The Loosening Skin

ENVELOPE

She died in a retirement home on the Isle of Wight. That’s not new, or news. It happened thirty years ago. Dan reads about her war skin, carefully preserved by the family. The skin finally came up for sale a month ago and was bought by a company called Envelope.

The article reads:

It takes Dan too long to realise this isn’t an article but an advertisement:

Fifteen days later, the package is delivered to his house.

Dan slides his purchase free of its wrapping and sets it on the kitchen table. It has its own silver stand that kicks out behind the frame, presenting it, pride of place. The image is a famous one: the black and white view of her in uniform, back straight, her feet planted in the soil. She holds a spade in one fist. Her chin is lifted and her hair is set in sweetheart curls. She served in the Land Army, travelling to London to sing in the evenings. A facsimile of her signature – a printed squiggle that tapers to a strong straight line – is in the top left corner.

The bottom right corner holds the tiniest swatch of her skin. A hole has been cut in the glass, just big enough for one finger to touch it. Beside the hole is a sticker that reads:

He still can’t believe he bought it.

It’s everything he hates about the world. It’s sentimental and exploitative and all the things that are wrong with the love industry, but it’s also part of a past he wants to understand. A past that belongs to him as much as to anyone else. No matter how they dice it up and present it, it’s a skin from a war that his great-grandfather fought in, that his grandfather taught him about while showing him the old scrapbook of mementoes, and listening to her songs. The legacies of an inherited war.

He puts a finger on the hole in the glass and touches the skin.

He feels love.

It’s not strong, but it’s there. He gets no image with it, no flashes of insight, but it is real and warm. So this was her: Edith Learner, during the war, planting seeds and singing songs with the mouths of the country joining in. But she didn’t just belong to them: she was in love. With who? He strains to find the subject of her passion, but it won’t come.

It’s possible to be in love and not give everything away. Dan knows this. When the others still lived here – when they were the Stuck Six, sticking together – they were in love, and yet none of them really knew him. They didn’t want to. It was enough that he was part of their love, sealed up tight within it. The secret part of him has always remained hidden inside.

Dan takes his finger away. He puts the frame back in its packaging and slides it to the back of the cupboard under the sink. It’s none of his business; he knows that. He sits at the table and waits for Liam to come downstairs.

Liam surfaces just after ten. He’s fully dressed and looks fresh, rested. He has his phone in one hand, and he holds the screen out as he takes a seat at the table.

Dan’s expecting a cat video or a news story, something to provoke emotion either way. Liam feeds on feelings, starts every day with them, setting emotions on high with a quick trawl of the internet. Today it’s a news story.

‘We must have both been out,’ Liam says. ‘He would have knocked, right?’

A photo of Mik, naked, is on the screen. Dan knows that body so well. The sight of it is a shock; it’s like coming across what looks like a familiar person and then realising – that’s my own reflection.

But it’s a reflection of Mik.

The white of Mik’s body against the dark grey water. The line of the lake, the curve of the landscape behind him… Dan realises the photo was taken just outside, practically on the doorstep.

‘But we were in yesterday, weren’t we?’ Liam says. ‘We were right here.’ The way he keeps saying we is annoying.

‘I went to Bedford to pick something up. Didn’t you say you walked into the village?’

‘Oh yeah.’

Dan gets up from the table, turns away from the phone and switches on the kettle. ‘Mystery solved, then,’ he says, even though it patently is not. But he finds he doesn’t want to solve it, at least, not with Liam. Later, alone, he’ll puzzle over it, try to unpack it. Mik was here.

‘The mystery is not why we were out,’ says Liam, patiently, ‘but why he was here at all. Maybe he wanted to see you. Maybe you should ask him.’

Enough pretence. Dan faces this man he lives with, extended an invitation to for reasons he doesn’t understand. They only share certain spaces, and he needs to spell out the limits of that space, yet again. How many times does he have to do this, before Liam leaves? Everyone has their limits. ‘He’s welcome to come and go,’ Dan says. ‘This was his home. It’s not your home.’

Liam puts his phone, screen down, on the kitchen table. ‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘I haven’t forgotten. I am looking.’

But you did forget – Dan thinks. He doesn’t say it. He doesn’t call out the lie. How he despises these lies, but finds comfort in them, too. They are his guarantee that he will never fall in love with Liam. ‘All right,’ he says.

Liam puts out a hand, and stretches it forward until it brushes the lower buttons of Dan’s shirt.

When Dan is certain his lines have been re-established to his satisfaction he leans over the table and kisses Liam, until Liam responds, opening his mouth, giving up his tongue to the moment.

‘He could have let himself in,’ Dan says, so casually, ‘The spare key is still in that pot Sunetra made.’

‘Oh God, those night classes,’ chuckles Howard, down the phone. ‘Do you remember when she came home crying because she’d made a pottery duck and it had exploded in the kiln?’

These polished, well-worn memories. Dan understands the need to collect them, then display them to another. It reminds him of his grandfather, although that thought makes him uncomfortable, and he doesn’t want to examine it. Still, these are not stolen moments of a war. They are smooth and tumbled stones that Howard loves to turn over and over during these calls. Once a week, on a Saturday afternoon, they touch base this way. That’s what Howard calls it: touching base. And so the old memories are turned and turned again until Dan finds the right moment to say, ‘But why was Mik here? Do you know?’

‘I’ll ask him later,’ says Howard, ‘but it was probably just a spur of the moment thing. You know Mik.’

Does he know Mik? The body was so familiar. An impulsive, self-absorbed student with such fierce loyalty, not yet dimmed by a distrust of life’s tricks. That couldn’t be Mik now. Time must have changed him, too. That’s what it does.

‘How’s Liam?’ asks Howard.

‘Fine, he’s still looking for a place, but finding somewhere he can afford is difficult, you know. The firm he works for isn’t throwing a lot of shifts his way, and he needs an extra room for his kids so they can stay over, that’s only fair on them.’ Dan is aware he’s talking so he doesn’t have to say anything real, but he rambles on, and Howard listens. He always was a good listener. At the end of the endless conversation he says, ‘Well, something will come up eventually.’

‘Is that a euphemism?’ says Howard. ‘Just my little joke.’

‘Yeah, ha ha,’ Dan says, then hears himself say, ‘It’s not serious, or anything. I mean, we’re sort of together, but it’s not…’

‘No, sure. If you need a break come over here! I’ll treat you to beer. I’d love to see you.’

‘Thanks. And tell Mik,’ Dan says, prodded into generosity by Howard’s own example, ‘about the key still being there. That he can come and go as he likes. You all can.’

‘Can we?’ says Howard, a hint of that old amusement in his voice, just like whenever there was a falling out between them, usually Nicky and somebody else because Nicky could always rub them all up the wrong way. Howard would affectionately shuttle messages of conciliation until Nicky started crying and apologising, and nobody could stand against that.

He suddenly misses Nicky, in a way he hasn’t in years, since she first moulted – a flexing of a muscle he had long thought atrophied. But it passes and he feels loose, unconnected, when he remembers her face. He says to Howard, ‘Well, thanks,’ although he’s not certain what he’s thanking him for this time. The house, maybe? Yes, he still likes this house and the way it exists around and apart from the few years in which it held the Stuck Six. It is not defined by that event: no place can be.

Sometimes Dan thinks that people who don’t have painful moultings are at the mercy of those who do.

The shouting, the weeping, the need to change everything: their feelings take precedence over the emotions of the people who can get up after a moulting, put a skin aside, and feel quiet sorrow for what’s been lost without having to abandon everything that went with that life.

Liam moulted before his wife, and he told her nothing had changed, for him. It wasn’t only because of the Bond with the children. He found he still wanted to be with her, as a friend. A companion. He wanted to stay where he was. Then, fourteen months later, she moulted.

And she had warned him when they first met. Emily warned him that she wouldn’t even be able to look at him after the love left, but he didn’t believe it. Liam has told him all this and more on the long, intense Saturday nights they have shared since he moved in.

‘It’s my fault, really,’ Liam says, and Dan says, ‘No, no it isn’t.’

Every Saturday afternoon Liam takes the kids to the park behind the supermarket in Shefford, placing swings and roundabouts between them and himself. Feeling the Bond doesn’t make communication any easier, but at least that way he can watch them for hours. Then he comes back to the house and gets drunk.

Dan fetches two more beers from the fridge. This process has a while to go yet. They’ve only just started to list all the emotions they share, the foremost being a hatred of those difficult moulters. Dan’s mother was one. They moved house so many times, cut loose so many lives.

‘I have to get a birthday present for Molly,’ Liam says. He hesitates, then adds, ‘Can I get something delivered here? Then I’ll have time to wrap it. I want to give it to her myself.’

Dan hands him a bottle of beer, and retakes his place on the sofa. ‘Of course. You don’t have to ask.’

‘Yeah, I do. Look, I realise, it’s been months, and you never wanted a live-in lover. You were just helping out because you’re a good person, and this was meant to stay as a brief thing, I get it. I’m not your type, not deep down. And I’m trying to get over a break-up, so it’s not like I’m in the proper place for this…’

So they’ve moved on to the strangely formal honesty that comes before the argument that leads to the sex. Dan feels himself smiling in recognition of it.

‘I’m glad you find this funny,’ Liam tells him, gently. ‘Me, not so much.’

‘I’m sorry. Really.’ He tries to make the smile go away. ‘How old will Molly be?’

‘Six.’

‘Wow.’

Why a wow for being six? But Liam nods, as if he understands the sentiment. ‘I asked her what she wanted and she said a tank. I couldn’t work out if she meant a fish tank or a battle tank. I can’t get her a fish, though. Emily will kill me.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, fish,’ Liam says, as if the answer is self-evident. ‘They die, don’t they?’

‘Battle tanks tend to have a higher mortality rate.’

‘Ha. Yeah. What time is it?’

‘Late?’

‘Already?’

‘Drink your beer and don’t think about it,’ Dan advises. They clink bottles and take long draughts of cold beer.

‘So, did you find out why Mik was here?’

‘Not really. Listen, I’m sorry about earlier. I want you to feel it’s your home, while you’re staying.’

‘It’s not,’ Liam says, simply. ‘I promise you, I am looking for a place. I want to be able to have the kids stay over—’

‘They can stay over here,’ says Dan, thinking of Howard, of what Howard would say.

‘They can’t.’

‘You’re ashamed of me?’

He waits for Liam to break, to start the argument. Not this time. This relationship is not as predictable as it seems. Liam is shaking his head. He doesn’t speak. He simply moves his head from side to side, his eyes closed, as if listening to his own music. How unreadable he becomes the moment he’s chased, and Dan had thought him so close, so easy to hold.

‘You’re right to be ashamed of me,’ Dan says, because now he wants to own the pain he causes. He thinks of the framed photograph of Edith Learner in the kitchen, put at the back of the cupboard under the sink, with a swatch of old skin inside. Such things should always be private. But then – how can he ever risk letting anyone know about that, about him, again? He’s so lonely, that’s what’s really happening here: it hits him so hard that he stops breathing. He’s so lonely.

‘I’m not ashamed of you,’ says Liam, and puts down his bottle, then holds out his arms.

‘Did you ever think of going to the British Museum, touching your old skin?’ Liam asks him, very softly, stroking his stomach as he lies beside him. Dan is aware that the beer is changing his shape; he’s not a beautiful man any more, not like Mik was. Is. But Liam has a paunch too, just the start of one. They’re not young men. There’s something so sad, and yet ultimately reassuring about that.

‘Why would I?’ Dan says. ‘I can remember what that was like.’

‘What was it like?’

All the reasons why he doesn’t love Liam flood over him, over the afterglow, over the night and vulnerability he felt, like a strengthening armour. ‘What kind of a question is that?’ he says.

Liam pauses. He takes his hand from Dan’s stomach. ‘I think it was like being in love with love,’ he says. Then he gets up and finds his clothes, scattered around the floor, and returns to the bedroom he’s using while he’s here, at the other end of the corridor.

In love with love.

Was that it, all along?

He had fallen in love with all of them, all at once. A miracle of instant inclusion.

Dan gets up. He can’t lie in bed any more. There’s a suggestion of light to the room, but not dawn, not yet. Only a grainy greyness throughout the house as he takes the stairs, makes his way to the kitchen, tells himself he’s heading for the kettle. But then he’s reaching for the cupboard handle and peeling back the packaging, and crouching over that black and white photograph.

Ridiculous – he thinks, and he feels shame again, seeing himself as if from the other side of the room, in his boxer shorts, huddled over somebody’s bought and sold skin. He’s become the man he never wanted to be. How he hated those people, empty of love, who cooed over the Six. Who wanted to touch them.

He puts his finger to the hole in the glass.

So soft, so vague. A gentle emotion. She was a good person. Could that be true? He wonders. He can’t tell what part of his assumptions come from the skin and what comes from the things he thinks he knows about her from what his grandfather used to say. The Nation’s Songstress. Some people are better at reading skins than others. He suspects he has no talent for it.

He searches for the source of her love again. The love is sweet and delicate, like a thread. But still there’s no face, no image. Nobody to blame for that emotion, and no pain. There’s never any pain in a skin, which means that all skins are, in fact, a lie.

The shame overcomes the curiosity, and he takes his finger away.

His instinct is to destroy the skin so that nobody else can touch it. He thinks of his own skin from the Stuck Six days, preserved and folded in the British museum. Maybe visitors touch that, and want to rub it out, burn it up. Other people’s love is so precious that it must pain the rest.

Dan turns over the frame and looks for a way to open it, but it’s glued together. He could break the glass. He thinks of Liam, sleeping. There’s no way to break it quietly, and he doesn’t want to explain the act.

Besides, who is he to destroy it?

He sits back on the cold floor, clutching the picture. The weak, grey light strengthens into day, and eventually Dan gets up, puts the frame back in its packaging, and takes it to his bedroom. He slides it under the bed, among the few possessions that the others left behind when they moved out, one by one.

When he walks in the house he knows she’s there, although he couldn’t say why. It’s in the warmth of the kitchen, perhaps. The romantic in him would say it’s because she’s passed through it, leaving a trace of her vividness behind. But when he walks into the living room it’s not Nicky he finds there but Sunetra, sitting on the sofa with her long dress pulled over her knees as she taps on her phone. She looks up and gives him a huge smile that lasts for no longer than a second. Then she says, ‘I have to get this down,’ and returns her attention to her phone.

He was so certain it was Nicky.

He stands in the doorway and watches her. It’s as if she’s given him permission to stare, with her determination to put her own attention elsewhere, so he drinks her in without feeling the need to hide it. She is unchanged, and utterly different. How can she be both? He notes all this dispassionately. There is a hole within him for her, but it doesn’t scare or repulse him. The feeling has gone, that’s all. She drops the phone back in her purse, then unfolds from the sofa and stands, to faces him directly.

‘Hello,’ Sunetra says.

He’d forgotten how tall she is.

‘You found the key, then.’

‘I’m still weirdly proud of that pot,’ she says.

‘You can take it with you,’ he says, and she frowns, and he regrets his choice of words. He never meant to suggest it was not important to him, even though it’s only a pot.

She tells him, ‘I like the fact that it stays here.’

‘I do too.’

She comes to him, and they hug. She puts a hand to his cheek and feels his skin. So personal an act. ‘You poor thing,’ she says, and he remembers how she always could read him; how could he have persuaded himself that Sunetra didn’t know him, deep down? She breaks the contact and says, ‘I’m not staying. I just had the urge to see the house.’

‘Just the house, then? Not me?’

She doesn’t reply to that, directly. She purses her lips, then says, ‘Did you see the photo of Mik, in the paper?’

‘He’s looking good.’

‘He always did.’

‘It’ll desert him at some point. Do you want a drink? Some dinner?’

‘Let’s get Chinese from that place in Shefford that does great chow mein. Did great chow mein.’

‘It still does. Not everything is different around here, you know.’

She laughs. ‘Of course it isn’t,’ she says. Oh, this is good, this is familiar and strong and they can stand each other, they can be more than old lovers, they can be friends, and the Chinese food isn’t delivered for an hour so they’ve confided nearly everything by the time they get to eat. He tells her about the phone call with Howard, and the emergency leak he fixed in a bathroom this morning where the woman recognised him and said she cried when the Six broke up and, maybe he could fix that leak for her too with a bit of personal attention. Was that a come-on? Yes, says Sunetra, and a rubbish one at that. She holds him in her eyes, with her interest.

Her turn: she talks of the poems she’s writing now, poems about loss and good grace and kindness. ‘They all seem to be full of you,’ she says, slowly, a puzzled revelation.

‘You think I’m kind?’

‘You always are to me.’

That brings guilt, for the cruelty she doesn’t know about. He hates her poems, particularly that famous one, in which he found only sentimentality; he’s said as much to Howard and the others a number of times. And even earlier, when they were all still in love, they would laugh at her efforts to be creative. That pot, outside the door, slowly sinking into the wet mud of the garden.

‘I wrote a new poem today,’ she says, ‘while waiting for you to get back. Do you want to hear it?

He hesitates.

‘No, of course you don’t, it’s fine, it’s fine,’ she says. She finishes the last of the chow mein.

‘It’s not that I—’

‘You lived it. You don’t need the poems. So where’s this Liam I keep hearing about? Howard talks to me too. He thinks you’re protesting too much.’

‘It’s not – listen, he’s taken his kids to a theme park. They’re staying over at the hotel there. But he’s not, we’re not…’

‘That’s a shame. I wanted to see this man you’re so busy not loving. Right. Well. I’ll get going.’

‘It’s late. Stay over.’

But she’s already up, and fetching her coat from the living room. His hesitation was unforgiveable, of course.

What did she want from tonight? He knows, suddenly, what he wants from her. He wants to show her the picture of Edith Learner, and have her touch that old skin. He wants to know what she thinks of it, and of him for owning it.

‘You know,’ Sunetra says. ‘I loved Liz first, and I loved Howard because it became clear that he was part of Liz. You I loved because you were so obviously the end of us all. You were our completion, and our end.’ She nods. He can tell she’s pleased with the way she’s phrased the thought. She’s making a mental note to write it down later, and package it up as a poem.

They wait for the taxi to arrive, then kiss goodbye quickly. ‘I forgot,’ she says, ‘a package came for Liam. I signed for it, I hope that’s okay. It’s in the hall. His name looked good on top of our address.’ She looks at him as if she is disappointed with him – as if a parcel arriving in someone else’s name is undeniably an act of love.

‘Thanks. You’d better get going.’

‘You can be happy, you know. That’s allowed.’

As the taxi drives away, her head is bowed. She doesn’t look up at him. She’s already on her phone, condensing their time together into a line, and he wouldn’t have believed he ever loved her if there wasn’t physical proof out there.

‘I’ve found a place,’ says Liam, near the end of their bath, just as the water is turning tepid.

Something in him changed after the visit to the theme park. Maybe it was so busy, so fraught and wild with electrical thrills and sugar and screaming, that it became impossible to top. No other distancing technique could ever work as well, so it has become pointless for him to try. Instead there has to be communication. Speaking softly as one tucks a child into bed at night, in a small quiet house bought for that purpose. That’s what Liam needs now.

They’ve bathed together before, but never like this, without sex between them. Dan leans back, feeling the water rise as his back slides against Liam’s chest. Liam applies soap with perfunctory circles of his hand. The entire reason for suggesting it must be to break this news. What a strange choice of location, Dan thinks.

‘It’s not perfect, but it’ll do for a start. I’ve been given more hours at work, too. Night shifts, so that’ll cover the rent.’

‘That’s great,’ Dan says, carefully, ‘A step forward.’

‘Is that what life is? Steps forward? One foot in front of the other?’

Dan sloshes the water up over his chest. It’s cramped, with his legs tucked up, but he’s strangely comfortable. The foetal position, almost. ‘It’s just a thing people say.’

‘Yeah, I’m not keen on those. Try saying something real instead.’ Liam applies shampoo to Dan’s hair and rubs it in, roughly. The foam forms and drips, and Dan has to close his eyes and mouth tight. So much for saying something real. Still it gives him time to think. He picks his words carefully, ready for when Liam has rinsed his hair clean.

‘I’ll never see you,’ he says.

‘No, probably not.’

‘But I want to see you.’ He tilts back his head, but can’t see anything but the wet ends of his own fringe, hanging down. Liam’s hands are on his chest, though. They press against his skin. He’s listening. Is he angry? There’s an energy emanating from him. It’s so difficult to be honest about this.

‘We’ll work something out,’ Liam says. The pressure from his hands lessens. ‘When people want to see each other, they find a way, I reckon.’

Yes, maybe that’s true. Liam worked all hours when they first met, and yet they would text and meet up, even in the middle of the night when Liam took his break. All in the name of the compatibility between bodies in a time when that seemed like an easy option. Smiles leading to open mouths, no words, no thoughts. Hands tugging at clothes. Dan would wear jogging bottoms to those meetups for ease of access. But then it began: words, afterwards, and shared stories, leaking through drip by drip. I need a place, I can’t stay there. Things are falling apart. It’s just for a little while. He would never have offered a space in the house to a different body, no matter how beautiful, or even made the effort to be there in the moments available. It was something about Liam.

‘Yeah,’ he says, and strokes the hand on his chest. ‘People find a way.’

Liam folds the wrapping paper over the box, and Dan passes him the sellotape.

The present is a fish tank.

Not a tank for living, breathing fish. The pink plastic box will be filled with water by Liam’s daughter, who will then empty a packet of glittery balls into it. The balls will expand, slowly, over time, into fish simulacra. They’ll grow and swim, and she’ll have to ‘feed’ them from a matching little pink tub. But they won’t be alive, and so they can never die.

‘I’m not certain what kind of life lesson this is,’ Dan says doubtfully, as the present is sealed shut by Liam’s hands.

‘It’s the kind that doesn’t get me into trouble with her mother,’ he says.

A date is set for moving out.

Howard phones, at his usual time on his usual day, and says, ‘How did you manage to upset Sunetra?’

‘Why? What did she say?’

‘Nothing. That’s the point. Usually she won’t stop talking about what she’s writing, how she’s feeling. Yesterday: nothing. She wouldn’t even sing your praises, which is unusual.’

‘She came to visit,’ Dan tells him. Here comes the guilt again: inescapable, inevitable. It prompts him to add, ‘Does it matter, though? If we can’t be on good terms any more? Most people aren’t, once they’ve broken up, are they?’

There’s a long pause on the other end of the phone. Eventually Howard says, ‘I suppose I’ve never thought of us as most people. But you’re right. You don’t have to stay close. I don’t want to make you feel that you have to talk to us – to me.’

‘No, that’s not what I—’

‘So what have you been up to?’

‘Helping Liam pack up, in the main.’

‘He found a place?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Howard says, his voice all compassion, as if Dan’s emotions had never been hidden from him, had always been his business even though every conversation had been about maintaining a distance, and it makes Dan so angry that he hangs up the call and says, ‘Motherfucker,’ over and over again, in surprise, in outrage. When the phone begins to ring again he blocks Howard’s number on an impulse and goes out to the garden, the air fresh, the lawn too long.

He crosses the grass, feeling his socks soak up the wetness of the soil, and picks up the pot that holds the spare key. He smashes it down, and when it doesn’t break he takes a rock from the overgrown rockery and hits the pot, over and over, until it fractures into three pieces: a handle, a rim, and the rest of the body. The key, nestled inside, once safe in the dark, has become visible.

A quick search reveals others have been searching for Edith Learner’s secrets.

A long thread on Reddit starts with the question of who she could have loved, back then. There’s a general agreement that the details are fuzzy, even for those who are adept at reading skins, but then an argument breaks out, accompanied by an influx of caps lock and exclamation marks. Is it disgusting to touch the dead, to want to know about them? Dan’s surprised by how many people seem to feel that, nowadays; he never remembers it being an issue before. The world is changing.

Just because it was okay in the past doesn’t mean it’s okay now we know better – somebody has typed.

Others defend the selling of the Songstress’s skin on the basis of her historical importance, and so it rages on, without the possibility of agreement. It’s like standing in the centre of a hall in which everyone is shouting, red-faced, fists raised. So many opinions that he feels deafened, numbed. His own anger has vanished.

He gives up on Reddit and searches for news articles instead.

Unless Martin Sibley was over a hundred years old at the time of providing the quote then he was full of shit, thinks Dan. There was no way Learner had been singing for him; he hadn’t even been born yet.

But there is a connection between them, due to owning that swatch. They are similar people, in some way. Searching for clues, touching that skin.

Is it possible to be in love not with a person, but with something bigger? An idea. Love. War. Could she have been in love with the war, and what it gave to her? A role. Perhaps that was the diffused, gentle feeling that was coming through her skin: a soft, hidden love for all that suffering, which had given her such purpose, and made her everybody’s sweetheart.

No. He prefers the thought of a tall strong soldier, or a nurse, or a fellow farm worker with ruddy cheeks and planted legs. He prefers the romance of a faceless lover, and he doesn’t want to know the truth, after all.

He shuts the lid of the laptop. It is getting late. Liam will be back soon.

‘Last Saturday,’ Dan said, raising his bottle to Liam’s. They clink.

‘Here’s to it.’

They drank.

‘I’m really going to miss you.’

‘You’ve been saying that a lot,’ says Liam, with a half-smile. ‘Keep it up and I might start believing you.’

‘I hope you do. Did the kids like the house?’

‘Loved it. They had a bit of an argument over the bedrooms, but I think we got it sorted out.’

‘Did she like her present?’

Liam tilts his head, and Dan reads the faint line of worry between his eyes. ‘She’s clever. She looked really pleased at first, but later she said: They’re not proper fish, though, are they?’

‘Yeah,’ says Dan. ‘She sounds switched on.’

‘She is.’

He’d planned to wait until the end of the night to say what he wanted to say, but suddenly it occurs to him that he doesn’t want them both to be drunk for it, even if that makes it easier on them both. He clears his throat, finds his courage. You can do this. ‘Do you know who Edith Learner is?’

‘The… um… singer. From the war.’

‘My great-grandfather was a big fan.’

‘Really?’ Liam shifts forward on the sofa; he’s wondering where this is going, perhaps. Dan likes to think he’s surprised him. ‘Did he fight in the war, then?’

‘Yeah. He was a para. Saw some heavy stuff. I never met him, but my granddad used to tell me all about it. I had a strong bond with my granddad, but later I began to realise that it wasn’t – sometimes people need an audience. Not just for good things in the past. For bad.’

The living room is so quiet, the lights down low. His home. Sunetra was sitting on this very sofa only a few weeks ago, writing her poem. It doesn’t matter if he fails to understand or like what she creates; only that she was here. He’s so grateful she was here.

Here goes.

‘He had a scrapbook, passed down from his father, from the war. Bits of skin, cut from enemy soldiers. People his father had killed, then carved out a square of skin, and pressed it in this thick book, and they’d been preserved. Granddad would bring out the book whenever he babysat me, and he’d let me touch these little squares, and play Edith Learner’s songs, and I’d feel that warmth, those good feelings. I didn’t know it was other people’s love I was feeling until later. He never really explained it to me.’

‘Jesus,’ says Liam. ‘That’s…’

‘Fucked up?’

‘Yeah. It is.’

Dan feels the need to defend it, from the point of view of his own young self, who found no wrong in it, and who wouldn’t have known there was anything to feel guilt about. He pushes the urge down.

‘Where is it now?’

‘The scrapbook? I don’t know. Maybe my dad took it after granddad died. He never mentioned it.’

‘You’ve never talked about it with him?’

Dan shakes his head. ‘Not with anyone. Not even the others. Howard, Mik, Liz. I could never get over how there was nothing but good feelings in those skins, even though those people died in fear, in pain. Why the hell doesn’t that last? I couldn’t explain it to myself, so how could I explain it to them?’

Liam is frowning, but it doesn’t seem to be judgemental in nature. ‘It’s not your job to explain it. It’s not even your secret to keep. You didn’t do anything wrong.’

‘No, that’s true.’ A short explanation of something from so long ago, and a few words, and there’s a new lightness in his chest. There has been no judgement, no verdict passed. He pulls Liam to his feet and leads him upstairs, but not for the tension that has always existed between their bodies. Instead he fishes under the bed and pulls out the package that he stored there.

‘I thought you said you didn’t have it,’ says Liam.

‘No, look.’ He reveals the frame, the photograph, the swatch of skin. ‘I bought it. I don’t even understand why.’

‘I don’t wanna touch it,’ Liam says. This has changed the mood. ‘You should throw it out.’

‘It’s a part of history, in a way.’

‘Not your history.’

‘But my grandad loved that music.’

Liam is tight-lipped, his body rigid as he sits upright on the end of the bed. ‘Not you. And not even your grandfather. It’s all the past, isn’t it?’

Dan imagines a scenario in which he, simply and cleanly, puts the frame on the floor and stamps it to pieces. Just like he did with Sunetra’s pot. But that act didn’t make him feel better. The harder you stamp, the more shards you create. The past is not so easy to destroy.

He slides the frame back into the envelope, and returns it under the bed. ‘I don’t know how to make sense of this yet, but it’s part of who I am,’ he says. ‘So I guess it stays, until I can.’

‘I don’t understand you, sometimes. You’re not some little boy any more. You don’t need to collect and hold these things for other people.’

‘I think you’re amazing,’ Dan says. ‘Thanks. For listening. For saying what you said. It’s made a big difference to me.’ The things that irritate him about Liam are the things that irritate him about himself: obstinacy, and cruelty, and sadness, and kindness. A mystery wrapped up in a skin.

‘I won’t tell anyone.’

‘It’s okay,’ Dan says, feeling safe. Feeling so tired of everything that tries to make sense of all that should be left unsolved. ‘It’s not your secret to keep.’

He gets up and leaves the room, leading Liam back downstairs to their drinks. The night won’t end up in this room. It’s not love. Not love for a person, or an idea, or a set of memories to keep. Not love, right now, at least. And that’s okay.