I tried to use the cold water and my thumb at the same time to pull the ridge of skin up. My thumbnail just slid deeper into my thigh.

  The blood cleared and I could see the raw flesh, all pink and meatlike underneath the parts of me that I had dug away.

  That night I dreamed the house was full of people. A party downstairs, going out into the garden. Empty and half-empty bottles of yellow and pink wine. Ashtrays all over, full of smoke and pale gray ash.

  People I recognized and people I didn’t. My brother and his wife, out back, much younger, holding champagne flutes, laughing, bleeding into and out of each other. The deer-man stood at the back of the garden with the rusty shears. Children running, maybe my nephew. I could not see their faces.

  The boy and girl from the video. The same age, laughing together. Their faces changing, their size changing. Growing older, then younger. Snippets of conversation like I was too drunk. I saw the big and thin Spanish or South American man far away. I looked around for my mother but could not see her anywhere. All the plants in the garden growing bigger, visibly, fractally, in spirals, beginning to obscure the light that came into the house. The house itself flaking and canted and sinking into something.

  Standing very close to the deer-man, watching over his shoulder as he used the rusty shears to endlessly prune the growing dream plants.

  My girlfriend inside, hair short like the new author photo that I did not recognize. Beautiful and leaned way back on the breakfast bar. Tilting her head backward, laughing, not seeing me. Drink in hand. I had no drink. My hands were empty. I wanted to talk to her. To say all the things I wanted to say. But I couldn’t arrange them in my brain.

  A burning smell. My legs went in a different direction, away from the party, upstairs.

  My father there, on the landing, naked except for his bathrobe, floating, oscillating from four to ten feet away from me, and oscillating in size, too. I wanted to say something. But my mouth would still not work. So he just floated there, naked except for his bathrobe, blood pooling between his legs, underneath his floating and naked blue-veined feet.

  Again, the smell of burning.

  I woke up in the bath.

  There was dry blood stained down my thighs and on the white porcelain. There were tissues in the bath too, blood-crusted. I’d put a towel under my head at some point as a pillow.

  My skin felt so cold. So did my insides. There was an empty wine bottle beside me.

  The bleeding had stopped.

  I stood but fell slightly. I stood again.

  My leg really hurt. It was all stiff, too. My dick hung short above it, so retracted it was almost at a right angle from my body. My balls were all up in me. There was dried blood in my pubic hair.

  I put my hand on the sink to steady myself. Then I stepped out of the bathtub with my bad leg.

  I felt out of breath. I could feel my heart pushing my chest.

  I stood still for a bit until the room stopped moving.

  I took the showerhead that had been lying between my legs and turned it on hot and blasted the bathtub. The dry blood lifted slowly from the porcelain and the water turned pink. Once it was mainly clean I stepped back into the bath and cleaned the hole in my leg. It stung and began to bleed again. But after a little while it stopped.

  I knew I should eat but I wasn’t hungry. So I went upstairs to check on the plants. I wanted to make sure they were doing okay.

  I wanted to check the door to the second attic was closed, too.

  I looked around to see if it felt like anyone was watching me. But I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t feel anything, either.

  The second attic door was closed properly, as I’d left it.

  But underneath the door, coming from the second attic into the first, I saw new mold, black, pooling.

  My father’s bathrobe was still hung there on the back of the bedroom door.

  The plants looked like teenagers. They were larger and just fine.

  I felt proud of them just then.

  Downstairs, I smoked and waited for my mother’s care home to open.

  I remembered something else from the night before. I was in a windowless basement restaurant, on a date with a girl who wasn’t my girlfriend.

  I wanted to impress the girl. I wanted to seem dangerous. So I told her I was a werewolf.

  “Isn’t it a full moon tonight?” she said.

  I panicked. I thought: style it out, style it out.

  “Yeah,” I said, “and I have to go do werewolf stuff now.”

  I left the restaurant without paying.

  Then the narrative of the dream changed into something I couldn’t remember.

  At the care home I sat in a blue plastic stackable chair. My mother sat in her usual disgusting chair.

  “You’re limping,” my mother told me.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I saw a deer from the window yesterday,” she said. She pointed out of the window at the extremely busy road. “How are you? Are you eating? It’s so lovely to see you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Was there really a deer there? That’s a road. A busy road.”

  “Your face looks bad, too,” she said. “It’s cut.”

  “I got in a fight. With the estate agent.”

  “You’re selling the house,” she said. “You should sell the house. The house must be worth a lot of money now. We paid off the whole mortgage.”

  “Your mother says we shouldn’t sell it,” I said. “She said estate agents are parasites. And I don’t want to clear it out.”

  “Your grandmother is a Russian communist,” my mother said. “A spy.”

  “She’s from London,” I said, “she’s Scottish.”

  “A cunning backstory,” my mother said, grinning. Then she looked out of the window at the road.

  “Mum,” I said, too loud.

  “Or maybe it wasn’t yesterday,” she said.

  “I was watching an old video,” I said. “A home video.”

  “What?” my mother said.

  “I found it in the attic. I should have taken pictures, to show you. You’re in the video.”

  “I remember we had a video camera,” my mother said. “Your brother loved it.”

  “He’s in it. You’re in it, too. So’s Dad.”

  My mother looked down at her hands.

  “But there’s another family there, too,” I said. “These children. And this man. I think his name is Julius.” I was talking too fast.

  “What?” my mother said.

  “There’s a car in it, too,” I said. I tried to slow down without losing her attention. “It’s the same car as in your manuscript, Mum. The one I told you about.”

  “Your manuscript?” my mother said.

  “Your manuscript, Mum. The one I told you about. I found it in your study. Upstairs.”

  “There is no upstairs here. There’s no study. This is a care home.”

  “At the house,” I said, “not here.”

  “You’re selling the house,” my mother said.

  “Mum,” I said. She grinned.

  “No upstairs here,” she said. “Stairs and the elderly are mortal enemies.”

  “It’s not funny. It is important.”

  “Gabriel,” she said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t remember a manuscript. Some days I think I don’t even remember the day before.”

  She put her hand out and into mine. And then on top of it.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I’m sure everything’s all right,” my mother said. “Or if it isn’t right now, I’m sure it will be in the morning.”

  “Okay, Mum,” I said, “please tell me if you remember anything about it.”

  “It’s a mystery,” she said, in a television magician voice, smiling at me.

  “Right,” I said.

  “I don’t know anything about these either,” said my brother, on the phone. I had sent him photos of the video. “I don’t know who those people are.”

  “It’s weird, right? The car is in Mum’s manuscript. And here in real life.”

  “It’s not weird. It’s just a video.”

  “She said she didn’t know anything about it,” I said.

  “Your parents had lives before you were born.”

  “It’s after. I think she’s lying.”

  “She is a very sick woman. She is demented. She is not lying to you.”

  “I think she’s lying,” I said, again.

  “Please,” my brother said. “Please just clear out the fucking house. It is putting stuff in boxes. It is not that hard.”

  “My skin is all peeling off. That’s in the manuscript, as well. In the second version. I’m frightened.”

  “Are you using the cream they gave you?” he said.

  “No,” I said, “I want a second opinion.”

  “You’re ugly, too,” my brother said. “How’s that?”

  But later my phone rang again. I heard my mother’s voice say hello.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hey, Mum,” I said.

  “I do remember the book,” she said. “The book you were talking about today. I wanted to call before it goes again.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “It’s like you said,” she said, “it’s a book about a mother who dies. And she has a husband and two children. And she dies in the car of another man.”

  “That’s how I read it the first time,” I said. “Then it changed.”

  “The great sadness of it was going to be that the husband never knew why the mother character was in the car. He didn’t know if his wife was being faithful when she died. But the reader knew she was. She had just accepted a lift. And the husband has to build a new life never knowing.”

  “Right,” I said, “but there’s another book there. When I read it again it had changed. She wasn’t married to Guy, the husband. She was married to Julius, the man who gave her the lift. The children had a different father.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” my mother said, “but maybe I remembered wrong.”

  “How does it end? Did you write the end?” I said.

  “Maybe,” my mother said, “I’m sorry. I don’t remember. Maybe it’s there. You should check.”

  “I will,” I said. I took a drink from the bottle of wine I was holding. “Can you call me if you remember anything else?”

  “I’ll try,” my mother said.

  “Thanks, Mum,” I said. “Love you.”

  “How are you? Are you eating?”

  “I am eating,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”

  After we got off the phone I went upstairs to my mother’s study. I wanted to read more of the manuscript.

  The room was dark but the curtains were open.

  In the dark I was sure I saw movement at the window. I heard the sound of rusted metal on metal. Like feet on a ladder.

  I went over to the curtains and closed them.

  I looked at the black mold on the wall. It seemed bigger still. But maybe that was because it was dark. In it I sort of saw the pattern of a figure. A broken neck. Two bulbous eyes staring out at me, upside down.

  I sat down at the desk and turned on the lamp. Transparent blue light filled the room. I looked at the mold. The figure was gone. But the mold seemed bigger, worse.

  I turned to my mother’s desk and started reading where I’d left off last.

  But the pages were blank.

  I kept turning them. And then I found something.

  Chapter Five

  When Harry woke, the clock said three forty-three in the morning. He shifted slightly on the mattress and felt that around him, again, the sheets were soaked with his own sweat gone cold. The draft from the roof had gotten worse. It came as a strong light wind, full of dark outside. He swung his legs off the bed and felt rainwater on the cold floor under the new skin of his bare feet.

  He dressed in all his yesterday clothes and looked down at his skinned hands. He wasn’t so old but he felt it and his hands had seen so many things. Deep lines in them. He turned them over in themselves, looked at his palms. His heart line, intuition line, line of Mars. He took a drink from the bottle on the floor and felt it warm his throat, waited to see if the dream would leave him.

  But it wouldn’t. A train he was on, hurtling at hundreds of miles an hour toward the sea. Passing another train going in the same direction at almost the same speed. For a moment, both of them still, and through the windows seeing the passengers on the other train as if they were together and not moving at all. Catching the eye through the glass and the glass of another passenger, a much younger man, himself skinned like he was.

  Then accelerating away. And getting off the train and swimming, across the sea, which he somehow knew was the Channel. To an island in it.

  And how cold the petrol was on his new and old skin and the smell of it. And the sharpness of the metal of the cigarette lighter. It struggling to spark in the air that was full of water. And the black branches of the dying, gray tree above him against the night sky.

  And then it sparking and how good it felt, how warm, the warmth of it. What was the word that the university doctor kept using? Exfoliate. A total exfoliation. And knowing that soon he would live in tree roots.

  He was so tired. Of waking up in the cold sweat. Of finding that there was more of himself underneath him.

  Leaving the house for the train station, Harry took a last look at his home. It was so leaning and broken. The walls all peeling away like himself, the broken glass, the missing roof parts. The cling-filmed windows. If they’d fixed it, maybe—

  The train ticket took almost the last of his money. He huddled himself on a bench in the outside, waiting for the first train of the morning that would carry him to his sea, his island.

  The narrative jumped ahead, skipping chapters. Blank pages between them. I kept reading.

  Chapter Eight

  Guy took a long time to answer the door. Rebecca realized, standing there, waiting, that she was sweating slightly. It went cold quickly in the conditioned air. She was nervous. She’d never been to this part of the campus before.

  She belonged in Humanities, really. It was cozier, more casual, full of shuffling women in men’s cardigans and young female students quietly laughing and talking. Here, in the Sciences, staff and students walked purposefully and metallic equipment made strange and industrial noise.

  Guy’s skin was worse than when Rebecca had seen him last, at the bus stop. A couple of the sores on his face were actively leaking pus. He was sweating, too. It mixed with the pus and made his face shine horribly. He smiled broadly.

  “Rebecca,” he said, “a welcome surprise.”

  “Hello, Guy.”

  “Come in, come in. Sit down,” he said. He was blocking the doorway. Rebecca stepped past him and sat down primly in the chair next to his desk.

  Guy’s office was disgusting. The wastepaper bin was full of sandwich containers from the canteen and fast-food packaging. The sandwich containers said things like “Egg Salad” and “Tuna Melt.” There were four or five half-drunk cups of cold, milky tea lingering, along with energy-drink cans and cardboard soda cups. There was popcorn everywhere for some reason, littered between used and crumpled tissues and napkins. Open next to the crusted computer keyboard was a vat of slightly discolored E45 moisturizing cream. Rebecca noticed loose hairs half-submerged in it.

  Guy sat down in his desk chair. It sagged underneath him noticeably.

  “What can I help you with, Rebecca?” He tried to hold eye contact with her. Rebecca looked up and away.

  “You mentioned something about a patient of yours. Or someone you’re studying. A subject.”

  “Yes.”

  “You said all their skin was peeling off. Like a reptile.”

  “Yes,” Guy said.

  “Have you worked out what’s causing it yet?”

  “Well,” Guy said, “no, not really. We have some working theories. But it’s essentially a mystery. At this time.”

  “Is it harmful? Do you think they’re in danger?”

  “I—why are you so interested? You’re shaking,” Guy said. Rebecca looked down at her hands. She moved them into her lap.

  “It’s Felix,” she said. She hadn’t wanted to tell him. But she didn’t seem to have another choice.

  “Your son,” Guy said.

  “It started a few weeks ago. At first I thought it was just bad eczema. So I took him to a doctor. They gave him some hydrocortisone. But it hasn’t stopped.”

  “No,” Guy said.

  “So I took Felix to a specialist. But they said the same thing: just childhood eczema. But his skin keeps coming off. In huge sheets.”

  “And underneath?”

  “It’s just the same. Just new skin. Just fresh skin.”

  “I see,” Guy said.

  “And I’m worried about him. He doesn’t seem to realize that it’s not normal. But he’s acting strangely. He’s quiet and withdrawn. He seems confused a lot of the time. More than Joanna. His sister. More than a normal child.”

  “I can understand why it would be confusing.” Guy said, “Is he sleeping?”

  “What? Not properly. He comes to us some nights. I don’t know what to do.”

  “He’s dreaming?”

  “I think so. Why?”

  “No reason,” Guy said. “I can see why it would be confusing for him.”

  “So,” Rebecca said, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know who else to talk to. I hoped maybe you knew something.”

 

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