‘So you like my mysteries?’
‘Oh yeah,’ he says, smoothing my hair back from my face.
‘Then why are you trying to solve me?’
‘You were thirty-eight, working with Petra, and you shed early,’ he says, as he holds the glass of water so I can sip through a straw. ‘You ran away from London. Why?’
I have no idea how much time has passed. I have been here so long, cocooned, while he tries to form me. This is his script. Everything in life has been revealed as a script, so how can I blame him? It’s in the wink of a receptionist underneath a poster that reads Love is a Warm Layer; it’s in the knowledge that whatever you are will come free in the next layer of loosening skin. Nothing can penetrate me beyond that.
I shake my head.
‘We’re so close to being together. Properly together. No secrets. Tell me this last thing.’ Max’s eyes hold tears. ‘I know it was terrible. It must have been something terrible.’
‘Are you crying for me, or for how bad you feel?’
‘Both, Rosie,’ he whispers. ‘This world. This whole world.’
‘No,’ I tell him. ‘Not your world. These things aren’t in your world. How can you bring them here? How dare you keep me here, and make yourself like them?’
‘No, it’s for good, Rosie, for good, for you.’
‘Max—’
‘Listen,’ he says. ‘Imagine. Imagine a world where love doesn’t live in the skin alone. Where it’s deep within you, all the time. No skin trade, no incinerators. That world would be a better place, because love could never be bought. Don’t you understand that I’m living that dream, right now, and my love comes from that place? That’s how you can love me too, if you’ll just hold on and take the pills. Remember Paris, walking by the Seine, and I was so nervous when I reached for your hand. But you let me hold it. You let me hold you, and that’s when I knew. I loved you beyond my skin.’
‘That’s not when you loved me. It wasn’t when you saw me for the first time, it wasn’t in Paris, it wasn’t in some moment you’ve played a thousand times over in your head. It wasn’t like that.’
‘Then how was it?’ He puts his hands on my face, and the skin crackles, like dead leaves against my cheeks. ‘Tell me how it was.’
I can’t.
I can’t play this game any more.
I have no words for it, for this act of recreation. He will make my memories part of his emotional landscape, but they will never be real to him. So I will keep this final part for me alone. I will not dilute it for anyone.
I don’t speak. I watch him cry, and I hold it safe, inside. I remember it, just for myself.
The warehouse.
2008. INSIDE.
As soon as she opened the unlocked door she knew she wasn’t alone.
The air was alive, filled with soft sounds, from a distance: the hum of machinery, and a high whirring she couldn’t place.
Rose took a few steps into the partitioned area, stacked cardboard boxes creating a right-angled wall. She caught the occasional voice coming from behind them: women talking, laughing.
She knew she should leave.
The boxes were sealed shut. She took a few quick snaps of them with her phone anyway, and then a couple of close-ups of the stamped marks on the sides that bore an address in London. The contents weren’t listed.
Should she rip a hole in one? She took out her penknife – Petra’s penknife, in fact, on loan to her – and considered it. But any damage would give away that somebody had been here, and Petra always said:
Don’t draw attention to yourself.
If only one of the boxes was open, but the wall was absolute. She felt impotent in the shadow of it.
Petra would say:
Think like an investigator.
She weighed up her options. Damage a box, take a photo. Try to make it look like – what? Rats? Or find the machines making that hum, and photograph them instead.
Rose scanned the makeshift walls. There was a gap, a slim line between two of the boxes in the third row up. She put her eye to it.
The women were talking as they worked. There were maybe thirty of them, operating sewing machines, sitting at tables that had been organised to make three sides of a square. They chatted as their fingers moved independently, accurately, stitching fine white triangles of material into long sheets of patchwork. Light fell in strips from high windows, up above.
Nobody else was visible. Against the far wall of the warehouse was a row of single beds, with crumpled, colourful sleeping bags upon them in different designs: stripes, circles, trucks, trains, butterflies. Another wall of boxes had been built nearby. Rose guessed there were basic cooking and washing facilities behind them. Something told her, in the way the women worked, that this was what they considered to be their home.
Somebody had to be bringing the material, collecting the products, and supplying them with food. But they weren’t here at the moment. These women were relaxed, being themselves in their own company. Rose listened carefully. She didn’t recognise the language.
She took some photos through the gap, but the focus wouldn’t align in the right place. They all looked blurred to her, unclear.
Time to go said Petra’s voice, inside her head.
The women were young. Not children, but youthful. As she watched, one of them sat back from her sewing machine and stretched out her arms. Rose noted the curve of her body, and how her belly stood proud from the chair. She was pregnant.
Once her eyes saw it, they recognised it wherever they fell; so many of the women were pregnant. Maybe all of them.
The material they sewed was in such small, delicate pieces. It was skinwork, she thought. Why else hide it away? It had to be skinwork. Rose took her knife and stabbed into one of the boxes, working it into the cardboard until she could reach inside. Her fingers made contact with a soft, giving stretch of sheet. She rubbed it, and felt nothing.
The stitched skin was empty of emotion. There were no memories, no echoes. Instead there was calm. It was good to touch discarded skin and feel nothing upon it; it bore a purity that could have come only from a life that had yet to be touched by love.
It was newborn.
Rose pulled her hand free.
The women – she wanted to tell them, to make them leave, come away. But the door hadn’t been locked. And the women were laughing. They had to know what they were sewing, and they were laughing. Touching that fresh clean skin every day, feeling no fear, no worry, no love.
Petra’s voice.
She needed it.
It was gone. There was only her own voice, from a place within that she had not known about, telling her to walk away from the women, from the warehouse.
The dual carriageway was in sight, the cars driving past, people on their early morning commutes, so close, and not one of them seeing the warehouse and what was within.
She walked across the scrubland, towards the road. The sun was higher in the sky, burning her wherever it touched. Her skin was alive with it, it wouldn’t stay, it couldn’t. She took off her black clothes and threw them down, and felt the skin already beginning to peel, to split, but it was not like it had ever been before. She was damaged all the way down, the warehouse had seeped through her; she was soft and pulpy underneath. It was impossible to walk on, the skin was sliding away and she had to be free of it. She fell.
Hands were upon her, squeezing.
Rose looked at the hands on her own skin, and found she was whole, and new. It shocked her so much that she couldn’t speak. She had expected to die.
‘I’ve got you,’ Petra said. ‘Can you walk?’ The squeezing became tugging. ‘Get up for me. Get dressed.’