Beneath the Skin (7 page)

“What do
I
think? Well, but I—that’s your job, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. What did the other letter say?”

“It was horrible so I threw it away. It had some weird stuff about what I ate. And there was something about being afraid of dying. It sounded as if it was someone who had been spying on me.”

“Or somebody who knows you?”

“Knows me?”

“It might be a joke. Don’t you think you might have some friend who’s doing this for a laugh?”

I hardly knew what to say.

“Someone’s threatening to kill me. I don’t see any joke.”

Aldham shifted uneasily in his chair.

“People have a funny sense of humor,” he said. There was a silence. I was thinking desperately: Could I just be wrong about this? Maybe it was nothing to make a fuss about. “Hang on a moment,” he said at last. “Let me have a word with someone.”

He took a folder out of his desk and inserted the two letters. He took that and his tea and walked heavily across the room and out of my sight. I looked at my watch. How long was this going to take? Was it worth getting my own files out of my bag and doing some work on the corner of Aldham’s desk? I wasn’t quite in the mood. When Aldham finally returned, he was with another man in a suit. He was a smaller, slighter man, graying, who looked as if he was a bit farther up the food chain. He introduced himself as Detective Inspector Carthy.

“I’ve looked at your letters, Miss . . . er . . .” he mumbled something that was apparently an attempt at my name. “I’ve looked at the letters and DS Aldham has filled me in on the details of the case. These are certainly nasty pieces of work.” He looked around and pulled a chair over from an unattended desk. “The question is, What’s actually going on here?”

“What’s going on is that somebody is threatening me and they’ve broken into my flat.” Carthy grimaced. “And I’m being harassed. That’s a crime now, isn’t it?”

“In certain circumstances. We have every sympathy for your concern,” he said. “But it’s difficult to know how to proceed exactly.”

“Don’t you think this person sounds dangerous?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Look, miss, I understand you’ve had other mail of this kind.”

I gave yet another recapitulation of my moment of fame, and the two detectives exchanged a brief smile.

“The melon thing?” Carthy said. “That was great. We’ve got the newspaper photo on a notice board somewhere. Everyone thinks you’re a heroine here. Maybe you could go and say hello to some of them before you go. But about the letters: I reckon that in all probability this is just the sort of thing that happens when you become a celebrity. There are sad people out there. This is their way of meeting people.”

I finally lost patience.

“I’m sorry, I just don’t think you’re taking this seriously enough. This person hasn’t just written letters. He’s been in my flat.”

“He
may
have been.” Carthy gave a long-suffering sigh. “Very well. Let’s think about a couple of things.” There was a moment’s pause. “Your flat. Is it easy of access?”

I shrugged.

“It’s just a normal conversion. There’s a common entranceway from Holloway Road. There’s a pub patio thing next to the backyard behind.”

Carthy wrote something on a large pad of paper that was balanced on his knee. I couldn’t see whether he was taking notes or just doodling.

“Do many people visit your flat?”

“How do you mean?”

“One a week? Two a week? On average.”

“I can’t answer it in that way. I’ve got friends. A bunch of them came round for a drink last week. I’ve got a new boyfriend. He’s been around quite a few times.” More scribbles on the pad. “Oh, and the flat’s been on the market for six months.”

Carthy raised an eyebrow.

“Which means that people have been visiting the flat?” he said.

“Obviously.”

“How many?”

“A lot. Over the entire six months there must have been sixty, seventy, maybe more.”

“Have any people come more than once?”

“A few. I
want
them to come more than once.”

“Have any of them seemed strange in some way?”

I couldn’t help laughing grimly.

“About three-quarters of them. I mean, they’re complete strangers rummaging through my cupboards, opening drawers. That’s what it’s like trying to sell your home.”

Carthy didn’t smile back.

“There are various motives for harassment of this kind. The most common is of a private nature.” He was sounding embarrassed. “Do you mind if I ask you some personal questions?”

“Not if they’re relevant.”

“You said you have a new boyfriend. How new?”

“Two or three weeks. Very new.”

“Does that mean that a previous relationship ended?”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean no. I wasn’t in a relationship.”

“But have you had a recent personal, that is, er, sexual liaison?”

“Well, fairly recent.” I was blushing hopelessly.

“Did it break up painfully?”

“It wasn’t like that,” I said. Now it was
my
turn to go red. “I’ve seen a few people at different times.”

“A few?” He and Aldham exchanged a significant look.

“Look, that sounds wrong.” I was flustered. I knew what they were both thinking, and there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t make it worse. What made it so ludicrous is that compared to almost anyone I know, I’m a nun: an awkward, embarrassed, inarticulate nun, too. “I’ve gone out with, seen, whatever you call it, two men in the last year or so.” They both went on looking at me as if they were not at all convinced by this low number. “The last of them was months ago.”

“Did it end badly?”

I thought of sitting opposite Stuart in a café near Camden Lock. I gave a sad laugh.

“It just fizzled out, really. Anyway, the last I heard he was hitchhiking across Australia. You can cross him off the list of suspects.”

Carthy gave a loud click of his ballpoint pen and stood up.

“DS Aldham will help you fill out a case form and take a brief statement.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ve told you.”

“I mean, to catch him?”

“If anything else happens, give Aldham a ring and we’ll take it from there. Oh, and take sensible precautions in your private life for a while.”

“I told you, I’ve got a boyfriend.”

He nodded curtly and turned away, muttering something I couldn’t hear under his breath.

I was late arriving at school. Even later than I’d said. When I walked out of the police station, I felt so tired I thought my legs would give way beneath me. My skin felt dusty, gritty, under my cotton dress. My scalp itched. My mouth was ashy. My shoulders were full of vicious little knots, bubbles of stress. When I walked out into the glare of the sunlight, my eyes, which already felt sunken back into their sockets, throbbed painfully. I screwed them up against the dazzle and fumbled in my bag for my dark glasses. Damn. I’d forgotten them. And my vitamin tablets. And I had only one more cigarette left. For a moment, I thought of going back to the flat and having a bath, cleaning my teeth, pulling myself together, before going to school. Or even just going to one of the nearby parks and sitting on the yellowing patches of grass by the side of a pond, watching the ducks, closing my eyes.

Instead I bought two packs of cigarettes, a cheap pair of sunglasses from a roadside stall, and then guiltily slunk into a greasy-spoon café. I ordered two cups of black coffee and a poached egg on toast. I ate slowly, watching people pass outside the smeary window. A Rasta in a yellow cap. A teenage couple, arm in arm, who stopped to kiss every couple of steps. A group of Japanese tourists with cameras and wearing jerseys. Surely they must be lost. A man carrying a baby in a sling; I could just see its tufty head. A woman screaming at the minute, red-faced child at her side. An Indian woman draped in a scarlet sari, picking her way in delicate sandals through dog shit and litter. A flock of schoolchildren carrying swimming bags, herded across the blaring, fume-filled road by a harassed young woman who reminded me of me. A cyclist in fluorescent yellow shorts, head down, swerving in and out of the traffic on thin wheels. A woman with a wide-brimmed hat, a bosom like a shelf, and a tiny poodle, who looked as if she had stepped into the wrong story.

I had stepped into the wrong story. He could be looking at me at this moment. Maybe I could see him, if I knew where to look. What had I done, that this should happen to me? I lit a cigarette, drank my cooling, bitter coffee. I was so late now a few more minutes wouldn’t make any difference.

Before catching my bus up Kingsland Road, I passed a phone box and I had the stupidest impulse to phone my mother. My mother who hadn’t been alive for twelve years. I just wanted her to tell me everything was going to be okay.

Pauline was politely chilly with me when I arrived. She told me a man named Fred had called. He had asked me to phone him on his mobile during the day. She didn’t seem happy to be collecting messages from a boyfriend for an absent member of staff. The primary assistant who was sitting in for me had the children in plastic pinafores, mixing up paints with thick brushes. So I told them they all had to draw a portrait of themselves to put up on the wall before parents’ evening. Raj painted himself with a pale pink face and brown hair, and legs sticking straight out of his chin. Eric, who never smiles, gave himself a red mouth that stretched from ear to ear. Stacey spilled water all over Tara’s efforts and Tara hit her in the neck. Damian started crying, tears dripping onto the paper. I took him into the home corner and asked him what was wrong, and he told me that everyone picked on him, called him sissy, pushed him over on the playground, locked him in the toilet. I looked at him: a pale and snuffly creature with clothes that hung off his skinny frame and dirty ears.

Fred wanted me to come and watch him play five-a-side football that evening. They played every Wednesday, he said—a regular lads’ feature. He was cheerful and laid-back, as if nothing had happened last night. He told me he was deadheading roses in suburbia, but he kept thinking about my body.

Pauline told me I had to have my literacy-hour material ready by the end of the week and did I think that was possible. Oh yes, I replied, unconvincingly, head throbbing. I usually buy a roll with cheese and tomato at the sandwich bar on the way to school, but today I’d forgotten, so while the other teachers ate healthy sandwiches and fruit, I had boiled potatoes and baked beans from the obese dinner lady, followed by steamed pudding and custard. Comfort food: It made me feel better.

I made the children write the letter
f
over and over again, following the dotted lines on their work sheets.
F
for fox and frog and fun. “And fuck,” said four-year-old Barny, an August baby and youngest in the class, to the hoots of his admiring friends.

At circle time, we discussed bullying. I didn’t look at Damian when I talked about everyone trying to care for each other, and all the children gazed at me with their cruel and innocent eyes. He sat quite near me, picking bits of fluff out of the rug, eyes swimming behind his thick glasses.

“Better?” I asked him as they left for the day.

“Mmm,” he mumbled, head hanging. I saw that his neck was grubby; nails dirty. I felt suddenly irritated and angry with him, and wanted to shake him out of his hopelessness. Maybe that’s how I was being, I thought: Maybe I was letting myself be bullied.

It’s amazing how much noise ten men can make. Not just shouting at each other, but grunting, screaming, howling, yelling, hitting the ground with a thwack, hurtling into each other, kicking each other’s shins so I thought I could hear the bones crack. I was amazed not to see blood gushing, bodies on stretchers, fisticuffs. But at the end of the hour they were all sweaty, smelly, fine; clapping each other round the shoulders. I felt a bit stupid, standing on the sidelines and watching them like part of the fan club. There were four other women there, as well, who obviously knew each other, were part of some kind of group who went out every Wednesday to watch their men getting pulped. Clio, Annie, and Laura, and someone whose name I never quite got and didn’t like to ask again. They asked me how I’d met Fred, and wasn’t he a charmer, and were friendly in a restrained kind of way that made me think there was a different girl most weeks and they didn’t want to commit themselves. I guess I was meant to have cheered Fred on, as he rushed past me in a hot blur, eyes glazed, yelling something, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it.

Afterward, he came over and draped an arm round my shoulder and gave me a kiss.

“You’re sweaty.”

I didn’t mind that much, but on the other hand I didn’t intrinsically take huge pleasure in it in some primitive hormonal way.

“Mmmm.” He nuzzled me. “And you’re all cool and lovely.”

After work, I’d been to Louise’s flat to have a bath, and she’d lent me a pair of gray cotton trousers and a sleeveless knitted top to put on. I hadn’t wanted to go back to my place. “Coming for a drink?”

“Sure.” The last thing my body needed was a drink, but I wanted company. As long as I was with other people, in a public place, I felt safe. Just the thought of it getting dark again, and me in my flat, on my own, made me breathless.

“I’ll see you after the shower.”

One drink turned into several, in a dark pub whose landlord obviously knew them all well.

“And she’s been getting all these mad letters,” continued Fred, as if it were all a big joke. His hand moved round to my side, feeling its way down my ribs. I shifted nervously, lit another cigarette, tipped the last of the lager down my throat. “Including ones that threaten to kill her. Haven’t you, Zoe?”

“Yes,” I mumbled. I didn’t want to talk about it.

“What did the police say?” asked Fred.

“Not much,” I said. I made an attempt at lightness: “Don’t worry, Fred. I’m sure you’ll be suspect number one.”

“It can’t be me,” he said cheerfully.

“Why not?”