Under My Skin (2 page)

‘Ew. How gross is that?' muttered Eleanor, her nose turned up.

There was a man, a tramp by the look of him. He staggered down the opposite side of the street and, as he zigzagged into the pool of a pink streetlamp, Sally got a better view. He was in a real state. It was hard to tell how old he was; he was so covered in grime and his beard was so unkempt he could be anything from thirty to sixty.

He had no arms. The left had been amputated almost at the shoulder, while the right ended at the elbow. As he ambled along, empty sleeves swung around him like an untied straitjacket. Sally felt a tug on her heartstrings – she always felt so guilty and impotent when she saw homeless people. She often gave them whatever coins were in her pocket, but always felt bad for not being able to do more.

He came closer and Sally heard him babbling, ranting and wailing. It sounded like gibberish, and, as much as she felt sorry for him, it was also unsettling. It was bad enough being with these girls but something worse, something dark and heavy, twisted in Sally's stomach. She wished she were anywhere but here.

He saw them.

‘Oh God, he's coming this way,' Melody said. ‘Keep walking.'

For the first time Sally was glad she was with them. There's safety in numbers. The little group set off at a pace away from the school, their backs turned to the homeless guy.

‘Is he following us?' Keira whispered.

Sally resolved to keep calm. Homeless people are harmless.

‘Hey!' He shouted over the road at them. ‘Help me!'

‘Just keep going,' Melody ordered. Sally obeyed without question.

‘Pretty girls!' he sobbed. ‘You can help me, pretty girls. Wait . . . wait for me. I don't wanna hurt you.'

Melody took charge. She whirled around to face him. Sally followed suit, hovering at Melody's shoulder like her other sidekicks did. The man had wobbled into the road, heading right for them. ‘Just leave us alone, paedo!' Melody demanded. ‘We haven't got any money, OK?'

His face contorted as if he was in great pain. Head back, he howled at the faint moon – a true lunatic. ‘Please.' He bounced up and down at the knees, the way that tantruming toddlers do. ‘Please get it out of me.'

‘Melody?' Eleanor said. ‘Maybe we should call the police.'

‘Don't get your phone out!' Melody scolded.

What's he gonna do? Snatch it? He hasn't got any hands.
Sally kept the thought to herself.

The tramp looked straight at Sally, and she flinched. Up close, he didn't seem so benign any more. Even from the middle of the road, she could see his eyes were arctic blue, and burned in the centre of his filthy face. They pierced her. ‘You. You'll help me. You're a good girl.' He smiled to reveal yellow, spongy teeth.

Sally said nothing, cowering behind Melody.

He continued ranting. ‘It never stops . . . never. It's . . . it's
inside
me. Get it out. GET IT OUT!' He charged for them, running the rest of the way across the street. The others shrieked, but Sally couldn't take her eyes away from his. Those eyes . . . they were like black ice and she was frozen to the spot.

Sally heard the horn, but didn't understand what was happening until it was too late. Brakes screamed and tyres screeched. The car slammed into the tramp's legs and he crashed over the bonnet, cracking the windscreen before tumbling onto the road. He landed with a damp thud.

Melody collided with Sally as she staggered onto the school lawn in her haste to get out of the way. Sally heard shouting and wailing, and honestly, it might have been her. In the midst of all the chaos she couldn't make sense of anything.

The car came to a standstill and the man lay still alongside it, not moving – not moving
at all
. His head was black and wet with blood, a puddle fanning out across the tarmac.

Sally realised she was gripping Melody Vine's hand.

Sally prodded a thick, fatty chunk of beef underneath what was left of her mashed potatoes. Her plate swam in gravy, beads of orange oil gleaming like algae on the surface of a brown lake.

‘Sally, please do not play with your food.'

Her eyes flicked up to regard her mother through her hair. ‘I'm not hungry.'

‘Sally.' Her father frowned, his face like a tombstone. ‘Don't answer your mother back.'

As they did every night, her mother and father sat opposite each other at one end of an unnecessarily long, feast-length dining table while Sally sat at the head between them. Her mum reached over the table and squeezed her husband's hand. ‘It's OK, dear. What she saw must have been absolutely dreadful.' Talking about her as if she wasn't there was also something they enjoyed.

Her father dabbed his moustache with a linen napkin. ‘That's no excuse to be surly. Sit up straight, please. Your posture's terrible. You'll get a hump if you're not careful.'

Sally gave up on dinner, resting her fork in the swampy remains. ‘I saw a man die, Dad.'

After the accident, the four girls had been made to wait to be interviewed by a stout, red-faced policeman before they'd been allowed to go, during which time they'd been forced to see paramedics scrape what was left of the poor man off the asphalt and into a black plastic body bag.

Her father seemed genuinely confused by her distress. ‘No great loss by the sounds of it. One less junkie for the rest of us to take care of.'

‘Dad!' Sally protested.

‘It'll be a different story once you're paying taxes, believe me.' He quaffed his twenty-five-pound-a-bottle wine and most likely didn't see any irony in it.

Her mother changed the subject, sipping at her own wine with thin lips. She was so bird-like, Sally couldn't help but imagine the sparrows drinking from the bird bath in the garden. ‘Unpleasantness aside, how did the audition go?'

That all now seemed so utterly trivial compared to what had followed. ‘I dunno. OK, I guess.'

‘Sally, answer your mother properly, please. We don't grunt.'

A deep breath. ‘It was fine. I think I sounded acceptable. We'll find out tomorrow if we got parts or not.'

Mrs Feather smiled. ‘I do hope so. It'd be so nice for you to get out of the house and actually do something for once. You need to join in more. I was in all the school plays when I was your age. I was once Lady Macbeth. And it'll look ever so good on your application forms.'

Even the words ‘join in' gave Sally cold cramps in her stomach. She'd heard the pitch before.
I do go out,
she thought sulkily. Sally looked to her mother. ‘May I go over to Stan's, please?'

‘But you've hardly touched your supper, dear.'

Sally felt the same way about her parents as she did about algebraic equations: baffled and frustrated in equal measure. ‘Please. I'm not hungry – and I need to talk about what happened with Jennie and Stan.'

‘Have you done your homework?'

‘Yes. You can check it if you like.' She'd done it while waiting for her turn at the audition.

Her mum relented. ‘Well, if you think it'll help.'

‘It will.'

‘All right then, dear, but I'd like you home by ten. And leave your homework on the sideboard for Dad to check.'

‘Sure thing.' Sally pushed herself away from the table, leaving her plate for her mum to clear away – why deprive her of her main joy in life? Cooking, cleaning, serving her dad. Their home was a time capsule. They could so easily be living in the 1950s: doilies, net curtains, chintz fabric and oppressive dark wood antique furniture, although that was nothing compared to the prehistoric roles her mum and dad played.

Her dad was a bona fide bank manager, although he never missed an opportunity to remind Sally that he'd started at the bottom and worked his way up the ladder through blood, sweat and tears, so her mother had never had to, or chose not to, work. ‘Being a wife and mother
is
a full-time job, dear,' she would often say. Her parents were a good ten years older than most of her friends' parents – when she was little, people had often mistaken them for her grandparents.

After putting her homework out for inspection on the sideboard next to her mother's creepy collection of faceless porcelain angels, Sally jammed some Converse on her feet and made a prompt exit. The second she let the front door slam shut behind her, she was back in the real world. Her home smelled a lot like the historical museum in town and she rinsed the furniture polish haze from her lungs with a deep breath of night air.

Somewhere close by, her owl, and it was
her
owl because he was a nightly visitor, hooted in the trees behind the house as she scurried across the lawn. She was ‘lucky' enough to live in Mulberry Hill, the ‘nice' part of town that overlooked the rest of Saxton Vale. Their hometown was truly a caste system: in the valley were the dingy terraced houses, rundown flats over betting shops and don't-get-out-of-your-car areas; halfway up the hill were the nicer semi-detached homes and shiny new ‘executive apartments' for commuters; while the richest residents lived up here at the very top of the tree. To Sally, Mulberry Hill was nothing more than a viper's nest filled with snakes like Melody Vine and her equally poisonous parents.

When they were about six, Stan and Sally had removed a plank in the fence separating their houses, to save themselves the trouble of having to go all the way down the drive just to come back up the other side. Sally was still skinny enough to fit through the gap even if Stan's shoulders would get wedged in these days. Although they were the same architecturally, Stan's house was the polar opposite of hers. The garden was perpetually overgrown and cluttered with his little sister's toys.

A warm, familiar voice called out of an upstairs window. It was Jennie Gong, her other best friend. It's OK to have two best friends. ‘Sal! Get your ass up here! New
Satanville
in t-minus two minutes! And you better have sweets!'

‘I come bearing Haribo!' Sally replied.

Stan's head appeared next to Jennie's in the window. ‘Come on up, Feather, the door's open!'

Sally hurried onto the porch and let herself in. The door was always unlocked. Unlike her sterile abode, Stan's was always noisy and chaotic, the way a home should be. Edie, wearing Stan's hand-me-down Buzz Lightyear costume, ran up to greet her in the hall. ‘Sally!' She wrapped herself around Sally's legs.

‘Hey there, you. I'm gonna need my legs back!'

‘They're mine now!' the little girl growled.

‘Edie, let her go!' It was Mrs Randall, Stan's mum. She was heavily pregnant again, although just as full of cheer as ever. She approached and gave Sally a hug. ‘Go on up, sweetheart, you don't wanna miss the start of your show.'

‘Thanks, Mrs Randall.'

‘How many times?' She smiled. ‘
Please
call me Lou.'

‘Sorry!' Sally blushed – she had to be reminded every time. Edie unhooked herself and Sally dashed up the stairs. Stan's bedroom door was covered in stickers of bands they liked and a massive poster of the
Satanville
cast standing in a graveyard. She barged her way in and found Stan sitting cross-legged on his bed, Mr Squid sat in his lap, while Jennie was on the Pokémon beanbag next to the bed.

‘Hey!' Stan shifted to make room for her. He put the well-loved stuffed squid with buttons-for-eyes on his pillow. ‘You OK?'

Jennie sprang up like Tigger and threw her arms round her. Sally breathed in her familiar, sugary perfume. She smelled like Love Hearts. When Sally closed her eyes and thought of her friend, she always saw strawberry-milkshake pink. ‘Relax, Jen, I brought the gummy bears! You don't have to wrestle them from me.'

‘That wasn't for the gummy bears, dummy.' She tucked a magenta stripe of hair behind her ear. ‘That was for the trauma. Stan told me what happened.'

‘Are you all right?' Stan looked up at her, his wide, blue eyes peering out from under his floppy fringe.

She threw him the gummy bears. ‘Yeah, I'm fine. It was awful, obviously, but I guess it's inevitable. Sooner or later, we'll all accidentally hold Melody Vine's hand.'

Her friends chuckled.

‘God, I hope you sterilised your hand afterwards.' Jennie flopped back into the beanbag. ‘But seriously?'
But seriously
was their code to stop joking around.

‘But seriously? It was messed up. I wish I could sterilise my
brain
– there's no way I'll sleep tonight.' She joined Stan on the bed, fingering her bracelets. The three of them had matching ones – a tribute to Zeke from
Satanville
who wore the same ones – three straps of red, brown and black leather twined together.

‘Man, you are so lucky to have seen a real dead person,' said Stan, morbid as ever.

‘Oh yeah, I feel blessed.'

‘But seriously. Who was he?' Stan asked.

Sally shrugged. ‘No idea. The police couldn't find any ID on him. John Doe, I guess.' That's what they always said on American shows.

‘Oh, that's so sad. Sadface.' Jennie made a sad face.

‘Double sadface.' Sally paused, a little ashamed of what she was about to say. ‘But it was really scary too. There was something . . . wrong about him . . . I've never seen anyone freak out like that.'

Stan gave her a gentle punch on the arm. It was weird; even though they'd known each other
for ever
and were best friends, they never hugged, held hands or touched unless absolutely necessary. They had very definite rules about personal space. ‘It must have been awful – but . . . what about the audition? Enquiring minds need to know.'

‘Oh, I'm so dense! I totally forgot that's why you were even there.' Jennie flipped her hair over her head.

Sally suddenly felt a fresh wave of nausea. Another thing to worry about. ‘Yeah, it was OK. I sang.'

‘And?' Stan prompted.

‘And what?'

‘Did you get cast?'

‘Oh, I dunno. We'll find out tomorrow. But I don't think —'

‘Well, if you don't, Roberts must be Helen Keller. You're the best singer in the whole school,' Stan said and Sally felt her cheeks flush.

‘God, Stan, gush much?' Sally couldn't look at them, allergic to praise. ‘Jeez, put
Satanville
on!'

‘Now you're talking!' Jennie grinned. ‘Nothing like dead people to take your mind off dead people.'

Stan left the bed and crossed to his computer where he'd downloaded the latest episode. Illegally downloading American TV is
wrong
, but there was no way they'd avoid spoilers until it was shown over here. It was a totally necessary evil. ‘You ready?'

‘Yep,' Jennie said.

‘Wait.' Sally popped a red sweet in her mouth. Red ones were the best. ‘I can't remember what happened last week.'

‘You do,' said Stan. ‘It ended where Taryn had to choose —'

‘OMG! Yes! We'll finally find out if she chooses Zeke or Dante for Lucifer's Ball! Go, go, go!' Stan pressed play and joined her on the bed after killing the lights.

They say true friends are those who hate the same people as you, and that was definitely the case, but
Satanville
was the glue that bound them together. Taryn Van Pelt's long-running love for her guardian angel and lust for her half-demon assassin had been a weekly fixture of their lives for over three years now. They'd only been fourteen when it had started.

‘She better choose Dante or Tumblr will explode.' Stan took a handful of gummy bears. This was true. Taryn and Dante – ‘Daryn' – were Sally's OTP, her One True Pairing.

‘Shh!' Jennie snapped. No discussion was permitted until the end of the episode. This was as good as it got for Sally. She plucked Mr Squid off the pillow and played with his tentacles absentmindedly while the opening credits rolled. If school was just her, Jennie, Stan and the teachers, it'd be pretty good fun. Sadly it wasn't, so it sucked.

They watched the episode in total silence, save for the occasional rustle of the gummy bears. Not a classic episode, but
always
awesome.

‘Oh my God!' Jennie declared when it had finished. ‘I can't believe she took Angela. What is she playing at?'

‘Yeah,' Sally added. ‘But remember Taryn doesn't know how Angela feels because she wiped her memory.'

‘You don't think Taryn will go gay?'

‘I dunno,' said Stan. ‘It
is
season four. Maybe they're running out of ideas.'

‘That would be amazing!' Sally grinned. ‘I'm totally shipping Taryn and Angela.'

‘Tarangela!' Stan laughed.

‘Amazing!' Jennie giggled. ‘I'm tweeting that right now!' She reached for her phone. ‘Hashtag Tarangela!'