Skin Lane Read online

  At the end of the working day, some nine and a half hours later, he would retrace his steps exactly. The only time he would use a different pavement from the one he had used in the morning was if he crossed the street to avoid some noisy crowd of men gathered outside the one of the two pubs he had to pass (they are still always almost all men, those early evening crowds outside the City pubs, even now, nearly forty years later; have you noticed that?). As he turned left at the bottom of All Hallows Lane, he would ignore the anonymous threat tolled out by the river barges moored for the night under Cannon Street rail bridge; the slow, funereal clanging-together of their empty metal hulls, weirdly amplified by the bridge, was too familiar to disturb him. If it was summer he would, as he emerged back up out onto the sudden open space of London Bridge, give a quick backward glance across at the sunset as it flared over the whole of the western city; but the view, no matter how bloody or sulphurous, never detained him. He always knew exactly how many minutes he had before the five-forty nine train departed from platform eleven, or the six-o-two from platform eight — and would have already calculated exactly how much time he would need to stop and buy his nightly copy of the Evening Standard at the station kiosk.

  The old London Bridge, which was to be demolished just a few months after our story takes place, was famous for the narrowness of its York stone pavements. They constricted the rush-hour crowds into almost intolerable crushes. But even when the black river of commuters was at its densest — that twice-daily human tide, rolling north at eight, receding south at five, as relentless in its way and thickening and gathering pace just as swiftly as the waters which slapped and surged and came to a rolling boil twice daily against the four great granite piers which supported the bridge — it is extraordinary how rarely any one of them ever bumped into anyone else. Mr F certainly never did. Even when he was forced to queue to go through the ticket barrier — even if he was obliged (on a rainy day) to cram into an overcrowded compartment on his train — he was expert at avoiding contact. If he did find himself having to stand, and the train lurched unexpectedly, he would brace himself with his knees, never reach to share an improvised handhold on a luggage rack; he never dropped his umbrella and had to stoop and grope to retrieve it; never accidentally grazed the back of an adjacent hand when attempting to open his evening paper. Since he was tall, there was rarely any danger that anyone’s wet hair would brush inadvertently against his face. If the crowding was so bad that contact became inevitable, the combined thicknesses of his suit and his overcoat meant that he would feel at most only a general pressure, never the exact shape or temperature of a specific limb or joint as it was pressed gently against his leg or into the small of his back. And even if his face was only inches from that of his neighbour, he would never look at them. Certainly not in the eye.

  Of course, as you will know if you have ever made such a daily train journey yourself, none of this made him in any way particularly unusual.

  Once he reached Peckham Rye Station, he would retrace his morning journey exactly, stopping only to buy some milk if he needed it, and would arrive back at the mansion block which contained his one-bedroomed, third-floor flat at twenty past six at the very latest. Earlier, of course, if it was a Friday night in winter.

  two

  Mr F lived, you will not be surprised to hear, on his own.

  Although the street as a whole was now fairly down-at-heel, the hundred-year-old building in which he lived retained, under the shabbiness of its flaking paint and the grime of its blackened brickwork, enough gentility to announce that this had, when everything was new, at least aspired to being a respectable address. The block, which held twelve flats, had kept all of its original ironwork; an unkempt privet hedge was kept hemmed in against the ground floor windows by a set of heavy cast-iron railings, and an elaborate fire escape (the latest thing at the time of construction) reached right to the third floor at the back. The handle of the panelled front door was still large and brass, the letterbox an incongruous neo-gothic maw more suited to a vicarage than a mansion block. The tessellated hallway had the usual nineteenth-century geometric design in red, black and white; the curving banister was mahogany, and the second-floor landing of the stairs boasted a small, dim window of stained glass. These features were of course still years away from being valued as “period” by the inhabitants; the wood of the stained glass window’s frame, for instance, was being allowed to rot under its chipped white gloss paint. It rattled in any kind of wind, and one or two of the small diamond-shaped panes of glass that made up the central panel {fleurs de lys on alternating lozenges of grey and yellow) were missing. This central panel was framed by bevelled strips of a plain but violently red glass, and because the window faced west, at sunset, these threw a lurid carmine frame, a bloody, disembodied trap-door, right across the shabbily carpeted turn of the landing. This meant that on summer evenings Mr F had to walk straight through this strange and intensely coloured rectangle of light on his way up the stairs; there was no way round it. He would have avoided it if he could, but having no choice except to walk straight through it, he would always (and I’m sure he didn’t know he was doing this) hold his breath while he did so. For some reason, he intensely disliked the way the strips of pure red, running across his right arm, looked strong enough to soak into the cloth of his suit; the way the white skin of his wrist, as he held his front door key in readiness, was stained scarlet. On warm summer evenings it was with some relief, that he finally reached his front door, slipped the key into the lock, and turned it.

  Mr F was a man who valued his privacy. He still remembered each and every one of the grimy bedsits he had been forced to occupy in the two years it had taken him to find the relative comfort of this flat. Relative; the kitchen and so-called living/dining-room were tiny, the bedroom only just big enough to hold, besides his single bed, an oversized stained-oak wardrobe and a tiny bedside table. The white-tiled bathroom, however, was of a reasonable size, and after two years of padding along shared hallways to see if there was any hot water left, Mr F particularly valued being able to lie down in his very own, full and full-sized bath more than once a week if he felt so minded. The moment he entered the quiet darkness of the flat, he felt reassured. After returning his overcoat to the hallstand, hanging up his key on the hook by the front door and his suit jacket on its hanger in the wardrobe, he would always repair first to the bathroom. There, he would remove his links and wristwatch, roll his sleeves up to well above the elbow, and proceed to conscientiously first wash and then scrub his hands, using a big wooden-backed nail-brush and a cracked brick of the pink carbolic soap that he favoured. He did this for several minutes, with the water running as hot as he could get it.

  Once this ritual was complete, his evenings in the flat were simple, quiet — and predictable. Whatever the night of the week, his supper, the washing up, the finishing of his evening newspaper with one roll-up and then an hour or so of sitting with the radio and smoking several more -“Golden Virginia” was his preferred brand — always came and went in the same order. Every Friday night, as often as not on a Sunday and occasionally on a mid-week evening as well, he took a hot bath before going to bed. This was as much for the pleasure of it as because he felt he ought to, and it was after this bath, standing in front of the misted washbasin mirror in his dressing-gown, that he carefully rubbed his hands with the lanolin lotion that gave them their distinctively soft skin and faint night-time perfume. He worked the lotion in by wringing his hands firmly together, until every trace of it was absorbed; he never would have dreamed of going to bed with them still greasy. Had anyone been there to witness it, this gesture — repeated, like the scrubbing, for several minutes — would surely have perplexed them; after all, isn’t it women, not men, who wring their hands, and then only to express some hidden grief? But of course, there was no one there in his bathroom, and Mr F himself never looked up to see the image framed in the washbasin mirror, never wondered from whom he had inherited or by whom he had b
een taught this strangely intent and melancholy gesture. Once back in the bedroom, he took off the dressing-gown and buttoned himself into his pyjamas. Standing at the foot of the bed, he could hardly avoid catching sight of himself in the half-length mirror with the bevelled edges which was set into the wardrobe door -but once again, he never stopped to stare at or scrutinise himself. When you live with someone for years, you barely notice how the slow, incremental changes in their body accumulate; and Mr F. had lived with himself always. He saw nothing worth staring at.

  Mr F was one of those fortunate men who never have much trouble getting off to sleep. As a child he had shared a bedroom with his two brothers, both of whom were much older than him — nine and eleven years, respectively — and he had developed the younger sibling’s characteristic trick of not letting anything wake him, not even the sound of two occasionally drunk young men undressing in the dark at midnight. As an adult, since he had kept to the same job all his working life, he had (with the exception of the war years) been in the enviable position of never having to go to sleep at night worrying about what the next morning would bring, or whether he would wake up in time. His body could be relied upon for that; his eyes opened promptly at twenty minutes past six, Monday to Friday, regular as clockwork -with an extra half hour at weekends — regardless of whether it was cold dark winter, or whether the sounds and colours of summer had already been probing and testing the faded red lining of his bedroom curtains for nearly two hours. It was the same in the evenings; once the ten o’clock pips had sounded on the radio, his body would go through the routine of turning off the gas, cleaning his teeth and getting undressed almost by itself. This meant that it was invariably ten-fifteen — almost exactly — when he folded back the counterpane.

  Once he was in bed, Mr F would close his eyes and be straight off to sleep in minutes. Or that was what he usually did, anyway. But

  But on this particular evening, which is a Thursday evening, early in the freezing January of 1967, as our story now more or less officially commences, he does not go straight to sleep. He places his wristwatch on the bedside table, folds back the bed-cover, turns the bedroom light out, gets into bed, lays his head carefully in the centre of the pillow — and then lies there and stares at the ceiling for a good twenty minutes. This is because now, at the age of nearly forty-seven, after nearly thirty-three years of working at the same address — after nearly thirty-three years of the same domestic routine, of his own company almost every solitary evening — something new has started to happen to this man.

  He has started to dream.

  More specifically, in the space of the last ten days, he has had the same dream three times in a row.

  Come to think of it — and ever since the last time it came, the third time, he has found himself thinking about it often, because the dream, as you will see, is of a peculiarly troubling nature — he may even have dreamed it more than three times; for all he knows, he may have dreamed it every single night, and simply not remembered it. After all, he thinks, which of us remembers all their dreams? The last two mornings, when he’s sat down with his cup of tea and made a conscious effort to see what he can remember, there’s been nothing, nothing at all; but the morning before that -

  The morning before that, he could remember everything.

  And the thing was, the everything he could remember was exactly the same — exactly the same the third time as it had been the first two times. He was sure of it — the dream hadn’t been just more or less the same, but exactly the same - as if he’d stayed in his seat at the end of the programme at the Odeon and watched the film all over again. As if he’d got up three mornings in a row and found exactly the same unaddressed brown envelope lying on the mat, waiting for him.

  This worries him, as well it might. In fact, he’s starting to think that this way that the dream repeats itself so exactly is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the whole business.

  And so perhaps it is no wonder that tonight, even though it is a Thursday night, and he is tired, Mr F lies there in his narrow bed with his eyes wide open and stares up at the ceiling first for twenty minutes, and then thirty. Eventually, it is nearly an hour before his eyes begin to slowly, reluctantly — because it does wear him out, this job of his, and the journey there and back again on the train, and all the walking, some days, really it does — before his eyes begin to reluctantly, finally close. And as he lies there, waiting for the dark, he tries to guess whether the dream will come again tonight or not, and if it does, whether it will be the same.

  It does. And when it comes, this is what he sees.

  Mr F is coming slowly up the stairs (this shot is a close-up, of his feet; well-polished oxfords, and two inches of turnup). The stair-carpet is so worn and thin that every other tread creaks — except that in the dream his footsteps, like everything else, are silent. Muffled. He passes the bloody window. The bars of scarlet light slide across his shoulder, down his arm and across the white skin on the wrist of his outstretched right hand; however, he makes it to the door unstained. Now his right hand is inserting the key into the lock. The key turns; the door opens; now the door is closing behind him again. The lock clicks shut. Then there is a long sequence in which, as on most of Mr F’s evenings, nothing much happens. There is the washing of the hands, the preparation and clearing away of his supper, the cleaning of his shoes ready for the next morning over a spread out sheet of newspaper — and all of this Mr F watches (over his own shoulder, as it were, and as if the film had the sound turned off) with some dread, because he knows by now what is going to happen when this is all over. He knows what is going to happen once the dishes are all done and the paper folded and the polish and brushes put back in the cupboard. Despite himself, he goes into the bedroom — and this is where the dream begins to diverge from what ought to happen next, from what actually happens when he gets himself ready for bed every night — and instead of hanging up his suit-trousers and putting on his dressing-gown to go and have his bath, he finds himself standing at the foot of the bed and staring at himself in the wardrobe mirror. He stands there for a long time — for what feels like several minutes. What the camera is looking for when it scrutinises his face and body like this, Mr F really doesn’t know. Is it looking to see whether the suit still fits him properly? Whether the hems of his trousers are too worn? Whether that smudge of dirt on his collar (which he doesn’t for the life of him know how he acquired) will come out, whether his tie is the right colour with this jacket, whether it’s tight enough — he has no idea (of course, he knows that it is him doing the staring really, not some camera; he knows that. That this is all a dream, not some peculiar modern film). He frowns, and notices that his eyebrows are slightly bushier than they used to be. Slightly bushier than they used to be back when he was… when he was… when he was what? When he was twenty? When he was younger? Is that it? And now, when he holds up both his hands like that, as if offering them for inspection, palms towards the mirror, why does he do that? To check if he’s got all the ink from his Evening Standard off? To make sure they’re white and clean and soft, soft enough to kiss — not that anyone ever does bend down and kiss the palms of another man’s hands. Why on earth would they do a thing like that?

  All the while, there is still no sound.

  When this staring in the mirror eventually stops (just as he never knows what he is looking for, so Mr F never knows quite how long the looking is going to go on for) he frowns at himself again, turns on his heel and walks down the hall to the bathroom. There is no sound of the taps running, so he knows he isn’t going in there to have a bath. It’s dark now, of course, so as he pushes open the bathroom door he reaches in and pulls the cord, automatically, without thinking, and the light comes on.

  The white ceramic tiles on the walls have never been so white and cold, or the light so bright; for some reason, the single high-wattage lightbulb is bare. The door swings open, and he walks in, and walks to the washbasin to get himself a drink of water, and then he
looks up, squinting in the brightness of the light and sees, O God, he sees

  Mr F sees, reflected there in the mirror over the washbasin, right there behind him, with its feet tied, its ankles lashed with a thick rope to the cast-iron brackets which hold up the lavatory cistern, a body.

  A man’s body.

  Naked.