“You’ll be needing a spade.” Uncle Don indicates the black-iron pot by the door. It bristles with gardening tools the way other people have umbrella stands. Around it is a tumble of men’s shoes in a litter of crumbled-off mud. A far cry from the kitchen at home, white-tiled like a science lab, or a hospital.
While Struan hovers, his thumbnail worrying the scab on the inside of his wrist, the dogs tick-tack out of the cave mouth of the darkened front room. The big one and the small one, rangy and unkempt. He thinks they might be mother and son. They slink past his legs to wait by the door. Two pairs of ghost-white eyes, eager to be loosed.
He’s only been in Garsdale since lunchtime. A bus, a hitched car ride and then his own two feet getting him from Leeds to this dim cottage that stinks of soil and moulder, but he’s not ungrateful for the suggestion of a walk around the neighbourhood. To show him the land, Don said, though Struan hadn’t realised he’d be expected to work it too.
He withdraws a narrow-bladed spade from the thicket. The flat is rusted, the edge pitted. It doesn’t look like it will stand up to breaking ground. He makes to put it back but Don says, ‘It’ll do the job fine.’ Then his uncle chooses a spade of his own and opens the door and the dogs dart out, and the two men follow.
“How’s your mam?” The question swoops out of nowhere, like the cars that tear around these Dales roads, forcing the walkers onto the verge. They are climbing a bend now and there’s another one coming. Struan recognises the quickening vibration through his soles this time and steps off pre-emptively, taking another step almost into the ditch when he realises that this one is a van. It’s going too fast for the corner, scything an arc through the tree branches right where he’d been standing. A decal of cartoon chickens obscured by a rain of twigs.
Walking on, Struan lets out his held breath, draws in another. The smell of the autumn air is clean, though lacking the antisepsis he’s used to. Instead, something vegetable: leaf drop and conker shells; something animal: wool tufts in the hedge; something else, musky, perhaps the little brown mushrooms that proliferate here. The afternoon sun doesn’t quite overpower the chill but he doesn’t mind. It’s a relief from the stifle of home.
Don’s question is a complicated one. On the phone the other night—his first alone since his folks installed him in his new university accommodation—Mum had said she was feeling tired. Probably just fatigue from the long drive, not a genuine dip in the erratic skimming stone trajectory of her illness. Maybe fatigue, yeah. Or perhaps a stoke of his guilt for choosing a university so far from home.
“She’s just the same,” Struan says, rubbing his wrist inside his sleeve, then snatching his hand away to stop himself from picking.
Uncle Don merely nods in response. And then they’re in the verge again as three cyclists rattle-swoosh past, helmets and suits the colours of Struan’s new floor-mates’ vibrant Pride flags.
“Worse than the motors, them,” Don says.
Struan’s turn to nod, although he suspects his uncle means something other than their flagrant confidence and assured trajectories.
It’s another quarter mile before they come across the rabbit. The dogs scamper ahead and are circling, sniffing the carcass when the humans catch up. Don tongue-clicks them away.
It’s a sad sight, Struan supposes, though sadness isn’t exactly what he feels. He’s never seen roadkill up close before. It’s interesting. The animal is stretched, arcing like one of the ghosts in Watership Down. Otherwise, it looks unharmed. Its eyes are closed as if in sleep and the fur still has that tawny-grey-gold brindle. It looks so soft. Struan can imagine how it would feel under his fingers.
Don rummages for a bin bag. “Hold it open.”
Struan looks away as he stretches the plastic. He hears the scrape of the blade, feels the jolt of the corpse. Then Don takes the bag back, swings it over his shoulder.
They walk on, the dogs trotting with happy tongues at Don’s heels.
‘It’s for your Aunt May’s memory.’ Don shakes the frying pan and turns off the gas. ‘Great big heart, that woman. Too much love in her to bear to see an animal left out there, reduced to dirty scraps. Always wanted them properly taken care of. You don’t remember your Aunt May.’
Struan’s sat at the table. The dogs are pacing and whimpering. Finding their restlessness contagious, he worries at the scab, feeling the tight skin give. Don’s right. All he has of Aunt May are hazy recollections: a bosomy woman with a drowsy odour that wasn’t astringent and false like the perfumes Mum wears, gentle hands setting a paper crown on his head at Christmas, cupping his scalp for a warm second after. Those few flitting impressions. He’s not even sure if they’re real memories. They’re more like the daydreams he comforted himself with when he was small. The ones about changing his skin, about being different.
Mum never talks about her sister. The photographs he found with Arbour Cottage, Garsdale, pencilled on the back, were from when the two of them were younger than he is now. He thinks they looked quite alike, but he suspects they really weren’t. He clearly remembers May’s death, though. Struan was old enough by then to sense that when Mum had cried in the kitchen, her tears were of anger more than grief. And he remembers Mum and Dad, sharp dressed and sombre for the funeral, pacing in and out of the living room where he was playing Mousetrap with the babysitter. Mum smoking. Mum snapping and sniping while Dad tried to calm her. Mum saying, No, no, no, I won’t, I won’t go, for the longest time before the car arrived eventually, and they did.
There was nothing between his earlier recollections and that day. No visits, no calls, no birthday cards or Christmas presents. Not a word from his mother’s lips since then either, but he’d remembered all the same.
“Sorry,” he tells Don. “I’m sure she was a good person, though.”
Shaking the cooling meat into the dogs’ bowls, Don says: “Your mam’d disagree, as like.”
Struan wonders if that’s meant to be an invitation for him to ask, but it’s too soon. None of this is what he’d expected. He turns his gaze to the window where, in the deepening bleed of the September sky, he can see the rabbit skin pegged out. The soft brindle ruffles in the breeze. Next to it, the two stoats it had been his turn to scrape up.
‘There you go, you two.’ The second Don places the bowls on the floor, the dogs dive for the meat. As Struan watches them eat, he feels his phone buzz in his pocket. If Don can hear the insistent vibration, he doesn’t say. Struan doesn’t want to answer it. Doesn’t even want to look and see if it’s the University calling to find out why he didn’t turn up at induction. Or if it’s Mum, always Mum. The phone stops ringing, eventually.
“You’ll be hungry too,” Don says. “I’ll go up the village for chips.”
In his absence, Struan gets the fire going in the living room. He used to do this for his grandfather when Mum, who considered it a filthy business, was absent. The scrunched newspaper, firelighters and matches are all there beside the coal scuttle. Soon there’s a proper blaze and the cave-room comes alive with flicker and shadow. He perches on the edge of a corduroy couch, sagging under a heap of books, magazines and other stuff. Though there is an empty armchair, from the spectacle case and tube of haemorrhoid cream resting on the arm, that is Don’s place. The comfortable niche he has made for himself in the world in the years after his wife went.
Her presence has even faded from the house she lived in.
In the fireglow, Struan’s hands are black with coal dust but, when he moves his fingers, something sparkles. He turns his hands this way, that way, fascinated by his new alien skin. Imagines himself like that all over. A creature of void and starlight.
No, that doesn’t feel right. Too cold.
He blasts hot water into the kitchen sink, scrubs the black away with soap and stiff bristles. Scrubs until his hands are new-born pink, scrubs until they’re roadkill raw. Scrubs at his fat fingers. Scrubs at his palms. Scrubs at his wrists, finally knocking off the scab and revealing the potential of newness beneath.
Struan tugs the fringe of old skin with this thumbnail, working the delicate rag as slowly as the boiling anxiety inside him will allow. There is pain—there should be pain. He teases, pulling and lifting. The more he can shed, snakelike, in one piece, the closer he feels he will be to discovering who—what—he is.
In his early teens they’d tried to cure him of the dermatillomania: the urge to pick and peel. I can’t just be me, he’d told Dr Manning, if I don’t know what that is. Dr Manning had many theories; about gender, sexuality, body image, but they were all wrong. All those visits had left him with was a better idea of the question of himself: what he was not, if not what he was.
One time, Struan peeled off a strip four centimetres long but today it’s barely one. The frustration floods through him, a tide of needles. He pops the skin scrap onto his tongue and, with a wordless prayer, swallows it. He licks the salty blood from his throbbing arm and pulls his jumper sleeve down.
He hears the door. Don’s back.
They don’t talk while they eat. The chips are too hot, too salty. Don moves some of the crap off the sofa for him to sit properly, turns on the ceiling light and the BBC News, banishing the magic from the cave, making it part of the world Struan already knows he has no place in.
The black dogs slink in to beg for food, jumping up one either side of him. He burrows his fingers into their coats, feels their hot flanks, the real, skinny-long shape of them hidden beneath the fur.
His phone goes in his pocket again. Must be Mum this time. The dog on that side of him grumps and shifts away. Struan can imagine the conversation playing out.
We got a call from the university, she’d say. What’s going on? Where are you?
Nothing’s wrong, he’d say, searching for a plausible lie. He’s getting better at those. I went out with some friends from the halls and we had a few drinks too many and we slept in.
Friends? That would stump her, simultaneously feeding her conflicting fears that he was finally growing beyond her and that he wouldn’t cope on his own. You’ve only been there a couple of days. What friends?
Just the guys on my floor. It’s fine. We’re going to register tomorrow.
That was how it would go. Unless, of course, he actually answered, and stammered apologies and lapsed into a paralysed silence that ended with the inevitable: We’re coming down tomorrow.
Don is staring at the TV but Struan watches the fire instead, his fingers up his jumper sleeve, picking and peeling. It distracts him from the huffy buzz as his phone tells him the caller left a message. He watches the coals settle, basks like a lizard in the heat, cosies into the dogs again and, inch by inch, relaxes.
“There’s a bed,“ Don says. “If you’re staying.”
Struan blinks. Realises that he has been drowsing.
“I don’t want to impose,” he mumbles, but where else is he going to go?
As he stumbles out, Don scritches the older dog and murmurs something Struan barely hears. It sounds like: “All the strays come here eventually, don’t they?”
If there was no sign of his Aunt May elsewhere in the house, the bedroom is full of her. The dressing table holds a satin-backed hairbrush and mirror set, a box of kirbies in a crocheted cover, an atomiser of perfume. The tasselled bedside lamp illuminates a stack of romance novels and a pair of reading glasses. The pillowcases and sheets welcome him with a trace of drowsy scent.
Struan kicks off his shoes and collapses onto the custard-coloured candlewick.
He dreams of a rumble and occasional jolt in a darkness interspersed by flashes of sodium orange. In the dream, he is enveloped in Aunt May’s scent, cradled gently and swaddled head to toe in soft warmth. In something that feels natural. His real skin.
Dawn wakes him. A soft, silver purity, a light of revelation. The bedroom, Struan understands now, is one person’s remembrance of another. But it’s just the veneer. No deeper. All the same, he suspects Don has slept in his chair for twelve years rather than desecrate this place.
The light, though . . .
Getting up, Struan approaches the window. He feels flushed. His skin itches. He’s ready. He steps forward.
And waits . . .
But there is no transformation. His skin does not split and slough and birth the real him anew.
His skin is wronger than ever.
He needs a knife, scissors . . . Searches the dressing table, the dresser, and then the wardrobe. And finds this flat box.
And in the box is tissue paper. And, within that . . .
A tiny all-in-one garment. Exquisitely tailored from a patchwork of hides. It is cosy rabbit and bold badger. Dappled fawn overlaid with a collar of striped pheasant feathers. A magpie hood. Four little paws to keep a toddler’s hands warm. Round the back is a fox cub’s brush.
So beautiful. So perfect. Its rightness calls to him but he doesn’t dare touch it.
Instead he picks and peels at his own traitorous flesh, because all he can think is that it’s too small.
And it is far too late.
Originally published in Uncanny Bodies, edited by Pippa Goldschmidt, Gill Haddow, and Fadhila Mazanderani.
Neil Williamson lives in Glasgow, Scotland. His books include The Moon King and Queen of Clouds, and his work has been nominated for World Fantasy, British Fantasy and British SF Association awards. Find out more at www.neilwilliamson.org.uk.