Under My Skin. Zoe Markham

plentifully because if I don’t my vision swims and I can’t read. I chat cheerfully to Dad for a few minutes between mouthfuls each evening because if I don’t, he’ll worry. I basically do the absolute minimum to get by, in terms of expected behaviour: enough to convince Dad that I’m ok, but it’s tough enough to do to let me know that I’m really not ok. I’m not sure exactly at what point this all happened, but I feel it all the same. And I know that it’s not good.

      When I hear the car leave in the mornings, I find myself heading straight for the attic again, and I feel like I’ve come full circle since we’ve been here. I’ve explored my territory, and exhausted it, and now I’ve come back to the beginning and there’s nowhere else to go. I read up there until my stomach complains so loudly that I have to come back down and cook bacon, or eggs, or steak, or chicken. It all tastes the same so it doesn’t matter to me which meat comes at which time of the day. The only person I ever speak to, other than myself, is Dad. And our couple of hours or so in each other’s company from the first week we were here has steadily disintegrated into what’s typically now no more than twenty minutes on any given day. We never really talked to each other before all this. Back when things were ‘normal’ he was always at work – always pulling overtime evenings and weekends. It actually wasn’t much different to now I suppose, except now, he’s all I have.

      Most weekends he still goes to the hospital to work, and if he does stay here, ‘here’ tends to mean ‘in the basement’. He never stops working. He keeps the race-against-time vibe going, although it’s quieter now, and that makes it feel more dangerous, more sinister somehow. Like he doesn’t even have time to talk about it. He used to tell me about his day when he got back, about the things he’d been working on and how they were bringing him closer to replication. I never understood any of it, but it was comforting to hear all the same. It felt like he was keeping me involved, not letting me forget that he was on the case, that it was all going to be ok. Now he hardly mentions a thing about it; the most I get is a vague, passing reference.

      ‘I’m getting closer every day Chlo; I’m getting two, sometimes even three hours a day in working on the compounds in the lab, plus four or five at home most nights.’

      ‘That’s great, Dad. How about sleep though? How much of that are you getting?’

      ‘I’ll sleep when we’ve got a backlog of vaccine behind us, Chlo. You watch me. I’ll sleep like a baby.’

      He’s so driven, that some days I can’t help but believe he’s going to do it; of course he’ll figure it out. Other days, I think to myself that if he hasn’t done it by now, this scientific mega genius recruited by a super-secret government agency, then he never will.

      The threat of my ever-dwindling supply of vaccine, coupled with my ever-increasing difficulty in finding any kind of escape to my days is starting to make me go a little bit… odd. I talk to myself a lot now. I talk to Mum all the time too. And Tom. I’ve typed a million texts to him, and I save them all, even though I can’t send them. I wrote him a letter too, acres of real words on real paper, telling him everything, and then I fed it to the fire and watched it burn.

      I’m starting to think I really need to get out – somehow. Dad worries himself half to death thinking about would happen to me if I did, and I used to do the same, but now I find I’m starting to worry more about what will happen to me if I don’t.

      *

      Lately Dad keeps bringing home these Living France magazines, and whatever glossy women’s mags are featuring anything at all to do with Paris. He’s trying to fire up my enthusiasm, give me something to hold on to, I know, but Paris is his ultimate solution to all this, not mine. I feel lousy thinking like that, because it’s a solution that’s totally for my benefit – and the whole situation is just so messed up that it’s beyond a joke. Neither of us actually want to go there, but it looks like that’s where we’re headed all the same.

      ‘Christophe was always the closest thing I had to a friend at the Agency,’ he tells me, every time the subject comes up. ‘He knew exactly what was going on, and that’s why he got out when he did – before it got too late for him, like it did for the rest of us.’

      ‘Yeah? Then why didn’t he tell you?’ I argue. ‘If he was such a friend, why did he leave you there?’

      ‘He didn’t leave me, Chloe. He sent me his address. Do you have any idea what he risked in doing that? Everything. He risked everything to give me a way out.’

      ‘Yeah? But what if he’s a double agent? I mean, if this whole thing was so top secret, and so intense – if he was the only one who got out, and he knew how dangerous they were, isn’t it just a little bit weird that he got in touch with you and left the super-secret details of where to find him in his covert new life?’

      ‘It’s not like that,’ he always says with a shake of his head when I bring it up, or when I used to – I don’t bother any more because he doesn’t listen.

      ‘Christophe gave me that address for a reason, and it’s not the one you think. I trust him. He’s the only one there I ever did trust, and I don’t have any reason to change my opinion of him now.’

      There are two problems I have with that. One is that if this indisputably trustworthy science-genius Good Guy colleague really is a Good Guy, then why didn’t Dad get in touch with him on day one? Why isn’t he helping Dad with the vaccine right now? And two – why didn’t he talk things through with Dad before he left? Why leave and then send the contact details on? Because they found him, that’s why. They found him, and re-recruited him, and now he’s a plant – a trap we’re about to fall right into. I watch the films, I read the books, I know that it’s never that simple.

      And I don’t want to go. I don’t want to run away to France, and I don’t trust this friend. It’s just another one of the awkward, corrosive secrets that Dad and I have started to keep from each other now.

      I don’t tell him how much I wish I was dead instead of Mum, and he doesn’t tell me half of what goes through his head. The secrets are probably the only things that keep us both anywhere near sane.

      As the days close in and even I start to notice it from behind the blinds, and as our ever-present background timer runs lower, the guilt that I constantly feel only seems to get heavier. It should be Mum here with Dad instead of me. Some days I can convince myself that it’s an absolute godsend that she’s not here, not like this. Others, I wonder how much harder, how much faster Dad might be working if it was her, and not me. It’s a nasty, dangerous thought, but it’s there, and it forces me to acknowledge it. Dad and I were never close, I never really felt like I meant that much to him. It was always Mum who was there for me. She was the one who helped me with my homework, drove me all over the place, and picked up the pieces whenever Tom and I fought and the world was ending. Dad was always at work. Now everything’s flipped around and I’m somehow his entire world, and that doesn’t always make sense to me. Sometimes I wonder if he just pretends as much as I do.

      But then I remember… I never had a choice in any of this. He did.

      And he chose me.

      *

      Trying not to think, or feel, is how I get through my days. I pretty much live in the attic now. I have a huge beanbag up there, an extra duvet which is like the War and Peace of the quilt world, and three electric heaters that, combined, can fry an egg at a hundred paces.

      Whenever Dad goes into town to do the food shop, he always asks if there’s anything I want, and I spend a good part of the week trying to think up things that might make my strange prison-but-not-a-prison more comfortable. I don’t know much about what new books are out there any more, so I ask him to pick me up some old classics that I know about but have never read. It’s weird how now I’m out of school for good I’m suddenly reading “better” books than I ever was before. No more fluffy paranormal romances for me, or gore-fest horrors. I’ve started to become obsessed with the complicated language and kind of… aching darkness of