Geoff Nicholson - The City Under the Skin

“That’s way too much already.”

She started to get up, to fasten her clothes, ready to make her escape. Zak put his hand on her, hoping it didn’t seem like a grab. And he hoped it didn’t sound either too insistent or too whiny when he protested, “You said you’d explain. So explain.”

Marilyn moved away across the floor, sat with her back to the wall, wrapped her clothes and her arms tightly around her body.

“My grandfather was a good man,” she said. “He raised me after my parents died. Car crash. Drunk driving. Unheroic stuff. He did his best. His big thing was walking through the city with me, pointing out buildings, architectural styles and features. I was the only eight-year-old in my school who knew what a piloti was.

“He always carried a walking stick with a globe for a handle, so that he had the whole world in his hand. I knew he’d been an architect, but that didn’t seem to have anything to do with what he was showing me. I didn’t really know what architects did, partly because the way he talked, it sounded like that phase of his life had been a million years ago. I knew he was bitter about it. And then one day he got a call from the mayor’s office: Meg Gunderson was a fan. They wanted to make the Telstar part of the city regeneration project, thought it would help to have the original architect on board. He was thrilled. It was a dream come true, to feel wanted again. He gave a few talks, addressed a bunch of committees, did some interviews, and then he disappeared.”

“Disappeared how?”

She’d been talking quickly, but now she stopped to take a deep breath, then another.

“I don’t know. He just went. One day he wasn’t there anymore. I did the whole missing-person thing with the cops, they went through the motions, but they didn’t do anything about finding him. And they were probably right. Why waste their time. We all assume he’s dead. Somehow I know he’s dead. And that’s what I was doing that first night when I met you, walking through the city, trying to see it through his eyes, maybe looking for his ghost or something. I’ve done a lot of that, probably too much.”

“That’s terrible,” he said, and he meant it. “Really terrible.”

“It is,” she said. “It’s not the worst part.”

She stood up now, took up a place at the center of the room, and a strange relaxation came over her. She let her arms and her body loosen, and she undressed completely. The clothes came off quickly and effortlessly. It wasn’t an act of display, wasn’t a striptease, but it was still quite a show. Before long she stood naked in front of him, her body smooth and delicate in the dim light of the globes, looking self-possessed yet defenseless. Then she turned around. There it was, the damage, a diagram of former pain.

Zak would never be sure whether he was surprised or not. The moment he saw the tattoo on her back, it seemed as though he’d always been expecting it, a kind of explanation but one that simply demanded other, more complex explanations.

“Take a good long look,” Marilyn said. “You’re the map expert.”

He started at the top. High on her lean shoulder blades there was the beginning of the disorder, an ineptly drawn web of straight and curved lines, laid over the contours of her body. Some were reckless, some shaky, and yes, as he’d seen before elsewhere on other bodies, it was possible that they might be roads or rivers or railroad lines, but really they might be many other things too: cables, water mains, power lines. They paid no attention, no respect, to the flesh beneath. Then there was an overlay of misshapen squares and circles, buildings perhaps, and scattered among them things that could possibly be interpreted as bridges or underpasses, but some of the marks looked more like mere doodles, blots, and gouges, like the simple, cruel defilement of the soft skin. There were loose crosses, empty semicircles, and arrows that must be marking something or other, but their meanings remained utterly obscure. You wouldn’t have wanted to read too much into any of that chaos.

Zak wondered for a moment if, possibly, there was really nothing to be read there at all, no code to be deciphered, no reference to any “real” world, if it was simply an attempt to obliterate the female body, to overlay it with mayhem and abuse. Maybe any reading of the map would be mere projection, seeing what you wanted to see, a futile exercise, like trying to use a set of Rorschach blots as a street plan.

As he’d already seen, things got worse as the tattoos descended the body. Below the taut nip of Marilyn’s waist the scrawl became even more hurried, abstract, and bewildering as it careened across the curves of her buttocks, overlapping circles, swirls, scribbles, as if the tattooist was getting frantic, perhaps bored, wanting to get the task over and done with. It was a familiar incoherence, again incorporating, right on the tailbone, in the smooth softness at the top of the cheeks, an infinitely crude but quite unmistakable compass rose. Well, now Marilyn had two of the fucking things.

There was something else that he saw now, on the tight musculature of her lower back, something obscured by a welter of lines, as though the tattooist had made a design and then decided to cross it out with more tattooing. Under those lines of attempted concealment or erasure was a blob-like shape with a circle at one corner, like an amoeba and its nucleus, or perhaps like a fried egg. In the general illustrative mayhem it was impossible to be certain, but Zak thought it was neither an overactive imagination nor simple obsession that made him see those lines as the Telstar Hotel.

Marilyn began her story. She looked vulnerable but tough, and inured rather than tearful. Slowly and with difficulty she told Zak as much as she could bear to remember — the night, the walk, the attack, the smell of the leather hood, the ride in the back of the van, the basement ordeal, the various species of pain she experienced, then the relief of a strictly limited kind, and the damage that would never be wholly repaired. She talked until the point came when she couldn’t tell him anymore, when she had nothing left in her.

“That’s all I’ve got,” she whispered.

She pulled on her clothes again, baggy pants, a T-shirt, a work shirt, a thick woolen jacket, putting on layers of protection.

“I have to leave,” she said.

“No you don’t,” said Zak, “there’s no reason in the world why you have to leave. I want you to stay the night. I want you to stay, period.”

“I can’t do that.”

And she didn’t. After she’d left, Zak was surprised to find that an ignoble part of him was relieved. There was already too much for him to take in. He felt hollow. He thought there must be some perfect words he was supposed to say, some magical action he should perform, that would make everything better: it might take him the rest of his life to work out what.

The city streets seemed abandoned. Marilyn Driscoll started to walk away from Zak, through the Arts and Crafts Zone, through the unraveling weft and warp of the city. She felt exposed but lightened. Zak would have found out sooner or later, why not now?

She was less than halfway home when she heard a car behind her, and she wasn’t in the least surprised when she turned her head just a little, just enough to see that it was a battered metallic-blue Cadillac. Well, of course. It drove slowly past her and stopped a short way ahead. She kept walking until she’d caught up with the car, and then she stopped and looked in through the open passenger window to see Billy Moore at the wheel, miserable, shame-faced. Before he could say or do anything, she opened the door and got in beside him, like a grateful hitchhiker.