The Loosening Skin

2008. SPOONFUL.

Petra’s car was one of those contract jobs, set up to be changed every seven years or with a new skin; some customers liked that freedom, although it sounded more like a flashy extension to an existing jail block to Rose. This car or that car: the deal remained the same.

But Petra said she liked her green Volvo, and had felt no need to change it after her last moult. The back seat was piled high with discarded bottles and wrappers, and the large boot was crammed with electronic devices and more traditional methods of applying brute force. The camera zooms and the hammers, all mixed up together; it was a wonder nothing got cracked.

As they drove along, silent in the early morning, it occurred to Rose that this was a car worthy of Mary Poppins, and it amused her to think of Petra, so capable, so practically perfect in every way, in that role. She hummed ‘A Spoonful of Sugar’ under her breath as the low sun began to gain in strength.

‘Really?’ said Petra, ‘Musical numbers? You kept that quiet.’

They stopped at a service station, drank lattes in tall glasses and ate doughnuts, choosing one table at random from a sea of them. It was early enough to feel that the place was theirs, and the few people who came and went were just passing through their territory. Men in suits, mainly, getting ahead of the game. Rose watched them stride to and from the blue signs of the toilet block, or order takeaway coffee from the dark wood and chrome counter, and wondered if each one was neck deep, drowning in some terrible form of business. Skin business.

All skin business was terrible, she had decided, from the creams and salves to the cutting and slicing. Inescapable and everywhere, looking like a quiet man in a suit, going about his day, until she looked closer.

‘We’re just checking this place out,’ said Petra, skimming the milk foam from the rim of the glass with her finger and licking it clean. ‘It’s off all the books. I reckon it’s a holding place for skins this guy is trying to move on the side. We get a few photos of the product and the setup, give them to Phin, and then Phin has leverage.’

‘Right.’

‘It’s straightforward.’

‘Yep.’

‘Great,’ said Petra. ‘So you can do it then. I’ll wait in the car.’

Rose had suspected it was building to this. ‘What if I get caught?’

‘Easy answer to that one: don’t get caught.’ The foam had been licked clean; Petra picked up the glass and drained it. ‘Look, it’s a warehouse on the outskirts of Slough at six in the morning. There’s going to be nobody there. You keep your hood up in case of security cameras, you take a few photos, you leave. You don’t take anything, and if it doesn’t feel right you walk away. I wouldn’t drop you straight in the deep end. This is a long-term training process. One step at a time.’

Rose sipped her coffee. ‘But why train me?’

Petra sighed. ‘I keep telling you, I fancied some company.’

Recently she had begun to feel a vexation building in the older woman, transmitting itself in the way Petra moved around the office, asking questions and seeming unhappy with the answers. Rose suspected she was disappointed in her.

‘I am trying,’ Rose said.

‘I know. It’s fine.’

‘I enjoy the work.’ Which was true, although the part she enjoyed was the moment when each case could be called over. The burning of the manila file, the ritual of it, pleased her beyond words.

‘Do you ever wonder if you would have been better off staying with Max?’

‘How could I? You know about my condition.’

‘Yeah. Your condition, I know. But people do, all sorts of people. They just pretend to still love someone, after that skin comes free. Not just for a comfortable life, although in your case I could have understood it. To live in that world.’

‘That’s world’s not real.’ Honesty prompted her to add, ‘Nothing is, though, is it?’

‘This is,’ said Petra, and pinched her hand.

‘Ow!’

‘Snap out of it. I know you still check up on him. You read the gossip columns. You watch all the movies. You still have feelings for him.’

‘I really don’t.’

‘That’s you all over. It’s only real when you say it is.’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘I want you to really commit to this life,’ snapped Petra. ‘I’m going to the loo. Think about what you’re going to do. You’re going to get into that warehouse and take those photos, and when you come out of the warehouse you’ll be a tiny amount closer to being a proper private investigator.’

After she had gone Rose took a sugar cube from the bowl and crunched it. The sweet shards of the cube dissolved in her mouth to nothing, so quickly, so she ate another and sucked it this time, trying to make it last.

2013. SEWN UP.

Back at the Sussex mansion the weather is not right for filming, so Max has given everyone the day off. The gate guard – not Mike this time but an unfamiliar face – tells me that lots of them organised themselves into cars and left for London. Others are ensconced in their trailers, no doubt moaning or playing cards or swapping tips about skin treatments, as actors do.

But Max – Max is in his home, and Taylor is nowhere to be seen.

‘You’re not meant to be left unprotected,’ I say. It seems there’s a little bit of the bodyguard left in me after all.

‘I sent her out,’ he says. ‘On an errand.’

‘Dry cleaning?’

‘Listen, I don’t want to discuss who does what for me any more. I just want one final thing from you. That’s the only reason I agreed to let you in.’

We are standing in his living room, on the dark wooden floor. He is nervous; his hands move over the material of his jeans, stretched tight over his thighs.

‘One final thing,’ I echo.

‘The skin. The skin I paid a fortune for.’

It’s that sinking realisation that I was right. I was right about him, oh God, I was right. I didn’t realise how much I was hoping I was mistaken until I heard those words.

‘It’s my skin,’ I say, carefully.

‘I paid for it.’

‘I’ll pay you back.’

‘With what? With the money you earn in that place in the middle of nowhere, with that teenager hoping you’ll take pity on him and fuck him? You could never afford it, and you know it, so don’t bullshit me, Rosie. Have more respect for me than that.’

‘Stay calm,’ I tell him.

‘I’m calm. Give me the skin.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’ He is so tense, his hands rubbing at the denim. ‘Have you burned it?’ It’s as if his world could turn on my answer.

I shake my head.

The tension seeps out of him, through his shoulders and his hands. ‘Oh thank God,’ he says. ‘Thank God. I had to know. I had to know if you could do it.’ He bends over at the waist and takes in long deep breaths.

‘If it’s so important to you, why did you let someone steal it?’ I ask him.

Slowly, he straightens. He locks his gaze on mine. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

A line.

‘I’m guessing your own skins never left this house,’ I venture. ‘Probably back in your safe room by now, locked up tight. Am I right?’

‘You’re crazy. I lost them all.’

‘Is that so? I saw your face when you heard my skin had been mutilated. That was the shock, for you. Nothing else. That was all you cared about.’

He raises an eyebrow at me, and that gesture pushes me into action. I run from the living room, down the hall, and take the steps two at a time to his safe room in the basement. The door is open, as is the wardrobe.

Hanging within are a selection of light summery dresses in many colours. And next to them, touching them, are his skins.

I hear him close the door behind me, the sliding of a bolt, and I know in that split second that I never have been, and never ever will be, a proper investigator. I am an idiot, and he knew it, right from the beginning. He knew it. I look at the door, and see his face through a slot that has been made in the wood. He was having renovations done, when I first came. He had a plan in place.

‘The pills by the bed,’ he says. ‘Take them.’

The room has been decorated, turned into a bedroom for one: a single divan, a small table on its right and an upholstered chair, green, on its left. A black and white photograph, large, framed, hangs over the bed; it’s that shot of Paris again. That dream of Paris. The bedside table holds a plastic jug of water with a matching glass, and two pink pills.

‘Let me out,’ I say. ‘This isn’t funny.’

‘Take the pills and I’ll let you out.’

And I think – why not? The pills never worked. The endless pills.

I cross to the bed, quick, and swallow them down, without water. ‘There. Let me out.’

‘Oh Rosie,’ he says. ‘There’s nobody like you.’ He closes the slot in the door.

I call out. I hammer on the door. Eventually I start shredding his skins; millions of pounds and memories, turned to strips with each touch reminding me of how good he once was. But he doesn’t come back, and I’m only halfway through destroying the third skin when the pills kick in and take the world away.

My skin is loose.

I feel it, feel it slipping from me, separating out from the layer beneath.

It’s too early. I should have years yet, but that itch, that building itch, I know it. Intense and innate. I move to scratch, and as I dig my nails into my stomach and thighs, finding the skin there already hard and white, I look around the room and place myself with it. It used to be the safe room, and now it’s my personal prison, complete with bed, sink, and pictures of trees in blossom, the Eiffel Tower rising above them, on the wall.

He’s been planning this from the start.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, close by, above me.

I’m lying on the floor. I’m naked. I’m naked, and I can see him now, sitting on the bed only a few feet away, looking not at my face but at my hands as I scratch. He is fully dressed, in a different shirt from the last time I saw him.

How long was I unconscious?

The itching has turned into pain – needles under the skin. I can’t scratch long enough, deep enough. I can’t think any more.

‘No,’ he says, over and over, and he moves to me and pins down my hands. ‘Not so hard, Rosie, not so hard.’

‘The induced moulting will make it painful,’ says a different voice, a woman. I’ve heard that voice before. ‘Sedation’s an option, but it can affect the emotional transfer.’

Max frowns. I dig my nails into his hand and he flinches, but he doesn’t let go. I’m on fire, knock me out, take me away. Everything is alight.

‘I need her to let it all go. To be clean.’

‘Restraints, then. Can you manage?’

‘Taylor,’ he calls, and another voice replies, ‘Yep.’ I don’t see her, but I think she’s at my ankles. Max grabs me under my arms and together they take me to the bed, and then hold me down as my wrists and ankles are placed in the prepared restraints.

‘How long?’ says Max.

‘At least overnight,’ says the disembodied voice.

‘Christ,’ he says. He is unhappy. I need to scratch. I twist and turn, and rub myself against the sheet upon the mattress.

What do I love? What will I lose, this time?

Nothing.

That thought reassures me. I love nobody, have loved nobody and nothing since my last moult. I have nothing important to lose.

I laugh.

I can’t stop.

‘Get out,’ says Max. Then he sits beside me as I laugh and squirm, and lose myself all over again.

I am here, and I am whole.

My latest moult is nowhere to be seen. I can’t remember the act of shedding it. I’m no longer in restraints, either. My wrists bear two red circles, like bracelets, but the marks don’t hurt. I wonder if I’ll wear them throughout this skin.

I feel—

I don’t know what I feel.

Max is not here. I get up and walk around the room, in circles, for a while. I pour myself a glass of water from the bedside table, and savour it in my throat, and then I get the feeling that I’m not alone.

The eyes are watching me through the slot in the door. My first response is to throw the glass at them, but it’s plastic, I forgot. The plastic simply bounces off, and the water splashes over the floor.

The eyes return.

They are brown, and in this letterbox form they are empty of any expression I can read. They are rimmed by thick orange glasses.

‘Sit on the bed please,’ says Anna Mallory.

‘Where’s Max?’

‘He’s gone for some rest. He was exhausted. He watched over you for days.’

‘Days?’

‘This is for the best. We’re going to help you. With your condition.’

There are so many things I could say to that, but I think carefully, and settle for a question instead. ‘Why?’

‘No doubt Max will want to explain it. He’ll be here in a moment. If you’ll sit on the bed and wait, please.’

Footsteps ring down the corridor.

‘Bed, please,’ she repeats, and I retreat to it.

The door opens and then Max is here, looking tired and dishevelled and movie-starrish. It’s in the way he holds his head; this is a moment he’s rehearsed. Anna and Taylor enter after him.

‘She’s awake,’ he says, over his shoulder, to his audience.

‘She’s fine,’ says Anna. ‘Good to go.’

‘You sure you can do this?’

‘Nothing is risk free. But this is what we’ve been working for all these years, right?’

That seems to reassure him. He steps towards me and I shrink back; it’s an automatic reaction, but one that gives him that disappointed look.

‘Okay,’ he says. I don’t know if it’s to me or to Anna. ‘Let’s do it.’

‘Rose, I’m going to sedate you again. Are you going to let me, or shall we hold you down? It’s up to you.’ She has that medical manner – This is for your own good is written through her.

If I open my mouth I would beg, and say all the things that desperate people say. So I say nothing. If I don’t say it, then I can’t be here. It can’t be true.

She comes to me, and injects me just over the crook of my elbow, and the new skin is so soft that the needle glides in easily, like a friend, invited.

My name is Rose Allington.

My name is Rosie Allington.

Max is holding my hand. I smile at him, and he smiles back, and then I realise I can’t breathe properly. My skin is suffocating; it has been sewn up tight into a sack that I can’t escape. It presses up against my legs, my arms, my stomach, my head. It adheres to my cheeks and nose and forehead, and to the edges of my mouth.

My hands and feet are tied to the bed once more. Max is sweaty.

‘Hey,’ he says. ‘You gave me a scare. We nearly lost you. The anaesthetic, we think.’

‘Don’t be scared,’ I say, to me and to him. I don’t want either of us to suffer any more. ‘Just help me. Help me take this off.’

‘But it’s working,’ he whispers.

The pressure is stifling. I lift my head from the pillow and look down the length of my body. I’m not clothed. Yes I am. I’m stitched into a skin. My own, used skin. The skin that loved him.

Two diamond patches are missing over the breasts; I can see my own nipples. They have a reality that everything else in this room does not. They are mine.

‘I couldn’t get them back, Rosie,’ he says, squeezing the dead skin that is wrapped around my hand. ‘I’ve made them pay for it though. That was never part of the deal, but no, they had to try to get even richer. These people are scum. That’s why I phoned your aunt, put on a phony accent, tried to get an earlier skin of yours so I could at least replace what was missing, but no dice.’

‘You should have burned it,’ I say. My lips tickle.

‘I could say the same to you. But you didn’t, did you? I had to know if you could. I figured, if you were prepared to track my skins down, and if you couldn’t burn your love for me when you got the chance, that you’d want me – deep down – to go ahead with this. To make you better. Make you happy again.’

‘Love?’

‘Yes. You can love me again. Like I still love you. I’m still in the same skin, Rosie. I’m here in the same skin.’

I shake my head, and hear the dead skin crackle against the pillow. ‘No, you’re different.’

‘I funded Mallory Peace. I heard about Anna, and the breakthroughs she’d made, and I set her up in business. I’ve been taking their pills since the beginning, and they work. The pills work. I’m still the same person I was. The person you loved.’

But my love, the memory of it stitched tight around me like a shroud, says otherwise.

‘No,’ I say. ‘You’re not.’

He frowns. He lets go of my hand.

‘It takes time,’ says Anna Mallory, unseen by me. She’s close by. ‘The new skin takes roughly seventy-two hours to become impregnated by the old skin.’

‘But she’s suffering!’ he says.

I concentrate on each breath as they argue. This pressure on my chest; it’s not the skin. It’s dead love.

‘Do you like this room? I had it decorated for you. I thought you’d like it. It’s always the first thing you notice, isn’t it, Rosie? How a room is decorated.’

‘No it’s not,’ I say, but he’s right. I’ve never noticed it before. I’m always checking out the room: the positioning of objects, the angle of the furniture, as if it means something. I’ve done it all my life.

‘You used to hate that fish tank I owned, do you remember? You said it made the place look like a drug baron’s palace. I suppose that’s what I am, now, in a way. But it’s for you. Working on a cure, for you.’

‘I don’t want to be cured.’

But he talks on, as if he can talk love back into me.

‘Remember when we met?’ he says. ‘I loved you straight away. I never told you that before because I knew you’d laugh at me.’

He has created a scene of it in his head. He played one character, and I played the other. But he didn’t love me straight away. He looked me up and down and said to Phineas Spice, ‘That’s fine.’ I wasn’t even a she to him then. I was that. And I liked it, to be an object of business. He was certainly an object of business for me, right up until Paris.

Paris sneaks from my old skin to the new. I feel it permeating me. If he mentions Paris he will see that emotion in my eyes, and I don’t want to give him that. I want to hurt him, this stranger who hurts me while wearing that familiar face. The face that never did love me straight away, no matter what the mouth says.

He talks on. ‘You made a list.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of your skins.’ He pulls a piece of notepaper from his pocket. ‘I found it in your backpack, with the skin. A list of all the times you changed, and you never told me. You never would tell me.’

I picture myself on that train; why do I always seem more complete in the past? My concerns, my thoughts, were solid on the train, sitting in that forward facing seat with the slice of early morning sunlight falling on the sticky tabletop. Already it seems an age ago.

‘Age sixteen. First moult,’ he reads.

‘Yes.’

‘I want to know what it was like. I’ve always wanted to know.’

‘I never wanted to – it wasn’t about hurting you.’ I can’t bear the thought of his pain. It must be working, this process, this sewing up into old skin.

‘You’ve been protecting yourself,’ he says. ‘But there’s no need, now.’

I laugh at that. And the funniest part is his hurt expression; he really doesn’t see it.

‘Sixteen. You were sixteen years old. Tell me.’

‘It’s none of your business.’

‘I’m in love with you,’ he says, as if that explains everything. ‘What do I have to do to make you believe that? I’ll tell you about my first moult.’

‘I know about that.’

‘I didn’t tell you everything. Listen. I was in Manhattan. My father’s apartment. He was away on a shoot, and I was watching a movie.’

‘I know,’ I repeat. ‘One of the movies he’d directed. It triggered something. You told me before.’ I’m ashamed to say I’m bored of it.

‘It wasn’t one of his. I lied. It was a dirty movie. I was whacking off when I got that itchy feeling, all over.’ His eyes are on my stomach, on the join where the skin has been sewn up around me. ‘The skin came off in my hand. The skin on my dick.’ He shrugs and blushes, like a little boy. ‘I screamed. The maid came running. Found me that way.’

‘Why wouldn’t you tell me that?’

‘It’s hardly flattering.’

‘Does that matter?’ But my real problem is that I much prefer the other version of the story, when his father the famous director makes a film that leads to a reaction in his only neglected son. It has more pathos. This story is ridiculous – the story of the maid and the boy caught with his trousers round his ankles. It suits him less.

‘Your turn,’ he says, with a cheeky smile. ‘You were sixteen years old.’

Oh, Max. What a creation he is.

‘I was sixteen years old,’ I say, and the words come from that start, and flow from the memory. There I am again, the solid me of the past. The one version of myself I can understand.

1986. THE FIRST TIME.

‘Mine wasn’t that bad,’ said her mother from the seat beside her. ‘It just came right off. I don’t understand it.’

All emotion had left Rose since her first moult, but here they were, back in a sudden rush; she hated her mother, she hated her, she hated her, the loud voice, the drone of it, the fact that her mother could discuss such an intensely personal thing in front of a collection of strangers in a doctor’s waiting room. And the strangers: she hated them too. Listening and pretending not to, hearing and not really caring either way.

The open-plan stretch of the waiting room from sliding double doors to reception desk was light and airy. Rows of chairs were bookended with small pine tables bearing magazines, and people sat in their own patterns, leaving spaces where one group ended and another began.

Her mother had chosen the front row, before a large poster. Block lettering listed the warning signs of serious skin conditions, from misshapen moles to constant itching.

‘At least it came off in one,’ said her mother. ‘But it took so long, and you don’t look right. I think we really should just get you checked out.’

Shut up, Rose said in her head. Shut up.

‘Soon be over and done with.’ The pat of her mother’s hand on her knee appalled her; she couldn’t help but flinch.

‘Is it still tender?’

Unable to raise her eyes, Rose nodded.

‘Rose.’

There was no escape. She had to look up, and meet her mother’s eyes. Why was it unbearable, to see and be seen this way? She felt as if she had lost herself, sloughed off every emotion that made her who she was. In its place, fast expanding to take up the emptiness, was black, viscose hatred of everyone who had ever lost their skin and thought it no big deal.

She stood up, and walked fast. Walked away.

Her mother called her name. Rose’s walk turned into a run.

‘You made up with her, right? Your mom?’

‘Of course. It was just… I don’t know. The triggering of the disease. But it didn’t affect the Bond for long. The Bond is different.’

I don’t need to say that it was never quite the same, though, do I?

‘So that’s why,’ he muses. ‘Why you ended up working for that Skin Disease Clinic in Lincoln. To make up to your mom. On some level.’

That’s too neat and tidy. It’s ridiculous.

‘This EMS, it makes you want to push everyone away. You can see that, right? It needs a cure. Think how many people we can help, if we get it right. With you,’ he says.

I close my eyes.

The thing is it feels good, to tell it, to talk of it, and to have his verdict, his summation. Why should that help? It’s almost an act of erasure. It takes out so much of what I’ve felt and discards it as unimportant. Simply a part of my illness.

And if Max does manage to remove the illness, what will be left?

He feeds me tangerine. The dead skin pulls at my neck as I lift my head for each segment. After that sweetness there are more pills to swallow, and if I take them without a fuss he smiles. I feel better, when I see him smile.

Afterwards, I say, ‘You’re hurting me.’

Still smiling, he says, ‘It can’t be worse than how you hurt me.’

‘It’s revenge, then.’

‘No, it’s not that. That’s not part of it.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Because I’m giving you a gift.’

My new skin, underneath, has been rubbed and rubbed by the old. It’s as tender as a blister. But my breasts, they remain free. I focus on my nipples; on the air upon them.

‘Tell me about Steve. Your first love. You were twenty-one.’

‘I was twenty-one,’ I repeat. Steve, who moulted me off.

‘You got kicked out of college for him.’

‘University. And I wasn’t kicked out because of him.’ Not exactly.

‘So tell me how it was.’

1991. STARTING A FIRE.

Rose folded her skin up small, and put it at the bottom of the metal bin.

It was late. Most of the students were out, drinking and clubbing. She had gone to the pub and drunk too much without feeling it, telling everyone she had just moulted and it had been fine. An easy one. But back here, in her room with its single bed, single desk, single chair, lone Dalí poster covering cracked paint, she couldn’t pretend. Her hands were clumsy. It took her four attempts to light a match.

Steve no longer loved her. Well, she no longer loved him, so that made them equal. All the love had seeped out of her with this moult, and now she was clean and new – emptied of love. Yet the memory of him saying – I’ve shed, this can’t work any more – hurt so much. She couldn’t understand it. She never wanted to touch the skin that had loved him again.

It caught quickly. It crackled. She fed the fat little flame of it, fed it photographs of the two of them, then the poems he had written for her:

It deserved to burn; all the untrue, stupid sentences of the world should burn. She hoped he was burning the things she had written to him, those long letters telling him every thought that came to her, every feeling she had experienced about her life so far. And when the fire began to die she fed it her lecture notes, her painstakingly careful handwriting on the subject of Ancient Greece, she gave those to the fire too, and felt better, and better, with each lick of heat along the sharp white edges, curling them over, twisting them to ash.

I’m not a child any more, Rose thought. I will never give away so many secrets about myself again.

Then she pictured the days ahead. The days of building up emotions only to have them crumble away with each moult. The lovers who would be taken away. The husband, maybe. One day she would wake and find she had left him behind, and she hadn’t even met him yet.

She reached for the bottle of vodka, a quarter empty, and tipped liquid freely over the flames. The flames followed the trail, leaping up to the bottle. She dropped it as an automatic reaction; the flames began to spread across the carpet and she knew in that moment she had gone too far, that she still wanted all those days and lovers ahead even if they could not last forever.

She stumbled from the room, screamed ‘Fire!’ up the stairwell, ran to the lobby and dialled 999 on the payphone as a few students emerged from their rooms, sniffing at smoke. They filed past her as she gave their address, and wearily began to assemble on the pavement opposite the hall of residence.

When she joined them, their expressions seemed to say to her: if it’s not one thing, it’s another.

How adult they all were, now. How boring it was, to feel.

‘How much longer?’ I whisper.

‘Not long.’

‘I smell.’

Max laughs a little. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘you do. Once we get you out of that old skin you can have a good long bath. How do you feel?’

That’s a difficult question to answer. I understand him better. I’ve seen his desperation to reel back time, to make us what we were again. I care about him, I do. I don’t know if that’s the fault of the process, or of being kept here; could it be some sort of Stockholm syndrome? Whatever it is, it’s making me hate myself a little more every minute.

‘Fine,’ I say. ‘You look tired, though.’

‘I feel like we’re getting somewhere, and I can’t sleep for thinking about it,’ he admits.

‘Do you still hate to be touched?’

‘I don’t hate it. I just prefer to be the one doing the touching. Tell me about Cyprus.’

‘The third moult.’

‘You were twenty-eight years old.’

‘I was in the RAF. But it wasn’t how you think.’

‘Did you see action?.’

‘No, Cyprus isn’t— It wasn’t… I was… I was…’

1998. HEAT.

Rose was a soldier second and an administrator first: working on the logistical side, ordering supplies, marking movements on maps. She knew how to use a gun and could run five miles in forty minutes, but mainly she could use a computer and keep a lot of other people running in the right direction.

The poster behind her desk bore a quote from Frederick the Great:

An Army Marches on its Stomach.

And so she was organised. An organised, proper person.

When she felt the first signs of her time approaching she informed her CO and got signed off for two days, then checked herself into the Moulting Ward.

It was an issue of temperature; the heat could cause problems in moulting for people who weren’t used to it. The ward was temperature controlled, and it was pleasant to sit in the communal area, listening to British Forces Radio, feeling the itch build.

A Flight Lieutenant she didn’t know came in, and they chatted for a while about home and family, but his moult was moving faster than hers. He left for a private cubicle to get the process over with, and then the overhead strip lights kicked in as day dimmed outside the window.

Why was it taking so long?

She was a woman now, grown, doing a job; she was responsible. It had been seven years since the last moult, so the timing was right. The stress of getting accepted into the RAF, training, being posted overseas: none of those had triggered a moult. And this time there was no Steve, no love to be lost. She wanted it done with, gone in a day. She wanted to prove how easy this process could be.

Forces Radio closed down for the night, and still there was only the itch.

At some point during the dark hours a member of the medical staff put her head around the door and looked surprised to see Rose still sitting there.

‘Go get some sleep in one of the private cubicles,’ she suggested, but Rose shook her head. She couldn’t face a small white space, or a medical bed with the sheets pulled tight, if it wasn’t about to happen.

‘It’s a quiet night,’ said the medical officer, and left.

Slowly, the itching intensified.

Rose dozed in one of the new plastic stackable chairs that had been flown out from home; she had put through the order herself. So many things here in Cyprus had been transported, hundreds of miles, to make this recognisable, to ground the troops in familiarity.

A sharp sting pierced her lower back. She jerked up from the chair and touched the sore spot through her uniform. The skin was pouching out, heavy with liquid. Not an insect bite, then, but a new facet of the moult. The thought triggered a realisation: the itching had become pain. She was in pain, all over, but strong on her back and buttocks, and it was growing, this pain; it would eat her up. Wherever it touched the skin puffed, as if injected with it, and the lights were too bright, the uniform too rough. She couldn’t stay here.

Rose walked out of the communal area and passed the medical officer in the corridor, who threw her a quizzical look, but said nothing. She walked on, out of the building, into the night air, so clean – and then the urge swept over her to run.

Running through the dark, quiet base, she imagined running right out of her skin, leaving it behind as a ghostly outline. The green buildings passed by, all the same, big as barns, holding sleeping soldiers, and she accelerated, outstripping the urge to be counted as one of them. She no longer wanted to belong.

To belong – why should that emotion abandon her?

Belonging was a form of love, perhaps.

The perimeter of Akrotiri base was demarcated by a tall fence. Rose reached it, pressed her face to the holes, and willed herself through, as if she could be poured from her skin on to the rocky ground beyond, and from there to the sea. The uniform held her back. She stripped it off, and the night air was so cold, so cold.

Lights swung down upon her; a voice said, ‘Stay still, stay still.’ She reached through the fence but only her fingers would fit. The pain redoubled and her skin was loose upon her. She wriggled free of it, not caring who was watching, then tried to bury it in the dusty ground. She dug with a frenzy.

‘Christ,’ said a thick voice, disgusted by her. She didn’t care. A blanket was placed around her shoulders. More lights arrived, and she was lifted, taken to one of the identical buildings, and a bed.

The next day the RAF began the process of ejecting her from their ranks as a liability. It was fine. Her urge to be there had vanished, and all that was left was shame that she had ever wanted to take part in the first place.

‘I thought you were this hard woman,’ says Max. ‘A killer.’

‘I pushed paper for a while.’

‘Did Phineas Spice know? That you were an administrator?’

‘It never came up in conversation.’

Max laughs.

I can’t help but wonder how he could have known me, held me, and thought me a killer? Didn’t the truth of me shine through?

‘What is it about me that you love?’ I ask him.

How odd it is to be having this conversation. I should scream and cry, and he should say scary things about what he’ll do to me if I don’t at least try to love him back. That’s how captors and captives speak.

‘You want a list?’ he says.

Those wide, playful eyes take me back to the tone we used to stretch between us, like a net in a game.

‘Yeah, I want an actual list. To make up for the list you stole from my bag.’

‘Right then.’

‘Come on then. Don’t tell me you have to think about it.’

‘You’re unique. I’ve told you that before.’

‘You’re wrong. But okay.’

‘You make me feel cared for,’ he says.

I don’t correct him, although he has to know he should say it in the past tense.

‘You’re so beautiful.’

I lie still, sewn up, knowing I am anything but. There’s no need to reply to this one either.

‘You give it meaning,’ he tells me.

‘What?’

He wets his lips, then says, ‘My life. You give my life meaning.’

‘How do I do that?’

‘I don’t know. It’s just one of your many mysterious talents, which now, apparently, include running away from doctors and hospitals, and being an administrator.’

‘So you like my mysteries?’

‘Oh yeah,’ he says, smoothing my hair back from my face.

‘Then why are you trying to solve me?’

‘You were thirty-eight, working with Petra, and you shed early,’ he says, as he holds the glass of water so I can sip through a straw. ‘You ran away from London. Why?’

I have no idea how much time has passed. I have been here so long, cocooned, while he tries to form me. This is his script. Everything in life has been revealed as a script, so how can I blame him? It’s in the wink of a receptionist underneath a poster that reads Love is a Warm Layer; it’s in the knowledge that whatever you are will come free in the next layer of loosening skin. Nothing can penetrate me beyond that.

I shake my head.

‘We’re so close to being together. Properly together. No secrets. Tell me this last thing.’ Max’s eyes hold tears. ‘I know it was terrible. It must have been something terrible.’

‘Are you crying for me, or for how bad you feel?’

‘Both, Rosie,’ he whispers. ‘This world. This whole world.’

‘No,’ I tell him. ‘Not your world. These things aren’t in your world. How can you bring them here? How dare you keep me here, and make yourself like them?’

‘No, it’s for good, Rosie, for good, for you.’

‘Max—’

‘Listen,’ he says. ‘Imagine. Imagine a world where love doesn’t live in the skin alone. Where it’s deep within you, all the time. No skin trade, no incinerators. That world would be a better place, because love could never be bought. Don’t you understand that I’m living that dream, right now, and my love comes from that place? That’s how you can love me too, if you’ll just hold on and take the pills. Remember Paris, walking by the Seine, and I was so nervous when I reached for your hand. But you let me hold it. You let me hold you, and that’s when I knew. I loved you beyond my skin.’

‘That’s not when you loved me. It wasn’t when you saw me for the first time, it wasn’t in Paris, it wasn’t in some moment you’ve played a thousand times over in your head. It wasn’t like that.’

‘Then how was it?’ He puts his hands on my face, and the skin crackles, like dead leaves against my cheeks. ‘Tell me how it was.’

I can’t.

I can’t play this game any more.

I have no words for it, for this act of recreation. He will make my memories part of his emotional landscape, but they will never be real to him. So I will keep this final part for me alone. I will not dilute it for anyone.

I don’t speak. I watch him cry, and I hold it safe, inside. I remember it, just for myself.

The warehouse.

2008. INSIDE.

As soon as she opened the unlocked door she knew she wasn’t alone.

The air was alive, filled with soft sounds, from a distance: the hum of machinery, and a high whirring she couldn’t place.

Rose took a few steps into the partitioned area, stacked cardboard boxes creating a right-angled wall. She caught the occasional voice coming from behind them: women talking, laughing.

She knew she should leave.

The boxes were sealed shut. She took a few quick snaps of them with her phone anyway, and then a couple of close-ups of the stamped marks on the sides that bore an address in London. The contents weren’t listed.

Should she rip a hole in one? She took out her penknife – Petra’s penknife, in fact, on loan to her – and considered it. But any damage would give away that somebody had been here, and Petra always said:

Don’t draw attention to yourself.

If only one of the boxes was open, but the wall was absolute. She felt impotent in the shadow of it.

Petra would say:

Think like an investigator.

She weighed up her options. Damage a box, take a photo. Try to make it look like – what? Rats? Or find the machines making that hum, and photograph them instead.

Rose scanned the makeshift walls. There was a gap, a slim line between two of the boxes in the third row up. She put her eye to it.

The women were talking as they worked. There were maybe thirty of them, operating sewing machines, sitting at tables that had been organised to make three sides of a square. They chatted as their fingers moved independently, accurately, stitching fine white triangles of material into long sheets of patchwork. Light fell in strips from high windows, up above.

Nobody else was visible. Against the far wall of the warehouse was a row of single beds, with crumpled, colourful sleeping bags upon them in different designs: stripes, circles, trucks, trains, butterflies. Another wall of boxes had been built nearby. Rose guessed there were basic cooking and washing facilities behind them. Something told her, in the way the women worked, that this was what they considered to be their home.

Somebody had to be bringing the material, collecting the products, and supplying them with food. But they weren’t here at the moment. These women were relaxed, being themselves in their own company. Rose listened carefully. She didn’t recognise the language.

She took some photos through the gap, but the focus wouldn’t align in the right place. They all looked blurred to her, unclear.

Time to go said Petra’s voice, inside her head.

The women were young. Not children, but youthful. As she watched, one of them sat back from her sewing machine and stretched out her arms. Rose noted the curve of her body, and how her belly stood proud from the chair. She was pregnant.

Once her eyes saw it, they recognised it wherever they fell; so many of the women were pregnant. Maybe all of them.

The material they sewed was in such small, delicate pieces. It was skinwork, she thought. Why else hide it away? It had to be skinwork. Rose took her knife and stabbed into one of the boxes, working it into the cardboard until she could reach inside. Her fingers made contact with a soft, giving stretch of sheet. She rubbed it, and felt nothing.

The stitched skin was empty of emotion. There were no memories, no echoes. Instead there was calm. It was good to touch discarded skin and feel nothing upon it; it bore a purity that could have come only from a life that had yet to be touched by love.

It was newborn.

Rose pulled her hand free.

The women – she wanted to tell them, to make them leave, come away. But the door hadn’t been locked. And the women were laughing. They had to know what they were sewing, and they were laughing. Touching that fresh clean skin every day, feeling no fear, no worry, no love.

Petra’s voice.

She needed it.

It was gone. There was only her own voice, from a place within that she had not known about, telling her to walk away from the women, from the warehouse.

The dual carriageway was in sight, the cars driving past, people on their early morning commutes, so close, and not one of them seeing the warehouse and what was within.

She walked across the scrubland, towards the road. The sun was higher in the sky, burning her wherever it touched. Her skin was alive with it, it wouldn’t stay, it couldn’t. She took off her black clothes and threw them down, and felt the skin already beginning to peel, to split, but it was not like it had ever been before. She was damaged all the way down, the warehouse had seeped through her; she was soft and pulpy underneath. It was impossible to walk on, the skin was sliding away and she had to be free of it. She fell.

Hands were upon her, squeezing.

Rose looked at the hands on her own skin, and found she was whole, and new. It shocked her so much that she couldn’t speak. She had expected to die.

‘I’ve got you,’ Petra said. ‘Can you walk?’ The squeezing became tugging. ‘Get up for me. Get dressed.’

The clothes, collected, rasped against the new skin. She cried as Petra tugged them into place. She never wanted to wear those clothes again.

Then Petra gathered up the old skin and flicked her silver lighter, touching the flame to it. It burned very quickly, down to a fine ash. The smell of smoke was so strong; Rose realised it couldn’t be from the skin alone. She turned her head, following the scent. Black smoke. The warehouse. But where were the women?

They made it back to the car and Petra drove. After a time Rose placed their direction; they were going to Wiltshire.

‘I can’t do this any more,’ she said.

‘I know,’ said Petra.

2013. SNIPS.

Anna Mallory snips away with scissors, starting at my toes. I feel the blade inch up the outside of my knee to my thigh first on one leg, then the other. The skin sticks and has to be peeled back carefully in long strips. Finally that old skin is in pieces.

I concentrate on the sensitive new skin being exposed to the air, already beginning to harden. My stomach, my arms, my shoulders are all released. My face.

‘There,’ she says.

Max hovers. ‘Did it work?’

‘It looks good. No damage to the new layer.’

‘Right. Great. You can go then.’

She opens her mouth, as if to argue, and then departs, taking Taylor with her, leaving the door ajar.

I won’t forget her, or what’s she’s done here. I won’t forget either of them.

As if he can read my thoughts, Max says, ‘It worked. Imagine how many people these treatments can help.’

I don’t reply.

He goes to the wardrobe and chooses one of the dresses that hangs next to his remaining skins. It’s yellow. He brings it out and shows it to me.

‘You wore it in Paris,’ he says, but it doesn’t look familiar.

‘Untie me, then.’

Once the restraints are off, I try to stand but my legs are too weak. Max helps me lower the dress over my head.

‘I shouldn’t put anything harsh on your skin for a while,’ he says. ‘I want so much to hold you, but I’m afraid it will hurt.’

His tenderness reaches me. ‘It’s okay. Just be gentle.’

So he sits beside me on the bed and hugs me, and it does hurt. Old emotions on new skin, love and disgust and hatred and all of it together: it’s too much for one person to feel. But I want him to have this moment, to remember, to embellish it in his endlessly replaying memory after I go.

‘There.’ I push him away. ‘That’s long enough. Will you do something for me, Max?’

‘Anything.’

‘Stop taking pills. Any pills. Shed that skin. You’ve been in it too long. It’s changed you.’

‘But we love each other again.’

I miss the Max who would never have done a thing like this with a ferocity that cements my decision. ‘I won’t take any more pills. I won’t stay.’

‘You don’t want to stay cured? After all you’ve told me?’

‘You don’t know what a cure is,’ I say. ‘You don’t even know what the real illness is, here.’

He clenches his fists, and says, ‘I could make you stay.’

But I know this scene, this melodrama of ours, is played out, and he knows it too. ‘Don’t make it any worse than it needs to be.’

‘No.’ He sighs. ‘Well, it was worth a shot.’

And, with that, he gets up from the bed and turns on all his charm to become a movie star with a hint of Little Boy Lost underneath. ‘It was madness, I guess, but it came from a good place. Do you believe that? And it will help millions of sufferers. I just need your word—’

‘I won’t tell anyone.’

‘You’re very kind. You know, I think you’re right. You’re not the girl I fell in love with. My Rosie would have had my balls for a stunt like this.’

Am I the forgiving sort, then, this time around? Can I finally forgive the very worst things? I should have him locked up. I want him locked up. But I’m out of interest in what should or shouldn’t happen. ‘Stop taking the pills, Max. We’re done. I don’t want to see you again.’

‘It’s probably for the best,’ he agrees.

‘I’m going now.’

‘I’ll get Taylor to call you a cab.’ He shrugs. ‘I’ve been here so long and I find myself calling it a cab. I guess I’m still American, deep down.’

So we go upstairs, and Taylor calls me a cab or a taxi or whatever we want to name it now, while all the time I feel my new skin hardening under the touch of that light summer dress.

‘Where do you want to be dropped?’ she asks, her tone all business. But she can’t look at me. Her hands are shaking. I wonder why she did it. Why she helped him hurt me.

‘The train station.’

‘No, Max will foot the bill. Take the taxi all the way.’

‘What day is it?’

‘It’s Sunday.’

‘Wiltshire, then.’

She nods, and we’re done.

2013. MUSEUM PIECE.

‘It’s on the local news,’ Petra says, and hands me her phone. There it is: the smoking pile of wreckage that was Mallory Peace Industries in Chichester. Three dead. The story beneath details the breakout of the blaze. Cause unknown.

‘Pretty,’ I say. I feel no blame. I was somewhere else entirely. A headline catches my eye, and I click on the link.

I check through the article. There are no updates. He’s still in intensive care after taking all those pills that caused a massive skin shed, at least three layers gone in twenty-four hours. He isn’t expected to live long.

I wondered if he might do something like that, one day. I could almost say he always had it in him.

And yet I miss my Max. I miss him so much; the treatment brought what I loved about him back to me. The Max who is now lying in intensive care, I’m not interested in. He deserves to die.

I hand back the phone. ‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘For your help.’

Paddington is business as usual. We stand under the row of boards and I find the next one to Bristol Temple Meads. Platform eight, ten minutes to go.

‘I’ve cleared it with Phin,’ she says. ‘He’ll deal directly with Taylor. When he finds her.’

Phineas Spice – the man who diagnosed me in his spare time, and whom I would never want to get on the wrong side of. I would pity Taylor if I didn’t hate her so much. I can’t understand how she could help him. I don’t think I’ll ever understand it. It’s a question that will follow me.

‘It was so good to see you,’ I say, and it’s not a lie. Maybe Aunt Alice is right; maybe friendship, above all things, can be kept, when it’s not based on something else. Envy, could we call it? My desire to be her, stronger than my desire to know her, is gone.

‘Did you enjoy the museum, this morning?’

I shrugged. ‘Actually, the Stuck Six were less impressive than I thought they would be. Those skins felt more like a novelty act than something deep and meaningful. I think perhaps love is overrated.’

‘You turning into a cynic?’

‘Maybe. Yeah. Yep, I’m a cynic now.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘So what’s a cynic going to do in Bristol?’

‘Don’t laugh.’

‘I won’t.’

‘I’m going to take a course in interior design,’ I tell her.

‘Or you could come back and work with me?’ Her mouth quirks. ‘No, I know, I know, go on then, get on the train.’

‘You’re so much stronger than me. But that’s okay.’

She looks older, for a moment, as she thinks about it. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Not stronger. Just happier to burn it all down. I make the worst things burn so that I feel better. I’ve only ever been trying to teach you that trick, because we’re the same in so many ways. Don’t you get it? That’s why I gave you a job, and kept you close. We saw the high life, the dream, and left it behind for reality. We’re the same.’

‘We’re not,’ I tell her, and we hug. My skin is still a little tender, but I think I can live with it.