Under My Skin Read Free

out!’ Melody scolded.
    What’s he gonna do? Snatch it? He hasn’t got any hands.
Sally kept the thought to herself.
    The tramp looked straight at Sally, and she flinched. Up close, he didn’t seem so benign any more. Even from the middle of the road, she could see his eyes were arctic blue, and burned in the centre of his filthy face. They pierced her. ‘You. You’ll help me. You’re a good girl.’ He smiled to reveal yellow, spongy teeth.
    Sally said nothing, cowering behind Melody.
    He continued ranting. ‘It never stops . . . never. It’s . . . it’s
inside
me. Get it out. GET IT OUT!’ He charged for them, running the rest of the way across the street. The others shrieked, but Sally couldn’t take her eyes away from his. Those eyes . . . they were like black ice and she was frozen to the spot.
    Sally heard the horn, but didn’t understand what was happening until it was too late. Brakes screamed and tyres screeched. The car slammed into the tramp’s legs and he crashed over the bonnet, cracking the windscreen before tumbling onto the road. He landed with a damp thud.
    Melody collided with Sally as she staggered onto the school lawn in her haste to get out of the way. Sally heard shouting and wailing, and honestly, it might have been her. In the midst of all the chaos she couldn’t make sense of anything.
    The car came to a standstill and the man lay still alongside it, not moving – not moving
at all
. His head was black and wet with blood, a puddle fanning out across the tarmac.
    Sally realised she was gripping Melody Vine’s hand.

Chapter Two
    Sally prodded a thick, fatty chunk of beef underneath what was left of her mashed potatoes. Her plate swam in gravy, beads of orange oil gleaming like algae on the surface of a brown lake.
    â€˜Sally, please do not play with your food.’
    Her eyes flicked up to regard her mother through her hair. ‘I’m not hungry.’
    â€˜Sally.’ Her father frowned, his face like a tombstone. ‘Don’t answer your mother back.’
    As they did every night, her mother and father sat opposite each other at one end of an unnecessarily long, feast-length dining table while Sally sat at the head between them. Her mum reached over the table and squeezed her husband’s hand. ‘It’s OK, dear. What she saw must have been absolutely dreadful.’ Talking about her as if she wasn’t there was also something they enjoyed.
    Her father dabbed his moustache with a linen napkin. ‘That’s no excuse to be surly. Sit up straight, please. Your posture’s terrible. You’ll get a hump if you’re not careful.’
    Sally gave up on dinner, resting her fork in the swampy remains. ‘I saw a man die, Dad.’
    After the accident, the four girls had been made to wait to be interviewed by a stout, red-faced policeman before they’d been allowed to go, during which time they’d been forced to see paramedics scrape what was left of the poor man off the asphalt and into a black plastic body bag.
    Her father seemed genuinely confused by her distress. ‘No great loss by the sounds of it. One less junkie for the rest of us to take care of.’
    â€˜Dad!’ Sally protested.
    â€˜It’ll be a different story once you’re paying taxes, believe me.’ He quaffed his twenty-five-pound-a-bottle wine and most likely didn’t see any irony in it.
    Her mother changed the subject, sipping at her own wine with thin lips. She was so bird-like, Sally couldn’t help but imagine the sparrows drinking from the bird bath in the garden. ‘Unpleasantness aside, how did the audition go?’
    That all now seemed so utterly trivial compared to what had followed. ‘I dunno. OK, I guess.’
    â€˜Sally, answer your mother properly, please. We don’t grunt.’
    A deep breath. ‘It was fine. I think I sounded acceptable. We’ll find out