The Loosening Skin

2005. PILLS.

Some people burn love and some people bury it. Some keep it locked up, or push it far under the bed. Some sell it.

The awards ceremony is over and Max didn’t win.

That is fine with him. ‘It wasn’t my best work,’ he says into the phone, on the drive to Sussex. He sprawls in the back of the limo, beside me. ‘I can do better. I want to feel like I earned it. I might try directing.’ Then he shrugs, and says, ‘Well, yeah, I know. But I can’t run away from Daddy’s shadow forever.’ He has long conversations on the phone with his psychiatrist about his father, and what it means to be a success in a world where money no longer has meaning.

When he puts the phone down I tell him, ‘You did deserve it. You just didn’t get it. Different things.’ We squeeze hands.

Awards. Weights and measures, women and men, prizes and parties and perfection. It’s late, and I’ve watched Max all day in a professional capacity. Now I can watch him in my own time, and he is a sight in that suit, the lines cut sharp over his shoulders, the shirt so white; I want him, and so much more than that. Chemistry is one way of describing it, but underneath that there is love. I don’t care what the science books say; love doesn’t only have to be as deep as this layer of skin. It can survive. When it feels like this it must survive.

At the house, Max walks ahead of me to the bedroom, and I follow with my eyes on nothing but him. He knows it. He loses the jacket and throws it over the tall Greek vase. He strips the bow tie from around his neck and drapes it on the frame of the Pissarro. The cufflinks he deposits on the neon fish tank. It’s a running joke that this estate of his, decorated by some professional idiot, should belong to a Colombian drug lord.

He stops at the double doors and raises his eyebrows at me. I put my hands in his hair to muss it, to shake out the public and make a private mess for myself.

‘Did you see Billy’s face when Tom won? He’s such a bad actor, he couldn’t even hide it for one close-up. I hope the camera caught it.’

‘Your look was good.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Do it now,’ I tell him. He likes me to give him commands, sometimes.

He makes the losing face, giving it a hint of the best man won, and I laugh.

‘You’re too good,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll go shoot the others and get that award for you.’

‘I’m so glad I employ you,’ he says. He fiddles with the top button of his shirt. ‘These are so small. Jesus, help, I’m trapped in this thing.’

But talk of the job has cut through the come-ons. ‘I’ve got to do a sweep first.’

‘And bring the meds.’

‘Bloody Americans, with your meds. Pills, love, we’ve got to take the pills.’

‘So do it.’

‘I am!’

‘So go.’

To show him that I can, I walk away, but he knows he owns me. He has since Paris, the city of love, where the skin traders lurk on every corner from the dingy market stalls on the banks of the Seine to the Galleries Lafayette. Love comes in all price ranges.

No, not Paris in my thoughts now – I need a clear head. I bring out my baton from the inside pocket of my jacket. It puts my brain in the right place to make my sweep. From room to room, quick and quiet. I go outside for a word with the perimeter guard. Mike’s on tonight, monitoring the screens from the booth by the main gate. He’s good; he’s a safe pair of hands. After our conversation I stand on the gravel driveway and look west, out over the Downs, and all the land Max owns. These are protected grounds where a deer herd is managed, and three full-time rangers ride their quad bikes like it’s a racing track. I raised it with Max once and he said, ‘I’m getting an easy ride, so why shouldn’t they?’

I get it. I really do. But the people that feed on him make me angry. I make myself angry, sometimes, for being yet another parasite. But not tonight. The stars are out and the cold slice of the air upon my lips makes me want him more.

So I go back into the house and fetch the pills in the bathroom that’s the size of my aunt’s bungalow in Bristol. The pills are orange and tiny; they’re another reminder of Paris. The guy who sold them to us looked over his shoulder the entire time. He didn’t open the envelope to check the money Max gave him. He just pocketed it and scuttled back into the shadows of the Sacre Coeur. I suppose he thought he knew where he could find Max if he’d been ripped off. The whole world thinks it knows where it can find Max.

Only I know where to find Max right now. Through the cream double doors, and he is laid out on the four-poster bed with black silk sheets. Ridiculous, and mouthwatering.

I hand him a pill, and we swallow them down together.

The bodies, bodies together, are not love. Sex is not love, and I am not stupid. But we were in love before there was sex between us and surely that means something. It had built to something real before there was even that first tentative kiss. The body is just the instrument of the emotion; how can it be only in those cells and nowhere else? I’m overcomplicating this so I take off my clothes and leave the baton on the bedside table. I fold each article carefully before placing it on the ornate chair that must be worth more than a hundred skins.

‘Any time,’ Max says.

‘You’ll keep.’

‘I’m too tired tonight.’

‘Yeah yeah.’

He fakes a snore. His eyes are closed. We know this game. I tiptoe, and pounce. He’s ready for me, he wraps me up, he says, ‘I love you,’ on an exhalation, like the words escape from inside him. ‘Let me,’ he says, and we roll so I’m lying on my front and he can stroke my back. He likes to touch more than to be touched. He makes love, breathes his love upon me. I feel it. As the moments pass, I feel it in every place where he puts his fingers and his mouth.

‘Tell me about your first kiss,’ he says.

I shake my head against the pillow.

‘Just give me something. Some piece of you.’

He begs me on the bad nights, but I won’t ruin this with the past. ‘I do give you everything. Everything that’s right here and now is yours.’

‘I feel like I don’t know you.’

‘You know me,’ I tell him. ‘You’re in me.’

Afterwards, he sleeps, and my skin starts to itch.

My skin is loosening.

It’s starting to fall away.

I get up.

This can’t be happening, it wasn’t meant to happen, the pills – a last hope – to the bathroom, for more pills, and I take one, then two, then all of them in mechanical movements. I don’t know if I’m trying to stop the process or stop myself from moving on.

I lie down on the tiles, so warm from the underfloor heating. It’s easy to be still. The sensation of itchiness builds as my top layer of skin separates, starting around my stomach until it is a loose flap in which fluid moves, like a blister. It’s so quick this time. The need to scratch cannot be ignored any more. The pills do nothing, I have to face that now; they neither kill me nor save me. What a waste of money. What a waste.

I rub myself against the tiles in a frenzy of itching until the skin splits, spilling forth fluid, and I can wriggle free of it. Then I know no more until morning.

I wake to find Max standing over me.

‘The meds didn’t work,’ he says.

He holds out a hand that I don’t take. I lie still. From the corner of my eye I can see my old skin, beside me, light and delicate as a shroud. I touch it, and for a moment I feel last night, and all the nights back to Paris and before.

I stop touching it. I look up at Max, naked Max, the film star; so many people would pay for this view. I wish he was wearing some clothes. I wish we both were.

‘We should get dressed,’ I say, and that is enough to give it all away.

‘Oh shit, Rosie,’ he says. He crouches down beside me and strokes my face while I wonder how long I have to let him.

2003. IN TRAINING.

Rose, alone, ran after the bobbing ponytail and implacable back of the instructor in the distance. Her breathing wouldn’t fall naturally with the timing of her feet and the pain built quickly in her lungs and calves. Perhaps it was the uneven ground that made it so much harder than it should have been. Squashing the reedy grass underfoot, tramping down nettles, she kept going, wishing she’d worn long jogging trousers rather than shorts.

When the instructor – Petra – came to a sudden halt, Rose’s pride stopped her from dropping to the ground. She bent over, put her hands on her knees. Her legs were freely decorated with white welts and fine red scratches. She sucked in air, over and over. The day was cold but she didn’t feel it, only the awareness of it, the wind careering around her, unable to touch the warmth inside.

‘I thought you said you kept yourself pretty fit?’ said the instructor, through measured breaths.

Rose straightened up. ‘It’s the ground.’ Back in the direction they had come, the disused airbase was no longer visible.

‘City running.’

‘It’ll get better.’

Petra slid a hand along the dark length of her ponytail, pulling the weight of it over one shoulder. ‘You don’t need to do that. Make excuses. I’m not your boss.’

‘Okay,’ said Rose.

‘This isn’t my job, I mean. I just help Phin out sometimes, and he helps me out. In return.’

‘How?’

‘What?’

‘How does he help you out?’

Petra shook her head. The ponytail bounced. She looked like the perfect image of a personal trainer: so upright, so together. ‘You’re ex-RAF, right? Then a bouncer.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And now about to become a bodyguard.’ She opened and closed her fingers in bursts. ‘To Max Black, no less. It’s a good gig.’

‘Right.’ Rose looked along the line of the hedgerow, into the indiscernible distance. It wasn’t a city. That was all it needed to be, right now.

‘I hope you like bodyguarding. I did.’

‘You guarded Mr Black?’

‘No. Some other rich good-looking dream. Then I woke up.’

A closer look at Petra’s face showed a hint of age, but she was by no means an old woman. Still, she wore that soft expression when talking of the past.

‘You miss it,’ Rose said.

‘We all move on.’

That, at least, was certain. We all move on. Whether we want to or not.

‘Let’s get back for lunch,’ said Petra, and was gone, running at a steady, speedy pace. Rose squared her shoulders, sucked in a breath, and set off after her.

Later, at Petra’s house, Rose took a hot shower and the sensation was of her lassitude being washed from her, puddling around her feet and circling the plughole. She was fully awake for what felt like the first time since leaving the RAF. If she ran again now, she would do better.

The steam rushed and tumbled from the window as soon as she released the catch, and the cold poured in to take its place. She looked out over the airbase: the empty hangars and the silent stretch of the runway, the encroaching weeds spotting it all with green. So still, and so different from what she was used to. To be without people was good, though. To be separate, and to have space.

Apart from Petra, who was waiting downstairs in the kitchen with a chicken salad sandwich, the bread cheap and white, the tomatoes overripe and tasty.

‘How long were you a bodyguard?’ Rose asked, in between bites.

‘Four years. Then I went into business on my own.’

‘Doing what?’

‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’ She had changed into a fresh tracksuit, black and businesslike. ‘Being a bodyguard opens doors to all sorts of worlds. That’s the main thing. You meet people. Just don’t fall for any bullshit.’

‘Phineas said the clients were all in the entertainment business.’

‘That’s what I mean. It’s all glamour and promises. And you’re never on the inside. Nobody is, really.’

They ate standing up, with plates on the work surface next to the sink. Petra switched on the kettle, and the soft, building noise filled the room.

‘It’s so quiet here,’ Rose said.

‘It’s my hideaway. The MOD sold these houses off for next to nothing when they closed down the base. Old military quarters. Plus nobody’s watching the place any more so it’s a perfect location for training. It’s not guarded; I cut a hole in the fence and I come and go as I want. Weapon practice. That stuff. Miles of unused ground. Of course, you’ll know most of it already. That’s why you only get the week-long refresher.’

Rose finished the sandwich. She could have eaten another but didn’t know if she should ask. To what extent was this, the whole thing, a test?

‘If you could tell me one thing that I should know, what would it be?’

Petra chewed her mouthful, taking her time, and swallowed. ‘At some point, it will end. Tea?’

‘Yes please. Everything does, though.’

‘Not like this does. Leaving you sorry you ever got close to it. Almost believing the lie that life is so much better for some lucky, beautiful, chosen people. And then you end up somewhere else, and it all seems like it never happened. So remember who you are, down inside. The thing that is most you.’

‘Right,’ said Rose.

‘You know what I mean?’

‘Yep.’

‘No you don’t,’ Petra said, as she took down two mismatched mugs from a cupboard.

‘No,’ Rose agreed. ‘I don’t.’

2013. STOLEN SKIN.

There are sad cases and happy ever after stories everywhere, and sometimes there are both rolled up in the same skin.

I told Terence, once, about the Grecian vase, the neon fish tank and the awards ceremonies. That life reflected in his eyes, a sparkling dream, and he said, ‘You had it all, then, Rose.’ Then the glitter faded. The smell of secondhand clothes kicked into his nostrils once more, and his mind couldn’t put the two together. I saw it so clearly, the moment when he decided I was pulling his leg.

‘Good one,’ he said. ‘Good one.’ He went back to sorting out the contents of the bin bags.

The Skin Disease Centre makes a good amount in charitable donations from this little shop. It’s set up in the far corner of the reception area, behind the rows of plastic chairs, and we squeeze as much as we can on to the racks and shelves: clothes, books, trinkets and teacups. The back room is piled even higher with items waiting to be given the chance to sell; my hand gets tired with pricing it all with the ancient sticker gun. Ten pence for this coaster, a pound for that cardigan.

But hey, it’s just a tired hand attached to a tired body. It’s not fatal. When you fall a long way for a long time and a cushion provides a soft landing, you don’t complain that it smells bad and has had six previous owners. That last job should have been the end of me, but here I am.

That’s why it’s not right that he should come walking in, eight years after I shed him, looking like he’s too good for the place. Which he is.

‘Max Black,’ I say. ‘Superstar.’

‘Still just Max to you.’ He smiles.

‘Not to the rest of the world.’ He walks on water, and everything turns to liquid around him for his ease. It ripples to his touch. So many words, so much adoration, for the actor turned director. I read on a gossip website that he was making a film about the Stuck Six. ‘Were you just passing?’

He browses, actually browses, a circular rail of men’s shirts. ‘Something like that.’

‘Sussex and Lincolnshire must have got closer together since the last time I checked. You are still in Sussex?’

He hesitates, then nods. He picks a tartan shirt from the rail, with frayed cuffs and collar, and fingers the sleeve.

‘That crazy house,’ I muse.

‘I timed this for lunch,’ he says. ‘Let me take you to lunch.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you loved me once.’

That was the last thing I expected him to say. I’m aware of Terence’s attention, ears pricking up, in the back room. I get this vision of him leaning forward over a bin bag of clothes, straining to catch every word. He’s so young, only one skin out of school.

‘Terence,’ I call. ‘Can you watch the shop for an hour?’

No reply.

I pull open the curtain and find him just as I imagined, except the bin bag contains romance novels, the covers dogeared and shiny.

‘Terence.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Hold the fort.’

‘Yeah,’ he says. But he’s not looking at me. He’s looking behind me, at Max Black, and his sparkling eyes are saying – it was true. It was all true.

‘He’s in love with you,’ says Max.

‘Who?’

‘The kid. In the thrift store. Terence.’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

Max shrugs. He’s comfortable here, sure of his own thoughts in the back of his bulletproof Range Rover. There was no point in attempting a cafe, a restaurant, anything normal. His bodyguard would have to clear the place first and the staff wouldn’t leave him alone. Thus speaks the voice of experience. But here, parked up near the bus station, we can talk and his bodyguard – a good-looking woman, of course – can wait outside in the car park for however long it takes. She won’t like it, but she’ll do it.

‘I thought you were a private investigator or something,’ he says. ‘Last time we spoke you were working in London. Instead you do a disappearing act and I have to hire someone to track you down. What happened?’

‘I shed.’

‘You’re so weird,’ he says, in an angry rush, as if the words had to escape out of him, ‘You are so fucking weird, Rosie. You could have just called me if you needed money. We were – we were so happy. If you were in trouble, you could have called.’

‘If I ever am in trouble, I’ll bear that in mind.’ I open a cubbyhole in the central console and find a half-bottle of champagne, unopened, and a glass. Underneath that there’s a packet of mints.

‘You may find this ironic,’ he says, ‘but it turns out I’m the one in trouble.’

I can’t even begin to get my head around that one. ‘What kind of trouble?’

‘I got robbed.’

‘Get real.’ He’s never alone, he’s never vulnerable. He hires people to make sure of it.

‘The Sussex house got turned over. A professional job.’

‘What did they take?’ I know the answer before he says it.

‘The skins.’

‘They got into the safe room?’

I saw that room being built. I liaised about the safety features. It was Fort Knox in the South Downs. It was unbreakable.

It was asking for trouble. I find I’m not surprised. But the skins – that’s a different matter. The skins are a big deal. The thought of someone else having them makes my insides hurt. I’m suddenly grateful this isn’t my problem; Max burned my old skin. I watched him light the bonfire. The only skins in that room were his own.

If he was a normal person he would have burned his own, long ago, or sold them for a few pounds. But the rich and famous, they don’t do normal things. They keep every single shedded skin, and it’s the fashion to have special temperature-controlled rooms for them. There are so many people out there who want a tiny piece of a celebrity to call their own.

‘Check the top-end businesses,’ I say. ‘They’ll try to shift them on the quiet.’

Max shakes his head. ‘We checked. They’re not moving through the usual channels. Whoever took them is keeping them, for now.’ He wets his lips, then says, ‘Find them for me.’

‘I don’t do that any more. That wasn’t what I did, anyway, exactly. I wouldn’t be any good at this.’

‘You knew people, right? Someone in the trade took my skins. I don’t want anybody else to have them. I know you understand this.’

It’s difficult to think clearly about skins from the past. I don’t want to be near those old loves, to touch them, or feel them. But, like Max, I don’t want anyone else to, either. Particularly the skin in which Max once loved me.

‘I don’t understand you,’ he says. He takes a card from the pocket of his shirt and holds it out. ‘My private number, if you change your mind. I can pay well. But then, it’s not about the money, is it? Or the love. If you work out what the hell it is about, let me know.’ He signals and the bodyguard opens the door, so I climb out and stand in the car park, watching him drive away until I can’t see the car any more.

I can’t quite believe he left me here. It’s a fair walk back to the shop.

I look at the card.

it says, and then a number. He doesn’t even need a surname any more.

A bus will take me back in the right direction.

While I ride, I take out my phone and browse online. I start off with looking for stories about him. Is he in a relationship? Well, I’d never find the truth by searching through the gossip sites. But the pictures show him with people, of course. All kinds of people.

The skyscraper ads are all about love.

It makes our world go round; the merry spin of who is in love, out of love. A story catches my eye about the Stucks. Six of them, in love with each other at the same time, once upon a time, but now the magic is over and their story is about to be turned into a thing of cinematic beauty, courtesy of Max Black. The photo of them at the top of the article shows them in the midst of that miracle of timing, all holding hands and smiling with rare radiance.

If only other emotions were lost in the moult. Fear, pain, guilt, sadness: why must these remain? Some people say it’s because those emotions are true, lasting, while love could never survive for longer. But I think love is the strongest feeling of all, and that’s why it has to die, and be sloughed away. Otherwise it could kill us. I remember how I would have taken a bullet for Max, or murdered someone who threatened him. Surely I’m better off without those feelings.

I’m better off being the kind of person who won’t even make a few enquiries for him.

Fear, pain, guilt. Sadness.

When I reach the Skin Centre I stand outside the doors and call the number on the card. To his credit, he answers the phone himself and has the decency to sound surprised.

‘Okay,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll poke around. But that’s all. I have a life here.’

‘I know,’ he says. ‘I saw it.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means thank you. I know how hard this must be for you. I didn’t realise—’

I cut him off, and go back to work.

2005. LEAVING THE ONCE LOVED.

Petra’s office, once Rose finally located it, turned out to be in one of those back alleys that had been squeezed into the shadows of other buildings. A supermarket depot jostled up behind it, the two separated only by a high wall upon which had been arranged a regiment of broken bottles. Hammersmith Road was in front, the cars bunching up and loosening in a continuous concertina.

It was locked up tight. She pressed the doorbell, and an outline appeared through a small central panel of leaded glass.

‘It’s Rose,’ she said.

The unbolting of the door took an age.

‘I could have lost another layer, that took so long,’ she said, when Petra’s face was finally revealed. She felt the muscles of her cheeks contorting but refused to cry. Petra wasn’t the kind of person she felt she could cry on.

Petra pointed at her leather backpack. ‘Is that all?’

‘What?’

‘You shed your skin on the floor of a superstar, then break up your fabulous romance, and that’s all you bring? I expected at least one suitcase filled with money, or statuettes, or something.’

‘I don’t want to take anything of his.’

‘Don’t be such an idiot.’

‘I can’t help it. Can I come in?’

‘Yes, sorry, manners. Come up, come up.’ She stood back and admitted Rose to the tiny hall that led to a steep wooden staircase. ‘Space is money. The door on the left.’

The bolts were slammed back into place behind her, and then she heard Petra’s fast feet drumming up the stairs. The room on the left was a surprise: larger than she thought it would be, and lighter, with tall windows. It had a halfmoon shaped pine desk in one corner, and a rubber plant in a bronze pot opposite. The plant exuded health, the shiny leaves tilted upwards. Apart from that, there was a yellow chaise longue with scrolled arms, squarely in the centre of the room, and an open fireplace with a pillared mantelpiece, painted white. Upon it were stacked letters and bills, photos and manila folders, and a silver lighter. But the room did not smell of smoke, and there was no ashtray in sight.

‘You told Phin?’

‘Yeah,’ said Rose. ‘Now what?’

‘Now you come and work for me. With me, if you prefer. Is that okay?’

She nodded.

‘I’m an investigator. Fancy being one of those?’

Could this new skin be an investigator’s skin? She wondered at how quickly she had left her last self behind. The self-assurance of the bodyguard, wiped away. But she already knew, this time around, that what she had lost in confidence she had gained in curiosity. There was so much she wanted to know, such as why the love disappeared and how the hate managed to stay behind, intact. If there were answers to be found to any question, she wanted to do it. ‘What do you investigate?’

‘The worst things.’

‘Do you stop them?’

‘Always,’ Petra told her. There wasn’t a speck of doubt to be found on her in that sharp suit. She inhabited the office, and the work. Whatever it was. ‘Always. One way or another.’

2013. UNGUARDED.

A leave of absence from the shop is the hardest part to arrange. Head Office wants a return date. Eventually we settle on a Monday a month away, and I don’t mark it on the calendar, which tells me something about my state of mind.

It’s not even as if my moult is due. I should have at least another five years, but I feel done with this version of my life already.

The fast train from Grantham, then from King’s Cross to Waterloo, an easy journey out of rush hour. I try to ignore the tight feeling London gives me in my chest; is it simply the stale air of the Underground? Down to Petersfield, which is a tight, monied kind of a town, secure in itself. I decide once I get there to hire a car rather than take a taxi using the expenses card Max had couriered up for me. The note that came with it bore his handwriting, but didn’t tell me anything useful such as how much of his money I could spend, or how much he would be paying me. I’m guessing he didn’t even think about such issues.

The approach to his Sussex house is the same: undeveloped stretches of rural land for so many miles around, green fields, dotted trees that darken the sky. But then, he owns it all, so the current building boom wouldn’t affect him. The tall fence with the high spikes still runs alongside the road for miles, and then broadens out into a set of gates – chunky, not flashy. Definite in their discouragement. I pull up to the metal pillar that houses the intercom and have a short conversation with a guy who sounds familiar, but I’m not certain that it’s Mike until I’m admitted and he comes out of the booth beside the beginning of the gravel drive to greet me. I get out of the car and find myself giving him a genuine smile.

‘Look at you,’ Mike says, holding out his arms and then dropping them again before I can mistake it for the offer of a hug. ‘You look great.’

‘You look the same,’ I tell him. He really does. ‘Don’t you age? I can’t believe it, eight years and here you are.’

‘Ah, well, it’s just a job. I never get the itch after a moult the way some people do.’ Then he flushes, and I realise he’s embarrassed.

‘I have to get out straight after. Same every time. Sorry I never said goodbye. It’s just how it takes me.’

He nods and we’re over the awkward moment. ‘Mr Black said you were coming to see the safe room. They cracked it without a scratch. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘Were you on duty?’

‘Yep, and nobody came through here. I’ve checked the perimeter since, twice. It’s intact.’

‘Nobody through the gate – not even a legit caller? A girlfriend, boyfriend?’

‘Nobody. The only thing that was different that day was Taylor – the bodyguard – changed her day off. The replacement came down, signed in early in the morning, and stayed until the following morning. She’s covered for Taylor before, she’s all right. But she said she didn’t hear anything. Max took two sleeping pills and was out like a light. He’s lucky they didn’t strip him of the skin he’s in now.’

It’s a horrible crime, but I’ve heard of worse. ‘Max in?’

‘Filming on the estate. He’s got a village set up there, caravans and everything, for this new thing he’s working on. Nobody’s staying at the house.’

‘So there’s a lot of people out on the Downs, then? Actors and crew?’

‘Fifty plus.’

I roll my eyes and he smiles. It’s a security nightmare, basically. ‘I’ll have to go poke around.’

‘Starting in the house, though, right?’

‘Yep.’

‘It’s great to have you around,’ he says. He leans forward. ‘None of the ones who have come after have been a patch on you.’ He gives me a set of codes and leaves me to it. I was unprepared for the emotion, but it really is good to see him.

In contrast, the house is not a welcome sight. It gives me that uncomfortable sensation straight away – like I’m done with it, and should have left it behind. At least the decor is different. Out with the neon, the vases, and in with dark wood and rich red tapestries, even a vast open fireplace. This latest designer obviously believes in the classic English Lord look, and has succeeded in making the place too warm, too close, for my liking.

I walk the corridors and find myself in the bathroom where I lost my love for Max. It’s different too; tiled purple, with more dark wood around the edges, almost black. A framed pen-and-ink drawing of the Eiffel Tower, just a few lines creating the feeling of the city, hangs over the clawfoot bathtub.

I could be sick.

I hunch over the toilet.

The feeling passes, and I straighten up and check in the bathroom cabinet. Max always was a believer in pills, all kind of pills, but I don’t see any, not even the sleeping aids Mike was talking about. Perhaps the last couple of moults have changed that aspect of his personality; who knows what’s been taken, and what he’s willingly thrown away? Besides, that’s not my business. My business is the safe room, in the basement. So that’s where I go, and the shock of seeing that thick metal door left open, and the temperature-controlled wardrobe emptied, bare, is considerable. It’s a forlorn, forgone expensive space with those skins missing. A collected life history has been taken.

Besides that, there are some building materials down here; he must be having some work done to the place. Strengthened, perhaps, for the return of his skins? Max always did believe in the best possible outcome.

We’ve not discussed it, but I’m fairly certain the police haven’t been here. There are no signs of an investigation. Max wouldn’t want them poking around.

Besides, there’s nothing to see. No points of interest. Nothing was forced, nothing was damaged. Whoever did this had the door code. Which means I need to talk to the bodyguards – the one who was on duty, and the one who had the incredible foresight to not be.

She seems efficient. I’d guess he isn’t sleeping with her, the way she talks about him, but I was good at maintaining that distance in public, back when protecting him was my job. To stand behind someone, at the ready, without touching, looking at them only with the professional gaze in place, is an easy trick to learn. You use it no matter what your feelings about your client, or you endanger them. Some of Petra’s lessons have lasted.

‘You ex-Forces?’ I ask her.

‘Navy.’

‘Then you got hooked up with Starguard?’

‘Phin approached me in a bar. I was bouncing there.’ She smiles. So Phineas Spice has been up to his same old tricks. She looks fond of him; it’s easy to like him, even though it’s not sensible to.

‘Been here long?’

‘About a year.’

She checks behind me – over my shoulder – that Max is still in her line of vision. We’re sitting in canvas chairs next to the catering wagon, which is offering a range of breakfast goodies that I struggled to resist. My croissant looks good on the plate but soon disintegrates into a mess of crumbs. At least the Americano is hot and fresh. Back when I was on the job I never would have eaten, and I’m pleased to see Taylor feels the same. She’s sipping a mint tea.

‘You like the work?’ I ask her.

‘It’s better than bouncing, am I right?’ So she’s recognised me as ex-Forces too, with all the bad choices that come along after that stint – or perhaps Phin told her about me. That wouldn’t surprise me at all.

She frowns at something behind me, so I turn and look at Max, who is talking to a tall man with curly black hair – it might even be one of the Stucks, he looks familiar – and pointing at the sun, which is about to disappear behind a scudding cloud. Everyone is milling about, looking grumpy. Film work always did look more like standing around than doing.

‘It’s okay,’ Taylor says, ‘just outdoor filming stuff. He’s about to lose the sun. He’ll probably break for ten minutes. Well, you probably know that.’

‘I’ve never seen him as a director before. It looks like he enjoys it.’

‘Jobs,’ she says. ‘They come and go.’

Her reflective tone annoys me; I’m not here to talk philosophy. ‘The night of the skin robbery – you weren’t here.’

‘No. It was my night off. You know the drill.’

I do know the drill, well. One night off a fortnight, arranged in advance. ‘But you changed yours at short notice.’

‘Family emergency,’ she says, shortly.

I don’t see any point in pushing her. ‘So you did a handover with your replacement?’

‘Yeah. I only know her as Smith.’

‘Seriously?’

She glares at me. ‘Obviously that’s not her real name. She’s legit, though. Tall. From Korea, Phin said. She was a skin fighter, and he bought her contract.’

‘Smith the Korean skin fighter.’ Only in film star circles. If she really was in the skin fights then she’s hard as nails, but it crosses my mind that it might be a story to make her seem glamorous to the kind of people who get off on that stuff. My bodyguard used to be a hooker, that kind of line. People in the entertainment business can be downright weird.

‘Ten minutes,’ calls Max. ‘Ten minutes, everyone.’

Taylor finishes her tea and stands. I get up too, and wonder if I once looked that good. She has that fearless, appraising gaze; the one I tried to find early this morning when I put on a dark grey suit for the first time in years. I stood in front of the wardrobe and willed myself back to that alert stance, but it just wouldn’t come.

‘I have to go. Listen, you should be asking Smith this stuff. It was her shift, so it’s her mistake.’

Now I know I don’t like Taylor. She’s happy to drop Smith in it quick enough.

‘A mistake?’ I give her room to elaborate, but she swallows, and then only offers a nod. ‘We all make mistakes, though, don’t we?’ I can’t resist saying, just to see how much she rattles, and a familiar voice behind me says, ‘Don’t bother trying to win an argument with her, Taylor. It can’t be done.’

I spin, and smile, and shake Max’s proffered hand, even though the contact must be unpleasant for both of us. The feeling of wrongness that comes from revisiting the past isn’t anywhere near as strong for other people; I must remember that. Perhaps he barely feels this need to put distance between us. Some people, like my parents, even manage to stay civil after moulting. It’s a trick I’ll never master, with my condition.

‘You’re paying me to ask the difficult questions,’ I say.

‘Nope. I’m paying you to get the difficult answers. I’ll start you off. Taylor didn’t have a personal reason for changing her night off. She was running an errand for me. One that’s best kept quiet.’

‘Pills?’

He inclines his head. It’s always pills, with him. The endless pills that never work. To his credit, he doesn’t bother to explain it.

‘I’ll need the name of your supplier.’

‘Really?’

‘They knew Taylor would be out collecting your order. Possibly they’ve got something on Smith, or suspected she wouldn’t be up to the task. It was a good opportunity to take what they really wanted.’

‘No, it’s not that kind of an organisation, I swear, Rosie.’

‘Max, I have to check.’

He breathes out, his chest deflating, then asks Taylor for a pen and piece of paper, which she produces from her suit pocket. He writes down a name and address, and hands it to me.

‘Chichester? Not exactly a den of iniquity.’

‘I told you – they’re not the usual kind of people.’ He checks his watch, and strides off. No goodbye. Taylor throws me a glance, and then goes with him.

As I slip the address into my pocket I feel my phone vibrate. It’s a message from another person I thought I’d left in my past, and it means Chichester has to wait.

I need to get to London, fast.

It’s a difficult business, identifying old skins. The feeling you get from touching one is only a reflection of the love the old owner once felt, before it was sloughed away. If it was a particularly strong love you might get images accompanying the feeling: a flash of a face, or maybe even a snatch of music. Still, it’s like piecing together a puzzle, reconstructing an old photograph that’s been torn to pieces.

says the poster on the dingy green wall. There’s a Labrador puppy wrapped in a blue blanket underneath the words. His face peeks out from the folds of material. I shift my position in the moulded plastic seat. My armpits are sweaty; I’ll have to keep my arms by my sides if I don’t want anyone to smell me. Which I don’t. This kind of place reminds me how much I want my smell to be my own business.

The door opens, and in comes a small man, wearing a cream suit with a buttoned waistcoat. His shoes are imitation animal skin. I remember how I used to rely on my instant judgements, back when I was trying to learn this stuff as an occupation, and I would have said with no hesitation that this man was a petty criminal, dressing in the hope of getting better at it. Do I trust my judgements any more? I keep my face blank, non-committal, as I stand. The receptionist, an older woman who keeps knitting on the desk next to the phone, eyes us both with interest.

‘Rose Allington?’ he says. It’s an Eastern European accent. ‘Petra said to wait for you. She said you would come today, but I have other buyers. There’s a line for this one, I can move it—’ He snaps his fingers at me.

‘I’m here. I want it, if it is what you say it is.’

‘It is. But you don’t need to take my word for it.’

‘Of course. Where is it?’

‘This way.’

The receptionist’s head has been snapping back and forth during our exchange like a spectator at a tennis match.

‘Margot,’ he says, ‘hold calls.’

‘Of course.’ She turns to me and winks. It’s unbelievable. She thinks she’s in a stage play, or something – that her life as a gangster’s receptionist is not real. Maybe she moulted and woke up with the urge to leave her comfortable life behind, and this is the result; enjoying the seedy workings of a company that the world would be better off without.

I follow him through the door and down a long corridor with peeling paint and exposed pipes, my mind taken up with that wink. Is that how it gets, after one too many moults? Everything becomes an in-joke?

His office is at the end; it’s a small room, with a painting placed to draw the eye above a single high-backed velvet armchair, the seat worn shiny. The painting is meant to look very old but something tells me it’s not. It’s a reproduction of a suffering saint who wears a white robe, diaphanous, that shimmers around him – no, it’s his skin coming free. He’s in the death throes of the final moulting. His eyes are raised to heaven, and radiance comes from him as he sloughs off his last skin, and leaves this mortal life.

An alcove is curtained off; the man, name still unknown to me and I’d like to keep it that way, pulls back the thick purple material. There, folded neatly upon a long trolley, is a skin. It looks as light and ordered as a sheaf of papers.

‘Full out,’ I say. I know the tricks.

‘You don’t want to touch first?’

‘Full out.’

He lifts it and arranges it, to make it into the shape of a body once more, and I know instantly that it’s not one of Max’s.

‘You’re wasting my time.’

‘Wait.’

‘It’s not even male.’ The breasts have been cut away and the remaining material sewn together to create a flatter chest that would fool nobody in the skin trade. I could leave. I should leave.

‘Just touch it,’ says the nameless man.

I put my fingers to the long, flat tube of the nearest arm and let the emotion come to me.

Yes, that’s love, the remains of it, the whisper that dies away from the shout and can never quite be silenced. Love for Max, specifically, undeniably; I’m getting it clearly now, the feeling as precise as a signature. Not fan adoration, not a crush, which is different. This is the real deal. Deep, and reciprocated. Requited love, soaked into the skin.

I see Max for a moment as I once saw him. He’s the bridge of the song, the voice of happy ever after. He’s how to live, and why.

The feeling fades.

He was my reason to write bad poetry; thank God I never was one for recording my emotions. I can’t quite believe how I felt about him, just as I can’t believe that anybody else ever did.

This is my skin.

My skin, here, in this crumbling back office, the breasts mutilated in the name of money. Max told me he’d burned it. I watched him walk it out to the bonfire.

I pull back my hand.

‘See? Not fake.’

I can tell from his expression that he doesn’t know it once belonged to me.

‘I’ll take it,’ I say. ‘What’s your price?’

He touches his tongue to his top lip and names a huge sum. Max’s very first moult itself wouldn’t cost more. We haggle, and I knock him down a little, but nowhere near as much as I should. I have no taste for this. I need that skin, and that’s all there is to it.

But I also need one more thing, and I have to time it right, so I wait until the deal is struck and the skin has been refolded and wrapped in zbrown paper, and the money is about to be transferred from Max’s credit line, before I say, ‘I’ll need the details.’

‘What?’

‘Provenance. Who sold it to you?’

‘That’s not— I don’t—’

‘Details.’ I plant my feet squarely, make it clear I won’t move without it. ‘It’s necessary. Or we can cancel.’

He’s already pictured the money in his account; he’s not going to lose it now. ‘It was a charity shipment. Random bag. I have people who go through, checking for pure ones. We got lucky.’

‘You did,’ I agree, although I know nobody gets that lucky. But it’s not his bluff. My instincts, long unused and struggling to surface, tell me that he really believes in this random bag story. Which means he’s part of the setup.

‘We’re done,’ I tell him, and I complete the transaction on my phone. He leads me out, a different path this time, down a flight of stairs and through a warehouse with thin, dirty windows where women and machines are hard at work. Skins are being sorted, pressed, scissored and stitched to make skimpy underwear. Love is a warm layer, indeed.

Back out on the street I find a familiar franchise of cafe and call Petra, who asks me if her tip was good. She doesn’t question me when I ask her instead where it came from. She was once my partner; she knows who to trust, and when. We worked together every day before this last moult of mine, and we were good at it.

‘Don’t drop me in it, Rose,’ she says.

‘It never came from you.’

So she gives me a name – a name that I’ve already heard today.

I finish my call and eat a slice of cake, savouring the sweetness. I have gone soft; I’m running on caffeine and sugar. A text message comes in.

How strange it is, to see our names next to each other on the screen.

I don’t reply. I open my leather backpack and look at the brown paper package inside. To buy it cost more money than I’ll ever make in my life. Luckily, it’s not my money. And I had to have it; Max will understand that. Particularly because this is his fault. If he had burned it as I asked, as he told me he had, it wouldn’t have been sitting in his skin room when the thieves took the lot.

So now I have to carry my old skin with me until I can find the time to dispose of it properly. I don’t want to be close to it, but there’s no choice. It’s now become part of this puzzle.

And the man who holds the next piece is Phineas Spice.

2006. LIGHTER.

London wasn’t so much a place as a mismatched mosaic of a city. The buildings looked sturdy enough, but the colours weren’t coherent. One backdrop was bright, the next clouded, and the pieces of people were dotted so randomly, an arm here, a head there. Rose never felt that she saw a whole person, only glimpses of expressions in a sharp-edged cut-out compilation.

She saw it differently to Petra, she knew. Petra found form and shape in everything because of the way it settled around her; she was her own centre. But Rose, sitting in her sleeping bag on the floor of the dark office, waiting for Petra’s return, worried she would never learn how to be that way.

She leaned her head against the wall, and the manila folder slipped from her lap to the cream carpet, the documents and photographs splaying out like a fan. There they were – what Petra would have called the worst things.

The only way these kinds of pictures, this kind of knowledge, made sense was if a person said to herself – some people aren’t right. They aren’t right in the head.

Them and us.

Or Rose could say – I’d never do a thing like that, but how could she be sure? What lay under the next skin, and the next?

But no, easier to say she’d never pay to watch people rip each other’s skin to shreds, and call it entertainment. The folder covered most of the details of skin fighting in the ring they had been investigating: the betting system, the location, the weapons specially designed to rip and scar. One of the fighters’ managers would call time, eventually, afraid of what might happen next. Because if you damaged the skin enough, the next shed wouldn’t be clean, or easy. The pain could send a person out of their mind, or kill them, and only a very specific crowd wanted to bet on that kind of thing, Petra had told her.

Pictures of scars, of skins in shreds, making London’s mosaic pieces, lay scattered upon the plush cream carpet of the office.

No, it made no sense. Except to Petra, who had investigated it on Phineas’s behest, and made a decision about what needed to be done next.

Call the police? Rose had said, almost hopefully. The police would give everything shape, for her.

See this bloke? said Petra, pointing to a shot of the crowd in cinema-style seating, close to the cage. He is the police.

It was like a line from a film. Too slick to be true. But maybe, sometimes, life could be like a film. For some people.

It was getting late. The concertina of traffic on the Hammersmith road was down to a soft squeeze. Rose leaned forward in her sleeping bag and gathered up the documents. She put them back in the file.

Everything was in its place except for the silver lighter that lived on the mantelpiece. Petra had taken it with her. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, but it was the first time Rose had asked to go along. She had been given a look of bemusement in return. Did it mean she wasn’t ready?

Enough questions.

She slid down the wall to lie flat on the carpet. Petra would take the chaise longue when she came back in; unspoken rules stated it was her sleeping spot. The weekends they spent back in Wiltshire, compartmentalising with a fair amount of success. Sometimes work spilled over into the conversations, but mainly they ate sandwiches and ran over the fields with the pace and purpose of escapees.

It was good.

One weekend, a few months ago, Petra had said, I’m due a moult, I think I’ve started, and sure enough there was a skin to be taken to the nearby council-run incinerator the next morning. Nothing changed, and there was no drama to it. Petra was the same.

It doesn’t bother me much, she said. Worse if I’ve got a partner, obviously, and then there’s breaking up and all that, but they’ve never turned nasty on me.

Of all the pieces that made no sense, that was the one that made Rose suspect that if there was a God, he had it in for her personally. But that was not a good, or a true, thought, she constantly reminded herself.

Sleep came from nowhere and left just as suddenly, to the sound of the downstairs door opening. The grainy light of early morning, followed by Petra’s feet on the stairs, their quick rhythm: and then she was in the room, just visible, with the smell of smoke unspooling from her black clothes. She moved to the desk, then to the mantelpiece, searching through the piles of paper.

‘You okay?’ whispered Rose.

‘Yeah. I can’t find—’ She spotted the manila folder, beside Rose. ‘Is that it?’

‘I was just looking through it.’

‘What for?’ Petra squatted and picked up the file. The smell of her was appealing in its thickness. It had its own presence in the room, speaking of an action completed.

After a pause, Rose said, ‘I don’t know.’

Petra patted her leg, through the sleeping bag. She took the file to the fireplace, and laid it in the grate. The silver lighter, produced from the pocket of her black leather coat, was flicked into life, and the file caught fire easily.

‘Done,’ said Petra. She stood, and stripped away her clothes. Her sports bra and pants were also black, sensible, and she looked lean. Fit for purpose, whatever that meant.

‘How did it go?’ whispered Rose. It was impossible to talk at a normal volume in the half-light.

‘You know when you get rid of a skin you were really enjoying and its like watching the good stuff go up in flames? This is the opposite.’

‘But won’t they just set up another ring somewhere else?’

‘Of course. It’ll take them a few weeks, though.’

Petra wriggled into her sleeping bag, on the chaise longue. Rose listened to a long sigh escape her lungs.

‘What good does it do, then?’ she murmured.

‘It helps me.’

‘Helps you what?’

‘Feel good about myself.’

‘Is that all that matters?’ said Rose, feeling a pain inside, a cutting emotion to which she couldn’t begin to put a name. ‘It’s like… It’s like you’re the most important thing in your own universe.’

‘I am. We all are. What I don’t get is why you won’t admit you should be the most important thing in yours.’

Later, when she was on the verge of finding sleep again, Petra said softly to her, ‘Keep trying, Rose. One day you’ll understand.’

2013. AFTER STARGUARD.

Is there really life after Starguard? Before this hunt kicked off I would have said yes. I had said my goodbyes to Phineas, and thought myself done with it all. Max bought me out, so there was no debt left to pay; I never expected to find myself willingly asking a favour of Phin again.

He sits at the polished glass bar of his club, sipping his vodka tonic. He’s aged, but the eyes are the same. Untouched by the life, somehow immune to all complications of skin. He always did look a little greasy to the touch with that permanent tan; he shines under the club spotlights, as if it all slips away from him.

It’s simple, he said to me, when Max paid him back for the clothes, the contacts, the cost of the opportunity. Don’t ever fall in love. It’s a choice.

He lived as if that were true. Perhaps it was, for him. A different partner every night, paid for so there was no chance to prefer one to the others. He never retraced his steps, that was the rumour.

If I make him sound like a monster then I’ve only explained one half of him, for all these things stem from the practicality that protects him. To live by your own rules and never deviate from them – that gives him a power that goes beyond charm. I do believe he has never meant to cause anybody deliberate harm. In fact, he’s gone out of his way to shut down the worst excesses of human behaviour he’s come across. But I now think it’s all to protect the sweet soul that I sometimes glimpse in him, and if you get caught up in his defence mechanism then he’d only think you an idiot.

Still, I think he’s always had a soft spot for me.

It’s early evening for the club – before midnight – and it won’t start heating up until after two. So right now the music is only soft jazz, and I don’t have to raise my voice to make myself heard.

‘I’m betting you already know why I’m here.’

‘I knew you’d work it out, Rose. I hear you’re up in Lincolnshire. How’s that?’

‘Different.’

‘So why go back to the work now? Hanging clothes on racks not cutting it for you?’

‘Max asked me,’ I say. I take a sip of my mineral water.

‘That’s not it, though, is it? It was the thought of those old skins, being stroked. Being used. You would have moved on for good if he hadn’t kept those old skins.’

‘What do you do with yours?’ I ask, giving in to the temptation to make it personal.

‘Take them down the public incinerator,’ he says. ‘I know, that’s not in fashion. I had you down for a burner too, but then this old skin popped up on the radar and I thought – nobody loved Max like you did. Then I heard about the burglary and it all made sense. Did he keep it without you knowing?’

‘It was a misunderstanding.’

Phin raises an eyebrow. When I don’t elaborate, he says, ‘We wear ourselves, then we peel ourselves away. We change and we change. How strange it is, the things we become, and the things we throw away. Do you know that poem? One of the Stuck Six wrote it, after she moulted.’

‘No.’

‘Well. It’s not important. I did you a favour, getting word to Petra before some crazy came along and snapped it up.’

‘Thank you.’

‘So let’s say we’re even. We’ve helped each other out enough for that, I think.’

He might mention things I’m desperate not to talk about. The warehouse flashes through my mind, so I move the conversation along. ‘How did you hear about it?’

He smiles. ‘It was being shouted out, Rose. Everyone was talking about it – the thefts, and then this appearance, from nowhere, of a prime Max Black contact skin, up close and personal, with the smell of sex on it.’ I wince, and he pats my hand. ‘Sorry, but that’s how it was broadcast. There was nothing subtle about it. I’d watch your back, if you’re carrying that skin around. There are lots of unscrupulous people in the game.’

I stand up. ‘Thanks,’ I say.

‘You going to destroy it, then?’

‘It should have been destroyed at the start.’

‘Yes, it should,’ he agrees.

I remember how much I like him. Like is different from love – it can survive. It’s held in the brain, perhaps, and not the skin. Phin found me working clubs as a bouncer, considering moving into fighting or selling myself, and he set me up in a job. With Max. Then he let Max buy out my contract. It was all about money, but it was never cruel, and he could so easily have been cruel, considering all the things he’s seen.

And then he was my employer again, in a different way. He still is Petra’s employer. They both try to make themselves feel better about the world, and that’s fair enough, I think. Yes, it’s fair enough.

He once told me something about myself, that helped me to make sense of the inexplicable. For that, along with everything else, I will forever think good thoughts of him.

I lean in and kiss his greasy cheek goodbye.

‘I’ve got a gig minding Trad Prester,’ he says. ‘Two weeks, London, next month. Cash in hand, if you’re interested, as a one-off. You still in shape?’ He looks me up and down.

‘Not even a little bit.’

‘Ah well. You should do something about that before age catches up with you.’

‘It already has.’ I turn to leave, and then remember one more question I should ask. ‘Smith. She was working for Max the night of the burglary. Can I speak to her? Is she here?’

‘Smith?’

‘Skin fighter you liberated. Korean.’

‘Ahh…’ He swallows, and the movement draws attention to the folds of skin around his Adam’s apple, visible above the opening of his cream shirt. So he has aged, after all. ‘No, you can’t speak to her. She went back to fighting.’

‘She chose to go back in?’

‘Some of them do. They get the taste for it.’

‘Where is she now?’

He shakes his head. ‘Got in a nasty bout, nothing to do with me.’

‘She’s dead?’

‘She was lovely,’ Spice says. ‘Straight off the container ship, they got her.’

‘You got her out, though.’

He takes a long drink. ‘Well, we didn’t speak the same language anyway.’

‘When was this?’

‘Day before yesterday. It’s all very fresh in the mind right now.’ He taps the side of his head. ‘Never mind. It’ll pass.’

I don’t ask him anything else. I leave it at that. Enough of London. I feel the same way about it as I feel about Phineas Spice. I have fond memories but I’ll be damned if I make too many new ones.

A bad night’s sleep in a cheap hotel later, I take the first train to Chichester. On the journey, the carriage window stuck half open and the businessman behind me shouting into his phone over the wind, I make a list of my skins:

My sixth moult is not due for another couple of years, at least, if things go according to the pattern.

So I have the fourth moult with me, in my backpack, and I will burn it as soon as the opportunity presents itself. That leaves only the first moult to account for. I know I’m only feeling paranoid, but I have to be sure that nobody can get to it. Even though the fourth skin, the one impregnated with Max, is the only one that could fetch big money. My first teenaged moult – well, there are people who would buy that for a few quid and a cheap rub from an online auction, but I’m not scared of those people. I only feel sorry for them.

But I need that skin gone anyway.

When Mum got ill my Aunt Alice took in her old skins. She’d been a hoarder all her life, and although I said they should be cremated along with her, Alice wouldn’t hear of it. I hadn’t thought about it before, but I suppose that means Alice still has my first skin too, so I need to find the time to return to Bristol.

But first I have to try to do my job.

2013. ONE SKIN AWAY.

The industrial estate on the south side of Chichester holds the usual small businesses for an affluent city: a curio shop next to a gym next to a vintage car mechanic next to a reclaimed antique tile seller. And in Unit 43B, tucked away at the dead end, there’s the supplier of Max’s damned pills. It’s a clean white box of a building with blacked-out windows.

It’s better than the back streets of Paris, although I’m expecting to find the same kind of impossible promises inside. The pills we popped together once upon a time guaranteed current skin longevity. They were meant to give us longer in love. I wonder what Mallory Peace are selling him, and if he still wants to stay in the same skin forever. Perhaps, this time, he wants to speed up the process, or have the new skin underneath look younger. Does that sound like something Max would want? It’s difficult to remind myself that I really don’t know him any more.

There’s a security camera over the main entrance, and a small intercom along the white wall. I push the little round button, not sure yet what I’m going to say. This is not how a proper private detective would do it. What would Petra lead with? Her voice won’t come to me.

‘Can I help you?’ A man’s voice: pretty young, I’d guess.

‘Max Black sent me.’ I don’t elaborate.

I wait through the silence. The buzzer sounds, and the door swings back.

What’s inside is a surprise.

Isn’t that always the way, though? What’s inside, behind, underneath that first layer, waiting to be found.

Focus, I tell myself.

The professional front is not a front at all. This really is a laboratory, an expensive operation, and the people I can see through the wall of safety glass that separates the workplace from the reception area are the real deal, with white coats and studious expressions. They are of all ages and colours, tapping on computers, using unidentifiable equipment; these aren’t three college boys with bad hair, kitchen foil and a Bunsen burner.

Perhaps I should have expected better of Max.

No, no I shouldn’t. He liked them on the seedy side. The back street exchanges, money in envelopes. He got a kick out of all that. This is a development; perhaps one that happened after a skin change.

The workers don’t look at me. They must be used to visitors. This is certainly a room for that purpose alone – for the process to be observed. I look around me, at the upholstered chairs with curved arms and the pastel drawings of flowers on the walls. It reminds me of a dentist’s waiting room.

I would sit quietly and wait but I tell myself that I’m here for a reason. I shouldn’t have the patience or the personality type for waiting, right? Time is money. So I steel myself and tap on the glass. Everyone looks up, frowning in my direction. One of the white coats disengages from a computer and comes my way: an older woman with orange-rimmed glasses, bright, probably meant to be fun, but they give her a fierce and owlish look.

She puts her hands to the glass wall and a section slides back. The waft of air from the laboratory is cool and sweet-smelling. ‘Rose Allington?’

‘Did Max tell you I’d be dropping in?’

‘He did. He speaks highly of you. I’m Anna Mallory.’

We shake hands, and she slides the door closed behind her. So I’m not getting the guided tour.

‘It’s your name on the sign,’ I say.

‘One of them.’

‘So Max deals with you directly?’

‘He did, when he first signed up for the service. Since then he’s not come in person. A young woman has picked up the treatment package. But we’re expecting him in a month’s time, for an evaluation. To see how it’s going.’

The young woman – that would be Taylor, the bodyguard. ‘What treatment package is he on?’ I look around the room again, to make sure I haven’t missed it. But no, there’s no price list, no explanations. No written material at all.

‘I’m afraid that’s confidential,’ she says.

‘I have Mr Black’s confidence.’

‘In that case I suggest you ask him directly. How many questions do you have, Ms Allington? Should we sit down?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘We should sit down.’

So we perch on the chairs, both bolt upright, and I ask far more questions than I had intended to, mainly to annoy her. To see if she can be annoyed. Which, apparently, she can’t.

‘Who knew about Mr Black’s package? The times of delivery, say?’

‘Me. Employees who deal with delivery preparation. They’re all vetted carefully. I can supply you with a list of names, but I’d rather you didn’t speak to them directly unless absolutely necessary.’

‘How’s your online security?’

‘We employ a firm called Bastion Solutions to handle that. I took the liberty of asking them to check our records when Mr Black told me about the burglary. They reported no threats or compromises, but they are expecting your call.’

And so on, and so on. Every question I ask she’s already thought of, and with every stonewall I find myself getting more and more curious as to what she’s actually promised Max. Because she’s the kind of person who doesn’t promise what she can’t deliver.

‘When did you first meet Mr Black?’ I ask her.

For the first time her eyes flicker. So here it is – a lie. ‘Eighteen months ago.’

‘Did you approach him, or did he come to you? How did he find out about you?’

‘He phoned in an enquiry. I’d imagine he heard about us from somebody else in his line of work. We’re quite well known in the entertainment industry now, and nearly all of our clients come through a personal recommendation.’

‘Do you know which client recommended you to Max?’

She smiles. Well, of course she wouldn’t answer that. But the smile is thin, and unamused. We’re in territory she doesn’t want to traverse.

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Never mind. I’ll ask him myself. Can I get that list of names? Employees with access to Mr Black’s records?’

‘I’ll email it. Could you?’ She hands me a pen and a small orange notepad that matches the shade of her glasses. When I flip it open I find only pristine pages; it’s brand new. I write my name, phone number and email address, feeling her eyes upon my writing.

‘Thank you,’ she says as I hand it back, and the way she says it makes me think that she’s won this confrontation. Something important has passed between us and I don’t even know what it is. Petra would have known. Petra would have solved this case by now.

We stand, and say polite goodbyes, before she taps in a code on the doorpad to release me back into the wild.

I walk to the hire car with no idea of what just really happened.

2007. BIG PICTURE.

It made for a strange evening – sitting in the dark with Petra, watching the screen. A story of romance unfolded, to the swoops and slides of well-played strings, and Max Black portrayed a dying businessman, hard and humourless, falling for his ditzy carer who brought sunshine to his final days. The actress was new to Rose. She had a miraculous complexion: so clean, so smooth. Rose spent the entire film wondering if it was digitally enhanced. Was anybody ever that beautiful? In comparison Max’s skin looked tight, tired. But he was meant to be dying, according to the script.

Afterwards they rode the tube to Phineas’s place, and sat around with him, taking three seats around a square table. Phin provided a jug of margarita.

‘To us,’ he said, once their frosted glasses were filled. Rose touched glasses with Phin, then with Petra, and drank.

The film was an easy place to start a conversation. Max the Object could be discussed as easily as one discusses the weather, or the decor, or the latest trash in the newspapers.

‘He looked old, didn’t he?’ said Petra.

‘Older,’ Rose conceded.

‘I hear he’s moving into directing movies,’ said Phin. ‘The girl I’ve got guarding him now says he’s working on a new project. He doesn’t do anything but work. She wants a change of assignment. Says he’s boring.’ He smoothed a hand along his bald head. ‘Even a movie star isn’t enough for the young now. They want adventure. Speaking of which…’

‘Yep, get down to it then, Phin,’ said Petra cheerily, pouring herself more margarita.

He switched his attention to Rose alone. ‘What made you want to go see that film?’

‘I just wanted to,’ she said, feeling defensive. ‘I like silly plots. Pure escapism.’ But it had been more than that – something to do with bringing two parts of her life together. She had, for the longest time, felt as if there were two halves to her that had twisted in opposite directions, like a cut peach around a stone.

And she had felt something powerful, watching Max with Petra beside her: that was definite. Max had once been all her own, and she had been his carer, his light; it had not been a concoction of the screen. Just as working with Petra was not a fabrication either. She tried to accept that she was all of these things: a bodyguard, a soldier, an investigator, a lover, a hater. Why did it matter? She didn’t know.

The club was busy enough that it felt possible, even desirable, to hold an intimate conversation loudly. Or perhaps that was the margarita. ‘I don’t want to see him again,’ she said. ‘Not in person. But on the big screen, that’s different. I can cope with that.’

‘Whatever works,’ said Petra.

‘Here,’ said Phin, and slid a manila folder across the table. ‘Give that a look. Not here, though. I’ve got something else I want to talk about.’

‘Really?’ said Petra. ‘There’s a first time for everything.’

‘Should I…?’ Rose made a motion to stand.

‘No, it’s about you.’

Here it comes, she thought. The conversation she had been expecting for months, since it became obvious to her that she was no good at this life. She’d have to find a new place to live, new friends, a new person to be.

‘Have you heard of EMS?’

That was a surprise. She shook her head.

Phin coughed. ‘Look, it’s— I don’t do personal, okay, but I was reading about this EMS thing and I thought, that’s Rose. Extreme Moult Syndrome. We all know some people have a bad time with it, but doctors are saying if you have to dump it all every single time then maybe it’s a medical condition.’

Petra said, ‘Bloody hell, they give everything a name now.’

‘Look it up, that’s all I wanted to tell you,’ said Phin. ‘Right, I’m done. Give me weekly updates on that one, it’s sensitive.’ He pointed at the file, then left them behind, returning to his usual seat at the bar where three men in white shirts with rolled sleeves – cardboard cutout gangsters – were waiting for him.

‘I swear I don’t understand him,’ said Rose.

‘What’s to understand?’

‘I just mean—’

‘I reckon,’ Petra said, very slowly, leaning in, ‘that he has a wife somewhere in suburbia. That she calls him Graham or Keith, and he has a lawnmower and hanging baskets.’

‘Really?’

‘You think Phineas Spice could be his actual name?’

‘But married?’

Petra shook her head. ‘I’m just kidding. No, he’s not married.’ A change came over her expression – a decision to let the margarita move her into a confessional frame of mind. ‘Listen, when I was on the Starguard books I – I had this thing with the celebrity couple I was guarding. I got attached. They didn’t. He got me out of there when the time came. Sometimes I wonder if, once upon a time, he got hurt so bad that he told himself he’d never go through it again. And that’s how he lives. But when he sees someone else going through it, that nearly hurts as bad, for him.’

‘You think?’

She shrugged. ‘It’s my personal theory.’

‘Is that why he took me on as a trainee investigator, after the Max thing?’

Petra winked. ‘Nope. That was my idea. You think you have this EMS then? Look it up.’

‘Now?’

‘Come on, let’s hear all about it.’

Rose checked it on her phone. There had been a documentary about it on television, a few days ago, and a website had been set up. She found a long checklist, filled with questions about behaviours: did she find it impossible to stay in contact with people after a moult? Had she ever experienced a moult after a personal trauma? Had she ever lost consciousness during a moulting? Petra replied for her as she read them aloud, saying, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ until they reached the bottom, when she said, ‘Well, shit,’ with an air of finality.

‘Yeah,’ said Rose, feeling it sink into her. She had a condition. She had an explanation.

‘So what’s the cure?’ said Petra.

‘I don’t think there is one. It’s just an awareness thing.’

Petra raised a fist of solidarity. ‘Well now we’re aware.’

‘I’ll go see a doctor.’

‘You never saw a doctor about it before?’

‘Of course I did. But I don’t have much luck with doctors.’

‘It’s not their fault being grumpy if they can’t cure it. Imagine having to face a patient that you really can’t help.’

‘It’s not my fault either. It’s the way I’m made.’

‘It sure is. I’m drunk.’ She stated it as a fact.

‘Drink less, then!’

‘But that’s the way I’m made,’ she said, and laughed.

2013. THE COST.

‘I can’t help you,’ I tell him. ‘I’m not a proper private investigator. I never have been.’

He’s reserved the whole restaurant, of course. The waitress tiptoes around me, her eyes on Max as she deposits a wicker breadbasket on the table. It’s an old-fashioned bistro with a candle in a green bottle, and a padded menu with a tassle. It offers comfort food, lasagne and lamb shanks, and the promise of a dessert that won’t be deconstructed. Max always did prefer this kind of food, the cheaper places with checked tablecloths, and I’m glad to see in this, at least, his tastes haven’t changed.

But I haven’t changed either: I always did hate eating out with him.

‘I thought we’d had this conversation,’ he says.

I wait until the waitress reluctantly leaves, then tell him, ‘I thought I could make it work, but I can’t. I was never like Petra. I wanted to be, and I suppose I thought… this time…’

‘You were in love with her? Petra?’

Why would he jump to that conclusion? ‘No, that’s not it. It’s too difficult to explain.’ Impossible to explain, certainly to him.

He shakes his head and takes a white roll, dotted with little black seeds, from the basket. ‘Research shows the only thing that goes with the skin is that form of sexually based attraction we call love. Nothing else. Look at the Stuck Six. They manage to all get along, still. It’s beautiful to witness.’

‘Yeah, I heard about them. Not in my case.’

‘No, with you it’s everything, isn’t it? Everything gets left behind when that skin comes off. Left behind, or thrown away. Other people manage to stay friends, help each other through those dark patches. They even stay together. Why not? We don’t all have to be in love.’

I’ve heard this before, had this argument before. ‘I do. I’ve been diagnosed with EMS. It’s who I am.’

‘It is,’ he says again, but this time with such quiet affection, such meaning, that I can’t bear it. ‘Rosie, you’re unique. You think the EMS is you, and you are it. But that’s not true. There’s so much more to you.’

The wine is good, probably the best bottle in the whole place. I look around the room – an old habit, unnecessary, since Max has a team of three with him tonight courtesy of Starguard – and see a man standing in the alcove behind the bar behind a red curtain, half-closed. For a second I’m tense, and then I see his posture, and I know he’s no threat. The manager, possibly, in deferential mode. He lifts a hand and gives me a thumbs up.

He thinks we’re on a date. Everyone likes to make their own stories, for telling. For reeling out like fishing line.

Soft jazz music arrives through the speakers over the bar. The saxophone grates on my nerves.

‘The Stuck Six,’ I say. ‘You’re basing your film on the autobiography one of them wrote? I bet the rights cost a fortune.’

‘It’s fascinating, though, isn’t it? Six people, all in love with each other at once. A miracle, some might say. You should meet Mikhael; he’s the one that’s been helping me with the adaptation.’

‘The one that wrote the book?’

‘No. The last one to fall in love.’

‘The young good-looking one.’ Why do I sound bitter?

‘They were all young. They were all very much in love.’

‘Until one of them wrote a book about it and they fell out over his version of events.’

He grimaces. ‘They haven’t fallen out. That was just the media talking. They’re just living their own lives now. It was real, though it was different for each of them. Have you read Howard Stuck’s autobiography? It’s a revelation. None of us experience love in the same way, do we? I want to concentrate on that. You know their skins are in the British Museum? You can go visit them. Even touch one, if you arrange an appointment. You should. I did. It’s overwhelming.’

‘I’m surprised you didn’t buy the bloody skins and keep them in that uncrackable safe room of yours.’

The starters arrive, just as I was gearing up to getting it all off my chest. We’re sharing a wooden platter of antipasti, with gleaming meats laid next to bowls of olives, peppers, oil and vinegar. Everything on the table must be rearranged to make room for it. The candle in the bottle is moved to the next table along, so the food is in semi-darkness. It makes the music seem louder.

‘Come on then,’ says Max, when the waitress leaves. ‘Give it to me.’

‘What?’

‘The reason. The real reason you don’t want to work for me.’

‘It’s not… Look, I think you should get a proper detective. I never was. Let me go back to Lincolnshire.’ Am I pleading with him now? ‘I’m only good for the shop, I promise you.’

He spears an olive with a wooden pick. ‘You’re so wrong. And you know what? You’ve spent a heck of a lot of my money already. I want results.’

‘I bought a skin.’

‘I know.’

‘I bought my skin.’

‘I know!’ he says, as loud and angry as I’ve ever seen him, flipping the platter, sending the food flying: ham, oil, everything, all over the checked tablecloth. The waitress and the manager arrive quickly, apologising – why are they apologising? They move our glasses across to the next table where our candle still burns. They fuss around, promising a new platter in only a moment. It takes so long for them to leave.

‘You’re an idiot,’ I tell him, when I finally get the chance. ‘My Max would never have done something like that.’

‘It’s the price I have to pay to get you to talk to me,’ he says. ‘For fuck’s sake, Rosie, say it. I know what you bought. How mad do we both have to be before we can have the conversation?’

‘You kept it.’

He flings up his hands. ‘Yes! Hallelujah.’

‘You kept my skin, and you promised. You promised.’ I cannot allow myself to cry.

‘I couldn’t,’ he says. ‘As soon as I touched it, I knew I couldn’t. I kept it – you can say no, I get it, I understand, believe me – can I have it back?’

‘Not ever. Not ever.’

‘Okay. Okay.’

He tries to put a hand over mine and I bat him off. ‘I’m burning it. I asked you to burn it. Now I’m going to do it, and make sure it’s done.’

‘Okay. Have you got it here? Is it with you?’

It sits in my backpack, next to the leg of my chair. ‘None of your business.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong.’

‘Why? Because you paid for it?’

‘I swear,’ he says, ‘I swear, nobody can get under my skin the way you can. Even now.’

‘It’s not even whole any more.’ Now I’ve started to speak I can’t stop. ‘They cut off the breasts, probably sold them separately, made a fortune. Now somebody out there owns them. Touches them.’

‘What?’

‘The skin, it was cut when I found out, and now I’m owned, that’s owned. Some rich fan of yours is out there wearing what I felt as a fucking bra.’

‘The breasts were gone.’ He says the words slowly, as if inching into new territory.

‘That’s what I’m saying.’

‘But I…’ He puts his hands over his eyes. His body shakes. It takes me a moment to realise he’s crying. Crying over my loss, my skin. Not his.

I can’t watch him feel this as if it happened to him.

‘I’m done.’ I stand, pick up my backpack. ‘I’ll send you a report on what I learned, because that’s what people in this line of work do, isn’t it? But the report won’t contain much, because I didn’t learn much. Get someone better.’

‘So you’re going? That’s it?’ He lets his hands fall away, and the look on his face takes me back, right back, to that bathroom floor.

‘Goodbye, Max.’ I can’t help but clutch the backpack to me as I leave the restaurant. The bodyguards, Taylor included, watch me walk away, and I don’t look back.

I spend the night at a good hotel in Chichester and charge it to Max’s card for no reason I can explain. I order lobster salad, drink most of the stuff in the minibar and watch an adult film, wanting him to see the itemised bill, to hold a picture in his mind of me, on this night: eating, drinking, wanking, being alive. Having a good time. Or not having a good time, depending on how he chooses to play it in his head.

He shouldn’t bother me this much.

He shouldn’t.

2013. REARRANGED.

Howard Stuck’s autobiography is a thick book in a large font, with a lot of glossy pictures of the Stuck Six, from their baby photos to their posed contemporary portraits. I buy it in town for the train journey down to Bristol, and I open it at random. As I read I try to understand what Max sees in this story:

I stop reading and put the book down. This oversimplified description is not a love I recognise. What kind of film will Max make of this? Is this how he rationalises what we felt for each other, with trite analogies of flowers and pizzas and growing and learning?

When the train pulls into Temple Meads I leave the book on the seat.

I grew up in Bristol. It’s one of those cities that feels individual, personal, no matter how big it gets and how many smaller places it swallows up. From Temple Meads I take a taxi to the suspension bridge, and walk from there to my aunt’s house. It amazes me how the bridge stays the same, no matter how many times the crew of workmen replace every single nut and bolt. The cars thunder over and the bolts shake loose, shake loose, and yet it remains somehow itself.

I suppose finding any hint of permanence in my life will always continue to surprise me.

Listen to me. Maybe deep inside, under all the skins, I’m a stand-up comedian.

The walk gets rid of the remains of my hangover. It’s a bright day, warm, so Alice is probably in the garden. I ring the doorbell a few times and get no answer, so I head around the back. The garden gate is unlocked, and she has her back to it as she weeds the borders to her gravel path, kneeling upon the mat I bought her last Christmas.

‘Hello Rose,’ she calls, without turning around.

‘You should keep this locked.’

‘Why? Only you come around this way.’

‘Burglars.’

‘That’s the job talking.’

I kneel down beside her and watch her pull out the dandelions, digging her fingers deep into the soil to reach the root. They come out white and twisted, and I think of maybe burying that old skin instead, right here. Alice would let me. But I don’t ask her. Instead I say, ‘I’m not an investigator any more, remember?’

‘That’s right. You work in a shop.’ She says it without inflexion, but somehow that makes it worse.

‘People change,’ I say. ‘They change all the time.’

She nods. I look at the pouched skin of her neck, and the way her small quick head sits upon it, as if the two don’t belong together. ‘Well, I’m pleased to see you anyway, even if you have changed. At least the face is the same.’ She lifts her bright eyes from the ground for the first time and scans me. ‘Yep, the same. Beautiful.’

‘Come on,’ I say, and I help her up. She’s so light, as if she’s down to her last skin.

The bungalow has been redecorated: painted, primped, the furniture rearranged. There are framed photographs on every wall, faces cut out in circles and grouped together to make merry collages of emotion over time. I can’t help but think of all the old photos that now have head-shaped holes in them. No doubt she’s kept them somewhere.

‘I moulted about a month ago,’ she says, ‘and that pink and mauve colour scheme had to go. This is nicer, don’t you think?’

I walk the length of the long wall of the living room, behind the sofa, and find some familiar faces. My dad, my mum, together. Alice has cut around them with irregular sweeps of the scissors, giving them strange curves. Dad moulted only a few months after Mum got pregnant with me but I saw them both regularly throughout my childhood. They remained polite, if not exactly friends; I think this is the first time I’ve seen them captured as a couple in an image.

Alice is on the wall, young and free, snipped to stand next to nobody. She has lived in this house for so many years, only feeling the need to change the paint and the position of the furniture when she changes her skin. If she’s had lovers they have come and gone unknown to me.

‘How are you feeling?’ I ask her.

‘Fine. A bit of a sore shoulder. Doctor Whitmore said less gardening, give it a chance to rest.’ She shrugs, and looks cheeky and guilty and shamefaced, all at once, like a child. ‘You can tell me off, it’s fine. I won’t mind.’

‘No thanks. If you can’t be bothered to look after yourself…’ Then I realise that’s just another parental trick, the long-standing alternative to the classic telling off, so I don’t finish the sentence.

‘You’re here for the skin,’ she says. ‘The first one of yours. Aren’t you?’

‘How did you know?’

‘I wish you wouldn’t take it. I can take good care of it. Your mum asked me to, when she got diagnosed. It was very precious to her.’

‘I know, but I can’t. I need to know it’s gone. Done with. What made you think I’d want it?’ It seems such a leap of intuition.

She brushes her cheek with her fingers, an old nervous gesture of hers. ‘Someone phoned, a few hours ago, and they were offering quite a bit of money for young female skins, they said. They were quite insistent about it and the price kept going up, and I just got this feeling, like they knew there was one in the house and they wanted that one in particular. I thought, afterwards, I bet Rose turns up looking for that old skin. I don’t know why.’

‘You got the feeling that someone wanted my old skin and you didn’t tell me, and you’re still swanning around in the back garden with the gate unlocked?’ She’s so unaware at times I could scream.

She gets up from her favourite armchair, which has been moved to the other side of the room since my last visit. ‘You’re here now anyway, aren’t you? You’re going to take it no matter what I say. Here.’ From underneath the television cabinet she pulls out a brown paper package, flat and square and tied with string. ‘See? Nobody would have looked there.’

‘That’s not the point.’ I take the package and am glad it’s wrapped up tight. Who wants to touch their teenage mind once more?

‘Anybody would think you were the grand old lady,’ she mutters, ‘the way you nag.’

‘Just— I’ll feel better if you lock the gate. And if you get another phone call, will you let me know? Straight away?’ She nods. I put the package in my bag, next to the other skin, and close the zip. ‘Did they say anything about who they were? On the phone?’

‘Not really. Money Moult, maybe? Not one of those from the television. It was a man. A nice voice. He called me by name.’

‘Alice?’

‘Mrs Stacey. He had a posh accent. Upper class.’

‘All right.’ Maybe it really was just a fishing phone call from one of those companies. They can be pushy, particularly with the elderly, who always seem to have old skins squirreled away. It’s one thing to burn your own moults, but the first moult of your child – that seems to be an entirely different matter. That’s the Bond. So much stronger than love, the way a parent feels about a child, that’s what the stories say. The Bond is the only eternal attachment; I read that somewhere.

‘Listen,’ says Alice. ‘When your mum and I were little, our mum – your Gran Stacey – told us that shedding was a necessary thing we all have to do to take away the bad thoughts. She said we all feel better afterwards, and it only removes the things that should go. Love, the romantic stuff, that’s just a trick to make you make babies. It’s not meant to last. But other things are. The Bond is. It’s not skin deep. The people you meet, and love, and,’ she purses her lips, ‘have relations with, they’re here today, gone tomorrow. But family isn’t. Look at us, we get along, don’t we? And that’s just a shadow of the Bond, from aunt to niece. Come and move in here, and if you find someone to love then love them, and let them go. Maybe even make a baby with them, and we can take care of it. Then you’ll know what forever means, Rose. It means a child.’

‘Until they turn into a teenager and get their first moult.’ I peruse the walls once more. I don’t like this conversation, and we’ve had it often enough before. She was never brave enough to have a baby and now she wants me to do it for her. But that first peeling away – the absolute need I felt to escape my mother and her consuming, eternal need for me – I don’t want to experience that from the other side. How I hurt her, when I left.

Alice returns to her armchair, stiff with age and indignation. ‘It doesn’t affect every child the way it affected you.’

‘So I might get lucky, is that it?’

She shakes her head. It strikes me that she looks like me. Or, rather, I will look like her, one day. Alone, in my own bungalow, with weeds to pull and young faces on the wall.

‘Do you wish you’d done it, now?’ I ask her. ‘Had a baby, I mean?’

‘Of course,’ she says, but now I find, hearing her say the words, that I don’t quite believe her. She’s still scared of it.

‘It’s just nature. The Bond. You said it yourself. A way to make babies get born, and cared for longer than just one skin.’

‘It’s all just nature,’ she says, her tone brusque. ‘What difference does it really make to any of us, whether it’s natural or not? You worry about the strangest things.’

I’ve annoyed her, I can tell. Coming to visit her always does end in annoyance, on one side or the other. Usually both.

I find my own face, small and grainy, in a large clip-frame of many cut-out people. I look very young. Next to me, tilted so that the sides of our heads are touching, is a glossy photo snipped from a magazine. It’s Max. Max’s professional, smiling face.

I point at it. ‘What’s this?’

‘What?’

‘You know very well what.’

She sniffs. ‘It’s my wall. I’ll put what I like on it.’

‘Take it down.’

‘Rose,’ she says, in her reasonable voice. ‘He belongs there. He was the love of your life.’

So we have an argument, which is, I think, what we both wanted.

After the argument we pass another hour in silence, watching quiz shows on television and eating biscuits from the tin. Then we make up wordlessly, as families do, and she says she’ll drive me to Clifton’s Public Incinerator, if that’s what I really want.

As families do.

How I hate car journeys…

There’s a long queue at the Incinerator, the cars moving slowly, people taking their time to drive up to the chute that leads to the flames. The machine is transparent so you can watch the voyage of your old skin as it slides down to go up in smoke. The authorities leave no room for doubt. You see it destroyed with your own eyes.

Alice sighs beside me. The radio is playing old songs and she hums along, knowing maybe one word in ten, mumbling at the rest.

With the heat of the afternoon sun hitting my side of the car, and the music at work upon me, I can’t help but think the worst thoughts. The things I saw that will never go away, no matter how matter times I shed, no matter what Alice tells me about Gran Stacey’s old sayings. The skins discarded or taken by force; the sweat and the smell of bad people doing bad things; the empty shining of the studio lights on Max, making him seem a little bigger, a little flatter, like nothing more than a white smile that had nothing to do with me. The bathroom floor. Then playing at being detective, and the warehouse in Slough, next to a patch of scrubland, the people driving by.

Being a private investigator wasn’t about helping people. I realise now that I wanted to know how bad this world can be, and I got an answer. I found basements and gambling rings and hospitals and cemeteries, and so many ways to buy and belittle love. To cut it, to measure, sew it and dress it and grind it up small and put it in those endless lines of pills.

I know why Max keeps buying the pills. It’s an act of optimism, and I can’t blame him for that. He never sees the worst of the world. So many people are employed to keep it from him, and the rest happily do it for free because of who he is and what his handsome face on the screen gives to them all. That moment of escape from reality.

We’re nearing the front of the queue. The two brown paper packages sit in my lap. Shall I open them, touch them one last time? The thing that stops me is the mutilation that was performed upon one of them: the removal of the breasts and the sewing up of the slits. It’s the thought of someone else touching it, cutting it, that is too hard to bear. The thought of someone profiting from my skin, although it makes no sense that it was mutilated as the price would have been so much better for the complete skin. And nobody would have been fooled to think it was a male skin, not for more than a few seconds. The seller had to know that.

Max’s face, when he learned about the removal of the breasts. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so surprised.

There it is.

The thing I should have worked out straight away.

I know who took my skin, and Max’s skins. But I don’t know why.

We reach the front of the queue and the open mouth of the incinerator chute is on the driver’s side of the car. Alice winds down her window and holds out her hands.

‘Come on, then.’

I shake my head.

‘Are you doing it or not, Rose?’

‘Not,’ I say, sounding like a child. Like nothing more than a baby.

‘Right.’ She sets off, through the gateway, and I can’t tell if she’s pleased or not. We travel for a few miles before she says, ‘So what will you do with them?’

‘Would you keep the old one? My first one?’

‘I was doing that anyway.’

‘I know. Thanks.’

She hums along to the latest song on the radio for a moment. It’s a ballad I’ve not heard before about how the shortest love is the sweetest love, and a day together is better than a lifetime alone. Then she says, ‘Do I still need to make sure the back gate is locked to protect your precious skin?’

‘You should do that anyway. But no, I don’t think anyone is bothered about it now. Or, at least, they won’t be. I’ll sort it.’

‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

‘I’m sorting it,’ I repeat. ‘Then I’ll come visit. For longer. When it’s done.’

She considers this, her eyes on the road, then says, ‘Don’t end up like me, Rose. Don’t end up alone. I know you have this thing, this moulting problem and it makes you want to leave everything behind because it hurts so much, but try to hold on to something. You don’t always have to be the one that leaves.’

I don’t say anything. I feel her words sinking into me and I hate it, I hate it. If it was a choice I would have already decided to be different. I would scratch this out of my skin myself if I could.

‘Can you drop me at the station?’ I ask her.

‘I thought we were going home! The station’s in the other direction.’

‘Then I suppose it’s time to perform a U-turn,’ I say, and I catch, on the side of her face, the flicker of a smile.