WHEN I FAILED my A levels my parents weren’t sure what to do with me. But then they’ve never been quite sure what to do with me. I emerged into the world yelling, fighting to make my presence felt, an alien creature to them, and so I’ve remained. They are gentle souls, considerate and unworldly, and they consider me a monster. I tell myself that it isn’t entirely my fault: my parents were older than most when I was conceived and I am an only child, carrying the weight of their expectations. In a different family, in a freer, less ordered household, I might have been respected, even admired. As it is they regard me with dismay and anxiety. How could someone so unconventional, so physically lovely, belong to them? I am the dark-eyed, shapely cuckoo in their nest.
Of course I set out to fail the exams. It was a challenge: to complete the paper and still achieve so few marks that I’d fail. Almost impossible these days. And harder, I might say, than getting the four As for which the dears had been hoping. All my life I’ve been bored. I have only survived by playing games. I don’t intend to hurt people.
But of course I had hurt them. We sat in the garden discussing my future. They looked grey and disappointed and for a very brief moment I wished I’d passed the bloody things so that for once they’d have something to celebrate in me. It was very hot. There was a smell of cut grass and melted tar. In the distance the sound of a hosepipe running and a wood pigeon calling.
“You do realize,” I said, “that I could have passed them if I’d wanted.”
“Of course.” My father looked at me over his glasses. He was a senior social worker and thought he should understand me.
“You’ve always been a bright girl.” My mother wore floral print dresses, which might have been fashionable when she was a student in the seventies. She illustrated children’s books – cats were her speciality, though I’d never been allowed pets because she was allergic to their fur.
“We’ve decided,” she said, “that you should go and work for Uncle George.”
George wasn’t a real uncle, but a distant cousin of my father’s. I’d only met him once at my grandmother’s funeral and remember him as a rather glamorous figure, with the look of a thirties movie star. During the service he shot several admiring glances in my direction, but even then I was used to men staring at my body and I took no notice. Vanessa, his wife, was pale, draped in purple chiffon. My parents spoke of the couple occasionally but in no detail. George was a businessman and of course they disapproved of that; I had been brought up to believe that money was grubby and something to be ignored. George and Vanessa lived in London and that alone gave me a frisson of excitement. In the big city there would surely be scope for new adventures and I’d find a way to keep boredom at bay.
It seemed anyway that I would have no say in the matter. With an uncharacteristic decisiveness my parents told me that everything had been arranged. I would leave by train the following morning. I would become Uncle George’s assistant and return at the end of the year to re-sit my A levels. Working for a living might give me a sense of responsibility. The next day they took me to the station. They stood on the platform waving me off, looking at once sad, guilty and very relieved.
Uncle George had a house in Camden, between King’s Cross and Regent’s Canal. He was waiting for me at Paddington and in the cab he talked, not expecting any reply.
“Our neck of the woods has certainly gone up in the world. One time you’d only find whores and bag ladies here. Now we live next door to the Guardian and a major publishing house.”
I said nothing. I was aware of him sitting beside me. He smelled of sandalwood and something else I couldn’t recognize: a chemical, almost medical scent. It occurred to me that for the first time in my life I was nervous. We stopped in a street that seemed industrial rather than domestic in character. George took my hand to help me out and held it for a little longer than necessary. I recognized him as a kindred spirit then, someone for whom the normal boundaries, the conventional rules of everyday life had no meaning.
He pushed open arched double doors in a high brick wall and I followed him into a cobbled courtyard. The rest of the neigh-bourhood might have been gentrified but this felt like stepping into a scene from Dickens. There was an L-shaped warehouse or workshop, with grimy barred windows. On the nearest door a sign said “Show Room” though from outside there was nothing to indicate what was being shown. I was suddenly curious about what George’s “business” might be. My parents had never discussed it, even when they told me I was to be his assistant.
To our left was a tall, narrow house, Victorian Gothic, with stone steps leading to another arched door. George took a brass key from his pocket and unlocked it. It was late afternoon, gloomy for midsummer, with the threat of thunder. I could see nothing of the room inside and paused for a moment on the threshold. George switched on a light and suddenly we were in a different continent. Or even in a different dimension of being. Organic rather than concrete. It was as if we’d been swallowed by a whale or sucked into the belly of a huge beast.
It was an entrance hall with a grand staircase leading away from the centre. But there were no hard edges. The walls were covered with animal skins – zebra and different kinds of deer. On the floor were fur rugs, the fur deep brown in colour, dense and very soft. So many that there were only glimpses of polished wood. I stood in astonishment then couldn’t help reaching out to stroke the nearest wall. The skin was smooth and surprisingly cool to my touch. George nodded approvingly.
“You obviously have a feel for the work,” he said. He set my rucksack next to an umbrella stand made from an elephant’s foot and led me on to meet Aunt Vanessa.
He explained more about the business over dinner. We ate steak, very rare as I like it, and drank strong red wine. My parents are practically vegetarians, so the meal alone made me feel I’d moved into quite a different world.
“My great-grandfather founded the company,” George said. “He was a big-game hunter and saw the opportunity. All the expat British wanted trophies, a record of the things that they’d shot. And it reminded them of Africa when they came home. A memory of the glories of Empire.” He gave a little sigh.
“But surely that sort of thing is outlawed now. Do people shoot game any more? I thought all animals were protected.” My parents were members of the Green Party.
“The business is certainly different.” He sighed again. “Taxidermy isn’t what it was. We have to work with museums now. But I still have private clients, at home and abroad. Of course discretion is essential.” He gave a sudden wolfish grin. “Occasionally we operate on the very edge of the law.” And I saw that was how he liked to operate. He was a game-player too. A risk-taker.
Throughout this conversation Vanessa was almost silent. Her skin was the colour of a white butterfly’s wing. How could she eat red meat and drink red wine and stay so pale?
Over the next few weeks I learned more about the business. Only two other people worked in the echoing workshop. All the rooms in the attic were unused, though once there’d been several dozen employees. A serious young man called Harry prepared skins for museums. These were all birds and animals that had died of natural causes or had been killed accidentally. When I first met him he was stuffing a pine marten that had been knocked down on a road in the Highlands. He’d constructed a wire frame and wrapped it with wood wool, before stretching the skin of the animal over it. The marten was a rare and beautiful creature, he said, and most people would never have the opportunity to see it living. He was evangelical about his craft and explained that his exhibits had brought an understanding of natural history to visitors to the museums.
The other employee was Arthur, an elderly man, who’d been in the place since George’s father’s day. He worked with vats of chemicals and very sharp knives in his own room in the basement. He dealt with the specimens imported from overseas. Only George was made welcome there. Arthur regarded me with suspicion and seldom spoke. Vanessa looked after the show room but few customers turned up by chance. Most of George’s personal clients slipped into his office unannounced. I never saw the victims of their slaughter arrive but the completed objects – polished ivory tusks on brass plaques or mounted wildebeest heads – were returned to them in an anonymous transit van. I had no moral problem about these transactions. The extinction of a great African mammal would have no real impact on me, and I’d always considered that laws were for breaking. Besides, it was clear that most of George’s income came from these illegal commissions. Harry of course would have been horrified, but Harry was engrossed in preparing his museum exhibits and never quite understood what was going on.
As I got to grips with the process of preserving skins, de-scaling tusks and preparing heads for mounting, my relationship with George developed in an unexpected and tantalizing way. I had assumed that he would want sex with me. All men did. Harry certainly blushed every time I came within yards of him and even the elderly Arthur watched my legs through narrowed eyes as I walked away from him and breathed more heavily when I approached. George, however, seemed impervious to my charms. There would have been no sport in seducing Harry, but George became a challenge. I wore more provocative clothes, allowed my breast to brush against his bare arm when we worked together. Still there was no response. The more that he ignored me, and the longer he made me wait, the more I wanted him. He became an obsession. I dreamed about him at night and woke up thinking about him. He was a married middle-aged man who smelled of sandalwood and borax, but still I wanted him more than I had wanted anything in my life.
It happened quite suddenly when I was least expecting it. By now it was October, damp and misty, with sodden leaves on the canal path and in the Bloomsbury squares where occasionally I wandered when I felt the need to spend some time away from the business. There were no wild London adventures. I spent my evenings with George and Vanessa or alone in my room. I had begun to study for my exams. I wanted to cause a sensation, to jump from the lowest A level marks the school had ever known to the highest, and realized that even for me that would take some effort.
Harry and Arthur had just gone home and Vanessa had closed the showroom and walked over the courtyard into the house to prepare dinner. George put his hand on my shoulder, startling me. Since that first day in the taxi he hadn’t touched me.
“We’ve had a new acquisition,” he said. “Would you like to see it?”
Of course I said I would. I’d have agreed to anything he asked at that time. He took my hand and led me upstairs to the empty rooms at the top of the building. There was no corridor – one cavernous space led directly into another. Each was lit by a bare bulb. In the shadows were piles of sacking, the occasional moth-eaten skin, odd tools the function of which I could only guess. As we moved further into the attic, I felt my heart rate increase. I was almost faint. At last we arrived at the furthest door. George asked me to close my eyes. I did as he asked immediately. He stood behind me with his hands on my shoulders and walked forwards with me. I felt his body against my spine and my buttocks. With my eyes tight shut I lost all sense of balance and would have stumbled if he hadn’t been holding me.
“Now! Open them!’His voice was unsteady with excitement.
It was a tiger. The animal had been skinned where it had been killed in India and the soft tissue of the head, the eyes and the brain removed. That was standard procedure. George had unrolled it and laid it out on the dusty floor for my inspection. In the small, dimly lit room the colours glowed like fire.
“Well?” he demanded.
I thought he’d set this up for me. He’d acquired the tiger just for this moment. It was a token of his admiration. Then he added: “Do you know how much money this will make me? The risk I’m taking by having it here?” And I saw I wasn’t the object of his excitement at all.
“It’s magnificent.” But I couldn’t take my eyes from the holes where once the eyes had been. I imagined the skin covering muscle and bone.
“So are you,” he said. “You’re magnificent too.” And now all his attention was focused on me and I pushed away my doubts. He made me wait a little longer while he looked at me at arm’s length. He ran his fingers over my head and across my shoulders then lightly over my breasts, exploring me as I had touched the skins on his wall on my arrival at the house. He undressed me and laid me on the tiger skin and that was where we made love.
He must have realized that we might be interrupted. Perhaps for him that added to the thrill of the encounter. If I’d thought about it I’d probably have been excited by the possibility of discovery too. George had turned no locks. In fact Vanessa must have seen us as soon as she arrived at the top of the stairs, through the string of open doors across the empty rooms to the small chamber where George had laid out the tiger.
We weren’t aware of her until it was all over. She could have been watching for some time because she was in the next room when we saw her, motionless and silent. I still don’t know if she’d guessed what would take place or if she’d come looking for us with an innocent message about dinner or a phone call. Her face was still white except for two perfectly round red patches on her cheeks. In her hand was a knife she must have snatched from the pile of tools on her way through the attic. George pulled on his trousers and stood up, his hands upturned in supplication.
“Vanessa. I’m sorry.”
I saw that he had a small paunch, like a young mother’s bulge in the early months of pregnancy. It hung slightly over his belt.
Her face became suffused with red and she lunged at him with the knife, hit him at the top of the paunch and pushed it home. I heard the sound of shattering bone and soft flesh. Then the knife was in the air, spattering blood over the tiger skin. She stabbed him again and again until she was sure he was dead. I slid away from her, holding my clothes to my body.
At last she stood still. “I don’t blame you,” she said, looking down at me, her face still flushed. She looked more human than I’d ever known her; it was as if someone had blown life back into a ghost. “You’re not the first of his playthings.”
“What will you do now?” I struggled into my clothes.
“I suppose I should phone the police.”
“No!” I was horrified at the thought. Perhaps I was more conventional than I’d believed. The idea of this story becoming public knowledge, of my parents reading about it in the Sunday newspapers, was more than I could bear. And it was clear that I’d meant very little to George. Rather than acquiring the tiger as a gift for me, he’d used me to make his experience of the beast more intense.
“What then?” Vanessa turned to me now as if I were a co-conspirator, as if we’d planned this murder between us.
“In this place there must be a way to dispose of a human body.” “Oh, I don’t really know. I’ve never been involved in that part of the business.” We caught each other’s eyes and began to laugh. There was something deliciously ludicrous about the whole conversation.
“I know,” I said. “I know what to do.”
We rolled George’s body in the tiger skin and carried him down to Arthur’s basement. I’ve always been a quick learner. The skinning was less complex than I’d expected – I’d watched Harry working often enough and it wasn’t as if we needed a perfect specimen for the purposes of taxidermy. We weren’t planning to preserve Uncle George. That would have been macabre. The bones and pieces of attached flesh went into the bin with the other biological waste for disposal by Camden Council and the skin dissolved very quickly in one of Arthur’s buckets. The tiger skin, spattered with blood, was a trickier problem. It had already been rubbed with borax and was partly preserved. In the end we cleaned it as best we could and hung it on the wall in a small room at the back of the house. The stains hardly showed in the dim light and there were other skins of endangered species there. If challenged, Vanessa would say that it was ancient. The man who had shot it could hardly go to the police to make a complaint.
I left London by the last train home, having told my parents that I felt uncomfortable in the presence of Uncle George, implying that he’d made unwelcome advances. They weren’t surprised; he must have had that sort of reputation and they seemed almost pleased that I’d decided to return to them. Vanessa drove me to Paddington and we made plans on the way. She was quite a different woman now, full-blooded and decisive. She said she’d tell the staff that George and I had run away together. And then she’d sell the house and the workshop. Even in this climate, the area had changed so dramatically that there’d be a market for all that land, so close to St Pancras and the Eurostar terminal.
A few weeks later I re-sat my exams and achieved marks that brought tears of joy to my parents’ eyes. “We always knew you were a good girl,” my mother said. I had decided to read politics at university. I thought I had all the necessary qualities to be an effective politician.
I moved into my little room in Oxford almost a year after Vanessa had stabbed her husband. From my suitcase I took a small wooden box. Inside was a perfectly preserved part of George’s anatomy. A memento of those months in London, as potent for me as the tiger had been for him. The exhibit was surprisingly small. In the end, that day, I hadn’t resisted the temptation to practise my skills at taxidermy. In more than one sense I had stuffed Uncle George.