Beneath The Skin Episode 6

Walt was already heading for the door. The curtain wrapped itself around his face and he fought it. Sand was choking him, getting into his eyes, his nose. Blackness closed in on him, but he could still smell blood. He could still hear Alys laughing.

Time seemed to slip and jolt, and he was back on the battlefield. He spun away, in slow motion, one hand gripping the back of his neck, trying to anchor himself, and when that didn’t work, he crumpled to the floor.

His hand came away from his skin slick with sweat. Or was it blood? Painted masks danced in front of his eyes. He was in the desert, exposed, falling to his knees in the sand. He felt the grains between his fingers, white hot, blistering.

There were bodies in front of him, and parts of bodies. The smell made him gag, flies buzzing around his head – he was going to be next.

A medic, stooped over the nearest corpse, looked up at him with eyes of yellow glass. In his hand he held a bone knife, a fleshing tool.

As Walt watched, the glass lenses burst; liquid dripped onto the sand like tears and it was Alys’s face he was looking into. She smiled, face wet, licking her lips.

Hands gripped his elbow, lifting him. Had he screamed? He looked up. It was the child, William, grave-faced.

“Are you okay? You don’t look okay.” Walt scrambled to his feet. His top was damp, sticking to him. He wiped the sweat from his upper lip, slightly surprised not to encounter the grittiness of sand.

“I’m fine. I’m all right, kid.”

The boy stared at him sadly. “They’re dead, the animals. They can’t feel anything any more.”

Walt snorted with humourless laughter. “Aren’t they the lucky ones?”

Mouse was drying her hair in the kitchen. The hairdryer was plugged into the socket beside Alys’s freezer. Her eyes were half closed, hair fanning out around her, but when she saw Walt she flicked the off switch and everything returned to normal.

Hair limp, eyes wary. That was her habitual expression, like she never knew what was coming in through the door.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said. She unplugged the appliance, wrapping the cable round it with jagged little movements that reminded him of Alys.

“There must be hundreds of them in here. Little animal ghosts living in the walls.” He pulled out a chair and collapsed into it.

“Stop it,” she said. “Stop it. I’m just going to start the tea. You know she uses a hairdryer?”

His eyes were fixed on the one she’d just laid on the worktop. “She uses a hairdryer to dry out the skins.”

“You can join us for tea, if you like.” Mouse was busy somewhere behind him. He heard a knife on a chopping board and winced.

“I’ll pass, thanks. I’ve lost my appetite.”

Mrs Petrauska

In the basement there was a patch of damp on the wall the shape of Africa. Alys hadn’t even noticed it, but Mrs Petrauska, the dance teacher from next door, called by to say that the guttering had come loose at the back of the building.

Walt had been sweeping at the bottom of the stairs at the time and only became aware he was being watched when her frame blocked out the daylight.

She’d folded her top half over the railings that separated the dance studio steps from the abyss, her face a pale moon of displeasure. They’d met for the first time in his second week on the job.

In a rare, light-hearted moment, he’d thought it might be funny to tie some kind of animal to the railings, one of those stuffed monstrosities Alys wandered around with.

He selected a little spider monkey and lashed it to the railings, but it had caused such panic among the tiny ballerinas that Mrs Petrauska had blazed out of the building to rant at him in Lithuanian. She had a death stare that reminded him of his old drill sergeant.

“The pipe, it is caput.” She snapped her fingers briskly, bringing him back to the present and making her bangles chime.

He was a bit in awe of Evelina Petrauska. The spider monkey incident had really annoyed her, and they hadn’t spoken civilly since.

On the few occasions they’d come into contact, she would merely arch her strong black brows and freeze him with a glance. Her eyes were an uncompromising black, her lipstick dark as port.

She could pierce you with a stare and you’d find yourself gazing at her mouth. It was unsettling.

She dressed in intriguing layers, mostly black, which flapped importantly around her like graduation robes.

She wore leggings with flat pumps and no socks, not even on the coldest days, so the exposed bits of her feet and calves were always a raw chilblain pink.

She reminded him of the figure drawings they made you do in school, rendering all the body parts down to their most basic shape: oval.

Everything about Mrs Petrauska, her face, her eyes, her droopy breasts and her large feet and hands, was oval. He guessed she was a few pounds heavier than she’d been in her prime, but she still had the grace of a dancer.

She always stood with her feet turned out, the way ballerinas do, and when she talked her hands joined together and seemed about to float upwards in some kind of arabesque.

Walt cupped his hands around the end of the broom and leaned on it. She was deigning to talk to him now that she wanted something fixed. Did she think she could just snap her fingers and he’d fix it? “Caput in what way?”

“It come away from the wall. She, Alys, she never checks the building. Last winter we had rats because she never put the bin out. She beprotiskas.’

She whirled magenta nails beside her temple.

“You tell her from me, come away from all that... that... bunny butchering and come fix her caput pipe!

“And you – you’re even more beprotiskas for working there!”

She sniffed and flounced off back to her ballet class.

Hair limp, eyes wary. That was her habitual expression, like she never knew what was coming in through the door

More tomorrow.

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