‘Why wouldn’t you tell me that?’
‘It’s hardly flattering.’
‘Does that matter?’ But my real problem is that I much prefer the other version of the story, when his father the famous director makes a film that leads to a reaction in his only neglected son. It has more pathos. This story is ridiculous – the story of the maid and the boy caught with his trousers round his ankles. It suits him less.
‘Your turn,’ he says, with a cheeky smile. ‘You were sixteen years old.’
Oh, Max. What a creation he is.
‘I was sixteen years old,’ I say, and the words come from that start, and flow from the memory. There I am again, the solid me of the past. The one version of myself I can understand.
1986. THE FIRST TIME.
‘Mine wasn’t that bad,’ said her mother from the seat beside her. ‘It just came right off. I don’t understand it.’
All emotion had left Rose since her first moult, but here they were, back in a sudden rush; she hated her mother, she hated her, she hated her, the loud voice, the drone of it, the fact that her mother could discuss such an intensely personal thing in front of a collection of strangers in a doctor’s waiting room. And the strangers: she hated them too. Listening and pretending not to, hearing and not really caring either way.
The open-plan stretch of the waiting room from sliding double doors to reception desk was light and airy. Rows of chairs were bookended with small pine tables bearing magazines, and people sat in their own patterns, leaving spaces where one group ended and another began.
Her mother had chosen the front row, before a large poster. Block lettering listed the warning signs of serious skin conditions, from misshapen moles to constant itching.
‘At least it came off in one,’ said her mother. ‘But it took so long, and you don’t look right. I think we really should just get you checked out.’
Shut up, Rose said in her head. Shut up.
‘Soon be over and done with.’ The pat of her mother’s hand on her knee appalled her; she couldn’t help but flinch.
‘Is it still tender?’
Unable to raise her eyes, Rose nodded.
‘Rose.’
There was no escape. She had to look up, and meet her mother’s eyes. Why was it unbearable, to see and be seen this way? She felt as if she had lost herself, sloughed off every emotion that made her who she was. In its place, fast expanding to take up the emptiness, was black, viscose hatred of everyone who had ever lost their skin and thought it no big deal.
She stood up, and walked fast. Walked away.
Her mother called her name. Rose’s walk turned into a run.
‘You made up with her, right? Your mom?’
‘Of course. It was just… I don’t know. The triggering of the disease. But it didn’t affect the Bond for long. The Bond is different.’
I don’t need to say that it was never quite the same, though, do I?
‘So that’s why,’ he muses. ‘Why you ended up working for that Skin Disease Clinic in Lincoln. To make up to your mom. On some level.’
That’s too neat and tidy. It’s ridiculous.
‘This EMS, it makes you want to push everyone away. You can see that, right? It needs a cure. Think how many people we can help, if we get it right. With you,’ he says.
I close my eyes.
The thing is it feels good, to tell it, to talk of it, and to have his verdict, his summation. Why should that help? It’s almost an act of erasure. It takes out so much of what I’ve felt and discards it as unimportant. Simply a part of my illness.
And if Max does manage to remove the illness, what will be left?
He feeds me tangerine. The dead skin pulls at my neck as I lift my head for each segment. After that sweetness there are more pills to swallow, and if I take them without a fuss he smiles. I feel better, when I see him smile.
Afterwards, I say, ‘You’re hurting me.’
Still smiling, he says, ‘It can’t be worse than how you hurt me.’
‘It’s revenge, then.’
‘No, it’s not that. That’s not part of it.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because I’m giving you a gift.’
My new skin, underneath, has been rubbed and rubbed by the old. It’s as tender as a blister. But my breasts, they remain free. I focus on my nipples; on the air upon them.
‘Tell me about Steve. Your first love. You were twenty-one.’
‘I was twenty-one,’ I repeat. Steve, who moulted me off.
‘You got kicked out of college for him.’
‘University. And I wasn’t kicked out because of him.’ Not exactly.
‘So tell me how it was.’
1991. STARTING A FIRE.
Rose folded her skin up small, and put it at the bottom of the metal bin.
It was late. Most of the students were out, drinking and clubbing. She had gone to the pub and drunk too much without feeling it, telling everyone she had just moulted and it had been fine. An easy one. But back here, in her room with its single bed, single desk, single chair, lone Dalí poster covering cracked paint, she couldn’t pretend. Her hands were clumsy. It took her four attempts to light a match.
Steve no longer loved her. Well, she no longer loved him, so that made them equal. All the love had seeped out of her with this moult, and now she was clean and new – emptied of love. Yet the memory of him saying – I’ve shed, this can’t work any more – hurt so much. She couldn’t understand it. She never wanted to touch the skin that had loved him again.
It caught quickly. It crackled. She fed the fat little flame of it, fed it photographs of the two of them, then the poems he had written for her:
It deserved to burn; all the untrue, stupid sentences of the world should burn. She hoped he was burning the things she had written to him, those long letters telling him every thought that came to her, every feeling she had experienced about her life so far. And when the fire began to die she fed it her lecture notes, her painstakingly careful handwriting on the subject of Ancient Greece, she gave those to the fire too, and felt better, and better, with each lick of heat along the sharp white edges, curling them over, twisting them to ash.
I’m not a child any more, Rose thought. I will never give away so many secrets about myself again.
Then she pictured the days ahead. The days of building up emotions only to have them crumble away with each moult. The lovers who would be taken away. The husband, maybe. One day she would wake and find she had left him behind, and she hadn’t even met him yet.
She reached for the bottle of vodka, a quarter empty, and tipped liquid freely over the flames. The flames followed the trail, leaping up to the bottle. She dropped it as an automatic reaction; the flames began to spread across the carpet and she knew in that moment she had gone too far, that she still wanted all those days and lovers ahead even if they could not last forever.
She stumbled from the room, screamed ‘Fire!’ up the stairwell, ran to the lobby and dialled 999 on the payphone as a few students emerged from their rooms, sniffing at smoke. They filed past her as she gave their address, and wearily began to assemble on the pavement opposite the hall of residence.