Beneath the Skin Read online

  “Are those all the letters?” asked Louise, pointing at the cardboard box.

  “Yep.”

  “Creepy. Why don't you throw them away?”

  “Shall I? I thought the police might need them.”

  “Why? You've got the perv's letters separate anyway. Chuck them. Treat it all like the trash it is.”

  So she held the neck of a bin bag wide open and I shoved the lavender envelopes, green-ink letters, instruction manuals on self-defense, sad biographies, into it. My spirits rose. Louise went down Holloway Road to buy some flowers while I cleaned out the bath with an old washcloth. She returned with yellow roses for the living room, a potted plant with fleshy green leaves for the kitchen.

  “You should have classical music playing when he arrives.”

  “I don't have anything to play music on.”

  “We can make coffee at the last minute. Bake a cake. That's meant to be good.”

  “I've only got instant coffee and even if I had all the ingredients, which I don't, I'm not going to start baking a bloody cake.”

  “Never mind,” she said, a bit too brightly, cutting the stems off the roses. “Just put some perfume on yourself instead. Can I use this jug for a vase? There, doesn't that look better?”

  It did. It felt better, too, now that Louise was with me, with her spiky eyelashes, scarlet mouth, vermilion nails, tight green dress. Just an ordinary mediocre room backing on to a pub, not a coffin after all.

  “I've been really thrown by all this,” I said.

  Louise filled the kettle. “Where the fuck does this plug in, anyway? There's no spare socket. That's the other thing your flat needs—total rewiring. Top to bottom.” She pulled out another plug with a flourish. “You can always come and stay at my place, if it would help. I haven't got a spare bed but I've a spare bit of floor. Come this weekend, if you want.”

  I had to stop myself from emitting a sob in response.

  “That's nice of you” was all I managed.

  The bedroom looked more or less okay, except I hadn't made the bed and the laundry basket was nearly full. We put the basket in the wardrobe, plumped up my pillow on the bed. Louise turned back the corner of the sheet, like my mother used to do. Wandering around, she paused and looked at objects on top of my chest of drawers.

  “What on earth is this strange collection?” she asked.

  “Things people sent me.”

  “What, as well as letters?”

  “Yes. The police wanted to look at them.”

  “Bloody hell,” she said, picking them up and examining them.

  There was a whistle, that I should wear round my neck at all times as an alarm. A pair of tiny silk knickers. A round smooth stone that looked like a bird's egg. A small brown teddy bear.

  “Why on earth has someone sent you this?” asked Louise, picking up a slightly grubby pink comb.

  “It came with instructions. The point is to scrape it against someone's nose, well, the bit between their nostrils. Apparently it makes murderers go away.”

  “If they keep still while you get your comb out. This is pretty, though.” She was looking at a dainty silver locket on a thin chain. “It looks like it might be valuable.”

  “If you open it up, there's a piece of hair inside as well.”

  “Who sent it?”

  “Dunno. It arrived wrapped in a newspaper article about have-a-go heroes. It's beautiful, isn't it?”

  “And these are exciting.” She was looking at a pack of pornographic playing cards. She inspected the picture of a woman cupping her pneumatic breasts. “Men,” she said.

  I shivered in the heat.

  Nick Shale arrived just after nine, by which time I had had a bath and changed into jeans and a yellow cotton shirt. I wanted to look neat and clean, to go with my flat. I piled my hair on top of my head and dabbed perfume behind my ears.

  He was wearing running shorts, and when he took off his canvas backpack, I saw there was a dark V of sweat down the back of his jersey.

  “Here we are—I bought you these.” He handed me a brown paper bag. “Apricots from the stall down the road. I couldn't resist them.”

  I flushed. It was like giving me flowers. I didn't think prospective flat buyers were meant to give presents to the owner. The apricots were golden and downy, almost luminous.

  “Thank you,” I said self-consciously.

  “Aren't you going to offer me one?”

  So we ate them, standing in the narrow kitchen, and he said he'd bring me strawberries next time. I pretended not to notice the bit about next time.

  “Don't you want to look round the flat again?”

  “Sure.”

  He wandered from room to room, staring up at ceilings as if he could see interesting patterns on their surfaces. There were several cobwebs that Louise and I hadn't noticed drifting in the corners. In the bedroom, he opened the fitted wardrobe and gazed for a moment into my laundry basket, a funny little smile on his face. Then he straightened up and looked at me.

  “I could do with a glass of wine.”

  “I don't have any.”

  “Then it's lucky I brought my own.”

  He stooped down and opened the backpack, bringing out a slim green bottle. I touched it: It was still cold, dribbles of moisture running down its neck.

  “Do you have a corkscrew?”

  I wasn't feeling especially pleased about this, but I gave him one. He turned his back to me to open it. I handed him a glass and a tumbler and he poured the wine into both, with a very slow and steady hand so that none spilled. He told me he lived in Norfolk but needed to buy a flat in London because he often stayed for two or three nights during the week.

  “So my flat could become a pied-à-terre,” I said. “What an honor.”

  “Cheers.”

  “I've got to go out now,” I said, lying of course. My weekend appointment book was empty.

  “It's a bit late, isn't it?” he said, draining his glass.

  I didn't reply. I didn't see why I needed an excuse for a man I didn't know.

  “You should take your bottle,” I said.

  “No, you keep it,” he said, turning to leave.

  “What about the flat?”

  “I like it,” he said. “I'll be in touch.”

  I heard the door close downstairs. I liked him well enough. I wondered what his handwriting looked like.

  TEN

  The next day I felt like a robot in class. I was doing a pretty reasonable impersonation of a primary school teacher. The robot got on with a whole-class lesson on letter formation while somewhere inside I was going over things in my mind. I needed to get rid of the flat. That came back and back the way a tune does, nagging at you. I had the tantalizing sense that if I could close the door on that unlovable bit of living space hacked out of an unpleasant house on a noisy road, then I would be able to close the door on other things as well. What I really ought to do was make the flat more secure, but that seemed wrong, like washing a broken bottle. The way to make that flat better and safer was to leave it. Nothing else would do. Starting next weekend I would start seriously looking at other flats.

  I'd been too young when I'd bought this one. The money I'd been left by Dad when he died had felt like Monopoly money. There was too much of it to be real. He had said to me to buy somewhere to live; it was almost like a dying command. He was a man who thought that if you owned your own property, then you were safe; the world couldn't touch you, no matter what happened. So I was a good daughter—although of course I wasn't a daughter at all anymore, since I had no parents left; I was just me and very lonely and scared—and I did as he had told me. Very quickly. And since I'd moved to London from a quiet village, my only impulse had been to buy something that was in the real city, where things were happening, where there were shops, markets, people, noise. I'd certainly found that.

  “Zoe?”

  I was woken up out of what felt to me like sleep, and what to an observer would have looked like
feverish activity (I was almost surprised to look at my hand and see a piece of chalk and at the blackboard to see a large b and p that I had carefully and unconsciously traced). I looked round. It was Christine, one of our special-needs teachers. The needs in our school were very special. You would see Christine sitting at improvised desks in the corridor with children suffering from an educational disability: abuse, malnutrition, having recently arrived from a war zone in eastern Europe or central Africa, that sort of thing.

  “Pauline asked to see you,” she said. “It's urgent. I'll take over here.”

  “Why?”

  “There's a mother with her. I think she's very upset about something.”

  “Oh.”

  I felt a dull ache in my stomach, that sense of an imminent blow. I looked at the class. What could it be? The turnover in our class was amazing. People moved their children away, sometimes out of the country, often without a word of warning. Other troubled children quickly took their place. We had children under court orders, with social service files. I made a quick count. Thirty-one. They were all here. No toddler had wandered off home without my noticing. There was no medication I should have administered. Nobody was foaming at the mouth. I felt better. How bad could it be?

  As I walked the short distance to Pauline's office, I thought how, if I hated my flat, at least I loved the school. In the small vestibule there was a pool of water made out of bricks with big fat fish in it. I dipped my fingers in it for luck, as I always did when I passed. The school was by the side of another of London's arterial roads. It was shaken all day by lorries making their way up toward East Anglia or down across the river to Kent and the south coast. To get to the nearest bit of scrubby park, you had to lead a crocodile of children along the road and across two dangerous junctions. But that was what I loved about it. It was something from another world, like a monastery, in the middle of the noise and dust. Even when the children were running around screaming it felt like a refuge.

  Maybe it was just those stupid fish that made me feel like that, and I'd probably got it all wrong anyway. I remembered some book of facts I'd read as a child on how water conducted sound better than air. The fish probably spent their entire lives moaning about the noise of the traffic and wishing they were somewhere more desirable. I tried to remember what it was like when I lay submerged in the bath rinsing my hair. Could I hear the lorries hurtling past outside? I didn't remember.

  Pauline was standing by the half-open door with a woman I recognized. They weren't speaking or doing anything. They had obviously just been waiting in silence for me to arrive. I saw the woman every day at the end of school, hovering at the door of the class. Elinor's mother. I nodded a greeting at her, but she didn't catch my eye. I tried to picture Elinor this morning. Had she been upset? I didn't think so. I tried to picture the girl in the class I had just left behind. Nothing unusual occurred to me.

  “Shut the door behind you,” Pauline said, leading me in. The mother stayed outside. She waved me to a chair in front of her desk. “That was Gillian Tite, the mother of Elinor.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  I noticed that Pauline was white-faced, trembling. She was either deeply upset or so angry that she could barely control herself.

  “Did you give the class homework last week?”

  “Yes. If you can call it homework.”

  “What was it?”

  “It was just for fun. We'd been talking about stories and I asked them to draw a picture of one of their favorite stories in their art book.”

  “What did you do with the homework?”

  “I'm trying to get them used to doing homework on time and giving it in. So I collected the books up on Wednesday—I think it was Wednesday. I'm pretty sure. I looked through them immediately.” I remembered doing it—sitting there while that peculiar man who came to view the flat went through my knicker drawer. That was the day I'd found the letter on the doormat. “I wrote nice comments on them and gave them back on the next morning. I don't know if Elinor's mother expected a mark out of ten. They're too young for that sort of homework.”

  Pauline ignored me.

  “Do you remember what Elinor drew?”

  “No.”

  “Does that mean you didn't look at the drawings?”

  “Of course I looked at them. I checked when they began them in class and I wrote a title for each one at the bottom of the page. Then I looked at them all when they were finished. I took them home. I didn't exactly spend hours on each picture, but I looked at them all and wrote something.”

  “Elinor's mother came in to see me in tears,” said Pauline. “This is Elinor's drawing. Take a look.”

  She pushed a familiar large-format exercise book across her desk. It was open and I recognized my writing at the bottom of the page. Sleeping Beauty. Elinor had made a pretty dismal attempt at copying the words herself. The p was the wrong way round and the second word dribbled away as if it had run out of energy. The drawing was different, though. It wasn't like a toddler's drawing. Actually there were traces of Elinor's scratchy drawing here and there, but it had been embellished and drawn over and filled out. The girl was now lying in a carefully rendered room. More than that, I could see what Pauline couldn't. It was my room. My bedroom. At least bits of it were. There was the picture of the cow on the wall that I had lived with all my life and the mirror with a string bag hanging from its edge. I'd always meant to put it away and hadn't got around to it.

  On the bed, Sleeping Beauty wasn't asleep and she wasn't Sleeping Beauty. She was me. At least she had my glasses on. The bed looked more like a mortuary slab. I mean that there were huge incisions in the body, with bits of internal organ, guts, trailing out. Parts of the body, especially around the vagina—my vagina—were so mutilated as not to be recognizable. Suddenly I started to be sick; bitter bile came up in my mouth, and I managed to hold it down, swallow it. But it burned the back of my throat and made me cough. I took a tissue from my pocket and wiped my mouth. I pushed the book back to Pauline. She looked at me earnestly.

  “If you have done this as some very strange kind of joke, then you'd better tell me straightaway. Just tell me: Did you do this?”

  I didn't speak. I couldn't speak. Pauline rapped on the table as if trying to awaken me.

  “Zoe. Do you realize the position you're in? What do you expect me to do?”

  My eyes were burning. I had to stop myself from crying. I had to be strong, not collapse.

  “Call the police,” I said.

  ELEVEN

  Pauline was dubious and reluctant at first, but I insisted. I wasn't going to leave her office without something being done. Carthy had given me his card, but my hands were shaking so much that I had to fumble in my purse to get it out. Pauline looked visibly surprised as I laboriously dialed the number while looking at the card. I suppose she thought I was going to dial 999 in some hysterical way.

  “It's happened before,” I said to her in explanation. “In a way.”

  I asked for Carthy. He was away. So I was put through to Aldham as a pretty poor second best. I was wild on the phone. I said he had to come over now, here, to the school, right away. Aldham was reluctant but I said if he didn't come then I would make an official complaint and added to this any threat that came into my mind. He agreed and I gave him the address of the school and quickly put the phone down. I lit a cigarette. Pauline started to say something about no smoking being allowed except in the staff room, but I said that I was very sorry but this was an emergency.

  “Are you going back to your class?” she asked.

  “It's not a good time,” I said. “I'd better talk to the police. I need to see what they say. I'll wait for them here.”

  There was quite a long silence. Pauline stared at me as if I were an unpredictable wild animal that needed careful handling. At least that's what I felt she was doing. I felt I would bristle at the slightest touch. Finally she gave a shrug.

  “I'll talk to Mrs. Tite outside,” she said
quietly.

  “Yeah,” I said, hardly taking in what she was saying.

  Pauline stopped at the door.

  “Are you saying that someone else did that? That picture?”

  I stubbed out my cigarette and started to light another.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Something horrible's going on. Horrible. I've got to get it sorted out.”

  Pauline started to say something, then stopped and left me alone in her office. I was hardly aware of the time. I smoked cigarettes one after another. I picked up a newspaper from Pauline's desk but I wasn't able to concentrate on it. It must have been half an hour later that I heard voices outside and Aldham came in, escorted by Pauline. She had already told him as much as she knew. I didn't bother with any greeting.

  “Look,” I said, pointing at the art book, which was still open where I had left it. “That's me. That's a fucking exact copy of my bedroom. You can't see that from the fucking pub.”

  Maybe Pauline had alerted him to my agitated state, because he didn't warn me or even snap back at me. He just looked at the drawing, and then muttered something under his breath. He looked stunned.

  “Where was this done?” he said, looking up.

  “How do I know?” It took an effort to slow myself down, to make myself concentrate. “It was just in a pile of schoolbooks. I had it in school last week on Friday when I collected it from the class.”

  “Where were they kept?”

  “In the classroom. I took them home last Wednesday and brought them back the following morning.”

  “Were they ever out of your sight?”

  “Of course they were. What do you think? I didn't sit and guard them all night. Sorry. Sorry sorry sorry. It's just—oh Christ. Sorry. Let me think. Yes, I went out to see a film with some friends. I must have been out for two, nearly three hours, I guess. It was the day I found the letter on my doormat. I told you about it. The first letter—or I thought it was the first letter. I threw it away.”

  Aldham wrinkled up his nose and nodded.

  “So,” he said. He looked baffled and anxious. He didn't meet my eye. “When did you return the books?”