Under Your Skin (6 page)

I try to conjure an image of us old, but I can’t.

•   •   •

We spend the rest of Saturday attempting normal family life. Or
I
do. I read all the papers, but I file information, or ideas, in a part of my mind labeled
LATER
. I try not to think about work—even when I notice in the
Times
’s “Saturday Review” that Stan is on
Top Gear
. I compartmentalize. My brain is like a cow’s stomach. If I try hard enough, I can shut bits of it down. It’s a trick from when I was little. I could do anything, by the end, whatever chaos was unwinding around me. Even now in moments of tension, I find myself visualizing pages of a school textbook—
Revised Nuffield Biology
or a Longman
20th Century History
—burned on to my retina by the force of childhood concentration.

It is overcast but not raining, and when Millie gets back from her ballet class, we persuade Philip away from his computer screens—the spreadsheets, the Bloomberg market news site—and into his waterproofs. He protests ineffectually, says, “Mills, my poppet, Samsung is tanking—don’t you care?” but she levers her little arm through his and yanks him away, and today, for some reason, his resistance is low.

Our house is on a corner, across the road diagonally from a narrow alley that leads to the common. Millie, linking the two of us, in her leg warmers and stripy wellies, skips along like the parody of an eight-year-old girl. My daughter is everything I could have dreamed of. A tight ball of energy and cheerfulness, she adores school and gym and ballet and hockey and swimming. She is in minichoir and drama club. She loves her friends, her family. She is the platonic ideal of a child, the best of both of us. Philip’s mother says she is a credit to us, that we’ve “done something right,” but she’s also a
credit to Robin, our old nanny, who combined enviable reserves of patience with amiable antipodean energy. As we reach the other side of the road, Millie trips, and while some children might darken, turn to glower at the curb, Millie giggles. “Oops,” she says, her hazel eyes widening in comic amazement at the face-forward tumble that might have happened. My heart clenches. I tighten my grip on hers. All the clichés are true: I would kill for my daughter, I really would.

It feels odd venturing on to the common, unnatural somehow. I hadn’t thought it would come back, but it does. No sign of anything untoward at first—just wobbling tots falling over their own feet in minifootball, a Pilates class on mats by the monkey bars, ambling groups of adults in coats, bare-armed kids on bikes.

We set off toward the playground, not directly across the grass but round the path. I keep my eyes on the ground, scanning it in case my bracelet fell off my wrist when I was running. I give Philip his messages. His best mates from university—specifically Rog—have rung about a lads ski weekend. I recite the dates and he mutters something under his breath that I will have to decode later or Rog will think I haven’t passed the dispatch on. I cup my hands ostentatiously over Millie’s ears and remind him about her birthday rerun the following day. “No calls,” I say. I’ve made another cake. His parents, who are coming to eat it, want to drive up early and take us out for lunch. They are going away next week, on a Swan Hellenic cruise of the Ancient World. It’s been nagging at me all week to check if that’s okay—sometimes he just wants space on Sundays—but now he says, “Fine,” shrugging, as if it doesn’t matter either way.

I’ve been trying to distract myself, but we have reached the part of the common the police have roped off with their red-and-white plastic tape; it drapes from tree to post to railing, fluttering and twisting like grotesque bunting. The café owners, facing a weekend of lost takings, have set up a mobile coffee-serving stall this side, on
the grass. It’s stupid, but I’ve started trembling, breathing in an odd way. I feel claustrophobic—and fight off the urge to force through the police cordon, to run over to where the body lay. Millie has seen a friend and is swinging open the gates of the play area. Unsteadily, I move toward Philip, but he has taken a phone call. His head is bowed; he is looking at the ground, scuffing a clump of grass back and forth with his Prada-encased toe.

The playground is full of people I recognize—parents from school, neighbors I’ve seen around. Most of them notice me and glance away. I’m not very good at making friends. I’m busy, not there at the right times, and even when I am—those hanging around moments, like school pickup, I’m self-conscious. More to the point, Philip isn’t keen on meeting new people. He doesn’t have time, he says, to put in the effort—the getting-to-know-you conversations, the dinner parties . . . . We have enough friends already he says. He may well be right, but such intractability has its drawbacks at moments like this. I wish Millie still needed pushing on a swing, or guiding up the steps of the slide, so I would have something to do with my hands, an object to lean on, but she is horsing about in the bushes with a gaggle of others. Climbing frames pall by the time you are eight. I can understand that. Who needs modular outdoor play when there’s a real tree to dangle from? I sit on a bench, leaning forward on my knees, trying to look perky.

I catch others’ eyes and smile. I do up a little girl’s shoelaces. A toddler tumbles into a puddle next to me and I scoop him up and put him back on his feet.

“Gaby!”

Phew. It’s like being picked last in school games. It’s Jude Morris, mother of a child in Millie’s class. I don’t know her well, but I like the look of her. When we first met a few months ago, she told me she used to be a corporate lawyer. “And now I channel all that energy and education into powder paints and playdates and PTA
events. I’m that woman. I’m that sad.” She is the first person I’ve met in ages who hasn’t immediately told me how moved they were by some interview I’ve just done—possibly because she’s had the sense never to watch one—or make me think, by being a bit standoffish themselves, that I need putting in my place.

She plonks herself down next to me. “So,” she launches, in a semiwhisper, “what a thing to happen. Here! I expect you’ve heard. Have you seen the police tape? I mean, horrendous. I’m so shaken up.”

It hasn’t occurred to me that anyone else might be shaken up.

“I know,” I say, smiling. “Extraordinary.”

A couple of other women sidle over. I remember both their names—Margot, who has a sporty boy in Millie’s class, and Suzanne, whose daughter is a natural actress—I’ve seen her in drama club. They probably know who I am, too, but they do this thing of addressing Jude, not me. They know her better, I suppose, but I find myself trying hard to make them talk to me. I like the look of them, too. I realize I want them to be my friends.

Margot, a neat German woman with wonderful cheekbones, tells Jude she’s heard it was a man walking his dog who found the body, on Friday afternoon. She screws up her face. “I think the dog was rolling in it.”

“No!” I say.

“It’s true,” Suzanne tells Jude. Round her neck is a series of colorful Tibetan scarves, which she adjusts, disentangling an avalanche of hair. “My dog rolls in awful things—dead rats and fox poo. Anything disgusting he can find.”

“Ughhh!” I say.

They talk about dogs and their habits for a bit. Then Jude mentions auto-asphyxiation, and someone else ventures prostitution. Margot, pursing her lips, says she heard the corpse was naked.

“Oh!” I say. The word
corpse
is not one that has entered my mind.
It is so absolute, so removed from life and humanity. Dead flesh. Dryness. Finality. A naked corpse, disengaged from my experience, my moments with her.

“I know,” they both say, acknowledging me for the first time.

“I can’t believe she was naked,” I say. “What do you think happened? God, it is almost unbearable, isn’t it? And so close to us.”

Margot looks at me. “You never think it, do you? You always think this stuff happens somewhere else.”

Suzanne says, “Perhaps it’s good for us to be shaken up once in a while—we can all be so smug. We don’t live in the real world.”

“It’s true,” I say. “It’s like a wake-up call.”

And Jude says, “Second that.”

And Margot says, “Third it.”

And we all laugh.

Is it terrible that I don’t mention my part in the discovery of the body? The more they chatter, the harder it becomes. I should have said something at the get-go, but now it’s too late. I didn’t because . . . why? In my line of business, one whiff of the wrong kind of publicity and a career can implode. Just look at the presenter John Leslie. The accusations of sexual assault may have been unsubstantiated, but he never worked in TV again. Stan the Man has an agent, his own media machine. I’ve always tried to avoid that sort of thing. It seems so grand and self-important. Philip handles the legal side of my contracts, and the production company has a perfectly good publicity department. But now, well, I can see how useful another person would be. It occurs to me with panic that I should have contacted Alison Brett, who deals with
Mornin’ All
’s PR. I should have asked DI Perivale to keep quiet about my involvement, secured a seal of confidentiality. It seems more urgent now that I have sat here and listened and not said anything. I care less about my career, I realize, than about what these nice women think.

I look across at Philip, who is standing by the gate, hopeless
and stiff. He is wondering, Why do I have to stand by this gate? What is my purpose here? Why can’t I be back at my computer, watching Samsung tank? I take a moment to watch him. I see him notice Millie, high in some branches, and his face brightens. I feel a swell of hope. I get to my feet and help her down, clinging on to her legs, catching her wellies as she scrambles. Jude reminds me about the charity auction I have promised to host at the school quiz in April, and I say good-bye to everyone as if they were my proper friends, trying hard not to mind too much that they aren’t, and the three of us set about our family day as if nothing were out of the ordinary at all.

•   •   •

At dusk, I see a man outside our window. He is on the other side of the road, behind a car, so I can’t catch the whole of him—just a snippet of his head, an arm, the change in light and texture as he moves behind glass, a tarnish of the silver, a mottle of the steel. I’m not imagining it. I stand and watch from the drawing room, wait for him to move. I am hyperaware these days, my nerve endings alert to every encroachment.

They haven’t caught “my stalker”—it sounds a bit showy-offy to call him that, I know, but I don’t know what other word to use. It could be a ghost, really, a figment of my overactive imagination, a sense of a person. Once, I told PC Evans, the policeman assigned to the case, I thought someone had been in the house. I smelled a sickly aftershave. Other times, I tried to explain, I feel watched, or shadowed. But it’s true I’ve never seen an actual person. Enquiries after Millie on Twitter: “How’s the little one’s nasty cold?” Presents—a pair of slippers from Toast, a CD of random songs (Ben Folds: “You Don’t Know Me”; Joe Jackson: “Another World”), a book (
Dear G-Spot: Straight Talk About Sex and Love
) from Amazon. “Maybe someone is being kind,” the policeman said, “looking out
for you.” I asked him if he had ever dreaded the post, the clatter of the letter box? Since I withdrew from Twitter, the gifts have become sporadic.

I’m standing just to the right of the bay, concealed by the shutters. I can tell it’s a man from his height. It could be a smoker, banished from a nearby house. An estate agent waiting for a client. A neighbor locked out. Or what? What am I dreading?

Millie yells from the kitchen. She’s
starving
. When’s supper? Can she have a snack?

I sort her out—make a sandwich and a hot chocolate. I look for Philip, though I can’t find him. I’m not long, but by the time I get back to the window, the figure has gone.

It began yesterday. I was woken by the phone. It was a journalist called Jack Hayward asking for an interview.

“What’s your peg?” I asked warily, as politely as I could manage, considering I was still half-asleep.

“You know, this unfortunate incident with the dead woman: two worlds collide sort of thing.”

“That’s a very complicated concept for this early in the morning,” I said, my mind working fast. So it
was
too late. My involvement was out there. Had the police held a press conference? Or alerted “their sources”? Either way, the information had been released. There was nothing I could do. “Surely you just want the dirt on my marriage, my infidelities, my teenage bulimia?”

He laughed, and it was a nice laugh, a laugh that had seen a few cigarettes in its time but was trying to cut down. “Give us a break,” he said pathetically.

I apologized gently, said I was sure he understood.

“Can I leave my number in case you reconsider?” he said.

“I won’t,” I said, but I took it all the same.

I rang Alison Brett, the press officer, at home. I hope I didn’t wake her. She was immediately efficient if so. “Avoid talking,” she said. “But if any of the paps turn up, give them what they want. They’ll go away then. Pose a bit. I know it’s a pain, but this sort of
off-duty shot can be good for ratings. You know the drill. Casual, stylish, approachable. Cool but not
too
cool.”

Well, I could certainly manage the last bit. I had opened the door yesterday to pick up the Sunday papers in “natural-look” makeup, i.e., quick dab of lippy, and jeans, i.e., what I was wearing already. Two photographers, straight from central casting—short, stocky, red of face—were already out there. They stubbed out their fags when they saw me. “Give us a pic, Gaby,” “Come on, Gaby,” and “Smile, Gaby.”

I waited for a bit, holding the papers under my arm. Afterward, I thanked the photographers—which always surprises them—and closed the door.

That was that, I thought. But the papers were full of it. In the car, on the way to work, I learn about “TV Gaby’s Secret Horror” and “Gaby’s Mournin’ Pall.” Most of the details are there, plus new information about the woman. Not her name, but the fact that she was Polish and apparently lived “nearby.” An employer is quoted, her sadness squeezed into tabloid platitude: “She was a lovely person who will be much missed by everyone she touched.” None of the articles included pictures of her. She’s an absence. I’m the presence, mournful but plucky, on my doorstep. It’s so wrong, that.