The Skin Map

CHAPTER 3
In Which Wilhelmina Takes Umbrage

Kit emerged from Stane Way soaked to the skin and completely disoriented. He felt as if he had just taken a trip through an automatic car wash without the car. He staggered forward, dashing water from his eyes-almost colliding with a mum pushing a pram. “Sorry!” he sputtered. The mother glared at him as she hurried on. Kit gazed around at the street lined with tall buildings and heaving with traffic. He was back.

Relief rippled through him. It worked, he thought. I’m home!

Then, without warning, he felt a sudden rush of nausea. He clamped a hand over his mouth, lurched to the nearest gutter, and threw up.

“Very nice,” muttered a teenage girl passing by just then. She and her friend gave him a wide berth and hurried on. “Get a life, creep!”

I’m trying, thought Kit. He spat and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. Gradually, the seasick sensation subsided and he started making his unsteady way back to his flat to change his clothes. Halfway there, he abandoned this plan, turned around, and headed for Clapton, where Mina was waiting for him; his clothes could dry on the way.

Walking along familiar streets in the sober light of day, it was almost possible to convince himself that the whole impossible series of events owed more to some sort of weird delirium than actual, physical happenstance. Did not the strangeness of the situation have about it the very peculiar quality of a dream? It truly did, he argued. And was it not common knowledge that hallucinations were often extraordinarily vivid? Obviously, the episode was a hallucination brought on by acute unhappiness, triggered by fatigue, and fuelled by frustration. And yet…

And yet, it had none of the surreal hallucinatory quality of a dream. The ground in that place had felt as solid beneath his feet, the sun as warm on his face, the scent of the air as redolent of the sea-all that and more had felt just as real as the waking world he had always known, just as concrete as the hard-paved London street on which he now stood. What was dreamlike about that?

What else could it be? He had read about alternate worlds and such. But wasn’t that all just the overinflated musings of theoretical physicists with way too much time and funding on their hands? In any case, people simply did not go popping from one place to another easy as you please and back again. No, it had to be some sort of mental aberration-admittedly of an extremely robust kind. Hysteria, maybe. Or, hypnosis. Maybe old Cosimo had hypnotized him, made him fantasize the seaside village and all the rest. As he considered this, another, darker, prospect suggested itself for his consideration: schizophrenia.

While Kit refused to seriously entertain that possibility, he nevertheless was forced to admit that those suffering from that mental aberration often saw and held conversations with people who were not physically present, and they had difficulty recognising their surroundings. And it was true that schizophrenia often manifested itself in young men of his age, striking without warning and resulting in just the sort of dislocation and disorientation he had experienced.

Whatever the explanation would turn out to be, the less said about his so-called travels the better. Nothing good would come of blabbing about what had happened. That much was clear. He would, he vowed, die on the rack with red-hot pokers in his eyes before confessing it to anyone.

Upon reaching the nearest Underground station, he swiped his Oyster at the turnstile and received the dreaded “Seek Assistance” sign once again. Rather than repeat his former escapade, he dutifully purchased a ticket from one of the machines, pushed through the turnstile, and headed down the steps to the platform. When the train came whooshing up, he climbed on, took a seat, and uneventfully rode the rest of the way to Clapton, where he proceeded straightaway to Wilhelmina’s flat, firmly resolved to forget the whole strange interlude, put it behind him; to never, ever breathe a word about it to another living soul. This resolve carried him all the way to his girlfriend’s tower-block apartment building and her front door.

He knocked.

There was a click and the door swung open. “You’re late!”

“What? No kiss? No cheery greeting?”

Wilhelmina frowned, but gave him a quick, dry peck on the cheek. “You’re still late.”

“Yeah, sorry about that. I had this-” He stopped abruptly and retrenched. “I mean, my Oyster card was out, so I had to walk.”

“And that took you eight hours?”

“Huh?” he wondered. “No, really.”

She moved away from the doorway, and he stepped in, kicking off his damp shoes. Her flat was ample by London standards, clean as a dental hygienist’s treatment room and nearly as cold. Wilhelmina was nothing if not tidy-perhaps owing to the fact that she had once been a dental hygienist, briefly, before chucking it in-too many people, too many mouths-to become a baker.

She still filled people’s mouths, albeit in a different and, for her, much more satisfying way.

As Kit watched her slouch back to her big blue sofa, which was her habitual nest, he was once more impressed with the idea that he simply had to get a better girlfriend at first opportunity. Dressed in black slacks and a black turtleneck with the horrible, ratty, hand-knitted purple scarf she wore everywhere, with her feet stuffed into flat-heeled, sheepskin boots, she was a dead ringer for the undertaker’s anemic daughter. Why, he wondered, did she have to look so austere? Whatever happened to sugar and spice? When enumerating the qualities he desired in a mate, vim and vigour, a zest for life, and a keenness of mind and intellect came quite near the top of the list. Wilhelmina’s idea of excitement was an extra scoop of sultanas in the cinnamon buns. Her intellect might have been keen enough-if anyone could ever catch her awake long enough to stimulate her into meaningful conversation.

Her job at Giovanni’s Rustic Italian Bakery-“Artisan Breads Our Specialty”-meant that she had to rise every weekday morning in the wee hours to be at work by four o’clock to fire up the ovens and mix the first of the day’s dough. She finished work just after one in the afternoon, was completely exhausted by six in the evening, and usually sound asleep by eight-all of which meant one hardly ever saw her when she wasn’t yawning, stifling a yawn, or having just yawned. If sleep were an Olympic event, Wilhelmina Klug could have slept for Team GB.

Her eyelids drooped, and her shoulders too. Like many tall girls, she had developed the round-shouldered, hunched-over posture that would in time grow into a widow’s hump; in Wilhelmina’s case, since marriage seemed so very remote, it would be a spinster’s hump.

Everything about her was retiring. Even her chin receded.

Her hair was mousy, both in colour and texture: very fine, shiny, and slightly bristly; and she wore it aggressively short. The better to keep it out of the pastry, she claimed, but the style was far from flattering. She had large, dark eyes that might in themselves have been pretty if not for the matching large dark circles beneath them.

Wilhelmina was no catch. As one of Kit’s colleagues put it after spending a rare evening with the unfortunate couple: “For warmth and affection, mate, you’d be better off with a pair of ferrets and a hot-water bottle.”

Kit could not disagree.

But until something better came along, she was, for him, it. And, despite her many obvious flaws, and his continually renewed determination to do better in the dating game, he inexplicably turned up time and again outside her door. It was as if his feet had a mind of their own and weren’t over-fussy about whose table they parked themselves under.

“Well?” she said.

“Sorry? Am I missing something here?”

“You’re late, dope. You promised to go help me pick out curtains for the bathroom this morning.”

“So, here I am. Let’s go.”

“Is this your lame idea of a joke?”

“Sunday morning-John Lewis, yeah? So, let’s go and pick out some curtains.”

“You’re winding me up, right? You know well and good they close on Sunday at five.”

“Wait!” He stepped close. “What did you say?”

She puffed out her cheeks with exasperation. “I’m too tired for this.”

“No, really, what time is it?”

“Four-bloody-thirty!” She gave him the full frontal glare of a woman on the edge and collapsed on the couch. “Idiot man.”

“It’s never half-four.” Pulling his phone from his front pocket, he checked the display. He saw the number four followed by two threes, experienced a twinge of disbelief, and quickly shoved the phone back into his pocket.

“Are you trying to pick a fight? You waste the whole day and this is the best excuse you can think up? ‘Duh, I forgot what time it is.. ..’ Pathetic.” She rolled her big brown eyes. “You can’t do better than that?”

“No, really, Mina,” said Kit, suddenly desperate to explain. “Listen, something’s happened-”

“Something’s happened, all right. I missed my chance to go shopping on the one day of the week I have off, and all because of you. Where were you anyway-at the pub? I tried to call you, but your phone is off.”

“We’ll go next week,” he offered.

“No thanks. I’ll do it myself-as usual.”

“No, Mina, listen-I’m trying to tell you the truth.” Even as he spoke he could feel his former resolve evaporating in the heat of her righteous indignation. He slid onto the couch beside her. “Something’s happened. I didn’t believe it myself-I’m still not sure I believe it yet-but I can explain. Really.”

“This should be good,” she snipped. Crossing her arms across her sunken chest, she thrust out her chin, daring him. “Go on, then.”

“Okay,” he said, his vow to say nothing about his hallucination effectively dwarfed by the need to make her believe, “but you can’t tell anybody what I’m about to tell you.”

“Yeah, right. As if I would.”

“Well, I was on my way here, but my Oyster was tapped out-” She opened her mouth to protest, but he cut her off. “No, just shut up and listen. The ticket machine wouldn’t cooperate, and I couldn’t get change, right? So, I decided to walk. Well, I’m walking along and decided to cut through this alley. All of a sudden there’s this terrific storm-wind, hail, lightning, the whole works. And this is where it gets weird, but you gotta trust me on this-I’m telling the truth, I swear-and I met my great-grandfather.”

“Your what?” Her voice climbed to another register.

“Great-grandfather. I met him-”

“I didn’t know you had a great-grandfather.”

“Neither did I. Turns out his name is Cosimo, too, and he took me to this old-fashioned pub at a place on the coast called Sefton-on-Sea and he-”

“How’d you get there?” Wilhelmina demanded.

“We walked,” he hedged.

“All the way from London?”

“Well, yeah. Sort of.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Define sort of.”

He had hoped to avoid that part of the experience, fearing, and rightly so, that he would not be believed. “Thing is,” he confessed, “I’m not exactly sure what happened.”

Her eyes narrowed farther.

“Whatever it was, it happened when we were in the alley-it has to do with ley lines and stuff. See, we started walking, and when we got to the end of the alley we were someplace else.”

“Someplace else?” Mina’s eyes became slits of suspicion. “Boy, you just don’t give up, do you?”

“Cornwall, I think,” said Kit. “Or, Devon.” He saw her face harden in disbelief. “Possibly Pembrokeshire. Anyway, that’s where we found this little old-fashioned fishing village and this pub.”

Mina was shaking her head.

“You don’t believe me.”

“Oh, I believe you,” she replied sweetly. “Liar! Why should I believe this load of old rubbish? Give me one good reason.” She glared defiantly. “Liar!”

Her disbelief angered him and he was seized by a powerful compulsion to make her understand. In that instant, he realised he simply could not carry the weight of the experience on his own. Nothing else mattered but that she should know he was telling the truth-as if getting another human being to acknowledge what had happened to him would make it more believable to himself.

Gripped by this conviction, he leapt to his feet. “I’ll do better than that,” he declared. “I’ll show you.”

“Yeah, right.” She yawned. “Pull the other one-it’s got bells on.”

“No, really. I’ll show you.” He crossed the room and lifted her green blazer from the coat stand. “Here, take this. It’s likely to be raining when we get there.”

“Might as well. The day is shot anyway.” She yawned again, rose lethargically, and padded after him. “Where are we going again?”

“You’ll see.”

A quick tube journey followed, and soon the two were marching along Grafton Street in search of Stane Way. “It’s just along here,” Kit assured her.

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Mina said. “As if I didn’t have better things to do.”

“You don’t, honest,” he said, her reluctance forcing him to become a cheerleader for the expedition. “This’ll be fun, I promise.”

“Quit saying that-because so far it isn’t.”

“C’mon, Mina,” he cajoled. “Just think-you’ll get to see some fetching landscape, have a nice cream tea somewhere, and a walk in the fresh sea air. You’ll like it. It’ll be fun.”

By way of reply she scowled and gave him a smack on the arm.

“Ow! What was that for?”

“I warned you,” she said, shoving her hands deep into the pockets of her jacket. “Anyway, I don’t want to go to the seaside, thanks all the same.”

“You’ve got to see this.”

“So is he going to be there?”

“Who?”

“The bloody pope!”

“You mean my great-grandfather?”

“Who else?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Then again, maybe.” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“If I said I believed you,” Mina ventured, “would we have to go through with this?”

“You make it sound like an ordeal,” he countered. “This’ll be”-he saw her eyes glint dangerously, and abruptly changed tack-“an education.”

They walked on. A few hundred yards later, Kit spied the street sign for Stane Way. “Look! This is where it happened-or hereabouts.” He stepped to the mouth of the alley and started down the long, shadowed street. “This way, and don’t worry-it’s not as bad as it looks.”

They walked a short way, the shadows deepening around them.

“My, this is a lovely spot.” Mina stepped over a plastic carrier bag spilling sandwich boxes and crisp packets onto the pavement. “Why haven’t you brought me here before?”

“Just keep walking.”

“You’re gonna make this up to me, boy,” Mina warned. “And it’s gonna take more than a cup of tea and a microwaved scone.”

Kit was striding down the middle of the alleyway with big, exaggerated steps. She followed, imitating his walk-more from boredom than conviction. “I don’t know if it will work,” he called back to her. “I was closer to the other end when it happened.”

“When what happened, exactly?”

“This fierce little storm boiled up out of nowhere, and-”

“What?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard above the sound of the wind just then gusting down the alleyway.

“I said,” he shouted back, “a storm came along-”

“Like this one, you mean?” she hollered, shouting at the top of her lungs.

He stopped. The storm! Black clouds roiled above them, a wild wind screamed through the gap between the buildings, and it started to rain. “This way!” he yelled. “Do you feel it?”

“What?” cried Wilhelmina, trying to hear and be heard above the uncanny shriek of the gale.

“Follow me!” he shouted. “Stay close! You don’t want to get lost.”

He started running to get out of the rain and felt the ground give beneath him in a fluid, shifty way-like jogging on the floor of a bouncy castle. In the same instant, his vision blurred and he felt himself falling: no great distance, as it turned out, merely the space between a stair tread and the floor.

Dashing water from his eyes with the heels of his hands, he shouted. “Over here!”

Receiving no reply, he turned to the alley behind him. Wilhelmina was nowhere to be seen.