Under Your Skin (19 page)

Clara rides across my hesitations. We ring her.

“Sure,” Robin says. “Of course. What’s one more? What better helper with Charlie could I have than Millie? I’d love to have my girl.”

As for getting her there, Clara will take her up on the train tomorrow.

A lifting sensation in my shoulders. “Above and beyond,” I say. “Definitely.”

“Don’t be silly.” Clara reaches to tap my knuckles with the feathered pen. She misses, knocks the crisps over instead. We’re both a little drunk.

And Marta? I should give her a few days’ holiday, suggest she go—where? Colliers Wood to stay with her identity-thefted friend.

Clara has to set off. Pete has been cooking chicken jalfrezi for the kids. He went to Southall especially for the spices. There’ll be washing up. “Fuck me, there’ll be washing up.” She decides to leave out the back, just for the fun of it. “All these people going in and no one coming out. It’s like that Beatles movie.”

We stand in the garden, in the middle of the lawn. Wispy clouds scuttle across the sky like smoke. We giggle. I’m thirteen again. Knock Down Ginger. Kissing Johnny Riggins. Fake ciggies from the health shop. Nicking my mum’s booze. We used to wander Yeovil pretending we were French.

Clara hovers in the alley. “Spiders!” she yelps, and then she is off, dancing to the end of it. She waves, turns the corner, and disappears.

•   •   •

When I was little, when the mood took her, my mother used to take me to the seaside. It didn’t matter if it was a school day, not to my mum. She would put the radio up high and sing at the top of her voice and stop for chips and Tizer. I would sit on the edge of the backseat, searching the skyline for the first hazy line of blue. But quite often it would all go wrong. I might have dropped tomato sauce on my top, or it might not be the right song, or she would see someone out the window she didn’t like. She would change her mind, turn back. The ozone would be blasting at the window, but in the car, the air would turn black and sour.

I think about that when Philip calls that night, how things that one longs for can sometimes tip, the moment you reach them, into disappointment.

He says everything I have waited to hear. He just got a text from Rog. He has heard what happened. He’s sorry I’ve been through such hell. Thank
fuck,
it’s over. What did the police
think
they were doing arresting me? Why did they think for a minute . . . ? He’s
so
sorry he didn’t ring earlier. His phone was charging. Back-to-back meetings, then forced to a karaoke club—this
endless
corporate entertainment. He hasn’t even showered. He saw that I’d rung, but he’s only just listened to my message. Of course, he’d have phoned back if he’d known. Am I all right? I sounded so
distraught
. Did the police take me in because I found the body? Is that what it was?

I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Yes. I’m sorry. Yes.

He’s coming straight back, he says. He’ll be on the next flight.

I’m so calm. It’s as if I am looking down on myself, from the cockpit of the Boeing 747, or whatever it is he would fly home on. He doesn’t sound like Philip. He sounds like a representation of Philip, the real Philip buried in there, beneath the mannerisms, the pat phrases, the real Philip thinking and feeling something completely different. I think back to a difficult conversation we had in Brighton. I said, “You’re being odd.” And he said, “No I’m not being odd. But by saying that you’re
making
me odd.” Everything seems artificial. Images of us before. All these memories I keep dredging up. They are all filtered. It’s all words and posture.

“Stay in Singapore,” I say. “It was a storm in a teacup. I’m sorry I cried in my message. I was overemotional, tired. But it’s over now. I don’t even need a lawyer. It was a misunderstanding. It’s enough that you’ve offered. Millie has gone to stay with Robin and . . . Don’t come home unless . . .” I want him to fill in the gaps, to sense there’s something I’m not saying, to care enough.

When it is silent on his end, I add: “Stay.”

“Well, if you’re sure. I suppose, having come all this way . . .” He yawns, an ache of silence, a sob. “And if you promise the police have let you go . . .”

“Stay,” I say again.

“Okay, old girl.”

Old girl
.

I’m in the kitchen and I look out into the black garden, at that square of banded light above the apple tree. I’m digging my fingernails into the palm of my hand and the pain is so ordinary, so easy to bear, I almost laugh.

I don’t sleep well. It’s racking up, the lack of sleep. Phrases from my phone call with Philip keep coming back to me: his reference to a missed shower, the indulgent self-importance of this “endless corporate entertainment,” his yawn. Somewhere Ania Dudek’s parents are suffering, and Philip is “forced” into karaoke. I told him to stay away, and I meant it, but he should have insisted on coming home. He should have realized I was in trouble. Or even if he didn’t, he should have wanted to be by my side. Nothing should have kept him away. My longing transmutes to hate. They were never that far apart, it turns out. You think it’s a continuum, a long arc, a process, but it’s just the flip of a switch. I ball up his shirt, the one I slept with last night, and hurl it across the room.

All this anger is oddly soothing, and in the morning, I am up early. Marta’s door is closed. I pack for Millie and we watch television quietly—I don’t want Marta coming down before Millie has left. Clara rings to let me know she’s at the garden door. Millie skips across the grass. I carry her bag. I’m in my dressing gown, and I have to hold it closed because I couldn’t find the belt! My daughter’s bag bumps with each step against my bare leg. I don’t want her to go, but she’s excited. Clara has come all this way—again. She has the train tickets, flapping them in the air as if she has won the lottery. I’m in too deep.

Millie won’t wear her coat; she shrugs it off. I get cross. I pick it up, tell her it’s cold, she’ll need it. Clara says, “We’ll have to run if we’re going to catch that train. We’ll soon warm up.”

When I walk back across the lawn, I catch sight of Marta at the kitchen window, watching.

“What is happening?” she says. “Where is Millie going?”

She is fully dressed, even down to the latex gloves. I feel at a disadvantage in my dressing gown, as if I have been caught out. I close the door and lean against it. “She’s gone to stay with . . .” I pause. I’m worried about hurting her feelings. “With our old nanny, Robin.”

“Why?”

“Just for a couple of days, while the police are getting to the bottom of . . . things.”

I gesture to the coat, thrown over my shoulder like a body. “She wouldn’t wear her coat.”

“It’s cold.”

“I got cross. I wish I hadn’t.”

“Sometimes she is spoiled girl.”

I sit down at the table. Do I mind Marta criticizing my daughter? “She is only eight,” I say.

Marta makes a dismissive noise, a hrumph at the back of her throat.

“So I won’t really be needing you for a little while. You should take a holiday if you like. Go away somewhere.”

She is still standing by the window. “Where? Where do I go?”

“Your friend?” I suggest brightly, “the one in Colliers Wood?”

“No. I think I stay here.”

Panic rises inside me. I don’t want her in the house. It’s awful I know. This is her home, but I would like a day or two without her. The table is tacky from last night’s wine. I shift my elbows. “Might be good not to be here for a while,” I say more firmly. She blinks slowly, moving her head slightly at the same time. It’s hardly a gesture at all, but it conveys contempt.

I clear my throat, look down. “If it is possible for you. It would be better.”

I hear her cross the room. The dishwasher shuts with a loud clack. When I look up, she has peeled off her latex gloves, thrown them on the counter, and left the room.

•   •   •

I lie on my bed, tensely reading a book—I hid the newspapers under the sofa without looking at them, a possible sign of madness. I am alone in the house. I heard the front door slam. I miss Millie, but she will be happier where she is. I tell myself that like a mantra. My senses have become alert to the smallest of details—a tap dripping in an upstairs bathroom, the lonely corkscrew gurgle of my own stomach. A slight shift in temperature has brought goose pimples to my arm. Noises. Shouts in the street. A scrape of the letter box—a note poked through, which I threw away without reading. The motorbike buzz of a neighbor’s leaf blower.

Despair slips in and sinks like a stone. What if I don’t escape all this? What if Perivale never lets this go? What would happen to me then?
Prison?
I get up quickly, cast off my dressing gown like a snake’s skin, like a bad thought, and snap on my running gear. No Asics still. I wear the green-flash Dunlops. I look out of the window. A few journalists are still there; one of them wrote that note. I can’t see Perivale. I charge down the stairs, grab a woollen hat from the cupboard, clatter out the back, streak across the garden, and wriggle behind the tree house. I bash my shoulder on a wooden post. I know I’ve grazed it, possibly drawn blood, but I don’t care. I pause in the passageway. No pockets, so I leave the key on the garden side and pull the door shut. It will look as if it’s locked; no one will know it isn’t. The house doesn’t need to be fortressed now I’m out of it.

The pounding of the pavement, the vibrating jolt of my own breath. I’m not that comfortable—I’m wearing the wrong bra, the
underwire is digging into my armpit, and I’ve got that peculiar teeth-joggling thing I sometimes get while running. The beanie keeps slipping down my forehead. I leave it until I can see only a slit of feet and gravelly earth and then push it back up; it waits, a haze of itchy fabric, before sliding down again. As soon as I am on the common, I feel my mood shift. The minutes, which stagnated in the house, speed up. For the first time in ages, I am out running and I am not worrying about what Philip is thinking or feeling. Today I just don’t care, and it’s liberating. There is fresh air in my lungs—or as fresh as Wandsworth Common gets. The diesel from trains and traffic mingles with the birthing of leaves, the pinking of blossom. Above me, wood pigeons coo, and in the bushes, blue tits dart and squeak.

It’s not too busy out here. I’ve timed it well—post-football club, pre-afternoon stroll. A dull day, too, a day for jigsaw puzzles and shopping centers. Layers and layers of fleeting gray cloud, a leaden gloom. I think about arriving back at Heathrow from Nevis last Easter, plunging from all that light and horizon-dazzling blue, down through the dirty milk shake of cloud, into the flat black-and-white world of Hounslow and Slough. The woman, an American, next to me said, “Can people really survive in such darkness?” Yes, they do.
We
do.

It’s a relief to clear my mind. Keep it clear. Exercise your limbs; don’t think. Over the bridge and down the path along the railway. They have resurfaced since I was last here—since that morning two weeks ago. Smooth tarmac, easy under foot, liquorice bubbles of tar by the weeds. End of the tax year—council’s using up its quota before the government grabs it back. Shouts reach me through the trees from the soccer field to my right—hairy men in small shorts hollering, “In. Slide him. Russell, he-re.” Two syllables for “here.”

I manage my usual circuit. I’ve crossed the common from road to road—2.5 kilometers, once round—and I’m pacing along the railway, approaching the bridge again, the beanie back across my eyes,
when footsteps rasp behind, a jangle of coins. I quicken, assuming I’ll outpace them, but the footsteps quicken, too. I slow right down. Some runners don’t like other people’s slipstream—the boy racers of the running world. There is no satisfied intake of breath, though, no jostle of air. It’s a man. I can hear him breathing. There’s a pitch to a person’s breath; I have time to reflect on that. I’m still a hundred yards from the bridge. Flight or fight? Is this nothing? Or everything? Is this the moment I’ve been dreading? I could run. I push the beanie out of my eyes. Or . . .

I stop and turn. One of my feet is still facing forward; it’s a comedy reversal of a racing start.

“Sorry.” He’s almost on top of me. His arms brake with a Woody Woodpecker windmill. “Sorry.”

“You,” I say. “Again.”

“God. Bloody idiot. Sorry.” He clutches both hands to his head in mortification. Or—the gesture turns into less of a smack and more of a smooth—to dampen the exuberance of his curly hair.

“What are you trying to do? Kill me?”

“No, of course not. No. Did I . . . ? I’m not wearing the right shoes.”

“For killing me?”

“No, for running. And you’re bloody fast. In training or something? And then I thought I’d wait until you reached the bridge, that you might walk over it because of the railing things and that that might be a good time to catch you.”

I study him. Jack Hayward—I remember his name. A nice voice, a bit of Yorkshire in there. A short
a
in
fast.

“Why do you want to catch me? Have you been following me?”

“No. No, of course not. Sorry. No. I wasn’t. I mean, I have been outside your house, but I came over the common for a cup of tea and a flapjack, saw you running, waited on that bench. I didn’t want to ruin your . . . keep fit.”

I have started walking on now, at quite a clip. “ ‘Keep fit!’ ” I say, over my shoulder. “How old are you—sixty?”

“Don’t we call it ‘keep fit’ anymore? Okay, so what is it? I didn’t want to ruin your jog.”

“Nope.”

“What, we don’t jog anymore?”

“
Jogging
’s dated too. It’s a run, even if you’re jogging it.”

“Okay, I didn’t want to ruin your run.”

We’ve reached the bridge and I turn. “Well. It’s a bit late now.” Good God, I’m flirting.

He puts his hands out in surrender. “Five minutes,” he says. “Just give me five minutes.”

“No. Sorry.”

I keep walking. Not running, though. That’s interesting.

He keeps pace. “I know you think journalists are scum.”