Beneath The Skin Episode 32

Awoman with a child in a pushchair navigated around them and they were forced to move closer together. Mouse smelled of fabric conditioner, not peachy perfume like her sister.

Tom’s dad used to kid on that he grew peaches in his greenhouse, and they believed him. He gave away stacks of them in brown paper bags.

It was years later that Walt discovered Tom’s dad had a mate with a fruit stall in Jesmond.

He and Tom and Steven would gorge themselves on peaches and m a ke themselves sick. A little peach goes a long way.

“When was he diagnosed?”

“I’m not sure. I didn’t have any contact with him for a while. I would meet Mum for a coffee now and again. She was desperate to see the baby, of course.”

Their pace had slowed, as if they were no longer in a hurry to get anywhere.

“Mum never let on there was anything wrong. She made herself ill trying to cope alone.

“Alys was down in London at that time, doing an internship in a gallery.

“Mum phoned me in the small hours one night. Dad had flushed his pyjama bottoms down the toilet and flooded the place and that was the final straw for her.

“She broke down on the phone and I had to get dressed and wake William up and get a taxi over to Fife. It was awful.” She glanced down at her son.

“I ended up staying with her, but Dad was a nightmare. He kept wandering. Twice we had to get the police. One time they found him at the station, waiting for the London train.”

A bouncer type in tracksuit bottoms muscled between them, so that Walt lost the thread of her voice. William was quiet, taking in this new drip-drip of information.

“His GP managed to get him into an assessment ward, but Mum had a heart attack three days later.”

He didn’t need to ask whether it was fatal. Alys came back, she said, wanted everything tied up as quickly as possible. The castle was sold, and they moved their father into this home in Stockbridge.

It was close to the Victorian townhouse Alys had set her sights on.

Alys rarely visited him, though. She wasn’t good around illness.

“So the money from the sale . . . ?” “All Alys’s. My father had cut me out of the will before his diagnosis.”

Her chin jutted. Defiance, perhaps, or just the sort of pain that stiffens every part of you.

“You didn’t contest it?”

“What’s the point?”

She sounded weary. “Alys was happy for me to move in with her. It saves her having to do anything, make any decisions. She needs me, and she pays Dad’s fees.” He wasn’t quite sure what to say.

“So if you’ve fallen out with your father, why visit him now?”

“You mean now he’s unable to remember what we fell out about? Why do you think?”

He wanted to know what could be so bad that your own father would turn his back on you. Was it just that she had fallen pregnant?

He thought of his own father, scurrying to his shed at the first hint of a raised voice. Like the time Walt had written off the family Toyota.

Or the night he got drunk and punched a hole in the wall; then his Dad had gone to ground, emerging from his larchlap bunker only when the dust had settled.

When Walt rowed with his mother there was a lot of fall-out – tight lips and long silences, the odd slammed door – but with his dad . . . There’d never been a cross word between them.

They resolved things with a couple of cans in front of the telly and that was it.

“He fell out with me.” Mouse said, as if that explained it. “By the time I made contact with him again, it was too late. He’d already been diagnosed.”

Guilt. He knew the symptoms, knew how she’d probe the feeling like a bad tooth until it hurt.

She probably bought her father shirts he’d never wear, rich desserts from Marks & Spencer.

There would be lavender heat packs and wine gums, and when the old man swore at her and threw his juice across the room, she’d soak it up, like she somehow deserved it.

Walt knew about guilt. A young woman with a clipboard and serious spectacles had told him that he had survivor’s guilt.

Recognising your good fortune doesn’t diminish your sorrow and grief over the ones you have lost.

After Tom, well-meaning people told him he’d been lucky. The “lucky” word became a boulder, sitting in the pit of his belly.

He’d tried lots of things to dissolve it, like booze and weed. He’d driven fast cars late at night.

Getting blown up, on that last tour, that had chipped a few lumps off the damn thing. Tom would have laughed at that.

But mostly, it was immovable. You just had to find a way to live with it. Or not.

He cleared his throat. “Guilt is something you do to yourself,” he said gently.

She looked about to deny it; she would never sabotage herself in that way.

“I just do what I can,” she whispered eventually.

“These places, they know that. That’s how they make wads, out of guilt. Out of people like you, Maura, just trying to do what they can.”

It wasn’t much of a thing to say, after she’d trusted him with all that family stuff, but it was how he felt. She gave him what his mother would have called an oldfashioned look.

“Why are you suddenly calling me Maura? You’ve done it three times now.”

Her cheeks had gone pink, because he now knew she’d been counting. “My family call me Mouse.”

“I’m not family. I’m just your sister’s employee,” he reminded her.

They’d reached Alys’s front steps. William hopped up them, two at a time, pinched toes forgotten.

They paused at the bottom of the steps, Mouse with her hand on the rail.

“I don’t know what you are to me,” she said quietly.

Something shimmered between them, a delicate filament of cobweb on the breeze.

He thought he saw his own heartbeat in her eyes. And then she turned and went into the building.

More tomorrow.

Something shimmered between them, a delicate filament of cobweb on the breeze

Beneath The Skin, by Sandra Ireland, is published by Polygon, £8.99. Her latest book, Sight Unseen, is out now.