Beneath the Skin Read online

  I put three multivitamin tablets in my mouth and crunched them crossly. Then I picked up the homework—if that's not too grand a word for it—that I had set the class to and brought home that evening. I had asked them all to draw one of their favorite stories. Some of the pictures were pretty incomprehensible. Benjamin's zigzag pattern in green and black was “The Big Bad Wolf.” Abstract art, I supposed. Jordane had drawn a round pea-green circle, nothing else, for “The Princess and the Pea.” Lots of them had done pictures of Disney films: Bambi and Snow White and things like that. I went through them and wrote encouraging remarks on them and then put them all in a folder under the table.

  “I'm going now.”

  The man stood in the doorway, camera round his neck. He was tapping his pen against his teeth and gazing at me. I saw that the bald spot in the center of his head was a cruel pink, and his hairy wrists were sunburned as well. Good.

  “Oh, right.”

  Not a word about coming back. Bastard.

  I left a few minutes after him, to go and see a film with Louise and a few of her friends I had never met before. It was lovely sitting in the dark with a group of women, eating popcorn and giggling. It was so safe.

  I came back quite late. It was dark, starless. I pushed open the door and there was a letter on my doormat; someone must have pushed it through the letterbox. Neat italic writing, black ink. It didn't look like another nutter. Standing in the doorway, I opened the letter.

  Dear Zoe,

  When does someone like you, young and pretty and healthy, become frightened of dying, I wonder. You smoke (there's a nicotine stain on your finger by the way). Sometimes you take drugs. You eat bad food. You stay up late and the next morning you don't get hangovers. Probably you think that you will live forever, that you will be young for a long while yet.

  Zoe, with your white teeth and your one small dimple when you smile, you will not be young for much longer. You have been warned.

  Are you scared, Zoe? I am watching you. I am not going to go away.

  I stood on the edge of the pavement while crowds of people flowed past me, jostled against me, and I stared at the letter. I lifted up my left hand and there was a yellow stain on the middle finger. I crumpled the letter into a tight ball and threw it into a bin with all the other rubbish, all the crap of other people's lives.

  Today, she is wearing a pale blue dress with straps. It comes down to her knees, and there is chalk dust near the hem that she has not noticed yet. She is not wearing a bra. She has shaved under her arms; her legs look smooth, soft. There is pale nail varnish on her toes, but it is beginning to chip on her left big toe. Her sandals are flat, navy blue, old, scuffed. She is tanned; the hairs on her arms are golden. Sometimes I can glimpse her milky underarms; the whiter skin behind her knees; if she stoops down I can see that the honey color on her shoulders and throat fades between the beginnings of her breasts. Her hair is piled on top of her head. It has bleached in the sun, so it is much darker underneath than on top. She is wearing small silver earrings, in the shape of little flowers. Every so often, she twists them round between her finger and thumb. The lobes of her ears are quite long. The vertical groove above her upper lip is quite pronounced. When she is hot, like today, sweat gathers in it. Every so often she wipes it with a tissue. Her teeth are white, but I have seen several fillings at the back of her mouth. They glint when she laughs or yawns. She is not wearing any makeup. I can see the pale tips of her eyelashes; the slight dryness of her bare lips. There is a sprinkling of freckles on the bridge of her nose that was not there last time I looked. The yellow stain on her middle finger has gone. Good. She wears no rings on her fingers. On her wrist is a large-faced watch, with Mickey Mouse in the center. She uses a ribbon for the strap.

  When she laughs, she makes a pealing sound, like a doorbell. If I told her that I loved her, she would laugh at me like that. She would think I was not serious. That is what women do. They turn what is serious and big into a small thing, a joke. Love is not a joke. It is a matter of life and death. One day, soon, she will understand that. She will know that the way she smiles, or opens her eyes wide when she is listening; the way her breasts flatten when she lifts her arms above her head—these things matter. She smiles too easily. She laughs too easily. She flirts. She wears skimpy clothes. I can see her legs through her dress. I can make out the shape of her nipples. She is careless of herself.

  She talks very quickly, in a light husky voice. She says “Yeah,” not yes. She has gray eyes. She is not frightened yet.

  FIVE

  Everybody knows that schools, almost everywhere except perhaps in busy places like Japan, finish at about four or three-thirty, although the little things that I teach clock out even earlier, at quarter past three. Even people who know nothing else about children know that. They see boys and girls being led along high streets, holding the hand of their mother or trailing behind carers, carrying schoolbags, lunch boxes. I'd already learned that the rush-hour traffic in London was about half composed of vast people-carriers ferrying glum-looking kids in uniform the huge distances between their nice houses and the schools that were considered worthy of them. Because, of course, as I'd also newly discovered, one of the main status symbols of any parent in London is the distance they have to transport their children. The school next door is for poor people, like the ones I teach.

  The big joke when people discover I'm a teacher is about how they envy me the short hours and the long holidays. Fair enough, of course, since this was one of the less worthy motives that brought me into this job. My school career had not been a major success, so I didn't have the qualifications for studying something really important like looking after sick pussycats, which was what I had wanted to do when I was much younger. I had only done well enough to teach small children. That suited me. I liked children, their transparency, their eagerness, and their sense of possibility. And I liked the idea of standing around a sandbox all day and wiping the noses of toddlers and helping mix paints.

  Instead I found myself in a job that was more like being an accountant in the middle of a zoo. And the hours were longer than being an accountant. The official school inspection was coming at us like a train. After the kids had been collected and taken back to their apartment blocks, we had meetings, form-filling, planning. We stayed on until seven, eight, nine o'clock, and Pauline would have been better off installing a camp bed and a Primus stove in her office, since she never seemed to leave.

  I got away earlier that evening because I had an appointment to meet a man at the flat. Naturally the bus didn't arrive for ages, so when I ran panting along the pavement only five minutes late at twenty-five to eight, he was standing there in the doorway reading a newspaper. Bad start. I had already given him too much time to look at the area. Fortunately, he seemed engrossed in what he was reading. Maybe he hadn't noticed the pub, or at least hadn't taken in its full implications. He was wearing a suit that was a slightly odd shape with lapels that were askew, so it was probably very expensive. He must have been in his later twenties, maybe thirty. His hair was cut very short, and he looked cool in the blistering heat.

  “I'm really sorry,” I panted. “Bus.”

  “That's all right,” he said. “I'm Nick Shale. You're Miss Haratounian.” We shook hands in a sort of continental style. He smiled.

  “What's so funny?”

  “I pictured you as a grim old landlady,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said, trying to smile politely.

  I opened the street door. There was the usual rubbish on the doormat, leaflets for takeaway pizzas, window cleaners, taxi cabs, and one hand-delivered letter. I recognized the writing immediately. It was the creep who had sent me the letter before—when was it?—five days ago. He'd been back to my door. How boring and irritating. How very nasty. I looked at it for a moment, then over at the man, Nick, who had a puzzled expression.

  “What did you say?” I said.

  “Your bag,” he said. “Can I take it for you?”
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  I handed it to him without speaking.

  I had my guided tour of the flat down to a skillful three minutes, brilliantly taking in all the points of interest while deftly avoiding areas that were not necessarily to the advantage of the property. Occasionally Nick asked questions that I had now become used to.

  “Why are you moving?”

  Did he think he could trap an old hand like me so easily?

  “I want to move closer to my work,” I said, falsely.

  He looked out the window.

  “Is the traffic a problem?” he asked.

  “I've never thought about it,” I said. That was laying it on a bit thick. At least he didn't laugh. I placed the envelope on the table. Unopened. “It's handy for the shops.”

  He put his hands in his pockets and stood in the middle of my living room as if he were rehearsing being the owner. He looked like the squire of a very small estate indeed.

  “You're not from London,” he said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You don't sound like it,” he said. “I'm trying to place you. With your name you should be Armenian. But you don't sound Armenian. Not that I know what Armenians sound like. Maybe they all sound like you.”

  I felt oddly sensitive when people looking around the flat turned personal as if we were all going to be good friends, but I couldn't help smiling.

  “I grew up in a village near Sheffield.”

  “Different from London.”

  “Yeah.”

  There was a pause for mutual thought.

  “I'd like to think about this,” Nick said with an earnest expression. “Would it be all right if I came back and had another look sometime?”

  I was dubious about whether it was specifically the flat he was interested in, but it didn't bother me too much. Even a crumb of enthusiasm was something.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Can I ring you or do I need to go through the estate agent?”

  “Whatever,” I said. “I'm at work quite a lot.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I'm a teacher in a primary school.”

  “That's great,” he said. “All those holidays.”

  I forced a smile.

  “Your number,” he said. “Can you give it to me?”

  I told him and he typed it into what looked like a chunky pocket calculator.

  “Good to meet you, erm . . . ?”

  “Zoe.”

  “Zoe.”

  I heard him trip down the stairs two at a time and I was left alone with my letter. I pretended to myself to be casual about it for a bit. I made myself an instant coffee and lit a cigarette. Then I opened it and spread it out on the table before me:

  Dear Zoe,

  I may be wrong, but I think you aren't as scared as I mean you to be. As you know, I'm looking at you. Maybe I'm looking at you as you read this.

  It was stupid but I glanced up and around, as if I might catch someone next to me.

  As I said before, what I'm really interested in is looking at you from the inside, the bits of you that you'll never see but I will.

  Maybe it's that you feel secure in your horrible little flat that you can't sell. You're not secure. For example: your back window. It's easy to climb up on the shed in the yard behind and then through it. You should put a proper lock on it. The one you've got at the moment is too easy. That's why I left it open. Go and look.

  P.S. You look happy when you're asleep. Being dead is only like being asleep forever.

  I put the paper back on the table. I walked across the room and out onto the landing. Sure enough the window that looked down on the garden I wasn't allowed to go into was raised a couple of feet. I shivered. I almost felt that there was a chill in the flat, like in a cellar, though I knew it was a clammy hot evening. I went back into the living room and sat by the phone. I wanted to be sick. But was it an emergency? Was it anything?

  I compromised. I looked up the nearest police station in the phone book and phoned it. I had a slightly complicated conversation with a woman at the desk, who seemed to be looking for excuses to put the phone down. I said there had been a break-in and she asked what had been stolen and what damage had been done. I said no damage and I wasn't sure what had been stolen.

  “Is this a police matter?” the voice asked wearily.

  “I've been threatened,” I said. “Threatened with violence.”

  The discussion went on for quite a few minutes more, and after a conversation with a third party, inadequately masked by a hand over the receiver, she said that somebody would call round “in due course,” whatever that meant. I went from window to window, locking them when I could, fastening bolts. As if somebody was going to climb into a first-floor window in full view of Holloway Road. I didn't switch on the TV or play music. I wanted to be able to hear anything. I just smoked cigarette after cigarette and sipped a beer.

  It was over an hour later that the doorbell rang. I walked down to the street door but didn't open it.

  “Who's there?”

  There was a muffled sound from behind the door.

  “What?”

  Another muffled sound. Awkwardly I pulled back the stiff-sprung opening of the letterbox and looked out. I saw dark blue cloth. I opened the door. There were two police officers. Their car was parked behind them.

  “Do you want to come in?”

  They didn't reply but looked at each other and stepped forward. I led them up the stairs. Both of them took off their caps as they entered the house. I wondered if it was an ancient form of respect toward women. To make things worse, I get nervous around the police. I tried to remember if there was anything illegal in the flat, in the fridge or on the mantelpiece. I didn't think so but my mind wasn't working very efficiently, so I couldn't be sure. I pointed to the letter on the table. Maybe I shouldn't touch it. It might be evidence. One of the officers stepped forward and leaned over the table, reading it. It took him quite a long time. I saw he had a long Roman nose, with a lump where it met his head.

  “You've had another letter from this person?” he asked finally.

  “Yes, I got one a few days ago. On Wednesday, I think.”

  “Where is it?”

  I'd been waiting for this.

  “I threw it away,” I said, a bit guiltily, and then quickly started speaking before he could get cross with me. “I'm sorry. I know it was a stupid thing to do. I just got upset by it.”

  But the officer didn't get cross. He didn't seem worried at all. Or even especially interested.

  “Did you check the window?”

  “Yes. It was open.”

  “Can you show us?”

  I led them out of the room. They followed in rather a heavy sort of way, as if they were being asked to do too much for something so trivial.

  “The pub garden's down there,” the other officer murmured, peering through the window. Roman Nose nodded. “He could've seen the window from down there.”

  They turned and walked back to the living room.

  “Can you think of anybody who might have sent this? Old boyfriend, someone at work, that sort of thing?”

  I took a deep breath and told them about the melon and the mail it had provoked. They both laughed.

  “That was you?” said Roman Nose rather cheerily. He turned to the other officer. “Danny was first at the scene at that one.” He turned back to me. “Nice one. We've got your picture up in the station. Quite a heroine you are to us.” He chuckled. “Watermelon, eh? Better than a truncheon any day.” There was crackling in his radio. He pressed a button and a voice said something that was unintelligible to me. “That's all right. We'll be along in a minute. See you there.” He looked back at me. “That's it, then.”

  “What?”

  “You get your face in the paper, this sort of thing happens.”

  “But he's broken in, he's threatened me.”

  “You're not from London, are you? What was your name again?”

  “Haratoun
ian. Zoe Haratounian.”

  “Funny old name. Italian, is it?”

  “No.”

  “It's just that there's a lot of strange people about.”

  “But hasn't he committed a crime?”

  Roman Nose shrugged.

  “Has anything been taken?” he asked.

  “I don't know. I don't think so.”

  “Are there any signs of forced entry?”

  “Not that I could see.”

  He looked across at his companion and gave a little nod toward the door that clearly meant Let's get out of here as soon as we can shut this little woman up.

  “If anything serious happens”—he put a gentle but unpleasant stress on the word “serious”—“then give us a ring.”

  They turned to go.

  “Aren't you going to take the letter with you?”

  “You keep it, love. Put it in a drawer. Somewhere safe.”

  “Aren't you going to take a statement? Don't I need to fill out some form?”

  “If you have any more trouble, we'll do all that, my dear. All right? Now you get some sleep. We've got work to do.”

  And they went to work. I looked out of the window as their car pulled out into all the other lights and hubbub of the hot city.

  SIX

  There was loud music and laughter outside on Holloway Road, as if there was a slightly sinister late-night street party going on. Somebody was clapping wildly. A car horn blared. The hot air held all the smells of the night together: spice, frying onions, exhaust fumes, patchouli, garlic, cinnamon, and the unexpected drift of roses. Occasionally a feeble twitch of wind fluttered the half-open curtains through the wide-open window, but otherwise the heat was thick and deep and saturated. It was the middle of the night but there were no stars, no moon, only the street lamps that cast a dirty orange glow round the room. And noise. People. Cars. I felt for a moment I'd like to be out in the middle of a forest or desert or on the open sea.