Beneath the Skin (10 page)

26

They exited in silence, the door held open for them by Fee. She was a regular girl guide. She'd make a good psychologist, Walt thought. She already had the smile and the professional head tilt, the one that said, ‘Don't worry, we can work on that next session.'

William began whining as soon as they hit the street. He was too hot, with the big parka. He was hungry, could they get chips? No one spoke. Walt risked a glance at Mouse's profile; she looked like she was walking on thorns. Cars streamed past and the pavement was crowded; office workers hurrying home and school kids loitering outside the supermarket. Walt led the way through a small gang of lads who were spraying Coke on squealing teenage girls.

‘Can I go into the charity shop?' William said. He was peering in the smeared window of a bric-a-brac store. The mannequins were dressed in vintage leather and paisley scarves, and behind them, second-hand bookshelves displayed all the funny little things the kid liked: old tins, clunky watches, plastic animals. William pressed against the pane, making a triangle with his nose and palms, fogging up the glass in between them.

‘No. We need to get home.'

When he didn't move, Mouse seized one skinny wrist, tugging his hand so he had to follow her. He walked slowly, eyes down, as if paddling in the sea. Walt lagged behind, watching the close-knit outline of the two of them. Mouse's hips swayed under the blue coat. He imagined her outrage if she figured out he was looking. He liked to see heels on a woman, but Mouse wore staid ankle boots, flat and a little scuffed. She didn't give a rat's ass about fashion, and he kind of liked that too. The on-going tension between them was pressing on his chest. He caught up with her. The lightest touch to her elbow and she turned to him, still walking.

‘Maura, what I said back there – it needed saying.'

‘You're always saying it, Mum,' William piped up from the other side. ‘You're always saying they don't look after Granddad properly – his nails and stuff. And they make him wear other people's clothes.'

‘I can fight my own battles, thank you. In a
tactful
way.'

‘I don't do tact. I do justice.'

She stopped, right in the middle of the pavement. An old chap in a grey anorak swerved around her, tutting at her lack of direction. ‘When I need your help, I'll ask for it.'

‘Like today? No need to thank me for collecting your son from school.'

She shot him a venomous look. ‘You messed that up too.' She turned, resumed walking, faster. William whined about his shoe and started hopping. She shook his arm. ‘Stop that!'

‘The kid wanted to see his granddad.'

‘Oh, you think it's a good idea for him to see his granddad like that?'

‘My shoes are too small. I need new shoes,' William said.

‘That's life, isn't it? You can't protect him from everything.'

‘I can try!'

‘My toes are
really
sore.' William went even slower, until Mouse stopped again and looked down at the kid. Walt couldn't see her expression, but he was glad he wasn't the one on the receiving end.

‘You are not getting new shoes, William. I know it's because you want the boxes.'

‘I've got nine boxes.' His voice was low, sulky. ‘I need ten.'

‘You don't need ten.'

‘I like ten. It's a good number.' He raised his voice, overtook his mother just a little so he could look across her disapproval at Walt. ‘Walt, do you have any shoe boxes?'

‘I don't buy shoes much.'

There was a brief silence.

‘What about socks? Do you just buy one sock at a time?'

‘William, that's rude!' his mother said.

‘How is it?' Walt said. ‘I've only one foot. The kid's being logical, and you're being overprotective again.'

‘And you're being a pain in the arse!'

‘Mum!' William dropped her hand. They'd reached the pedestrian crossing. They stood there uneasily, Mouse and William in front, Walt a step behind. He was flanked by a pensioner with a shopping trolley who smelled of mint and, on the other side, a mother with a little girl in a pink jacket and woolly hat. The child was standing next to William. They traded glances like two Jack Russells, and William's eyes dropped to her daisy-patterned wellingtons. Walt suppressed a smile; he could almost see the cogs turning. They must have come in a big box.

The green man flashed up and the crossing signal beeped. Everyone obediently stepped out onto the road. Walt waited until they'd reached the other side before speaking again.

‘That fat lassie, she was away to give your dad a full cup of scalding tea. He'd have spilled it over himself.'

‘So you managed to do that for him.'

‘He knocked it out my hand. Where's the common sense? Expecting a frail old man to manage a full cup of tea.'

‘He's not even that old!' That was wrung from deep down. Her tone softened. ‘He's not even seventy. It's so unfair.'

A woman with a child in a pushchair navigated around them and they were forced to move closer together. Mouse smelled of fabric conditioner, not peachy perfume like her sister.

Tom's dad used to kid on that he grew peaches in his greenhouse, and they believed him. He gave away stacks of them in brown paper bags. It was years later that Walt discovered Tom's dad had a mate with a fruit stall in Jesmond. He and Tom and Steven would gorge themselves on peaches and make themselves sick. A little peach goes a long way.

‘When was he diagnosed?'

‘I'm not sure. I didn't have any contact with him for a while. I would meet Mum for a coffee now and again. She was desperate to see the baby, of course.'

Their pace had slowed, as if they were no longer in a hurry to get anywhere.

‘Mum never let on there was anything wrong. She made herself ill trying to cope alone. Alys was down in London at that time, doing an internship in a gallery. Mum phoned me in the small hours one night. Dad had flushed his pyjama bottoms down the toilet and flooded the place and that was the final straw for her. She broke down on the phone and I had to get dressed and wake William up and get a taxi over to Fife. It was awful.' She glanced down at her son. ‘I ended up staying with her, but Dad was a nightmare. He kept wandering. Twice we had to get the police. One time they found him at the station, waiting for the London train.'

A bouncer type in tracksuit bottoms muscled between them, so that Walt lost the thread of her voice. William was quiet, taking in this new drip-drip of information. ‘His GP managed to get him into an assessment ward, but Mum had a heart attack three days later.'

He didn't need to ask whether it was fatal. Alys came back, she said, wanted everything tied up as quickly as possible. The castle was sold, and they moved their father into this home in Stockbridge. It was close to the Victorian townhouse Alys had set her sights on. Alys rarely visited him, though. She wasn't good around illness.

‘So the money from the sale . . . ?'

‘All Alys's. My father had cut me out of the will before his diagnosis.' Her chin jutted. Defiance, perhaps, or just the sort of pain that stiffens every part of you.

‘You didn't contest it?'

‘What's the point?' She sounded weary. ‘Alys was happy for me to move in with her. It saves her having to do anything, make any decisions. She needs me, and she pays Dad's fees.'

He wasn't quite sure what to say.

‘So if you've fallen out with your father, why visit him now?'

‘You mean now he's unable to remember what we fell out about? Why do you think?'

He wanted to know what could be so bad that your own father would turn his back on you. Was it just that she had fallen pregnant? He thought of his own father, scurrying to his shed at the first hint of a raised voice. Like the time Walt had written off the family Toyota. Or the night he got pissed and punched a hole in the wall; then his Dad had gone to ground, emerging from his larchlap bunker only when the dust had settled. When Walt rowed with his mother there was a lot of fall-out – tight lips and long silences, the odd slammed door – but with his dad . . . There'd never been a cross word between them. They resolved things with a couple of cans in front of the telly and that was it.

‘
He
fell out with
me
.' Mouse said, as if that explained it. ‘By the time I made contact with him again, it was too late. He'd already been diagnosed.'

Guilt. He knew the symptoms, knew how she'd probe the feeling like a bad tooth until it hurt. She probably bought her father shirts he'd never wear, rich desserts from Marks & Spencer. There'd be lavender heat packs and wine gums, and when the old man swore at her and threw his juice across the room, she'd soak it up, like she somehow deserved it.

Walt knew about guilt. A young woman with a clipboard and serious spectacles had told him that he had survivor's guilt.
Recognising your good fortune doesn't diminish your sorrow and grief over the ones you have lost.

After Tom, well-meaning people told him he'd been lucky. The ‘lucky' word became a boulder, sitting in the pit of his belly. He'd tried lots of things to dissolve it, like booze and weed. He'd driven fast cars late at night. Getting blown up, on that last tour, that had chipped a few lumps off the damn thing. Tom would have laughed at that.

But mostly, it was immovable. You just had to find a way to live with it. Or not.

He cleared his throat. ‘Guilt is something you do to yourself,' he said gently.

She looked about to deny it; she would never sabotage herself in that way. ‘I just do what I can,' she whispered eventually.

‘These places, they know that. It's bollocks. That's how they make wads, out of guilt. Out of people like you, Maura, just trying to do what they can.'

It wasn't much of a thing to say, after she'd trusted him with all that family stuff, but it was how he felt. She gave him what his mother would have called an old-fashioned look.

‘Why are you suddenly calling me Maura? You've done it three times now.' Her cheeks had gone pink, because he now knew she'd been counting. ‘My family call me Mouse.'

‘I'm not family. I'm just your sister's employee,' he reminded her. They'd reached Alys's front steps. William hopped up them, two at a time, pinched toes forgotten. They paused at the bottom of the steps, Mouse with her hand on the rail.

‘I don't know what you are to me,' she said quietly. Something shimmered between them, a delicate filament of cobweb on the breeze. He thought he saw his own heartbeat in her eyes. And then she turned and went into the building.

27

‘I don't know you any more!' Jo had shouted. They'd been having a row, a blazing, drunken row after a night clubbing in Newcastle; the sort of row where words are hurled as brazenly as missiles. ‘I don't know who you are!'

He thought afterwards that it was a cruel thing to say to a guy who didn't know himself. He was not the same. He was an imposter with a boulder in his belly. That was another thing she'd said, that Tom was always between them, and he'd sniped back, ‘Don't give me that “there are three people in my marriage” shite,' in his best Diana voice. Not that there was any hope of a marriage. She'd returned the engagement ring, later, by post.

They'd been downing shots in some bar near the station: bright blue ones, the colour of eyes. Tom's eyes. As the medic had worked on him, Walt had held his gaze gently in his, partly because he was scared to look at the place where Tom's legs had been. You'll be all right, bonny lad. We'll get you home. Trust me, I'll get you home, mate.

He swallowed blue shots until he couldn't remember the colour of his own eyes, and Jo had got that face on her, that scowl she saved just for him. Come on, she said, or we'll miss the last train back. He'd been living with her off and on in Morpeth at the time. She'd kicked off on the platform because he'd started up a bit of banter with some lasses on a hen night. It was the end of the night and their pink feathers were a bit bedraggled. Apparently he'd had more chat for the hens than he'd had for his fiancée all evening. He'd shaken off her hand, told her to fuck off in front of a platform of sniggering fellow drunks, and that's when she'd said she didn't know him any more.

The train had come in while they'd been arguing. The revellers had pressed towards it and Walt had stood there on the cold concrete, hunched into his thin jacket, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet. He might have left the best bits of himself in the desert. They might still be there, bloody fragments of compassion and decency stuck to the sand.

‘Are you getting on?' she'd called, and he realised she was standing in the train carriage, looking out, doors wide open and the orange light behind her oddly welcoming. He couldn't move.

‘Walt!' She hung on to the door, leaning out, and the guard came along and said, ‘Step inside, love. Hands off the door.'

‘But my boyfriend . . .'

‘Are you getting on, sir?'

He couldn't move. The voices faded. He was aware of a shrill voice and the train doors closing and then the train pulled away in a cloud of fumes. He saw Jo's face, a white, angry blur pressed against the window.

‘Are you okay? You don't look okay,' the guard had said.

He'd left the station, spent the night on a mate's sofa. An army mate, who understood.

28

Walt stood in the hall, level with the kitchen door. If he rocked forwards just a bit, making sure his shadow didn't betray him, he could see the two sisters. Alys was sitting at the table eating her breakfast, although it was after nine in the evening and William had already gone to bed. There was a family packet of cornflakes open beside her and she was ploughing through a heaped bowl of the stuff. Hot, milky tea steamed from her favourite mug, the one that said ‘Taxidermists don't give a stuff '.

Mouse was scouring William's bright blue lunchbox in the sink. ‘Dad was very upset today.'

‘Yeah?'

‘And then Walt turned up and things went from bad to worse.'

‘Yeah.' Alys continued to chew, holding her spoon clumsily, the way a child would, at an unnatural angle. ‘He does that. He upsets the balance.'

Mouse turned from the sink, wiping the plastic box with a tea towel. ‘ He's angry, I think. He always seems so angry.'

I'm not, I've never been angry, that's not me.

Walt slid back against the wall, trying not to meet Shackleton's accusing glare.

‘He is cute, though, Walt.'

‘Alys, don't say that.' There was a snapping noise. He could imagine Mouse folding her cloth in temper. ‘That's not helpful. I don't know what to do about Dad.'

‘We should get Weetabix. Will you get me some Weetabix, next time?'

Mouse sighed. ‘Yes. Yes, I'll get some. Alys, I'm going out for my tea tomorrow. I'll defrost something for you.'

There was a silence: the kind that is way too silent.

‘Where are you going?'

‘Galen is taking me to that new bistro.'

‘Galen?'

‘Yes.'

‘Galen? You shouldn't ever fuck your boss.'

‘Don't be so crude. We're just going out for tea.'

‘I don't want you to.' The sound of a petulant chair scraping back. ‘You shouldn't get involved.'

‘Alys . . .' A big gust of a sigh. ‘It's just tea. Companionship.'

‘That's not how he'll see it! Don't go. I don't want you to go.'

‘Alys, I . . .'

There was a jarring crash, the sound of a cereal bowl being smashed to the floor. Walt slid down the wall, cradling his skull in his arms. The shattering radiated through his nervous system like red-hot needles. He could, vaguely, still make out Mouse's whispered promise: ‘It's just a meal, Alys. I won't leave you.'

‘Maybe we could swap mobile numbers,' Mouse said, the next day. ‘Just for convenience.'

‘It would be convenient . . . if I had one.'

‘You don't have a mobile?' She looked at him in disbelief.

‘No.' He thought of his nearly new iPhone. He'd left it on the table for his mother to find, and the act of setting it down, the finality of that dull metallic clunk, had remained with him like a taste in his mouth.

Her expression said ‘that's odd', but she let it go. ‘It doesn't matter. I'm just a bit paranoid, after my dad being upset like that. I don't know what triggered that.'

Coby.
The word unpeeled in Walt's brain, but he came up with the thing you say in such circumstances. ‘He's in the right place, you know.'

She did know. She said all the usual things people say in such circumstances: I couldn't look after him here; he needs proper nursing.

‘He'll settle down,' Walt said. ‘He'll be okay.'
Coby.
The word hovered between them, but, like the strange button, it was a thing best held back for now.

‘Have you been in my room?' Walt fixed the kid with a hard stare.

‘No.' Too quick, too sheepish.

‘In my bag? Have you been in my bag?'

‘No.' Even faster. William was studying the wall behind Walt. There was a downwards slant to his mouth and his eyes looked a bit shiny; Walt hoped he wouldn't cry. He hated weeping women and crying kids were worse.

‘That's okay. I just thought . . . Ee, never mind.'

The kid ducked away.

Walt had been in his room earlier, folding up his clothes, putting his socks into a pile for washing. He had gone through his pack; it was a kind of ritual, a thing he did the way other people check for keys, change, their phone. This was all he had in the world now, this bag. Bergens had to be packed correctly, and always upright, so as not to disturb the layers. Heaviest items went at the bottom, jammed against the frame to protect your back: uniform trousers, or just jeans now, and then T-shirts. Socks and boxers went together at the top. The rope was old and had never lost its dampness. It was heavy, so it went at the very bottom. He checked it at least once a day, for security. When he'd checked that afternoon, the rope had shifted, as if someone had tugged at it. Walt had never moved it, or taken it out. It remained at the very bottom of the pack like a coiled snake, waiting. To check it was enough, for now.