Under My Skin. Zoe Markham

back up at me. ‘Don’t wait up for me. Keep the blinds and curtains closed, and don’t even think of answering the door to anyone. Even if it’s the police. Especially if it’s the police.’

      I get that kick of fear in my belly that I narrowly avoided when I heard the shouting. It’s never far off.

      ‘Your phone’s all charged up,’ he says, his voice softening a little, ‘and I’ve put my number in it for you. Text me if you need anything, ok?’

      ‘Ok,’ I try to reply lightly, but my voice breaks and betrays my sudden terror at being left alone. I try again, and do a little better with a faux-cheery and not entirely appropriate ‘Good luck!’ Good luck finding the thing that will save me before we find out what the hell happens to me if you don’t.

      I actually thought I’d be fine about it, I’ve been on my own in the flat a few times over the last few weeks, when Dad had his interview, and when he went to sign the lease on the cottage, but when I close the window a massive wave of anxiety hits me, hard. I have to physically steady myself, and I’m just about to pull the curtain back across when a second wave, packing an even harder punch, crashes over me as I see the car’s taillights disappear down the drive. I’m on my own, in the middle of nowhere. Anyone could be out there, watching the house, watching me from the darkness right now. I pull the curtain closed so hard that a couple of the hooks ping out and it sags heavily in the middle. I duck down next to the wall, and sit with my back to it, knees pulled tight against my chest, trying to get a grip. Agents could be watching Dad leave from anywhere down the lane, getting ready right now to come in and take me; and all that stands between me and them is a front door that I’m pretty sure would give with a swift kick or two from a decent enough boot. How could he leave me alone like this? What was he thinking? After everything he’s told me about them…

      God. I can’t breathe. Don’t think, dontthinkdontthink.

      Day one. Hour one. And it’s not going well.

       Take the piss. Make it funny. Poor little rich girl cries for Daddy when she’s left alone in a beautiful house all day to do whatever she wants. Someone forgot to put their big girl pants on. What are you, six years old? Are you really so special that anyone would go to this much trouble to get hold of you? Self-important much!

      It starts to work, slowly. It’s a pretty thin veneer, and it doesn’t hold up to too much questioning, so I don’t. I just try and go with it. It’s either that, or hide with my back to the wall all day. And I’m already getting cramp.

      I pull myself up, take a deep breath, purely for effect, and shuffle over to get another hoodie from my wardrobe. I think about getting back under the covers for a bit, but my head feels light and cramps are slowly starting to make themselves known in my stomach as well as my back and legs. I need to eat, and I need to take my mind off things. This is a job for bacon.

      I get through two packs of Danish before I cast a guilty look over at the frying pan, wondering how the hell I’m not the size of a house by now. I suppose it should be a bonus, but I can’t help wondering what all the fat and salt is doing to what’s left of my insides. I’ll have to try and talk to Dad about it again soon. I should probably at least switch to grilling the meat. Or maybe there’s a way I could just get some protein shakes, like those gym maniacs, instead of being such a carnivore. I’ve asked him about it before, and he didn’t exactly say no, as such, just gave me a kind of mutter that it’s ‘not quite that simple.’ No, well, nothing really is any more.

      I contemplate a third pack, before realising that we don’t actually have one – we didn’t bring much shopping with us and we’re going to need to do a grocery run PDQ. I say ‘we’ meaning Dad, obviously. You do see a lot of frightening sights in Asda, I know, but there are limits. Resigned to a bacon-less environment, I set to work de-greasing the kitchen from my fry-fest, and before I know it, I’ve got the Marigolds on. Dad’s ‘keep things a bit tidier’ must still be swimming around in my head, because I have a sudden vision of cleaning the whole place from top to bottom. Or, almost the whole place. I don’t want to go into the basement. Being down there alone would bring back… well, I don’t know if there are words to describe the memories. The accident was horrific, but it was an understandable type of horror. I mean, it’s the kind of thing that happens every day, you just always hope it’s never going to happen to you or yours. What came after, well, that’s a whole different story. Not something I think the human brain is really equipped to deal with just yet; I know mine isn’t at least. I should be worrying only about shoes and hot boys, according to the books and magazines I’m supposed to buy. Not whether or not I’m some kind of soulless demon who has absolutely no right to exist.

       Take one broken girl. Add a generous helping of pain and terror.

       Simmer for six months.

       Needles, a homemade drip attached to the frame of an old standard lamp, the dimmest of light bulbs, and a bright, blinding torch for when he needed to check my eyes. A room that never got warm, blankets that scratched and burned at my skin as my cells imploded and pores bled. Scrap metal, boiled, sharpened and seared through bone to force it back into place. Limbs that jerked uncontrollably one minute, and seized completely the next. Wires, everywhere, pretending to be veins, trying to trick my body, trying to make me into something I should never have become. Lying flat, not seeing anything other than a damp, water-stained ceiling week after week. Pain. Endless pain accompanied by endless doses of morphine that never touched it. Fear – of what the pain would do next, of what he would do next, of what I was turning into. A hideous, stumbling experiment, brought to life in the darkness. Screams. A million screams in a place where no one would ever hear them.

      It wasn’t really me. That’s what I have to tell myself, or I can’t handle the flashbacks. That person, that thing, down there, wasn’t me. But I still can’t go into the basement. It doesn’t matter that the equations, the test tubes, the conical flasks and the bottles of god only knows what are all hidden away underneath this beautiful cottage in the middle of this beautiful countryside – that’s just a matter of aesthetics. There’s no more damp, cramped flat in the arse end of London, but the principle remains. And it’s a nasty principle, however you look at it.

      A distraction, that’s what I need. It was never easy in the flat, because there was no room to move, no space to think. Here though, I’ve got nothing but room – and I obsessively, determinedly, clean and tidy every damn inch of it until everything looks nice; until everything looks normal. I find the radio and turn it up far too loud, wanting the inane chatter and cheesy, commercial music to fill my head, willing it to take up as much room in there as possible. I dust, I polish, I hoover. I fluff cushions. I sweep the fireplace. And I don’t stop until my arms and legs start to tremble and my heart starts to pound so hard in my ears it blocks out the radio. And when I can’t do any more, I sit and I cry like a baby – for a thousand different reasons. I even cry for the fact that I’m crying.

      ‘You’re pathetic, Chlo,’ I tell myself. ‘You’re absolutely bloody pathetic. What was the point of coming through it all, just to end up like this?’ I don’t want the end-product to be this whiny, self-indulgent, sickly creature. I know that I need to heal mentally as much as physically; but I just don’t know how the hell I’m supposed to do it. I lie back on the sofa, refusing to think about anything at all until the pounding in my ears eases, and the trembling in my limbs settles. I lose track of time, but as my body slowly recovers in its own way from the morning’s unusual exertion, angry growls start to bellow forth from my stomach. It must be protein o’clock, and as I realise that I’m going to have to go and mess up my now immaculate kitchen all over again, I start to laugh. And it feels better than crying.

      *

      I throw a pack of chicken breasts into the oven this time, thinking it’s probably healthier than frying them. I mean, I don’t actually have a clue what I’m doing; Mum always used to cook for us, or if she had to work late she’d leave money for pizza. It suddenly hits me that I’m going to have to cook for us tonight – that I’ve been somehow shifted into the role of housewife here,