Beneath The Skin

“I could do with a glass of wine.”

“I don’t have any.”

“Then it’s lucky I brought my own.”

He stooped down and opened the backpack, bringing out a slim green bottle. I touched it: It was still cold, dribbles of moisture running down its neck.

“Do you have a corkscrew?”

I wasn’t feeling especially pleased about this, but I gave him one. He turned his back to me to open it. I handed him a glass and a tumbler and he poured the wine into both, with a very slow and steady hand so that none spilled. He told me he lived in Norfolk but needed to buy a flat in London because he often stayed for two or three nights during the week.

“So my flat could become a pied-a-terre,” I said. “What an honor.”

“Cheers.”

“I’ve got to go out now,” I said, lying of course. My weekend appointment book was empty.

“It’s a bit late, isn’t it?” he said, draining his glass.

I didn’t reply. I didn’t see why I needed an excuse for a man I didn’t know.

“You should take your bottle,” I said.

“No, you keep it,” he said, turning to leave.

“What about the flat?”

“I like it,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

I heard the door close downstairs. I liked him well enough. I wondered what his handwriting looked like.

TEN

The next day I felt like a robot in class. I was doing a pretty reasonable impersonation of a primary school teacher. The robot got on with a whole-class lesson on letter formation while somewhere inside I was going over things in my mind. I needed to get rid of the flat. That came back and back the way a tune does, nagging at you. I had the tantalizing sense that if I could close the door on that unlovable bit of living space hacked out of an unpleasant house on a noisy road, then I would be able to close the door on other things as well. What I really ought to do was make the flat more secure, but that seemed wrong, like washing a broken bottle. The way to make that flat better and safer was to leave it. Nothing else would do. Starting next weekend I would start seriously looking at other flats.

I’d been too young when I’d bought this one. The money I’d been left by Dad when he died had felt like Monopoly money. There was too much of it to be real. He had said to me to buy somewhere to live; it was almost like a dying command. He was a man who thought that if you owned your own property, then you were safe; the world couldn’t touch you, no matter what happened. So I was a good daughter-although of course I wasn’t a daughter at all anymore, since I had no parents left; I was just me and very lonely and scared-and I did as he had told me. Very quickly. And since I’d moved to London from a quiet village, my only impulse had been to buy something that was in the real city, where things were happening, where there were shops, markets, people, noise. I’d certainly found that.

“Zoe?”

I was woken up out of what felt to me like sleep, and what to an observer would have looked like feverish activity (I was almost surprised to look at my hand and see a piece of chalk and at the blackboard to see a large b and p that I had carefully and unconsciously traced). I looked round. It was Christine, one of our special-needs teachers. The needs in our school were very special. You would see Christine sitting at improvised desks in the corridor with children suffering from an educational disability: abuse, malnutrition, having recently arrived from a war zone in eastern Europe or central Africa, that sort of thing.

“Pauline asked to see you,” she said. “It’s urgent. I’ll take over here.”

“Why?”

“There’s a mother with her. I think she’s very upset about something.”

“Oh.”

I felt a dull ache in my stomach, that sense of an imminent blow. I looked at the class. What could it be? The turnover in our class was amazing. People moved their children away, sometimes out of the country, often without a word of warning. Other troubled children quickly took their place. We had children under court orders, with social service files. I made a quick count. Thirty-one. They were all here. No toddler had wandered off home without my noticing. There was no medication I should have administered. Nobody was foaming at the mouth. I felt better. How bad could it be?

As I walked the short distance to Pauline’s office, I thought how, if I hated my flat, at least I loved the school. In the small vestibule there was a pool of water made out of bricks with big fat fish in it. I dipped my fingers in it for luck, as I always did when I passed. The school was by the side of another of London’s arterial roads. It was shaken all day by lorries making their way up toward East Anglia or down across the river to Kent and the south coast. To get to the nearest bit of scrubby park, you had to lead a crocodile of children along the road and across two dangerous junctions. But that was what I loved about it. It was something from another world, like a monastery, in the middle of the noise and dust. Even when the children were running around screaming it felt like a refuge.

Maybe it was just those stupid fish that made me feel like that, and I’d probably got it all wrong anyway. I remembered some book of facts I’d read as a child on how water conducted sound better than air. The fish probably spent their entire lives moaning about the noise of the traffic and wishing they were somewhere more desirable. I tried to remember what it was like when I lay submerged in the bath rinsing my hair. Could I hear the lorries hurtling past outside? I didn’t remember.

Pauline was standing by the half-open door with a woman I recognized. They weren’t speaking or doing anything. They had obviously just been waiting in silence for me to arrive. I saw the woman every day at the end of school, hovering at the door of the class. Elinor’s mother. I nodded a greeting at her, but she didn’t catch my eye. I tried to picture Elinor this morning. Had she been upset? I didn’t think so. I tried to picture the girl in the class I had just left behind. Nothing unusual occurred to me.

“Shut the door behind you,” Pauline said, leading me in. The mother stayed outside. She waved me to a chair in front of her desk. “That was Gillian Tite, the mother of Elinor.”

“Yes, I know.”

I noticed that Pauline was white-faced, trembling. She was either deeply upset or so angry that she could barely control herself.

“Did you give the class homework last week?”

“Yes. If you can call it homework.”

“What was it?”

“It was just for fun. We’d been talking about stories and I asked them to draw a picture of one of their favorite stories in their art book.”

“What did you do with the homework?”

“I’m trying to get them used to doing homework on time and giving it in. So I collected the books up on Wednesday-I think it was Wednesday. I’m pretty sure. I looked through them immediately.” I remembered doing it-sitting there while that peculiar man who came to view the flat went through my knicker drawer. That was the day I’d found the letter on the doormat. “I wrote nice comments on them and gave them back on the next morning. I don’t know if Elinor’s mother expected a mark out of ten. They’re too young for that sort of homework.”

Pauline ignored me.

“Do you remember what Elinor drew?”

“No.”

“Does that mean you didn’t look at the drawings?”

“Of course I looked at them. I checked when they began them in class and I wrote a title for each one at the