Under Your Skin: A Novel - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sabine Durrant is a former assistant editor of The Guardian and a former literary editor at The Sunday Times whose feature writing has appeared in numerous British national newspapers and magazines. She is currently a magazine profile writer for The Sunday Telegraph and a contributor to The Guardian’s family section. She is the author of several books, including Remember Me This Way, Take Me In, and Finders, Keepers. She lives in south London with her partner, sportswriter Giles Smith, and their three children.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Under Your Skin

FRIDAY

I left the house earlier than usual this morning and, though it isn’t exactly dark, it isn’t yet light. The common is full of ghosts and shadows; the trees still ironclad, unyielding figures to the early gauze of spring; the bushes and brambles along the railway line knotted and clumped: a mugger’s paradise, though I try not to think about that.

I take my usual route—over the bridge and round the soccer fields, pitches, churned into clods like a choppy sea. It’s darkest where the path hits the corner, and there is an uncomfortable moment where you are hemmed in, rail cutting on one side, the adventure playground on the other. A blue anorak, sodden and draped, gives a creepily human form to a post, and my pace quickens until the path channels across the open grass toward the main road. The headlights of cars—commuters who need to be at work earlier than me, if such a thing were possible—rake the pavement. A shape comes toward me almost silently, another runner, a flash of headphone and Lycra, gone in a breath, a whiff of warmth and sweat. You are never alone in London, not in the dead of night, or even in the bone-cold chill of a predawn March morning. There is always the possibility of someone watching, following, seeing what you’re up to. I’m not sure I like it.

It helps to run. The pace, the rhythm, the sensation of regular movement in my limbs help give order to my thoughts. I didn’t sleep well last night. Even in the short snatches of unconsciousness I dreamed I was awake and anxious. In the end, I had to get up. I focus on my breath. In and out. In and out. I will run, try and sort things in my mind, and then once home, I will shower. Steve will be there to drive me to the studio at 7:00 AM. Kiss good-bye to Millie—Marta will give her breakfast. (Try to like Marta more.) Will I see Philip? Probably not. Already now it is—what, 5:15 AM?—he is showering, shaving, shaking off Nobu and the Dorchester (I smelled the cigars when he stumbled in at 3:00 AM), elbowing into all that spandex and peddling off on his brand-new carbon bike for Mayfair, Tokyo, Bloomberg. We used to run together. (Matching running tops, his and hers Asics. Is it pitiable to say I loved that?) But we haven’t since last summer. With the city as it is, he says, he needs serious muscle feedback. He needs powerful resistance. Running, he says, doesn’t come near reducing his stress.

My breath is ragged. I can feel it, hot, in my chest. It’s all wrong; I’m not doing it right. I’m hopeless; I’m a person who can’t even run properly. I turn up the central path, past the heartrending bench where someone ties a wreath (“MUM”) at Christmas. It might help to filter out the facts first. Philip’s parents: want an answer about Sunday lunch. Millie’s pretend birthday: beg Philip not to miss this one. (How could he have not turned up on Tuesday?) The weekend in Brighton . . . Something horrible happens in my stomach when I think about this. He says he’s too busy. “No biggie,” I said, but I didn’t mean it. It’s not even the kind of phrase I use. It was as if I were pretending to be someone younger, sassier: India, that girl at work with the orthodontically perfected smile, Stan Kennedy’s protégée, pretty and clever enough to have her eye on my job. No biggie? Did Philip look at me oddly when I said that? Did I sound as if I was trying to be cool? No biggie. All this little stuff is big; that’s the problem. What’s trivial? What’s serious? Sunday lunch with Philip’s parents, fancy undies in a suite in Brighton, a younger woman’s pearly teeth, an eight-year-old blowing out her candles. It’s what life is made of. It’s all about love in the end.

Up to the bridge and over. It’s busier out here now. I spot two other runners across the grass, a large dog nosing toward the pond. Three geese fly up, flapping, cackling. Somewhere behind lowering gunmetal clouds, a sun is rising, creating blank trickles of light that seem to flatten the common, leach it of contrast and color. By the children’s playground, a toddler’s red shoe is stuck upside down on one of the gray railings. A wet, spotted ladybug hat hangs from a silvery branch. All these abandoned possessions, these bits of people left behind. Once, out running, I saw a pair of men’s pants in the undergrowth. How? It’s not like Clapham Common. It’s Wandsworth. We’re all Labradoodles and Rusty Racquets here, not cabinet ministers in compromising positions.

At the café, I make a split-second decision and turn off, keen on a quick jog round the bowling green. But when I reach the hut by the tennis courts, something draws me into the wilderness of the wooded copse beyond. I don’t usually run there. It’s only a small triangle of denser trees, tall and narrow, that edge the soccer field, but you’re out of sight of the main drag. It feels too dodgy, too risky. Why did I do it? The gathering light? A desire to outrun the day? The manicure of the bowling green, and the sedateness of my pace? My hopeless failure to sort? I don’t know. Afterward, I might say it was a sudden yearning to feel fresh vegetation beneath my feet, to push the pathetic and tame boundaries of the common, to be, for a few seconds, on my own.

I can’t tell you.

I’m not scared—because I’m running quite quickly, maybe—but it’s harder going than I expected. The ground is uneven, shifts to trip you up. Tree limbs poke at eye level; tangles of grass lunge at ankle. And then, through a crisscross of branches, I see it.

At first, I think of blow-up dolls. Or fish. Once, on holiday in the Isle of Wight, we came across a dead porpoise high up on the sands—unsettlingly pale and fleshy, a disturbing incongruity. Then, walking along the canal at Oxford years ago, when I was a student, I stumbled on a dead swan, stretched out across the embankment. It was shocking, not so much because it was dead—though there was a sense of savagery in the wasted beauty, all that whiteness—but because it was just there, because no one had cleared it up, I suppose, before me.

I push a little farther into the undergrowth, pressing back the pale limbs of the silver birch saplings, to a place where someone or something has worn the foliage flat, to where the muddle of object is.

She is lying on her side, her bare white arms outstretched above her head, her back arched. Hair the color of mahogany is away from her face, as though someone had pulled it. Her eyes are open, but they are glazed, as if covered in plastic wrap. She has long, thick eyelashes—I wonder if they might be fake—and a thin face. Her teeth are small and her tongue swollen. It looks to be pushing out of her mouth against her bottom lip. She is wearing tight khaki-colored trousers—Topshop perhaps—with pockets on the thighs and little zips on the ankles. Her feet are bare. Her toenails are polished, almost black. Her fingernails, in contrast, are ragged and torn. A triangle of black thong shows where her pink cap-sleeved T-shirt has ridden up in back. The skin on her face, neck, and some of her chest is bluish white, but there are marks, blood, cuts and scratches, tiny dots and dark horizontal lines, all over. I can hardly bear to look at her neck.

I haven’t screamed. I haven’t made any sound at all. Isn’t that odd? But I’m suddenly aware of my own breathing; it sounds like...