letting the day drift by, getting small amusements from some of the antics of the holiday makers and day-trippers, like the fat woman struggling beneath a large multi-coloured towel, trying to don her bathing costume. It reminded him of his family holidays with his mum and dad, and sometimes when they took grandmother, after granddad had died. From time to time he glanced back at Melanie but apart from rolling over onto her back to toast her stomach, or glancing at a few pages of the latest Booker winner, she was unmoving.
Then he noticed the waiter from the hotel walking along the promenade with a couple of friends. They were drinking from beer cans and laughing loudly, making lewd comments about some of the women on the beach. All the women on the beach it seemed. The waiter said something to his colleagues and peeled away from them, hopping down onto the sand and weaving his way through the sunbathers.
Sean drew in his breath as the waiter stopped a yard from where Mel lay and crouched down to speak with her. It could of course be totally innocent – Melanie had never given him any cause before to doubt her fidelity – but there was something about her body language that told him this time was different. They were married now in any case, surely that would make it different.
She sat up and pushed her sunglasses up into her hair, slicking it away from her face. Whatever he was saying to her was obviously very funny as she threw back her head and laughed with the kind of abandon she rarely showed in Sean’s company. Not that he could remember anyway. The waiter dropped down into a space on the towel next to her. He was describing something, gesturing towards the sea, making her laugh again. Sean was about to leave the table and go down to where they were sitting when he saw her hand something to the waiter.
What followed was a repeat of his own actions earlier as the waiter poured sun-cream into his hand and started to smooth it over Melanie’s back. Sean sat back in his seat, picked up his can of drink and took a long swallow, not caring now who saw his peeling arms. He was filled with a curious mixture of anger and arousal. Watching the handsome young man massaging his wife’s back was stirring echoes of a previous evening, memories of the evening he knew he hadn’t won the youthful Melanie, but rather Phil had. Younger, funnier, and the one she had let massage her neck and shoulders in the pub after the baseball match in the park. Self-loathing and disgust swept over him; he hurled the half-finished can into the rubbish bin and walked quickly back to the hotel.
By the time he reached their room at the hotel his flesh was screaming. Hot wires were being drawn across his body, searing and burning; the rustling noise in his head was becoming intolerable. It was now hissing in his ears – furtive whispers, almost fully formed words. He stripped off his shirt and cried ou
t. The skin was hanging in long wispy strips from his chest and the flesh beneath was a livid purplish red. In front of the mirror in the bathroom he examined the damage. It wasn’t only confined to his chest – his legs were peeling badly and when he checked his back it was in a similar state. Yet, now he was naked, there was no pain.
He’d had sunburn before. As a child his parents had taken him to Newquay for the week and on the first day there he’d stayed in the sun too long and got horribly burnt. The pain of the raw scorched skin was still etched in his memory; but that had felt nothing like this.
He took a piece of the peeled skin and rubbed it between his finger and thumb; it was dry but felt greasy. The strip of skin was attached to a point just below his breastbone. He tugged it and with a whispering sigh it pulled away from his chest, tearing in a line down to his navel where it finally detached. He tried it again with a strip on his arm. Again the sigh, and he realised with horror the noises that had been haunting him for the past few hours were coming from him – coming from his skin.
Melanie came back from the beach several hours later to find Sean sitting on the balcony of their room, leafing through a pile of magazines, and gazing out over the town. ‘I don’t know how you can wear all those clothes,’ she said. ‘It’s still scorching out there.’
He was dressed in grey slacks with a white shirt buttoned to the neck and cuffs. He couldn’t let her see the state of his skin. His torso resembled a side of beef draped in a ragged and torn net curtain, and his legs and arms fared little better. So far his hands and face were relatively normal – he’d noticed a slight peeling of the skin around his nose, but compared to the rest of his body it was negligible. The rusting, whispering noise was constant now as his skin cracked and rippled under his clothes, and the whispering was no longer a string of amorphous sounds drifting past his ears. Now they had shape, were whispered words, and it was clear to him what was happening. The pain he was enduring as the skin split and tore was nothing compared to the pain of crushed ambitions and shattered dreams. It was a worthwhile sacrifice; if he had to suffer, and there seemed little alternative, then it was at least in a worthy cause.
Later, as he readied himself for dinner, Melanie lay on the bed, a wet flannel on her forehead, pleading a migraine. ‘You go on down without me,’ she said. ‘I must have laid in the sun too long.’
In the dining room he occupied a table in the window so he could look out at the remnants of the day. It also kept him away from the single table, where a man was sitting, his back to Sean, although he knew now who he was.
Sean ordered steak from a pretty waitress with apricot skin and a warm smile. Of the waiter there was no sign, but then Sean wasn’t expecting to see him this evening. He guessed he would be otherwise occupied, flaunting his fake foreign phrases, and his practised skin rubbing techniques.
He ate the steak, watched life pass by, as he’d watched it pass him by all his life, then he slipped the steak knife into his pocket and hoped the waitress wouldn’t notice when she came to collect his plate. She didn’t seem that attentive.
After another sickly dessert and three cups of very strong coffee he said a warm goodnight to the waitress and went back to the room. The man at the table was still there. As Sean reached the exit he turned to look at the man’s face, confirming his suspicion that Mel calling him by the wrong name hadn’t been accidental, or even a coincidence.
At the top of the stairs he paused, ducking out of sight as the door to his and Melanie’s room opened and the handsome young waiter stepped out into the corridor. The young man checked his watch, smiled broadly, punched the air, then trotted down the corridor to the service lift and pressed the call button. Sean waited for him to step inside the lift before he approached the room and slid his key into the lock.
Melanie was sitting up in bed reading a magazine. She barely glanced around as Sean entered the room and took off his jacket. ‘What was he doing in our room?’ He said to her evenly.
‘Who?’ Melanie said, still not looking up from her magazine, but he thought her cheeks flushed.
‘The waiter. I saw him coming out of our room,’ he said. Tell the truth, he was thinking. Just tell the truth. We can start again. You can tell me I am good enough, I can be enough, and we can start afresh, a new beginning with the past stripped away and discarded.
‘Oh, him. I called room service. He brought me up a cup of tea.’
Sean glanced across at the cup on the bedside table. The tan liquid had formed a skin and looked cold. He nodded slowly. ‘I see. That explains it then.’
But it didn’t explain the fading rash on her chest – it was known as a passion rash by the girls in the circle of friends he’d hung around with during his youth. It also didn’t explain the pale pink mark at the base of her throat where lips had attached themselves with hungry passion. But it was her explanation and he would accept it… for now. He wanted to be a good husband, and that meant trusting his wife. He sat on his side of the bed and switched on the TV.
Later, as he turned off the television after the late evening news, he realised he hadn’t heard a word of it. His skin was making so much noise now it was drowning out every other sound in the room. Even when Melanie said goodnight to him and switched off her bedside light he’d barely heard her. It was as if she was speaking from another room. All he heard was the ebb and flow of his whispering skin, the dark rustling of detachment as skin parted company with flesh and slipped down inside his clothing in greasy strips
He pushed himself off the bed, quietly shuffled into the bathroom, and shook off his clothes. Some of the skin came away, stuck to the inside of his shirt, and when he pulled off his trousers he almost screamed as the skin around his genitals ripped and tore.
In the glared light from the lamp above the mirror he stared down at his body, listening as another small patch of skin detached itself from his stomach with a sibilant sigh and fell to the floor. There was still so far to go. So much of his skin was intact, still covering the crimson flesh, still providing him with a mask with which to fool the world. It was happening too slowly, much too slowly. How could he change, how could he become new if so much of the old remained?
With faltering steps - the pain was really quite intense - he hobbled across to the bed and stared down at Mel, who was lying with her thumb poised at her lips, enhancing the lie of her innocence. He picked up his pillow and laid it across her face, and when she stirred and tried to push it away he flopped on top of it, using all his weight to bear down, pressing his body to hers in a mockery of the love making they had not yet shared.
It took less than a minute, but he laid there for a further ten while his skin sighed in exaltation. He was so close now, so close to a new beginning, a new start. He took the pillow away from Melanie’s face, smiling slightly at the surprised expression in her eyes. With his fingertips he closed the lids, marvelling at how peaceful she looked – how calm. She was as perfect in death, as Phil had been. He had been messier, resisting more energetically as befitted his physical abilities, but eventually greater age and experience, together with the knife, had prevailed. From his comforting of Melanie had grown their love and the marriage, so the sacrifice was worthwhile.
He went across to his jacket lying across a chair where he’d left it, took the steak knife from the pocket, and returned to the bed.
Sitting down next to his wife’s serene body he slid the blade of the knife into his thigh, fascinated to see the silver steel move under the thin translucency of his skin. Soon he would be free of the bonds, free of the masks. There wasn’t much skin left now, and what remained was membrane thin, pink and watery, as if it didn’t want to be skin any more.
He laid the knife next to the telephone as he dialled room service and asked if the young foreign speaking waiter wouldn’t mind bringing him a sandwich.
He was surprised, but not shocked, when the door opened almost immediately, and the man from the dining room entered; unfinished business naturally.
Accompanied by the whispered, exultant sighs of his expectant skin he began to stand, knife in hand, for the penultimate act in his resurrection.
A VICTORIAN POT DRESSER
The girl took a deep breath to steady her nerves before approaching the room. Sixteen years old and dressed in a simple white cotton shift, she looked virginal, which appearance was accurate. Her long brown hair had been washed and brushed until it shone in the gaslight. Tonight she had been allowed a bath and, as she lifted her hand to knock on the door, she could smell the delicately perfumed soap on her skin.
Luxuries such as baths were rare in her home, an orderly institution run with a pious hand by her father, the village rector, who preached that cleanliness came from within, and only by absolute devotion to God would purity be attained.
But the entire day had been special. Woken at five o’clock, when all the other family members were still asleep, the rector’s wife, married shortly after the death of the girl’s natural mother, had taken her downstairs to the kitchen, and, instead of the usual breakfast of thin broth supplemented with a wedge of dry bread, she had been given two boiled eggs, with bread cut thinly and spread liberally with butter. This, she thought, as she dipped a piece of bread into the creamy yellow yolk, is true extravagance. Since then she had been spoiled to an extent that exceeded all her birthday treats, and surpassed even the extravagances occasionally enjoyed at Christmas.
Now it was early evening, with the shimmers of dusk masking the onset of darkness. She rapped on the stout oak door with her knuckles.
‘Enter,’ said a voice from within.
She opened the door and stepped into the gloomy interior of the rector’s study.
McQueen led me through the labyrinthine aisles between the furniture, stacked high in his cavernous warehouse.
‘I think I might just have something to appeal to you,’ he said, glancing back over his shoulder at me.
Falling Into Heaven Page 4
