Under Your Skin (3 page)

I’m having my microphone fitted. Hal, the floor manager, is clipping it underneath the dress to my balconette, nestling it in my cleavage—and I’m thinking of the girl and her bra, that it must have been a style they call “multiway,” which adjusts to fit whatever type of shirt you’re wearing, or it wouldn’t have come undone at the front. I’m thinking about this, but it seems too intimate, so I’m trying not to think about it when Stan saunters in, chatting to Terri, the producer.

He sees me and holds up his hands in mock surprise. “Miss Marple. Solving a murder, helping the police with their enquiries, and still at work on time. Or do we find Miss Marple as a role model a little aging?” He twiddles an invisible mustache and adopts a Belgian accent. “Perhaps Hercule Poirot?”

I wonder if he planned to come in after me all along. It is always better to be standing up when putting someone down. In this context, the context in which my life has been taken out of the ordinary and the domestic, perhaps it’s important to him to look busier and jollier and more in control and more alive than me.

“Not solving a murder, Stan the Man.” I grin. I’d never let Terri see me crack. She’s tough and has no time for slackers, but as long as I stay dignified, she’ll stand up for me. “Just finding one.”

When he plonks himself down, the cushions beneath me swell with displaced air.

“Remind me never to run with you,” he says, to the room in general.

The
Mornin’ All
studio takes up the entire fifth floor of a tower on the South Bank. Out of the window behind me is a view of London and the Thames—as magnificent, as picture-perfect as an artificial backdrop. Our section, with its mock-up “warehouse-style” wall, its swirly carpet, its nestle of lounge, is in the middle of the studio. The lighting is rigged. We’re a glossy, brightly lit spot of loveliness, a ray of sunshine, but I’m sitting here and all I can think is how ugly Stan is. The music is playing, they’re running the intro, and he’s
wisecracking away across the room—to the lighting and the sound guys, to the researchers, to pretty India in her corner, waiting for her Twitter and email and Facebook slot. He’s an uncouth rugby player on tour: “What do necrophiliacs call morticians? Pimps . . . What’s the difference between pedophilia and necrophilia? Eighty years.” He’s trying to unnerve me. I’m wondering if his words aren’t slightly slurred.

Then we are on air. I say my good mornings, give my own spiel, and he turns to the camera, engages it with his eyes, and stares into the viewer’s soul, like he is the only one who understands. His expression is somber, the corners of his mouth turning down, when he announces the sadness to come later in the show. “A year ago,” he says simply, “Maggie Leonard’s fourteen-year-old son, Saul, lost his life as a result of Internet bullying.” He gives me a look heavy with shared sorrow. I nod sympathetically, allow a doleful half smile. We’re in this together, him and me.

He rubs his hand across his jaw; I alone can hear the rasp of skin on bristle.

“A raw day,” Stan concludes.

•   •   •

A few weeks ago, when a cabinet minister was caught lying on
Question Time,
we invited a psychologist into the studio to talk about body language and the art of mendacity. Children, she said, often cover their mouths after telling fibs; grown-ups touch their chins with their hands or fiddle with their cuffs—an unconscious desire to cross their arms.

I work hard to control my body language during today’s show, because I feel as if I am lying all the way through. Today, the trivialities feel particularly shallow and vapid. I’m late with my prompt for India, have to apologize on air, make a “pratfall” face for the viewer. “No biggie,” India says in return. I coo over the lurcher—Billy, he’s
called—tease Stan, wish I had checked the burglar alarm before I left home, told Marta not to walk across the common, but to take the long way round to school. I hadn’t been thinking straight. There are precautions that have to be taken.

During the interview with Maggie Leonard, I sit with my head cocked to one side. We know what vocabulary is permissible this side of midday and what isn’t. We say “passed on,” “lost his life,” “no longer with us,” “left you.” It’s insane, the efforts we make to stop ourselves from saying the word
dead.

In the car on the way home, I lie my face against the window. It’s a relief to let my guard down. I think about that poor girl. The car stops and starts, jerks and accelerates. I bash my chin, knock my forehead. My neck has come loose. Steve, my driver, is chatting away about last night’s darts and the roadworks at Elephant and Castle. “Fed up with this weather,” he says. “It’s not cold; it’s not wet; it’s not hot. It’s just nothing, isn’t it? This year March is just a load of nothing.”

Shopfronts, corrugated iron, roundabouts, Tube entrances, building works—cranes and drills and graffitied awnings—it’s all still there. Horrible things happen to good people. Buses crash and children die. Women are raped and mutilated in the Congo—there was a program about it the other night. Friends tell you about tragedies—a young husband’s unexpected heart attacks, brave six-year-old with leukaemia. They touch your life, these terrible happenings. You wish they weren’t real, and your heart lurches in the dead of night, but then they slant away, and you carry on with your own little existence. But this, this death knocked everything sideways. It is too close. No one is safe. It’s a world in which people kill other people. Death isn’t just slow, stretched over months, years, like my mother’s. It happened in an instant. In a few seconds. A rope round the neck, a tug; it’s all it takes. Thinking this, I feel dizzy, as if I’m about to fall.

The car vibrates at the lights. My perfect life. What is it next to this? Nothing. I think of the girl’s mother. Father. School days. Summer holidays. Jobs. Family. Friends.
Boyfriend
. Have they been told? Have the police found out who she is?
Was
. Did she like her life, or did she long for it to be different? I’ve started shivering, even though it’s warm back here.

The BBC News app on my iPhone has no mention of anything “breaking.” Is this news? I don’t know. A torso bobbing to the surface at Limehouse, that bin bag of limbs found floating in the Regent’s Canal, that was news. But perhaps whole bodies are found, in patches of common ground, in other suburbs—Bexleyheath, Southall Green, Crouch End—every day.

The traffic cranks to a stop. A skip lorry, ratcheting into the junction from the Walworth Road, is blocking everything in all directions. Horns screech. Exhaust fumes bloom.

“Driven by morons, skips,” Steve says. “No respect. They’re all the same. Ex-cons, I reckon. The way they take speed bumps down my road—make a sound like a bomb going off. They have to be doing it on purpose. They need anger management,” he says.

Congestion eases. We slide unfettered down Kennington Park Road, the tarmac smooth beneath the wheels, and Steve, who had opened his window to release an angry elbow, is talking into the wind now as it whistles past his ears, past Oval Tube and St. Mark’s Church. I should ask him about his wife—she had her ob-gyn appointment today—find out if his daughter, Sammy, got her interview. I’ll do it in a bit, when the window’s shut. Now’s a good moment to ring Clara, she will be in the staffroom, as peaceful as her life gets.

“Hello, Gaby Mortimer,” Clara says, as she always does.

I can hear clattering behind her voice, like a slow train on a track, or a canteen worker clearing trays.

“You there?” she says.

I clear my throat and say, “Hello, Clara Macdonald.”

“God. Friday. Couldn’t come soon enough as far as I’m concerned. Just want to get home, run a hot bath, sort out the kids—Pete’s cooking—and put my feet up in front of
Mad Men
. I’ve got a mountain of lesson planning, but I won’t feel guilty, because Sky Plus is getting so full I need to clear the list or it’ll start deleting itself, or is that just a myth? Anyway, if I watch a bit of telly, it’ll be like tidying up.”

Just hearing her voice is encouraging. We’ve been friends since grade school, and for me, Clara Macdonald is about as bloody close to perfect as you can get.

“What’s up?” she continues, reading my silence. “Who’s upset you? Is it Philip? Is he still in plonker mode? Or is it that handsome twat at work?”

“Both,” I say, half laughing. “The plonker’s being a plonker, and the twat’s being a twat, but also . . .”

I’ve been wondering how to say it, what order to put the words in, whether to begin with “You will never believe what happened to me today” in an upbeat, imparting-of-
top
-gossip sort of way, or whether to be earnest: “Listen, it will be on the news soon and I wanted you to hear it from me first.” I still don’t know. Neither seems right. The first, too blatantly callous. The second, well, there’s that tone, isn’t there, that slips into people’s voices when they are telling you awful things? A bit what my favorite aunt would have called “churchy,” a bit marbles-in-the-mouth self-righteous. I know, too, that Clara will be tear-prickingly sympathetic about my trauma, and I don’t deserve that. It isn’t fair. Not at all.

I visualize her in the staff room, colleagues bustling around her, a reading bag, slung across her shoulder, her Tube pass—quick pat to check—padding out her back pocket. She may already have her coat on—that tweed thing from Primark (“Primarni,” she calls it), her stripy scarf round her neck. I imagine the door about to open,
a splash of thronging corridor, some nice fellow teacher offering a lift to the Tube.

Steve has wound up the window. I change my mind. I will speak to her later, when she is not in a hurry. I am probably overreacting anyway. In as upbeat a tone as I can manage, I say, “Just checking in before the weekend.”

She sounds blithe, not a care in the world. “Before all hell breaks loose,” she says.

•   •   •

Marta is in the kitchen, not eating, but sitting at the table fingering through
Grazia
. She never seems to eat. It worries me. Last summer, everything happened in such a hurry—Robin, our old nanny was pregnant, my mother was dying. I didn’t take as much care as I should have in hiring a replacement. Perhaps I didn’t ask the right questions. I panic-bought a nanny. Now she concerns me. I don’t blame her for not eating my food—I’m not exactly Michel Roux. But I wonder when she does eat and what, and whether somehow it should be my responsibility. She’s only twenty-four. Perhaps she is homesick, or has an eating disorder of some kind that I should know about.

Millie is at gym club, being dropped back. Marta has finished the laundry. Square piles of folded jumpers and T-shirts—including my running gear from earlier, are washed and pressed—awaiting redistribution. Kitchen surfaces, pale polished granite, stretch uncluttered; the floor gleams. Click open a shiny cupboard and the boxes of cereal, the pots of jam will be neatly lined up. That’s the other thing: she is so tidy. When she first arrived, her one request was special cleaning gloves—latex, like a second skin. I know I should be grateful. Philip is in his element, at last in surroundings that match his brain. But it makes me uncomfortable. Robin, who came from New Zealand and lived with us for seven years until she
got pregnant and married her East Anglian farmer—the audacity of the girl!—was unbelievably messy and that was just fine. She was part of the family. We all—or she and I—mucked in together. Marta is different. Marta feels like an employee, and I know this is a high-class sort of problem, and I know I should probably get over myself, but I’d like it if she felt like a friend.

Quietly, I make some tea—a lemon-and-ginger infusion, good for the nerves—and sit down on the bench. Marta looks up, resigned. She’s thinking I’m about to make a stab at conversation. She’s dreading it. But I have to tell her what happened. I don’t want to alarm her, I say, but she needs to be cautious. She should make sure the doors and windows are locked. She is not to walk across the common, not with Millie, not alone. She should be on her guard. We don’t know who is out there, I say, searching for
alarm
on her face, seeing only impassivity.

She stares at me from behind two drapes of black hair. When I have finished, she looks away, bites at a piece of skin at the corner of a nail, and then picks at it with her thumb. She tells me she is always careful when she is looking after Millie and is always sure to put on the burglar alarm. It’s probably just my imagination, but she sounds a bit defensive, as if I have made up the whole story just to get at her. I must have said it all wrong.

I stare at the magazine open in front of her. It’s a photo spread of Pippa Middleton, and Marta has doodled on the page in pen, though they are not really doodles, more like score marks. She seems to have scratched out Pippa Middleton’s face.

I ask her how her course is going—she is learning English at a school in Tooting. I mention some bar I’ve heard about where young people go that “sounds quite jolly.” I can’t believe I’ve just said that.
Quite jolly?
Bloody hell. No wonder she hates me. But I worry for her. When the doorbell rings, I flee, grateful for the reason to shut up.

A tall, dark-haired man in baggy jeans and a dirty-green waxed jacket is standing there, slightly bent over, his back to me. He is looking closely at a leaf on a branch of the olive tree nearest to the path. He turns before I get a word out and says, “Press your own oil, do you?”

It’s DI Perivale.

“Only dug the olive trees in a month ago,” I say. “We had the whole garden done, back and front, a complete redesign. A company called Muddy Wellies. We hope to but I don’t know yet. There are only three trees, so even with a hot summer, probably not.”

He steps forward, puts his hands out, as if measuring distance. “Nice gaff. Big for just the three of you.”

To cover my surprise that he knows anything about me at all (
the three of you
), I lean back and survey the repointed red brickwork, the three floors of window, the elegantly tapered Victorian gable, the thick entwined ropes of newly planted wisteria, as if seeing my house for the first time.