Gary McMahon: In the Skin

Max’s room is located at the end of the hall. I lift the latch on the baby-gate and head that way, allowing the ghost of a smile to tickle my lips. I can hear him singing, his voice high and surprisingly tuneful. He is tapping something — a car? a train? — against the wall or the floorboards.

Maybe this is the dose of reality I need to nail me into the moment.

I push open the door and see him sitting there, under the window. He is turned away from me and I can only see him from behind, but he looks bigger, broader, than before I went away. I think again of how quickly kids develop in so small a time, and a sense of pride flushes through me, purging me of everything else — all the bad stuff that has recently been causing a blockage; all the darkness I can barely keep at bay.

“Hey, Max. How’s my best boy?”

Max stops playing with his cars. He lets them fall to the floor. His hands look huge; his fingers are like butcher-shop sausages. He makes podgy fists and climbs wearily to his feet, then turns to look at me.

His face is different, much wider and bonier than before. His eyes seem to have lightened a shade in my absence and his hair has grown alarmingly long. Max’s mouth is set into an unfamiliar smile: a slanted expression, sly and untrustworthy, too old for his face. More like a smirk.

“Max?” It sounds as if I am querying his identity, and this seems to amuse him.

“Hey, boy.”

He lumbers towards me on legs far chunkier than I can recall, dragging his left foot as if he has acquired a slight limp. He is taller than I remember; his clothes no longer quite fit.

“Daddy.” That word is the clincher. Max has never called me daddy in his life — always pa or dad or even da-da, when he was much younger. His voice is deeper, too, and comes from somewhere right inside him — a cold dark spot I’ve never even glimpsed until now.

“ Daddy .”

I run from the room, feeling foolish and afraid. The kid closes the door behind me and for a moment I’m sure I hear him chuckle dryly.

I stop at the top of the stairs, caught between separate layers of the same existence. I can hear Adi shuffling about downstairs like a zombie, and the kid in the room has begun once more to clatter a plastic toy against the wall.

I stay where I am for a long time, unsure of what exactly is going on in the strange territory of my life.

Later, I’m standing outside wishing that I smoked, just so I might have something to do with my hands. I’m pacing up and down the garden under the nursery window. The light is off; my son is in bed. My son . I must remember that. He is my son, and not some tiny intruder who’s come to stay.

Kicking my heels, I notice something on the ground: a small round bundle. Greasy paper wrapped up in a ball and discarded in the grass. I bend down and pick it up, untying the slippery knot of wrappings. When I’m done I hold a piece of greaseproof burger paper in my hand, the name of the fast food outlet stencilled across it in bold letters.

Panic flares up inside me, then diminishes like a dying firework. I am afraid, yet the fear is almost sexual, like an illicit glance from a stranger in a rough downtown bar.

I walk over to the wheelybin and dispose of the grubby creased paper, slamming down the lid in an effort to dismiss it from my mind. It doesn’t work; the stain of dread is upon me, making my fingertips moist and tacky.

I see several cigarette butts on the paved area near the bins. I have never smoked and Adi gave up months ago, replacing one addiction with another — early morning runs, exhaustive sessions at the gym, rowing miles on machines and lifting pieces of iron in slow repetitive motions.

I scoop up the fag ends with a trowel I keep hidden in a flowerbed for the purpose of removing cat shit and tip them into the bin. Again the lid slams shut, but the unease remains.

Has someone been watching the house while I was away? The thought of alien eyes cataloguing my family’s movements chills me. I think of the prostitute back in New York City and pray this is not part of some elaborate blackmail plot.

When I look up at the nursery window, there is a stocky figure standing behind the glass, hands splayed flat across the pane, head tilted questioningly to one side. Watching me watching him. The figure ducks down behind the sill but a sharp afterimage remains burned in its place, a nuclear silhouette seared onto a bomb-site wall.

I stumble backwards and feel something give under my feet. Stooping down, I pause to examine a dead bird. Its neck is floppy, the head bobbing about when I pick up the tiny cadaver by one ruffled wing. The bird’s beak has been removed; a bloody nub of flesh is all that remains of its face, tiny black eyes stare from the mess, as flat as pinheads. As I look closer I make out a bald spot on the underside of its body, where feathers have been stripped away, perhaps with a blade. There is a mark on the pale pink flesh: a tattoo. It is too small to identify, but I’m sure the blue-black mark is ink.

I dispose of the corpse in the bin, burying it under the rest of the trash. As I approach the rear door on my way back to the house I see something scratched into the UPVC frame: a faint insignia, something resembling a collapsed figure-of-eight lying on its side. Similar to the mark etched onto the bird.

I go back inside and lock all the doors, and then check each window in the house, one by one, rattling the mechanisms to ensure they have not been pried loose. All entrances are sealed but still I feel insecure. Our lives are being invaded, subtly and with great care, but nonetheless we are under scrutiny.

Upstairs, I check on Max. He is asleep in his bed, lying flat on his back with his hands palm-down on the covers. He never used to sleep this way; before I went away, he always lay on his front, like me, with his hands tucked under the pillow. I leave the door ajar and go back outside to confront Adi, who is lingering with obvious intent in the bedroom doorway, her mood having experienced another abrupt shift.

“Are you coming to bed?” her voice is softer than before and she has changed into a nightdress that I swear is new — I’ve certainly never noticed it hanging in the wardrobe or folded neatly in a drawer. Short in the leg, low at the chest. Sexy. But her frame is too skinny for the garment; it hangs on her gym-thin body like rags.

“In a minute.” I turn away, but not in time to miss her sly, calculating grin in the full-length mirror on the wall.

“Don’t belong,” I think she says, before realising that I have joined the last two syllables of her sentence together to create a single word. She walks across the landing to the top of the stairs, taking her time and lifting the hem of the garment as she raises one leg so I catch a glimpse of her waxy buttocks. The expression on her face as she peers over one shoulder is supposed to be sultry, but to me she resembles a snarling beast.

I squeeze past her, slink downstairs, and retreat into the living room, where I sit down and retrieve my laptop from the drawer in the big, low coffee table, an expensive piece of furniture designed to look like a giant book. I switch the machine on and wait for it to boot up. When I try to open my well-organised folders, I discover that all the files have been deleted. All my records have been destroyed; there is nothing that I can possibly do to save them.

There is a new drive installed on the machine, and when I click the cursor to open it, I see it is filled with digital images. Obscene photographs of men and women coupling with dogs, sucking horse’s cocks, pressing the mouths of reluctant farm animals against their grubby private parts. The last file I look at is a sepia image showing a number of deceased children lying in state, dressed in miniature suits. White hands crossed over shallow breasts in a row of tiny coffins.