When I was bad they sent me to the Skin Room, and sometimes it would breathe.
And my parents, or at least that was what I called them then, would stand at the top of the stone stairs as I descended, both motionless, until they were only two smudged points against the light.
I would sit in the centre, the lamp casting a warm light on the floor. The skin nearest would glow a kind of pink, and if you pressed your fingers against it you would be able to make out the dark web of veins and then something else. Beneath all that, a of kind subcutaneous awareness.
Another child joined from time to time. I did not know her name and I would not ask. We would face away from each other, pick at the thick wiry black hairs that grew from the walls, run our fingers over the greasy patches, the whitening edges of the great scabs that would bloom overnight like fungus.
The Skin Room knew when we were scared, I think. It would move slow - in and out - and soften its edges. We would press our small faces into the skin beneath our feet and hum songs half-remembered. We would sit in the corners and feel the folds against our shoulders, our backs. It would not sing so much as vibrate, which would move through the core of your spine, the soft cage of your ribs, and then - as we learnt once when we were kept there for what must have been days - if you opened your mouth, it would vibrate the wet muscles of your throat just enough that you would sing. Or, at least, the room would sing through you. Lilting, broken, songs that told us things we already knew there, in the dark.
Afterwards, climbing up the cold stone steps, breathless, they would let the two of us step out into the cool night air. We would try not to gasp, at how clean, how scentless, it all was. How we would stand, hands millimetres apart, silent, eyes raised to the stars, which seemed like pores on the skin of something vast and unknowable.
-—
My parents would take me up the hill to the house at the very top in silence. At each hairpin curve in the road there would be a torch burning, small white rocks left in the dirt, twigs tied together with dirty string, small black and white portraits of people I almost recognised. Beyond that, thick forest, dirt slopes, knotted weeds.
Sometimes a figure at some distance, standing, face covered by a shiny plastic bag, the colour of the beetles that would die in our garden, unable to right themselves, limbs flailing on the broken paving stones. We would climb higher and higher and I would say nothing. My legs would begin to scream, the tendons in my shins pulled thin to breaking. Lungs run ragged.
Often times no one at all as we climbed the hill, just the road, the shifting pools of light, the low moan of something scared moving in the forest beyond.
She would always be there ahead of me. In the room, studying the floor in front of her. The room which was never in the same place twice, you understand. Some nights it was the first thing as we entered the front doors, others a guide would take fifteen minutes to take us there, through bedrooms and dining halls and soft twinkling gardens filled with statues of dogs and angels and startled horses.
We would wait in the library as they did whatever necessary to wake the room. We would sit in hardwood chairs, on plush cushions, feeling the grain of the wood, the delicate swirls, the firm ridges. She was pale with hollow cheeks, a lazy eye. Hair greasy like dead fish. White spots at her temples, a yellowed strip of discoloured skin at her lower lip. But amongst all the books which I could not read, and the candles that were too ornate to be beautiful, she looked alive, and imperfect, and that was enough.
We did not speak but I think we both knew. If the candle inside the lamp guttered and went out, and we were left in the amorphous muggy dark of the Skin Room, we would find each other and hold hands. She would say small things out loud, and I would nod. I would list textures I had forgotten but that I would like to feel again: rust after heavy rain, the bristled fur of a dead rat, the feel of stepping on an old plaster.
There would come fear, rising in my stomach, and then - gone. Something else in its place. Something new and hungry and knowing.
-—
More than a decade later, and it’s deep summer when I see her again. The kind where the days feel empty and long, the heat dulls the hours. There is the smell of freshly cut grass, of dog shit, cheap perfume. I am trimming grass, as I do now and again, for money. The tool has cut my calf and I am trying to pretend I do not notice, but I can feel the blood coagulate on the knotted bone of my ankle.
Behind me a row of houses that look much the same. White walls, white guttering. The windows are reflective. The roofs something like black slate. A garage, a tarmac drive.
I kill the lawnmower. The engine whines, and then dies.
She is across the street, smoking, sunglasses large enough to obscure the raised hairy moles that grow beneath her eyes. I stand motionless. She does not move either. The sun is white and starches the sky. Only two clouds, flat, dimensionless, against the paling blue.
‘There are lots of things I would like to say’, she says.
Her voice is loud enough that I can hear it across the street. I think I have caught a mouse with the lawnmower. Something dark and wet struggles in the green heap. It makes a quiet, frantic sound.
‘Yes,’ I say, and I know she can hear me too.
It is too bright on this street. The light becomes blinding on car windshields, kitchen windows, the foil wrappers of chocolate bars.
‘But I don’t know if I can say them,’ she says.
Whatever it is dying in the grass makes a high-pitched whine.
‘It is too bright on this street,’ I say.
She nods.
‘Can we talk?’
I have been waiting for her to say that all my life, I feel.
-
‘My life has fallen apart. Or at least,’ I say, ‘it was never together to begin with. Those six walls I knew so well and now-‘
I shrug. I sometimes think I don’t understand people. At the job centre they tell me things with their eyes that their mouths do not say.
Her sunglasses are off now. I can see her lazy eye drift, the white cornea starting to yellow, thin pink veins trembling. There is glossy mucus gathering at the corner, and I want to reach out and touch it.
I don’t. Instead I order a large vanilla milkshake from the waitress, with crushed ice, and powdered sugar. Her husband pays.
Heis short, with crooked teeth and sharp eyes. His moustache is thin, and some of the hairs around his mouth are yellow from cigar smoke. He is very beautiful, the way fresh razors are. They catch the light in the same way.I say this to her: ‘your husband is very beautiful.’
She shakes her head and laughs. ‘Only in the right light,’ she says.
There are dark circles under his armpits, flecks of white at the corner of his lips.
A book found in the bottom of a well, bound in skin. Inside it had commandments. Her husband explains this to me. They want to start the room again. It’s very important. All part of some great plan.
‘Ok,’ I say. ‘Why are you talking to me?’
‘There must be someone,’ he says. ‘We need someone to move behind the skin, if you understand.’
And for a moment, I think I do. I think of the way the Skin Room would respond to my touch. Would soften, or glow, or shift. The friendly smell of sweat in the creases at the corners. The retraction when we plucked the thick black hairs.
He smiles, which is an ugly thing.
‘We wanted,’ he says, ‘to keep it in the family.’
She does not look at me. She does not need to.
They lay it all out in front of me.
In the dark, I will have no eyes.In the silence, I will have no ears.
But if whoever is inside sits, and opens their mouth just the right way, I may be able to sing.
-—
I am not looking forward to it, or dreading it.
It feels like the sunrise. Inevitable, quietly beautiful.
Tomorrow they take my measurements. They use scalpels to peel the nerves from my muscles, my bones. This will not be pleasurable, they tell me.
They let me take one last walk around the Mansion before I sleep, before I wake tomorrow on a sterilised hospital bed.
I found a beetle, rolling on its back, little hairy arms waving. The shell the colour of spilt petrol, metallic and dark. I knelt down and whispered to it. I told it not to worry, that there were many more worlds than these. And then I crushed it with my thumb, and placed the brittle, jammy remains in my mouth.It was, without doubt, the worst thing I have ever tasted. Like water left to stand for a month. Like rotting meat. The blue green mould that grows on wet foods overnight.
And then I returned to my room, where I sat upright on my bed, and worked my tongue under my nail, until the sun had set, and all the remnants of the beetle were gone. I remained motionless, my mouth wide open, my eyes closed, until the sun set. And then on.
I remained like that until I could hear the Skin Room begin to sing.