Skin Read online

  To my amazement, Charlie did actually answer our request for a conference call. It only took one glance at him, however, to realise he wasn’t about to show contrition. No, Charlie was proud of his handiwork. He wanted us to know it was him.

  ‘Poor old Amber,’ he deadpanned, his eyes wide, eyebrows raised. A parody of surprise. ‘Who on earth would do something like that?’

  ‘It is a horrible situation—’ Colin started, before I cut in.

  ‘Cut the crap, Charlie. We’ve spoken to Mrs Patel. She seems to think the only person involved is you.’

  Instantly, Charlie’s face hardened. His lip curled. ‘And would Mrs Patel care to share the evidence she has to support those serious allegations?’

  I shook my head, too angry to speak.

  ‘Now, now,’ Colin said. ‘Let’s all take a deep breath, shall we? There’s no need for anyone to…’

  Before he could finish, Charlie’s screen went blank. Moments later, a barrage of ferocious bass-heavy music blared through the walls, mingling with the thud of Amber’s treadmill.

  ‘You know he is right,’ Colin said. ‘About there not being any evidence, I mean.’

  I let out a sigh. ‘You know, I’ve got a lot of work on at the moment. We’ll talk about this later.’ With that I killed the feed but didn’t move. I just sat there, staring at the outline of my reflection in the blank monitor as I listened to the racket blasting through the walls, angry and indecipherable. Like a storm. A car crash. A city being flattened.

  FATIMA WASN’T PLEASED that I’d lost the camera. I’m not sure she believed my story about the broken harness. Nor did she take me up on my half-hearted offer to go back and look for it. And although she claimed to have accepted my apology, I can’t shake the feeling she’s holding on to a grudge. For one thing, I received a message about my last report, criticising its lack of detail. She even went as far as to publicly share a link on social media to an online training course to help improve my writing style. The bitch. But that’s not all. In addition to her public criticisms, she’s also updated our patrol rota. This means that instead of a fortnight to wait, I’m now not scheduled to go back out for almost a month. It’s infuriating, but as she’s chairwoman of the group, there’s literally nothing I can do. Other than forming my own, break-away faction, that is. An independent neighbourhood watch scheme, comprising of a single member. I can’t see that going down very well.

  And then there’s the fact I’ve been feeling sick ever since I visited the church last week. Time and time again I find myself scrolling through lists of symptoms. Filling out online questionnaires. Checking my temperature. Scouring my skin for signs of a rash. It’s irrational, I know. It’s already been five solid days since Jazz put his arms around me. If I’d been exposed, I’d already be dead. But that doesn’t stop me from worrying.

  In an effort to distract myself, I’ve tried to keep busy at work. Not that I’ve had much choice. For some reason, it’s been relentless recently, with more new members signing up than ever before. Perhaps people can sense the hot weather through their walls. Some primal throwback to a time when the start of summer was a signal to chase a mate, rather than simply reach for the aircon.

  Despite the added pressure of work, however, I’ve struggled to get Jazz out of my head. Late at night, I find myself trawling social media sites, inputting various iterations of his name: Jason Freeman, J. Freeman, Jazz Freeman. Nothing ever comes up, though. The man is a digital ghost. While that alone isn’t surprising, especially considering he’s trying to keep a low profile and avoid the detection of the authorities, the lack of any archive pages from before the fall is definitely odd. There are no awkward teenage photographs. No dating profile. No work résumé. It could only mean one thing. The name he’d given me was a fake.

  Of course, the sensible thing to do would have been to simply send a message to the relevant authorities right then. Having studied various maps and satellite images of the city, I’d narrowed down the school he’d mentioned to two possible sites. I could pass along the details, and within minutes they’d swoop in with their drones and their teams of heavily armed soldiers and capture him. I’d be a hero. And if he did turn out to be immune, the government would be able to use him as a vaccine. His capture would save millions of lives. I’d have single-handedly saved the world. And if he wasn’t immune, well then too bad. He’d be just one less crazy person threatening the safety and stability of our society.

  But I didn’t call the authorities. No. I kept Jazz all to myself. I guess, if I’m honest, I felt possessive of him. Yes, I knew it was dangerous not to report him. It was probably completely illegal. Yet at the same time, it felt good to have a secret. Something that no one else in the world knew about. Something small I could keep scrunched up tight and hidden inside me. To cling to during the hours of endless drudgery in my room. As pathetic as it sounds, Jazz was exciting.

  When Colin and I first got together, we courted in total secrecy. This was just after I’d left university, before I’d started my career in marketing, and I was working long hours for little pay in some godawful call centre. As it happened, Colin was doing an apprenticeship with an IT company on the floor below. We first met in a local coffee shop, and although the attraction hadn’t been immediate, I’d found his goofy jokes and Dad-like dress sense oddly endearing. I bumped into him again at a bar a few weeks later and, with alcohol lowering my inhibitions, I’d ended up going back to his place.

  At the time, I was still technically dating someone else, and so we initially decided to keep our relationship hidden. I still remember the excitement of those early months together. Sneaking around the building. Sending late night text messages. Clandestine meetings after work. It was all such a thrill. So much so, that I remember feeling a slight twinge of disappointment when, a few months later, we began to get more serious about each other and decided to come clean. As nice as it was to be able to go for dinner without constantly looking over our shoulders, there was no denying that some of that early magic disappeared the moment we stepped out of the shadows. In retrospect, I can’t help feeling that the early flood of feelings I had for Colin were less to do with him and more the illicit pleasure of keeping him hidden.

  And of course, once you’re married, you very quickly find there are no secrets. There’s no space for intrigue or mystery once you’ve squeezed the blackheads on your partner’s back or nursed them through a particularly nasty bout of norovirus. In fact, there’s very little space whatsoever. Even when Colin and I weren’t physically together, we’d message constantly. He lived in the little square in the corner of my computer screen at work. In my pocket on my phone when I was commuting. Hardly a minute past when we weren’t communicating.

  I remember one time, when Amber was still little, we went to a family party to celebrate my grandparents’ diamond wedding anniversary. Sixty years of marriage! I always find it incredible that people can make it through six years without killing each other, let alone six decades. And yet at the same time, I couldn’t help thinking about the amount of time my grandparents actually spent with each other. For forty years of their marriage, Grandad had worked shifts in a local factory. He would leave the house at eight in the morning and get home at six at night. In those ten hours, they wouldn’t hear from each other at all. Nothing. Not a bleep, not a blip, not a buzz. Then at the weekends he’d go fishing, or to the football, and again, they wouldn’t speak during that entire time. Measured like that, in terms of hours spent communicating with each other, it occurred to me that Colin and I had probably already spent far, far longer together than Nana and Grandad ever had. And I didn’t see anyone rushing to buy us a fucking cake.

  So perhaps it’s the mystery that made Jazz so attractive. Not in a romantic way, obviously. I don’t feel the remotest bit sexually attracted to him. I mean, he must be almost young enough to be my son. Nevertheless, I recognised the same furtive rush as I did when Colin and I were secretly dating. That feeling of knowing someth
ing nobody else does. Of having something that belongs to me and me alone. And the fact that I couldn’t just pick up the phone and call him or send him a message whenever I felt like it only added to the appeal. He was like an itch I couldn’t scratch, and as the days rolled by, I increasingly found he was all I could think about.

  That’s what made Fatima’s latest petty diktat so frustrating. There was no guarantee that Jazz would still be alive in a month’s time. And even if by some miracle he didn’t get sick and die, who’s to say he’d still be staying in the same place? He said himself that he liked to move around. Like the fawn, he could simply melt back into the city, never to be seen again.

  Which is why, in opposition to all logic, I found myself lying in bed one Saturday morning hatching a plan to get my camera back.

  I’d slept badly, my dreams filled with nightmarish visions of axe-wielding priests. I woke just before dawn, my mind still fuzzy with sleep inertia. As I lay there trying to clear my head, I found myself thinking about Jazz. It occurred to me that in all the months I’d been out on patrol, I’d never once been asked by anyone to see my clearance. Hell, I’d never even seen anyone out there apart from Jazz. No police. No soldiers. What was to stop me, I wondered, heading out on my own for a few hours? For even if, on the off-chance, I was stopped by a patrol unit, surely I could just tell them I was part of a neighbourhood watch scheme? After all, I wouldn’t be lying. And even if the worst happened and they contacted Fatima, I could simply claim I’d got mixed up about what day I was supposed to be out there. It was an easy enough mistake to make, especially with the recent changes to my rota.

  Outside, I could hear the first faint call of birdsong through the layers of protective glass. No one in the house would be up for hours yet. Even if they did wake up while I was gone, it wasn’t like they’d miss me. As long as I was back in time for dinner this evening, they’d have no way of knowing I’d been gone. As for work, I could simply message them to say I was sick. It wasn’t as if they were going to demand a doctor’s note.

  It was ridiculous, I knew that. But sometimes ridiculous is what you need. Sometimes ridiculous is the only thing that is capable of shattering the crushing boredom of life.

  And so that is how, early one Tuesday morning, I came to zip myself into my protective suit and mask. And then, as the first thin strains of sunlight streamed into my room to chase the night away, I quietly let myself out of my room and crept down the hall.

  And out of the front door.

  FOURTEEN

  SIX DAYS. NINE if we skipped breakfast. That was how long we had before we began to starve. We laid everything out again, spending hours juggling our meagre rations into new combinations. Pot Noodles and pizza. Pasties and instant mash potato. It was no good, though. No matter how we split it, we had less than two weeks’ worth of food.

  With no obvious solution, we put everything away. Maybe it would be enough? Surely a vaccine would be discovered and rolled out any day now. Then we could return home. Things would go back to normal. Although how we’d know it was safe to return to the city was another problem. Our phones were as good as bricks, and despite the cottage’s Wi-Fi router blinking incessantly, the Internet remained stubbornly down along with the TV. Even most radio stations had stopped broadcasting by now, the only message we could still pick up a looped public service announcement, an island in an ocean of static:

  Stay calm and await further instructions.

  Stay calm and await further instructions.

  For the kids, this lack of electronic stimulation was perhaps the most traumatic element of all. For days they were near comatose with boredom, refusing to get out of bed or go outside. They were like two miniature addicts in withdrawal. Not that Colin and I were much better. Every minute or so, we would take out our neutered phones and tap hopefully at the screens, re-reading the same articles on our frozen timeline, scrolling through the same old pictures on social media until we hit the top of the page, where a small digital cog turned endlessly:

  Loading… Loading… Loading…

  Occasionally our frustration would boil over and we’d go out into the surrounding countryside, looking for higher ground as we clutched our phones towards the sky, praying for a signal.

  My kingdom for a bar of network coverage!

  Of course, we never found any.

  Thankfully, after the first few days we began to adjust. Talking face-to-face no longer felt such a strain. The kids began to hold eye contact again instead of constantly glancing down at their laps. Midway through the first week, Colin uncovered a battered copy of Monopoly that had somehow escaped the bonfire. For the next few days we all crowded round the board, staging sprawling financial battles that lasted until late into the night. It was fun, spending time together. Like something out of the past. An idealised, 1950s vision of family life. It was so enjoyable that it was almost possible to forget the real reason we were there. But then the kids’ bellies would begin rumbling, and I’d remember that, even with an entire avenue of hotels and a couple of million cash in the bank, I couldn’t buy them the one thing they needed:

  Food.

  On the seventh evening, once the kids were safely tucked up in bed, Colin and I went to the kitchen and laid out the rations again. It didn’t take long. Even at a stretch, there were less than a dozen meals left. I cursed myself, thinking of the tins and packets we’d left at home. Why hadn’t we brought more? Or made more of an effort to pick up supplies along the way?

  ‘Maybe I could go out there?’ Colin pointed vaguely in the direction of the woods behind the house. ‘I could, I don’t know, hunt something?’

  I stared at him. Even back then, my husband was not in the best of shape. A slight paunch already visible through his shirt. His skin pale from too many days spent hunched over a computer screen. And sure, he was good with his hands. He could wield an electric screwdriver or a soldering iron with the best of them. But hunting? I tried to picture him crouched in the scrub, a bandana pulled over his receding hairline, his finger twitching on the trigger of an imaginary crossbow.

  ‘Good idea, Rambo. Maybe you could take your sniper rifle and rustle us up a few seagulls?’

  Colin frowned. ‘At least I’m being proactive. I mean, the only other thing I can think of is…’

  He trailed off. There was no need for him to finish. We both knew that the only other option was to take the car and see what we could find nearby. There’d be no shops open of course. But perhaps there’d be an aid centre or a food bank. Or at the very least, a vending machine we could break into. There had to be something.

  ‘So who’s going to go?’ I asked, though if I was honest, I already knew the answer.

  Colin shrugged. ‘Why don’t we both go? We can’t be more than twenty minutes away from the nearest village. We can be there and back in an hour.’

  ‘And leave the kids?’

  ‘They’re asleep. They won’t even know we’re gone.’

  ‘Until a crazed desperado breaks down the door.’

  ‘Come on, Angela. We’re in the middle of nowhere. Besides, we’ve been here for a week already and we haven’t exactly seen many crazed desperados, have we? We haven’t seen anyone full stop.’

  ‘Nice try. But not in a million years would I leave them here by themselves for one minute, let alone an hour. So why don’t we just cut to the chase, and I’ll go by myself. That is what you’re suggesting, right?’

  ‘Don’t be like that.’

  ‘It’s fine. Seriously. It’s probably better this way. At least if something does happen, you’ll be here to look after the kids.’

  Colin frowned, feigning concern. ‘I don’t know. Maybe we should wait another day or two?’

  ‘For what? Until we’re actually starving. We could be here for weeks. Or months. Unless we get some food, we’re not going to make it. We’ll die. Do you understand that?’

  He gave a feeble nod. ‘Well at the very least take something with you.’

  By �
�something’ he meant a weapon.

  ‘Don’t be so melodramatic.’

  Colin wouldn’t have it, though. He opened the cutlery drawer and extracted a large carving knife. ‘Just in case,’ he said, handing it to me.

  I snorted. ‘Really? What is this, a horror movie?’ Still, I took the blade from him and stowed it in my handbag. ‘Happy now?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘It’ll be fine. I’ll be back before you know it. Promise.’

  By the time I reached the car, however, my bravado had already begun to fade. I sat behind the steering wheel for a good few minutes before I eventually started the engine. The GPS was still down, so I switched it to manual mode, fumbling for the handbrake. Then suddenly I paused, killing the engine and unfastening my seat belt.