Gary McMahon: In the Skin

Click-ick .

“He seems…different. Bigger . Broader in the chest. Like a little man instead of a baby boy.”

She lets out a loud bark and at first the sound puzzles me, but then I realise she has simply laughed. Another sound I rarely hear. “Kids change. They grow and become someone else almost daily at his age. He’s still the same Max. Still your boy.”

I listen for a trace of mockery in her voice, but instead locate something far more complex. Is it sarcasm? I get up and pad across the landing, ducking into the bathroom, my bowel heavy with waste and my head light as a balloon. I wash my face in the sink but am unable to meet my eyes in the mirror. Pipes gurgle. Water runs down the plughole. My legs are shaking and my feet are freezing cold, as if the circulation has been cut off.

I cross to the window and peek through the curtains. The morning is dusky; the sky is leaden, but light threatens to break through to the east. I can see a shallow runnel carved through the dewy grass under the window; it traces a straight line away from the back of the house and stops at a pile of mulch left over from the last time someone did any gardening.

I close the curtains. Step away.

Adi stays in bed while I get Max up, shaking him awake with a hand on his shoulder. He never slept through like this before I went to New York; he always woke early, dragging us from sleep with his high-pitched questions and requests for cartoons and breakfast. It takes me five minutes to rouse him, and even then he blinks at me as if he doesn’t know where he is, fails to recognise his father. It’s almost as if he has a hangover.

“Come on, big man. Let’s get you some breakfast.”

Instead of the usual mad rush to the bathroom, he walks slowly and purposefully, pausing to straighten one of his books on the shelf by the door. He turns. Smiles. That same lop-sided grin: the one I don’t know. The one I don’t like.

I chat to him while he brushes his teeth, filling the room with banal information, absurd chit-chat. Max moves his hand in small circular motions, scrubbing his tiny white milk teeth with the utmost care.

“You done?”

“Yes, daddy. I finish.” He places his Thomas the Tank Engine toothbrush in the mug on the sink, twisting it so the head faces the wall. Even that small compulsive act is totally unfamiliar.

He refuses to hold my hand as he leads me down the stairs, but at last he has begun to chatter: “I want toast and pea-butter and a big boy bowl with porridge.”

Max hates peanut butter. He always — always — has a chopped banana covered in a thin layer of maple syrup for breakfast, usually followed by a round of dry white toast.

“You sure? You can have anything you want now that daddy’s home. We won’t tell mummy. It’ll be our special secret.”

He looks at me sideways, his eyes narrowed. “I want pea-butter. Big boy porridge.”

I know without a doubt this is not my son. This large child with the crooked smile and the unfamiliar eating habits. This strange invader.

He takes my hand. His fingers are like ice-lollies.

“Make mine breakfast, daddy. Now.”

I sit in front of the television and watch him eat. He has a little orange plastic table and chair he always pulls into the centre of the room, chewing as he watches cartoons. Looney Toons are his favourite; and Tom and Jerry . Today he demands to watch Scooby Doo .

The way he eats is different, too. He never used to push the food into the corner of his mouth, pouching it inside one cheek, like a hamster. But he does so now. My son. My unknown son.

Surely this feeling, this sense of him having changed so fundamentally that he is no longer my progeny, should be gone by now? He should have assumed his normal proportions in my eye; the old, familiar paternal emotions formed over the past three years must come flooding back.

But they haven’t. Nothing has reverted to normal. Everything is relative, and my judgement is impaired. Either that or someone has stolen my son and put something else in his place. A doppelganger. A double…but not quite. An imperfect copy of the original.

(…a copy of a copy…)

I resist the urge to laugh, knowing that to do so would surely signal the end of something I cannot even remember beginning, and if I start I might never, ever stop.

I watch him eat and I feel so alone; alone, even though I am sharing the room with a person formed partly from my own cells, a tiny part of me mixed with a tiny part of Adi to create a perfect whole.

Perfect hole . In my life.

“What you laughing at, daddy?”

I force myself to stop, wiping the tears from my cheeks. “Nothing, fella. Daddy’s just being silly. You eat your breakfast, now. Be a good lad. It’ll make you big and strong.”

But he is already big — so fucking big. And strong, too, with those chunky hands and thick fingers. My own hands are small, like my father’s. Like his father’s before him.

A floorboard creaks above my head and I glance up at the ceiling. Cobwebs in the corners, strung between the old polystyrene coping. Dead insects wrapped up in silk — flies and moths and other, unrecognisable husks. All drained. All dead a long time.

I hear Adi close the bathroom door; the shower comes on with its usual squeal of rusted pipes. If I were to turn on the kitchen taps, she would scald under the sudden jet of red-hot water. I consider it, even going as far as bracing myself to stand. Max stares at me, chewing sideways, like a bovine. His eyes glisten like chipped gemstones. What colour where they before my trip? Blue? Brown? Now they are green.

Upstairs, Adi starts to sing: the happy-happy pills are doing their job, taking off the edges, smoothing out the day into a long flat ribbon leading towards sleep.

I stand and walk to the huge window at the back of the room, the one looking out onto the garden. Sunlight is straining to make its mark on the day, but the low clouds are fighting it, holding it back. They hang onto the darkness as if it were a lover.

There are tiny handprints on the window glass, splayed fuzzy marks that sully the otherwise clean pane. I reach out to wipe one of them away but it remains on the glass. Leaning forward across the cluttered windowsill and upsetting a vase of flowers, I stare hard at the greasy blemish; my breath mists the window, obscuring the mark.

It is on the outside of the glass.

Panic flares within me like a sudden flame, burning at my heart, climbing into my throat and drying it out. I swallow but it hurts. Razor blades slice a hot line down into my gullet.

The smaller section of window at the top of the sealed unit is ajar: I remember opening it early last night, feeling stifled in the room. But didn’t I shut it again before retiring to bed? I cannot be certain.

The handprints seem to climb towards the opening, becoming fainter, the outlines less well defined, as they reach the latch.

I turn away, blanking all thought. Max is smiling at me, one hand resting on the tabletop and the other rubbing his chin in a thoughtful gesture far too old, too mature, for one so young.

He is wearing the lopsided smile that I have come to loathe. Wearing it like a mask.

I can’t find a decent music station on the radio as I drive through town towards the motorway. The airwaves are filled with plastic pop, monotonous commercial hip-hop, or the empty voices of idiot deejays. All I want is some music — or a proper song to help clear my mind. Johnny Cash, Elvis Costello, John Lennon… Someone who might put a tune to my pain.

But madness is a lone crooner; insanity can only be performed as a solo.