Single Skin E-Book

Steve Dearden

• Herausgeber: The Poetry Business
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Steve Dearden's stories are populated by real people with real jobs and real desires and fears; and in the rhythms of the dialogue and the scaffolding of the terse descriptions, we find loneliness, and majesty, and a belief in humanity that gives your heart a lift.

Leseprobe

Single Skin

Steve Dearden

For Sheena and Ella May

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Sheena Wrigley, Danny Broderick, Mandy Sutter, Ian Daley, Ralf Andtbacka and Tom Spanbauer for their encouragement and support over the years.

Route published slightly different versions of 'Docklands' in the Route Compendium, 'Setting the Agenda' in Route Newspaper, 'Percentages' in Naked City. 'Clare Counting' was first published in the Comma Press anthology Brace.

Contents

DedicationAcknowledgementsContents

FotDocklandsThe Things They DidSetting the AgendaDog NightsPercentagesHotel FranceClare CountingAuthentic

BiographyPraise for the Author

Fot

Our ear hairs prickle with cold as we leave the art shop, boots crunching the compacted snow. We’ve bought sketchpads, thick mottled paper and bright primary bindings not as different as we had hoped from pads we could buy at home.

Cropper stuffs his sheepskin hands into his sheepskin pockets, 'Right, now where?'

Kath points, 'There's Ralf.'

Ralf is three car bonnets away, slamming the door of a black 4x4.

We shout, 'Ralf. Ralf!'

Maybe he does not hear us because it is still early in the morning. He stuffs a double sandwich in his mouth, tosses the plastic triangle onto the ice and, blond ponytail swinging down his black leather jacket, clatters into the warmth of a shop full of drums and guitars.

Cropper’s breath hangs in the air, 'That was Ralf.'

Kath asks, 'Should we go in? Or wait for him?'

We hang about a while, but Ralf doesn’t come out and the shop looks specialist. We go back to the hotel.

*

Ralf has a fine head of hair and a thick ginger goatee. I am clean shaven, I have a fine head of hair too, but keep finding myself looking at balding men and comparing them to the way I am coming to terms with my new and quite unfounded balding paranoia. I don’t mean the slapheads, the real shiny domers, the Charlton-one-hairs. What attracts me is the small white coin appearing on a crown. I hardly notice the bone-cuts, the shaved out receding hairline disguisers, but am fascinated by the tuft on the forehead, the wispy island being cut off by two creeping spurs of skin.

I should worry about real terrors, like the night before we left England, my wife driving to doctors, slamming through the moor road bends, me in the back hoiking our three-month-old daughter upright, slapping her back saying, 'Come on gorgeous, come on darling you can make it' because I think she is not breathing, that she is dying if not already dead. I blow in her mouth, suck her nose. I keep saving her life when all the time, as it turned out, all the poor girl was doing was trying to get some sleep. I laugh now. I told Kath and Cropper the story while we were waiting for the connecting flight in Stockholm, and I guess I will tell it again later if things go well with Ralf and his wife, but this does not preoccupy me now. What I worry about in the downtime is my bogus balding. I have a fine head of hair. Not the slightest sign of thinning. Hair doesn’t run out on our family. My daughter has a fair amount already.

Back at the hotel, I notice little fragile fluffy patches above Cropper's ears as he bends to hand me a brandy shaped glass of sweet wheaty beer and then falls back into the sofa under the antlers. He says, 'Is this lunch?' takes off his fur cap and holds it up by the ear mufflers. 'Ralf didn’t hear us.'

Kath hovers, 'I have to eat.'

Cropper picks at bobbles on his lichen coloured jumper, 'Do you ever have those dreams like when you are suddenly totally brilliant at something? When you can do it absolutely? My French is crap as my Finnish, but often I dream I speak fluent, not buying pommes de terre I mean talking real meaning of life stuff - perfect - everything. And I am not sure if just before I wake up or just after but I’m convinced if I start straight away I could speak that good in real life.'

I ask, 'Did you ever?'

'I’m even thinking in French. Or I am playing the piano, not picking out tunes with one finger, I'm playing all those notes at once, chords and that.' He holds his hands out in front of him, 'I could never get my head round needing to use all your fingers.'

Kath perches on the edge of her chair, folds the green napkin from under her beer over and over on itself. We are only here forty-eight hours so she feels we should be out taking the place in.

I ask, 'When we meet Ralf, shall we tell him we saw him, or would it be more polite to pretend we didn’t?'

'What?' Kath has that Liverpudlian way of saying What? with an implicit the fuck? that makes you reevaluate your part of the conversation.

*

Tomorrow we have an invite to Ralf’s factory, but this evening we are having dinner at his house, where we will quietly come to know whether we want to make a deal or not. We have come to propose that we market and distribute our boots alongside his umbrellas in the UK, if he does the same for our boots alongside his umbrellas in Finland. We reckon a ratio of five hundred pairs to fifteen hundred umbrellas is about right, though we usually work on the basis that if we like someone enough almost any deal will do, just to make it happen. We will know whether we want to tonight. If we decide yes, then tomorrow will be signing agreements and lunch on us. If no, we will admire Ralf’s factory and Kath will go ice swimming.

At Manchester Airport, Kath had promised to go ice swimming if we didn't do the deal. At Stockholm while we were watching the de-icer spraying the wings of our plane, I suggested she wasn’t serious and she said, 'Believe me, wait and see, I’ve even brought my baldie cap.' That worried me, that she said ‘baldie cap’, it preoccupies me more than the fact that during the evening and morning we have been here, we have not seen a single person wearing rubber boots. We’ve seen nobody with an umbrella either.

The girl working the hotel bar is the same girl that was on the desk when we arrived late last night, her badge says Elsa. She brings us a bowl of peanuts, almonds, cashews, 'You are Ralf guests? He will be a polar bear.'

Kath, 'What?'

'He has proposed to his wife.'

Kath, 'To his wife?'

'Yes, and she said she is not sure, she keeps him waiting.'

Kath, 'You mean fiancé.'

'No, every year he proposes to his wife. Every year to now Ulla says you be my husband still, but this year she says wait and see.'

Kath, 'Is this some kind of Finnish custom?'

'No, Ulla’s custom, every year, I think they have been together – oh – ten fifteen, and every year she say yes, but this year, wait and see.'

'We met him in the street.' Cropper tells her. 'But he didn’t see us.'

'Usually he is a big soft friendly brown bear. Everybody likes Ralf. Now he is a polar bear.'

Cropper says, 'I saw this programme the other day on global warming, there’s less ice so they’re hungrier and angrier.' He makes a little claw with his fingers and growls, 'Rier.'

*

After our beer and nut lunch we wander into the central square of old Eastern bloc-looking concrete modernism. The department store mannequins have thick sixties DJ hair and sideburns, but wear fifties brown coats, suits, seventies ties. Obviously none wear bright coloured boots, but none carry umbrellas either, not even furled black ones. Cropper points to the long six storey block running down one side of the square, stuck with neon store logos. 'My room cleaner told me, last year a Yank threw himself off that, they found him in the morning.'

I ask, 'Why?'

Sometimes, maybe three or four times in a day walking round a place, Kath will skip out of her stride, like a child jumping. Every two or three times she jumps, she will let out a little cry like the start of a song. Then she will say something like she says this time, on the ice of the square, out of the somewhere else of her little jump.

'Maybe he was losing his hair.'

I have not told anyone that I am looking at bald men in the belief that I am going bald even though I have a fine head of hair. I have not told my close colleagues Kath and Cropper, nor my wife. I have not even told my daughter, safe in the knowledge that she would not understand a word of my confession not to the fear of going bald, but to this slip of consciousness in which I perceive myself as bald already, even though I am not. My reluctance to share the experience comes not from a fear of family and friends knowing I have what I guess is becoming an obsession, I am scared they will give it a name, somethingnia, will try and put me in touch with other sufferers - it's quite common in men your age – that they will begin to nudge me towards somethingniacs anonymous.

So I say, Kath-like, 'What?'

And she replies, 'You don’t see many baldies here.'

Cropper taps his head, 'They’re all wearing hats, I bet when you’re inside there’s as many.'

Kath, 'There he is again.'

Ralf stands talking into his Nokia, one black scrolled leather boot up on the bottom plinth of the civil war memorial, the other hand scrunched under the hem of his cracked jacket into a pocket of his faded black jeans. He is nodding and smiling tightly. When the call is over, he slaps the phone with the heel of his hand, his shoulders hunch and he twists his mouth and gingery goatee to one side. His weight compacted.

Cropper says, 'Well I’m going to talk to him.'

As he sets off across the road a blonde woman in a long grey fur takes hold of Cropper's elbow. She points to the red pedestrian light and says in unaccented American, 'We Don’t Walk.' As the light runs green a VW Estate pulls up, driven by a girl in blue and scarlet Lapp clothes, lots of embroidery. Ralf gets in. The girl is smiling like her smiles fuel the car and as she moves off, Cropper steps into the road, leans an arm out as if to catch and gather them. The girl swerves but waves and smiles like she has always known Cropper and is glad to see him, Ralf bangs on the window shouting something I am glad we can’t understand and even gladder we can’t hear.

We stand in the square watching the VW pick up more speed than you would think was a good idea on ice.

Kath, 'I'd say he's losing it.'

I say, 'I’m beginning not to like this deal.'

Cropper has the lizard look - after prey has escaped.

*

One of the first days I had to take care of my daughter all day on my own, she was a little bastard. Every half hour or so she would begin to wriggle, then fart her lips in little bubbly explosions, then scream until she choked on her own empty crying. I exhausted all possible avenues of her desire and ended up thinking you have everything, sleep, food, love, toys, the whole environment is focused on your satisfaction, and if you want to be left alone, right now there’s nothing I’d like better, OK? But leaving her alone didn’t work either, she settled for a few moments, then squirmed again, got to her gagging scream pitch. Eventually I lifted her, bringing her ear close to my lips, and restricting my volume but not my feeling said, 'Shut. The fuck. Up.' I put her down in her play gym, walked out of the room, left her to make sense of this.

Not the kind of behaviour that fits the brand image of a man who sells bright coloured rubber boots.

It was me who first spotted Ralf at Rainwear International in Harrogate, cutting between the suits and the hospitality girls insincerely kitted out in branded macs and sou'westers, unluckily twirling open come-buy-me umbrellas inside the high dry-ceiling halls. He passed me with a broad drooping smile and a brown eyed clarity that made me think that wherever he was going, we ought to make sure we weren't too far from where he ended up, or at least where he next stopped. I didn’t know what he made or sold but he strolled the hectic aisles as if they were wide open prairie - onto something no one else could sense - which was the way we felt about ourselves. Niche and confident.

So Cropper asked around, we each sauntered by the faux wooden forest cabin, umbrellas like inverted satellite dishes all the colours of our rainbow wellingtons and some more. Kath went earwigging: Ralf was big in the Nordic countries, wanting to export, but was finding it hard to break into the UK and the rest of Europe. So on the third and last day of the fair I went along to open up a relationship but found the faux wooden hut had been struck early - all that was left, stuck to the breeze block wall exposed by the absence of a stand, was a map of Finland. I was just thinking how the land mass was shredded with water and that the little umbrellas on the map were not beaches but Ralf’s outlets, when my mobile rang the tone that meant THIS IS IT (I THINK) and my wife told me her waters had broken and she was standing with her hands up on the mantelpiece like a suspect's on a cop car roof and would I get myself over there before she flooded the place.

I rushed back to the stand where Cropper was telling Kath that one of the hospitality girls was from Vaasa where Ralf was based and that apparently most people there spoke Swedish, 'Ralf's gone I must get going. The baby.'

Now Ralf has gone again, driven off by the Lapp girl, and the way he spat whatever it was he said at us in Finnish or Swedish or Lapp I am not sure we are going to like him and it's odds on we will get to watch Kath ice swimming. Cropper licks his lips half hurt, half wondering what to do next. He sits on a street bench and for a moment I think he has lost his curiosity.

*

We walk back past the dummies in the window like the un-grey men on hair dye packaging. Kath takes us into a vast supermarket where she buys deep red and orange candles and wooly hats for her children. Cropper and I wander round looking for a non-alcoholic barley beer his wife has asked him to bring back, I buy a golden apple candle for mine, but find nothing for my daughter. I have not yet learned how to live with her, let alone how to be away from her. I look at the clothes but they seem cheap and thin, the cloth not of the quality I want next to her skin. When she can walk she will be able to wear our smallest boots, the blue ones with fish, or the ones we call Neon Tartan.

Twenty-four hours after my wife and I arrived at the hospital the doctor put on green boots and a gown, scrubbed up and sucked my daughter out of my wife with a sink plunger attached to a vacuum cleaner. While the surgeon sewed my wife up, I dressed my daughter in a plain white sleep suit, and apart from her extraordinarily long and beautiful bootless feet, what struck me most was that she looked like Henry V. A cap of birth muck and matted, cross-hatched hair ran from her forehead round above her ears to just under her crown. I touched the sides of my scalp. I can never be exact about the location of my imaginary balding, unless I am looking at where it is happening to someone else.

Cropper and I sit on plastic bucket seats between the supermarket doors and the checkouts waiting for Kath. We pretend to be old men watching the world go by. A woman in the scarlet overall comes up and asks us something.

Cropper points to his chest, to me, 'We don’t understand. English.'

The woman says, 'Have you lost a child?'

I think Nearly.

Cropper’s off on his old northern codger act, 'Depends what you’re offering, have you got one this high?' holds his hand out, 'It’ll have to be a good worker.'

The shop assistant thinks she has misunderstood for a moment, then shakes her head and stomps off looking for someone more obviously missing a child. Someone screaming panic I should imagine.

Kath joins us, looks at her watch, 'Should we eat? What time do you think he’ll feed us? He said a meal didn't he? Should we get something? Should we wander?' After shopping she is always agitated and full of questions.

We wander and come across an official looking house set back from the road, Cropper and I follow Kath’s nosiness in and up the stairs and before we know it an efficient pink lipsticked woman with short blond hair and blue plastic spectacles has hushed us, hushed us again, taken our coats and thrust into our hands flutes of softly sparkling sweet wine. She takes me by the elbow and leads us into the front of a room full of people standing toying with their bubbly while listening to a squat man in a dark expensive suit who glances at us and without breaking his urbane flow, raises his glass in welcome. He is obviously talking about the room, gesturing towards the tall tile stoves in the corners, elegant nineteenth century furniture on which some of the guests are sitting, and paintings that look like they've been slashed and sewn back together.

Standing next to the man speaking is a woman as edgy as the man is confident and relaxed. She keeps looking down into her glass which she hand-to-hands at hip height, shifting from one brightly polished black ankle boot to the other, she keeps looking up at the official and smiling, nodding, but somehow to a different speech to the one he is making. She dyes her hair, a parting of unblack roots has begun to stretch like a rent in tight cloth, a kind of strip baldness. I feel the prickle of my own parting, the pull of scalp clearing. I do not have a parting.

Cropper catches my eye, nods to the back of the room. Ralf is the only man not in a suit. He stands, in black jeans and leather jacket, close behind Ulla, talking to her like a translator, but she is staring ahead, smiling as if she already knows what is being said, blue eyed, dark hair, the pink cheeks people call rosy. I recognize her from a photograph in Ralf’s brochure and realize they haven’t a clue what we look like. Our only contact has been emails and Ralf’s message left on the ansaphone just before we left saying he was sorry not to be able to meet us, something had come up, he would collect us from the hotel at eight tonight. For all Ralf and Ulla know we are Finnish latecomers, locals they have not seen around before, people who speak Finnish, or Swedish, or Lapp.

Cropper has begun to move his way round the edge of the room, but before he gets halfway Ralf pulls Ulla backwards and they disappear through double doors that slide closed behind them. I sidle round the room too and by the time I have caught up with Cropper, Kath is behind me. The official burbles on gently but authoritatively and we get curious half-glances from his guests. We have an eye conference, Cropper questioning whether he should try the doors, Kath and I shrugging well, maybe