Beneath the Skin (2 page)

I hadn’t made any plan of what to do next if the man was going to get up and come at me. My watermelon was only good for one shot. But he wasn’t able to get up. He clawed at the pavement a bit, and then we were all surrounded by a crowd. I couldn’t see him any longer, and I remembered the woman. Some people got in my way, tried to talk to me, but I pushed my way past them. I was light-headed, exhilarated. I felt like laughing or talking wildly. But there was nothing funny about the woman. She was slumped and twisted on the pavement, her face down. There was quite a lot of blood on the stone, very dark and thick. I thought she must be dead but there were odd twitches from her leg. She was smartly dressed, a business suit with quite a short gray skirt. Suddenly I thought of her having breakfast this morning and going to work, and then heading home thinking of what she was going to do this evening, making mundane and comforting plans for herself, and then this suddenly happening and her life being changed. Why hadn’t she just let go of the stupid bag? Maybe it had been caught round her arm.

People were standing around her looking uncomfortable. We all wanted somebody official—a doctor or a policeman or anybody in a uniform—to step forward and take charge and make this a regular event that was being dealt with through proper channels. But there was nobody.

“Is there a doctor?” an old woman next to me said.

Oh fuck. I’d done a two-day first-aid course in the second term of my teacher-training. I stepped forward and knelt down next to her. I could sense an air of reassurance around me. I knew about administering medicines to toddlers, but I couldn’t think of anything relevant here except for one of the key maxims: “When in doubt, do nothing.” She was unconscious. There was lots of blood around the face and mouth. Another phrase came into my mind: “the recovery position.” As gently as I could, I turned her face toward me. There were gasps and expressions of disgust from behind me.

“Has anybody called an ambulance?” I said.

“I done it on my mobile,” a voice said.

I took a deep breath and pushed my fingers into the woman’s mouth. She had red hair and very pale skin. She was younger than I’d thought at first, and probably rather beautiful. I wondered what color her eyes were, behind the closed lids. Perhaps she had green eyes: red hair and green eyes. I scooped thick blood out of her mouth. I looked at my red hand and saw a tooth or a bit of a tooth. A groan came from somewhere inside her. There was a cough. A good sign probably. Very loud and close by I heard a siren. I looked up. I was pushed aside by a man in uniform. Fine by me.

With my left hand I found a tissue in my pocket and carefully wiped the blood and other stuff off my fingers. My melon. I didn’t have my melon. I wandered back in search of it. The man was sitting up now, with two police officers, a man and a woman, looking down at him. I saw my blue plastic bag.

“Mine,” I said, picking it up. “I dropped it.”

“She did it,” a voice said. “She stopped him.”

“Fucking KO’d him,” someone else said, and close by a woman laughed.

The man stared up at me. Maybe I expected him to look vengeful but he just seemed blankly puzzled.

“That right?” asked the female officer, looking a bit suspicious.

“Yeah,” I said warily. “But I’d better be getting on.”

The male police officer stepped forward.

“We’ll need some details, my darling.”

“What do you want to know?”

He took out a notebook.

“We’ll start with your name and address.”

That was another funny thing. I turned out to be more shocked than I realized. I could remember my name, though even that was a bit of an effort. But I just couldn’t think of my address even though I own the bloody place and I’ve been living there for eighteen months. I had to get my appointment book out of my pocket and read the address out to them, with my hand trembling so much I could hardly make out the words. They must have thought I was mad.

I had reached “E” in the register; E for Damian Everatt, a skinny little boy with huge spectacles taped together at one hinge, waxy ears, an anxious gappy mouth, and scabby knees from where the other boys pushed him over in the playground.

“Yes, miss,” he whispered, as Pauline Douglas pushed her head round the already open classroom door.

“Can I have a quick word, Zoe?” she said. I stood up, smoothing my dress anxiously, and joined her. There was a welcome through-breeze in the corridor, though I noticed that a bead of sweat was trickling down Pauline’s carefully powdered face, and her normally crisp graying hair was damp at her temples. “I’ve had a call from a journalist on the
Gazette
.”

“What’s that?”

“A local paper. They want to talk to you about your heroics.”

“What? Oh, that. It’s . . .”

“There was mention of a melon.”

“Ah yes, well you see . . .”

“They want to send a photographer, too. Quiet!” This last to the circle of children fidgeting on the floor behind us.

“I’m sorry they bothered you. Just tell them to go away.”

“Not at all,” Pauline said firmly. “I’ve arranged for them to come round at ten forty-five, during break time.”

“Are you sure?” I looked at her dubiously.

“It might be good publicity.” She looked over my shoulder. “Is that it?”

I looked round at the huge green-striped fruit, innocent on the shelf behind us.

“That’s the one.”

“You must be stronger than you look. All right, I’ll see you later.”

I sat down again, picked up the register.

“Where were we? Yes. Kadijah.”

“Yes, miss.”

The journalist was middle-aged and short and fat, with hairs growing out of his nostrils and sprouting up behind his shirt collar. Never quite got the name, which was embarrassing as he was so aware of mine. Bob something, I think. His face was a dark shade of red, and wide circles of sweat stained his armpits. When he wrote, little shreds of shorthand in a tatty notebook, his plump fist kept slipping down the pen. The photographer who accompanied him looked about seventeen; cropped dark hair, an earring in one ear, jeans so tight I kept thinking that when he squatted on the floor with his camera they would split. All the time Bob was asking me questions, the photographer wandered round the classroom, staring at me from different angles through the camera lens. I’d tidied my hair and put on a bit of makeup before they arrived. Louise had insisted on it, pushing me into the staff cloakroom and coming after me with a brush in her hand. Now I wished I’d made a bit more effort. I sat there in my old cream dress with its crooked hem. They made me uncomfortable.

“What thoughts went through your head before you decided to hit him?”

“I just did it. Without thinking.”

“So you didn’t feel scared?”

“No. I didn’t really have time.”

He was scribbling away in his notebook. I had a feeling that I should be making cleverer, more amusing comments about what had happened.

“Where do you come from? Haratounian’s a strange name for a blond girl like you.”

“A village near Sheffield.”

“So you’re new to London.” He didn’t wait for me to reply. “And you teach nursery children, do you?”

“Reception, it’s called. . . .”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Mmm.” He looked at me musingly, like someone assessing an unpromising item of stock at an agricultural auction. “How much do you weigh?”

“What? About seven and a half stone, I think.”

“Seven stone,” he said, chuckling. “Fantastic. And he was a big chap, wasn’t he?” He sucked his pen. “Do you think society would be a better place if everybody got involved the way you did?”

“Well, I don’t really know.” I fumbled for some sort of coherent statement. “I mean, what if the melon had missed? Or if it had hit the wrong person?”

Zoe Haratounian, spokeswoman on behalf of inarticulate youth. He frowned and didn’t even make a pretense of writing down what I’d said.

“How does it feel to be a heroine?”

Up to then it had been amusing in a way, but now I felt a little irritated. But of course I couldn’t put it into words that made any sense.

“It just happened,” I said. “I don’t want to set myself up as anything. Do you know if the woman who was mugged is okay?”

“Fine, just a couple of cracked ribs and she’ll need some new teeth.”

“I think we’ll take her with the melon.” It was the boy-photographer.

Bob nodded.

“Yes, that’s the story.”

He pulled the fruit off the shelf and staggered across with it.

“Blimey,” he said, lowering it onto my lap. “No wonder you took him out. Now look at me, chin up a bit. Give us a smile, darling. You won, didn’t you? Lovely.”

I smiled until the smile puckered on my face. Through the doorway I saw Louise staring in, grinning wildly. A giggle grew in my chest.

Next he wanted the melon and me with the children. I did my impersonation of a prim Victorian schoolmarm but it turned out that Pauline had already agreed. The photographer suggested cutting it up. It was a deep, luscious pink, paler at the rind, with polished black pips and a smell of fibrous coolness. I cut it into thirty-two wedges; one for each child and one for me. They stood round me on the sweltering concrete playground, holding their melon and smiling for the camera. All together now. One, two, three, cheese.

The local paper came out on Friday and I was on the front page. The photograph of me was huge; I was surrounded by children and slices of melon. MISS HEROINE AND THE MELON. Not very snappy. Daryl had a finger up his nose and Rose’s skirt was tucked into her knickers, but otherwise it was all right. Pauline seemed pleased. She pinned the piece on the notice board by the foyer, where the children gradually defaced it, and then she told me that a national paper had rung, interested in following up the story. She had provisionally set up an interview and another photo opportunity for the lunch break. I could miss the staff meeting. If that was all right with me, of course. She had asked the school secretary to buy another melon.

I thought that would be the end of it. I was bewildered by the way a story can gather its own momentum. I could hardly recognize the woman on an inside page of the
Daily Mail
next day, weighed down by a vast watermelon, topped by a large headline. She didn’t look like me, with her cautious smile and her fair hair tucked neatly behind her ears; and she certainly didn’t sound like me. Wasn’t there enough real news in the world? On the page after there was a very small story at the bottom of the page in which a bus had fallen off a bridge in Kashmir and killed a horribly large number of people. Maybe if a blond British twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher had been on board they might have given it more space.

“Crap,” said Fred when I said as much to him later that day, eating soggy chips doused in vinegar after a film in which men with bubbling biceps hit each other on the jaw with a cracking noise like a gun going off. “Don’t do yourself down. You did what heroes do. You had a split second to decide and you did the right thing.” He cupped my chin in his slim, callused hand. I had the impression that he was seeing not me, but the woman in the picture with the sticky little smile. He kissed me. “Some people do it by throwing themselves on top of a grenade; you did it with a watermelon. That’s the only difference. Let’s go back to your place, shall we? It’s still early.”

“I’ve got a stack of marking and forms that are about a yard high.”

“Just for a bit.”

He chucked the last of the chips in an overflowing bin, sidestepped the dog turds on the pavement, and wrapped his long arm round my shoulder. Through all the exhaust fumes and the fried reek from kebab houses and chip shops, he smelled of cigarettes and mown grass. His forearms, where he had rolled up his shirt, were tanned and scratched. His pale hair flopped down over his eyes. He was cool in the industrial warmth of the evening. I couldn’t resist.

Fred was my new boyfriend, or new
something
. So maybe we were at the perfect time. We were past the difficult, embarrassing first bit where you’re like a comedian going out before a difficult audience and desperately needing laughter and applause. Except in this case very much not needing laughter at all of any kind. But we hadn’t remotely got to the stage where you walk around the flat and don’t happen to notice that the other person hasn’t got anything on.

He had been working most of the year as a gardener and it had given him a wiry strength. You could see the muscles ripple under his skin. He was tanned on his forearms and neck and face, but his chest and stomach were pale, milky.

We hadn’t got to the stage either of just taking off our clothes and folding them up on separate chairs in some clinical, institutional sort of way. When we got into my flat—and it always seemed to be
my
flat—there was still an urgency about getting at each other. It made everything else seem less important. Sometimes, in class on an afternoon when the children were fidgety and I was tired and listless in the heat, I would think about Fred and the evening ahead and the day would lift itself.

We lit cigarettes afterward, lying in my little bedroom and listening to music and car horns in the street below. Someone shouted loudly: “Cunt, you cunt, I’ll get you for this.” We listened to the sound of feet pounding down the pavement, a woman screaming. I’d got used to it, more or less. It didn’t keep me awake at night, like it used to.

Fred turned on the bedside lamp and all the dreary, dingy nastiness of the flat was illuminated. How could I ever have bought it? How would I ever manage to sell it? Even if I made it look nicer—got rid of the flimsy orange curtains the last owner had left behind, put down a carpet over the grubby varnished boards, wallpapered over the beige woodchip, painted the blistering window frames, put mirrors and prints on the walls—no amount of clever interior design could disguise how cramped and dark it all was. Some developer had carved up an already small space to make this hole. The window in the so-called living room was actually cut in half by the partition wall, through which I sometimes heard a neighbor I’d never met shouting obscenities at some poor woman. In a spasm of grief and loneliness and the need for a place I could call home, I’d used up all the money my father had left me when he died. It had never felt like home, though, and now, when property prices were soaring, I was stuck with it. In this kind of weather, I could clean the windows every day and still they’d be smeared with greasy dirt by the evening.