Beneath the Skin Page 13

  ‘Then find out!’

  ‘Don’t shout!’ Mouse squared up to him. He hadn’t realised he’d been shouting. He turned away, crossing his arms over his chest. He felt sick. He’d been so careful. He’d left his phone at his mother’s, paid for things in cash so there’d be no electronic trail. And now here he was on Facebook, proposing in an Edinburgh square. What if it went viral? Steven was on Facebook.

  ‘Alys saw it,’ Mouse was saying. ‘She was horrified. She seems to think you two are an item. I tried to explain it was a joke but . . .’ She pressed a hand across her lower face. Her eyes seemed huge, fixed on the screen ‘I tried to tell her it was a joke.’

  ‘She doesn’t do jokes.’ Walt was pacing. He had to go, get out of here.

  ‘She’s very literal.’

  ‘So are most people.’ He came back to the table. ‘We need to get that off there. Fast.’

  Mouse reared back to look at him, and he moved away from her questioning eyes, started to fill the kettle, playing for time. He wanted to bang his head against the cupboard door.

  ‘I’ve already made tea,’ she said. Her voice was clipped. ‘There’s a full pot of it on the table.’

  ‘Oh, because tea will fix everything.’ He slammed off the switch and turned to face her again.

  William, oblivious, was trawling for videos of cats and dogs.

  ‘Don’t take it out on me! You were the one acting the idiot!’ They stood glaring at each other over the kid’s head. Alys wandered back in, all little girl lost in her mismatched pyjamas. She paused for effect at the other side of the table. Walt could not escape her gaze. It peeled away his veneer, exposed the bits he wasn’t proud of.

  ‘I thought you liked me,’ she whispered. ‘I thought we were getting close.’

  He opened his mouth to deny it, but Mouse said, ‘I told you not to mess with her, didn’t I? I told you to keep your distance.’

  ‘And now you want to marry my sister!’

  ‘No, I don’t! I don’t want to be close to anybody! I should never have come here.’ This burst from him, surprised him. ‘You know what? I quit – the job, the house, this whole fucking family.’

  William was staring at him, but he knew better than to catch his eye.

  Mouse made a little, satisfied noise in her throat: hmm. I knew this would happen, that’s what she was thinking. The room was suddenly too small. He felt like thumping someone, was dizzy with the redness.

  ‘When did you decide to marry?’ Alys said, as if he hadn’t spoken. She stepped forward, picked up the teapot and began to pour a thin trickle into her red mug. It had never been a good pourer, that teapot. And it was heavy. He could see the sinews in her wrist popping with the strain. Her pulse fluttered among the blue veins like a bird’s heart. No one answered her.

  Then William piped up: ‘Look, Auntie Alys. There are loads of jokes on here, like puppies falling asleep in their food bowls. And cats. Lots of cats.’ His voice was soft and wheedling, the sort of voice he might have used to call a truce in the playground. ‘Pax’, that’s what they said in Walt’s day. Shout ‘pax’ and everything stops, all the pushing and shoving and hostage-taking. Everyone is disarmed, for just that millisecond of peace.

  Pax.

  Walt tried to slow his breathing. Alys was still holding the teapot. She looked at him again, skinned him. He felt the chill on his innards. Her face was calm, a mask. And then she let go of the teapot.

  Thank God you were there, said Mouse afterwards. Thank God.

  It was nothing, he’d said. I’ve got quick reactions.

  She hadn’t dropped the teapot, Alys. Hadn’t thrown it. She’d just abandoned it. As it fell, Walt reacted. Hypervigilance. He’d grabbed William, hoisted him off the chair. The pot crashed onto the table and split apart, a tide of scalding tea seeping around the laptop and soaking the seat where William had been sitting.

  Alys had left the room without looking back.

  Mouse had taken up William and hugged him until Walt thought they might both fracture, like the teapot. He watched from the sidelines.

  ‘I’d worry about Alys,’ he said eventually, ‘if I were you.’

  32

  That night, he kept waking up with the past in his head; not the nightmarish parts, just the what-ifs that littered his path like cigarette butts. He kept thinking of Jo. Perhaps he was just horny. He switched on the lamp beside his bed and lay staring at the cracks in the ceiling.

  Jo was with someone else now, according to Steven. In the hospital she’d visited him once, but they’d already broken up by then, so it was more of a courtesy call. She’d had a lucky escape from all the rehab and the medics and the rebuilding. She’d brought him grapes (original) and a bottle of elderflower cordial. ‘I love the taste, it reminds me of spring,’ she’d said, as she poured him a glass.

  It had been spring when he’d proposed to her. She’d picked a clutch of snowdrops and carried them back to their hotel room like a bride in training, and somehow left them lying on the bed. When Walt had seized her and kissed her and urged her down onto the fresh sheets, the crushed white scent of snowdrops had clung to their bare skin for hours. They’d lain together like two saplings, legs spiralled, talking about the future on the same pillow. They shared the same looks, Jo and himself: both tall and straight, the same unruly dark hair, although his had been cut short back then. Nose to nose, it was like looking into a mirror, breath misting dark blue eyes. He chose to inhabit a little bubble, not looking forward, trying not to look back. They carried that small patch of woodland around with them for months, intoxicated.

  On his next tour, the imaginary wood was his happy place. It was untouchable, a sanctuary, and when he fucked Jo in his memory, that glorious moment of entering her smelled always of fresh spring green.

  And then Tom got blown up, and the wood became a wasteland overnight.

  Somewhere in the small hours, he must have fallen into a deep sleep, because he was jolted out of it by the sound of his door clicking open. He lay rigid, waiting for his body’s manic downloading of data to subside. The light was still on. There was no one there. Cursing, he heaved himself from the bed on his one leg, leaning on the bedside cabinet for support. He hefted the door shut, displacing a puff of chilly air, which smelled faintly of onions. He got back into bed. There’s no one there, he kept repeating to himself. No one there. It’s the faulty catch on the door. He kept meaning to wedge the damn thing shut. This was about the third time it had sprung open of its own accord, leaving him in a state of panic.

  He dozed for another hour, before finally giving up and swinging his legs out of bed. He reached for his prosthesis, went through the motions of securing it. First the liner, the all-important second skin, which protected his residual limb, then the moulded resin socket. It was a snazzy blue – matched his eyes, the physio had joked. The foot was carbon: a flexible, all-terrain jeep of a foot. A go-anywhere foot. It was funny how quickly it had become a part of him. He’d assimilated it. His mind, on the other hand, was a thing apart: floundering, ungainly and damaged.

  Finally, he stood up tall, worked the kinks from his back, and strode over to the window. The curtains were stained yellow by the streetlights. Drawing aside one half, gently, like a bride’s veil, he gazed down onto the dark street. He could get dressed, take up his pack and simply walk out. It was easy done. Sighing, he rested his brow against the cold glass. He’d tried so hard to make a clean break. They would never have traced him. He could have remained here, concealed, for ages, or travelled north, inflicted himself on some other unsuspecting family. But now it was all fucked up. He’d gone viral. How long before one of Steven’s sprogs, swiping through his iPad, came across Uncle Robert on Facebook? How fucking long?

  He walked over to his pack and began to check it. Light things at the top: boxers, T-shirts. Heavier things at the bottom: jeans. Rope.

  33

  Should he leave a note?

  They always did, in films. It would be better tha
n a half-empty Scotch bottle. More dignified. He had a note already, didn’t he? The death letter, the one they make you write, saying goodbye to your nearest and dearest. He hadn’t needed to use it before. Maybe it would find its purpose now. He’d find a place for it, propped up against the sugar bowl.

  It hadn’t travelled well: there was a coffee ring across the corner, which seemed a bit cavalier. If your mother was to receive a goodbye note, it should be pristine, like a well-starched handkerchief.

  Walt takes a last swig of whisky; places the tumbler beside the bottle. Next to that he leaves his keys and his mobile phone, arranging them carefully for no obvious reason, trying not to imagine his mother picking them up, turning on the phone to ring him in that muddled way she acts around technology.

  He takes a last, long look around the kitchen: at those awful curtains with the big sunflowers, as familiar as his own clothes; the drawer with the missing handle that Dad has never fixed; the spice jars lined up in a special pine rack, even though Mam only ever uses salt and pepper and maybe the odd bay leaf. Realisation seeps through his fuddled brain. This is the end of the road, my friend. The End.

  He’s always liked the garden in the half dark. He likes the sounds and the tired smells: damp flowers, woodsmoke, a soupçon of fried onions left over from teatime. He remembers the boy hiding in the apple tree, and as he climbs the drainpipe it’s as if the boy is watching him, hiding in the foliage of the past. Walt has lost sight of himself now, but the boy can see him. The boy watches him unbind the washing line from the gutter, working it between his fingers until the hemp strafes his cold cuticles; but on he labours, as if there’s a lot riding on the untying of the rope. He can almost hear gunfire. The cowboys are lynching their man and the boy is whispering in his ear, ‘They pee themselves when they’re hanged.’ At last the rope is free and coiled round his elbow like a skein of wool as he strides towards the tree. The ancient knot is knitted into the bark and the tree still seeps around the wound. Walt tugs the rope, testing the tension, and the boy repeats, ‘They pee themselves, you know.’ That is the only thing he is afraid of.

  34

  As Walt crept from the bedroom, he sensed he wasn’t the only one up.

  William was sitting on the bottom step of the attic stair, shoeboxes fanned out across the landing carpet like tarot cards, lids carefully tucked beneath them. He was hunched over, his face furrowed with the effort of thinking. His eyes looked pouchy, the soft skin underneath stained violet. He jumped when Walt spoke.

  ‘What you doing, son? It’s not even light outside.’

  ‘Something woke me up.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought . . . dunno.’

  ‘Did you open my door a while back?’

  The kid’s head shot up. ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Nothing. Just a faulty catch. What are you doing now?’

  ‘I’m sorting my boxes into colours. Look.’

  William beckoned him over. The first box on the left contained all things yellow and orange. He had peach raffle tickets in there, a pencil stub, yellow plastic sunglasses and a carton of sandalwood joss sticks he’d pinched from his auntie. He poked through the second box, obviously blue; there were his mother’s turquoise beads, a postcard from the Med, a small blue ceramic starfish. Walt’s gaze roamed over the boxes: red, green, grey and so on. It was all a bit obsessive.

  Walt wondered what Mouse made of it all, and experienced a dart of something fearful. He opened the red box: an old lipstick, a marker, a diary with a wine leather cover. And underneath . . . He grabbed the stiff peak of a cap and pulled it out; items rolled to the floor and William squeaked in protest. He examined the cap, held it under his nose. It smelled faintly of the basement and the odour made his stomach crawl.

  ‘Where’d you get that?’

  ‘It was just lying around.’ William shrugged, defensive.

  ‘It was lying around in the basement. Your mother said we should throw it out.’ Walt held his gaze for a moment, but the kid was sharp, and quickly changed the subject.

  ‘I have a black box,’ he said. ‘Do you want to see in the black box?’

  Walt sighed. A black box. You just knew there had to be a black box. Carefully Walt lowered himself to the floor.

  ‘Right, talk me through this one.’

  As dawn streaked the sky behind the tenements across the street, Walt found himself sitting on the outside step. He’d lit a last fag, zipped up his too-thin jacket. The daylight settled in around him, moist with unshed rain. He would get a train, go north. He glanced at his pack, slumped against the railings. He had all he needed.

  Or he could just walk to the park. One last time.

  His thoughts jerked back to William and his magpie collection.

  William had been keen to show off his treasures: an unwrapped, furry stick of liquorice toffee, a piece of sea-coal from Cramond beach, a ring with an onyx stone. Does your mother know you’ve taken that? A black plastic comb. A leather wallet and, deep inside it, a pile of monochrome snaps. Walt had taken them out and held them up in the lamplight. He recognised the backdrop – castle walls and stunted trees – from Mouse’s descriptions of her childhood. There was even a tumbledown structure that may have been the cowshed-turned-garage. In one of the shots, two men, both in work gear, posed beside an old Ferguson tractor. Walt had traced a finger over the grainy image.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘My granddad,’ William had said, pointing to the man on the left. He was stocky, with a dark moustache and a bold stare. Walt saw a faint shadow of the man in the care home; the strong bone structure, the large outdoor hands. The second man was shorter, slighter, with a prim smile. His nose and his lips gleamed with dots of light.

  ‘And him?’

  ‘That’s Uncle Coby,’ William whispered. ‘But we don’t talk about him.’

  The front door banged, jolting Walt back to the present, to the cold stone beneath his backside. He fought the urge to hit the deck. Hypervigilance. Just go with it, the psychologist had advised. He’d talked about grounding techniques. Hold on to something concrete. Rationalise your surroundings. Stating the obvious was supposed to be some kind of a mantra to ward off flashbacks. When the past reached out to get you, just remind yourself, this is Monday. I am sitting on the step. That’s just the door banging, not a bomb. He’d had a big problem with clapping in the early days. He’d been at one of the kids’ birthday parties, and the applause that greeted the birthday cake had sent him ducking under the table. He was instantly in a ditch in Helmand, bullets cracking past his head. That was one way to spoil a party.

  ‘Jesus! What are you doing out here?’ Mouse was all belted up in the blue coat. He struggled to his feet.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’ he countered. ‘Bit early for work, isn’t it?’

  ‘I just got a call from my father’s care home. He’s gone missing. Just walked out, sometime in the night.’ Her voice was shaky.

  ‘Shit.’ He went to reach out a hand to touch her hunched shoulders, then thought better of it.

  ‘Could you stay with William? He’s playing in his room.’ She looked guilty. ‘I just have to go down and see what’s going on. I left a note to say . . . I thought you were still in bed.’

  Walt felt his throat tighten. ‘Don’t do this to me. I’m not a fucking babysitter. I won’t always be here.’

  ‘I know! I’m sorry. But it’s too early to call Mrs Petrauska.’

  ‘Don’t ask me.’ He grabbed his pack and headed down the steps.

  ‘Don’t do this to me!’ Her anguish flowed after him. He paused, looked up. She was crying; standing at the top of the steps, tears running down her face. He sighed and turned back.

  ‘Go on. Go on. Do what you have to do. I’ll look after him.’ He trudged back up the steps as she ran down. She grasped his arm briefly as she passed. He rested his brow once against the clammy door before letting himself back in. When he looked back, she was running down the street.

>   ‘Your father’s gone missing from the care home.’

  Walt thought he’d better say something. Mouse’s note still sat on the table, but he doubted if Alys had read it. She was still in her pyjamas, staring into one of the freezer drawers as if she couldn’t quite remember why she was there. She looked up at him, frowning.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I said I’d stay with William.’

  ‘Cool.’ She turned back to the freezer.

  He pulled a chair from under the table and sat down. No one had the right to be that neutral. He wanted to provoke a reaction, prod her with an imaginary stick until her scorpion tail revealed itself.

  He had sat down at her place setting. He hadn’t intended to, but there was a perverse enjoyment in it. He ran a finger round the rim of her red mug. ‘Want a coffee?’ he asked.

  ‘Ugh. Can’t stand coffee. Never drink it.’

  Walt thought of the unexplained coffee he’d found before, but now wasn’t the time to try and get answers from her.

  ‘I expect he’s wandering around in his pyjamas right now, your dad,’ he said. ‘He’ll be confused, in shock. Lost. And I think it’s going to rain.’

  Alys got up, balancing two wrapped packages in the crook of her wrist as she slammed the freezer door shut.

  ‘I thought I had a waxwing,’ she said, ‘but I wasn’t sure. They’re quite hard to get, because they only winter here, on the east coast. I’m going to dress it as a highwayman. They have this black mask around their eyes.’

  ‘Did you hear what I said, Alys? Your father is missing.’

  ‘I heard you.’ She approached the table. Her mouth had gone sullen, all tucked in, the bottom lip pouting. ‘You’re sitting in my seat. That’s my mat and my mug.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ He scraped the chair back and got up. They were very close. He loomed over her, and it frightened him a bit, because he could feel his temper flaring. He gripped the edge of the table. She’s damaged, she’s ill, he kept repeating to himself. But she didn’t look ill. He wanted to shake her like a cereal box until her flaws fell out, and then he might understand her better. She was looking up at him, and her eyes were cold.