Beneath the Skin Read Free Page B

Alys’s eccentric business style or had given up and gone elsewhere.
    In the evenings, when he had the chance to review the day, he thought about Alys a lot. He supposed she was eccentric, although some might have a different word for it. Her attention was on a timer; her eyes would slide away as you talked to her, her thoughts already on a different loop. People seemed to bore her, including her sister and nephew. She yawned when things got emotional, like she couldn’t be arsed with complicated stuff. Hunger, cold, boredom – these were the things that preoccupied her. Anything heavier, like William crying over some playground spat, or Mouse stressing over an unpaid bill, had her heading for the hills – or rather, the basement. Even the cats weren’t petted like regular cats. She stroked them as a chiropractor might, fingertips second-guessing their internal workings. And the cats were passive with her, draping themselves over her arms, wiping their chins against her face. It made his skin crawl, the way she clutched them to her body, letting their tiny paws knead her flesh like the hands of a suckling baby.
    The cats were a ragbag of colours; black, two tortoiseshell and a fat white one, called Alaska, who was deaf. The other three had old women’s names which Walt couldn’t quite recall; Abigail or Enid or something. They all responded to a generic ‘Cats!’ and a toe up the backside when Alys wasn’t looking. Mouse, on one of the few occasions their paths had crossed, said primly, ‘I take it you’re not a cat person, Robert?’ No, he’d said, he was a dog person. Definitely dogs.
    Mouse was always so formal with him. He’d told her twice to call him Walt, that everyone did, apart from his mother. Maybe, being a mother herself, it was all she could manage.
    He wanted to know why Mouse was called Mouse, but it didn’t seem the sort of thing you could ask without having some kind of dialogue first, and Mouse made it obvious she didn’t want to start a conversation. She did her best to stay out of his way and the child, William, was ushered quickly up the stairs between spells of school or whatever. Mouse worked in a pharmacy, so sometimes the lad was looked after by the dance teacher from next door. Alys wasn’t babysitter material, Mouse said.
    The way Mouse hustled William past him in the hallway was the way his sister-in-law, Natalie, had been at the end. His niece and a nephew were younger than William, and he loved them both in a vague sort of way. It was pointless trying to remember birthdays, he was always away, but he made sure he bought them huge presents when he got back: giant teddies, Scalextric, computer games. Like Mouse, Natalie had subtle ways of letting you know you’d messed up: a tightening of the mouth, maybe, or a clipped word or two. When the wheels really started to come off, he’d seen her whispering to Steven. After that, Steven would put on a certain face when Walt offered to babysit. ‘It’s okay, man. We don’t have the money to go out anyway this week,’ he’d say, or, ‘No worries, kid, Natalie’s mum’s already offered.’ Stuff like that. And Natalie would squeeze the kids closer, as if he might infect them with the crazy bug.
    Anyway, the cats ignored him, unless he had a can opener in his hand. They prowled every surface, lurked under the table and raided the bins. Every bin in the house seemed to contain a collection of feathers and unclassified bits of gore – fur, claws, tiny bones as sharp as needles and endless streamers of bloodied kitchen roll on which Alys had wiped her hands. Mouse had told him that part of the taxidermist’s skill lay in stripping the skin from the carcass, never opening the body cavity. Someone should have told Alys.
    Mouse had also revealed, with a certain pride, that Alys had sold a piece to a famous American collector. She’d told him