Алия Уайтли: The Loosening Skin

‘It was a misunderstanding.’

Phin raises an eyebrow. When I don’t elaborate, he says, ‘We wear ourselves, then we peel ourselves away. We change and we change. How strange it is, the things we become, and the things we throw away. Do you know that poem? One of the Stuck Six wrote it, after she moulted.’

‘No.’

‘Well. It’s not important. I did you a favour, getting word to Petra before some crazy came along and snapped it up.’

‘Thank you.’

‘So let’s say we’re even. We’ve helped each other out enough for that, I think.’

He might mention things I’m desperate not to talk about. The warehouse flashes through my mind, so I move the conversation along. ‘How did you hear about it?’

He smiles. ‘It was being shouted out, Rose. Everyone was talking about it – the thefts, and then this appearance, from nowhere, of a prime Max Black contact skin, up close and personal, with the smell of sex on it.’ I wince, and he pats my hand. ‘Sorry, but that’s how it was broadcast. There was nothing subtle about it. I’d watch your back, if you’re carrying that skin around. There are lots of unscrupulous people in the game.’

I stand up. ‘Thanks,’ I say.

‘You going to destroy it, then?’

‘It should have been destroyed at the start.’

‘Yes, it should,’ he agrees.

I remember how much I like him. Like is different from love – it can survive. It’s held in the brain, perhaps, and not the skin. Phin found me working clubs as a bouncer, considering moving into fighting or selling myself, and he set me up in a job. With Max. Then he let Max buy out my contract. It was all about money, but it was never cruel, and he could so easily have been cruel, considering all the things he’s seen.

And then he was my employer again, in a different way. He still is Petra’s employer. They both try to make themselves feel better about the world, and that’s fair enough, I think. Yes, it’s fair enough.

He once told me something about myself, that helped me to make sense of the inexplicable. For that, along with everything else, I will forever think good thoughts of him.

I lean in and kiss his greasy cheek goodbye.

‘I’ve got a gig minding Trad Prester,’ he says. ‘Two weeks, London, next month. Cash in hand, if you’re interested, as a one-off. You still in shape?’ He looks me up and down.

‘Not even a little bit.’

‘Ah well. You should do something about that before age catches up with you.’

‘It already has.’ I turn to leave, and then remember one more question I should ask. ‘Smith. She was working for Max the night of the burglary. Can I speak to her? Is she here?’

‘Smith?’

‘Skin fighter you liberated. Korean.’

‘Ahh…’ He swallows, and the movement draws attention to the folds of skin around his Adam’s apple, visible above the opening of his cream shirt. So he has aged, after all. ‘No, you can’t speak to her. She went back to fighting.’

‘She chose to go back in?’

‘Some of them do. They get the taste for it.’

‘Where is she now?’

He shakes his head. ‘Got in a nasty bout, nothing to do with me.’

‘She’s dead?’

‘She was lovely,’ Spice says. ‘Straight off the container ship, they got her.’

‘You got her out, though.’

He takes a long drink. ‘Well, we didn’t speak the same language anyway.’

‘When was this?’

‘Day before yesterday. It’s all very fresh in the mind right now.’ He taps the side of his head. ‘Never mind. It’ll pass.’

I don’t ask him anything else. I leave it at that. Enough of London. I feel the same way about it as I feel about Phineas Spice. I have fond memories but I’ll be damned if I make too many new ones.

A bad night’s sleep in a cheap hotel later, I take the first train to Chichester. On the journey, the carriage window stuck half open and the businessman behind me shouting into his phone over the wind, I make a list of my skins:

• Age 16 – first moult. Bristol. Gave it to Mum.

• Age 21 – Early second moult triggered by stress. Finals at York tied with a break-up with Steve (who moulted me off). Burned the skin in a bin in the bedroom, the fire got out of control, fire brigade called, I got suspended. Joined the RAF.

• Age 28 – Third moult while on active duty, Cyprus, established pattern of stressful moults. Kicked out of the RAF as unstable. Tried to bury the skin; the RAF took it and disposed of it properly as per regs.

• Age 34 – Fourth moult. Sussex. Max told me he’d burned the skin.

• Age 38 – Fifth moult. London. Sudden early moult, again triggered by stress. The warehouse. Skin was burned on the scrubland there.

My sixth moult is not due for another couple of years, at least, if things go according to the pattern.

So I have the fourth moult with me, in my backpack, and I will burn it as soon as the opportunity presents itself. That leaves only the first moult to account for. I know I’m only feeling paranoid, but I have to be sure that nobody can get to it. Even though the fourth skin, the one impregnated with Max, is the only one that could fetch big money. My first teenaged moult – well, there are people who would buy that for a few quid and a cheap rub from an online auction, but I’m not scared of those people. I only feel sorry for them.

But I need that skin gone anyway.

When Mum got ill my Aunt Alice took in her old skins. She’d been a hoarder all her life, and although I said they should be cremated along with her, Alice wouldn’t hear of it. I hadn’t thought about it before, but I suppose that means Alice still has my first skin too, so I need to find the time to return to Bristol.

But first I have to try to do my job.

The industrial estate on the south side of Chichester holds the usual small businesses for an affluent city: a curio shop next to a gym next to a vintage car mechanic next to a reclaimed antique tile seller. And in Unit 43B, tucked away at the dead end, there’s the supplier of Max’s damned pills. It’s a clean white box of a building with blacked-out windows.

It’s better than the back streets of Paris, although I’m expecting to find the same kind of impossible promises inside. The pills we popped together once upon a time guaranteed current skin longevity. They were meant to give us longer in love. I wonder what Mallory Peace are selling him, and if he still wants to stay in the same skin forever. Perhaps, this time, he wants to speed up the process, or have the new skin underneath look younger. Does that sound like something Max would want? It’s difficult to remind myself that I really don’t know him any more.

There’s a security camera over the main entrance, and a small intercom along the white wall. I push the little round button, not sure yet what I’m going to say. This is not how a proper private detective would do it. What would Petra lead with? Her voice won’t come to me.

‘Can I help you?’ A man’s voice: pretty young, I’d guess.

‘Max Black sent me.’ I don’t elaborate.

I wait through the silence. The buzzer sounds, and the door swings back.

What’s inside is a surprise.

Isn’t that always the way, though? What’s inside, behind, underneath that first layer, waiting to be found.

Focus, I tell myself.

The professional front is not a front at all. This really is a laboratory, an expensive operation, and the people I can see through the wall of safety glass that separates the workplace from the reception area are the real deal, with white coats and studious expressions. They are of all ages and colours, tapping on computers, using unidentifiable equipment; these aren’t three college boys with bad hair, kitchen foil and a Bunsen burner.