Алия Уайтли: The Loosening Skin

A date is set for moving out.

Howard phones, at his usual time on his usual day, and says, ‘How did you manage to upset Sunetra?’

‘Why? What did she say?’

‘Nothing. That’s the point. Usually she won’t stop talking about what she’s writing, how she’s feeling. Yesterday: nothing. She wouldn’t even sing your praises, which is unusual.’

‘She came to visit,’ Dan tells him. Here comes the guilt again: inescapable, inevitable. It prompts him to add, ‘Does it matter, though? If we can’t be on good terms any more? Most people aren’t, once they’ve broken up, are they?’

There’s a long pause on the other end of the phone. Eventually Howard says, ‘I suppose I’ve never thought of us as most people. But you’re right. You don’t have to stay close. I don’t want to make you feel that you have to talk to us – to me.’

‘No, that’s not what I—’

‘So what have you been up to?’

‘Helping Liam pack up, in the main.’

‘He found a place?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Howard says, his voice all compassion, as if Dan’s emotions had never been hidden from him, had always been his business even though every conversation had been about maintaining a distance, and it makes Dan so angry that he hangs up the call and says, ‘Motherfucker,’ over and over again, in surprise, in outrage. When the phone begins to ring again he blocks Howard’s number on an impulse and goes out to the garden, the air fresh, the lawn too long.

He crosses the grass, feeling his socks soak up the wetness of the soil, and picks up the pot that holds the spare key. He smashes it down, and when it doesn’t break he takes a rock from the overgrown rockery and hits the pot, over and over, until it fractures into three pieces: a handle, a rim, and the rest of the body. The key, nestled inside, once safe in the dark, has become visible.

A quick search reveals others have been searching for Edith Learner’s secrets.

A long thread on Reddit starts with the question of who she could have loved, back then. There’s a general agreement that the details are fuzzy, even for those who are adept at reading skins, but then an argument breaks out, accompanied by an influx of caps lock and exclamation marks. Is it disgusting to touch the dead, to want to know about them? Dan’s surprised by how many people seem to feel that, nowadays; he never remembers it being an issue before. The world is changing.

Just because it was okay in the past doesn’t mean it’s okay now we know better – somebody has typed.

Others defend the selling of the Songstress’s skin on the basis of her historical importance, and so it rages on, without the possibility of agreement. It’s like standing in the centre of a hall in which everyone is shouting, red-faced, fists raised. So many opinions that he feels deafened, numbed. His own anger has vanished.

He gives up on Reddit and searches for news articles instead.

Mystery Love Found in Songstress Skin

A wartime romance was revealed in the sale of the skin of Edith Learner, but who was the object of her affection?

Buyers of the limited edition commemorative swatches found a deep but vague trace of true love, but research through family records has revealed no such connection. Learner famously declared during the height of the war that she sang for lovers everywhere – but gave no sign that she belonged to their number.

‘Love is so precious, you would have thought she’d have told the world,’ said collector and fan Martin Sibley, who received his swatch and was shocked to find within it the revelation of an affair, ‘but perhaps we all knew, really, deep in our skins, because she sang about love so beautifully for us, through such a dark time. She was an inspiration to us. Perhaps it’s better left as a mystery, so we can imagine that her love was for all of us.’

Unless Martin Sibley was over a hundred years old at the time of providing the quote then he was full of shit, thinks Dan. There was no way Learner had been singing for him; he hadn’t even been born yet.

But there is a connection between them, due to owning that swatch. They are similar people, in some way. Searching for clues, touching that skin.

Is it possible to be in love not with a person, but with something bigger? An idea. Love. War. Could she have been in love with the war, and what it gave to her? A role. Perhaps that was the diffused, gentle feeling that was coming through her skin: a soft, hidden love for all that suffering, which had given her such purpose, and made her everybody’s sweetheart.

No. He prefers the thought of a tall strong soldier, or a nurse, or a fellow farm worker with ruddy cheeks and planted legs. He prefers the romance of a faceless lover, and he doesn’t want to know the truth, after all.

He shuts the lid of the laptop. It is getting late. Liam will be back soon.

‘Last Saturday,’ Dan said, raising his bottle to Liam’s. They clink.

‘Here’s to it.’

They drank.

‘I’m really going to miss you.’

‘You’ve been saying that a lot,’ says Liam, with a half-smile. ‘Keep it up and I might start believing you.’

‘I hope you do. Did the kids like the house?’

‘Loved it. They had a bit of an argument over the bedrooms, but I think we got it sorted out.’

‘Did she like her present?’

Liam tilts his head, and Dan reads the faint line of worry between his eyes. ‘She’s clever. She looked really pleased at first, but later she said: They’re not proper fish, though, are they? ’

‘Yeah,’ says Dan. ‘She sounds switched on.’

‘She is.’

He’d planned to wait until the end of the night to say what he wanted to say, but suddenly it occurs to him that he doesn’t want them both to be drunk for it, even if that makes it easier on them both. He clears his throat, finds his courage. You can do this . ‘Do you know who Edith Learner is?’

‘The… um… singer. From the war.’

‘My great-grandfather was a big fan.’

‘Really?’ Liam shifts forward on the sofa; he’s wondering where this is going, perhaps. Dan likes to think he’s surprised him. ‘Did he fight in the war, then?’

‘Yeah. He was a para. Saw some heavy stuff. I never met him, but my granddad used to tell me all about it. I had a strong bond with my granddad, but later I began to realise that it wasn’t – sometimes people need an audience. Not just for good things in the past. For bad.’

The living room is so quiet, the lights down low. His home. Sunetra was sitting on this very sofa only a few weeks ago, writing her poem. It doesn’t matter if he fails to understand or like what she creates; only that she was here. He’s so grateful she was here.

Here goes .

‘He had a scrapbook, passed down from his father, from the war. Bits of skin, cut from enemy soldiers. People his father had killed, then carved out a square of skin, and pressed it in this thick book, and they’d been preserved. Granddad would bring out the book whenever he babysat me, and he’d let me touch these little squares, and play Edith Learner’s songs, and I’d feel that warmth, those good feelings. I didn’t know it was other people’s love I was feeling until later. He never really explained it to me.’

‘Jesus,’ says Liam. ‘That’s…’

‘Fucked up?’

‘Yeah. It is.’

Dan feels the need to defend it, from the point of view of his own young self, who found no wrong in it, and who wouldn’t have known there was anything to feel guilt about. He pushes the urge down.

‘Where is it now?’