In the Skin Read online

  Grand Central Station. (The Untouchables)

  Central Park. (When Harry Met Sally)

  The Statue of Liberty. (Planet of the Apes)

  The Empire State Building. (King Kong)

  The site of the planned memorial, Ground Zero, at the foot of the tragic Twin Towers. (This will undoubtedly feature in a hundred movies not yet made.)

  9/11. I remember watching the planes hit on my computer screen at work. The office was hushed, my colleagues awed into an uneasy silence by the drama and sense of occasion. The water cooler bubbled. A pencil rolled off a desk and hit the floor. Someone began to cry, muffling the sobs with their hands. Even the traffic sounds outside the plate glass windows were muted. I fail to connect the solemn construction sight before me with the insane chain of events I witnessed that day. Instead of a sense of loss and futility at the waste of so many lives, I feel the urge for a hot dog from the vendor we passed on the street five minutes ago. I wonder if they taste better than the ones we have England.

  I suppose these sights are meant to impress me, to give me wonderful memories I can package up in ribbons and bright coloured paper to take home with me. But all they do is make me feel even more disconnected from the world around me, less substantial than ever.

  One of the pretty assistants asks me out to a bar. She makes it clear that more than her company is on offer. I decline her invitation, and walk quickly away when she asks if I’d like to meet her male friend, Enoch.

  * * *

  I spend my nights at the hotel bar, drinking alone and wondering if the alcohol is making anything better.

  I catch sight of the blonde woman from my first day one more time, but she is with someone else. She doesn’t even acknowledge me; probably fails to recognise me. I sit and watch her through the mirrored tiles, studying her moves, caught up in her display. She is like an actress, and the old man beside her is a captive audience.

  A laugh.

  A toss of the head.

  A hand on his knee.

  Sweet and sour suggestions whispered in his ear.

  When they leave the bar I follow them to the lift. I stand by a pot plant and wait for the lift doors to close, shutting them both up in a metal casket. Then I head for the stairs, racing the lift to its destination. I check every floor as I reach the separate levels, not even thinking about what I am doing or what it is I expect to achieve.

  By the time I reach the fourth floor, my breath a hot jet of air burning my throat, sweat running down the cold skin of my back, I see them disappearing into a room at the end of the corridor. His hand is resting upon her firm arse. Her arm is pressed into his side, kneading flesh. Needing flesh.

  I approach the door to the room and wait, listening for the sounds of their transaction: the crisp fluttering of notes, like wings against glass; a low murmuring, breathy gasps that hitch when they reach a certain point; empty laughter.

  I press the palm of my hand against the door. The wood is laminated: yet another layer of a manufactured reality. I strain to feel something from inside the room, a stray emotion I can possibly latch onto, a wisp of meaning in the chaos around me. There is nothing. We are all alone together, and this is what we do to break up the tedium, the slow decay that ends in the grave: we reach out to each other but rarely ever touch, missing the connection by inches, miles, light years…

  I step away from the door, certain that it moved in its frame: a gentle pulsing sensation against the skin of my palm, a sense of dreamlike motion I cannot explain but which moves me in a way beyond all my powers of description. I think of fake plastic trees and depleted rain forests; of extinct species and genetically enhanced and mechanically recovered meat products.

  3

  At the airport I toy with the idea of jetting off to somewhere I’ve never even heard of, and even wait in line to buy a ticket. But then I see sense and walk away from the line, looking for my check-in desk. Wherever I go, it will follow me. This sense of dread and despair and…expectation.

  I browse magazine racks filled with pictures of faces that seem about to crack. Darkness presses in from the edges of my vision, a stuttering display of shadow.

  The flight home is mercifully uneventful. I drink more alcohol and glare at the other passengers, warning them not to disturb me. I make a small girl cry simply by the power of my gaze. Everyone is faded, a copy of a copy of a person; everything is synthetic.

  Nothing is real, even

  my

  self.

  TWO

  We Are It

  1

  “So you’re home?” The welcome is hardly inspiring: Adi’s eyes are glazed over, like frosted glass on a winter’s day. She barely even looks at me; she just wobbles her head in my general direction. Her hair is a mess; her face is paler than I have ever seen it.

  “Have you been taking your medication?”

  She giggles. Then she turns away, dragging her feet as she walks across the room. I put my suitcase down near the TV and follow her into the kitchen, throwing my coat across the back of the sofa and watching it slip away down the back, between cushion and wall. The sound it makes is like a wretched sigh: the slow puling of breath between chapped lips. The room seems to shift like a gauze sheet, giving me a puzzling glimpse of something else beneath.

  “How are you feeling?”

  She turns on me with her eyes blazing: glaring, burning, stripping me down to the bone.

  “Please.”

  Her smile is awful, as if a sword is cleaving slowly through the jawbone. “I’m fine. Everything is the same.”

  I count to ten.

  “Max. Where is he?”

  “Upstairs. Playing with his toys. He likes to be left alone sometimes.”

  I can’t figure out whether it’s a threat or an indirect instruction so I leave the room and climb the stairs, my fingertips dragging along the rough wallpaper, my feet sounding hollow against the stiff wooden treads.

  Max’s room is located at the end of the hall. I lift the latch on the baby-gate and head that way, allowing the ghost of a smile to tickle my lips. I can hear him singing, his voice high and surprisingly tuneful. He is tapping something — a car? a train? — against the wall or the floorboards.

  Maybe this is the dose of reality I need to nail me into the moment.

  I push open the door and see him sitting there, under the window. He is turned away from me and I can only see him from behind, but he looks bigger, broader, than before I went away. I think again of how quickly kids develop in so small a time, and a sense of pride flushes through me, purging me of everything else — all the bad stuff that has recently been causing a blockage; all the darkness I can barely keep at bay.

  “Hey, Max. How’s my best boy?”

  Max stops playing with his cars. He lets them fall to the floor. His hands look huge; his fingers are like butcher-shop sausages. He makes podgy fists and climbs wearily to his feet, then turns to look at me.

  His face is different, much wider and bonier than before. His eyes seem to have lightened a shade in my absence and his hair has grown alarmingly long. Max’s mouth is set into an unfamiliar smile: a slanted expression, sly and untrustworthy, too old for his face. More like a smirk.

  “Max?” It sounds as if I am querying his identity, and this seems to amuse him.

  “Hey, boy.”

  He lumbers towards me on legs far chunkier than I can recall, dragging his left foot as if he has acquired a slight limp. He is taller than I remember; his clothes no longer quite fit.

  “Daddy.” That word is the clincher. Max has never called me daddy in his life — always pa or dad or even da-da, when he was much younger. His voice is deeper, too, and comes from somewhere right inside him — a cold dark spot I’ve never even glimpsed until now.

  “Daddy.”

  I run from the room, feeling foolish and afraid. The kid closes the door behind me and for a moment I’m sure I hear him chuckle dryly.

  I stop at the top of the stairs, caught between se
parate layers of the same existence. I can hear Adi shuffling about downstairs like a zombie, and the kid in the room has begun once more to clatter a plastic toy against the wall.

  I stay where I am for a long time, unsure of what exactly is going on in the strange territory of my life.

  2

  Later, I’m standing outside wishing that I smoked, just so I might have something to do with my hands. I’m pacing up and down the garden under the nursery window. The light is off; my son is in bed. My son. I must remember that. He is my son, and not some tiny intruder who’s come to stay.

  Kicking my heels, I notice something on the ground: a small round bundle. Greasy paper wrapped up in a ball and discarded in the grass. I bend down and pick it up, untying the slippery knot of wrappings. When I’m done I hold a piece of greaseproof burger paper in my hand, the name of the fast food outlet stencilled across it in bold letters.

  Panic flares up inside me, then diminishes like a dying firework. I am afraid, yet the fear is almost sexual, like an illicit glance from a stranger in a rough downtown bar.

  I walk over to the wheelybin and dispose of the grubby creased paper, slamming down the lid in an effort to dismiss it from my mind. It doesn’t work; the stain of dread is upon me, making my fingertips moist and tacky.

  I see several cigarette butts on the paved area near the bins. I have never smoked and Adi gave up months ago, replacing one addiction with another — early morning runs, exhaustive sessions at the gym, rowing miles on machines and lifting pieces of iron in slow repetitive motions.

  I scoop up the fag ends with a trowel I keep hidden in a flowerbed for the purpose of removing cat shit and tip them into the bin. Again the lid slams shut, but the unease remains.

  Has someone been watching the house while I was away? The thought of alien eyes cataloguing my family’s movements chills me. I think of the prostitute back in New York City and pray this is not part of some elaborate blackmail plot.

  When I look up at the nursery window, there is a stocky figure standing behind the glass, hands splayed flat across the pane, head tilted questioningly to one side. Watching me watching him. The figure ducks down behind the sill but a sharp afterimage remains burned in its place, a nuclear silhouette seared onto a bomb-site wall.

  I stumble backwards and feel something give under my feet. Stooping down, I pause to examine a dead bird. Its neck is floppy, the head bobbing about when I pick up the tiny cadaver by one ruffled wing. The bird’s beak has been removed; a bloody nub of flesh is all that remains of its face, tiny black eyes stare from the mess, as flat as pinheads. As I look closer I make out a bald spot on the underside of its body, where feathers have been stripped away, perhaps with a blade. There is a mark on the pale pink flesh: a tattoo. It is too small to identify, but I’m sure the blue-black mark is ink.

  I dispose of the corpse in the bin, burying it under the rest of the trash. As I approach the rear door on my way back to the house I see something scratched into the UPVC frame: a faint insignia, something resembling a collapsed figure-of-eight lying on its side. Similar to the mark etched onto the bird.

  I go back inside and lock all the doors, and then check each window in the house, one by one, rattling the mechanisms to ensure they have not been pried loose. All entrances are sealed but still I feel insecure. Our lives are being invaded, subtly and with great care, but nonetheless we are under scrutiny.

  Upstairs, I check on Max. He is asleep in his bed, lying flat on his back with his hands palm-down on the covers. He never used to sleep this way; before I went away, he always lay on his front, like me, with his hands tucked under the pillow. I leave the door ajar and go back outside to confront Adi, who is lingering with obvious intent in the bedroom doorway, her mood having experienced another abrupt shift.

  “Are you coming to bed?” her voice is softer than before and she has changed into a nightdress that I swear is new — I’ve certainly never noticed it hanging in the wardrobe or folded neatly in a drawer. Short in the leg, low at the chest. Sexy. But her frame is too skinny for the garment; it hangs on her gym-thin body like rags.

  “In a minute.” I turn away, but not in time to miss her sly, calculating grin in the full-length mirror on the wall.

  “Don’t belong,” I think she says, before realising that I have joined the last two syllables of her sentence together to create a single word. She walks across the landing to the top of the stairs, taking her time and lifting the hem of the garment as she raises one leg so I catch a glimpse of her waxy buttocks. The expression on her face as she peers over one shoulder is supposed to be sultry, but to me she resembles a snarling beast.

  I squeeze past her, slink downstairs, and retreat into the living room, where I sit down and retrieve my laptop from the drawer in the big, low coffee table, an expensive piece of furniture designed to look like a giant book. I switch the machine on and wait for it to boot up. When I try to open my well-organised folders, I discover that all the files have been deleted. All my records have been destroyed; there is nothing that I can possibly do to save them.

  There is a new drive installed on the machine, and when I click the cursor to open it, I see it is filled with digital images. Obscene photographs of men and women coupling with dogs, sucking horse’s cocks, pressing the mouths of reluctant farm animals against their grubby private parts. The last file I look at is a sepia image showing a number of deceased children lying in state, dressed in miniature suits. White hands crossed over shallow breasts in a row of tiny coffins.

  When I log onto the Internet the homepage I am automatically directed to features downloadable atrocity videos: beheadings in Iraq, massacres in Rwanda, inner-city CCTV murder footage…

  I shut down the laptop and stare at the keyboard, aware that I might be losing my mind. The keys possess no recognisable characters; the letters and numbers have become a sequence of gibberish.

  I close the lid and stare at the childish stickers Adi and I put there months ago, laughing at the inappropriate nature of small tabs of paper illustrated with skulls and breasts and peace signs. A Yin Yang symbol is a pair of eyes staring up at me. My brain begins to ache and I draw away, heading across the room towards the doorway. My mind is filled with pictures of puckered animal rectums. The bloated teats of milking cows. The thin, wet dicks of domestic dogs…

  Adi is lying on her back on top of the bedclothes when I go back upstairs. Her slim legs are open; she is wearing no underwear. I swallow hard, my throat dry, the sensitive tissue inside my mouth throbbing and swelling so much that it constricts my throat.

  “Come on, baby,” she says in a faux American drawl. For a moment I think she knows about my New York tryst, but then she flutters her eyelids and I realise it is an act, a tacky seduction technique gleaned from some lowbrow newsstand magazine.

  Adi watches as I undress and I wish she would avert her gaze. Her eyes are cold, hard, and she begins to strum the fingers of one hand against the taut mattress. I take off my clothes as slowly as I possibly can but it is not slow enough. She believes I am teasing her and laughs accordingly, licking her pale lips for effect.

  “Fuck me now.” Her request is obscene rather than erotic. I swallow down bile. Adi’s mouth is slick with saliva.

  (…puckered animal rectums…)

  She grabs me as soon as I climb into bed, as if wanting to get this over and done with as quickly as possible. Her moans and groans are carefully orchestrated and as she digs her fingernails into my side I feel only an echo of pain.

  “FuckmeIwantyourcockinme.” It’s a nonsense rhyme, a silly singsong verse devoid of all meaning. She slides down my body and eventually teases me erect, her long, dry tongue lapping, coarse hands flapping. When she finally mounts me I feel her hot slime slithering down the shaft of my penis; her vagina convulses, gripping me tight, imprisoning me in a carnal pose.

  (…the bloated teats of milking cows…)

  Her hands feel different, as if they belong to a stranger, and they seem to multiply s
o that a crowd is caressing me, coaxing me towards a reluctant climax. Their faces swarm over me, tasting my flesh. All I see when I close my eyes is the erased features of the dead bird. Dry, twisted claws. The absence of its beak. The alien marking on its belly matching the one cut into the doorframe.

  It is over in seconds. Despite the dull orgasm, I feel no satisfaction, and Adi must feel even less.

  “Mmm…”

  These sounds she is making. I feel no connection to them.

  “Niiice…”

  Lies, all lies. I wish I knew what she was up to.

  (…the thin, wet dicks of domestic dogs…)

  Adi reaches into a drawer and takes out a jar full of pills, screws off the lid and pops one of the long orange capsules into her mouth. Her teeth look serrated in the darkness and her eyes are vapid, devoid of light and life.

  I feel as if I have been raped.

  3

  Much later — later than I can even imagine — I awake in blackness. Staring into the room, I see phantoms dancing before me, gossamer figures moving with slow precision through thick, dark treacle. I blink my eyes and climb out of bed. My feet feel like dead weights attached to the ends of my legs. The figures are no longer there; despite feeling groggy, the dream has scattered like a swarm of flies.

  For some reason I am drawn to the window. I part the curtains and look down into the huge unkempt garden, allowing my gaze to follow the line of the narrow crazy-paved pathway bisecting the shaggy lawn. Soft moonlight illuminates the scene; it looks like a matte painting on a film set.

  There is something down there — a twisted shape struggling through the long grass at the side of the path, inching its way towards the sagging wooden fence marking the boundary of my property. At first glance, it looks like a wounded animal — perhaps a cat or a dog — squirming along on its belly, heading for cover. But then I begin to make out further disquieting details. Stubby arms reach forward, short white fingers digging into the dirt to drag the rest of the bulky little form along some predetermined route. Limp legs hang below a squat torso, barely moving other than to trail through the muck after the main body as the thing makes its way towards the fence at the bottom of the garden.