Beneath the Skin Read online

  “What's that?”

  “A local paper. They want to talk to you about your heroics.”

  “What? Oh, that. It's . . .”

  “There was mention of a melon.”

  “Ah yes, well you see . . .”

  “They want to send a photographer, too. Quiet!” This last to the circle of children fidgeting on the floor behind us.

  “I'm sorry they bothered you. Just tell them to go away.”

  “Not at all,” Pauline said firmly. “I've arranged for them to come round at ten forty-five, during break time.”

  “Are you sure?” I looked at her dubiously.

  “It might be good publicity.” She looked over my shoulder. “Is that it?”

  I looked round at the huge green-striped fruit, innocent on the shelf behind us.

  “That's the one.”

  “You must be stronger than you look. All right, I'll see you later.”

  I sat down again, picked up the register.

  “Where were we? Yes. Kadijah.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  The journalist was middle-aged and short and fat, with hairs growing out of his nostrils and sprouting up behind his shirt collar. Never quite got the name, which was embarrassing as he was so aware of mine. Bob something, I think. His face was a dark shade of red, and wide circles of sweat stained his armpits. When he wrote, little shreds of shorthand in a tatty notebook, his plump fist kept slipping down the pen. The photographer who accompanied him looked about seventeen; cropped dark hair, an earring in one ear, jeans so tight I kept thinking that when he squatted on the floor with his camera they would split. All the time Bob was asking me questions, the photographer wandered round the classroom, staring at me from different angles through the camera lens. I'd tidied my hair and put on a bit of makeup before they arrived. Louise had insisted on it, pushing me into the staff cloakroom and coming after me with a brush in her hand. Now I wished I'd made a bit more effort. I sat there in my old cream dress with its crooked hem. They made me uncomfortable.

  “What thoughts went through your head before you decided to hit him?”

  “I just did it. Without thinking.”

  “So you didn't feel scared?”

  “No. I didn't really have time.”

  He was scribbling away in his notebook. I had a feeling that I should be making cleverer, more amusing comments about what had happened.

  “Where do you come from? Haratounian's a strange name for a blond girl like you.”

  “A village near Sheffield.”

  “So you're new to London.” He didn't wait for me to reply. “And you teach nursery children, do you?”

  “Reception, it's called. . . .”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “Mmm.” He looked at me musingly, like someone assessing an unpromising item of stock at an agricultural auction. “How much do you weigh?”

  “What? About seven and a half stone, I think.”

  “Seven stone,” he said, chuckling. “Fantastic. And he was a big chap, wasn't he?” He sucked his pen. “Do you think society would be a better place if everybody got involved the way you did?”

  “Well, I don't really know.” I fumbled for some sort of coherent statement. “I mean, what if the melon had missed? Or if it had hit the wrong person?”

  Zoe Haratounian, spokeswoman on behalf of inarticulate youth. He frowned and didn't even make a pretense of writing down what I'd said.

  “How does it feel to be a heroine?”

  Up to then it had been amusing in a way, but now I felt a little irritated. But of course I couldn't put it into words that made any sense.

  “It just happened,” I said. “I don't want to set myself up as anything. Do you know if the woman who was mugged is okay?”

  “Fine, just a couple of cracked ribs and she'll need some new teeth.”

  “I think we'll take her with the melon.” It was the boy-photographer.

  Bob nodded.

  “Yes, that's the story.”

  He pulled the fruit off the shelf and staggered across with it.

  “Blimey,” he said, lowering it onto my lap. “No wonder you took him out. Now look at me, chin up a bit. Give us a smile, darling. You won, didn't you? Lovely.”

  I smiled until the smile puckered on my face. Through the doorway I saw Louise staring in, grinning wildly. A giggle grew in my chest.

  Next he wanted the melon and me with the children. I did my impersonation of a prim Victorian schoolmarm but it turned out that Pauline had already agreed. The photographer suggested cutting it up. It was a deep, luscious pink, paler at the rind, with polished black pips and a smell of fibrous coolness. I cut it into thirty-two wedges; one for each child and one for me. They stood round me on the sweltering concrete playground, holding their melon and smiling for the camera. All together now. One, two, three, cheese.

  The local paper came out on Friday and I was on the front page. The photograph of me was huge; I was surrounded by children and slices of melon. MISS HEROINE AND THE MELON. Not very snappy. Daryl had a finger up his nose and Rose's skirt was tucked into her knickers, but otherwise it was all right. Pauline seemed pleased. She pinned the piece on the notice board by the foyer, where the children gradually defaced it, and then she told me that a national paper had rung, interested in following up the story. She had provisionally set up an interview and another photo opportunity for the lunch break. I could miss the staff meeting. If that was all right with me, of course. She had asked the school secretary to buy another melon.

  I thought that would be the end of it. I was bewildered by the way a story can gather its own momentum. I could hardly recognize the woman on an inside page of the Daily Mail next day, weighed down by a vast watermelon, topped by a large headline. She didn't look like me, with her cautious smile and her fair hair tucked neatly behind her ears; and she certainly didn't sound like me. Wasn't there enough real news in the world? On the page after there was a very small story at the bottom of the page in which a bus had fallen off a bridge in Kashmir and killed a horribly large number of people. Maybe if a blond British twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher had been on board they might have given it more space.

  “Crap,” said Fred when I said as much to him later that day, eating soggy chips doused in vinegar after a film in which men with bubbling biceps hit each other on the jaw with a cracking noise like a gun going off. “Don't do yourself down. You did what heroes do. You had a split second to decide and you did the right thing.” He cupped my chin in his slim, callused hand. I had the impression that he was seeing not me, but the woman in the picture with the sticky little smile. He kissed me. “Some people do it by throwing themselves on top of a grenade; you did it with a watermelon. That's the only difference. Let's go back to your place, shall we? It's still early.”

  “I've got a stack of marking and forms that are about a yard high.”

  “Just for a bit.”

  He chucked the last of the chips in an overflowing bin, sidestepped the dog turds on the pavement, and wrapped his long arm round my shoulder. Through all the exhaust fumes and the fried reek from kebab houses and chip shops, he smelled of cigarettes and mown grass. His forearms, where he had rolled up his shirt, were tanned and scratched. His pale hair flopped down over his eyes. He was cool in the industrial warmth of the evening. I couldn't resist.

  Fred was my new boyfriend, or new something. So maybe we were at the perfect time. We were past the difficult, embarrassing first bit where you're like a comedian going out before a difficult audience and desperately needing laughter and applause. Except in this case very much not needing laughter at all of any kind. But we hadn't remotely got to the stage where you walk around the flat and don't happen to notice that the other person hasn't got anything on.

  He had been working most of the year as a gardener and it had given him a wiry strength. You could see the muscles ripple under his skin. He was tanned on his forearms and neck and face, but
his chest and stomach were pale, milky.

  We hadn't got to the stage either of just taking off our clothes and folding them up on separate chairs in some clinical, institutional sort of way. When we got into my flat—and it always seemed to be my flat—there was still an urgency about getting at each other. It made everything else seem less important. Sometimes, in class on an afternoon when the children were fidgety and I was tired and listless in the heat, I would think about Fred and the evening ahead and the day would lift itself.

  We lit cigarettes afterward, lying in my little bedroom and listening to music and car horns in the street below. Someone shouted loudly: “Cunt, you cunt, I'll get you for this.” We listened to the sound of feet pounding down the pavement, a woman screaming. I'd got used to it, more or less. It didn't keep me awake at night, like it used to.

  Fred turned on the bedside lamp and all the dreary, dingy nastiness of the flat was illuminated. How could I ever have bought it? How would I ever manage to sell it? Even if I made it look nicer—got rid of the flimsy orange curtains the last owner had left behind, put down a carpet over the grubby varnished boards, wallpapered over the beige woodchip, painted the blistering window frames, put mirrors and prints on the walls—no amount of clever interior design could disguise how cramped and dark it all was. Some developer had carved up an already small space to make this hole. The window in the so-called living room was actually cut in half by the partition wall, through which I sometimes heard a neighbor I'd never met shouting obscenities at some poor woman. In a spasm of grief and loneliness and the need for a place I could call home, I'd used up all the money my father had left me when he died. It had never felt like home, though, and now, when property prices were soaring, I was stuck with it. In this kind of weather, I could clean the windows every day and still they'd be smeared with greasy dirt by the evening.

  “I'll make us some tea.”

  “I've got no milk.”

  “Beer in the fridge?” Fred asked hopefully.

  “No.”

  “What have you got?”

  “Cereal, I think.”

  “What's the use of cereal without milk.”

  It was a statement of fact rather than a question I was supposed to answer. He was pulling on trousers in a businesslike kind of way that I recognized. He was about to give me a peck on the cheek and leave. Purpose of visit over.

  “It's all right as a snack,” I said vaguely. “Like crisps.”

  I was thinking about the woman who had been mugged; the way her body flew through the air like a broken doll hurled out of the window.

  “Tomorrow,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “With the guys.”

  “But of course.”

  I sat up in bed and contemplated the marking I had to do.

  “Sleep well. Here, there's some post you've not opened.”

  The first was a bill, which I looked at, then put on the pile on the table with the other bills. The other was a letter written in large, looping script.

  Dear Ms. Haratounian, from your name I gather you are not English, though you look it from the photographs I have seen. I am not a racist, of course, and I count among my friends many people like yourself, but. . .

  I put the letter on the table and rubbed my temples. Fuck. A mad person. All I needed.

  THREE

  I was woken by the doorbell. I thought at first it must be some sort of joke or a wino who had mistaken the street door for the entrance to a hostel. I opened the curtains slightly in the front room and pushed my face against the glass, trying to see who it was, but the angle was wrong. I looked at my watch. Just after seven. I couldn't think of anyone who could possibly be calling at this time. I wasn't wearing anything so I pulled on a bright yellow plastic raincoat before going downstairs.

  I opened the door just a fraction. The street door of the building opens directly onto Holloway Road, and I didn't want to stop the traffic with my appearance just after I've woken up. It was the postman and my heart sank. When the postman wants to hand his mail to you personally, this is not generally good news. He usually wants you to sign for something in order to prove that you have received a horrible bill printed in red threatening to cut off your phone.

  But he looked happy enough. Behind him I could see the beginnings of a day that was still cool but was going to be very hot indeed. I'd never seen this particular postman before, so I don't know if it was a new thing, but he was wearing rather fetching blue serge shorts and a crisp light blue short-sleeved shirt. They were obviously official summer issue, but they looked jaunty. He wasn't exactly young, but there was a Baywatch-postman air to him. So I stood on the doorstep looking at him with interest, and he looked back at me with some curiosity as well. I realized that my raincoat was on the skimpy side and not joined very well in the middle. I pulled it tightly together, which probably made things worse. This was starting to feel like a scene from one of those sleazy British comic sex films from the early seventies that you sometimes see on TV on Friday nights after you've got back from the pub. Porn for sad bastards.

  “Flat C?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “There's mail for you,” he said. “It wouldn't go through the box.”

  And there was. Lots and lots of different envelopes arranged in piles held together with elastic. Was this a joke? It took some complicated maneuvering to receive these bundles with one arm while holding my coat closed with the other.

  “Happy birthday, is it?” he said with a wink.

  “No,” I said, and pushed the door shut with a naked foot.

  I took them upstairs and spilled them onto the table in the main room. I picked a dainty lilac envelope to open but I already knew what they were. One of the things about having a great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather who walked out of Armenia about a hundred years ago with nothing but a recipe for yogurt is that you're very easy to look up in the phone book. Why couldn't he have changed his name like other immigrants? I read the letter.

  Dear Zoe Haratounian,

  I read of your heroic exploit in this morning's newspaper. First may I be allowed to congratulate you on your courage that you showed in tackling that person. If I may trespass a little longer on your patience . . .

  I looked ahead and then over the page and then the page after that. There were five of them, and Janet Eagleton (Mrs.) had written on both sides of the paper in green ink. I'd save that one for later. I opened an envelope that looked more normal.

  Dear Zoe,

  Congratulations. You did brilliantly, and if more people behaved the way you did, London would be a better place to live. I also thought you looked lovely in the photograph in the paper and that's really why I'm writing. My name is James Gunter and I'm twenty-five and I think I'm quite presentable looking, but I've always had trouble meeting the right girl, Miss “Right,” if you will. . . .

  I folded up the letter and placed it on top of Mrs. Eagleton's. Another letter was more like a package. I opened it up. There was a bundle of paper half folded, half rolled up. I saw diagrams, arrows, subjects arranged in columns. But sure enough, on the first page it began as a letter addressed to me.

  Dear Ms. Haroutunian,

  (That's an interesting name. Might you be a Zoroastrian? You can let me know at my box number (below). I will return to this subject (Zoroaster) below).

  You have defenses against forces of darkness. But as you know there are other forces that are not so easily resisted. Do you know what a kunderbuffer is? If you do you can skip the following and begin at a section I will mark for your convenience with an asterisk. I append one for demonstration purposes (*). The section I will mark for your convenience I will mark with two (2) asterisks in order to avoid unnecessary confusion.

  I put the letter on top of James Gunter's. I went into the bathroom and washed my hands. That wasn't enough. I needed a shower. That was always a bugger in my flat. I liked showers with frosted doors that you could stand up in. I once went out with som
eone whose only redeeming quality, in retrospect, was that he had a power shower with six different nozzles apart from the normal one above. But the shower in my flat involved squatting in the bath and fiddling with decaying valves and twisting the cable. Still, I lay back for several minutes with a washcloth over my face, showering it. It was like lying under a warm wet blanket.

  I got out and got dressed in my work clothes. I made a mug of coffee and lit a cigarette. I felt a bit better. What really would have made me feel better is if the pile of letters had gone, but it was still stolidly present on the table. All those people knew where I lived. Well, not quite all. Another brisk inspection of the letters showed that several of them had been redirected from the newspapers where they had been originally sent. Some of them were probably nice. And at least, I thought to myself, they were writing instead of phoning up or calling round.

  At that moment the phone rang, which made me jump. It wasn't a fan. It was Guy, the real estate agent who was allegedly trying to sell my flat.

  “I've got a couple of people who want a look around the property.”

  “Fine,” I said. “You've got the key. What about that couple who saw it on Monday? What did they think?” I had no hopes of them, really. He had looked grim. She had talked in a friendly way, but not about the flat.

  “They weren't sure about the location,” Guy said breezily. “A bit on the small side as well. And they felt it needed too much work on it. Not keen, basically.”

  “The people today shouldn't come too late. I'm having some friends around for a drink.”

  “Birthday, is it?”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Do you really want to know, Guy?”

  “Well . . .”

  “I'm having an anniversary party because it's six months since this flat went on the market.”

  “It's not, is it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “It doesn't seem like six months.”