Beneath the Skin Read online

  ‘Different but interesting,’ his mother had retorted.

  ‘So you do believe in God?’ young David had asked, with surprise.

  ‘Only the God of love,’ his mother had laughed, dismissing his father’s frown with a wave of her elegant hand.

  When he was sent away to school, his prayers were like a mantra. To God, or to the God of love, so long as he said his prayers every night and at chapel every day, his parents would be safe, he would see them soon.

  ‘So now we’ve got Rupert at home sleeping in until lunch and then disappearing off to God knows where until he needs to be fed. He’s meant to be bloody revising, not acting like a domestic pet. Could you have a word with him, David? He’s always loved you. He might listen.’

  David nods. Charlie looks exhausted, old. ‘Course I will, though I doubt he’ll listen to me.’ Insurance, Antonia, his parents and money. Prayers work, he thinks, but only to a point.

  Sami sits at his desk, thinking. He’s held back from texting. Waiting for her to text him, which she hasn’t, which does his head in. He isn’t used to this. Since being a tiny, asthmatic child, what Sami Richards wants, Sami gets.

  ‘Baby of the family and the only boy. Well, that explains it. You are unbelievably spoilt. You do know that, don’t you?’ Sophie stated on their first proper date.

  ‘No I’m not! Why do you say that?’ He was genuinely surprised. He didn’t feel spoilt. He used his charm to good effect, he knew, but spoilt? Spoilt wasn’t a pleasant word.

  ‘Your sisters do your supermarket shopping, your mum travels from Yorkshire to clean your flat. Leaves little love notes “from Momma”.’

  The spoilt list went on. Charm, he insisted. Spoilt, she retorted. They agreed to disagree, eventually.

  Sami drums his fingers on the desk and then pulls out his iPhone. Tomorrow? What time? he types, ponders for a moment, then adds, Thinking wicked thoughts. Can’t wait to see you. He presses send.

  His private line rings almost instantaneously. ‘Ha!’ his ego sings.

  Still sitting at Olivia’s kitchen table, Antonia looks at her watch, surprised at the time. As she lay in bed fretting about the visit here last night, she expected to stay for an hour at most. She expected to be tense and shy, to feel inadequate and stupid. Olivia has always been friendly, but she’s clever, she’s educated, reads the Guardian and has opinions. But time has flown by, the coffee interrupted by telephone calls, the window cleaner, a crying neighbour with her crying baby and the insistent beep of the washing machine. There has been no time to feel tense.

  When they finally sit down on the long sofa in the lounge, Antonia studies Olivia’s face. Perhaps there’s a hint of tiredness around her eyes, smudges of pale grey on her fair skin. ‘So you were up at five with Hannah, you made breakfast and lunch boxes, walked the girls to different schools, had a word with Rachel’s teacher, visited a new mum and her baby on the way home, changed the bedding …’ Antonia laughs as she counts the chores on her fingers, marvelling at how much Olivia manages to fit in to a weekday morning. By eleven she’d made David a bacon sandwich, had tea in bed and got dressed.

  ‘The bedding wasn’t until you came. But you’ve forgotten Tesco local for bread and milk on the way back from school.’

  ‘Tesco, of course!’

  Antonia smiles, but her mind is on the white bap bacon sandwich which she found untouched on the kitchen island when she came down from the shower. It looked forlorn, abandoned. She should’ve said goodbye to David before he left, she should’ve given him a kiss.

  She goes back to Olivia. ‘I don’t know how you do it, Olivia. Don’t you get fed up at times?’ The words are out, and Antonia winces. She hadn’t intended them to sound as they did, like a criticism of Olivia’s life.

  ‘Actually, I do get fed up sometimes and I take it out on Mike, which probably isn’t fair of me.’ Olivia’s pale eyes drift away and she frowns. ‘He was the first to go to Hannah this morning,’ she comments, as though to herself.

  ‘If you ever want a break, I’d be happy to look after the girls.’ There they are again, Antonia’s thoughts popping out as words. But she says them quietly, her body rigid with the anticipation of rejection. ‘Seriously, I’d love to help, it would make me feel useful.’

  ‘Aren’t you lovely,’ Olivia replies, her face flushing with unexpected colour. She leans forward and gives Antonia a brief hug. ‘I might just take you up on that. But they’ll run rings around you, so don’t say you haven’t been warned!’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Antonia drives straight down Barlow Moor Road from Olivia’s house to Southern Cemetery. She even buys flowers from the extortionately priced shop on the busy road catering for the bereaved. And busy husbands, she thinks with a smile. Two bunches in a single day, though the petals of the red chrysanthemums she clutches in her hand are already browning at the tips.

  She parks her car between two trees on Nell Lane and notices that a block of pale-brick apartments with trendy wooden balconies has been built since last she came. The wood looks weathered already. She fleetingly wonders whether she’ll remember where to go, but her feet seem to know the way as she tiptoes between plots to prevent the heels of her boots sinking in the grass. She ponders why she’s come. She hasn’t visited the cemetery for a long, long time. Perhaps it’s Olivia’s words about family and the smell of a home. Or perhaps it’s that rarely felt need to be normal, to belong.

  ‘God knows, we try our best to be good parents, but we don’t always get it right,’ Olivia said earlier, her face pensive and almost tearful.

  ‘“They fuck you up, your mum and dad”,’ Antonia responded bravely, hoping she’d quoted the poem correctly. ‘“They may not mean to …”’

  ‘Absolutely! I love that poem,’ Olivia replied, her face clearing, leaving Antonia feeling inordinately pleased.

  ‘Your dad’s in pain. And sometimes he gets full of anger and disappointment, that’s all,’ her mother would say, ever forgiving. ‘It’s the drink that’s talking, not him. He doesn’t mean it, Chinue.’

  Candy’s love and tolerance for Jimmy was constant. It must have been mutual once, that adoration, Antonia muses as she walks into the breeze. They were people before they were parents. As a small child she’d seen the photographs, a bundle of sticky snapshots tied together with a perished rubber band. She’d found them at the back of a drawer in an old shoebox, along with her birth certificate and a few one-pound premium bonds. An array of happy photographs taken at the seaside. Her dad thickset with sideburns and a quiff and her mum, stunning in a headscarf, larking around on the sand and the pier with another grinning couple. The snaps fascinated her. She took to gazing at them in secret when her parents were still in bed in the morning, trying to reconcile the smiling man with her angry father. But then one day she became complacent, she laid the photographs out on the threadbare carpet like a pack of cards, guessing the order in which they were taken. So absorbed, she didn’t hear the groan of the stairs or the creak of the opening door, just the sound of his gravelly voice behind her.

  ‘What have you got there? Pass it here.’ So she stood with jelly knees, turned and handed him the bundle she’d frantically scraped together from the floor, her eyes fixed on the swirls of the brown carpet, waiting with breath taut in her lungs.

  ‘That’s Scarborough,’ her father said eventually, his voice smiling. ‘Bloody hell! That’s a blast from the past. With Marcie and Ben. Call your mum down for a laugh. Just look at my hair!’

  Sophie isn’t a person given to nerves. Except when it comes to anything medical, which she knows is stupid. Even more so, given that both Norma and Barry are nurses. Or perhaps that’s why. Bloody parents. But then there’s the dentist too. Her mum dragged her kicking and squealing for the twice-yearly check-up as a child.

  ‘It’s your fault,’ she said to Norma when they were last friends. ‘My dental phobia. You made me go to that bloody maniac when we were small.’ But the reality is that Sophie didn
’t have one single filling as a child, it’s only as an adult, when she can choose not to go, that she has the problems. Indescribable toothache from an abscess just a few months ago. Pain nearly as bad as the ‘I told you so’ look on her mum’s face when Sophie asked her to go with her to the bloody maniac, who was as kind and as patient as he’d always been.

  ‘Fuck!’ Sophie says to herself in Sami’s full-length mirror. Even without her contact lenses, she can see she looks a mess. She’s stayed in bed all morning, valiantly resisting the urge to have a glass of wine and go back to sleep. But sleep isn’t an option when she’s worried, when her mind is churning out thoughts and spiky memories.

  ‘You did go for that smear appointment, didn’t you?’ Norma asked when Sophie still lived at home, when her mum could still nosey through her post, even if she didn’t go so far as to open it.

  ‘Yes! Get off my case!’ Sophie replied, the usual retort. But Sophie assumed that a cervical smear would be as bad as the dentist, only at the other end of her anatomy. She couldn’t bear the thought of it. She’d been obsessed with an irrational fear of having one ever since she’d spied a photograph of the barbaric instrument of torture they used for the procedure when she was about ten.

  The science books were on the top shelf of the bookcase at home, but Sophie was tall and could reach. She’d pile the books on the soft carpet and flick through them cross-legged, her mum actually thinking she was taking an interest in medicine, a short-lived hope that her offspring might one day become a doctor.

  Of course Sophie and her cousin were glued to the science books in the hope of finding pictures of bollocks and dicks. Or an account of having it off. Preferably with photographs. Instead it was graphic and biological, more of a horror story than Sophie and her cousin had ever expected. ‘Which is why, which is why …’ Sophie now says to her blurry self.

  She climbs back into bed. The sheets feel slightly dank from sweat, from worry. She’s spilt some coffee, a spreading stain on the silky cream throw. Staring at the stain, she examines the spirals of colour that fade from dark brown to beige. Antonia will clean it for her, she thinks, she’ll spray on some newly-advertised-on-the-shopping-channel product then hand-wash it in the sink and the stain will disappear, like magic.

  She picks up the cold coffee cup and takes a sip to ease down the paracetamol that’s stuck in her throat. Her colleagues at the estate agents used to joke that it was a good idea to have a large gin and tonic before a smear, to help them relax. Sophie laughed and dismissed the thought at the time and yet when she started the last round of IVF, she drank a couple of large glasses of wine before leaving for the clinic. The doctor immediately smelled the alcohol on her breath and reprimanded her severely, saying she didn’t deserve the procedure if she was going to endanger it. Sophie tried to laugh it off, asking where all the ‘tea and sympathy’ had gone and mocking the doctor for being a member of the ‘grin and bear it brigade’. Yet the doctor’s disapproval helped her be brave, to grit her teeth and let them get on with what they had to do without the prop of alcohol. Last time, at least.

  Sophie stops biting her nails and groans out loud, lifts her mobile close to her eyes so she can see, taps in a message to Antonia, Where the fuck are you? I’ve called three times, then inches further down into bed, waiting for a reply, wishing for magic.

  Olivia throws the last of her drink down the sink before leaving the house for the school pick-up. It’s a new range of ‘real’ coffee advertised by handsome actors who persuade their female audience with a beautiful, deep and languid voice to have a ‘coffee moment’.

  She and Antonia laughed about the advert as they sipped their coffee this morning. ‘Coffee moment! The power of advertising. I can’t believe that I actually went out and bought it. You’d never believe I was highly educated and a feminist at uni to boot. And it tastes vile!’

  But Antonia lowered her eyes and looked into her mug. ‘Oh, really? I didn’t go to university,’ she said quietly.

  The conversation had flowed until then. Olivia was left feeling she’d somehow humiliated Antonia and to cover up her own embarrassment she invited her to stay for lunch, even though she had a million other things to do. But they got back on track; Antonia insisted on making them her ‘club sandwich special’, which she produced ten minutes later with a flourish, complete with cocktail sticks from God knows where and even a paper napkin.

  ‘Look at the time! Sorry for imposing for so long,’ Antonia said as she left. But it wasn’t an imposition at all, Olivia thinks, as she strolls in the weak autumn sunshine towards the primary school gates. She’s surprised at how effortless it was to talk to her. Or perhaps to talk at, she muses. She did all the talking, probably too much.

  ‘Oh, we all need to have a rant from time to time,’ Antonia said when Olivia apologised for going on. ‘Or all the time, in Sophie’s case,’ she added, laughing.

  ‘Were you two at school together?’ Olivia asked to be polite, not particularly wanting to talk about Sophie.

  ‘Yes, Sale High, from Year Seven. Sorry, I interrupted. You were saying about your dad.’

  And so it went on. Olivia ranting. Ranting that she couldn’t rant to her sister or to her dad because they wouldn’t have a bad word said about Mike. Not that she wanted to rant, because she was lucky to have Mike as a partner, but that sometimes being married to somebody whom everyone else thought perfect was annoying and made her feel bad for wanting to rant because, really, she had nothing to rant about.

  Hannah darts out of the green school door waving something in her hand, a look of sheer happiness on her pink shiny face. ‘It’s a party invitation, Mummy! To make a bear! Can I go?’

  Olivia lifts Hannah, hugging her tightly, the pleasure of holding her youngest child still as intense as the day she was born. But a thought pinches her chest and the euphoria of unburdening herself fades, just a little. She’d confided in Antonia about the miscarriage and what Mike had said. Perhaps she’d said too much; she doesn’t know her that well, but the flow of words and hurt, concern and confusion were unstoppable.

  Of course she didn’t tell Antonia everything. Olivia still has no idea why she didn’t want the last baby, the boy. In her mind she blames the toll of pregnancy and childbirth, the burden of looking after yet another child, but they aren’t the real reasons for her rejection of him. She still can’t put her finger on it, but the awful truth is that she didn’t want their son, she resented each step of the way until she lost him and once he was gone she felt nothing but guilty relief.

  Maybe there was something in what Mike said, she thinks as she kisses Hannah’s warm chubby face. Not by deed, but perhaps by unwholesome feelings or by thought she did something to make her unborn baby die. It’s a frightening thought, one she shared with Antonia. ‘Thoughts don’t kill, Olivia,’ she replied, her brown eyes kind, understanding. ‘Much as we would like them to at times. It’s the deed that counts.’

  Sophie peers at her mobile again before flinging it from the bed and on to the floor where it makes a soft thudding noise of protest. She feels another surge of breathlessness. She wants to feel brave, she really does, but sometimes it’s hard, the erect head, the bright smile, the flippancy for the ‘camera’ which everyone expects.

  So many injections. The prodding, the poking, the pain. The fucking humiliation of it all. She knows what’s coming this time and she doesn’t feel brave at all.

  She lies with her face in the pillow, like she did as a child, resisting the urge to kick her legs and howl. Then after a few moments she leans over and scoops her phone from the carpet. She sits up cross-legged and stares at the name in her contacts list. ‘Carrot or stick?’ she muses aloud. She knows she could wait for Antonia to call her back, but she’s temporarily annoyed with her, and besides, she knows she needs a much firmer hand to help her through. She takes a deep breath and presses call. It’s answered after three rings, which Sophie finds herself counting. ‘Hello, Mum,’ she says. ‘It’s me.’

>   Antonia fingers the bunch of flowers as she stares at the mossy, weathered headstone. In memory of. Name, date of birth and date of death. No loving this, or much missed that. Her dry eyes flick back to the flowers. It’s a large bouquet, albeit common chrysanthemums, bought impulsively when her heart was full of poetry.

  The slant of sunlight behind her moves and she feels her heels sink into the grass. It’s fine. She has tissues in her bag to wipe her boots, so she won’t soil the car. She gazes at the weed-strewn grave of Jimmy Farrell a moment longer and then shakes her head and turns away, berating herself for dwelling on the good moments, which were far too few. There’s no point brooding on the dead, it’s the living who count. She has David to think of and what to create for his dinner. Something he likes, a delicacy to please him. Perhaps poussin, she thinks, he’d see the funny side of that.

  As she hurries towards the exit gate, a bird chirps from a tall tree and the wind ripples the flowers’ cellophane wrapping, reminding her they’re there. She stops and turns her head towards the direction of her father’s grave, then sighs, tucks her hair behind her ears and bends to lay the flowers gently on the closest naked grave.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘I don’t really think she’ll go through with it. Do you?’ David asks from the other end of the new Italian contemporary dining table. ‘Antonia?’

  Antonia lifts her head, her face blank for a moment in the light of the dinner candle. ‘Oh, do you mean Helen and this America thing? Not if she knows that Charlie is ill, surely. Though you never know with Helen. Has he told her?’

  David shakes his head. He’s tried several times to broach the subject of the doctor and the test results, but Charlie ducks the issue by saying it isn’t important, that there’s too much else to think about. Talking to Charlie about anything just now seems impossible.

  ‘Should you say something? To Helen?’