‘I wish you wouldn’t take it. I can take good care of it. Your mum asked me to, when she got diagnosed. It was very precious to her.’
‘I know, but I can’t. I need to know it’s gone. Done with. What made you think I’d want it?’ It seems such a leap of intuition.
She brushes her cheek with her fingers, an old nervous gesture of hers. ‘Someone phoned, a few hours ago, and they were offering quite a bit of money for young female skins, they said. They were quite insistent about it and the price kept going up, and I just got this feeling, like they knew there was one in the house and they wanted that one in particular. I thought, afterwards, I bet Rose turns up looking for that old skin. I don’t know why.’
‘You got the feeling that someone wanted my old skin and you didn’t tell me, and you’re still swanning around in the back garden with the gate unlocked?’ She’s so unaware at times I could scream.
She gets up from her favourite armchair, which has been moved to the other side of the room since my last visit. ‘You’re here now anyway, aren’t you? You’re going to take it no matter what I say. Here.’ From underneath the television cabinet she pulls out a brown paper package, flat and square and tied with string. ‘See? Nobody would have looked there.’
‘That’s not the point.’ I take the package and am glad it’s wrapped up tight. Who wants to touch their teenage mind once more?
‘Anybody would think you were the grand old lady,’ she mutters, ‘the way you nag.’
‘Just— I’ll feel better if you lock the gate. And if you get another phone call, will you let me know? Straight away?’ She nods. I put the package in my bag, next to the other skin, and close the zip. ‘Did they say anything about who they were? On the phone?’
‘Not really. Money Moult, maybe? Not one of those from the television. It was a man. A nice voice. He called me by name.’
‘Alice?’
‘Mrs Stacey. He had a posh accent. Upper class.’
‘All right.’ Maybe it really was just a fishing phone call from one of those companies. They can be pushy, particularly with the elderly, who always seem to have old skins squirreled away. It’s one thing to burn your own moults, but the first moult of your child – that seems to be an entirely different matter. That’s the Bond. So much stronger than love, the way a parent feels about a child, that’s what the stories say. The Bond is the only eternal attachment; I read that somewhere.
‘Listen,’ says Alice. ‘When your mum and I were little, our mum – your Gran Stacey – told us that shedding was a necessary thing we all have to do to take away the bad thoughts. She said we all feel better afterwards, and it only removes the things that should go. Love, the romantic stuff, that’s just a trick to make you make babies. It’s not meant to last. But other things are. The Bond is. It’s not skin deep. The people you meet, and love, and,’ she purses her lips, ‘have relations with, they’re here today, gone tomorrow. But family isn’t. Look at us, we get along, don’t we? And that’s just a shadow of the Bond, from aunt to niece. Come and move in here, and if you find someone to love then love them, and let them go. Maybe even make a baby with them, and we can take care of it. Then you’ll know what forever means, Rose. It means a child.’
‘Until they turn into a teenager and get their first moult.’ I peruse the walls once more. I don’t like this conversation, and we’ve had it often enough before. She was never brave enough to have a baby and now she wants me to do it for her. But that first peeling away – the absolute need I felt to escape my mother and her consuming, eternal need for me – I don’t want to experience that from the other side. How I hurt her, when I left.
Alice returns to her armchair, stiff with age and indignation. ‘It doesn’t affect every child the way it affected you.’
‘So I might get lucky, is that it?’
She shakes her head. It strikes me that she looks like me. Or, rather, I will look like her, one day. Alone, in my own bungalow, with weeds to pull and young faces on the wall.
‘Do you wish you’d done it, now?’ I ask her. ‘Had a baby, I mean?’
‘Of course,’ she says, but now I find, hearing her say the words, that I don’t quite believe her. She’s still scared of it.
‘It’s just nature. The Bond. You said it yourself. A way to make babies get born, and cared for longer than just one skin.’
‘It’s all just nature,’ she says, her tone brusque. ‘What difference does it really make to any of us, whether it’s natural or not? You worry about the strangest things.’
I’ve annoyed her, I can tell. Coming to visit her always does end in annoyance, on one side or the other. Usually both.
I find my own face, small and grainy, in a large clip-frame of many cut-out people. I look very young. Next to me, tilted so that the sides of our heads are touching, is a glossy photo snipped from a magazine. It’s Max. Max’s professional, smiling face.
I point at it. ‘What’s this?’
‘What?’
‘You know very well what.’
She sniffs. ‘It’s my wall. I’ll put what I like on it.’
‘Take it down.’
‘Rose,’ she says, in her reasonable voice. ‘He belongs there. He was the love of your life.’
So we have an argument, which is, I think, what we both wanted.
After the argument we pass another hour in silence, watching quiz shows on television and eating biscuits from the tin. Then we make up wordlessly, as families do, and she says she’ll drive me to Clifton’s Public Incinerator, if that’s what I really want.
As families do.
How I hate car journeys…
There’s a long queue at the Incinerator, the cars moving slowly, people taking their time to drive up to the chute that leads to the flames. The machine is transparent so you can watch the voyage of your old skin as it slides down to go up in smoke. The authorities leave no room for doubt. You see it destroyed with your own eyes.
Alice sighs beside me. The radio is playing old songs and she hums along, knowing maybe one word in ten, mumbling at the rest.
With the heat of the afternoon sun hitting my side of the car, and the music at work upon me, I can’t help but think the worst thoughts. The things I saw that will never go away, no matter how matter times I shed, no matter what Alice tells me about Gran Stacey’s old sayings. The skins discarded or taken by force; the sweat and the smell of bad people doing bad things; the empty shining of the studio lights on Max, making him seem a little bigger, a little flatter, like nothing more than a white smile that had nothing to do with me. The bathroom floor. Then playing at being detective, and the warehouse in Slough, next to a patch of scrubland, the people driving by.
Being a private investigator wasn’t about helping people. I realise now that I wanted to know how bad this world can be, and I got an answer. I found basements and gambling rings and hospitals and cemeteries, and so many ways to buy and belittle love. To cut it, to measure, sew it and dress it and grind it up small and put it in those endless lines of pills.
I know why Max keeps buying the pills. It’s an act of optimism, and I can’t blame him for that. He never sees the worst of the world. So many people are employed to keep it from him, and the rest happily do it for free because of who he is and what his handsome face on the screen gives to them all. That moment of escape from reality.
We’re nearing the front of the queue. The two brown paper packages sit in my lap. Shall I open them, touch them one last time? The thing that stops me is the mutilation that was performed upon one of them: the removal of the breasts and the sewing up of the slits. It’s the thought of someone else touching it, cutting it, that is too hard to bear. The thought of someone profiting from my skin, although it makes no sense that it was mutilated as the price would have been so much better for the complete skin. And nobody would have been fooled to think it was a male skin, not for more than a few seconds. The seller had to know that.