Under My Skin (11 page)

‘He’s on a high today,’ Mrs Deegan says, and she sticks her head out and she is led back across the street.

Daniel sits quietly in the barber’s chair. The double red doors are bolted and the blinds are down. When I walk inside with Doreen he does not look around. Instead he looks at our faces in the mirror and says, ‘Pappy told me to wait here, and not to go upstairs.’

The house is quiet and when I walk down the landing to his bedroom the boards do not even creak. I turn the handle quietly and when I open the door Pappy is wearing the white glittery suit and standing on a white painted chair. The sequins
from his suit catch the light and make small white spots on the bedroom walls. He looks just the way he did on the stage, except there is a leather belt around his neck and he is facing my mother’s picture on the shelf. His eyes are looking into my mother’s eyes and her eyes are sad and looking away.

‘What are you doing, Pappy?’ I ask, and he turns around very slowly. He looks at me as if he does not know me.

Again.

Again.

‘I’m changing the light bulb,’ he says

Yesterday I made my first phone call to my grandmother. I called her and when she answered I read everything out from a copybook page.

‘This is Hope Swann calling,’ the first line said.

‘Pappy is not well,’ the second line said.

‘Please send help,’ and then without waiting for any answer I put the phone down and tried to imagine her setting off with her huskies and a sleigh.

Matilda said goodbye to Glassman and watched as he leaned down to open the cab door. She stood still and managed to smile when he kissed her cold cheek and when the cab moved away she turned and pressed a small red-gloved hand to the glass. Without noticing people or streets or shop fronts she found her way to her apartment and giving her keys a little shake, she quietly let herself in. Glassman did not understand that after he had told her the news she had felt her own breath slip away. That as her body seemed to curl and then stiffen on the sheets beside him, she felt something real and full of happiness and life just die inside. She had no way to tell him. No means to explain. There were no words big enough to show him that her life, all of it, every day marked out on the calendar, had been for and around him.

Her cat Godot had not been fed for two days. Any longer and he would start chewing on his own tail. She opened the windows and a light snow shower came in and she sat there on the end of her bed and felt the cold wind on her face.

When she got up she saw that she had creased the sheets and she was somehow glad of this. It was in her mind a sign of life she didn’t know she had. She had been let down before and she knew the mechanics of it. How she could begin to move on again after losing a love. It had happened only last year too and now she had a cat, knowing that there was an agreed limit on their love. She would feed Godot and in turn he would stay. He would live with her, asking for nothing, just a roof over his head, a handful of Go-Cat and a clean litter
tray. Without Glassman she would have to go back to love in dry handfuls now.

She closed the window and seemed to pause and watch her own every move. She had loved this apartment. The curved tongue-and-groove panelling. How the room curled and how her bed, a wide cream expanse with Egyptian cotton sheets and pillowcases covered in blue cornflowers, had kept her safe until now. The bathtub with the shining taps. The goldfish swimming on her shower curtains. The specially chosen walnut doorknobs and the French windows in the kitchen. The previous owner had left a red antique scales and Glassman had helped her to paint the kitchen door to match. Her crockery came from Denmark. In summer she grew sunflowers on her balcony. Until now, when she closed her door behind her, she moved to Europe and said goodbye to New York. But that was before she went swimming and forgot about loving water and instead seemed to fall into him. Her friends said she was crazy and then they saw it too and could only stand by and watch how her life began to turn and turn around his. How nothing mattered. How everything, her work, her home, her family, were all just things to be passed on a road that led to him. He had a way of making her feel
cherished
. That was it. He would lay one hand on her shoulder as he walked from the kitchen to the bathroom and she felt alive. He could look at her and smile over his small silver glasses and make her feel like a three-year-old.

She was not beautiful in any conventional way. She knew that. But he had wanted to touch her from the start. He made her feel wanted and gave her a real sense of place. And now, without him, her whole life would become an irritation. The phone could not ring now unless it was him. The doorman could not give her any message unless it was from him. Even
her parents who lived in Connecticut were in the way. Her friends, giant obstacles to her thoughts. At least if she could not have him, she could be alone with her thoughts of him. Perhaps she always knew it was all going to end. He did not want her to sublet her apartment. He had baulked at making promises. Told her about his illness. That in ten years he would be sixty, but nothing mattered to her. Matilda was in love with him. There were red hearts being puffed towards him and they kept coming even when he looked away.

The first item was a piece of glass from his workshop. She had taken it on the first night he showed her around. She had turned it over and over in her hand and when he was not looking she did not put it back down. Then she took his black sweater and he knew about that. It was one of the regular transactions of love. Like the sock left in the bed. The undershorts on the radiator. Small symbols to reassure the other person that you intend to come back. Like all women, though, she marked these things down, and truth be told, Glassman was just careless and tended to leave his things lying around and Matilda, because she wanted to, mistook his untidiness for love.

Then she began to forage and collect.

And everything went into an old suitcase in the closet in the hall. A band-aid taken from the trash can in his bathroom. She treasured it. And a black silk tie from his wardrobe, never worn but taken out once and run through his hands. His empty meds bottles. The plastic caps prised open so she could smell inside. It seemed sad – but she had begun to associate a pharmacy smell with him.

The first photograph she took was of his hands. Strong, long fingers. Made to draw things and carve wood. They were not a doctor’s hands at all. Much less a doctor working in the
ER. He would not know that one night she went there. That she got up and dressed at 3 a.m. and went out into the snow and walked twenty blocks until she found him, in green scrubs working on a traffic accident. She stood silently behind the glass and watched him give orders and move quickly and silently and all the time save lives and then she went home and masturbated to the thoughts of it. The next day she knew his patient had lived. He was always different when someone died. Not blaming himself but just looking puzzled and quiet and his eyes full of questions. It was always, ‘Why?’ With Glassman everything ended in ‘Why?’

Matilda took the trash out. Fed her cat and ignored his sulks.

‘You think you have problems,’ she said, and they would not even meet each other’s eyes. Godot walked to the window and watched the snow as if it was new to him. He had seen it for two winters now and yet he sat with his back to her, his head looking up and down as he tried to watch each and every flake. ‘Another break-up,’ he would say, if Godot would ever talk. She did her laundry. Changed her sheets even though they were almost new. She opened her post and paid her cable bill. Then she checked her mailbox and her heart sank a little further when she saw there was no email from Hope. She tried to practise returning to her old life. And then she turned off her phone and went where she had wanted to go all along.

Matilda kept the wig in the closet in the bedroom. It was short with loose curls and peroxide blonde. She painted her lips red in her favourite MAC colour, which was Rage. Then she put the wig on and took a pill and went to the walk-in closet in the hallway. The inside of the door was covered in black and white prints. Glassman smiling at a barbecue – he hated barbecues. Glassman with his favourite Ben and Jerry’s –
Caramel Chew-Chew. Glassman on the beach – he got a great tan – and on the sidewalk after the concert in the Beacon. Then his hands again. His fingertips. His smiles. His face. His eyes – his eyes, and it all came together to make a montage and a shrine to Glassman.

He had told her and was direct about it – and yet in a simple clear moment in her hallway closet she decided something else. He said ‘Yes’ to releasing her. He said ‘Yes’ to ending it. He said ‘Yes – yes – yes’ as she packed all her little things and ‘Yes’ when he followed her down the stairs and on to the street. It was
his
arm that went up for the cab and he breathed ‘Yes’ to the one that swooped into the sidewalk straight away. Glassman said ‘Yes – oh yes’ to the final goodbye of it, but high in the dark shadows of her closet, when Matilda could not manage the word, Marilyn said ‘No.’

Alter ego n. – 1. A second side to an individual’s personality, different from the one that most people know. 2. A very close and trusted friend.

Daniel climbs the first snowdrift. His feet are sliding, his dark eyes blinking, white sky and white earth meet. The peacock is dazzled by it and flies up and sits on the roof. When my brother sees this he laughs, a bright shouting laugh that comes up from his feet. He walks on top of the drift, as high as the ash trees, and then jumps down and crunches into the frozen snow on the lane. The water tanks are frozen. There is no water for the house. One lamb is dead. A second one in my arms. The lamb’s brother, in a small pink cardigan. He makes himself at home in the warm kitchen and gives short sharp bleats, stepping around.

My grandmother’s house is pretty, an old falling-down place, painted a very pale blue. There are trees, every kind, silver birch, Dutch maple, horse chestnut and pine. When Daniel passes the kitchen window he is singing honky-tonk, Benny Goodman, I think, and I put some hot toast into his hand. This year I am thirteen years old. In March we will both be fourteen.

‘Juna has a glass eye,’ he says. ‘That means she can see you inside and out.’

My grandmother has driven up the front avenue with her little car puffing out lots of white smoke. It is a long winding gravel
path, hard like concrete now, through wide-open fields. So she gets the best of it, the duck pond frozen in the hollow, the old-fashioned wooden fences and gates, the swing with snow on the seat. And in the distance she would have seen Ghost Lake between two hills, and then the house, beginning to crumble, with the stone arches into the stables, the old red-roofed byres and the grey tractor frozen in the yard.

Juna is a tall woman with broad round shoulders and a shock of snow-white curly hair. When she gets out of the car she beams at us, first Daniel and then me. There is something raw about us. I already know this about myself, but she takes all of this in and absorbs us. The Wellingtons worn in the house. The holes in my elbows. The dirty jeans. We are all dressed in layers like onions to keep warm and my hair is in two long blonde braids, several days old. She smiles again at the hen who has decided to leave the kitchen and the lamb who puts his head around the door. She takes a look around the yard and then begins to carry groceries towards the house. Today she reminds me of the Snow Queen, with her white hair and mittens, except she is driving a Robin Reliant instead of a sleigh.