Skin Deep (2 page)

I wonder why it’s so light, why I can see Lindz, and the panic rises in my throat.

I know.

Coils of light – orange flames – lick towards me.

An acrid stench of burning.

The screaming is coming from me now.

The flames touch me. I can’t move away, can’t get my arms free. They stroke my skin in a white-hot sear of agony.

The pain . . . oh God . . . the pain.

It goes on forever.

A voice yells, sobs, ‘Hang on, I’ll get you out.’ A hand grabs my leg and pulls me hard and fast, away from the flames. Out from under Charlotte’s body.

Rob yanks me out of the door. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I couldn’t get it open in time.’ One arm hangs useless by his side. He puts the other arm round my waist and half drags, half carries me away.

I know I’m howling with the pain and I can’t stop. Nothing’s ever hurt like this before.

He collapses on to the grass with me. Steven’s bent double beside us, rocking back and forth on his knees. Sarah’s there too, whimpering and holding her head.

Rob looks at me. ‘Oh my God, oh . . .’ and he starts to cry too.

I let myself slide back into the dark again as the car explodes.

Ugly people don’t have feelings.
They’re not like everyone else. They don’t notice if you stare at them in the street and turn your face away. And if they did notice, it wouldn’t hurt them. They’re not like real people.

Or that’s what I used to think.

When I was younger.

Before I learned.

When I was small, my mother used to take me shopping with her. Thursday is market day in Whitmere and she bought her fruit and vegetables from the organic stall there. The stallholder had a purple-red birthmark running the length of his face and across his mouth. It made his bottom lip stick out, all swollen and wet like a lolling tongue. I wished Mum would buy our food from somewhere else because I had to try to forget his face whenever I looked at the vegetables on my plate or picked up an apple.

He couldn’t speak very well either. I assumed he wasn’t all there in the head. Somehow not looking right made me think his brain was as wrong as his face. I could never stop staring, fascinated by how my stomach turned and how worms crawled along my spine when he sucked back on that flabby lip in a nervous tic. Mum told me off for it when she caught me.

She thought I was being helpful when I washed the fruit and veg for her at home. I never had the courage to tell her I was trying to wash him off them.

Once I asked her if we could buy our stuff from another stall. Why did we always have to go to that one? And she explained what organic meant, about pesticides and fertilisers and protecting wildlife. But she finished with, ‘Besides, some people need our support more than others.’ I never asked again, but I thought it was stupid because ugly people don’t have feelings.

I know better now.

That’s why on a warm day in early September, I wasn’t there for the school photo. I was sitting on the canal bank instead. The Orange River we called it because of the iron deposits in the soil that leached out to stain the water a murky rust colour.

I’d skipped school for the first time ever. Mum would’ve written me a note if I’d asked her, but then I would’ve had to explain and see the understanding come into her eyes. See her blink to hold back tears.

I checked my watch. The girls would be in the toilets now doing their hair and make-up, squealing about how bad they looked.
As if
. Then they’d line up on the staging in the hall. Best faces for the camera.

Oh, they’d notice I wasn’t there. But nobody would ask why. The teachers would be relieved because when they hung the photo in the school foyer, one face would be missing. I bet they’d even ‘forget’ to ask me for a note.

Ugly people don’t have feelings. We’re not like everyone else.

The water in this stretch of the canal was a funny colour – looked like Mum’s carrot soup.
I steered the boat along, hand resting on the tiller bar. From the time since we’d last passed a town, I reckoned we must be about ten miles from Whitmere. Time to start looking for a mooring. Didn’t want to get too close. Towns meant trouble. Too many people.

I could hear Mum inside the boat, clattering around and singing some tree-hugger shit to herself as she made dinner. Not tofu again, please. I swear they made that stuff to convert vegans to meat. Cole had agreed with me about that. Tasted like candle wax, he’d said. But then if someone asked Cole what a vegan was, he’d say, ‘It’s someone who farts a lot.’ Death by beans, he used to call Mum’s cooking. It’s not really true. We don’t fart more than everyone else, but when he met us, Cole’s stomach had some trouble readjusting after a life of eating dead cow.

I cruised on a bit further. Nowhere good to stop yet. Too far from any roads. I didn’t fancy hauling my bike over four muddy fields in the middle of winter before I got to the nearest lane.

The smell of bean stew wafted out of the door and I listened to the familiar sound of water lapping on the boat hull as I scanned ahead. There were some houses coming up in about a mile – looked like a village. I squinted for a better view. Only a couple of the houses seemed to be near the canal. The rest were set back. There was bound to be a road nearby so this was a possibility.

I yelled into the boat. ‘Might have found a spot.’

‘I’ll be there in a minute,’ Mum called back.

She always got a buzz when we came to a new place. Me, not so much. Maybe I used to; now it was just same old, same old. This place could be different though. I had a plan for this one. I’d not told Mum yet, but even thinking about it made my stomach churn, in a good way.

It’d be better if Cole was still around to help me break it to her. He’d have backed me up, but he’d been gone a year now. He got tired of travelling, he said – found another woman to hook up with, one with a house and a couple of kids. Mum said I should forget him and move on. Travellers moved on – that’s what we did. But moving on in your head’s harder. I remembered stuff all the time. Things he used to say or do. Times we had a laugh together. Like when I told him about Chavez, the guy Mum was shacked up with before him.

Cole had frowned. ‘Mexican?’

‘Nah, from Bishop’s Stortford. Real name’s Jeremy, but he changed it. Thought he was Che Guevara – if Che spent his life permanently stoned and bumming around on a narrowboat.’

‘Sounds like a tosser to me.’

‘They were all tossers before you.’

He’d winked at me, then raised his voice so Mum could hear. ‘Yeah, well, you gotta kiss a lot of frogs before you meet the handsome prince, eh, Karen?’

Mum, predictably, freaked at him, yelling about women’s emancipation and respect while we cracked up laughing. Then she threw cushions at us until Cole grabbed and tickled her, and made her laugh too.

I spotted a copse of willow trees on the bank ahead, and a bridge across the canal – a road. Were we too near the village? You couldn’t see the houses from here and the footpath was so overgrown that I doubted anyone walked along it often. Cars going over the bridge noticing us? A risk – but the wall was high and if I pulled in just where that alder tree was, I reckoned we’d be tucked away out of sight. This might be it.

Mum came up the steps, shielding her eyes from the sun, and I pointed to the clump of trees.

‘Perfect! My clever son!’

Her hands fluttered round my face, stroking it, touching my hair. She smiled and my stomach churned, in a bad way. That smile was too bright, too fixed. Not right.

‘It’ll be good here. I can sense it. There’s good energy. The ley lines meet here and they’re rising up to greet us.’ She turned that smile on me. ‘It’ll be different here.’

I looked at her, wanting to say, ‘Like you said the last place would be different, and the one before that,’ but I kept my mouth shut. Couldn’t risk unbalancing her mood. Besides, we needed to moor up somewhere and we needed money. Whitmere had a market where she could sell the jewellery she made. Maybe we’d make it through the winter before they moved us on.

I steered
Liberty
towards the bank. Mum sat on the roof, her bare feet dangling in the doorway. Silver rings on her toes, and in her nose and eyebrow. Hennaed hair glinting copper in the sun. The last of the New Age travellers, who never grew up.

‘Feel that energy, Ryan, feel that energy.’

There’s something about waking up early on Saturday morning before the rest of the family.
The whole weekend stretched before me and, for a few hours, I had it all to myself. A quiet house. Peace.

My magazine had an article on how exfoliation made the skin glow and apparently people in French spas spent a fortune battering themselves with water jets, so I turned the shower up high enough for the water to sting my shoulders while I scrubbed all over with a loofah. But when it came to washing my face, I turned the spray down. Low pressure, cool water. I never forgot to do that. Couldn’t.

I gave myself a scalp massage with the new hair conditioner, giving it time to soak in before rinsing it off. The bottle said it’d make my hair full and glossy. When I cleaned my teeth, I timed myself with a watch – two minutes like the dentist said. I had to do the flossing blind though; there was no mirror above the basin. I’d thrown the towel stand at it when I got back from hospital. Dad had taken the pieces away without a word. Nobody replaced it.

I sat down at my dressing table to put on the moisturiser and the sunscreen the dermatologist prescribed. It had to be done a certain way – tap the moisturiser in and then massage it thoroughly over the whole scarred area to keep the tissue soft and stop it contracting. The sunscreen was easier and only had to be smoothed over gently. My skin lived by this routine now.

I rough-dried my hair and gave it a quick smooth with the tongs, then threw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt.

Raggs took one look at me coming down in my old ‘walkies’ trainers and ran around in circles chasing his tail. I grabbed his lead in case we needed it and stuffed it in my pocket with a couple of apples for the ponies and one for myself. He did his usual thing of hurtling down the garden and back to me again, over and over, as if he was on a bungee cord. I caught him up at the gate that led out into the paddock and down to the canal. The paddock was ours, two acres bounded by high hawthorn hedge to shelter the ponies. We bought the Shetland, Ollie, to keep Scrabble company when Lindsay’s horse was sold. It felt like Lindz had died all over again when Clover went, but my dad said no father would be able to stand seeing his daughter’s horse running in the field while she lay buried in the ground.

I whistled to the horses and Ollie headed over first, led by his greedy little tummy. Their velvet noses snorted at my hands as they chomped the apples. Raggs ran along the hedge line, nose to the ground as he followed rabbit trails.

I could see Lindsay’s home clearly through the trees, a Georgian manor house that dwarfed our old farmhouse. There was a figure in the garden, wearing pyjamas and a brown robe. He stood and stared at the rose bushes, statue still. Mr Norman. I hadn’t seen Lindz’s dad for weeks. I watched him for a few minutes, wondering what he was doing, and then he turned and shuffled back into the house, slowly, bent over like an old man.

Best not to think of Lindz today. Not on such a peaceful morning. The pain was always there to catch me if I did, always too raw.

I patted the ponies’ necks and followed Raggs down the field until we got to the thicket of trees that lined the footpath through to the canal. Not many people walked this stretch now it was so overgrown. Raggs disappeared into the undergrowth. He knew this walk as well as I did so I paid no attention and concentrated on picking a path through the nettles. The leaves on the willows above us were still pale green. They’d start to yellow soon, then fall. Raggs and I would kick them up as we walked. He hadn’t seen leaf-fall before – this would be his first autumn. He’d love it.

I lifted a branch aside and came out on to the canal towpath. Raggs was already there peeing up a tree. I patted my leg and he fell in beside me as we strolled along the gravel path. But he stopped abruptly after a few metres, his whole body a line of quivering attention, and I looked up to see what he was watching, expecting to spot a heron or something.

Then I stopped too.

It wasn’t a heron.

A narrowboat was moored up ahead of us and there was a boy on the bank washing the boat windows.

He was stripped to the waist and barefoot, wearing nothing but long shorts. His hair was the colour of the honey Mum bought from the farm shop, his skin tanned the same shade.

I ducked back into the trees, bending to grab Raggs’s collar. We were going to go the other way
now
, but the stupid dog jerked away from me. I patted my leg frantically, but he ignored me. He took a few steps towards the boy.