Under My Skin

After the cream, it’s time for my all-important injection – the one thing keeping my body under the illusion that all is well – before a variety of tablets get chased down by my bedtime cuppa. I hate injecting. I mean, I get that no one would enjoy it, but I really, really hate it. My hand shakes so badly when I push the needle in. I make a right mess of it. It almost doesn’t hurt when Dad does it, but I know I have to get used to it, especially with him starting work tomorrow; tonight though, I wimp out at the last minute. I clamber into a clean pair of PJ bottoms, pull on two pairs of thick socks and a fresh hoodie, scoop up my portable medkit – which is basically an enormous, glorified makeup bag filled with all the twisted things I need to keep myself alive and kicking – and head downstairs to find him.

The kitchen’s sparkling, and the living room’s empty. I really don’t want to go down any further; I’ve had enough of basements to last me a… Well, a good long while.

It’s either that, or a shaky-handed skin-stab, and I sigh as I slowly make my way down the narrow staircase.

‘You know,’ I say, picking my way across the cold stone floor and wishing I’d gone for an unprecedented three pairs of socks, ‘the living room up there is huge, and there’s masses of room in the kitchen, or even the hallway in that little eaves-y bit under the stairs. Why do you want to hide away down here like some kind of… mole martyr.’

He’s in the middle of hooking his computer up, and he laughs as I curl up on the big, flattened cardboard box next to his desk, enjoying the minor respite from the damp flagstones. ‘It’s freezing down here, and it smells… funny.’

‘You know what would smell even funnier?’ he asks, not laughing any more. ‘If someone dropped by unexpectedly, to welcome me to the area, or read the meter, or who knows what else, and while they’re standing in the hallway they catch sight of this lot.’ He points to a towering pile of battered files, and a whiteboard covered in sprawling equations.

‘So?’ I shrug. ‘It’d look like you’re a scientist, which you are. No biggie.’

‘Well, it would depend how closely they looked, wouldn’t it?’ he counters. ‘And whether or not they recognise what they’re seeing. We can’t be too careful, how many times do I need to say it? I just don’t see the point in taking any chances, Chlo, not when we’ve come this far.’

‘I suppose,’ I concede, yawning as I hand over my kit and raise my hoodie to expose my stomach, hoping my ‘please do this for me, you know I hate it’ pitiful expression will do the trick. He tuts at me, but does the honours all the same.

‘You know you’re going to have to –—’

‘Yes, I do know,’ I snap, cutting him off. ‘Just… not tonight, ok?’

I stay put and watch him work for a while, knowing he won’t let me help with anything because he’s totally OCD about everything being in exactly the right place. And given that every file, memory stick, and hand-scribbled equation down here is because of me, I’m not going to be the one to disturb any of it.

It’s pretty hard not to think about the vaccine in here. That’s probably the real reason I don’t want to be down here. I’d be a psychologist’s dream right now. We’ve got so little of it left. I look over to see the case he keeps the vials in, and there are so many empty slots that my insides turn around and I start up a slow, cold sweat. I can’t function if I let that particular thought roam free in my head – the obvious one – What’s going to happen when it runs out? See, that’s the most messed up thing about it all: I can’t even say to myself, Well, you’ll die Chlo, and that’ll be that, because it’s a million miles from being that simple. I have something arguably worse than death to look forward to.

Dad’ll find a way to make more before we run out. Of course he will. However clueless he can be at emotions and life in general, he’s a genius in the lab; the Agency proved that. They don’t hire anyone who isn’t a total Einstein. It’s a shame that they don’t actually treat their Einsteins a little better while they have them, but then isn’t that always the way. I reckon you’re far better off being completely mediocre in this life – that way, people don’t notice you, don’t expect anything of you, and tend to just leave you alone. You stay under the radar, and you really can’t go wrong. That’s what I’m all about now: staying under the radar.

‘Chlo, you’re making me nervous,’ Dad mutters, tugging a little too forcefully on some cables under the desk. ‘Plus you’re right, it is cold down here, and I haven’t got to grips with the thermostat yet. You’d better go on back up.’ He straightens up and stretches, stifling a yawn. ‘It’s been a long day. Why don’t you get an early night, it’d do you good.’

I’m not sure I’ll be able to sleep after my nap earlier, but he’s told me a million times that sleep helps my cells regenerate, or at least helps them think they’re regenerating, so… I guess it’s worth a try. The trouble is, more often than not, with sleep comes the nightmares, which is why I prefer to put it off for as long as possible.

‘It’d do you good too,’ I tell him. ‘You’ve got a big day tomorrow.’

‘Oh, I won’t be too much longer. I just want to get this all hooked up so I’m ready to crack on as soon as I get in tomorrow night.’

‘You said you’d need to keep your head down at the hospital for a couple of weeks before you could even start researching… stuff. You won’t really need much down here for a bit, so why not ——’

‘Chlo…’ He puts his hands on my shoulders. ‘Just let me get on, ok? We’re working against the clock here.’

I suppose it doesn’t occur to him that I’m the last person who needs reminding, that maybe it would be nice if just for once he could pretend there wasn’t a great big timer counting down to my imminent… whatever. Maybe we could sit and watch a film together, or something, anything, if he could just drag himself away from his research long enough. What difference would a couple of hours really make? But if I say anything, I’m going to look like a sure-fire contender for worst-daughter-of-the-year, so I nod, and smile, and wish him goodnight as I make my way back up the stairs. This is us now, our life: Dad hiding in the basement, me hiding upstairs, the clock ticking on us the whole time.

There are three compounds he needs to finish the vaccine, compounds he had access to in the Agency but wasn’t directly involved in engineering. He has a tiny sample of each of them, and needs to figure out a way to create them, from scratch, before the supplies he managed to smuggle out of the lab run out. If he can’t, I suppose late nights and cold rooms will be the least of his worries, just like lonely nights will be the least of mine.

I get the kettle on and make some tea, taking his down and hugging him tight, before downing my pills with mine, hauling my tired body up the stairs and crawling into bed. I leave the bedside light on, and dig into a book, reading until the last possible moment, when the words start to dance on the page in front of my eyes, and I can’t hold sleep off any longer. The nightmares don’t come, and I sleep peacefully for the first time in months. Maybe they can’t find me here. I dream that Dad keeps me hidden in the basement with all his research. I’m cold, and alone, but I’m safe.

CHAPTER THREE

It’s pitch dark when the shouting wakes me, and for a second I don’t know where I am. I hear my name nestled in amongst a flood of swearing, and recognise Dad’s as the only voice before panic takes hold completely. The boxes. I wince as I remember throwing them out of my window. Fumbling for the light switch, I let rip a mini swear-fest of my own – why would he have come in and turned the lamp off? He knows I hate the dark. I pull back one heavy curtain and see him out on the drive, furiously gathering them up. I sigh, and brace myself as I open the window.

‘Chloe! I just went arse over wotsit over these! What did I say yesterday?’

‘Sorry!’ I shout back down. ‘I meant to say…’

The look he gives me speaks volumes, and I hold my hands up in surrender.

‘Just…’ He sighs, ‘Can you please try and keep things a bit tidier? I’ve got enough to deal with right now as it is.’

‘Yeah, sorry Dad, I will. Are you leaving already? Weren’t you even going to say goodbye?’

‘I left you a note,’ he says, leaning the boxes against the garage door. ‘I thought you could use the sleep, and I could use a head start.’ He wipes his hands on his jacket, then looks back up at me. ‘Don’t wait up for me. Keep the blinds and curtains closed, and don’t even think of answering the door to anyone. Even if it’s the police. Especially if it’s the police.’

I get that kick of fear in my belly that I narrowly avoided when I heard the shouting. It’s never far off.

‘Your phone’s all charged up,’ he says, his voice softening a little, ‘and I’ve put my number in it for you. Text me if you need anything, ok?’

‘Ok,’ I try to reply lightly, but my voice breaks and betrays my sudden terror at being left alone. I try again, and do a little better with a faux-cheery and not entirely appropriate ‘Good luck!’ Good luck finding the thing that will save me before we find out what the hell happens to me if you don’t.

I actually thought I’d be fine about it, I’ve been on my own in the flat a few times over the last few weeks, when Dad had his interview, and when he went to sign the lease on the cottage, but when I close the window a massive wave of anxiety hits me, hard. I have to physically steady myself, and I’m just about to pull the curtain back across when a second wave, packing an even harder punch, crashes over me as I see the car’s taillights disappear down the drive. I’m on my own, in the middle of nowhere. Anyone could be out there, watching the house, watching me from the darkness right now. I pull the curtain closed so hard that a couple of the hooks ping out and it sags heavily in the middle. I duck down next to the wall, and sit with my back to it, knees pulled tight against my chest, trying to get a grip. Agents could be watching Dad leave from anywhere down the lane, getting ready right now to come in and take me; and all that stands between me and them is a front door that I’m pretty sure would give with a swift kick or two from a decent enough boot. How could he leave me alone like this? What was he thinking? After everything he’s told me about them…

God. I can’t breathe. Don’t think, dontthinkdontthink.

Day one. Hour one. And it’s not going well.

Take the piss. Make it funny. Poor little rich girl cries for Daddy when she’s left alone in a beautiful house all day to do whatever she wants. Someone forgot to put their big girl pants on. What are you, six years old? Are you really so special that anyone would go to this much trouble to get hold of you? Self-important much!

It starts to work, slowly. It’s a pretty thin veneer, and it doesn’t hold up to too much questioning, so I don’t. I just try and go with it. It’s either that, or hide with my back to the wall all day. And I’m already getting cramp.

I pull myself up, take a deep breath, purely for effect, and shuffle over to get another hoodie from my wardrobe. I think about getting back under the covers for a bit, but my head feels light and cramps are slowly starting to make themselves known in my stomach as well as my back and legs. I need to eat, and I need to take my mind off things. This is a job for bacon.

I get through two packs of Danish before I cast a guilty look over at the frying pan, wondering how the hell I’m not the size of a house by now. I suppose it should be a bonus, but I can’t help wondering what all the fat and salt is doing to what’s left of my insides. I’ll have to try and talk to Dad about it again soon. I should probably at least switch to grilling the meat. Or maybe there’s a way I could just get some protein shakes, like those gym maniacs, instead of being such a carnivore. I’ve asked him about it before, and he didn’t exactly say no, as such, just gave me a kind of mutter that it’s ‘not quite that simple.’ No, well, nothing really is any more.

I contemplate a third pack, before realising that we don’t actually have one – we didn’t bring much shopping with us and we’re going to need to do a grocery run PDQ. I say ‘we’ meaning Dad, obviously. You do see a lot of frightening sights in Asda, I know, but there are limits. Resigned to a bacon-less environment, I set to work de-greasing the kitchen from my fry-fest, and before I know it, I’ve got the Marigolds on. Dad’s ‘keep things a bit tidier’ must still be swimming around in my head, because I have a sudden vision of cleaning the whole place from top to bottom. Or, almost the whole place. I don’t want to go into the basement. Being down there alone would bring back… well, I don’t know if there are words to describe the memories. The accident was horrific, but it was an understandable type of horror. I mean, it’s the kind of thing that happens every day, you just always hope it’s never going to happen to you or yours. What came after, well, that’s a whole different story. Not something I think the human brain is really equipped to deal with just yet; I know mine isn’t at least. I should be worrying only about shoes and hot boys, according to the books and magazines I’m supposed to buy. Not whether or not I’m some kind of soulless demon who has absolutely no right to exist.

Take one broken girl. Add a generous helping of pain and terror.

Simmer for six months.

Needles, a homemade drip attached to the frame of an old standard lamp, the dimmest of light bulbs, and a bright, blinding torch for when he needed to check my eyes. A room that never got warm, blankets that scratched and burned at my skin as my cells imploded and pores bled. Scrap metal, boiled, sharpened and seared through bone to force it back into place. Limbs that jerked uncontrollably one minute, and seized completely the next. Wires, everywhere, pretending to be veins, trying to trick my body, trying to make me into something I should never have become. Lying flat, not seeing anything other than a damp, water-stained ceiling week after week. Pain. Endless pain accompanied by endless doses of morphine that never touched it. Fear – of what the pain would do next, of what he would do next, of what I was turning into. A hideous, stumbling experiment, brought to life in the darkness. Screams. A million screams in a place where no one would ever hear them.

It wasn’t really me. That’s what I have to tell myself, or I can’t handle the flashbacks. That person, that thing, down there, wasn’t me. But I still can’t go into the basement. It doesn’t matter that the equations, the test tubes, the conical flasks and the bottles of god only knows what are all hidden away underneath this beautiful cottage in the middle of this beautiful countryside – that’s just a matter of aesthetics. There’s no more damp, cramped flat in the arse end of London, but the principle remains. And it’s a nasty principle, however you look at it.

A distraction, that’s what I need. It was never easy in the flat, because there was no room to move, no space to think. Here though, I’ve got nothing but room – and I obsessively, determinedly, clean and tidy every damn inch of it until everything looks nice; until everything looks normal. I find the radio and turn it up far too loud, wanting the inane chatter and cheesy, commercial music to fill my head, willing it to take up as much room in there as possible. I dust, I polish, I hoover. I fluff cushions. I sweep the fireplace. And I don’t stop until my arms and legs start to tremble and my heart starts to pound so hard in my ears it blocks out the radio. And when I can’t do any more, I sit and I cry like a baby – for a thousand different reasons. I even cry for the fact that I’m crying.

‘You’re pathetic, Chlo,’ I tell myself. ‘You’re absolutely bloody pathetic. What was the point of coming through it all, just to end up like this?’ I don’t want the end-product to be this whiny, self-indulgent, sickly creature. I know that I need to heal mentally as much as physically; but I just don’t know how the hell I’m supposed to do it. I lie back on the sofa, refusing to think about anything at all until the pounding in my ears eases, and the trembling in my limbs settles. I lose track of time, but as my body slowly recovers in its own way from the morning’s unusual exertion, angry growls start to bellow forth from my stomach. It must be protein o’clock, and as I realise that I’m going to have to go and mess up my now immaculate kitchen all over again, I start to laugh. And it feels better than crying.

*

I throw a pack of chicken breasts into the oven this time, thinking it’s probably healthier than frying them. I mean, I don’t actually have a clue what I’m doing; Mum always used to cook for us, or if she had to work late she’d leave money for pizza. It suddenly hits me that I’m going to have to cook for us tonight – that I’ve been somehow shifted into the role of housewife here, and I couldn’t be any less qualified for it. I see a panic attack racing across the horizon towards me, and I desperately look around for something to fight it off with. My new phone’s sitting on the windowsill, still attached to its charger, and I make a grab for it. I could text Dad, tell him to get a takeaway on his way back tonight. Or maybe I shouldn’t disturb him on his first day. I could save him some of the chicken. I’m starting to get dangerously close to setting off an ‘I can’t do this’ loop of destruction in my head, when I see the note he said he’d left; it was neatly folded up and tucked underneath the phone. Not the most obvious of spots, but he must’ve known I’d be playing with the phone at some point.

Chlo,

I’m getting an early start. Didn’t want to wake you. Don’t open the door, don’t answer the phone, keep the curtains closed tight and ring me if you need me. Eat well, and stay warm. I’ll pick up groceries & a takeaway on my way home.

Dad.

Well, that’s my dinner worry solved for today at least.

If we had the internet, it’d be easy; I could just look up some simple recipes. Dad doesn’t think I’m ready to get back online yet though. And he’s right. The temptation to email Tom and tell him everything would be pretty hard to resist. I mean, I write emails to him in my head every day:

Dear Tom, you’ll NEVER believe what happened…

I can remember his email address, but not his phone number. He was on speed dial on our landline, and just ‘Tom’ on my mobile. I can’t dredge up any more than a zero and a seven from the tangled mess of my memory. Some days I try, for hours at a time. Other days, I try for hours at a time not to.

I look down at the phone in my hands, and I wonder…

No… he wouldn’t be that careless, or that clueless…

… would he?

My fingers fumble through the options almost of their own accord, and as I press the web browser symbol, I get that familiar panicky sensation of ice flooding my stomach.

Mobile data is disabled for this device. Please check your settings.

That should be where I stop, but I follow the prompts and check the settings all the same. It’s like drinking, or smoking, you know it’s bad… you know it’s only going to hurt you… but you do it all the same. When I see Please enter your password to change your mobile data settings I’m genuinely relieved, glad that he’s taken the choice away from me, because I don’t think I would have been strong enough to make the right choice on my own.

I can’t stand the thought of anyone seeing me like this; I don’t want to catch the look in their eyes: revulsion, fear, disgust. I’m genuinely terrified of what their reaction would be. And it’s not just the look, it’s what they’d say. Would they call out? Cover their mouth with their hands just a split second too late to stifle their gasp of horror? Or would they just fire a horrified whisper to the friend beside them, pulling them in close and hurrying by? Maybe there’d even be some pity there, which I think would somehow be even worse. I could never go out, never talk to someone the way I look now. But if I was behind a screen… well, I could be anyone. I could make a fake profile on Facebook, friend Tom and see what he’s doing, find out who he’s hanging out with now, if he still thinks about me. I could open a Wattpad account and share everything that’s happened to me, pretend that I’ve got this crazy, twisted imagination and it’s all just fiction. Maybe people reading it would get hooked, and become as curious as I am to find out how it all turns out. Or maybe they’d just think I was sick in the head and move on to safer ground and some One Direction fan fiction.

Either way, I don’t have to worry, because Dad’s locked me out of the internet as securely as he’s locked me in the cottage. It keeps me safe. It keeps me so lonely that the coldness inside is actually starting to burn. And I’ve got nothing in the world to do but stare through the little window of the oven and wait for my chicken to cook.

*

When I’ve eaten, and cleaned up after myself (‘keep things a bit tidier’), I head up to my room before I get too tired or shaky to be able to manage the stairs. I wonder about maybe taking out my diary and making myself read through it, if only to see how far I’ve come. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Look at how far you’ve come rather than how far you’ve still got to go? I’ve done nothing but dwell on my own sorry self all morning though. If I’m going to be stuck here, like some twisted effigy of a Disney princess up in a tower, then I need something else… someone else, or I’ll go insane within a week. I can already feel the danger. I need an escape. And if I can’t go out, I’m going to have to look within.

I go to the bookshelves and scan through the titles until I find what I need, what never fails, and it brings a little twist of irony that makes me smile and lets me know what I need to do next. With my ancient, battered copy of Jane Eyre under my arm, I drag a thick blanket from the airing cupboard on the landing, and then stab viciously at the trapdoor above with the hooked pole that I find inside. As it swings open, I make a couple of failed attempts to hook the ladder, my co-ordination is pants these days, and finally wrestle the narrow, pull-down ladder into position. And then the real challenge begins. The ladder sits at a steep angle, and my knees buckle as I try to climb it whilst pushing up the heavy blanket and keeping the book wedged safely under my arm at the same time. Step by painful step I haul myself up, and finally pull myself, breathless and sweating, through the tiny hatch into the attic. Because what better place to curl up with Jane and her demons?

Once I’ve got my breath back I pull the hatch closed behind me, which makes me feel even more isolated from the world, but now that I have a book for company I don’t feel half as lonely. In fact, as I settle down and cocoon myself into the blanket, for the first time since leaving the flat I actually feel safe. It’s like hiding from the world physically is one thing, but without being able to hide mentally as well, I’m still totally vulnerable. Here, if there are footsteps on the drive, or a knock at the door, I won’t hear them – they can’t frighten me. No one can peer in through a gap in the curtains, no one can see movement behind a blind. And I realise that this place could be my saving grace. It’s freezing up here, but completely bare of anything that could remind me of who, or why, I am. The sunlight flooding in through the skylight is beautiful, there’s no need for a blind here, and the sloping ceiling is panelled with heavy, dark wood that makes me feel like I’m in a whole different house. I can’t imagine a better reading cave. Settling down with the blanket tucked tightly around me, just where the elongated rectangle of sun hits the floor, I open my book.