Under My Skin

‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day…’

Ha! You and me both, Jane.

And I take her hand and leave my own demons behind for a while.

The hours melt away from me. I don’t hear the tyres on gravel, or the heavy bang of the front door. I miss the first frantic cry, and the second, before the hammering of feet on the stairs startles me out of Thornfield. I can’t move; I’ve got so cold up here that my legs have seized completely, and my hands and feet are painful blocks of sharp ice. My heart seizes not from cold but from terror. They’re here, they’ve found me.

As the frenzied shout rings out, Dad’s voice registers, and relief mixes itself into the cocktail of panic that was building inside me.

‘I’m up here! I’m all right!’ I shout back, letting go of my book and awkwardly rubbing my legs, trying to encourage some life back into them. I’m supposed to be getting stronger, not giving myself hypothermia.

‘Hold on! I’m coming down!’

I drag myself over to the trapdoor and push it open, narrowly missing Dad’s head as he stares up at me.

‘Christ, Chlo.’ He exhales, ‘I thought…’

He thought they’d found me. He thought they’d taken me.

‘I’m fine!’ My teeth pick a really inappropriate time to start chattering. ‘I was just reading up here, I’m coming… I’ll be… down in a second…’

I can’t come down while he’s standing there. My legs still won’t work right and he’ll be angry if he sees the state I’ve got myself into. He’d probably lock the hatch so I wouldn’t be able to get up here again, and I’m not ready to lose this space now that I’ve only just found it.

He looks at me, head to one side, suspicion in his eyes.

Go… go downstairs… I’m fine, I’m fine…

‘All right,’ he finally relents with a sigh. ‘It’s late, Chlo. I’ve brought you a curry. Come on down and get it while it’s hot.’

‘’Kay!’

I move back from the opening and wait until I hear him go back down the stairs before I shake painful life into my frozen limbs. I leave the blanket where it is, and promise myself that tomorrow I’ll bring up a duvet, some cushions, and a couple of those little electric heaters I always used to have aimed at me in the flat – if I can find them.

He’s at the table when I come down, and the rich, spicy smell of the curry sends my stomach into a noisy growl-fest that kills the tension and makes him laugh, instead of lecture like I was expecting. I sit down to a plate piled high with riceless chicken madras, and tuck in. It’s still weird, being able to smell the spice but not taste it. The warm chunks of meat are heaven. There’s a pint of water set for me, which I down almost in one as I’m around halfway through my plateful. I hate to think what I must look like: some drunken rugby fan woofing down a massive curry and necking a pint after a game. Not exactly the most ladylike of approaches; yet another reason I can’t see myself ever being girlfriend material. One meal, and I’d be dumped. Plus I dread to think what Mum would make of me if she saw me like this.

‘How’s the chicken?’ Dad asks, presumably noticing I’ve stopped stuffing myself senseless.

‘It’s fine,’ I say, reloading my fork. ‘I just… my taste…’

He looks thoughtful for a minute before replying.

‘I think we can get it back,’ he says, although he looks down at his food instead of at me, which isn’t a promising sign. ‘There must be a way we can regenerate the cells on your taste buds. Once we’ve got everything else taken care of, I’ll work on it, I promise.’

‘It’s fine,’ I lie. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to fuss about it. It’s just… everything tastes like… chicken.’

He’s laughing again, and it’s contagious this time.

This is nice, spending time together like this. We’ve been so on top of each other for so long lately that getting some distance like today – however bad it felt this morning – is probably going to do us both the world of good. We might actually learn to enjoy each other’s company rather than just putting up with it.

I attack the rest of my chicken with renewed vigour.

‘I might get you a vindaloo next time,’ he chuckles. ‘See how far gone those taste buds really are!’

I see that drunken rugby fan again, and try to sit up a little straighter and eat a little slower. I’ve never been much of girly girl, but I mean, there are limits.

CHAPTER FOUR

My relationship with Dad, one that was never strong to start with and that disintegrated into a hateful, unspeakably broken thing when it happened, starts to improve a little every day. I think that’s the main reason the loneliness and frustration take a while to build up. Once I get over the initial shock of the changes, and with the cottage really being a million times nicer than the flat, it starts to feel a lot more like freedom than I was expecting. I spend most of my days locked up in the attic reading, where nothing in the world, inside or out, can get to me. It’s like having my own ‘tallest tower’; metaphorical dragons circle the roof above me, and no prince, however charming, could ever get near. This is an infinite comfort rather than a cause for tears. Disney would hate me.

The hatch feels like a steel door, and I leave my worries at the bottom of the stepladder every time I clamber up it. And as the days begin to pass with no sign of trouble, I eventually start to grow a little braver, and begin to widen my territory, like some kind of nervous woodland animal. I don’t really have any way of keeping track of time. My days are structured around the growls emanating from my stomach, but in terms of the number of days that are passing, I have no idea. Dad works as many weekends as weekdays, it seems, and without being able to see outside, or feel anything other than cold, it could be mid-winter, or early spring for all I know. The number of books I get through becomes my only way to guess at the time passing. I read one, sometimes two novels a day, and as my ‘read’ pile grows I can make a rough guess at how long we’ve survived here. I try not to look too closely though, because the more books that teeter on the pile, the more times I remember reading each one, the lower my supply of vaccine dips.

When I can’t take the cold of the attic any longer, I start to read down by the fire, keeping low on the sofa under a blanket, and tensing at every sound from outside to begin with, but with each chapter I make it through safely I begin to relax a little more – and eventually I come to enjoy the warmth and the comfort. The windows and doors are locked, the curtains are pulled tight across heavy blinds, and I finally start to feel safe in the house itself, rather than just in the attic. The urgency and the panic Dad manages to maintain more quietly now starts to slowly, dangerously, slip away from me.

I start to do exercises every day to help with my limp and my general level of fitness. They’re ridiculously repetitive and boring, but once I get comfortable having the radio on, enjoying the company it provides without worrying too much about every little outside noise and threat it could be masking, they don’t feel so bad. And the worrying dwindles with every song I start to sing along to; because if they were out there, surely they would have come for me by now?

With my new muscles (ha, ok, not quite) I drag the furniture around in the living room so the TV faces away from the window, that way none of its tell-tale colours can possibly shine through to the outside world, and I can watch back-to-back DVDs all day long, never even needing to change out of my PJs. My life is one long, open-ended sick day. After a full rotation of my books, and an impressive run at Buffy on DVD, I feel myself kick down a gear, and relax more thoroughly, to settle into it – to enjoy it even. The more days that pass with no one hammering on the door, or hassling Dad at work, the safer, and the more untouchable I feel.

I should have known the feeling could never last. Holidays, sick days, anything like that, they should all come to an end. If they don’t, they eventually up end being every bit as frustrating as whatever it is they were an escape from.

*

I don’t see much of Dad, but when I do, I can tell by his outfits that summer must be drawing to a close out there, and that’s around the time when I inevitably start to get tired of my own company. The pattern of the days and the weeks becomes all too familiar, and the DVDs and books follow suit. No matter how much you adore a book, there’s a limit to how many times you can re-read it in quick succession. Same goes for your favourite films and TV series, there are only so many times you can re-watch them back-to-back before they start to lose their magic. Dad’s always offering to get me more – he’s never happier than when I’m reading or watching TV because I’m ‘resting’. That’s all he ever wants me to do. Stay still, stay safe.

He leaves before six in the mornings, and he’s rarely home before ten in the evening. We eat together whenever he gets in, and then he quietly heads down to the basement to put in even more hours, while I make my way up to bed. It’s become a strange existence; like being in limbo almost, just sitting here waiting to see if he can create the compounds and produce the vaccine from scratch. There’s this big, invisible timer ticking away in the background the whole time. Sometimes I can turn it right down, like when I’m reading; not just normal reading, but when I totally, one hundred per cent lose myself in a book. The problem is that it’s getting harder to lose myself in ones I’ve read a hundred times. The less immersed I am, the louder the ticking becomes. The louder the ticking becomes, the more it stops me losing myself, and the vicious circle begins, and self-perpetuates.

I’ve started to wear the same clothes for too many days. I still have a bath every day, but that’s only because my skin falls off me in terrifying chunks if I don’t (yeah, I tried it). I eat regularly and plentifully because if I don’t my vision swims and I can’t read. I chat cheerfully to Dad for a few minutes between mouthfuls each evening because if I don’t, he’ll worry. I basically do the absolute minimum to get by, in terms of expected behaviour: enough to convince Dad that I’m ok, but it’s tough enough to do to let me know that I’m really not ok. I’m not sure exactly at what point this all happened, but I feel it all the same. And I know that it’s not good.

When I hear the car leave in the mornings, I find myself heading straight for the attic again, and I feel like I’ve come full circle since we’ve been here. I’ve explored my territory, and exhausted it, and now I’ve come back to the beginning and there’s nowhere else to go. I read up there until my stomach complains so loudly that I have to come back down and cook bacon, or eggs, or steak, or chicken. It all tastes the same so it doesn’t matter to me which meat comes at which time of the day. The only person I ever speak to, other than myself, is Dad. And our couple of hours or so in each other’s company from the first week we were here has steadily disintegrated into what’s typically now no more than twenty minutes on any given day. We never really talked to each other before all this. Back when things were ‘normal’ he was always at work – always pulling overtime evenings and weekends. It actually wasn’t much different to now I suppose, except now, he’s all I have.

Most weekends he still goes to the hospital to work, and if he does stay here, ‘here’ tends to mean ‘in the basement’. He never stops working. He keeps the race-against-time vibe going, although it’s quieter now, and that makes it feel more dangerous, more sinister somehow. Like he doesn’t even have time to talk about it. He used to tell me about his day when he got back, about the things he’d been working on and how they were bringing him closer to replication. I never understood any of it, but it was comforting to hear all the same. It felt like he was keeping me involved, not letting me forget that he was on the case, that it was all going to be ok. Now he hardly mentions a thing about it; the most I get is a vague, passing reference.

‘I’m getting closer every day Chlo; I’m getting two, sometimes even three hours a day in working on the compounds in the lab, plus four or five at home most nights.’

‘That’s great, Dad. How about sleep though? How much of that are you getting?’

‘I’ll sleep when we’ve got a backlog of vaccine behind us, Chlo. You watch me. I’ll sleep like a baby.’

He’s so driven, that some days I can’t help but believe he’s going to do it; of course he’ll figure it out. Other days, I think to myself that if he hasn’t done it by now, this scientific mega genius recruited by a super-secret government agency, then he never will.

The threat of my ever-dwindling supply of vaccine, coupled with my ever-increasing difficulty in finding any kind of escape to my days is starting to make me go a little bit… odd. I talk to myself a lot now. I talk to Mum all the time too. And Tom. I’ve typed a million texts to him, and I save them all, even though I can’t send them. I wrote him a letter too, acres of real words on real paper, telling him everything, and then I fed it to the fire and watched it burn.

I’m starting to think I really need to get out – somehow. Dad worries himself half to death thinking about would happen to me if I did, and I used to do the same, but now I find I’m starting to worry more about what will happen to me if I don’t.

*

Lately Dad keeps bringing home these Living France magazines, and whatever glossy women’s mags are featuring anything at all to do with Paris. He’s trying to fire up my enthusiasm, give me something to hold on to, I know, but Paris is his ultimate solution to all this, not mine. I feel lousy thinking like that, because it’s a solution that’s totally for my benefit – and the whole situation is just so messed up that it’s beyond a joke. Neither of us actually want to go there, but it looks like that’s where we’re headed all the same.

‘Christophe was always the closest thing I had to a friend at the Agency,’ he tells me, every time the subject comes up. ‘He knew exactly what was going on, and that’s why he got out when he did – before it got too late for him, like it did for the rest of us.’

‘Yeah? Then why didn’t he tell you?’ I argue. ‘If he was such a friend, why did he leave you there?’

‘He didn’t leave me, Chloe. He sent me his address. Do you have any idea what he risked in doing that? Everything. He risked everything to give me a way out.’

‘Yeah? But what if he’s a double agent? I mean, if this whole thing was so top secret, and so intense – if he was the only one who got out, and he knew how dangerous they were, isn’t it just a little bit weird that he got in touch with you and left the super-secret details of where to find him in his covert new life?’

‘It’s not like that,’ he always says with a shake of his head when I bring it up, or when I used to – I don’t bother any more because he doesn’t listen.

‘Christophe gave me that address for a reason, and it’s not the one you think. I trust him. He’s the only one there I ever did trust, and I don’t have any reason to change my opinion of him now.’

There are two problems I have with that. One is that if this indisputably trustworthy science-genius Good Guy colleague really is a Good Guy, then why didn’t Dad get in touch with him on day one? Why isn’t he helping Dad with the vaccine right now? And two – why didn’t he talk things through with Dad before he left? Why leave and then send the contact details on? Because they found him, that’s why. They found him, and re-recruited him, and now he’s a plant – a trap we’re about to fall right into. I watch the films, I read the books, I know that it’s never that simple.

And I don’t want to go. I don’t want to run away to France, and I don’t trust this friend. It’s just another one of the awkward, corrosive secrets that Dad and I have started to keep from each other now.

I don’t tell him how much I wish I was dead instead of Mum, and he doesn’t tell me half of what goes through his head. The secrets are probably the only things that keep us both anywhere near sane.

As the days close in and even I start to notice it from behind the blinds, and as our ever-present background timer runs lower, the guilt that I constantly feel only seems to get heavier. It should be Mum here with Dad instead of me. Some days I can convince myself that it’s an absolute godsend that she’s not here, not like this. Others, I wonder how much harder, how much faster Dad might be working if it was her, and not me. It’s a nasty, dangerous thought, but it’s there, and it forces me to acknowledge it. Dad and I were never close, I never really felt like I meant that much to him. It was always Mum who was there for me. She was the one who helped me with my homework, drove me all over the place, and picked up the pieces whenever Tom and I fought and the world was ending. Dad was always at work. Now everything’s flipped around and I’m somehow his entire world, and that doesn’t always make sense to me. Sometimes I wonder if he just pretends as much as I do.

But then I remember… I never had a choice in any of this. He did.

And he chose me.

*

Trying not to think, or feel, is how I get through my days. I pretty much live in the attic now. I have a huge beanbag up there, an extra duvet which is like the War and Peace of the quilt world, and three electric heaters that, combined, can fry an egg at a hundred paces.

Whenever Dad goes into town to do the food shop, he always asks if there’s anything I want, and I spend a good part of the week trying to think up things that might make my strange prison-but-not-a-prison more comfortable. I don’t know much about what new books are out there any more, so I ask him to pick me up some old classics that I know about but have never read. It’s weird how now I’m out of school for good I’m suddenly reading “better” books than I ever was before. No more fluffy paranormal romances for me, or gore-fest horrors. I’ve started to become obsessed with the complicated language and kind of… aching darkness of old books. The things I used to read feel almost like when I try and watch TV now: garbled nonsense playing in the background that isn’t loud enough to compete with the fears in my head. I need stronger stuff. I read The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk, and this one called Varney the Vampire which is fast becoming my favourite book of all time. The more I have to concentrate, the harder I have to work to follow the language and the plot, the less room there is in my head for anything else. The days blur outside the high windows of my attic, and I don’t even look up at the sky any more.

Drawing more and more into myself, the biggest change I notice is in my nightmares. Ever since it happened, there’s only ever really been one – the same scene playing out in the same way every night. There was a brief respite when we first moved in, but now it’s back, and it’s starting to feature a whole new opening scene that makes no sense. Dad and I have talked about the dreams, because it’s kind of hard not to when you wake up screaming most nights. I’ve been trying to get my sleep during the day, to keep the tears and the terror away from him. Sometimes it works, sometimes I can read all night and sleep up in the attic most of the day, but it seems more and more that the only place I can really settle to a book is up there, and sleep tends to find me after my bath and my meds no matter what.

There’s another reason I’d rather not wake him: when I wake up terrified, and he’s there beside me trying to comfort me – when I should feel safe and secure in his presence – I really don’t. I feel the exact opposite. He’s the last person I want to see; I’m scared that if there was anything dangerous in my room, or if I was stronger, or faster, I could really hurt him in that one, painfully clear moment when I remember what he did to us.

I never hear him have nightmares. I’ve always wondered why.

The dream has only ever starred me, Mum and Dad, but now a new character has found his way in, and I don’t really know what to make of him. He feels like some kind of doctor maybe, wearing a long, dark cloak with a hood that falls down low over a breathing mask with heavy ventilators to each side, and the combination of the two completely obscures his face. I don’t know who he is, or why he’s there, and it’s weird because everything else I dream about is so personal, and so real. He doesn’t speak, or even do anything. He’s just there. The only thing I hear is his breathing, rhythmic and ragged through the ventilator. I can’t see his eyes, but I can feel him watching me, and that’s all he does, watch, and breathe. He’s only ever there at the very start of my dream. He’s waiting for something, I think. I’m not sure I want to think about what.

He makes me feel even more ‘unclean’, even more repulsive somehow. Like my body is such a perversion now that even the air around me has become dangerous. Like no one could ever be safe near me.

The point at which he melts into the blackness around him is when my dream begins in earnest, and from here it’s always the same. Back to normal. I have to live through the experience over and over, every time I fall into a deep sleep.

Don’t think.

I try not to think so much, for so long, that sometimes it feels like there’s nothing left of me.

CHAPTER FIVE

Going by the number of times I’ve re-read Jane Eyre, and by the thickness of Dad’s sweaters, I think we must have been here for about two months or so when it happens. Summer has left us, and autumn is moving in. I’m following my well-trodden path through the days like a compliant lab rat, and Dad’s becoming ever more the quietly mad scientist with each day that passes without a breakthrough.

I have an exercise bike now, so I can work more on my fitness – a new wheel for my cage – and I decide to watch some TV while I put in some time on it. I pedal hard for almost ten minutes before the shaking starts, which means I’m finally starting to see some improvement. The first day he brought it home, I couldn’t even manage five. When I ease myself off the saddle and make for the sofa, I start to shiver. The fire must have died awhile back without me noticing, and when I stop moving the coolness of the air hits me. I think of my ‘nest’ up in the attic, but don’t fancy a double dose of stairs, so I try and warm myself up with the thick blanket on the back of the sofa instead.

The woodpile is just outside the back door, and there are matches and plenty of old newspapers folded and stacked in the kitchen. I should get up and sweep the ashes, and relight the fire so I can slump in front of its crackling, cosy warmth – but a deep lethargy seems to have set into my limbs, and I can’t make myself move. I stretch out on the sofa and bundle myself as tightly into the blanket as I can manage. I know I shouldn’t sleep like this, because I’ll only wake up even colder; I should go and put another hoodie on at least, or grab my thick duvet and burrow under that, but the longer I think about it, the less capable of moving I feel. I stare into the grey emptiness of the fireplace, and my mind drifts. My eyelids become heavy, and before I can do a thing to stop myself, I slide down into a cold, uncomfortable sleep, and the cloaked stranger brings me my nightmare.

Everything leading up to the crash in the dream is exactly the same as it was for real, but it all feels different. Things are dark and blurred around the edges, almost a little out of focus in places, and all the fear and confusion I felt at the time gets replaced by this overwhelming feeling that everything is about to change. When the nightmare starts for real, I know what’s going to happen, and how it’s going to happen, but I still have to go through the whole process. There are no shortcuts. And this time there’s no hope at all that somehow things might turn out ok. Because I know that Mum and I are going to die.