‘Days?’
‘This is for the best. We’re going to help you. With your condition.’
There are so many things I could say to that, but I think carefully, and settle for a question instead. ‘Why?’
‘No doubt Max will want to explain it. He’ll be here in a moment. If you’ll sit on the bed and wait, please.’
Footsteps ring down the corridor.
‘Bed, please,’ she repeats, and I retreat to it.
The door opens and then Max is here, looking tired and dishevelled and movie-starrish. It’s in the way he holds his head; this is a moment he’s rehearsed. Anna and Taylor enter after him.
‘She’s awake,’ he says, over his shoulder, to his audience.
‘She’s fine,’ says Anna. ‘Good to go.’
‘You sure you can do this?’
‘Nothing is risk free. But this is what we’ve been working for all these years, right?’
That seems to reassure him. He steps towards me and I shrink back; it’s an automatic reaction, but one that gives him that disappointed look.
‘Okay,’ he says. I don’t know if it’s to me or to Anna. ‘Let’s do it.’
‘Rose, I’m going to sedate you again. Are you going to let me, or shall we hold you down? It’s up to you.’ She has that medical manner – This is for your own good is written through her.
If I open my mouth I would beg, and say all the things that desperate people say. So I say nothing. If I don’t say it, then I can’t be here. It can’t be true.
She comes to me, and injects me just over the crook of my elbow, and the new skin is so soft that the needle glides in easily, like a friend, invited.
My name is Rose Allington.
My name is Rosie Allington.
Max is holding my hand. I smile at him, and he smiles back, and then I realise I can’t breathe properly. My skin is suffocating; it has been sewn up tight into a sack that I can’t escape. It presses up against my legs, my arms, my stomach, my head. It adheres to my cheeks and nose and forehead, and to the edges of my mouth.
My hands and feet are tied to the bed once more. Max is sweaty.
‘Hey,’ he says. ‘You gave me a scare. We nearly lost you. The anaesthetic, we think.’
‘Don’t be scared,’ I say, to me and to him. I don’t want either of us to suffer any more. ‘Just help me. Help me take this off.’
‘But it’s working,’ he whispers.
The pressure is stifling. I lift my head from the pillow and look down the length of my body. I’m not clothed. Yes I am. I’m stitched into a skin. My own, used skin. The skin that loved him.
Two diamond patches are missing over the breasts; I can see my own nipples. They have a reality that everything else in this room does not. They are mine.
‘I couldn’t get them back, Rosie,’ he says, squeezing the dead skin that is wrapped around my hand. ‘I’ve made them pay for it though. That was never part of the deal, but no, they had to try to get even richer. These people are scum. That’s why I phoned your aunt, put on a phony accent, tried to get an earlier skin of yours so I could at least replace what was missing, but no dice.’
‘You should have burned it,’ I say. My lips tickle.
‘I could say the same to you. But you didn’t, did you? I had to know if you could. I figured, if you were prepared to track my skins down, and if you couldn’t burn your love for me when you got the chance, that you’d want me – deep down – to go ahead with this. To make you better. Make you happy again.’
‘Love?’
‘Yes. You can love me again. Like I still love you. I’m still in the same skin, Rosie. I’m here in the same skin.’
I shake my head, and hear the dead skin crackle against the pillow. ‘No, you’re different.’
‘I funded Mallory Peace. I heard about Anna, and the breakthroughs she’d made, and I set her up in business. I’ve been taking their pills since the beginning, and they work. The pills work. I’m still the same person I was. The person you loved.’
But my love, the memory of it stitched tight around me like a shroud, says otherwise.
‘No,’ I say. ‘You’re not.’
He frowns. He lets go of my hand.
‘It takes time,’ says Anna Mallory, unseen by me. She’s close by. ‘The new skin takes roughly seventy-two hours to become impregnated by the old skin.’
‘But she’s suffering!’ he says.
I concentrate on each breath as they argue. This pressure on my chest; it’s not the skin. It’s dead love.
‘Do you like this room? I had it decorated for you. I thought you’d like it. It’s always the first thing you notice, isn’t it, Rosie? How a room is decorated.’
‘No it’s not,’ I say, but he’s right. I’ve never noticed it before. I’m always checking out the room: the positioning of objects, the angle of the furniture, as if it means something. I’ve done it all my life.
‘You used to hate that fish tank I owned, do you remember? You said it made the place look like a drug baron’s palace. I suppose that’s what I am, now, in a way. But it’s for you. Working on a cure, for you.’
‘I don’t want to be cured.’
But he talks on, as if he can talk love back into me.
‘Remember when we met?’ he says. ‘I loved you straight away. I never told you that before because I knew you’d laugh at me.’
He has created a scene of it in his head. He played one character, and I played the other. But he didn’t love me straight away. He looked me up and down and said to Phineas Spice, ‘That’s fine.’ I wasn’t even a she to him then. I was that. And I liked it, to be an object of business. He was certainly an object of business for me, right up until Paris.
Paris sneaks from my old skin to the new. I feel it permeating me. If he mentions Paris he will see that emotion in my eyes, and I don’t want to give him that. I want to hurt him, this stranger who hurts me while wearing that familiar face. The face that never did love me straight away, no matter what the mouth says.
He talks on. ‘You made a list.’
‘Of what?’
‘Of your skins.’ He pulls a piece of notepaper from his pocket. ‘I found it in your backpack, with the skin. A list of all the times you changed, and you never told me. You never would tell me.’
I picture myself on that train; why do I always seem more complete in the past? My concerns, my thoughts, were solid on the train, sitting in that forward facing seat with the slice of early morning sunlight falling on the sticky tabletop. Already it seems an age ago.
‘Age sixteen. First moult,’ he reads.
‘Yes.’
‘I want to know what it was like. I’ve always wanted to know.’
‘I never wanted to – it wasn’t about hurting you.’ I can’t bear the thought of his pain. It must be working, this process, this sewing up into old skin.
‘You’ve been protecting yourself,’ he says. ‘But there’s no need, now.’
I laugh at that. And the funniest part is his hurt expression; he really doesn’t see it.
‘Sixteen. You were sixteen years old. Tell me.’
‘It’s none of your business.’
‘I’m in love with you,’ he says, as if that explains everything. ‘What do I have to do to make you believe that? I’ll tell you about my first moult.’
‘I know about that.’
‘I didn’t tell you everything. Listen. I was in Manhattan. My father’s apartment. He was away on a shoot, and I was watching a movie.’
‘I know,’ I repeat. ‘One of the movies he’d directed. It triggered something. You told me before.’ I’m ashamed to say I’m bored of it.
‘It wasn’t one of his. I lied. It was a dirty movie. I was whacking off when I got that itchy feeling, all over.’ His eyes are on my stomach, on the join where the skin has been sewn up around me. ‘The skin came off in my hand. The skin on my dick.’ He shrugs and blushes, like a little boy. ‘I screamed. The maid came running. Found me that way.’