Алия Уайтли: The Loosening Skin

‘Rose Allington?’ he says. It’s an Eastern European accent. ‘Petra said to wait for you. She said you would come today, but I have other buyers. There’s a line for this one, I can move it—’ He snaps his fingers at me.

‘I’m here. I want it, if it is what you say it is.’

‘It is. But you don’t need to take my word for it.’

‘Of course. Where is it?’

‘This way.’

The receptionist’s head has been snapping back and forth during our exchange like a spectator at a tennis match.

‘Margot,’ he says, ‘hold calls.’

‘Of course.’ She turns to me and winks. It’s unbelievable. She thinks she’s in a stage play, or something – that her life as a gangster’s receptionist is not real. Maybe she moulted and woke up with the urge to leave her comfortable life behind, and this is the result; enjoying the seedy workings of a company that the world would be better off without.

I follow him through the door and down a long corridor with peeling paint and exposed pipes, my mind taken up with that wink. Is that how it gets, after one too many moults? Everything becomes an in-joke?

His office is at the end; it’s a small room, with a painting placed to draw the eye above a single high-backed velvet armchair, the seat worn shiny. The painting is meant to look very old but something tells me it’s not. It’s a reproduction of a suffering saint who wears a white robe, diaphanous, that shimmers around him – no, it’s his skin coming free. He’s in the death throes of the final moulting. His eyes are raised to heaven, and radiance comes from him as he sloughs off his last skin, and leaves this mortal life.

An alcove is curtained off; the man, name still unknown to me and I’d like to keep it that way, pulls back the thick purple material. There, folded neatly upon a long trolley, is a skin. It looks as light and ordered as a sheaf of papers.

‘Full out,’ I say. I know the tricks.

‘You don’t want to touch first?’

‘Full out.’

He lifts it and arranges it, to make it into the shape of a body once more, and I know instantly that it’s not one of Max’s.

‘You’re wasting my time.’

‘Wait.’

‘It’s not even male.’ The breasts have been cut away and the remaining material sewn together to create a flatter chest that would fool nobody in the skin trade. I could leave. I should leave.

‘Just touch it,’ says the nameless man.

I put my fingers to the long, flat tube of the nearest arm and let the emotion come to me.

Yes, that’s love, the remains of it, the whisper that dies away from the shout and can never quite be silenced. Love for Max, specifically, undeniably; I’m getting it clearly now, the feeling as precise as a signature. Not fan adoration, not a crush, which is different. This is the real deal. Deep, and reciprocated. Requited love, soaked into the skin.

I see Max for a moment as I once saw him. He’s the bridge of the song, the voice of happy ever after. He’s how to live, and why.

The feeling fades.

He was my reason to write bad poetry; thank God I never was one for recording my emotions. I can’t quite believe how I felt about him, just as I can’t believe that anybody else ever did.

This is my skin.

My skin, here, in this crumbling back office, the breasts mutilated in the name of money. Max told me he’d burned it. I watched him walk it out to the bonfire.

I pull back my hand.

‘See? Not fake.’

I can tell from his expression that he doesn’t know it once belonged to me.

‘I’ll take it,’ I say. ‘What’s your price?’

He touches his tongue to his top lip and names a huge sum. Max’s very first moult itself wouldn’t cost more. We haggle, and I knock him down a little, but nowhere near as much as I should. I have no taste for this. I need that skin, and that’s all there is to it.

But I also need one more thing, and I have to time it right, so I wait until the deal is struck and the skin has been refolded and wrapped in zbrown paper, and the money is about to be transferred from Max’s credit line, before I say, ‘I’ll need the details.’

‘What?’

‘Provenance. Who sold it to you?’

‘That’s not— I don’t—’

‘Details.’ I plant my feet squarely, make it clear I won’t move without it. ‘It’s necessary. Or we can cancel.’

He’s already pictured the money in his account; he’s not going to lose it now. ‘It was a charity shipment. Random bag. I have people who go through, checking for pure ones. We got lucky.’

‘You did,’ I agree, although I know nobody gets that lucky. But it’s not his bluff. My instincts, long unused and struggling to surface, tell me that he really believes in this random bag story. Which means he’s part of the setup.

‘We’re done,’ I tell him, and I complete the transaction on my phone. He leads me out, a different path this time, down a flight of stairs and through a warehouse with thin, dirty windows where women and machines are hard at work. Skins are being sorted, pressed, scissored and stitched to make skimpy underwear. Love is a warm layer, indeed.

Back out on the street I find a familiar franchise of cafe and call Petra, who asks me if her tip was good. She doesn’t question me when I ask her instead where it came from. She was once my partner; she knows who to trust, and when. We worked together every day before this last moult of mine, and we were good at it.

‘Don’t drop me in it, Rose,’ she says.

‘It never came from you.’

So she gives me a name – a name that I’ve already heard today.

I finish my call and eat a slice of cake, savouring the sweetness. I have gone soft; I’m running on caffeine and sugar. A text message comes in.

MAX: Either u found them or that’s a big dinner allowance you just gave yourself.

ROSIE: Not one of your skins. A necessary purchase. Will explain later.

MAX: Looking 4ward to it. Where are u?

How strange it is, to see our names next to each other on the screen.

I don’t reply. I open my leather backpack and look at the brown paper package inside. To buy it cost more money than I’ll ever make in my life. Luckily, it’s not my money. And I had to have it; Max will understand that. Particularly because this is his fault. If he had burned it as I asked, as he told me he had, it wouldn’t have been sitting in his skin room when the thieves took the lot.

So now I have to carry my old skin with me until I can find the time to dispose of it properly. I don’t want to be close to it, but there’s no choice. It’s now become part of this puzzle.

And the man who holds the next piece is Phineas Spice.

London wasn’t so much a place as a mismatched mosaic of a city. The buildings looked sturdy enough, but the colours weren’t coherent. One backdrop was bright, the next clouded, and the pieces of people were dotted so randomly, an arm here, a head there. Rose never felt that she saw a whole person, only glimpses of expressions in a sharp-edged cut-out compilation.

She saw it differently to Petra, she knew. Petra found form and shape in everything because of the way it settled around her; she was her own centre. But Rose, sitting in her sleeping bag on the floor of the dark office, waiting for Petra’s return, worried she would never learn how to be that way.

She leaned her head against the wall, and the manila folder slipped from her lap to the cream carpet, the documents and photographs splaying out like a fan. There they were – what Petra would have called the worst things.

The only way these kinds of pictures, this kind of knowledge, made sense was if a person said to herself – some people aren’t right. They aren’t right in the head.