Beneath The Skin

well. Good.

“Oh, right.”

Not a word about coming back. Bastard.

I left a few minutes after him, to go and see a film with Louise and a few of her friends I had never met before. It was lovely sitting in the dark with a group of women, eating popcorn and giggling. It was so safe.

I came back quite late. It was dark, starless. I pushed open the door and there was a letter on my doormat; someone must have pushed it through the letterbox. Neat italic writing, black ink. It didn’t look like another nutter. Standing in the doorway, I opened the letter.

Dear Zoe, When does someone like you, young and pretty and healthy, become frightened of dying, I wonder. You smoke (there’s a nicotine stain on your finger by the way). Sometimes you take drugs. You eat bad food. You stay up late and the next morning you don’t get hangovers. Probably you think that you will live forever, that you will be young for a long while yet.

Zoe, with your white teeth and your one small dimple when you smile, you will not be young for much longer. You have been warned.

Are you scared, Zoe? I am watching you. I am not going to go away.

I stood on the edge of the pavement while crowds of people flowed past me, jostled against me, and I stared at the letter. I lifted up my left hand and there was a yellow stain on the middle finger. I crumpled the letter into a tight ball and threw it into a bin with all the other rubbish, all the crap of other people’s lives.

Today, she is wearing a pale blue dress with straps. It comes down to her knees, and there is chalk dust near the hem that she has not noticed yet. She is not wearing a bra. She has shaved under her arms; her legs look smooth, soft. There is pale nail varnish on her toes, but it is beginning to chip on her left big toe. Her sandals are flat, navy blue, old, scuffed. She is tanned; the hairs on her arms are golden. Sometimes I can glimpse her milky underarms; the whiter skin behind her knees; if she stoops down I can see that the honey color on her shoulders and throat fades between the beginnings of her breasts. Her hair is piled on top of her head. It has bleached in the sun, so it is much darker underneath than on top. She is wearing small silver earrings, in the shape of little flowers. Every so often, she twists them round between her finger and thumb. The lobes of her ears are quite long. The vertical groove above her upper lip is quite pronounced. When she is hot, like today, sweat gathers in it. Every so often she wipes it with a tissue. Her teeth are white, but I have seen several fillings at the back of her mouth. They glint when she laughs or yawns. She is not wearing any makeup. I can see the pale tips of her eyelashes; the slight dryness of her bare lips. There is a sprinkling of freckles on the bridge of her nose that was not there last time I looked. The yellow stain on her middle finger has gone. Good. She wears no rings on her fingers. On her wrist is a large-faced watch, with Mickey Mouse in the center. She uses a ribbon for the strap.

When she laughs, she makes a pealing sound, like a doorbell. If I told her that I loved her, she would laugh at me like that. She would think I was not serious. That is what women do. They turn what is serious and big into a small thing, a joke. Love is not a joke. It is a matter of life and death. One day, soon, she will understand that. She will know that the way she smiles, or opens her eyes wide when she is listening; the way her breasts flatten when she lifts her arms above her head-these things matter. She smiles too easily. She laughs too easily. She flirts. She wears skimpy clothes. I can see her legs through her dress. I can make out the shape of her nipples. She is careless of herself.

She talks very quickly, in a light husky voice. She says “Yeah,” not yes. She has gray eyes. She is not frightened yet.

FIVE

Everybody knows that schools, almost everywhere except perhaps in busy places like Japan, finish at about four or three-thirty, although the little things that I teach clock out even earlier, at quarter past three. Even people who know nothing else about children know that. They see boys and girls being led along high streets, holding the hand of their mother or trailing behind carers, carrying schoolbags, lunch boxes. I’d already learned that the rush-hour traffic in London was about half composed of vast people-carriers ferrying glum-looking kids in uniform the huge distances between their nice houses and the schools that were considered worthy of them. Because, of course, as I’d also newly discovered, one of the main status symbols of any parent in London is the distance they have to transport their children. The school next door is for poor people, like the ones I teach.

The big joke when people discover I’m a teacher is about how they envy me the short hours and the long holidays. Fair enough, of course, since this was one of the less worthy motives that brought me into this job. My school career had not been a major success, so I didn’t have the qualifications for studying something really important like looking after sick pussycats, which was what I had wanted to do when I was much younger. I had only done well enough to teach small children. That suited me. I liked children, their transparency, their eagerness, and their sense of possibility. And I liked the idea of standing around a sandbox all day and wiping the noses of toddlers and helping mix paints.

Instead I found myself in a job that was more like being an accountant in the middle of a zoo. And the hours were longer than being an accountant. The official school inspection was coming at us like a train. After the kids had been collected and taken back to their apartment blocks, we had meetings, form-filling, planning. We stayed on until seven, eight, nine o’clock, and Pauline would have been better off installing a camp bed and a Primus stove in her office, since she never seemed to leave.

I got away earlier that evening because I had an appointment to meet a man at the flat. Naturally the bus didn’t arrive for ages, so when I ran panting along the pavement only five minutes late at twenty-five to eight, he was standing there in the doorway reading a newspaper. Bad start. I had already given him too much time to look at the area. Fortunately, he seemed engrossed in what he was reading. Maybe he hadn’t noticed the pub, or at least hadn’t taken in its full implications. He was wearing a suit that was a slightly odd shape with lapels that were askew, so it was probably very expensive. He must have been in his later twenties, maybe thirty. His hair was cut very short, and he looked cool in the blistering heat.

“I’m really sorry,” I panted. “Bus.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’m Nick Shale. You’re Miss Haratounian.” We shook hands in a sort of continental style. He smiled.

“What’s so funny?”

“I pictured you as a grim old landlady,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, trying to smile politely.

I opened the street door. There was the usual rubbish on the doormat, leaflets for takeaway pizzas, window cleaners, taxi cabs, and one hand-delivered letter. I recognized the writing immediately. It was the creep who had sent me the letter before-when was it?-five days ago. He’d been back to my door. How boring and irritating. How very nasty. I looked at it for a moment, then over at the man, Nick, who had a puzzled expression.

“What did you say?” I said.

“Your bag,” he said. “Can I take it for you?”

I handed it to him without speaking.

I had my guided tour of the flat down to a skillful three minutes, brilliantly taking in all the points of interest while deftly avoiding areas that were not necessarily to the advantage of the property. Occasionally Nick asked questions that I had now become used to.

“Why are you moving?”

Did he think he could trap an old hand like me so easily?

“I want to move closer to my work,” I said, falsely.

He looked out the window.

“Is the traffic a problem?” he asked.

“I’ve never thought about it,” I said. That was laying it on a bit thick. At least he didn’t laugh. I placed the