Under Your Skin (17 page)

“I’ve lost my mobile . . .” I wail. “I rang you at home . . .”

“I’m so sorry, Gaby. We took the kids to the theater. If I’d known I—”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does, though. I can’t imagine what you’ve been going through. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” It comes out high and artificial.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m tidying.”

“Are you? Are you really?”

I swallow hard. “Just emptying the dishwasher.”

“Okay, good. Domestic tasks, always more absorbing than you
think. The other day, the cat tangled a ball of wool round a chair leg . . .” She gabbles for a while about the pleasures involved in untangling wool, how it took two hours and they were the “happiest two hours” of her professional life. She is giving me time. When we were growing up, I would just turn up at her house sometimes, and she would always know, by instinct, when I needed to talk and when the best thing was distraction.

I hold my hand over the receiver and blow my nose on a piece of tissue I find snailed under my pillow.

“Ken says your replacement, the girl who does the tweets, isn’t half as good.”

I clear my throat. “Really?” I say.

“Not a patch.”

“Is he a fan?” I ask, a little squeeze of vanity to show her I’m all right.

“Everyone’s a fan,” she says softly. “You know that. So, Gabs, what’s been happening? What’s going on?”

“How long have you got?”

She answers literally. “Fifteen minutes.”

I tell her everything—almost. I explain about the arrest and the interview and the smallness of the cell. I don’t mention the credit card or the Italian mud. I don’t give many details about Perivale’s questioning. When I get near that point, everything inside me tightens. I realize he makes me feel as if nothing about me as a person matters, that he can mold me into anything he wants, and that that is his aim.

“Did the cell have a loo?” Clara asks gently after I have fallen silent.

“One of the cells did.”

“Did you go?”

“I had a wee. Couldn’t keep it in. I didn’t have anything else.”

“Loo roll?”

“No.” I laugh. “I had to give a little shake.”

“It’s inhumane! No loo roll in Battersea police-cell shock! You should write an exposé.”

“I think a different exposé might be in the pipeline.”

“The tabloids still outside your house? I can see the olive trees in the corner of the pictures—they’re looking good.”

“Yes.”

She says, now the police have “seen the error of their ways,” I should talk to one of the hacks, do an exclusive, so the others go away, like they do when they come out of the Big Brother house. “Mystorymyagony,” she says, turning it into a single word. “Go on, do it. Get it done. Mention the lack of loo roll while you’re there. Lobby. Get questions asked in Parliament.”

“I could become known as the woman who reintroduced Andrex to the arrested masses.”

“Or Cushelle,” she says, enjoying the name. “Or those tissues with aloe vera built in. Or quilted. Or bloody hell, why shouldn’t felons be allowed Wet Ones?”

We both laugh. My eyes feel tight and small. When my chest contracts, I feel an ache like a stitch.

“When are you going back to work?” she asks finally.

“Terri has given me a few days off. India, the tweeter, has been longing for the opportunity to take my place. Did Ken in physics really say she wasn’t any good?”

“Yes.”

“I feel so pathetic.” My voice catches. “What am I going to do, Clara?”

“Don’t do anything. You’ve had a traumatic experience. You’ll be back at work before you know it. You need to rest. Spend some time with Philip.”

The bell goes. She’s got Resistant Materials with her year nines. She’ll ring me later to see how I’m “faring.” It is a good
choice of word, “faring.” It calls to mind sea voyages and fair, clement weather. It has optimism built in. She doesn’t know Philip is away.

“You’re a survivor, Gabs,” she adds, with a concern that has been there all along, underneath the joking. “All that stuff you did on your own when we were growing up. You’ll get through it. You’ve got through worse.”

After I hang up, I get out of bed and wash my face. It stares back at me, hollow cheeked and red eyed. I get dressed. I can’t find my favorite jeans, so I put on tracksuit bottoms and a sweater. I peer out of the bedroom window, through the slats in the blinds. The clouds have shifted and it looks like a sunny day—sky the color of Aertex shirts. How many are still down there? I look down at the tops of heads. Bodies leaning against cars. Camera equipment splayed on warm slabs. Puddles in the gutter. Boredom. Cold hands. Pop music from someone’s iPod. Idle chatter reaches up, the possible convolutions of tomorrow’s game: “Yeah, they should put McEachran in midfield, give the kid a chance.”

Should I choose one to talk to, I wonder, as Clara suggests? I’ll ask Alison Brett when she calls back.

And then I see him.

Perivale. And I realize I have been so acutely dreading this moment that I feel no real surprise at it actually taking place.

He is standing across the road, by the alley to the common, leaning against an ivy-clad wall. His hands are dangling by his side, the low crotch of his jeans foreshortening his legs, head tipped back. He looks, with his hangdog demeanor, his hanks of thick hair, like a character from a Dickens novel. He is scuffing the ground, turning something over with the toe of his shoe. And then he looks up and stares straight at me.

I dart back into the room. The mattress sighs. I lie flat, stare at the ceiling without moving. It’s not over. The police haven’t seen the
error of their ways. It’s still going on. My stomach muscles contract, wither in on themselves, shrink into my pelvic floor.

I wait for the air around me to still. It is ridiculous. The slats are closed. He can’t see me. I am clenching and unclenching my teeth again. As soon as my legs can take my weight, I creep out of the room and go downstairs. I pause in the kitchen and then I let myself out into the garden—a whole house stands between us now, but it doesn’t seem enough. I can still feel his eyes, but he can’t be there, out the front, and simultaneously up there, in that top window in the street behind us. It’s impossible. He has just spooked me. I move under the cover of the apple tree, where I can’t see any windows at all. New growth is fizzling, the cherry knotted with buds, the ivy unfurling against the wall, each leaf a little clawlike hand. A robin perches on a lower frond, head hopeful.

It’s cold. From inside, it looks like summer, but out here, it’s as bitter as midwinter. In the shadow of the house, the grass is sodden.

There is a door in the back wall behind the hornbeams and the tree house. It leads on to a passage, where the street used to keep the bins. A few years ago the council—or rather the company contracted by the council—declared the passage too dangerous (too much bending, or ivy negotiation), and many of our neighbors, concerned for “security,” have bricked their back doors in.

I fought for ours. I imagined Millie as a teenager, nipping out there for an assignation or a secret cigarette. I felt in touch with the history of the house, in tune with coal deliveries and milk in metal urns, for a time when Serco was just a twinkle in the public service market’s eye. Philip agreed back then, but last year, when we redesigned the garden, he fell in line with the neighbors, and I was too preoccupied with my mother to fight. The door is still there, but buried behind the tree house; you have to arch to reach it, contort round a wooden corner, bend your neck, bash your elbows. To bother, you’d really have to want a cigarette.

The damp seeps through my sneakers. I wriggle through the undergrowth, raindrops scattering, and stretch my arm far enough to draw back the bolt. I bash the door about a bit, tearing beards of ivy from its joints, until it opens.

•   •   •

Millie is home. I rang Marta and she brought her back along the alley, through the secret door. Neither Perivale nor the tabloid journalists will have seen her come in—a pathetic little triumph, a wresting of control, a spark. I hug her and hug her, breathe in the smell of pencil sharpenings and floor wax and that particular form of processed garlic they use in school dinners. She is all that matters. I tell myself that over and over. She pulls away. “Too tight,” she says, “and you’re dribbling on my neck.”

Marta is watching from the door to the kitchen. She has an expression that is almost distaste, but not quite. Perhaps she is feeling homesick. “Listen,” I say, turning to her. “As I’m here, have the rest of the day off. You probably have lots of things you’d like to do.”

She is standing very rigid. She pushes her shoulder back. “But Millie and I, we had a plan to go swimming,”

“Do that another time,” I say kindly.

She still doesn’t move. “But I told her we would go.”

“I’m sure she won’t mind. Mills? Do you?”

But Millie, searching the cupboard for biscuits, isn’t listening.

I turn back to Marta and smile. I’m expecting her to smile, too, but she doesn’t. “It is the pool with the wave machine,” she says. “You want to come, don’t you, Millie.”

I feel a little bit lost for a moment. I look back at Millie. “Sweetie, Marta’s talking to you. She’s offering to take you swimming, or you could stay here with me.”

Millie has a mouth full of Jammie Dodger. “Are you working?”

“Nope.”

“I’ll stay,” she says.

The wind must catch the door because as Marta leaves, it closes behind her with a slam.

•   •   •

Millie and I sort through her end-of-term schoolbag. We marvel at paintings of trees on brown crumpled paper, chocolate eggs from her teacher, a bit bashed from the journey home, a project book, containing stuck-in pictures of bread and vegetables, “A Food Web,” a letter to Santa left over from Christmas, a wonky elephant made of clay that has lost an ear. We lie these treasures out on the floor and sift through them like Howard Carter and his young assistant in the Valley of the Kings.

She plays in the garden, swings a bit from the struts of the tree house and watches some TV. She reads to me and I read to her. We make complicated creatures involving plastic laces and metallic beads. We talk about Izzie Matthews and whether her hair is longer than Millie’s or not. Even as I am engaging with the issue—perhaps Izzie’s hair is very slightly longer, but I’m sure Millie’s is thicker—I am worrying about why Philip has not rung back. Or, a different sort of anxiety, Alison Brett.

Twice, in the course of the afternoon, the letter box rattles and a voice sinews into the house. “Gaby! Any comment, Gaby?” Both times Millie is concentrating—once on threading a bead, once on Miley Cyrus. I don’t know if she hears. She doesn’t say anything if she does.

She asks if we can go swimming and I say no. “What about the playground?” I shake my head. Millie, picking up the early traces of her own boredom, slips into petulance. I am aware of feeling panic, and an edging despair, the inner sapping of my own resources. I should be returning to the house about now, sweeping in on a breeze from the world outside. If I had had a proper day at work,
these hours before bed would have a different flavor; an intensity and speed, not this languor. Time has varying tastes. I wonder whether India really wasn’t any good. I wonder if she missed a cue. Or giggled uncontrollably. I hope she did. How horrible I am. How can I be a parent when I can’t even operate as a person?

A neighbor rings to complain about the reporters, “this unsavoury mob.” She asks what I am going to do about it. They are smoking outside her house. It’s an invasion of her privacy. I don’t know her. She’ll have got my number from the school list, or from Philip’s squash ladder at the Harbour Club. An invasion of
my
privacy. She says, with the whine of someone used to getting her own way, “It’s not fair on the rest of us, and I’ve got people coming. It’s my book club tonight.”

“I’m sorry about your book club,” I say, “but I don’t really know what I can do.”

“What about the police?”

I smile wanly. “They’re already here.”

I try publicity once more, and this time—at last—I manage to speak to Alison Brett. But she took a long time coming to the phone and she sounds less efficient than usual, more distracted. “Alison Brett speaking,” she says, though I’ve told her assistant who I am; she knows it’s me.

“Presumably we need a plan,” I say. “Damage limitation. Should I be talking to anyone in particular?”

“Yes,” she says. “That’s a good idea. Probably best if you do it direct.”

“So there isn’t a journalist you would recommend? No particular newspaper or magazine?”

“God,” she says. “Tricky one. Listen, leave me your number and I’ll get back to you.”

I have a horrible feeling I am being fobbed off.

Just after 5:00
PM
(1:00
AM
in Singapore), when the sun is flashing
low through the branches of a distant sycamore, catching the catkins on next door’s silver birch, and Millie and I have worked our way through a packet of chocolate digestives, Caroline Fletcher comes to the door. I let her in, pressing myself against the wall so as not to be seen. “Animals!” she says, then turns and over her shoulder spits, “Go away.” The gate clatters. “Fuck me!” She is wearing heels, with thick black tights and a frilly sailor-suit-style dress—a stranger, if ever I saw one, to Gok Wan’s Spring Trends.

She rejects tea, or coffee, or something stronger—she won’t stay long. She has brought my phone. It is wrapped and bound in plastic cellophane, like a miniature version of that luggage you see on long-haul flights. She hands it to me with a roll of her eyes. “Evidence,” she says. “He wishes. Anyway, we’ve got it back. Any news on your alibi?”

“My alibi?” I am holding my phone against my heart as if it were a fragment of the True Cross.

“For the pizza and wine receipt? The eighth of February? Early evening, I think, seven
PM
?”

“Right.”

She stands in the kitchen while I rummage around for my diary. I find the date. It would have been amazing to find proof that I had actually been in Honolulu. A late production meeting, drinks with friends,
anything
. The day before, Tuesday, I had had a parent/teachers meeting at Millie’s school. But there are no appointments, nothing to jog my memory, on Wednesday at all. I rack my brain. Millie had extra gym, so she and Marta would still have been out. Philip is never home before 8:00
PM
. But nothing else. Just a blank.