Under My Skin. Zoe Markham
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I try to speak, but my throat’s too tight, and she grabs my arm and drags me up the stairs behind her before I can get a word out.
‘Quickly Chloe,’ she urges, pulling me into my room and grabbing clothes from my drawers. ‘We need to go. Now. Hurry.’
She leaves me piling clothes into a bag with no idea why. I hear Dad pounding up the stairs, and there’s more shouting, and crying. I don’t know how much I’m supposed to take; I don’t know where we’re going, or for how long. So I keep going until the bag is full, then I sit on the bed, and wait. Wait for the shouting to stop, wait for the footsteps to thunder back down the stairs, wait for the front door to slam, and for that final silence to descend. This is my last chance to stop it all, and there’s not a thing I can do.
I follow Mum down the stairs, dragging the heavy bag behind me, and then we’re on the driveway in the rain, getting into her car. Mum’s all raw, burning emotion, and I’m a ghost at her side. I let her shout, I let her tell me what an immoral, lying, evil monster my dad is. How medical research and military research are worlds apart, and how everything he’s ever told us is a lie. How what he was doing to those soldiers was unthinkable, unforgivable. And I stand there, not understanding, terrified, and try to defend him.
Then Mum’s driving too fast and the rain is getting heavier. The fear inside me is building. It won’t be long now. I still babble madly on, like it could make a difference. Maybe Dad was saving lives, in a way. He was saving others from having to give their lives in the first place. Surely that was a good thing? It only makes her angrier, and the angrier she gets, the harder she squeezes the accelerator.
‘You’re like him,’ she says, disgusted. ‘My god, Chloe, you’re just like him.’ She flicks a frantic look in the rear view mirror, and whimpers. ‘It’s too late.’ She doesn’t take her eyes off the mirror, as if they’re right behind us, these undead soldiers Dad apparently has at his disposal, come to chase us down, bring us back. “The project was classified for a reason.”; “Do you have any idea what they’ll do?” Tears stream down my face, mirroring the rain that floods the windscreen faster than the wipers can clear it. And faster we fly through the narrow streets, darkness pressing in all around us, the lights blurring in the rain-obscured glass. It’s coming. I scream and shout myself hoarse but I know it can’t make any difference. Mum makes the turn that’s going to kill us. I can’t tear my eyes from the speedometer; I want to look at Mum, tell her I love her, tell her I’m sorry, but all I can see is the glowing ‘70’ on the display. I hear the brakes lock up, feel the back end of the car start to slide. Steel twists and splinters around me. My seatbelt crushes three of my ribs, and the impacted passenger door breaks my left shoulder and hip. A slice of shattered windshield tears into my face, but I don’t feel it, I don’t feel any of it. There’s no pain. There’s just the warm blood on my face, and the cold rain around me. And the car spins… flips… flies… landing heavily on its roof. I hang upside down from my seatbelt and two more of my ribs crack. My leg smashed against the footwell as we flew through the air, and is broken in two places. And now it’s quiet, and still. And I look over to see Mum’s lifeless eyes staring straight ahead, and my world ends.
I’m screaming in the dark, my body ice cold and tangled up in something, and I don’t know where I am. I scream harder, and fall to the floor, my limbs trapped and useless. Brightness explodes on my face, and I feel arms around me and panic even more. Until I hear his voice.
‘It’s ok, Chloe. It’s over. It’s ok, you’re ok.’ Over and over he says it, and finally I understand that it’s true. Except it’s not, because it’ll never be over. And I keep on having to relive it like this. And I don’t know if I can do it any more.
‘Chlo, you’re all caught up in the blanket, here, hold still.’ Dad lifts me awkwardly, trying to untangle the twisted fabric from my legs, and I let him. He rests me back on the sofa, putting a thick cushion behind my head, and fussing over me all the while. ‘Christ, you’re like ice,’ he says, as he lifts my feet and swings them round. ‘Why were you sleeping down here? Why did you let the fire go out?’
I can’t form an answer, not yet. All I can see are Mum’s dead eyes. I don’t even feel the cold that’s making me shake so hard I could be having a fit.
‘Don’t move,’ he says, pulling the blanket back up over me and running for the stairs. As if I even could.
You’re just like him.
He runs back down with the thick double duvet from his bed, and piles it onto me. Then he stands beside the sofa with his head in his hands.
‘I shouldn’t have left you. I thought… Christ. I thought things were getting better. I thought this was all going to stop.’
I close my eyes and turn my head towards the back of the sofa.
How could he think it would ever stop?
*
I must have drifted off to sleep again, although it can’t have been for very long. When I wake the second time I’m warm, and I turn my head to see a bright fire dancing in the grate. The duvet’s so thickly folded down on top of me that I have to fight hard to get out from underneath it.
‘Dad?’ I call, disorientated and not understanding how I could have gone back to sleep after that.
He comes in, calmer now, although still deathly pale. He’s drying his hands on a towel, and the smell of warm spices follows him into the room.
‘I’m sorry Chlo,’ he says in a voice heavy with resignation. ‘I’ll call the hospital in the morning. I shouldn’t be working full-time, leaving you like this every day. I thought by now things would… I don’t know what I thought.’ He sighs. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘No, Dad, you don’t understand.’ My head’s still spinning but the warmth and the brief sleep seem to have accelerated my return from the nightmare, and I’m almost coherent. ‘I’m fine,’ I lie, ‘I just… I was using the bike and I got tired… I didn’t notice the fire, and I must’ve fallen asleep because of the exercise, and… it was just… I’m fine.’ It’s a weak finish, but it’s all I have.
‘Was it the usual?’ he asks.
I nod. He doesn’t know about my strange new ringmaster, but he knows everything else.
‘It will stop, Chlo, I promise you it will. It just takes time. It’s your brain’s way of dealing with things, and with the way your brain’s been… rewired… it’s only natural…’
There’s nothing natural about it, we both know that, but neither of us say it.
My eyes hurt from having fallen asleep with my contacts in, and the tears have made them doubly painful. With a bit of help, I get up from the sofa and trudge upstairs to take them out. Then I stand under a scalding hot shower until my skin starts to burn. Showers aren’t good for me, they dry my skin out even more – but I dry and dress without putting any of my lotions on. Because I’m finding it harder and harder to care. If Dad’s thinking of quitting, what’s the point in me even bothering?
He calls me down to eat; food’s the last thing on my mind but I’ve got no choice but to go because my stomach is doing its usual dance of desperation. He still won’t let me try out some protein shakes. I’m sick of having to chew my way through mountains of meat and eggs all the time, but he’s always so busy. His hours are starting to stretch almost as thin as my sanity.
‘You can’t quit your job,’ I tell him as I sit down. I don’t know why I said it, because it’s the exact opposite of what I’m thinking: you have to quit your job, or I’m going to go insane here on my own.
He chews his food slowly, buying himself time before he replies. Which gives my mouth time to dig me in even further. ‘I just need to stay awake in the daytime, that’s all. I can do that. And I’ll