Under My Skin. Zoe Markham
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takes a long drink of his beer. ‘I thought…’ he trails off, struggling. ‘I thought maybe you’d turned a corner,’ he says, finally. ‘I don’t hear you cry in the night so much any more. I thought things were ok.’
Things will never be ok.
‘I have,’ I lie earnestly. ‘It’s just, maybe it was a small corner. Maybe this whole thing is about small corners. There are just so many of them.’ I’m getting dangerously close to the truth here, and I catch his look. It’s not a promising one; it’s challenging, defensive even.
‘You think you have corners?’ he says, eyebrows raised. ‘Chloe, do you have any idea what my days are like?’
‘Well not really, no, because I’m stuck here by myself all day every day, aren’t I? I don’t know anything about anything any more. I read books that are hundreds of years old, and I clean the house.’ My mouth genuinely has a mind of its own, but I’m a teenager. I’m supposed to be moody and confrontational. It’s expected.
He drains his beer, and sighs. ‘So what is it that you want? Do you want to go hang out in town for a while? Maybe have a few drinks and go dancing? Is that it?’
Well, I’ve never ‘gone dancing’ in my life, although probably this isn’t the time to mention it.
‘No, of course not, I –’
He’s angry now, and I don’t think the beer is helping. He sounds almost as petulant and childish as me when he interrupts.
‘No, come on, what is it that you want to do instead of lying around all day reading? Am I really making this so very hard for you?’
‘No, that’s not what I’m saying, if you’d just listen –’
‘I do nothing but listen, Chloe! You want to be able to taste more, you don’t want to have to eat so much food all the time, you’re tired of the bad dreams, you’re always cold. I listen. But I’m not your personal wish-granter. I’m kind of occupied just now with trying to keep you breathing.’
He bangs his fist down hard on the table at the last word, and I flinch. I haven’t seen him angry like this since the night it happened, and with the nightmare fresh in my mind it’s too much. Tears sting the back of my already sore eyes and I stare fixedly down at my plate. Whatever I say is going to piss him off now; it’s like we’ve been slowly simmering away inside this house-shaped pressure cooker, and now it’s starting to whistle and shake and someone needs to let all the steam out or it’s going to blow us both clean away.
‘I’m lonely, Dad,’ I confess, embarrassed and desperate all at once. ‘I was never exactly Little Miss Popular or anything, I know, but I had friends, I had people I could talk to –’
‘You’ve got me!’ he shouts, and I’m scared. I push my chair back from the table and I don’t know whether to run upstairs, or outside, or what. So I just sit there, staring at my feet, waiting for this to end.
‘All of this,’ he waves a hand at the house in general, ‘it’s all for you, Chlo. So you can be comfortable. So your recovery can be as pleasant as I can possibly make it. To make up for the way things were… in the beginning. And in the meantime, I spend every waking moment trying to fix you – trying so damn hard to fix you – and now I’m not good enough to even talk to?’
He doesn’t normally drink, and I wonder if it’s the beer that’s making him like this. I don’t even know where he got it from, I never see any in the fridge. What if he has a stash of it down in the basement? What if he drinks more and more, gets angrier and angrier…
My head’s telling me to shut up and back off, but my mouth is off again before I can stop it.
‘What am I even supposed to talk to you about? There’s… nothing. I have no life!’
He stands up and kicks his chair back in one fast, aggressive move, and crosses to the sink, turning his back to me as he stares out of the window. I see his knuckles tightening and whitening against the sideboard.
‘You have a life, Chloe,’ he says coldly, quietly, and it’s scarier than when he shouts. ‘Don’t ever call it “nothing”. Not after what it cost.’
Mum was terrified of him that night, and I was scared for her, but not scared of Dad as such. It’s my turn now though. I want to be sick. I want to run. He’s angry at me, and he’s frightening me; my mouth opens, and I know I’m only going to make it worse, but I do it anyway.
‘I can’t stay like this… be like this. It’s too much. You have no idea what it’s like, Dad. You can’t keep me locked up forever. It doesn’t make it all just go away. It just traps it all in with me.’
He doesn’t say anything for so long that I start to wonder if I actually said it out loud after all. And then finally he says, ‘If I let you out, what do you think will happen?’
‘I don’t know,’ I fire back automatically. ‘You tell me.’
This is something we’ve skirted around so many times. Maybe we can finally get it all out in the open now. Maybe this is the way to put the nightmares to bed. I suppose there’s only one way to find out.
Dad sighs, and his shoulders drop. It’s as if all the tension goes out of him at once, and I’m not sure if he’s stalling, or if the discussion is over before it’s even started. He fusses around the sink for a bit, rinsing a couple of mugs, and taking deep breaths, and then he finally comes and sits back down. I scoot my chair back in to the table. We’re right back where we started, but everything has changed.
‘They’d kill me,’ he says, simply.
I look up and see that he’s deadly serious. I always thought, I don’t know, I mean, they’re the government. You don’t think about them killing anyone. Not here, I mean, this is good ol’ Blighty. Maybe a fine, or a few months in prison for breach of contract or something. But killing?
‘But Dad, they’re…’
‘Yes, I know. They’re the Good Guys. We’re all on the same side. Only they’re not, Chloe. Your mum was right about that. There’s absolutely nothing good about them.’
Well, clearly I need to think more carefully about whether I actually want to know the answer before I ask a question. Bloody hell.
‘And that’s nothing,’ he goes on, ‘compared to what they’d do to you.’
Oh. Well, good, that helps.
He moves his chair closer to mine and puts a hand on my arm. I pull away from him.
‘I don’t want to make things worse for you,’ he says. ‘But when it comes to things like leaving the house, or talking to people, you need to know. You need to understand. Nowhere’s safe from them Chloe, not really, not yet. When it comes down to it, yes, this house is still a cage for you – but it won’t be forever, I promise. Right now though, you need to be invisible. You need to not exist. For both our sakes.’
I take a deep breath in, and nod slowly, giving him what he wants because I suddenly have a question to ask. A massive question.
My voice drops almost to a whisper. ‘Why did you do it?’
I don’t think I even really expect him to answer. But he does – without hesitation, like he’s been practicing… justifying it to himself in his head all this time.
‘Because if I hadn’t, someone else would have. Because I wanted to know how far the boundaries of science as we know it could be pushed. Because I could. There are a thousand reasons Chloe. Because I thought I could make a difference, a positive difference. Because it was an opportunity I’d never get again.’
He’s misunderstood me completely. I didn’t mean why did he work for them – although it is a good question, and I