The Skin Room
THE SKIN ROOM
By Morgan Fleetwood
Text copyright © Morgan Fleetwood 2015
All Rights Reserved
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
First published in 2017 by Howarth Press
PART ONE
Failure
1
I went to the bad part of town to look for a bad girl. It was the hottest part of the day—a mistake to be out. The sun was crisp and white, and the shutters were down over shop doors and windows along the dust-dry street. Walking past the station, I saw a striking blonde exiting a café. She was dressed provocatively in a shiny, black latex skirt and loose white top. I crossed the road and followed her, listening to her red sandals clicking on the sidewalk, a slip-slap sound. There was little traffic during siesta time, and this sound kept a beat in my head. Her hips moved from side to side as she advanced in a straight line. Her scent drifted backwards: apricot and lime. My eyes fed on her ankles and swelling calves, her buttocks, and the smooth rotation of her shoulder-blades, as she strode up Via Etnea toward the Piazza dell’Università.
She returned to the street where I had first seen her and stopped outside a confectioner’s shop, Aurelio’s. She clasped her hands behind her back and peered into the display of pralines, truffles, and other chocolate assortments, all cradled in red silks beneath spotlights. I moved a step nearer. She didn’t notice me at first, but when I stood next to her and hummed a few bars of “My Favorite Things,” she looked up. She was the most beautiful woman I had seen since my mother died.
She wore a red bra whose straps showed through her cotton blouse. She shuffled her feet nervously when she saw me standing so close. I liked the shifting sound her sandals made on the concrete. I stepped as close as I dared, only a foot away, and looked down at her fingernails. They were scarlet and well kept, only a touch too long.
“You were following me,” she said.
I looked at her body and said nothing.
“I walked all the way up this street and down it again.” She frowned and tossed her blonde hair. She spoke in Italian with a little lisp, using soft R’s.
I saw the curve of her neck and wondered what it would feel like to reach out and touch the soft hairs on her nape.
“I suppose the next question is why,” she said.
I looked into the window, calculating fast. I caught her eye in the glass and spoke to her reflection. “Would you like me to buy you some chocolates?”
“Why would you want to do such a thing?”
“You’re pretty,” I said.
She smiled and for the first time I glimpsed her teeth that were less than perfect: beige not white, uneven not straight. It was not such a big deal; the teeth were not as important as the face and hair. I lowered my gaze to the latex skirt that stopped at her thighs, and saw the tinge of her yellow-boned kneecaps.
“You think I’m good-looking?”
I tried not to meet her eyes. “Your looks are … uncommon.”
She tilted her face, eyed her reflection in the window and looked at herself critically, without vanity. She pulled at a loose strand of hair, moved her eyes slightly, and spoke to my hologram in the glass. “What kind of chocolates?” she asked.
“Any of them. They’re on me.”
“What if I want the most expensive ones in the whole store?”
“Then I shall buy them for you, if you wish.”
She probed her mouth with her tongue. Her lips opened for a second, and I saw the teeth again in their uneven rows. She looked like the kind of woman who was used to being approached by strangers and I guessed that she was some sort of prostitute or escort girl. Her hair was pure gold and, aside from her skin, that was thing about her I admired most.
“I can’t quite make you out,” she said, her smile inflating at the edges.
“It’s an offer. Take it or leave it.”
She cocked her head back and laughed a ripple of notes as she pulled my arm and led me into the store.
A few customers were standing at the bar, knocking back espressos, their conversations sliding back and forth. Four old men played a game of cards. A young guy, wearing a black leather jacket, ate a flaky croissant, his head bowed over the pink pages of La Gazetta dello Sport. I heard the whirring of a coffee-grinder, the tinkling of cups and spoons, the sound of a nozzle frothing milk.
The girl’s arm was still hooked in mine as we approached the counter. The walls behind the bar were decorated with silver mirrors, printed with fading brands: Coca-Cola, Birra Moretti. It was an old-fashioned place with marble floors and wrought-iron tables, lit overhead by Murano glass chandeliers. I smelled the freshly-ground coffee and the chocolates on show behind the glass counters.
She seemed eager to cash in on my offer as she kept a grip on my arm.
“What’s your name?’ she asked.
“Alex.”
“I’m Valentina.” She pointed to a cabinet lit up with golden lights. “I’d like some of those.”
The chocolates were heart-shaped, dark. They reminded me, like her name, of Valentine’s Day.
“A box of those?” I asked her.
She raised two fingers and wiggled them in the air. “Two boxes.”
I caught the eye of the assistant and pointed into the glass cabinet.
“Two boxes of hearts, please.”
“Gift-wrapped?” he asked.
I looked at her.
“One yes,” she said, “and one no.”
I nodded to the man.
He had a few days of stubble on his cheeks, and the long brown hair of a moody rock guitarist, tied back in a ponytail with an elastic band. I was glad to see him slip on a pair of latex gloves before dipping his fingers into the rows of pralines.
“Any preferences?” he asked the young lady.
“No orange creams.”
“Don’t worry. There aren’t any. This one is gianduja. This is strawberry, this one is….”
He gave her a broad smile. Was he trying to flirt with her? He took the second box and dropped in the hearts with the automatic ease of someone accustomed to his task. Perhaps he noticed the coldness of my stare as he looked back at me with tight lips and hard eyes. You’re buying, he seemed to say, so what? I can still look at her. He hunched his shoulders and assembled the remaining chocolates. Once he had finished, he slowly tied ribbons around the boxes, knitting his brows in concentration.
“Anything else?” He leaned back and looked me in the eye.
I turned to Valentina. It was, after all, her show.
“Are these the most expensive … sorry, I mean, are these the finest chocolates you have? I thought I saw, in the window, a green box lined with silk.”
The man grinned. “One box or two?” he asked.
“Three.”
I nodded in agreement, yet felt my cheeks burning. My hands were sweaty and I rubbed them on my jeans, a couple of short swipes.
“Three it is.” I tried to smile. “I think that will be all, though, after that.”
The man scuttled over toward the window, swiping at a buzzing fly with a latex-gloved hand. Sunlight scratched across the tiles. The air con felt ice-cool on the back of my neck.
I turned to her. “Enough now?”
“Almost.”
I gave her a hard look and she seemed to sympathize—maybe realizing she’d taken her profiteering too far—because when I opened my mouth to speak, she asked, “How about a coffee? On me, this time?”
“Sure.”
I wondered if everything I had done so far was right, or if I had already made mistakes. Sometimes it was best to give them everything they asked for, but not always.
The man returned quickly at first then slowed his stride when he saw the two of us standing closely together. Perhaps he sensed our new complicity.
“Here you are,” he said. “Three boxes of the Queen’s Delight. That makes…”
He stabbed his finger into the checkout keys. The electronic digits lit up on my side of the till. I made a rough calculation: it would cost me about ten pages of translation, one day’s work. That was my rate for English/Italian. My rates for French and Spanish were higher, but those languages were not much in demand, not since I’d moved to Sicily.
He shoved our purchases across the counter in a plastic bag, then remembered his manners, or his liking for Valentina, and slowed his hand with a half-smile, almost expecting a rebuke.
“Card OK?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“We’re having coffee too,” she interrupted, in a way that made me think I hadn’t made any mistakes yet.
“You can pay for the chocolates here,” he said. “But you will have to see my colleague at the other till for your drinks. Sorry about that.” His tone indicated that he wasn’t sorry at all. Just unhelpful, or jealous, maybe.
Her sandals made that slip-slap sound across the marble tiles. As we approached a leather sofa in the corner, I caught sight of our reflections in the wall-to-wall mirror. She was about my height, admirably thin, looking underdressed for this café. I was wearing the cream-colored suit I always wore when I went to town on Saturdays. I thought it made me look gentlemanly, richer than I was. That helped.
“What will you have?” I asked.
“Cappuccino, please.” She sat down, smiling, and placed the bag on the chair next to her.
Standing above her for the first time, I noticed the way her blonde hair looked slightly darker where it was parted in the middle, and I wondered if I had made an error of judgement. Was that real blonde hair? I decided not to say anything for now and analyzed the rest of her face: her eyebrows looked as if they had been shaved and then re-penciled to form perfect arcs. The skin on her neck was slightly browner than the skin near her breasts, as though she tanned with her top on. I didn’t mind that, because I didn’t much like the sun either. My skin was pale, freckled. I could understand her wanting to protect herself. She used dark eye shadow but had put on too much and it made her eyes look too melancholy, almost gothic. It was the kind of error a girl makes when she is in a hurry, or trying too hard to get noticed. I saw that she made mistakes too, and for some reason that made me feel more at ease. She looked up at me and caught me staring at her. I looked away, feeling my pulse quicken.
As I walked over to the bar, I felt as though I had reached the first milestone of a long journey.
People moved to and fro across the marble floors, their brightly-colored figures echoing off the mirrors. An annoying pop song—Laura Pausini or someone sounding like her—boomed across the café. I tried to avoid getting too close to anybody and treaded very carefully, stepping round the retirees still huddled over their game. They slapped down their cards in turn, with just an occasional grunt or nod of a head.
“One coffee, one cappuccino. One canolo siciliano.”
I passed over a five-euro bill. The assistant was a white-haired lady who put on her glasses and lifted the bill up against the light to check if it was counterfeit. Not much trust around in Italy these days. She nodded, slipped the change and my receipt into a carved wooden dish, smoothed by passing hands. I took the receipt to the barista. His forehead was sweating as he levered the controls and whirled his hands in a juggler’s frenzy, adding more invisible batons with each order. I handed him the receipt that he took with hairy fingers, tore in half, and replaced on the zinc counter. He banged out the contents of a steaming espresso scoop, cranked in some dark powder, and hooked up the portafilter to the machine. He hit a button and black foam sluiced into each cup. He tilted a jug beneath the silver entrail and set the milk hissing; and once the jug was full he banged it twice on the table, watching as the white froth bubbled to the brim. He knuckled the two cups—one large, one small—across the counter.
I turned to where she was sitting.
I turned to where she was supposed to be sitting.
I turned to see that she had gone.
Her bag of chocolates had vanished too. I felt as if someone had just punched me in the chest, or scraped their nails across my face.
I sat down and drank my espresso, and then sipped her cappuccino, taking bites of the crunchy canolo, tasting its semi-sweet, ricotta filling. I caught sight of the stubbled face behind the chocolate counter, and noticed his shameless smirking. He didn’t even try to hide it. I finished up and left the bar, thinking that all I wanted to do was slit that man’s throat.
Inspector, I had everything prepared at home. The knives and tools. It was just a matter of time before I found the right girl and used the right words in the right way. It was expectation; it was need. I liked that bar, but now I could not go back. I stalked other streets, lingered in other doorways, my eyes taking in every female stride, turn of heel, flick of hair. She would be blonde, she would have long thighs, and she would take care of her skin…
2
I walked past my sister’s room and hesitated on the threshold. Something drew me inside: it must have been the fact that I was missing her. I sat down on the bed and fingered the sheets, absent-minded. The reverberation in the room sounded strange, like the rumble of a distant earthquake, until I realized it was only a plane streaming overhead toward Catania airport. I recalled my last meeting with Sonia in the port of Messina as we sat overlooking the strait….
The wind came at us hard, a blast of iodine and sea spray. Ferryboats raked across the channel, slicing the waves. A distant storm X-rayed the clouds. Thunder smacked the air.
I hugged my sister and smelled the tobacco in her hair. There was alcohol, probably vodka, on her breath. She gripped me tighter than I expected. It felt good, that hug, like I was suddenly feeling better after a chronic illness.
“Hey, drifter.” I smiled.
The corner of her mouth turned up. The wind brushed her hair and loosed a few blonde strands. She told me about her man, Carlo.
“I’m gonna leave that asshole,” she said. “He’s gone too far, this time.”
“You can always go back to Luxembourg.”
She nodded. “Yes, that’s my plan. I’m gonna wait a few days, and try to talk him into letting me go.” She tapped my shoulder and tried to smile. “You never liked him anyway.”
“Nobody likes people like that.”
She said, “I liked him for a while, but, well, things have changed. You should see what he’s trying to do now, it’s too fucking awful.”
“Not my field of expertise.” I waved my hand.
“OK. You always were a softie.” She mussed up my hair like I was her younger brother, when really I was older than her. She was twenty-eight and I was thirty-two. I didn’t like it when she hung out with Carlo. He didn’t always treat her well—everybody knew it. And I was glad that Sonia was finally starting to get it too.
We sat on a bench overlooking the mythical strait between Scylla and Charybdis. In the gusty air, sailboats jostled against one another in their moorings, dipping and snorting like horses at the start of a race. If I closed my eyes, I could almost see the steam rising from their bodies, hear their stamping hooves… I bowed my head, listening to the wind as it slapped the sails and set the ropes tapping against the masts, making tinny echoes. When I opened my eyes again, I saw Sonia’s oval-tipped fingernails, a shade of carmine, in need of care.
“Do you want me to touch up your nails?” I asked.
“Not this time, Ally, thanks.” She spread her fingers out in front of her. “They don’t look so bad.”
“I could do a n
ice job.”
With trembling fingers she scratched open a pack of smokes, pulled out one, and tried to light it with a few thumbed revs of her lighter. The wind strangled the flame. She turned away from me, raised a hand to shroud the gas and sucked in her cheeks. Flick, flick. The smoke eventually bloomed around her lips. I shuddered when I heard the deep, prolonged rattling of her sickly cough.
“Doesn’t sound so good,” I said.
She tapped her chest. “Just a cold.” She nodded, and pulled on her cigarette.
“Is there anything I can do?” I asked.
“Don’t think so.”
I thought that she was making herself ill, and it was a thought that made my stomach ache. Sometimes it ached for a long time when I thought about her, and so I tried to start thinking about somebody else, but it was hard.
It struck me that my sister should have led a different life, away from Carlo and his gang. It was a thought that came to me often yet never came to her.
“Just tell me if I can do anything.” I stared at the sea. It was a deep, sparkling blue, darkening all the time due to the pall of black clouds encroaching across the sky.
“I can handle it,” she replied.
Which meant, as usual, he could handle her, any way he wanted.
We got up from the bench. The sky was totally overcast now. Rain started to fall, streaking the air in diagonal lines. I felt a pitter-patter on the back of my neck. I didn’t mind it too much. It was nice when it rained, though the humidity was hard to get used to. My shirt was clinging to me, and wouldn’t let go.
“When will I see you?” I asked.
“If I’m not on the boat, I’ll be back home, in Luxembourg. Will you come and see me?”
It was doubtful. I had to look after our father, something she refused to do. But he was old and ill, and there was nobody else. Not since mother died.
I said, “Just promise me you’ll look after yourself.”