Beneath The Skin

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know who these people are.”

Unfortunately, they then started to tell me. To me the interplay of these old friends and brothers was a bewildering mixture of ancient jokes, obscure references, private catchphrases, and I generally thought the best thing was to keep my head down and wait for something I could follow. After a while the frenzied, competitive cross talk subsided and I found myself talking to Morris once more.

“Are you together with any of…” I said in a subdued voice and giving a discreet nod in the direction of the various young women around the table.

Morris looked evasive.

“Well, Laura and me are sort of, in a way…”

“In a way what?” said Laura across the table. She was a large woman with straight brown hair pulled back in a bun.

“I was telling Zoe that you’ve got ears like a bat.”

I assumed that Laura would get furious with Morris. I would have. But I was starting to see that the three women hovered on the edge of the group, mostly talking among themselves and only being brought into the general conversation when necessary, which didn’t seem to be very often. The boys, fresh-faced, bright-eyed after the football, looked more like little boys than ever. Why had I been embraced by their little group? As an audience? Morris leaned over very close to me and I almost thought for a moment he was going to nuzzle my ear. Instead he whispered into it.

“It’s over,” he said.

“What is?”

“Me and Laura. It’s just that she doesn’t know it yet.”

I looked across at her as she sat there, unaware of the sentence hanging over her head.

“Why?” I asked.

He just shrugged, and I felt I couldn’t bear to talk about it anymore.

“How’s work going?” I said, for want of anything better.

Morris lit a cigarette before answering.

“We’re all waiting,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

He took a deep drag and then an even deeper gulp of his beer.

“Look at us,” he said. “Graham is a photographer’s assistant who wants to be a real live photographer. Duncan and me go around showing stupid secretaries how to do things with their software that they should have read in the manual. We’re waiting for one or two of our ideas to, well, come to fruition. The way things are now, you need one halfway plausible idea and you’re worth more than British Airways.”

“And Fred?”

Morris looked reflective.

“Fred is digging and sawing while trying to decide who he is.”

“But in the meantime there’s that tan and those forearms,” said Graham, who’d been eavesdropping.

“Mmmm,” I said.

We sat there for a long time and drank too much, especially the boys. Later Morris moved across to be close to Laura, at her request, which sounded more like a command, and Duncan sat next to me. First he talked about his work with Morris, how they were out on the road every day, working mainly separately in different companies, teaching idiots with too much money and no time how to operate their own computers. Then he told me about Fred, how long they’d known each other, their long friendship.

“There’s just one thing I can’t forgive Fred for,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“You,” he said. “It wasn’t a fair fight.”

I made myself laugh. He stared at me.

“We think you’re the best.”

“The best what?”

“Just the best.”

“We?”

“The guys.” He gestured around the table. “Fred always chucks his women in the end,” he said.

“Oh well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we?”

“Can I have you afterward?” he said.

“What?” I said.

“No, I want her,” Graham said from across the table.

“What about me?” said Morris.

“I was first,” said Duncan.

There was a little bit of me that recognized that this was one of their jokes, and maybe at some other time I might have laughed and made a flirtatious attempt to play along, but this wasn’t one of those times.

Fred pushed himself against me. Pushed his hand against my trousers, Louise’s trousers. All of a sudden I felt nauseous. The thick, noisy atmosphere of the pub was curdling around me.

“Time to go,” I said.

He gave me a lift back to my flat in his van, dropping Morris and Laura on the way. He must have been way over the limit.

“Do you mind when they talk to me like that?”

“They’re just jealous,” he said.

I told him how the police had asked about my personal life.

“They made me think it was my fault,” I said. “They asked about my sex life.”

“A long story?” There was a gleam in his eyes.

“A very short story.”

“That many?” He whistled.

“Don’t be stupid.”

“So they think it’s one of your ex-lovers?”

“Maybe.”

“Did any of them seem like nutcases?”

“No.” I hesitated. “Except, when you start thinking like that, of course, everyone seems odd, a bit sinister. Nobody’s just normal, are they?”

“Not even me?”

“You?” I looked across at him as he drove, thin hands on the steering wheel. “Not even you.”

He seemed pleased. I saw him smile.

He pushed me back in my seat and kissed me so hard I tasted blood on my lip, and pressed a hand against my breast, but he didn’t ask to come in. And I’d learned my lesson from last night. I didn’t ask him. I waved him off, in a reasonably convincing charade of cheerfulness, and instead of going into the flat I walked down the still crowded road to the nearest pay phone. I called up Louise: Maybe I could go there for the night. But the phone rang and rang and nobody answered. I stood in the booth, holding the phone to my face, until a cross man with a bulging briefcase banged on the glass. There was nobody else I knew well enough to ask; there was nowhere else to go. I dithered on the street for a few minutes, then told myself not to be so stupid. I walked back to the front door, opened it, picked up the junk mail, the gas bill, and the postcard from my aunt, and went upstairs. There were no hand-delivered letters. The windows were all locked. The peppermint liqueur stood on the table, top off. Nobody was there.

NINE

“I really think he’s interested.”

“Who? Fred?”