Beneath The Skin

bridge in Kashmir and killed a horribly large number of people. Maybe if a blond British twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher had been on board they might have given it more space.

“Crap,” said Fred when I said as much to him later that day, eating soggy chips doused in vinegar after a film in which men with bubbling biceps hit each other on the jaw with a cracking noise like a gun going off. “Don’t do yourself down. You did what heroes do. You had a split second to decide and you did the right thing.” He cupped my chin in his slim, callused hand. I had the impression that he was seeing not me, but the woman in the picture with the sticky little smile. He kissed me. “Some people do it by throwing themselves on top of a grenade; you did it with a watermelon. That’s the only difference. Let’s go back to your place, shall we? It’s still early.”

“I’ve got a stack of marking and forms that are about a yard high.”

“Just for a bit.”

He chucked the last of the chips in an overflowing bin, sidestepped the dog turds on the pavement, and wrapped his long arm round my shoulder. Through all the exhaust fumes and the fried reek from kebab houses and chip shops, he smelled of cigarettes and mown grass. His forearms, where he had rolled up his shirt, were tanned and scratched. His pale hair flopped down over his eyes. He was cool in the industrial warmth of the evening. I couldn’t resist.

Fred was my new boyfriend, or new something. So maybe we were at the perfect time. We were past the difficult, embarrassing first bit where you’re like a comedian going out before a difficult audience and desperately needing laughter and applause. Except in this case very much not needing laughter at all of any kind. But we hadn’t remotely got to the stage where you walk around the flat and don’t happen to notice that the other person hasn’t got anything on.

He had been working most of the year as a gardener and it had given him a wiry strength. You could see the muscles ripple under his skin. He was tanned on his forearms and neck and face, but his chest and stomach were pale, milky.

We hadn’t got to the stage either of just taking off our clothes and folding them up on separate chairs in some clinical, institutional sort of way. When we got into my flat-and it always seemed to be my flat-there was still an urgency about getting at each other. It made everything else seem less important. Sometimes, in class on an afternoon when the children were fidgety and I was tired and listless in the heat, I would think about Fred and the evening ahead and the day would lift itself.

We lit cigarettes afterward, lying in my little bedroom and listening to music and car horns in the street below. Someone shouted loudly: “Cunt, you cunt, I’ll get you for this.” We listened to the sound of feet pounding down the pavement, a woman screaming. I’d got used to it, more or less. It didn’t keep me awake at night, like it used to.

Fred turned on the bedside lamp and all the dreary, dingy nastiness of the flat was illuminated. How could I ever have bought it? How would I ever manage to sell it? Even if I made it look nicer-got rid of the flimsy orange curtains the last owner had left behind, put down a carpet over the grubby varnished boards, wallpapered over the beige woodchip, painted the blistering window frames, put mirrors and prints on the walls-no amount of clever interior design could disguise how cramped and dark it all was. Some developer had carved up an already small space to make this hole. The window in the so-called living room was actually cut in half by the partition wall, through which I sometimes heard a neighbor I’d never met shouting obscenities at some poor woman. In a spasm of grief and loneliness and the need for a place I could call home, I’d used up all the money my father had left me when he died. It had never felt like home, though, and now, when property prices were soaring, I was stuck with it. In this kind of weather, I could clean the windows every day and still they’d be smeared with greasy dirt by the evening.

“I’ll make us some tea.”

“I’ve got no milk.”

“Beer in the fridge?” Fred asked hopefully.

“No.”

“What have you got?”

“Cereal, I think.”

“What’s the use of cereal without milk.”

It was a statement of fact rather than a question I was supposed to answer. He was pulling on trousers in a businesslike kind of way that I recognized. He was about to give me a peck on the cheek and leave. Purpose of visit over.

“It’s all right as a snack,” I said vaguely. “Like crisps.”

I was thinking about the woman who had been mugged; the way her body flew through the air like a broken doll hurled out of the window.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“With the guys.”

“But of course.”

I sat up in bed and contemplated the marking I had to do.

“Sleep well. Here, there’s some post you’ve not opened.”

The first was a bill, which I looked at, then put on the pile on the table with the other bills. The other was a letter written in large, looping script.

Dear Ms. Haratounian, from your name I gather you are not English, though you look it from the photographs I have seen. I am not a racist, of course, and I count among my friends many people like yourself, but…

I put the letter on the table and rubbed my temples. Fuck. A mad person. All I needed.

THREE

I was woken by the doorbell. I thought at first it must be some sort of joke or a wino who had mistaken the street door for the entrance to a hostel. I opened the curtains slightly in the front room and pushed my face against the glass, trying to see who it was, but the angle was wrong. I looked at my watch. Just after seven. I couldn’t think of anyone who could possibly be calling at this time. I wasn’t wearing anything so I pulled on a bright yellow plastic raincoat before going downstairs.

I opened the door just a fraction. The street door of the building opens directly onto Holloway Road, and I didn’t want to stop the traffic with my appearance just after I’ve woken up. It was the postman and my heart sank. When the postman wants to hand his mail to you personally, this is not generally good news. He usually wants you to sign for something in order to prove that you have received a horrible bill printed in red threatening to cut off your phone.

But he looked happy enough. Behind him I could see the beginnings of a day that was still cool but was going to be very hot indeed. I’d never seen this particular postman before, so I don’t know if it was a new thing, but he was wearing rather fetching blue serge shorts and a crisp light blue short-sleeved shirt. They were obviously official summer issue, but they looked jaunty. He wasn’t exactly young, but there was a Baywatch-postman air to him. So I stood on the doorstep looking at him with interest, and he looked back at me with some curiosity as well. I realized that my raincoat was on the skimpy side and not joined very well in the middle. I pulled it tightly together, which probably made things worse. This was starting to feel like a scene from one of those sleazy British comic sex films from the early seventies that you sometimes see on TV on Friday nights after you’ve got back from the pub. Porn for sad bastards.

“Flat C?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“There’s mail for you,” he said. “It wouldn’t go through the box.”

And there was. Lots and lots of different envelopes arranged in piles held together with elastic. Was this a joke? It took some complicated maneuvering to receive these bundles with one arm while holding my coat closed with the other.