The Skin Map Read online

  “Okay. Whatever,” said Kit. “But I fail to see what any of this has to do with me.”

  “Ah, yes, I was coming to that, young Cosimo.”

  “And that’s another thing,” protested the younger man. “You keep calling me Cosimo.”

  “Cosimo Christopher Livingstone—isn’t that your name?”

  “As it happens. But I prefer to go by Kit.”

  “Diminutive of Christopher. Of course.”

  “I don’t know about you, but where I went to school anybody walking around with a name like Cosimo was just asking to get his head dunked in the toilet.”

  “Pity.” The elder gentleman sniffed. “Sad, really. Names are very important.”

  “It’s a matter of taste, surely.”

  “Nothing of the sort,” replied the elder Cosimo. “People get named all sorts of things—that I will concede. Whimsy, ignorance, sudden inspiration—all play a part. But if anyone guessed how monumentally important it was, the process would be taken a lot more seriously. Did you know—there are tribes in the jungles of Borneo that refuse to name an infant until it is four years old? See, the child must develop enough to demonstrate the attributes it will carry into adulthood. The child is then named for those attributes. It’s a way of reinforcing desirable qualities and making sure they don’t disappear from the tribe.”

  “But . . . Cosimo?”

  “A fine name. Nothing wrong with it.” He gave his young relation a glance of stern appraisal. “Well, I suppose you have a point.”

  “I do?”

  “We cannot both be called Cosimo, after all. As we will be spending a lot more time together from now on, it would make it far too tedious and confusing.” He tapped the table with his fingertips. “Very well, then. Kit it shall be.”

  Although he was unable to say why, Kit felt a slight uplift of relief at having won the point. “You still haven’t said what any of this has to do with me.”

  “It’s a family matter, you might say. Here I am, your dear grandpapa”—the old man winked at Kit and flashed a disarming smile—“and I need your help with a project I’ve been working on for quite some time. You’re all the family I’ve got.”

  Kit considered this, but in spite of everything, he could still scarcely credit that he had any residual familial ties to the relic sitting across the table from him. His expression betrayed his disbelief. The elder man leaned forward and grasped Kit’s hands in his own.

  Speaking in a hoarse and persistent whisper, he said earnestly, “See here, young Cosimo—excuse me, Kit. It will be the adventure of a lifetime—of several lifetimes. In fact, it will change you forever.” The old gentleman paused, still holding the younger man’s hands and fixing him with a mad stare. “I need you, my boy, and I’ve gone to a very great deal of trouble to find you. What do you say?”

  “No.” Kit shook his head, as if waking from a dream. He pulled his hands free, then ran them through his hair, then clutched his tankard. “This is crazy. It’s some kind of hallucination—that’s what it is. Take me back. I want to go home.”

  Cosimo the Elder sighed. “All right,” he agreed, “if that is what you wish.”

  Kit sighed with relief. “You mean it?”

  “Of course, dear boy. I’ll take you back.”

  “Fine.”

  “Only, funny thing—I think you’ll find there is no going back. Still, if that’s what you want. Drink up, and let’s be off.”

  Kit pushed aside his tankard and stood. “I’m ready now.”

  The old man rose and, digging two coins out of his coat pocket, flipped them to the serving girl and promised to come back next time he was passing through. They walked out onto the dockyards and returned to the narrow alley between two warehouses. “Here you are. Just continue on the trackway and you’ll be home in a trice.”

  “Thanks.” Without a moment’s hesitation, Kit started down the alley.

  As he passed into the shadow between the two buildings, he heard the old gentleman call behind him, “If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

  Fat chance, thought Kit, hurrying into the shadows. He cast a glance over his shoulder, but already the alleyway entrance was dim and far away. A wind gusted through the alley and the shadows deepened; clouds gathered overhead and it began to rain—sharp, stinging little pellets—and above the sound of the swiftly gathering storm, the clear, distant voice of his great-grandfather shouting, “Farewell, my son. Until we meet again!”

  CHAPTER 3

  In Which Wilhelmina Takes Umbrage

  Kit 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 t
he 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 strange interlude, put it behind him; to never, ever breathe a word about it to another living soul. This resolve carried him all the way to his girlfriend’s tower-block apartment building and her front door.

  He knocked.

  There was a click and the door swung open. “You’re late!”

  “What? No kiss? No cheery greeting?”

  Wilhelmina frowned, but gave him a quick, dry peck on the cheek. “You’re still late.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that. I had this—” He stopped abruptly and retrenched. “I mean, my Oyster card was out, so I had to walk.”

  “And that took you eight hours?”

  “Huh?” he wondered. “No, really.”

  She moved away from the doorway, and he stepped in, kicking off his damp shoes. Her flat was ample by London standards, clean as a dental hygienist’s treatment room and nearly as cold. Wilhelmina was nothing if not tidy—perhaps owing to the fact that she had once been a dental hygienist, briefly, before chucking it in—too many people, too many mouths—to become a baker.

  She still filled people’s mouths, albeit in a different and, for her, much more satisfying way.

  As Kit watched her slouch back to her big blue sofa, which was her habitual nest, he was once more impressed with the idea that he simply had to get a better girlfriend at first opportunity. Dressed in black slacks and a black turtleneck with the horrible, ratty, hand-knitted purple scarf she wore everywhere, with her feet stuffed into flat-heeled, sheepskin boots, she was a dead ringer for the undertaker’s anemic daughter. Why, he wondered, did she have to look so austere? Whatever happened to sugar and spice? When enumerating the qualities he desired in a mate, vim and vigour, a zest for life, and a keenness of mind and intellect came quite near the top of the list. Wilhelmina’s idea of excitement was an extra scoop of sultanas in the cinnamon buns. Her intellect might have been keen enough—if anyone could ever catch her awake long enough to stimulate her into meaningful conversation.

  Her job at Giovanni’s Rustic Italian Bakery—“Artisan Breads Our Specialty”—meant that she had to rise every weekday morning in the wee hours to be at work by four o’clock to fire up the ovens and mix the first of the day’s dough. She finished work just after one in the afternoon, was completely exhausted by six in the evening, and usually sound asleep by eight—all of which meant one hardly ever saw her when she wasn’t yawning, stifling a yawn, or having just yawned. If sleep were an Olympic event, Wilhelmina Klug could have slept for Team GB.

  Her eyelids drooped, and her shoulders too. Like many tall girls, she had developed the round-shouldered, hunched-over posture that would in time grow into a widow’s hump; in Wilhelmina’s case, since marriage seemed so very remote, it would be a spinster’s hump.

  Everything about her was retiring. Even her chin receded.

  Her hair was mousy, both in colour and texture: very fine, shiny, and slightly bristly; and she wore it aggressively short. The better to keep it out of the pastry, she claimed, but the style was far from flattering. She had large, dark eyes that might in themselves have been pretty if not for the matching large dark circles beneath them.

  Wilhelmina was no catch. As one of Kit’s colleagues put it after spending a rare evening with the unfortunate couple: “For warmth and affection, mate, you’d be better off with a pair of ferrets and a hot-water bottle.”

  Kit could not disagree.

  But until something better came along, she was, for him, it. And, despite her many obvious flaws, and his continually renewed determination to do better in the dating game, he inexplicably turned up time and again outside her door. It was as if his feet had a mind of their own and weren’t over-fussy about whose table they parked themselves under.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Sorry? Am I missing something here?”

  “You’re late, dope. You promised to go help me pick out curtains for the bathroom this morning.”

  “So, here I am. Let’s go.”

  “Is this your lame idea of a joke?”

  “Sunday morning—John Lewis, yeah? So, let’s go and pick out some curtains.”

  “You’re winding me up, right? You know well and good they close on Sunday at five.”

  “Wait!” He stepped close. “What did you say?”

  She puffed out her cheeks with exasperation. “I’m too tired for this.”

  “No, really, what time is it?”

  “Four-bloody-thirty!” She gave him the full frontal glare of a woman on the edge and collapsed on the couch. “Idiot man.”

  “It’s never half-four.” Pulling his phone from his front pocket, he checked the display. He saw the number four followed by two threes, experienced a twinge of disbelief, and quickly shoved the phone back into his pocket.

  “Are you trying to pick a fight? You waste the whole day and this is the best excuse you can think up? ‘Duh, I forgot what time it is. . . .’ Pathetic.” She rolled her big brown eyes. “You can’t do better than that?”

  “No, really, Mina,” said Kit, suddenly desperate to explain. “Listen, something’s happened—”

  “Something’s happened, all right. I missed my chance to go shopping on the one day of the week I have off, and all because of you. Where were you anyway—at the pub? I tried to call you, but your phone is off.”

  “We’ll go next week,” he offered.

  “No thanks. I’ll do it myself—as usual.”

  “No, Mina, listen—I’m trying to tell you the truth.” Even as he spoke he could feel his former resolve evaporating in the heat of her righteous indignation. He slid onto the couch beside her. “Something’s happened. I didn’t believe it myself—I’m still not sure I believe it yet—but I can explain. Really.”

  “This should be good,” she snipped. Crossing her arms across her sunken chest, she thrust out her chin, daring him. “Go on, then.”

  “Okay,” he said, his vow to say nothing about his hallucination effectively dwarfed by the need to make her believe, “but you can’t tell anybody what I’m about to tell you.”

  “Yeah, right. As if I would.”

  “Well, I was on my way here, but my Oyster was tapped out—” She opened her mouth to protest, but he cut her off. “No, just shut up and listen. The ticket machine wouldn’t cooperate, and I couldn’t get change, right? So, I decided to walk. Well, I’m walking along and decided to cut through this alley. All of a sudden there’s this terrific storm—wind, hail, lightning, the whole works. And this is where it gets weird, but you gotta trust me on this—I’m telling the truth, I swear—and I met my great-grandfather.”

  “Your what?” Her voice climbed to another register.

  “Great-grandfather. I met him—”

  “I didn’t know you had a great-grandfather.”

  “Neither did I. Turns out his name is Cosimo, too, and he took me to this old-fashioned pub at a place on the coast called Sefton-on-Sea and he—”

  “How’d you get there?” Wilhelmina demanded.

  “We walked,” he hedged.

  “All the way from London?”

  “Well, yeah. Sort of.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Define sort of.”

  He had hoped to avoid that part of the experience, fearing, and rightly so, that he would not be believed. “Thing is,” he confessed, “I’m not exactly sure what happened.”

  Her eyes narrowed farther.

  “Whatever it was, it happened when we were in the alley—it has to do with ley lines and stuff. See, we started walking, and when we got to the end of the alley we were someplace else.”

  “Someplace else?” Mina’s eyes became slits of suspicion. “Boy, you just don’t give up, do you?”

  “Cornwall, I think,” said Kit. “Or, Devon.” He
saw her face harden in disbelief. “Possibly Pembrokeshire. Anyway, that’s where we found this little old-fashioned fishing village and this pub.”

  Mina was shaking her head.

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “Oh, I believe you,” she replied sweetly. “Liar! Why should I believe this load of old rubbish? Give me one good reason.” She glared defiantly. “Liar!”

  Her disbelief angered him and he was seized by a powerful compulsion to make her understand. In that instant, he realised he simply could not carry the weight of the experience on his own. Nothing else mattered but that she should know he was telling the truth—as if getting another human being to acknowledge what had happened to him would make it more believable to himself.

  Gripped by this conviction, he leapt to his feet. “I’ll do better than that,” he declared. “I’ll show you.”

  “Yeah, right.” She yawned. “Pull the other one—it’s got bells on.”

  “No, really. I’ll show you.” He crossed the room and lifted her green blazer from the coat stand. “Here, take this. It’s likely to be raining when we get there.”

  “Might as well. The day is shot anyway.” She yawned again, rose lethargically, and padded after him. “Where are we going again?”

  “You’ll see.”

  A quick tube journey followed, and soon the two were marching along Grafton Street in search of Stane Way. “It’s just along here,” Kit assured her.

  “I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Mina said. “As if I didn’t have better things to do.”

  “You don’t, honest,” he said, her reluctance forcing him to become a cheerleader for the expedition. “This’ll be fun, I promise.”

  “Quit saying that—because so far it isn’t.”