Under My Skin

by Alison Jameson

  ‘How dare you?’ he begins and he’s completely out of breath. ‘How dare you?’ and he just puffs the same words out again and then I see he’s waving our letter in his hand.

  ‘Dear Mr O’Grady…’ he begins and he’s so wound up and gasping I’m afraid he might just collapse.

  ‘Dear Mr O’Grady, we are writing to complain about the state of our accommodation. For three weeks now,’ and here he takes a step towards me, ‘three weeks – it is NOT – three weeks’ – and he goes back to reading again, ‘for three weeks we have been asking you to fix our cooker. Are you aware that this is a danger to our health and the health of the other tenants in 102? In addition to that the bath is blocked again and we are having problems with the family downstairs – there is a bad smell coming from their rooms.’

  And this part came from Doreen. ‘If things are not rectified immediately we will withhold our rent.’

  And then he’s off with the ‘How dare you?’ and the ‘How dare you?’ again. There is a half-built mews in the back garden. The Smells downstairs have told us that he’s run out of money. We probably shouldn’t have mentioned withholding our rent – especially when we already owe him more than three weeks.

  ‘Do not write to me,’ he concludes in one big town crier’s peal. ‘Do NOT write to ME,’ and then he goes off, Mr Anger and Repetition, back down the stairs again. If Doreen was here we would lie down on the floor and laugh ourselves sick over it. And then we would sit up and look at each other and I would say the same thing I say, every day, ‘We need to get out of here, Doreen.’

  More than anything I want this job. Not just to have some more money but to have my very own desk and phone and pen. And I think Larry will be later than five today. I guess he’ll make it to our place at around nine.

  When Doreen comes out of the bathroom she tells me the spider is still there. Then we both squeeze in together and look down at him and he is really huge.

  ‘He’s not from around here,’ she says.

  ‘Where do you think he’s from?’

  ‘South America,’ she replies and then before I can even speak she leans down really close to it and shouts, ‘Hola! Como se va?’ But still the spider does not move.

  Then we hear a loud bang outside and when we lean out the bedroom window we can see that the landlord is back and has climbed up on the mews roof. He’s drunk and shouting and he seems to be attacking the house with an axe.

  Downstairs the Smells are all out on the lawn.

  ‘Mr O’Grady… Mr O’Grady… please come down. You will hurt yourself. Mr O’Grady… please come down.’

  And all we can hear is our landlord screaming curses and crying like a baby.

  ‘Doreen,’ I whisper.

  ‘I know,’ she replies and she is beginning to laugh. ‘We have got to get out of here.’

  In the sitting room we watch the TV with the volume turned down. She is eating a bag of white bonbons and I am eating a chocolate frog. The front door bangs shut and then Larry puts his head around the door. He kisses the top of my head and slides down into my armchair.

  ‘Anything happen today?’ he asks. Doreen points the remote control at the TV but the channel does not change.

  ‘Not much,’ I tell him. He puts his arm around me and kisses my hair. ‘Made Pasta Putana. Watched some TV.’

  On Wednesday I take my grandmother to the swimming pool. Her name is Djuna Ethel Hendleberg Swann. She is eighty-three years old and usually we spell her first name with a simple ‘J’. In 1935, Juna swam the English Channel. She wanted to beat the record set by Gertrude Ederle, the first woman ever. But it took Juna sixteen hours and forty-nine minutes. Now she says it takes her that long just to get up the stairs. She wears a purple hat that is shaped like a mushroom and when we walk in the park, she runs her stick along the rails. Once when we were in a hotel she got stuck, with a large crate of broccoli, in the service lift. I have to watch her all the time but it’s not any trouble. She is happiest when I put her make-up on and she loves blue eyeshadow and fire-engine-red nails.

  At the swimming pool she undresses very slowly. She has a black and white striped bathing costume and she looks a bit like a zebra stepping across the room. She wears earplugs and goggles and a tightly fitted blue Speedo cap. Her glasses have to be inside her handbag before she puts her goggles on. Her clothes have to be folded really neatly before her earplugs go in. Her teeth have to be wrapped in a tissue before her swimming cap goes on – and all these things are like a road map or a trail of breadcrumbs to take her back home. Then she begins to move carefully from the locker room to the pool. Sometimes she gets confused when there are too many doors and she always wants to go back out the same door she came in. So I steer her the other way and when she smiles suddenly, she puts one hand shyly up to her face. She looks different without her glasses and teeth, a bit like another person underneath herself. Her white hair is gone under the swimming cap and it turns her into a mad pixie thing. ‘This is one way to clear the kids out of the pool,’ I tell her and that never fails to make her laugh. I warn her about the steps and stay really close to her and then she stands very still for a moment and with one slow, steady glide, she launches herself in. She can still pound out a few good strokes. ‘The American Crawl’, she calls it. The same one she used in 1935.

  She turns over then and tries the back crawl.

  ‘Now you’re just showing off,’ I tell her.

  ‘I never lost it,’ she says.

  Outside the spray flies into the air as the breakers crash up and down and then into one another again. Every week she points out the pink church where her best friend got married and then we take the slope down on to the sand and begin to walk slowly, her arm linked through mine. There is a black cannon on the promenade. A surfer’s shop. A hut that sells fishing tackle. A giant plastic ice cream cone. Vertigo is on the first corner into the main street and opposite is my place of work – the vintage record shop.

  ‘Which would you like?’ I ask her. ‘A cone or some tea?’

  ‘Neither,’ she says flatly and then, ‘We stayed in the Atlantic Hotel once.’ Her eyes rest on a row of new shops. ‘Somewhere over there.’

  We walk to the first pub and ask for tea. Inside there are men and women sitting on bar stools and children running around the room. We find a quiet corner where there are old-fashioned road signs and a white chamber pot hangs over our heads. We sit away from everyone, where it is peaceful and we are up on a high cushioned form. We sit side by side and we are quiet, our cheeks still fresh with the sea wind. The tea arrives. A giant silver pot. Two big mugs. Pink and blue.

  ‘It is the best tea I have ever had.’

  Every Wednesday I say this and every Wednesday she smiles at the size of the mugs.

  ‘People are very generous here,’ she says. The rain begins to spatter on the windows beside us.

  ‘Let’s stay here for ever, Juna,’ I want to say, but she is looking at the pictures on the walls and reading the names of the old street signs. I want to tell her that I will look after her. That I will take good care of her – no matter what. But how can anyone suddenly say this? She would say she does not need me to care for her. That she likes her life the way it is. Living on the farm with a big cat jumping out of every chair. And how will she go in the end? I have begun to worry about this – and still in old age she moves and breathes all around me. On the beach, she walks head down into the wind, and the only part of our lives that feels safe, and has any kind of certainty, is the sea wind, and the giant mugs and the silver pot of tea.

  Bandhu calls again and this time, Doreen is at home. He brings her a giant Elizabeth Arden make-up set and a bottle of Campari for Larry and me.

  ‘We can’t accept this,’ I tell her.

  ‘It’s an Indian custom,’ Doreen replies. ‘It would be very rude to refuse.’ Then I call Larry and ask him if he has ever heard about an Indian custom that involves Campari and Elizabeth Arden and he says, ‘It doesn’t sound very Hi
ndu to me.’

  My fear of water began in the shower. It took a whole day to install, my pappy, my brother Daniel and me. There were phone calls from neighbours who asked, ‘Is it in yet?’ without saying their names or even ‘Hello’ first. The plumber was stopped and asked questions at our shop door. Dogs raced up and down the street and then barked back over their shoulders like they didn’t care, but they did. We were the first house in the town to have one and we boarded it like a spaceship.

  ‘Stand at the back,’ Pappy said. And then, ‘Are you ready?’ and without waiting for an answer he turned the water on. No one told me what it would be like. That I would be blasted by sudden jets of water. That they would hit me on the face and take the wind out of me. I was six and full of confidence then. I could sing every advertising jingle from the TV and when I called into Farrell’s clothes shop I did my Irish dancing up and down their floor.

  In the shower there was steam and pounding water and noise and no way to escape. I couldn’t breathe and I turned my face into the corner and the water pounded my back. I turned around to face it but there was no air anywhere. I gave in quickly. I didn’t know how to have a shower so I caved in and sank down on to the floor.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Pappy said and he reached in to turn the water off and I climbed out, humiliated, wearing a large floral shower cap and soap on a rope. Daniel looked out from under a white towel and held his hands out towards me. It was a gesture he used to show exasperation, confusion, annoyance, except now he used it and gave that funny infectious laugh of his as well. There was no half-way mark with Daniel’s laugh. It was either the funniest thing ever or not at all. Most of the time his own laughter forced him back into a chair.

  Matilda knows all about my fear of water. She also knows where to get the best hotdog in New York. When Larry is working late I go to the Internet Café and we chat. She’s got a big job with the New York Post and I’ve already told her that I work in an advertising agency. When she asked what I do there I typed in ‘Managing Director’ and sent it back to her and she replied with one word: ‘Wow!’

  The funny thing about emailing Matilda is that it’s easier to tell her things I still can’t tell anyone else. I think it’s because I have never actually seen her so I can’t imagine her eyes or if there is a smile or a frown on her face. One night I sat down and told her all about Pappy and Daniel and when I pressed ‘Send’ I thought I would never hear from her again. Then her reply came back with a ‘ping’ and the screen flashed on and it seemed to light up my life. She only wrote one line back but I printed it out and I still keep it in my bag.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  That was all she said but it means an awful lot to me.

  Sometimes if you blame yourself for something – and you keep it inside like a secret – and then someone says, ‘It wasn’t your fault’ – it seems to save your life.

  The best hotdog in New York incidentally is at Gray’s Papaya on 71st and Broadway and it’s also the cheapest.

  Larry is standing near the jukebox. One eye is black and half closed and there is a golden light on his face. He makes me a club sandwich, just the way I like it, toasted rye bread, fresh tomatoes, potato chips and sour cream on the side. I sit at the counter and eat very slowly and in between cracking eggs he smiles and winks over at me. It takes me an hour to eat everything and he always laughs about this. Sometimes I think I don’t have enough teeth or else the ones I have are not sharp enough.

  ‘Baby…’ he says and he is pretending to be sad now. ‘You’re eating all our rent.’ Then he sits down smiling and starts to smoke. When he offers me one I say, ‘No thanks – that’s last month’s gas.’ He goes to the freezer and finds two beers and then he hands one to me.

  Larry’s eyes are very dark and he has wild eyebrows and long bristling lashes and he is more than six feet tall – but when I think about Larry I don’t see any of that because there are other things about him that are secret and more important to me.

  He has a scar, a thin white line just over his top lip and curling down and around his mouth. Sometimes it stands out like a whiplash on his bright tanned face. A dog bit him as a child and it gave Larry a slightly crooked Cupid’s bow. And when he laughs, only I can see that one of his teeth folds slightly over another, and when he is smiling like that, he is really lovely to me. His hair is dark with a slight curl, the kind of forest you can almost hear grow. He reads something once and he remembers it for ever and he sees things about me – that I can’t even see. He hates people who are mean with their money and he loves Frank Sinatra and he loves New York.

  When the last couple leaves he turns the sign and Vertigo is steady and finally empty at ten minutes after three. He smiles at my silence and changes the record on the jukebox. Then he leans on one elbow and looks into my face. When he sits down again his leg leans and rests against mine and I feel his life and his warmth moving towards me, the nearness of it, his golden inner glow.

  On nights like this he tells me about his family and the kind of boy he was growing up – and how his mother is a strong-willed and sometimes angry woman; and how his father had a stroke and lost his voice – and all of his hair. Now he uses a little notebook and pen to write everything down. He tells me how they sent him to university and what a disappointment he is to his family because he left a degree in economics to be a short-order cook.

  But tonight things are suddenly different – because Larry looks right into my eyes and out of nowhere there are four really awful words.

  ‘We need to talk.’

  Yesterday Matilda asked me who my favourite New Yorkers are and I replied, ‘Woody Allen. Art Garfunkel and Meryl Streep.’ Then she sent me hers – ‘Eleanor Roosevelt, Walt Whitman and Benjamin Cardoso.’ The last person is a Supreme Court Judge. Larry told me and now I feel too embarrassed to email her for a week.

  Outside it is beginning to rain and inside my whole world is falling apart.

  ‘The thing is…’ Larry says and then – lucky for me – the telephone begins to ring. He looks at it and so do I and we both know it is probably ‘Mr Friendly’, the debt collector, again. We listen and count the rings and then Larry gets up and bolts the double doors.

  He sits down again and says, ‘Listen…’ and this time I interrupt. He looks like a cartoon character in his white chef’s coat, with his black eye and his favourite beanie hat.

  ‘I got you something,’ and I pass the black eye patch over the table. He smiles at this. A real Larry smile. And in that second everything seems to change. He takes off his little hat and puts the pirate patch on. Then he leans over and puts one hand on my head and through my hair I can feel the weight and the warmth of his hand. He swallows and sighs and I am thinking, ‘OK, here it comes.’

  ‘It’s like this…’ he says, and outside three girls begin tapping on the glass door.

  ‘We’re closed,’ Larry shouts but they are not going away.

  So I get up and open the door a crack.

  ‘Could you go away?’ I ask them. ‘I’m being dumped.’

  ‘Oh!’ they all reply together and then they say, ‘Sorry!’ and they hurry off down the wet street.

  When I come back to the table Larry has lit a candle and turned off the lights.

  ‘There will never be anyone like you,’ he says, and then in a very soft voice he says, ‘Ever’, under his breath. I feel as though I should say, ‘Thanks’, or something but inside I am packing up all my feelings and thoughts.

  And then he says my name and what a little name it is – and what a meaning and it has never felt further from the truth – but he says it again, whispering it now, and his eyes are filling up.

  ‘Will you marry me, Hope?’

  Yesterday I looked up dyslexia and wrote it into my notebook.

  n. A learning disorder marked by severe difficulty in recognizing and understanding written language, leading to spelling and writing problems. It is not caused by low intelligence or brain damage.
r />   When Doreen read the part about brain damage, she looked at me and asked, ‘Are you absolutely sure?’

  This morning Larry makes Eggs Benedict with cinnamon toast and blueberry pancakes. For lunch he cooks fresh scallops and roast figs with garlic cream and Parma ham. For dinner he feeds me pink fillet steak with black pepper and cream. We drink wine, three bottles, and make each other laugh. He closes early and tells everyone he meets, ‘From now on I’m cooking for my wife.’

  Mr Costello stands with his back to the fireplace. There are four candles on the piano and his wife stretches her fingers a little so she is ready to play. They have moved the yellow couch back and closed the curtains and the dark wooden blinds. For three days the rain has fallen and now on a wet Tuesday night everyone stands in a loose circle around the bride and groom. The air smells of warm apple pie and on a table near the window there are eight bottles of Heineken and a jug of mulled wine. Doreen is of course my bridesmaid. She is wearing a white tennis skirt and her nice black suede pumps. Larry has a black top hat he found at Oxfam and the pirate’s eye patch. I am wearing my leopard print coat and my favourite red Converse runners. And Mrs Costello is standing by and smiling, ready to turn the music up.

  Juna arrives and gives me away. This takes two steps on their carpet – one foot landing on a big red rose and the second on some giant green leaves. We did not want a church wedding because me and Larry don’t believe in God or any of that stuff. One day I went into Vertigo and we’ve been together ever since. In our world everything happens by accident – and so we asked Mr Costello if he would read out the vows and if we could get married in their flat downstairs.