Someone Else's Skin
boy, Marn, and he’s had such a hell of a life. We’d like to make it up to him, just a little.
    Great, that’s great.
    Had she been jealous? She was twenty-two when Stephen moved into her parents’ house. She’d been living in London for three years, priding herself on having made a clean break. Not like her friends or flatmates, who went home every reading week and for the holidays, coming back with gifts of food, meals for the freezer, home-made cake, like children from a party. Not Marnie Rome. She was done with all that. Put childish things away. A card at Christmas, a present of books, proof of her taste and intelligence. On her way to being a detective, single-minded, not missing a trick. Free from all the mess and fuss of family life, from the ties that bind.
    Until the phone call in the middle of the morning. The afternoon at the house, stretching into evening, night. She’d begun to think – for the second time in her life – that she’d never get out. Away.
    Remembering that night was like turning the pages in a flicker book, its details blurred and jerky. She remembered the smell, and the way her shoes stuck to the floor in the kitchen . . .
    Heat shivered behind her eyes. She lifted her arm, sniffing at her sleeve.
    The smell of the secure unit was in her clothes and hair. She’d be carrying it on her skin for days, like prison ink. No escape.
    Her phone buzzed at her hip. She pulled it from her pocket and peered at the display.
    A text, from Ed: Here if you need me.
    She bent her forehead, pressing it to the phone’s small screen. She’d made a promise to herself five years ago that she wouldn’t reach for Ed until she was sure it wasn’t panic or despair making her reach. More than once she’d come close to inviting him in, for more than coffee. He liked her; she knew that. It wasn’t ego on her part, and anyway it was mutual. She was attracted to him. Right now, if she made a move, it would be a smash-and-grab one-night stand. It wasn’t worth ruining their friendship, to satisfy her skin’s aching for someone else’s touch.
    She stood and straightened all the cushions on the sofa, shaking and knocking the shape of her body from each square in turn, before putting it all back in place. By the time she was done, she was out of breath. When she switched off the lights, shadows stole back the living space. She moved through the flat soundlessly, undressing and standing for a long minute in front of the wardrobe mirror.
    No mythical creatures. No pierced hearts, or entwined roses, or barbed wire. Just words. Because words hurt. Specifically, they hurt when inked across your ribcage and at the sharp points of your eighteen-year-hips.
    Shall I kill myself, or make a cup of coffee? Two lines, parallel, across the last two ribs on the right side.
    On the other side of her ribcage: An invincible summer.
    Places of exile . . . across her left hip.
    And curved around the bony jut of her right hip, I had the whole sky in my eyes, and it was blue and gold.
    Pretentious, post-teen genuflection. The invincible summer when she read too much Albert Camus, and decided to make a statement on her skin. That should’ve been the end of it. But after Stephen Keele stabbed her parents to death, she found herself craving the peculiar, indulgent torture of the tattoo parlour. Like being punctured by a pencil lead, over and over again. The tattooist keeps wiping away ink and blood with a sterile cloth, which hurts even worse than the needle itself, as if he’s scrubbing a freshly skinned knee then skinning it again, scrubbing it, skinning it, over and over. Each stage of the process has its distinct pain. The needle. The scrubbing. The day when the bandages come off, and the ink begins drying under the skin and it starts to feel like slapped sunburn. She had to treat her skin like a baby’s: washing it and keeping it moisturised. Keeping clothes away from it. Not scratching, that was the hardest part of all.

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