Explanation at this point becomes embarrassing because it requires a four letter word I hate. Chamber’s Dictionary gives it several meanings but the relevant one is this:
Scab noun: a crust formed over a sore or wound.
I take a gentle pleasure in carefully removing most such crusts and have my own names for the main varieties:
Cakes and Crumbs. Black or brown lumps that form on the deepest scratches. Dried blood is a main ingredient. I try not to touch these because, picked off too soon, they leave a hole in which fresh blood wells up before clotting.
Hats. A cake or crumb may grow a crisp white border, as much part of it as a brim is part of a hat. This brim overlaps the surrounding skin in such a way that the tip of a fingernail, slid beneath, easily lifts off the whole hat uncovering a moist but shallow and unbleeding wound. A few hours later other kinds of crust form over that. They also form over larger sores where topskin has crumbled off, flaked off or been scratched off.
Bee-wing. Pale grey and gauzy. It has white lines like veins on wings of bees, wasps and house flies, but more random looking. Minute red or brown spots sometimes suggest wings of more exotic insects. Bee-wing is so transparent that if laid on a printed page words can be read through it.
Parchment. Pale yellowish-brown, not gauzy, yet as transparent as bee-wing. It seems made by the drying of moisture exuded from raw skin beneath. I remove it by pressing a fingertip into the skin on each side and pulling them apart. The living underskin stretches, the parchment splits, its edges curling up like the edges of water lily leaves, making peeling off easy.
Moss. This yellowish-grey furriness seems an intruder, like the mould on rotten fruit. It grows in circular holes and narrow grooves made by accidental scratches in swollen, inflamed skin, but is so far below the skin’s level that fingernails cannot reach it without doing more damage. I use fine-pointed tweezers to grip an edge of such growths and, since their roots must be intertwined, easily lift out the whole mossy mat or strip.
Paper. A splendid example of this lost me control of my remaining firm.
The board meeting in our Waterloo Street office consisted of secretary, accountant, lawyer, works supervisor and two major shareholders who were partners from the days when my father’s firm had built housing schemes. As chairman I let the others do most of the talking, usually sitting with closed eyes and even dozing a little until silence fell. Then I would sit up, summarise the situation in a few crisp words, indicate the only sensible choices, hold a vote on them, then ask the secretary to announce the next item on our agenda. One afternoon, halfway through a meeting, I sensed that my left arm was in a very interesting state. I excused myself, went to lavatory, sat on pan, rolled up shirtsleeve. A big expanse of skin inside the elbow joint had withered into dry white paperiness, paperiness so brittle that it had cracked into little four-sided lozenges like an area of neatly laid marquetry. And it was NOT ALIVE. My first impulse was to set fingernails of my right hand in line and use them to rake that dead paper off with two or three sweeping strokes. It would have left an area of raw underskin with bleeding gashes in it and many wee triangular paper scraps standing up and not easy to nip off. So with the tweezers I delicately prized off each paper tile and placed it between the pages of my pocket book, leaving a raw but undamaged area on which I spread an ointment prescribed by the specialist — Betnovate or Trimovate or Eumovate, I forget which. Then I rolled down sleeve, washed hands, returned to meeting. While performing that delicate operation I was perfectly happy.
“Well, gents, what have you been discussing?” I said, having been absent for ten or twenty minutes. Only the secretary looked straight at me. The rest seemed too embarrassed to look at anything but the table before them, then they looked furtively at the works supervisor. He was the youngest, the one I most liked and trusted because I had promoted him from being a site foreman. He cleared his throat then explained that, though he did not wholly agree with the rest of the board, there was a general feeling that I should leave the firm’s steering wheel and become more of a back-seat driver; my great experience would always be valuable but blah blah blah blah et cetera. I grinned as I heard all this and when he fell silent was about to quell the mutiny — could easily have done it — but was suddenly overtaken by weariness with the whole business. It occurred to me also that someone had sampled the clear liquid in the tumbler beside my notepad and found it was not water but Polish vodka. I sipped from it, shrugged and said, “Have it your own way gents.”
All but the works supervisor at once cheered up, congratulated me on my wise decision, said I would gain rather than lose financially because blah blah blah blah blah. So the paperish arm left me with nothing to enjoy but my skin game.
The nature of other crusts (Lace, Fish-scale, Snakeskin, Shell, Biscuit, Straw and Pads) I leave to the imagination of my readers, but some cannot be classified by a simple name. From the shallow valley above the caudal vertebrae I have removed three discs of the same size but different textures: beewing, parchment and paper, joined at a point where they overlapped by a little dark purple oval cake. I have also detached something like a tiny withered leaf, intricately mottled with black and grey, glossily smooth on the underside but with a knap like Lilliputian velvet on the upper. Anything often thought about enters our dreams and I sometimes dream of more extravagant growths. One is like a thin slab of soft, colourless cheese, slightly wrinkled: it peels off with no physical sensation at all. Another lies under it and another under that. At last I uncover what I know is the lowest layer which I fear to remove, knowing that underneath lies nothing but bone wrapped in a network of naked veins, arteries, tendons and nerves, yet intense curiosity is driving me to expose what I dread to see when I fortunately awaken.
I reduced the bouts of wild scratching to once a week and between them carefully removed the crusts I have listed and the others I have not. The pleasure of this harvesting is twofold: sensual because the raw skin beneath feels briefly relieved, perhaps because it can perspire and breathe more freely; emotional because I like separating the dead from the quick, removing what is not the living me from what is. After each session I apply ointment then sweep up the dust, flakes and crusts with a hand-held vacuum cleaner of the sort used on car upholstery. Yet I do so with a kind of regret, feeling these former growths of mine should be used for something. I considered gathering the biggest in a porcelain jar as Victorian ladies gathered flower petals, but the scent would not have been sweet. So instead of that —
I switch a plate of the electric cooker to maximum heat and with the tweezers lay on it a little pagoda-like tower of the largest crusts. They catch fire, each glowing red-hot before, with a faint sizzle, darkening and merging with the rest in a small black wart or bubble that heaves as if trying to rise off the plate, then collapses into a smear of white ash while releasing a wisp of smoke. This wisp, inhaled, has a tiny but definite odour of roasted meat. Surely this sight, sound and smell are as near as I can get to enjoying my cremation while alive? The ceremony is performed, of course, when my wife is away from home, but it once engrossed me so completely that I did not notice she had returned and was watching.