Dying for Christmas by Tammy Cohen Page B

inside.
    ‘Open it. Aren’t you dying to see what’s in there?’
    My first thought was, a dead budgie.
    So it was a pleasant relief when I opened it to find an assortment of little paint pots and what looked at first glance to be individually wrapped brushes.
    ‘Art stuff?’
    I’d come to dread the sound of his laugh, which now ripped from his throat.
    ‘Not quite, Jessica. I want to show you something.’
    He was wearing a white linen shirt today, loose over the top of a pair of faded jeans, and he lifted it up, revealing a flat lightly tanned stomach. There was a line of hair that started at his belly button and disappeared beneath the waistband of his jeans. I tried to swallow but couldn’t.
    With one hand holding up his shirt, he used the other to push his jeans down at one side. There, nestling in beside one perfectly smooth hip bone, was a tattoo. Of a small, brightly coloured bird.
    I looked more closely at the box in my hands.
    The little bottles weren’t paints, they were inks. Those individually wrapped brushes? Sterile tattoo needles.

Chapter Sixteen
    One of the other archivists got a tattoo a few months ago. She’s a strange person. Most of us there are. She’s forty-two and had been having an affair with a married man for fifteen years. He’s much older than her and had been promising to leave his wife all that time, but never got around to it. Fifteen years of waiting. I expect most people find that unfathomable, but I sympathized. Sometimes I feel like I’ve spent my whole life waiting for something. For my real life to start. Waiting is something I’m good at.
    One morning she came into work and there was something different about her. She was buzzing with energy. At first I thought it must have finally happened – at last he’d left his wife. But it turned out she’d had a tattoo done on her shoulder. She showed it to me in the toilets, shyly pulling down the back of her cardigan to reveal a butterfly emerging from the strap of her vest top.
    ‘I’ve wanted one for years,’ she confided. ‘But Paul hates them. He thinks they’re common.’
    Within a week, she’d finished the affair.
    So I knew tattoos were powerful things.
    All the time I was remembering this, Dominic was jabbing at me with the needle. He’d had the template prepared already – a tiny bird just like his. And of course it was to go in exactly the same place, resting on my hip. He had to shave a bit of my pubic hair first. I don’t think he liked that. Judging by that horrible painting I imagined Natalie was probably one of those women who get the whole lot whipped off.
    After shaving it, Dominic had made a big deal of dabbing the designated area with an alcohol wipe. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve thought of everything, Jessica. It’s perfectly safe. Your health is important to me.’ He glanced at me then as if checking that I’d got a private joke. He seemed eager for me to acknowledge how considerate he’d been, so I held back from asking how having me sleep in a dog kennel in the cold, and eat fatty food until it clogged up my veins, fitted in with this concern for my well-being.
    In truth I couldn’t have said anything. My voice was frozen in my throat by the sight of those needles and that neat row of little rainbow-coloured bottles.
    I was about to be branded, like a sheep or a cow, tied to this man for ever by these matching patches of decorated skin.
    ‘Please don’t,’ I said, before I could stop myself.
    He looked at me and smiled.
    And then began the pushing of the needle into skin. ‘You have to penetrate just the right amount,’ Dominic explained. ‘Through the second layer of skin but not so far in that there’s blood all over the place. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear a popping sound as it goes through each layer.’
    I didn’t want to hear the popping sound. I didn’t want to see the beads of blood that mixed with the black ink that formed the outline. I didn’t want to see the picture