Алия Уайтли: The Loosening Skin

Them and us.

Or Rose could say – I’d never do a thing like that, but how could she be sure? What lay under the next skin, and the next?

But no, easier to say she’d never pay to watch people rip each other’s skin to shreds, and call it entertainment. The folder covered most of the details of skin fighting in the ring they had been investigating: the betting system, the location, the weapons specially designed to rip and scar. One of the fighters’ managers would call time, eventually, afraid of what might happen next. Because if you damaged the skin enough, the next shed wouldn’t be clean, or easy. The pain could send a person out of their mind, or kill them, and only a very specific crowd wanted to bet on that kind of thing, Petra had told her.

Pictures of scars, of skins in shreds, making London’s mosaic pieces, lay scattered upon the plush cream carpet of the office.

No, it made no sense. Except to Petra, who had investigated it on Phineas’s behest, and made a decision about what needed to be done next.

Call the police? Rose had said, almost hopefully. The police would give everything shape, for her.

See this bloke? said Petra, pointing to a shot of the crowd in cinema-style seating, close to the cage. He is the police.

It was like a line from a film. Too slick to be true. But maybe, sometimes, life could be like a film. For some people.

It was getting late. The concertina of traffic on the Hammersmith road was down to a soft squeeze. Rose leaned forward in her sleeping bag and gathered up the documents. She put them back in the file.

Everything was in its place except for the silver lighter that lived on the mantelpiece. Petra had taken it with her. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, but it was the first time Rose had asked to go along. She had been given a look of bemusement in return. Did it mean she wasn’t ready?

Enough questions.

She slid down the wall to lie flat on the carpet. Petra would take the chaise longue when she came back in; unspoken rules stated it was her sleeping spot. The weekends they spent back in Wiltshire, compartmentalising with a fair amount of success. Sometimes work spilled over into the conversations, but mainly they ate sandwiches and ran over the fields with the pace and purpose of escapees.

It was good.

One weekend, a few months ago, Petra had said, I’m due a moult, I think I’ve started, and sure enough there was a skin to be taken to the nearby council-run incinerator the next morning. Nothing changed, and there was no drama to it. Petra was the same.

It doesn’t bother me much, she said. Worse if I’ve got a partner, obviously, and then there’s breaking up and all that, but they’ve never turned nasty on me.

Of all the pieces that made no sense, that was the one that made Rose suspect that if there was a God, he had it in for her personally. But that was not a good, or a true, thought, she constantly reminded herself.

Sleep came from nowhere and left just as suddenly, to the sound of the downstairs door opening. The grainy light of early morning, followed by Petra’s feet on the stairs, their quick rhythm: and then she was in the room, just visible, with the smell of smoke unspooling from her black clothes. She moved to the desk, then to the mantelpiece, searching through the piles of paper.

‘You okay?’ whispered Rose.

‘Yeah. I can’t find—’ She spotted the manila folder, beside Rose. ‘Is that it?’

‘I was just looking through it.’

‘What for?’ Petra squatted and picked up the file. The smell of her was appealing in its thickness. It had its own presence in the room, speaking of an action completed.

After a pause, Rose said, ‘I don’t know.’

Petra patted her leg, through the sleeping bag. She took the file to the fireplace, and laid it in the grate. The silver lighter, produced from the pocket of her black leather coat, was flicked into life, and the file caught fire easily.

‘Done,’ said Petra. She stood, and stripped away her clothes. Her sports bra and pants were also black, sensible, and she looked lean. Fit for purpose, whatever that meant.

‘How did it go?’ whispered Rose. It was impossible to talk at a normal volume in the half-light.

‘You know when you get rid of a skin you were really enjoying and its like watching the good stuff go up in flames? This is the opposite.’

‘But won’t they just set up another ring somewhere else?’

‘Of course. It’ll take them a few weeks, though.’

Petra wriggled into her sleeping bag, on the chaise longue. Rose listened to a long sigh escape her lungs.

‘What good does it do, then?’ she murmured.

‘It helps me.’

‘Helps you what?’

‘Feel good about myself.’

‘Is that all that matters?’ said Rose, feeling a pain inside, a cutting emotion to which she couldn’t begin to put a name. ‘It’s like… It’s like you’re the most important thing in your own universe.’

‘I am. We all are. What I don’t get is why you won’t admit you should be the most important thing in yours.’

Later, when she was on the verge of finding sleep again, Petra said softly to her, ‘Keep trying, Rose. One day you’ll understand.’

Is there really life after Starguard? Before this hunt kicked off I would have said yes. I had said my goodbyes to Phineas, and thought myself done with it all. Max bought me out, so there was no debt left to pay; I never expected to find myself willingly asking a favour of Phin again.

He sits at the polished glass bar of his club, sipping his vodka tonic. He’s aged, but the eyes are the same. Untouched by the life, somehow immune to all complications of skin. He always did look a little greasy to the touch with that permanent tan; he shines under the club spotlights, as if it all slips away from him.

It’s simple, he said to me, when Max paid him back for the clothes, the contacts, the cost of the opportunity. Don’t ever fall in love. It’s a choice.

He lived as if that were true. Perhaps it was, for him. A different partner every night, paid for so there was no chance to prefer one to the others. He never retraced his steps, that was the rumour.

If I make him sound like a monster then I’ve only explained one half of him, for all these things stem from the practicality that protects him. To live by your own rules and never deviate from them – that gives him a power that goes beyond charm. I do believe he has never meant to cause anybody deliberate harm. In fact, he’s gone out of his way to shut down the worst excesses of human behaviour he’s come across. But I now think it’s all to protect the sweet soul that I sometimes glimpse in him, and if you get caught up in his defence mechanism then he’d only think you an idiot.

Still, I think he’s always had a soft spot for me.

It’s early evening for the club – before midnight – and it won’t start heating up until after two. So right now the music is only soft jazz, and I don’t have to raise my voice to make myself heard.

‘I’m betting you already know why I’m here.’

‘I knew you’d work it out, Rose. I hear you’re up in Lincolnshire. How’s that?’

‘Different.’

‘So why go back to the work now? Hanging clothes on racks not cutting it for you?’

‘Max asked me,’ I say. I take a sip of my mineral water.

‘That’s not it, though, is it? It was the thought of those old skins, being stroked. Being used. You would have moved on for good if he hadn’t kept those old skins.’

‘What do you do with yours?’ I ask, giving in to the temptation to make it personal.

‘Take them down the public incinerator,’ he says. ‘I know, that’s not in fashion. I had you down for a burner too, but then this old skin popped up on the radar and I thought – nobody loved Max like you did. Then I heard about the burglary and it all made sense. Did he keep it without you knowing?’