Beneath the Skin (8 page)

“Well . . . er.”

“You’ve never seen me sleep,” I said and immediately wished I hadn’t, but Fred just looked puzzled. It was a relief when Morris started telling me how they used to come here on quiz night.

“It’s cruel, really,” he said. “It’s just too easy. It feels like helping ourselves to their money. We’re lucky they don’t just take us out back and break our thumbs.”

“The Hustler,” said Graham.

“What?” I said.

“Is my idiot brother boring you?”

“Don’t be mean,” I said.

“No, no,” said Morris. “It’s another reference. That’s what Herman Mankiewicz said about Joseph Mankiewicz.” Now he grinned over at his brother. “But Joseph was the more successful one in the end.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know who these people are.”

Unfortunately, they then started to tell me. To me the interplay of these old friends and brothers was a bewildering mixture of ancient jokes, obscure references, private catchphrases, and I generally thought the best thing was to keep my head down and wait for something I could follow. After a while the frenzied, competitive cross talk subsided and I found myself talking to Morris once more.

“Are you together with any of . . .” I said in a subdued voice and giving a discreet nod in the direction of the various young women around the table.

Morris looked evasive.

“Well, Laura and me are sort of, in a way . . .”

“In a way what?” said Laura across the table. She was a large woman with straight brown hair pulled back in a bun.

“I was telling Zoe that you’ve got ears like a bat.”

I assumed that Laura would get furious with Morris.
I
would have. But I was starting to see that the three women hovered on the edge of the group, mostly talking among themselves and only being brought into the general conversation when necessary, which didn’t seem to be very often. The boys, fresh-faced, bright-eyed after the football, looked more like little boys than ever. Why had I been embraced by their little group? As an audience? Morris leaned over very close to me and I almost thought for a moment he was going to nuzzle my ear. Instead he whispered into it.

“It’s over,” he said.

“What is?”

“Me and Laura. It’s just that she doesn’t know it yet.”

I looked across at her as she sat there, unaware of the sentence hanging over her head.

“Why?” I asked.

He just shrugged, and I felt I couldn’t bear to talk about it anymore.

“How’s work going?” I said, for want of anything better.

Morris lit a cigarette before answering.

“We’re all waiting,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

He took a deep drag and then an even deeper gulp of his beer.

“Look at us,” he said. “Graham is a photographer’s assistant who wants to be a real live photographer. Duncan and me go around showing stupid secretaries how to do things with their software that they should have read in the manual. We’re waiting for one or two of our ideas to, well, come to fruition. The way things are now, you need one halfway plausible idea and you’re worth more than British Airways.”

“And Fred?”

Morris looked reflective.

“Fred is digging and sawing while trying to decide who he is.”

“But in the meantime there’s that tan and those forearms,” said Graham, who’d been eavesdropping.

“Mmmm,” I said.

We sat there for a long time and drank too much, especially the boys. Later Morris moved across to be close to Laura, at her request, which sounded more like a command, and Duncan sat next to me. First he talked about his work with Morris, how they were out on the road every day, working mainly separately in different companies, teaching idiots with too much money and no time how to operate their own computers. Then he told me about Fred, how long they’d known each other, their long friendship.

“There’s just one thing I can’t forgive Fred for,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“You,” he said. “It wasn’t a fair fight.”

I made myself laugh. He stared at me.

“We think you’re the best.”

“The best what?”

“Just the best.”

“We?”

“The guys.” He gestured around the table. “Fred always chucks his women in the end,” he said.

“Oh well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we?”

“Can I have you afterward?” he said.

“What?” I said.

“No, I want her,” Graham said from across the table.

“What about me?” said Morris.

“I was first,” said Duncan.

There was a little bit of me that recognized that this was one of their jokes, and maybe at some other time I might have laughed and made a flirtatious attempt to play along, but this wasn’t one of those times.

Fred pushed himself against me. Pushed his hand against my trousers, Louise’s trousers. All of a sudden I felt nauseous. The thick, noisy atmosphere of the pub was curdling around me.

“Time to go,” I said.

He gave me a lift back to my flat in his van, dropping Morris and Laura on the way. He must have been way over the limit.

“Do you mind when they talk to me like that?”

“They’re just jealous,” he said.

I told him how the police had asked about my personal life.

“They made me think it was my fault,” I said. “They asked about my sex life.”

“A long story?” There was a gleam in his eyes.

“A very short story.”

“That many?” He whistled.

“Don’t be stupid.”

“So they think it’s one of your ex-lovers?”

“Maybe.”

“Did any of them seem like nutcases?”

“No.” I hesitated. “Except, when you start thinking like that, of course, everyone seems odd, a bit sinister. Nobody’s just normal, are they?”

“Not even me?”

“You?” I looked across at him as he drove, thin hands on the steering wheel. “Not even you.”

He seemed pleased. I saw him smile.

He pushed me back in my seat and kissed me so hard I tasted blood on my lip, and pressed a hand against my breast, but he didn’t ask to come in. And I’d learned my lesson from last night. I didn’t ask him. I waved him off, in a reasonably convincing charade of cheerfulness, and instead of going into the flat I walked down the still crowded road to the nearest pay phone. I called up Louise: Maybe I could go there for the night. But the phone rang and rang and nobody answered. I stood in the booth, holding the phone to my face, until a cross man with a bulging briefcase banged on the glass. There was nobody else I knew well enough to ask; there was nowhere else to go. I dithered on the street for a few minutes, then told myself not to be so stupid. I walked back to the front door, opened it, picked up the junk mail, the gas bill, and the postcard from my aunt, and went upstairs. There were no hand-delivered letters. The windows were all locked. The peppermint liqueur stood on the table, top off. Nobody was there.

“I really think he’s interested.”

“Who? Fred?”

“No. This man who’s coming back to see the flat. God knows why, but I think he might like it. If only he did. I hate it here, you know, Louise. Really hate it. I dread coming back at night. If I could only get out of here, maybe all the letters would stop and he’d go away.”

Louise looked round the room.

“What time is he coming?”

“About nine. Strange time to be viewing flats, don’t you think?”

“That gives us nearly two hours.”

“Are you sure you want to give up your precious Thursday evening like this, Louise?”

“I was only going to sit eating chocolate and flick through the TV channels. You’ve saved me from myself. Anyway, I like a challenge.”

I looked grimly around the flat.

“It’s certainly a challenge,” I said.

Louise rolled up her sleeves, looking, rather alarmingly, as if she were going to scrub the floor.

“Where shall we start?”

I love Louise. She’s down-to-earth and generous; even when she’s acting outrageous and reckless, I know she’s got her feet on the ground. She gets the giggles. She cries at soppy films. She eats too many cakes and goes on mad, hopeless, completely unnecessary diets. She wears skirts that make Pauline raise her beautifully shaped eyebrows, and high platform shoes, T-shirts with strange logos on them, huge earrings, a stud in her navel. She is small, stubborn, sure of herself, dogged, with a sharp, determined chin and a turned-up nose. Nothing seems to get her down. She’s like a pit pony.

When I arrived at Laurier School, Louise took me under her wing, for all she had been there only a year herself. She gave me teaching tips, warned me which parents were troublesome, shared her sandwiches with me at lunch when I forgot to bring any, lent me tampons and aspirins. And she was my one point of stability in the whole fluid mess that was London. Now here she was, putting my life in order.

We began in the kitchen. We washed the dishes and put them neatly away, scrubbed the surfaces, swept the floor, cleaned the tiny window that looked over the pub’s back garden. Louise insisted on taking down the pots and pans I’d hung above the stove.

“Let’s open up the space,” she said, squinting around her as if she had turned into an unimpressed interior decorator.

In the living room, twelve foot by ten, she emptied ashtrays, pushed the table under the window so the peeling wallpaper was partly obscured, turned over the stained sofa cushions, vacuumed the carpet, while I stacked bits of paper and mail into piles, threw away junk.

“Are those all the letters?” asked Louise, pointing at the cardboard box.

“Yep.”

“Creepy. Why don’t you throw them away?”

“Shall I? I thought the police might need them.”

“Why? You’ve got the perv’s letters separate anyway. Chuck them. Treat it all like the trash it is.”

So she held the neck of a bin bag wide open and I shoved the lavender envelopes, green-ink letters, instruction manuals on self-defense, sad biographies, into it. My spirits rose. Louise went down Holloway Road to buy some flowers while I cleaned out the bath with an old washcloth. She returned with yellow roses for the living room, a potted plant with fleshy green leaves for the kitchen.

“You should have classical music playing when he arrives.”

“I don’t have anything to play music on.”

“We can make coffee at the last minute. Bake a cake. That’s meant to be good.”

“I’ve only got instant coffee and even if I had all the ingredients, which I don’t, I’m not going to start baking a bloody cake.”

“Never mind,” she said, a bit too brightly, cutting the stems off the roses. “Just put some perfume on yourself instead. Can I use this jug for a vase? There, doesn’t that look better?”

It did. It felt better, too, now that Louise was with me, with her spiky eyelashes, scarlet mouth, vermilion nails, tight green dress. Just an ordinary mediocre room backing on to a pub, not a coffin after all.

“I’ve been really thrown by all this,” I said.

Louise filled the kettle. “Where the fuck does this plug in, anyway? There’s no spare socket. That’s the other thing your flat needs—total rewiring. Top to bottom.” She pulled out another plug with a flourish. “You can always come and stay at my place, if it would help. I haven’t got a spare bed but I’ve a spare bit of floor. Come this weekend, if you want.”

I had to stop myself from emitting a sob in response.

“That’s nice of you” was all I managed.

The bedroom looked more or less okay, except I hadn’t made the bed and the laundry basket was nearly full. We put the basket in the wardrobe, plumped up my pillow on the bed. Louise turned back the corner of the sheet, like my mother used to do. Wandering around, she paused and looked at objects on top of my chest of drawers.

“What on earth is this strange collection?” she asked.

“Things people sent me.”

“What, as well as letters?”

“Yes. The police wanted to look at them.”

“Bloody hell,” she said, picking them up and examining them.

There was a whistle, that I should wear round my neck at all times as an alarm. A pair of tiny silk knickers. A round smooth stone that looked like a bird’s egg. A small brown teddy bear.

“Why on earth has someone sent you this?” asked Louise, picking up a slightly grubby pink comb.

“It came with instructions. The point is to scrape it against someone’s nose, well, the bit between their nostrils. Apparently it makes murderers go away.”

“If they keep still while you get your comb out. This is pretty, though.” She was looking at a dainty silver locket on a thin chain. “It looks like it might be valuable.”

“If you open it up, there’s a piece of hair inside as well.”

“Who sent it?”

“Dunno. It arrived wrapped in a newspaper article about have-a-go heroes. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“And these are exciting.” She was looking at a pack of pornographic playing cards. She inspected the picture of a woman cupping her pneumatic breasts. “Men,” she said.

I shivered in the heat.

Nick Shale arrived just after nine, by which time I had had a bath and changed into jeans and a yellow cotton shirt. I wanted to look neat and clean, to go with my flat. I piled my hair on top of my head and dabbed perfume behind my ears.

He was wearing running shorts, and when he took off his canvas backpack, I saw there was a dark V of sweat down the back of his jersey.

“Here we are—I bought you these.” He handed me a brown paper bag. “Apricots from the stall down the road. I couldn’t resist them.”

I flushed. It was like giving me flowers. I didn’t think prospective flat buyers were meant to give presents to the owner. The apricots were golden and downy, almost luminous.

“Thank you,” I said self-consciously.

“Aren’t you going to offer me one?”

So we ate them, standing in the narrow kitchen, and he said he’d bring me strawberries next time. I pretended not to notice the bit about next time.

“Don’t you want to look round the flat again?”

“Sure.”

He wandered from room to room, staring up at ceilings as if he could see interesting patterns on their surfaces. There were several cobwebs that Louise and I hadn’t noticed drifting in the corners. In the bedroom, he opened the fitted wardrobe and gazed for a moment into my laundry basket, a funny little smile on his face. Then he straightened up and looked at me.