Unless Martin Sibley was over a hundred years old at the time of providing the quote then he was full of shit, thinks Dan. There was no way Learner had been singing for him; he hadn’t even been born yet.
But there is a connection between them, due to owning that swatch. They are similar people, in some way. Searching for clues, touching that skin.
Is it possible to be in love not with a person, but with something bigger? An idea. Love. War. Could she have been in love with the war, and what it gave to her? A role. Perhaps that was the diffused, gentle feeling that was coming through her skin: a soft, hidden love for all that suffering, which had given her such purpose, and made her everybody’s sweetheart.
No. He prefers the thought of a tall strong soldier, or a nurse, or a fellow farm worker with ruddy cheeks and planted legs. He prefers the romance of a faceless lover, and he doesn’t want to know the truth, after all.
He shuts the lid of the laptop. It is getting late. Liam will be back soon.
‘Last Saturday,’ Dan said, raising his bottle to Liam’s. They clink.
‘Here’s to it.’
They drank.
‘I’m really going to miss you.’
‘You’ve been saying that a lot,’ says Liam, with a half-smile. ‘Keep it up and I might start believing you.’
‘I hope you do. Did the kids like the house?’
‘Loved it. They had a bit of an argument over the bedrooms, but I think we got it sorted out.’
‘Did she like her present?’
Liam tilts his head, and Dan reads the faint line of worry between his eyes. ‘She’s clever. She looked really pleased at first, but later she said: They’re not proper fish, though, are they?’
‘Yeah,’ says Dan. ‘She sounds switched on.’
‘She is.’
He’d planned to wait until the end of the night to say what he wanted to say, but suddenly it occurs to him that he doesn’t want them both to be drunk for it, even if that makes it easier on them both. He clears his throat, finds his courage. You can do this. ‘Do you know who Edith Learner is?’
‘The… um… singer. From the war.’
‘My great-grandfather was a big fan.’
‘Really?’ Liam shifts forward on the sofa; he’s wondering where this is going, perhaps. Dan likes to think he’s surprised him. ‘Did he fight in the war, then?’
‘Yeah. He was a para. Saw some heavy stuff. I never met him, but my granddad used to tell me all about it. I had a strong bond with my granddad, but later I began to realise that it wasn’t – sometimes people need an audience. Not just for good things in the past. For bad.’
The living room is so quiet, the lights down low. His home. Sunetra was sitting on this very sofa only a few weeks ago, writing her poem. It doesn’t matter if he fails to understand or like what she creates; only that she was here. He’s so grateful she was here.
Here goes.
‘He had a scrapbook, passed down from his father, from the war. Bits of skin, cut from enemy soldiers. People his father had killed, then carved out a square of skin, and pressed it in this thick book, and they’d been preserved. Granddad would bring out the book whenever he babysat me, and he’d let me touch these little squares, and play Edith Learner’s songs, and I’d feel that warmth, those good feelings. I didn’t know it was other people’s love I was feeling until later. He never really explained it to me.’
‘Jesus,’ says Liam. ‘That’s…’
‘Fucked up?’
‘Yeah. It is.’
Dan feels the need to defend it, from the point of view of his own young self, who found no wrong in it, and who wouldn’t have known there was anything to feel guilt about. He pushes the urge down.
‘Where is it now?’
‘The scrapbook? I don’t know. Maybe my dad took it after granddad died. He never mentioned it.’
‘You’ve never talked about it with him?’
Dan shakes his head. ‘Not with anyone. Not even the others. Howard, Mik, Liz. I could never get over how there was nothing but good feelings in those skins, even though those people died in fear, in pain. Why the hell doesn’t that last? I couldn’t explain it to myself, so how could I explain it to them?’
Liam is frowning, but it doesn’t seem to be judgemental in nature. ‘It’s not your job to explain it. It’s not even your secret to keep. You didn’t do anything wrong.’
‘No, that’s true.’ A short explanation of something from so long ago, and a few words, and there’s a new lightness in his chest. There has been no judgement, no verdict passed. He pulls Liam to his feet and leads him upstairs, but not for the tension that has always existed between their bodies. Instead he fishes under the bed and pulls out the package that he stored there.
‘I thought you said you didn’t have it,’ says Liam.
‘No, look.’ He reveals the frame, the photograph, the swatch of skin. ‘I bought it. I don’t even understand why.’
‘I don’t wanna touch it,’ Liam says. This has changed the mood. ‘You should throw it out.’
‘It’s a part of history, in a way.’
‘Not your history.’
‘But my grandad loved that music.’
Liam is tight-lipped, his body rigid as he sits upright on the end of the bed. ‘Not you. And not even your grandfather. It’s all the past, isn’t it?’
Dan imagines a scenario in which he, simply and cleanly, puts the frame on the floor and stamps it to pieces. Just like he did with Sunetra’s pot. But that act didn’t make him feel better. The harder you stamp, the more shards you create. The past is not so easy to destroy.
He slides the frame back into the envelope, and returns it under the bed. ‘I don’t know how to make sense of this yet, but it’s part of who I am,’ he says. ‘So I guess it stays, until I can.’
‘I don’t understand you, sometimes. You’re not some little boy any more. You don’t need to collect and hold these things for other people.’
‘I think you’re amazing,’ Dan says. ‘Thanks. For listening. For saying what you said. It’s made a big difference to me.’ The things that irritate him about Liam are the things that irritate him about himself: obstinacy, and cruelty, and sadness, and kindness. A mystery wrapped up in a skin.
‘I won’t tell anyone.’
‘It’s okay,’ Dan says, feeling safe. Feeling so tired of everything that tries to make sense of all that should be left unsolved. ‘It’s not your secret to keep.’
He gets up and leaves the room, leading Liam back downstairs to their drinks. The night won’t end up in this room. It’s not love. Not love for a person, or an idea, or a set of memories to keep. Not love, right now, at least. And that’s okay.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to Dan Coxon, Helen Marshall, Mark Morris, Nina Allan, the Talking Cat, and the MNWers.
George Sandison liked the first half of this story, but told me there was a second half that still needed to be written. Thanks for being right, and for publishing it once it was (eventually) finished.
And thank you, Nick, Elsa and Barney. I’ve got you all under my skin.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aliya Whiteley is the author of the novels The Beauty, The Arrival of Missives, and Skein Island. She writes novels, short stories and non-fiction and has been published in places such as The Guardian, Interzone, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Black Static, and Strange Horizons, and anthologies such as Unsung Stories’ 2084 and Lonely Planet’s Better than Fiction I and II. She has been shortlisted for an Arthur C. Clarke Award, Shirley Jackson Award, British Fantasy and British Science Fiction awards, the John W. Campbell Award, and a James Tiptree Jr. Award. Her stories are unpredictable; they can be terrifying, tender, ferocious and deeply funny. She also writes a regular column for Interzone magazine. She blogs at: aliyawhiteley.wordpress.com and tweets most days as @AliyaWhiteley.