In the Skin

1

“So you’re home?” The welcome is hardly inspiring: Adi’s eyes are glazed over, like frosted glass on a winter’s day. She barely even looks at me; she just wobbles her head in my general direction. Her hair is a mess; her face is paler than I have ever seen it.

“Have you been taking your medication?”

She giggles. Then she turns away, dragging her feet as she walks across the room. I put my suitcase down near the TV and follow her into the kitchen, throwing my coat across the back of the sofa and watching it slip away down the back, between cushion and wall. The sound it makes is like a wretched sigh: the slow puling of breath between chapped lips. The room seems to shift like a gauze sheet, giving me a puzzling glimpse of something else beneath.

“How are you feeling?”

She turns on me with her eyes blazing: glaring, burning, stripping me down to the bone.

“Please.”

Her smile is awful, as if a sword is cleaving slowly through the jawbone. “I’m fine. Everything is the same.”

I count to ten.

“Max. Where is he?”

“Upstairs. Playing with his toys. He likes to be left alone sometimes.”

I can’t figure out whether it’s a threat or an indirect instruction so I leave the room and climb the stairs, my fingertips dragging along the rough wallpaper, my feet sounding hollow against the stiff wooden treads.

Max’s room is located at the end of the hall. I lift the latch on the baby-gate and head that way, allowing the ghost of a smile to tickle my lips. I can hear him singing, his voice high and surprisingly tuneful. He is tapping something — a car? a train? — against the wall or the floorboards.

Maybe this is the dose of reality I need to nail me into the moment.

I push open the door and see him sitting there, under the window. He is turned away from me and I can only see him from behind, but he looks bigger, broader, than before I went away. I think again of how quickly kids develop in so small a time, and a sense of pride flushes through me, purging me of everything else — all the bad stuff that has recently been causing a blockage; all the darkness I can barely keep at bay.

“Hey, Max. How’s my best boy?”

Max stops playing with his cars. He lets them fall to the floor. His hands look huge; his fingers are like butcher-shop sausages. He makes podgy fists and climbs wearily to his feet, then turns to look at me.

His face is different, much wider and bonier than before. His eyes seem to have lightened a shade in my absence and his hair has grown alarmingly long. Max’s mouth is set into an unfamiliar smile: a slanted expression, sly and untrustworthy, too old for his face. More like a smirk.

“Max?” It sounds as if I am querying his identity, and this seems to amuse him.

“Hey, boy.”

He lumbers towards me on legs far chunkier than I can recall, dragging his left foot as if he has acquired a slight limp. He is taller than I remember; his clothes no longer quite fit.

“Daddy.” That word is the clincher. Max has never called me daddy in his life — always pa or dad or even da-da, when he was much younger. His voice is deeper, too, and comes from somewhere right inside him — a cold dark spot I’ve never even glimpsed until now.

“Daddy.”

I run from the room, feeling foolish and afraid. The kid closes the door behind me and for a moment I’m sure I hear him chuckle dryly.

I stop at the top of the stairs, caught between separate layers of the same existence. I can hear Adi shuffling about downstairs like a zombie, and the kid in the room has begun once more to clatter a plastic toy against the wall.

I stay where I am for a long time, unsure of what exactly is going on in the strange territory of my life.

2

Later, I’m standing outside wishing that I smoked, just so I might have something to do with my hands. I’m pacing up and down the garden under the nursery window. The light is off; my son is in bed. My son. I must remember that. He is my son, and not some tiny intruder who’s come to stay.

Kicking my heels, I notice something on the ground: a small round bundle. Greasy paper wrapped up in a ball and discarded in the grass. I bend down and pick it up, untying the slippery knot of wrappings. When I’m done I hold a piece of greaseproof burger paper in my hand, the name of the fast food outlet stencilled across it in bold letters.

Panic flares up inside me, then diminishes like a dying firework. I am afraid, yet the fear is almost sexual, like an illicit glance from a stranger in a rough downtown bar.

I walk over to the wheelybin and dispose of the grubby creased paper, slamming down the lid in an effort to dismiss it from my mind. It doesn’t work; the stain of dread is upon me, making my fingertips moist and tacky.

I see several cigarette butts on the paved area near the bins. I have never smoked and Adi gave up months ago, replacing one addiction with another — early morning runs, exhaustive sessions at the gym, rowing miles on machines and lifting pieces of iron in slow repetitive motions.

I scoop up the fag ends with a trowel I keep hidden in a flowerbed for the purpose of removing cat shit and tip them into the bin. Again the lid slams shut, but the unease remains.

Has someone been watching the house while I was away? The thought of alien eyes cataloguing my family’s movements chills me. I think of the prostitute back in New York City and pray this is not part of some elaborate blackmail plot.

When I look up at the nursery window, there is a stocky figure standing behind the glass, hands splayed flat across the pane, head tilted questioningly to one side. Watching me watching him. The figure ducks down behind the sill but a sharp afterimage remains burned in its place, a nuclear silhouette seared onto a bomb-site wall.

I stumble backwards and feel something give under my feet. Stooping down, I pause to examine a dead bird. Its neck is floppy, the head bobbing about when I pick up the tiny cadaver by one ruffled wing. The bird’s beak has been removed; a bloody nub of flesh is all that remains of its face, tiny black eyes stare from the mess, as flat as pinheads. As I look closer I make out a bald spot on the underside of its body, where feathers have been stripped away, perhaps with a blade. There is a mark on the pale pink flesh: a tattoo. It is too small to identify, but I’m sure the blue-black mark is ink.

I dispose of the corpse in the bin, burying it under the rest of the trash. As I approach the rear door on my way back to the house I see something scratched into the UPVC frame: a faint insignia, something resembling a collapsed figure-of-eight lying on its side. Similar to the mark etched onto the bird.

I go back inside and lock all the doors, and then check each window in the house, one by one, rattling the mechanisms to ensure they have not been pried loose. All entrances are sealed but still I feel insecure. Our lives are being invaded, subtly and with great care, but nonetheless we are under scrutiny.

Upstairs, I check on Max. He is asleep in his bed, lying flat on his back with his hands palm-down on the covers. He never used to sleep this way; before I went away, he always lay on his front, like me, with his hands tucked under the pillow. I leave the door ajar and go back outside to confront Adi, who is lingering with obvious intent in the bedroom doorway, her mood having experienced another abrupt shift.

“Are you coming to bed?” her voice is softer than before and she has changed into a nightdress that I swear is new — I’ve certainly never noticed it hanging in the wardrobe or folded neatly in a drawer. Short in the leg, low at the chest. Sexy. But her frame is too skinny for the garment; it hangs on her gym-thin body like rags.

“In a minute.” I turn away, but not in time to miss her sly, calculating grin in the full-length mirror on the wall.

“Don’t belong,” I think she says, before realising that I have joined the last two syllables of her sentence together to create a single word. She walks across the landing to the top of the stairs, taking her time and lifting the hem of the garment as she raises one leg so I catch a glimpse of her waxy buttocks. The expression on her face as she peers over one shoulder is supposed to be sultry, but to me she resembles a snarling beast.

I squeeze past her, slink downstairs, and retreat into the living room, where I sit down and retrieve my laptop from the drawer in the big, low coffee table, an expensive piece of furniture designed to look like a giant book. I switch the machine on and wait for it to boot up. When I try to open my well-organised folders, I discover that all the files have been deleted. All my records have been destroyed; there is nothing that I can possibly do to save them.

There is a new drive installed on the machine, and when I click the cursor to open it, I see it is filled with digital images. Obscene photographs of men and women coupling with dogs, sucking horse’s cocks, pressing the mouths of reluctant farm animals against their grubby private parts. The last file I look at is a sepia image showing a number of deceased children lying in state, dressed in miniature suits. White hands crossed over shallow breasts in a row of tiny coffins.

When I log onto the Internet the homepage I am automatically directed to features downloadable atrocity videos: beheadings in Iraq, massacres in Rwanda, inner-city CCTV murder footage…

I shut down the laptop and stare at the keyboard, aware that I might be losing my mind. The keys possess no recognisable characters; the letters and numbers have become a sequence of gibberish.

I close the lid and stare at the childish stickers Adi and I put there months ago, laughing at the inappropriate nature of small tabs of paper illustrated with skulls and breasts and peace signs. A Yin Yang symbol is a pair of eyes staring up at me. My brain begins to ache and I draw away, heading across the room towards the doorway. My mind is filled with pictures of puckered animal rectums. The bloated teats of milking cows. The thin, wet dicks of domestic dogs…

Adi is lying on her back on top of the bedclothes when I go back upstairs. Her slim legs are open; she is wearing no underwear. I swallow hard, my throat dry, the sensitive tissue inside my mouth throbbing and swelling so much that it constricts my throat.

“Come on, baby,” she says in a faux American drawl. For a moment I think she knows about my New York tryst, but then she flutters her eyelids and I realise it is an act, a tacky seduction technique gleaned from some lowbrow newsstand magazine.

Adi watches as I undress and I wish she would avert her gaze. Her eyes are cold, hard, and she begins to strum the fingers of one hand against the taut mattress. I take off my clothes as slowly as I possibly can but it is not slow enough. She believes I am teasing her and laughs accordingly, licking her pale lips for effect.

“Fuck me now.” Her request is obscene rather than erotic. I swallow down bile. Adi’s mouth is slick with saliva.

(…puckered animal rectums…)

She grabs me as soon as I climb into bed, as if wanting to get this over and done with as quickly as possible. Her moans and groans are carefully orchestrated and as she digs her fingernails into my side I feel only an echo of pain.

“FuckmeIwantyourcockinme.” It’s a nonsense rhyme, a silly singsong verse devoid of all meaning. She slides down my body and eventually teases me erect, her long, dry tongue lapping, coarse hands flapping. When she finally mounts me I feel her hot slime slithering down the shaft of my penis; her vagina convulses, gripping me tight, imprisoning me in a carnal pose.

(…the bloated teats of milking cows…)

Her hands feel different, as if they belong to a stranger, and they seem to multiply so that a crowd is caressing me, coaxing me towards a reluctant climax. Their faces swarm over me, tasting my flesh. All I see when I close my eyes is the erased features of the dead bird. Dry, twisted claws. The absence of its beak. The alien marking on its belly matching the one cut into the doorframe.

It is over in seconds. Despite the dull orgasm, I feel no satisfaction, and Adi must feel even less.

“Mmm…”

These sounds she is making. I feel no connection to them.

“Niiice…”

Lies, all lies. I wish I knew what she was up to.

(…the thin, wet dicks of domestic dogs…)

Adi reaches into a drawer and takes out a jar full of pills, screws off the lid and pops one of the long orange capsules into her mouth. Her teeth look serrated in the darkness and her eyes are vapid, devoid of light and life.

I feel as if I have been raped.

3

Much later — later than I can even imagine — I awake in blackness. Staring into the room, I see phantoms dancing before me, gossamer figures moving with slow precision through thick, dark treacle. I blink my eyes and climb out of bed. My feet feel like dead weights attached to the ends of my legs. The figures are no longer there; despite feeling groggy, the dream has scattered like a swarm of flies.

For some reason I am drawn to the window. I part the curtains and look down into the huge unkempt garden, allowing my gaze to follow the line of the narrow crazy-paved pathway bisecting the shaggy lawn. Soft moonlight illuminates the scene; it looks like a matte painting on a film set.

There is something down there — a twisted shape struggling through the long grass at the side of the path, inching its way towards the sagging wooden fence marking the boundary of my property. At first glance, it looks like a wounded animal — perhaps a cat or a dog — squirming along on its belly, heading for cover. But then I begin to make out further disquieting details. Stubby arms reach forward, short white fingers digging into the dirt to drag the rest of the bulky little form along some predetermined route. Limp legs hang below a squat torso, barely moving other than to trail through the muck after the main body as the thing makes its way towards the fence at the bottom of the garden.

If it were not so small, so pitifully worn and crumpled, I would assume the shape is a man.

I watch in fascination as the thing crawls forward another few feet, stopping to rest after it has reached a large mound of earth rising up from the ground like a hillock. It rolls over onto its side, rudimentary limbs stiff and unmoving, and in the darkness its face — I call it that, but there are no visible features — is jet-black and glistening, like the shell of a beetle.

Soon I begin to feel awkward, like a pervert watching an elderly neighbour undress through an unguarded window. Or a person who studies with interest a cripple who has fallen down on the floor, rather than offering to help.

I close the curtains to block out the view. Open them again. The struggling shape has vanished, but the sense of agonised motion remains in the air, rippling the darkness.

4

Morning can’t come quick enough.

I have trouble sleeping after that weird dream, especially with Adi’s legs wrapped around my thighs. They feel like snakes slithering under the bedclothes, and I imagine them moving of their own volition, not truly part of her body. I shift my weight on the mattress, moving away from Adi, reclaiming my right arm from under her bony elbow. She stirs; mutters; slaps her lips. Her breath smells of old rooms and empty hallways. It tastes of the dark.

“Where are you going?” Her voice is a blade; it cuts deep and true.

“Toilet. I have a bad stomach.”

There is a pause; I do not want to move in case I cause a fuss. She is still taking her pills, but their numbing effect rarely lasts.

“Did you miss me?”

I slide back onto the bed, realising my ablutions must wait. This is more important than my desire to take a shit. “Of course I did. You’re my wife.” The words are hollow; there is nothing inside them but dust.

“You could probably tell I missed you, too. Lots.” She giggles, and the sound sends spiders scuttling across the flesh of my scalp. For a second, I cannot breathe…

“Yes.” I don’t know what else to say.

“Things will be different here. I’m not so afraid anymore. Maybe I can even come off the medication.”

“We’ll see. Let’s just take things slowly, live each day as it comes.” I reach out a hand towards her but she doesn’t notice…or chooses not to. My fingers flail on the bedding like dying worms, but still she does not respond.

“What about Max? Has he changed much while you were gone?”

If the question is loaded, then the ammunition is high calibre, armour-piercing. I pause before answering, keeping my voice controlled, swallowing down the panic that dwells inside me like a squatter in an otherwise vacant property. “He’s changed too much.”

I’m sure I can hear her eyelids scraping together as she blinks: Click-ick. “How do you mean?”

Click-ick.

“He seems…different. Bigger. Broader in the chest. Like a little man instead of a baby boy.”

She lets out a loud bark and at first the sound puzzles me, but then I realise she has simply laughed. Another sound I rarely hear. “Kids change. They grow and become someone else almost daily at his age. He’s still the same Max. Still your boy.”

I listen for a trace of mockery in her voice, but instead locate something far more complex. Is it sarcasm? I get up and pad across the landing, ducking into the bathroom, my bowel heavy with waste and my head light as a balloon. I wash my face in the sink but am unable to meet my eyes in the mirror. Pipes gurgle. Water runs down the plughole. My legs are shaking and my feet are freezing cold, as if the circulation has been cut off.

I cross to the window and peek through the curtains. The morning is dusky; the sky is leaden, but light threatens to break through to the east. I can see a shallow runnel carved through the dewy grass under the window; it traces a straight line away from the back of the house and stops at a pile of mulch left over from the last time someone did any gardening.

I close the curtains. Step away.

Adi stays in bed while I get Max up, shaking him awake with a hand on his shoulder. He never slept through like this before I went to New York; he always woke early, dragging us from sleep with his high-pitched questions and requests for cartoons and breakfast. It takes me five minutes to rouse him, and even then he blinks at me as if he doesn’t know where he is, fails to recognise his father. It’s almost as if he has a hangover.

“Come on, big man. Let’s get you some breakfast.”

Instead of the usual mad rush to the bathroom, he walks slowly and purposefully, pausing to straighten one of his books on the shelf by the door. He turns. Smiles. That same lop-sided grin: the one I don’t know. The one I don’t like.

I chat to him while he brushes his teeth, filling the room with banal information, absurd chit-chat. Max moves his hand in small circular motions, scrubbing his tiny white milk teeth with the utmost care.

“You done?”

“Yes, daddy. I finish.” He places his Thomas the Tank Engine toothbrush in the mug on the sink, twisting it so the head faces the wall. Even that small compulsive act is totally unfamiliar.

He refuses to hold my hand as he leads me down the stairs, but at last he has begun to chatter: “I want toast and pea-butter and a big boy bowl with porridge.”

Max hates peanut butter. He always — always — has a chopped banana covered in a thin layer of maple syrup for breakfast, usually followed by a round of dry white toast.

“You sure? You can have anything you want now that daddy’s home. We won’t tell mummy. It’ll be our special secret.”

He looks at me sideways, his eyes narrowed. “I want pea-butter. Big boy porridge.”

I know without a doubt this is not my son. This large child with the crooked smile and the unfamiliar eating habits. This strange invader.

He takes my hand. His fingers are like ice-lollies.

“Make mine breakfast, daddy. Now.”

5

I sit in front of the television and watch him eat. He has a little orange plastic table and chair he always pulls into the centre of the room, chewing as he watches cartoons. Looney Toons are his favourite; and Tom and Jerry. Today he demands to watch Scooby Doo.

The way he eats is different, too. He never used to push the food into the corner of his mouth, pouching it inside one cheek, like a hamster. But he does so now. My son. My unknown son.

Surely this feeling, this sense of him having changed so fundamentally that he is no longer my progeny, should be gone by now? He should have assumed his normal proportions in my eye; the old, familiar paternal emotions formed over the past three years must come flooding back.

But they haven’t. Nothing has reverted to normal. Everything is relative, and my judgement is impaired. Either that or someone has stolen my son and put something else in his place. A doppelganger. A double…but not quite. An imperfect copy of the original.

(…a copy of a copy…)

I resist the urge to laugh, knowing that to do so would surely signal the end of something I cannot even remember beginning, and if I start I might never, ever stop.

I watch him eat and I feel so alone; alone, even though I am sharing the room with a person formed partly from my own cells, a tiny part of me mixed with a tiny part of Adi to create a perfect whole.

Perfect hole. In my life.

“What you laughing at, daddy?”

I force myself to stop, wiping the tears from my cheeks. “Nothing, fella. Daddy’s just being silly. You eat your breakfast, now. Be a good lad. It’ll make you big and strong.”

But he is already big — so fucking big. And strong, too, with those chunky hands and thick fingers. My own hands are small, like my father’s. Like his father’s before him.

A floorboard creaks above my head and I glance up at the ceiling. Cobwebs in the corners, strung between the old polystyrene coping. Dead insects wrapped up in silk — flies and moths and other, unrecognisable husks. All drained. All dead a long time.

I hear Adi close the bathroom door; the shower comes on with its usual squeal of rusted pipes. If I were to turn on the kitchen taps, she would scald under the sudden jet of red-hot water. I consider it, even going as far as bracing myself to stand. Max stares at me, chewing sideways, like a bovine. His eyes glisten like chipped gemstones. What colour where they before my trip? Blue? Brown? Now they are green.

Upstairs, Adi starts to sing: the happy-happy pills are doing their job, taking off the edges, smoothing out the day into a long flat ribbon leading towards sleep.

I stand and walk to the huge window at the back of the room, the one looking out onto the garden. Sunlight is straining to make its mark on the day, but the low clouds are fighting it, holding it back. They hang onto the darkness as if it were a lover.

There are tiny handprints on the window glass, splayed fuzzy marks that sully the otherwise clean pane. I reach out to wipe one of them away but it remains on the glass. Leaning forward across the cluttered windowsill and upsetting a vase of flowers, I stare hard at the greasy blemish; my breath mists the window, obscuring the mark.

It is on the outside of the glass.

Panic flares within me like a sudden flame, burning at my heart, climbing into my throat and drying it out. I swallow but it hurts. Razor blades slice a hot line down into my gullet.

The smaller section of window at the top of the sealed unit is ajar: I remember opening it early last night, feeling stifled in the room. But didn’t I shut it again before retiring to bed? I cannot be certain.

The handprints seem to climb towards the opening, becoming fainter, the outlines less well defined, as they reach the latch.

I turn away, blanking all thought. Max is smiling at me, one hand resting on the tabletop and the other rubbing his chin in a thoughtful gesture far too old, too mature, for one so young.

He is wearing the lopsided smile that I have come to loathe. Wearing it like a mask.