Алия Уайтли: The Loosening Skin

‘Yeah, I do. Look, I realise, it’s been months, and you never wanted a live-in lover. You were just helping out because you’re a good person, and this was meant to stay as a brief thing, I get it. I’m not your type, not deep down. And I’m trying to get over a break-up, so it’s not like I’m in the proper place for this…’

So they’ve moved on to the strangely formal honesty that comes before the argument that leads to the sex. Dan feels himself smiling in recognition of it.

‘I’m glad you find this funny,’ Liam tells him, gently. ‘Me, not so much.’

‘I’m sorry. Really.’ He tries to make the smile go away. ‘How old will Molly be?’

‘Six.’

‘Wow.’

Why a wow for being six? But Liam nods, as if he understands the sentiment. ‘I asked her what she wanted and she said a tank. I couldn’t work out if she meant a fish tank or a battle tank. I can’t get her a fish, though. Emily will kill me.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, fish,’ Liam says, as if the answer is self-evident. ‘They die, don’t they?’

‘Battle tanks tend to have a higher mortality rate.’

‘Ha. Yeah. What time is it?’

‘Late?’

‘Already?’

‘Drink your beer and don’t think about it,’ Dan advises. They clink bottles and take long draughts of cold beer.

‘So, did you find out why Mik was here?’

‘Not really. Listen, I’m sorry about earlier. I want you to feel it’s your home, while you’re staying.’

‘It’s not,’ Liam says, simply. ‘I promise you, I am looking for a place. I want to be able to have the kids stay over—’

‘They can stay over here,’ says Dan, thinking of Howard, of what Howard would say.

‘They can’t.’

‘You’re ashamed of me?’

He waits for Liam to break, to start the argument. Not this time. This relationship is not as predictable as it seems. Liam is shaking his head. He doesn’t speak. He simply moves his head from side to side, his eyes closed, as if listening to his own music. How unreadable he becomes the moment he’s chased, and Dan had thought him so close, so easy to hold.

‘You’re right to be ashamed of me,’ Dan says, because now he wants to own the pain he causes. He thinks of the framed photograph of Edith Learner in the kitchen, put at the back of the cupboard under the sink, with a swatch of old skin inside. Such things should always be private. But then – how can he ever risk letting anyone know about that, about him, again? He’s so lonely, that’s what’s really happening here: it hits him so hard that he stops breathing. He’s so lonely.

‘I’m not ashamed of you,’ says Liam, and puts down his bottle, then holds out his arms.

‘Did you ever think of going to the British Museum, touching your old skin?’ Liam asks him, very softly, stroking his stomach as he lies beside him. Dan is aware that the beer is changing his shape; he’s not a beautiful man any more, not like Mik was. Is. But Liam has a paunch too, just the start of one. They’re not young men. There’s something so sad, and yet ultimately reassuring about that.

‘Why would I?’ Dan says. ‘I can remember what that was like.’

‘What was it like?’

All the reasons why he doesn’t love Liam flood over him, over the afterglow, over the night and vulnerability he felt, like a strengthening armour. ‘What kind of a question is that?’ he says.

Liam pauses. He takes his hand from Dan’s stomach. ‘I think it was like being in love with love,’ he says. Then he gets up and finds his clothes, scattered around the floor, and returns to the bedroom he’s using while he’s here, at the other end of the corridor.

In love with love.

Was that it, all along?

He had fallen in love with all of them, all at once. A miracle of instant inclusion.

Dan gets up. He can’t lie in bed any more. There’s a suggestion of light to the room, but not dawn, not yet. Only a grainy greyness throughout the house as he takes the stairs, makes his way to the kitchen, tells himself he’s heading for the kettle. But then he’s reaching for the cupboard handle and peeling back the packaging, and crouching over that black and white photograph.

Ridiculous – he thinks, and he feels shame again, seeing himself as if from the other side of the room, in his boxer shorts, huddled over somebody’s bought and sold skin. He’s become the man he never wanted to be. How he hated those people, empty of love, who cooed over the Six. Who wanted to touch them.

He puts his finger to the hole in the glass.

So soft, so vague. A gentle emotion. She was a good person. Could that be true? He wonders. He can’t tell what part of his assumptions come from the skin and what comes from the things he thinks he knows about her from what his grandfather used to say. The Nation’s Songstress. Some people are better at reading skins than others. He suspects he has no talent for it.

He searches for the source of her love again. The love is sweet and delicate, like a thread. But still there’s no face, no image. Nobody to blame for that emotion, and no pain. There’s never any pain in a skin, which means that all skins are, in fact, a lie.

The shame overcomes the curiosity, and he takes his finger away.

His instinct is to destroy the skin so that nobody else can touch it. He thinks of his own skin from the Stuck Six days, preserved and folded in the British museum. Maybe visitors touch that, and want to rub it out, burn it up. Other people’s love is so precious that it must pain the rest.

Dan turns over the frame and looks for a way to open it, but it’s glued together. He could break the glass. He thinks of Liam, sleeping. There’s no way to break it quietly, and he doesn’t want to explain the act.

Besides, who is he to destroy it?

He sits back on the cold floor, clutching the picture. The weak, grey light strengthens into day, and eventually Dan gets up, puts the frame back in its packaging, and takes it to his bedroom. He slides it under the bed, among the few possessions that the others left behind when they moved out, one by one.

When he walks in the house he knows she’s there, although he couldn’t say why. It’s in the warmth of the kitchen, perhaps. The romantic in him would say it’s because she’s passed through it, leaving a trace of her vividness behind. But when he walks into the living room it’s not Nicky he finds there but Sunetra, sitting on the sofa with her long dress pulled over her knees as she taps on her phone. She looks up and gives him a huge smile that lasts for no longer than a second. Then she says, ‘I have to get this down,’ and returns her attention to her phone.

He was so certain it was Nicky.

He stands in the doorway and watches her. It’s as if she’s given him permission to stare, with her determination to put her own attention elsewhere, so he drinks her in without feeling the need to hide it. She is unchanged, and utterly different. How can she be both? He notes all this dispassionately. There is a hole within him for her, but it doesn’t scare or repulse him. The feeling has gone, that’s all. She drops the phone back in her purse, then unfolds from the sofa and stands, to faces him directly.

‘Hello,’ Sunetra says.

He’d forgotten how tall she is.

‘You found the key, then.’

‘I’m still weirdly proud of that pot,’ she says.

‘You can take it with you,’ he says, and she frowns, and he regrets his choice of words. He never meant to suggest it was not important to him, even though it’s only a pot.

She tells him, ‘I like the fact that it stays here.’

‘I do too.’

She comes to him, and they hug. She puts a hand to his cheek and feels his skin. So personal an act. ‘You poor thing,’ she says, and he remembers how she always could read him; how could he have persuaded himself that Sunetra didn’t know him, deep down? She breaks the contact and says, ‘I’m not staying. I just had the urge to see the house.’