Beneath the Skin Read online

  ‘There’s a damp patch on the back wall. Do you want me to take a look at the pipes?’ Walt asked.

  ‘What pipes? What damp?’ Alys replied.

  ‘The rain’s been seeping into the wall because your pipe is broken.’

  ‘Eh?’ She shrugged, changing the subject immediately. ‘I haven’t really shown you round the basement, have I?’

  They were standing in the shop, her studio. It was cold in there. A weak sun struggled to make it through the grimy window and past the golden eagle. A bare electric bulb provided light, the long flex swaying slightly even though there appeared to be no draught. He felt a hundred pairs of eyes on him: the stag, the eagle, the tiny field mice on the table in the corner. Alys was upbeat, smiling at him as she pulled aside the curtain for him to pass through into the back room. She didn’t draw back like most people would, to give him space. She took up the space and he had to brush past her, his clothes coming into contact with her clothes, static blooming between them. Had she felt it too, that tension? Was she coming on to him? She followed him through into her workshop, and his spine tickled. He felt awkward around her, too conscious of his own movements, of her nearness.

  A battery of lights took up the wall where her bench was situated: anglepoise, spotlights, floor lamps, all projecting fat silver cobwebs onto the walls, and she liked to be there in the middle, preying on her animal corpses: chopping and stretching, teasing and manipulating. Like a spider, she was luring him in here. The last place on earth he should be working in was a dark cellar. He’d served his time in foxholes and trenches, in places where the light didn’t shine. Away from her glowing web the basement was full of shadows.

  There was a door at the back, which was locked. He’d tried it, inquisitively. He’d seen her with keys but hadn’t been quick enough to ascertain where she kept them. It was small details like that that kept you alive.

  ‘Go on then. Give me the guided tour.’ He swept his arm back towards the unlit bowels of the basement. Her answering grin made something jump inside him. She brushed past him, black feathers from the workbench fluttering after her like ghost birds. There were keys in her hand, although he hadn’t seen her take them out of a drawer or a handbag. Did Alys even own a handbag? It didn’t seem likely.

  He followed her reluctantly to where the lamplight didn’t reach. He wanted to smack on a switch somewhere and flood the place with electricity, but she was confident in the dark. She pressed her back against the locked door, as if there was a surprise party waiting behind it and she wanted to ramp up the excitement. He could see the rapid rise and fall of her diaphragm under the white shirt, and he wanted to touch her, to experience some human contact. But she was already in another place, in her head.

  ‘You remember I mentioned Walter Potter?’

  The name conjured up an elderly gardener or a retired minister. ‘Brother of Harry? Beatrix?’

  ‘Walter Potter is my inspiration!’

  ‘Right. Cool.’

  ‘He created tableaux of animals; kittens, frogs, birds. Victorian whimsy. Come and see.’ She whipped around to unlock the door.

  Even before the light went on, Walt felt some presence tickling the nape of the neck. It was the same feeling he’d had many times in Afghanistan: an instinct on entering a space and feeling the weight of it, knowing that something else was there, unseen, sharing the same air. That instinct had saved his life more than once.

  But when light flooded this space he realised there was no threat here. The absence of life alarmed him – shelf upon shelf and row upon row of lifeless bodies, glassy eyes, reaching paws. It was almost too much to take in. There were birds, of course, tiny ones: tits and robins and finches, spiky with claws and beaks and ruffled feathers. There were rats in tuxedos playing cards, stoats smoking cigars. A trio of toads dressed as Chelsea pensioners. But worst of all were the kittens. They took up a whole shelf on their own. It appeared to be a wedding party, complete with a Siamese vicar in a clerical collar. The ‘bride’, an emaciated tortoiseshell, was dressed in Gothic black lace and the groom, sporting a black top hat and a piercing in his little pink nose, was frozen in the act of placing a tiny ring over one of her unsheathed claws.

  Revulsion flipped over in his belly, like something horrible waking up. How could she think this was okay? It was barbaric. He took a deep breath, fighting the urge to gag.

  Alys was smiling with pride. ‘Like it? It’s my homage to Walter Potter.’

  ‘It’s a bit . . . creepy,’ was all he could manage, but she wasn’t listening. She skipped forwards as if to embrace the wedding tableau, carefully plucking at this and that. The vicar held a prayer book. The best man was a ginger kitten, painfully young, wearing a snazzy bow tie and bearing a velvet ring cushion. Alys flicked its tassels.

  ‘Walter Potter completed The Kittens’ Wedding around eighteen ninety. It had twenty kittens in mourning suits and brocade dresses, most of them made by his daughter Minnie. This is my take on it. I’ve gone for a more punky feel, you see.’ She rearranged the bride’s black lace veil. The kitten wore a startled expression, as if it couldn’t quite believe what had happened to it.

  Walt felt like his mouth, too, was hanging open. He cleared his throat. ‘I kind of get the birds and stuff, but . . . kittens?’

  ‘The Kittens’ Wedding actually ended up in America,’ Alys continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. Off she went, like she was quoting from a book. ‘It was sold for over eighteen thousand a few years ago. But it would fetch a lot more now. Taxidermy is the new black!’ She giggled. ‘Potter’s whole collection was broken up and sold off. Damien Hirst wanted to save it for the nation but it wasn’t to be. Scandalous.’

  Like he gave a shit. The place was oppressive. The sick feeling wouldn’t let go of him and he wanted to get out. His voice sounded rough, even to him. ‘Who would buy this stuff?’

  His words fell on deaf ears. He shivered. The place was on the chilly side, no doubt to preserve the art, if you could even call it that.

  ‘I’m working on something else at the moment.’ She came back to him, conspiratorial. He realised she was holding one of the wedding guests in her hands; a black-and-white feline maybe six weeks old at time of death, attired in a kilt and ripped leather top. ‘Potter’s most famous tableau was The Death and Burial of Cock Robin. It took him seven years to create and he used nearly a hundred birds, some of them now extinct.’

  ‘I’m not bloody surprised.’

  Alys’s gaze narrowed a little. Was he pushing it a bit too far? ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘I aim to do my own little tribute. You know, some of Potter’s birds actually cried glass tears.’

  ‘Tears from a glass eye? Incredible.’ He wasn’t sure if she got his sarcasm; she was in her own little world, clutching the kitten to her chest like a teddy bear, rubbing her face against it, just as the living cats rubbed their chins against her skin. She was looking at him in the way felines look at you when they suss out you’re a dog person. Like they can turn you with a single blink of their uncanny eyes.

  He had to get out of there. Turning on his heel, he blundered through the door, back into the main part of the basement, suddenly longing for heat and light and air. He didn’t turn back to see whether she was following him, but he knew she’d be laughing.

  7

  Stuffed kittens? Walt was still turning it over in his mind at lunchtime, as he sat on the basement steps nursing a mug of tea. Where was she getting the kittens? They couldn’t be all roadkill, could they? There wasn’t a mark on them. It reminded him of that movie, the Stephen King story with the undead cat and characters you weren’t too sure about until the end.

  He chucked the dregs of the tea into the dust and patted his breast pocket for his cigarettes. He couldn’t get Alys’s expression out of his head, the way she’d looked when she’d rubbed the kitten against her face. It was as though she couldn’t tell the living from the dead.

  She appeared suddenly at the door. ‘Are you having a fag? Ligh
t one up for me.’

  No ‘please’ or ‘thank you’. Still, he pinched a cigarette between his lips and sparked up his lighter. He drew on it heavily and passed it over. ‘I’ve never seen you smoke.’

  ‘I’m a social smoker.’

  Social? Alys? She had to be kidding, but her face was impassive. He sneaked a look at her profile as she drew on the cigarette. He liked how the action made her cheeks hollow. It was erotic. There was something about her that he found appealing, though he usually didn’t much care for women who were stick thin, like she was. She looked as if you could blow her away like thistledown – but not without a fight. You’d find her clinging on firmly by her fingernails. She was a battler, and he liked that.

  Not his kind of battle though, the earthy, destructive type. Her battles were of the cerebral kind. You could see it behind her eyes, the constant shifting dart of the creative impulse.

  She took another slow drag on the cigarette, and he narrowed his gaze. She made him feel jumpy, like he wanted to have a go at her, and that worried him. He liked being around lasses, usually. They were a calming influence. But not this one.

  ‘The world is full of folk bumming ciggies,’ he said. ‘Folk who never buy any and then look down their noses at those who do, like they’re weak and needy. It’s a power trip.’

  ‘Are you weak and needy?’ She pouted a thin blue stream of smoke into the air. It sounded vaguely flirty when she said it, but he turned his face away from her, and she changed tack. ‘So what’s it like, where you come from?’

  He shrugged. ‘Pretty remote. A village surrounded by . . . nothing. The moors, the Cheviots, the odd salmon river.’

  ‘Sounds quiet. Is that why you joined up?’

  ‘I suppose so. Home was too small, the road to Newcastle too long. I was bored. Me and my mate Tom enlisted together.’

  ‘Join the army, see the world.’

  ‘Parts of it.’ He stubbed out the fag beneath his heel and stood up abruptly. He didn’t want her to ask about Tom. ‘I’ll go and have a look at this gutter.’

  She considered this for a moment, before drawing a key from the back pocket of her jeans. Was that where she put the storeroom key once she’d tucked up her dead kittens for the night?

  ‘You can get into the garden that way.’ She nodded to an odd, wedge-shaped wooden door he hadn’t noticed. The area outside the studio was a weird collection of angles. If you stood at the bottom of the steps that climbed up to the pavement, you were almost underneath the stairs that crossed the gap to the glossy green door of Alys’s doll’s house. The oddly-shaped garden door had been made to fit, lopped off across one corner. Walt reached out to take the key from Alys. It was still warm from her body, and the warmth somehow slipped down into his belly. Don’t even think about it, he warned himself. No good could come of that.

  He wrestled with the gate. Was she still watching him? The skin on his back grew hot. The gate creaked open and he eased through, closing it firmly behind him. A vague sense of relief washed over him as he loped around the side of the building. The grass was long, starred with daisies; a few chipped terracotta flowerpots were stacked against the wall.

  Round the back, he checked the downpipes. They were of the old, heavy sort, layered with wartime green paint and rust. When he tipped his head back, the height of the building was dizzying; the system of pipes branched out, clinging like cast-iron vines to the brickwork. The connecting brackets were embossed with what the antiques pundits would no doubt call ‘period motifs’. Very creative, the Victorians. He pulled experimentally at one of the pipes. A bracket at shoulder-level had come adrift, leaving a hole he could poke two fingers in. A bit of plaster should sort it. He must ask Alys where the nearest DIY shop was. He could fix it in ten minutes.

  His body was starting to settle, after the horrors of the basement. A final, almost imperceptible shudder ran through him. Breathe. Just breathe and let it go. He let his gaze wander along the base of the wall, making mental notes as he went. This would be the back wall of the basement, although most of it was below ground level, obviously. There were a couple of vented bricks there, and . . . a tiny window. He couldn’t remember seeing a window in the basement. There definitely wasn’t a window, because it was so damn dark. Was there a window in the locked inner sanctum, the place of stuffed kittens? He couldn’t recall, but he’d got the impression of wall-to-wall shelves.

  He peered closer. The window was at knee-level. He stooped and wiped a circle with his hand, just as he’d done that first day, when he’d first come across Alys’s studio. He could see nothing but the kind of blank darkness that makes you want to pull away.

  He turned his attention to the pipe again. The drain cover at the base of it was blocked with leaves and muck, which wouldn’t be helping the damp situation. He scraped it away with the side of his foot, encountering resistance. The grate was spiked with bits of debris: leaves and stiff twigs, or were they . . . bones? Little, brittle rat bones. And those weren’t leaves. It was vegetable matter of some kind. Peelings, perhaps. Onion skins? Who would be out here messing around with onions and whatever the hell all these bits were?

  He wished he’d brought tools. He usually had a penknife about him but he must have left it in his room. He didn’t like being unprepared. Nor did he like to leave a job undone. Little details bothered him; leaves and twigs, or whatever they were, bollocking up the drains bothered him. Carefully, he began to prise up the cover.

  He saw it happen in slow motion; felt the sickening crunch a split second before the heavy iron grid slammed down on his thumb, and then he was on his knees, cradling his hand against his gut; his body clenched tight against the pain. Blood pulsed in the screwed-up darkness behind his eyelids. Something alarming and visceral took over: sand choking him, disembodied voices in the static. In his chest he felt the tell-tale throbbing heartbeat of the helicopter coming to get him. The pain was so deep he couldn’t feel it any more, was riding above it, floating somewhere in the dust clouds and he heard them calling . . .

  Robert. Robert!

  They never called him Robert.

  That’s what brought him back. They never called him Robert but there it was in a panicky kid’s voice. Robert! He dragged in a breath. Did he have sweets on him? They all wanted sweets, the kids. Or pens, or footballs. He squinted upwards, and the eyes staring down at him were blue. That jarred too, because he knew they should be brown.

  ‘Robert, are you okay?’ A hand jostled his shoulder, and he was suddenly back where there was no sand, no heat, no sound other than the screeching of the gulls. He came back to an ordinary grey granite afternoon, finding himself kneeling in the dirt like a prize fucking idiot, hugging a bruised thumb.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ Blond hair, blue eyes, gazing at him in alarm.

  ‘No, bonnie lad. I’m fine. Just let me get up.’ Walt winced as he got clumsily to his feet. Every time this happened, it took longer to snap out of it, as if a part of his brain was still in that other land, unwilling to come back and fight this different kind of fight. William was watching him silently. He raised a smile for the child’s benefit. ‘It’s all right, son, I just hurt me thumb.’

  Carefully he unwrapped his fingers so they could both inspect the damage. William wrinkled his whole face, brow, nose, the lot, as he checked out the blackening nail and the swelling flesh. The digit was like a black grape, but luckily there was no blood.

  ‘Ugh. Is it broken? Can you wiggle it?’

  ‘Yeah, I can wiggle it,’ Walt declared without checking. He tucked the injured hand into his armpit. What was the lad doing here anyway? His system began to click back into gear. ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’

  The youngster was dressed in civvies, faded jeans and a hoodie.

  ‘I was feeling sick this morning, so Mum left me with Mrs Petrauska when she went to work. I don’t really like Mrs Petrauska. Her eyes are too black and she smells of garlic, but she lets me watch David Dickinson. I like David Dickinson. “Cheap as
chips.”’

  ‘You’re weird.’ Walt eyed him suspiciously. ‘And you don’t look sick.’

  ‘You do. Your face has gone white.’

  An awkward silence ensued. He didn’t know how to be around kids any more. He’d been used to short, frantic bursts of playtime with his niece and nephew, hyping them up with unsuitable presents and too much sugar until Natalie’s tight expression warned him off.

  Mouse’s son was small for his age. What was he – seven, eight? An ad man’s dream, the sort of blond cherub that could sell anything from sugar frosties to paint; a kind of golden child with two smiley parents, a Labrador puppy and a fishing rod. But when you really looked at him you could see the tarnish; skin peeling where he’d chewed his lip, shadows under his eyes. He looked like a kid who’d stayed up late with one too many violent computer games. He was watching Walt, waiting for some kind of adult exchange, and when it didn’t come, he seemed to make a decision. Gripping Walt by the wrist, he began to lead him back to the front of the building, carefully, as you would a docile but unpredictable bullock.

  ‘Come on, I’ll get you a plaster.’

  Walt followed obligingly. He wanted to point out that a plaster probably wouldn’t cut it, but instead he said, ‘It’s okay. Alys is there. Shouldn’t you go back to Mrs Petrauska’s? She’ll be wondering where you are.’ William didn’t look round. ‘Alys doesn’t know where the plasters are.’

  Of course she wouldn’t. Not babysitter material, Mouse had said.

  They passed Alys sitting on a low stool in the doorway, smoking, the white cat curled up on her lap. She looked at them without interest, until the black thumb was produced for inspection. Then her eyes lit up.

  She dropped the cigarette and jumped to her feet, brushing off the cat. It skulked away into the shadows to groom its fur. Alys moved towards Walt, a little too close, cupping his injured hand in hers, her touch insubstantial. He smelled smoke on her scalp. His damaged hand lay in hers, upturned, like a dead thing. She was gentle but it was an odd gentleness. He tried to ignore the pain, which was threatening to burst out through the mangled tip of his thumb. It was nauseating, but he would never admit it, would grit his teeth against exposing it, because he’d experienced so much worse, witnessed so much worse. To admit to any kind of hurt was a betrayal.