Beneath the Skin Read Online Free

need for a place I could call home, I’d used up all the money my father had left me when he died. It had never felt like home, though, and now, when property prices were soaring, I was stuck with it. In this kind of weather, I could clean the windows every day and still they’d be smeared with greasy dirt by the evening.
    “I’ll make us some tea.”
    “I’ve got no milk.”
    “Beer in the fridge?” Fred asked hopefully.
    “No.”
    “What have you got?”
    “Cereal, I think.”
    “What’s the use of cereal without milk.”
    It was a statement of fact rather than a question I was supposed to answer. He was pulling on trousers in a businesslike kind of way that I recognized. He was about to give me a peck on the cheek and leave. Purpose of visit over.
    “It’s all right as a snack,” I said vaguely. “Like crisps.”
    I was thinking about the woman who had been mugged; the way her body flew through the air like a broken doll hurled out of the window.
    “Tomorrow,” he said.
    “Yeah.”
    “With the guys.”
    “But of course.”
    I sat up in bed and contemplated the marking I had to do.
    “Sleep well. Here, there’s some post you’ve not opened.”
    The first was a bill, which I looked at, then put on the pile on the table with the other bills. The other was a letter written in large, looping script.
Dear Ms. Haratounian, from your name I gather you are not English, though you look it from the photographs I have seen. I am not a racist, of course, and I count among my friends many people like yourself, but. . .
    I put the letter on the table and rubbed my temples. Fuck. A mad person. All I needed.
     
THREE
     
    I was woken by the doorbell. I thought at first it must be some sort of joke or a wino who had mistaken the street door for the entrance to a hostel. I opened the curtains slightly in the front room and pushed my face against the glass, trying to see who it was, but the angle was wrong. I looked at my watch. Just after seven. I couldn’t think of anyone who could possibly be calling at this time. I wasn’t wearing anything so I pulled on a bright yellow plastic raincoat before going downstairs.
    I opened the door just a fraction. The street door of the building opens directly onto Holloway Road, and I didn’t want to stop the traffic with my appearance just after I’ve woken up. It was the postman and my heart sank. When the postman wants to hand his mail to you personally, this is not generally good news. He usually wants you to sign for something in order to prove that you have received a horrible bill printed in red threatening to cut off your phone.
    But he looked happy enough. Behind him I could see the beginnings of a day that was still cool but was going to be very hot indeed. I’d never seen this particular postman before, so I don’t know if it was a new thing, but he was wearing rather fetching blue serge shorts and a crisp light blue short-sleeved shirt. They were obviously official summer issue, but they looked jaunty. He wasn’t exactly young, but there was a
Baywatch
-postman air to him. So I stood on the doorstep looking at him with interest, and he looked back at me with some curiosity as well. I realized that my raincoat was on the skimpy side and not joined very well in the middle. I pulled it tightly together, which probably made things worse. This was starting to feel like a scene from one of those sleazy British comic sex films from the early seventies that you sometimes see on TV on Friday nights after you’ve got back from the pub. Porn for sad bastards.
    “Flat C?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    “There’s mail for you,” he said. “It wouldn’t go through the box.”
    And there was. Lots and lots of different envelopes arranged in piles held together with elastic. Was this a joke? It took some complicated maneuvering to receive these bundles with one arm while holding my coat closed with the other.
    “Happy birthday, is it?” he said with a wink.
    “No,” I