‘You can be happy, you know. That’s allowed.’
As the taxi drives away, her head is bowed. She doesn’t look up at him. She’s already on her phone, condensing their time together into a line, and he wouldn’t have believed he ever loved her if there wasn’t physical proof out there.
‘I’ve found a place,’ says Liam, near the end of their bath, just as the water is turning tepid.
Something in him changed after the visit to the theme park. Maybe it was so busy, so fraught and wild with electrical thrills and sugar and screaming, that it became impossible to top. No other distancing technique could ever work as well, so it has become pointless for him to try. Instead there has to be communication. Speaking softly as one tucks a child into bed at night, in a small quiet house bought for that purpose. That’s what Liam needs now.
They’ve bathed together before, but never like this, without sex between them. Dan leans back, feeling the water rise as his back slides against Liam’s chest. Liam applies soap with perfunctory circles of his hand. The entire reason for suggesting it must be to break this news. What a strange choice of location, Dan thinks.
‘It’s not perfect, but it’ll do for a start. I’ve been given more hours at work, too. Night shifts, so that’ll cover the rent.’
‘That’s great,’ Dan says, carefully, ‘A step forward.’
‘Is that what life is? Steps forward? One foot in front of the other?’
Dan sloshes the water up over his chest. It’s cramped, with his legs tucked up, but he’s strangely comfortable. The foetal position, almost. ‘It’s just a thing people say.’
‘Yeah, I’m not keen on those. Try saying something real instead.’ Liam applies shampoo to Dan’s hair and rubs it in, roughly. The foam forms and drips, and Dan has to close his eyes and mouth tight. So much for saying something real. Still it gives him time to think. He picks his words carefully, ready for when Liam has rinsed his hair clean.
‘I’ll never see you,’ he says.
‘No, probably not.’
‘But I want to see you.’ He tilts back his head, but can’t see anything but the wet ends of his own fringe, hanging down. Liam’s hands are on his chest, though. They press against his skin. He’s listening. Is he angry? There’s an energy emanating from him. It’s so difficult to be honest about this.
‘We’ll work something out,’ Liam says. The pressure from his hands lessens. ‘When people want to see each other, they find a way, I reckon.’
Yes, maybe that’s true. Liam worked all hours when they first met, and yet they would text and meet up, even in the middle of the night when Liam took his break. All in the name of the compatibility between bodies in a time when that seemed like an easy option. Smiles leading to open mouths, no words, no thoughts. Hands tugging at clothes. Dan would wear jogging bottoms to those meetups for ease of access. But then it began: words, afterwards, and shared stories, leaking through drip by drip. I need a place, I can’t stay there. Things are falling apart. It’s just for a little while. He would never have offered a space in the house to a different body, no matter how beautiful, or even made the effort to be there in the moments available. It was something about Liam.
‘Yeah,’ he says, and strokes the hand on his chest. ‘People find a way.’
Liam folds the wrapping paper over the box, and Dan passes him the sellotape.
The present is a fish tank.
Not a tank for living, breathing fish. The pink plastic box will be filled with water by Liam’s daughter, who will then empty a packet of glittery balls into it. The balls will expand, slowly, over time, into fish simulacra. They’ll grow and swim, and she’ll have to ‘feed’ them from a matching little pink tub. But they won’t be alive, and so they can never die.
‘I’m not certain what kind of life lesson this is,’ Dan says doubtfully, as the present is sealed shut by Liam’s hands.
‘It’s the kind that doesn’t get me into trouble with her mother,’ he says.
A date is set for moving out.
Howard phones, at his usual time on his usual day, and says, ‘How did you manage to upset Sunetra?’
‘Why? What did she say?’
‘Nothing. That’s the point. Usually she won’t stop talking about what she’s writing, how she’s feeling. Yesterday: nothing. She wouldn’t even sing your praises, which is unusual.’
‘She came to visit,’ Dan tells him. Here comes the guilt again: inescapable, inevitable. It prompts him to add, ‘Does it matter, though? If we can’t be on good terms any more? Most people aren’t, once they’ve broken up, are they?’
There’s a long pause on the other end of the phone. Eventually Howard says, ‘I suppose I’ve never thought of us as most people. But you’re right. You don’t have to stay close. I don’t want to make you feel that you have to talk to us – to me.’
‘No, that’s not what I—’
‘So what have you been up to?’
‘Helping Liam pack up, in the main.’
‘He found a place?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Howard says, his voice all compassion, as if Dan’s emotions had never been hidden from him, had always been his business even though every conversation had been about maintaining a distance, and it makes Dan so angry that he hangs up the call and says, ‘Motherfucker,’ over and over again, in surprise, in outrage. When the phone begins to ring again he blocks Howard’s number on an impulse and goes out to the garden, the air fresh, the lawn too long.
He crosses the grass, feeling his socks soak up the wetness of the soil, and picks up the pot that holds the spare key. He smashes it down, and when it doesn’t break he takes a rock from the overgrown rockery and hits the pot, over and over, until it fractures into three pieces: a handle, a rim, and the rest of the body. The key, nestled inside, once safe in the dark, has become visible.
A quick search reveals others have been searching for Edith Learner’s secrets.
A long thread on Reddit starts with the question of who she could have loved, back then. There’s a general agreement that the details are fuzzy, even for those who are adept at reading skins, but then an argument breaks out, accompanied by an influx of caps lock and exclamation marks. Is it disgusting to touch the dead, to want to know about them? Dan’s surprised by how many people seem to feel that, nowadays; he never remembers it being an issue before. The world is changing.
Just because it was okay in the past doesn’t mean it’s okay now we know better – somebody has typed.
Others defend the selling of the Songstress’s skin on the basis of her historical importance, and so it rages on, without the possibility of agreement. It’s like standing in the centre of a hall in which everyone is shouting, red-faced, fists raised. So many opinions that he feels deafened, numbed. His own anger has vanished.
He gives up on Reddit and searches for news articles instead.
Mystery Love Found in Songstress Skin
A wartime romance was revealed in the sale of the skin of Edith Learner, but who was the object of her affection?
Buyers of the limited edition commemorative swatches found a deep but vague trace of true love, but research through family records has revealed no such connection. Learner famously declared during the height of the war that she sang for lovers everywhere – but gave no sign that she belonged to their number.
‘Love is so precious, you would have thought she’d have told the world,’ said collector and fan Martin Sibley, who received his swatch and was shocked to find within it the revelation of an affair, ‘but perhaps we all knew, really, deep in our skins, because she sang about love so beautifully for us, through such a dark time. She was an inspiration to us. Perhaps it’s better left as a mystery, so we can imagine that her love was for all of us.’