The Skin Map Read Online Free Page B

Wilhelmina Takes Umbrage
    K it 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