Beneath The Skin Episode 36

The thought of her ignited a weird mix in the pit of his stomach, a cramp of joy and longing

It’s one of life’s little jokes that men wake up every morning with an urgent need to pee. For Walt, there was another phenomenon: an irrational fear that bloomed in his belly every night. Sometimes his bad dreams were shot to hell on waking, reduced to blurred frames he’d learned not to splice together. But the residue remained.

The answer was to get out of bed, to get moving, shift the fear still fluttering inside like a trapped moth.

That Sunday morning, the fear had a warm fuzzy edge. He noticed it because it was so unexpected.

Lying in bed he ran over the events of the previous evening like a drunk hunting for flashbacks, but he could find no cringeworthy moments, no skeletons.

It had been good.

They’d left the square and ended up in a fast-food place, eating ketchupy burgers under cheap fluorescent lights. Walt had apologised.

It wasn’t up to Galen’s standard, and Mouse was surely a soft- music- andcandlelight sort of girl, he’d said.

She’d chuckled and scored him five out of 10. William had given him an eight, on account of the free gift that came with the meal.

The lad had constructed a bright yellow plastic car as they chatted away like normal people.

Walt had spoken about Jo, and his parents, and Mouse had told him more about the castle and her father’s illness.

Not earth-shattering revelations, just the humdrum yellow plastic parts that make up your life. It felt good.

“Is Galen taking you out again?” Walt had wanted to know, and Mouse had shrugged, as if she didn’t much care.

It was probably a mistake, she’d said, to get involved, especially when she had zero feelings for the guy.

William had left them briefly at that point to go to the toilet, trundling the little car along with him.

Walt had looked at her across the table and said: “There needs to be a bit of chemistry. Find someone who sets your heart racing.”

And she’d opened her mouth to speak, and closed it again, as if there wasn’t any point in saying what she was about to say.

She’d looked down at her hands, and he’d looked at them too, at the smooth skin and the blunt, no-nonsense nails, and he’d fought the urge to take hold of them.

Suddenly William was back, leaning against the Formica table, his expression filled with urchin-like pathos, a Victorian painting of a lost boy.

“Walt,” he’d said quietly. “The bogs in here are just awful.”

Walt grinned, remembering. The warm fuzziness settled over him like a net.

He was getting too close to Mouse. He knew he was. He couldn’t stop thinking about her, the thought of her igniting a weird mix in the pit of his stomach, a fierce cramp of joy and longing.

Homesickness with the possibility of home.

He talked himself out of it, of course. He was just passing through.

Mouse was a bitch, a shrew, saddled with a bairn and that sister... There wasn’t any possibility that he’d want to get involved. She would be needy too.

Maybe just wanting a father for the kid or someone to cut the grass. Nah, there was no way he’d want to get involved – and yet. And yet...

He loved the soft sweep of her cheek, the way her eyes went all misty when he made her laugh. He wanted to take hold of her square, capable hand, feel the texture of her hair.

The coyness of his thoughts made him cringe. What was wrong with him?

Back in the day any woman he met was fair game. If he thought about them at all, it was on a porn loop in the sleazy private recesses of his brain; but there was something that stopped him thinking like that about Mouse, about Maura.

Oh, he could imagine it, being in bed with her, naked. Could anticipate how her skin would feel, about how they would move together, fit together, the soft sounds she might whisper...

He checked the clock. It was 9.30 and he thought he could smell coffee and toast, but that might have been wishful thinking.

He wanted to imagine Mouse waiting for him downstairs, a smile in place.

In his imagination it was just the two of them, a normal warm fuzzy Sunday. But this was Alys’s house. Cursing, he rolled to the edge of the bed, leaned over and grabbed his prosthesis.

In the bathroom , he shuffled uncomfortably; it was always freezing in there. He ran water into the sink but it was slow to come hot.

Alys had a thing about conserving energy, she was always going around the place turning down every appliance in the house.

He drenched his face with icy water, coming up slowly, glistening, to peer at himself in the mirror.

When he first came out of hospital, he’d done a lot of peering into mirrors. He’d never been one for all that metrosexual stuff: the hair gel and the moisturiser and so on.

The most he’d ever admired his reflection was when he was all kitted out in his dress uniform, before a regimental dinner or something.

He’d looked at himself with pride on those occasions, for the man he was, his integrity, his resourcefulness.

It had never been about appearance. When he’d come home though, without his foot, he’d had to steel himself to look. But actually, the foot was just surface.

He’d taken to searching his face in the mirror for the evidence of how he felt inside.

Melissa, the art therapist, had once shown him some photographs of frontline troops: “before and after” shots.

He’d looked at those images for a long time, staring into eyes that had seen too much.

He wondered if his eyes looked like that to other people.

Did Mouse see blue irises and black lashes? Or did she see the bruising shadows underneath that never went away?

His “after” face was leaner, anything soft and fleshy stripped away along with his peace of mind.

What was going on inside didn’t have a reflection.

More tomorrow.

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