Under My Skin

It starts out right where everything began to go wrong, on the day that Mum found out what Dad really did for a living. I come home from school, only I’m not really me in the dream, I’m outside of me… watching. There’s heavy darkness around everything I see, like I’m watching things through a tunnel. And it’s cold; so cold.

I see myself unlocking the front door and I can’t shout at me not to go in, to turn around, to go to Tom’s, to the library, anywhere but there. I can never do anything to change it, I can only relive it. I hear Mum shouting before the door’s even open, her tone and her words are venomous; raw anger and disdain drip from every syllable and she doesn’t sound anything like herself and I’m scared before I’ve even set foot in the house. I can’t make out everything she’s saying, some of the words fade in and out, but the me that’s watching already knows every argument, insult and counter-argument by heart, because I’ve been hearing them in my head since the day it happened. Because I don’t know how to make them stop.

‘…twenty years thinking I was married to someone decent, someone with morals and a bit of backbone – twenty years and I never realised what an evil, messed up Frankenstein you really are. You bastard, Martin. You complete and total bastard. “Project Rise”? How do you sleep at night? How do you live with yourself? You sick, twisted…’

‘The project was classified for a reason, Alma. What the hell do you expect?’

‘What do I expect? I expect you not to have anything to do with something so –’

‘Medical research! You knew that, I never once lied to you –’

‘You never once told me the truth either! You never once got anywhere near!’

‘How the hell could I? This is government work, MOD classified at the highest level. Do you have any idea what they’ll do to me –’

‘I don’t give a damn about what they’ll do to you, just like you don’t give a damn about the men you killed – or their families – or anyone other than your own precious self and your revolting little career. You can go straight to hell for all I care… the whole lot of you.’

‘What do you think has paid for all this? Eh? The house you wanted, the car you wanted – you can thank my revolting little career for that, you hypocritical, ungrateful…’

Around and around they go, the insults getting deeper and the point of no return becoming a tiny speck in the distance. And all I can do is watch.

‘Sick, twisted abomination…’ Those are the last words I hear from Mum before she flings the kitchen door open and storms through it. She’s white as a ghost, paler than I’ve ever seen her, but somehow she manages to go whiter still when she sees me there in the hallway.

I try to speak, but my throat’s too tight, and she grabs my arm and drags me up the stairs behind her before I can get a word out.

‘Quickly Chloe,’ she urges, pulling me into my room and grabbing clothes from my drawers. ‘We need to go. Now. Hurry.’

She leaves me piling clothes into a bag with no idea why. I hear Dad pounding up the stairs, and there’s more shouting, and crying. I don’t know how much I’m supposed to take; I don’t know where we’re going, or for how long. So I keep going until the bag is full, then I sit on the bed, and wait. Wait for the shouting to stop, wait for the footsteps to thunder back down the stairs, wait for the front door to slam, and for that final silence to descend. This is my last chance to stop it all, and there’s not a thing I can do.

I follow Mum down the stairs, dragging the heavy bag behind me, and then we’re on the driveway in the rain, getting into her car. Mum’s all raw, burning emotion, and I’m a ghost at her side. I let her shout, I let her tell me what an immoral, lying, evil monster my dad is. How medical research and military research are worlds apart, and how everything he’s ever told us is a lie. How what he was doing to those soldiers was unthinkable, unforgivable. And I stand there, not understanding, terrified, and try to defend him.

Then Mum’s driving too fast and the rain is getting heavier. The fear inside me is building. It won’t be long now. I still babble madly on, like it could make a difference. Maybe Dad was saving lives, in a way. He was saving others from having to give their lives in the first place. Surely that was a good thing? It only makes her angrier, and the angrier she gets, the harder she squeezes the accelerator.

‘You’re like him,’ she says, disgusted. ‘My god, Chloe, you’re just like him.’ She flicks a frantic look in the rear view mirror, and whimpers. ‘It’s too late.’ She doesn’t take her eyes off the mirror, as if they’re right behind us, these undead soldiers Dad apparently has at his disposal, come to chase us down, bring us back. “The project was classified for a reason.”; “Do you have any idea what they’ll do?” Tears stream down my face, mirroring the rain that floods the windscreen faster than the wipers can clear it. And faster we fly through the narrow streets, darkness pressing in all around us, the lights blurring in the rain-obscured glass. It’s coming. I scream and shout myself hoarse but I know it can’t make any difference. Mum makes the turn that’s going to kill us. I can’t tear my eyes from the speedometer; I want to look at Mum, tell her I love her, tell her I’m sorry, but all I can see is the glowing ‘70’ on the display. I hear the brakes lock up, feel the back end of the car start to slide. Steel twists and splinters around me. My seatbelt crushes three of my ribs, and the impacted passenger door breaks my left shoulder and hip. A slice of shattered windshield tears into my face, but I don’t feel it, I don’t feel any of it. There’s no pain. There’s just the warm blood on my face, and the cold rain around me. And the car spins… flips… flies… landing heavily on its roof. I hang upside down from my seatbelt and two more of my ribs crack. My leg smashed against the footwell as we flew through the air, and is broken in two places. And now it’s quiet, and still. And I look over to see Mum’s lifeless eyes staring straight ahead, and my world ends.

I’m screaming in the dark, my body ice cold and tangled up in something, and I don’t know where I am. I scream harder, and fall to the floor, my limbs trapped and useless. Brightness explodes on my face, and I feel arms around me and panic even more. Until I hear his voice.

‘It’s ok, Chloe. It’s over. It’s ok, you’re ok.’ Over and over he says it, and finally I understand that it’s true. Except it’s not, because it’ll never be over. And I keep on having to relive it like this. And I don’t know if I can do it any more.

‘Chlo, you’re all caught up in the blanket, here, hold still.’ Dad lifts me awkwardly, trying to untangle the twisted fabric from my legs, and I let him. He rests me back on the sofa, putting a thick cushion behind my head, and fussing over me all the while. ‘Christ, you’re like ice,’ he says, as he lifts my feet and swings them round. ‘Why were you sleeping down here? Why did you let the fire go out?’

I can’t form an answer, not yet. All I can see are Mum’s dead eyes. I don’t even feel the cold that’s making me shake so hard I could be having a fit.

‘Don’t move,’ he says, pulling the blanket back up over me and running for the stairs. As if I even could.

You’re just like him.

He runs back down with the thick double duvet from his bed, and piles it onto me. Then he stands beside the sofa with his head in his hands.

‘I shouldn’t have left you. I thought… Christ. I thought things were getting better. I thought this was all going to stop.’

I close my eyes and turn my head towards the back of the sofa.

How could he think it would ever stop?

*

I must have drifted off to sleep again, although it can’t have been for very long. When I wake the second time I’m warm, and I turn my head to see a bright fire dancing in the grate. The duvet’s so thickly folded down on top of me that I have to fight hard to get out from underneath it.

‘Dad?’ I call, disorientated and not understanding how I could have gone back to sleep after that.

He comes in, calmer now, although still deathly pale. He’s drying his hands on a towel, and the smell of warm spices follows him into the room.

‘I’m sorry Chlo,’ he says in a voice heavy with resignation. ‘I’ll call the hospital in the morning. I shouldn’t be working full-time, leaving you like this every day. I thought by now things would… I don’t know what I thought.’ He sighs. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘No, Dad, you don’t understand.’ My head’s still spinning but the warmth and the brief sleep seem to have accelerated my return from the nightmare, and I’m almost coherent. ‘I’m fine,’ I lie, ‘I just… I was using the bike and I got tired… I didn’t notice the fire, and I must’ve fallen asleep because of the exercise, and… it was just… I’m fine.’ It’s a weak finish, but it’s all I have.

‘Was it the usual?’ he asks.

I nod. He doesn’t know about my strange new ringmaster, but he knows everything else.

‘It will stop, Chlo, I promise you it will. It just takes time. It’s your brain’s way of dealing with things, and with the way your brain’s been… rewired… it’s only natural…’

There’s nothing natural about it, we both know that, but neither of us say it.

My eyes hurt from having fallen asleep with my contacts in, and the tears have made them doubly painful. With a bit of help, I get up from the sofa and trudge upstairs to take them out. Then I stand under a scalding hot shower until my skin starts to burn. Showers aren’t good for me, they dry my skin out even more – but I dry and dress without putting any of my lotions on. Because I’m finding it harder and harder to care. If Dad’s thinking of quitting, what’s the point in me even bothering?

He calls me down to eat; food’s the last thing on my mind but I’ve got no choice but to go because my stomach is doing its usual dance of desperation. He still won’t let me try out some protein shakes. I’m sick of having to chew my way through mountains of meat and eggs all the time, but he’s always so busy. His hours are starting to stretch almost as thin as my sanity.

‘You can’t quit your job,’ I tell him as I sit down. I don’t know why I said it, because it’s the exact opposite of what I’m thinking: you have to quit your job, or I’m going to go insane here on my own.

He chews his food slowly, buying himself time before he replies. Which gives my mouth time to dig me in even further. ‘I just need to stay awake in the daytime, that’s all. I can do that. And I’ll take things easier tomorrow. I was on the bike for too long. I just wanted to see how much I could do.’

I feel totally pathetic at this point. All I have to do is stay inside and take things easy while he works all hours to keep me alive, and I can’t even manage that.

He takes a long drink of his beer. ‘I thought…’ he trails off, struggling. ‘I thought maybe you’d turned a corner,’ he says, finally. ‘I don’t hear you cry in the night so much any more. I thought things were ok.’

Things will never be ok.

‘I have,’ I lie earnestly. ‘It’s just, maybe it was a small corner. Maybe this whole thing is about small corners. There are just so many of them.’ I’m getting dangerously close to the truth here, and I catch his look. It’s not a promising one; it’s challenging, defensive even.

‘You think you have corners?’ he says, eyebrows raised. ‘Chloe, do you have any idea what my days are like?’

‘Well not really, no, because I’m stuck here by myself all day every day, aren’t I? I don’t know anything about anything any more. I read books that are hundreds of years old, and I clean the house.’ My mouth genuinely has a mind of its own, but I’m a teenager. I’m supposed to be moody and confrontational. It’s expected.

He drains his beer, and sighs. ‘So what is it that you want? Do you want to go hang out in town for a while? Maybe have a few drinks and go dancing? Is that it?’

Well, I’ve never ‘gone dancing’ in my life, although probably this isn’t the time to mention it.

‘No, of course not, I –’

He’s angry now, and I don’t think the beer is helping. He sounds almost as petulant and childish as me when he interrupts.

‘No, come on, what is it that you want to do instead of lying around all day reading? Am I really making this so very hard for you?’

‘No, that’s not what I’m saying, if you’d just listen –’

‘I do nothing but listen, Chloe! You want to be able to taste more, you don’t want to have to eat so much food all the time, you’re tired of the bad dreams, you’re always cold. I listen. But I’m not your personal wish-granter. I’m kind of occupied just now with trying to keep you breathing.’

He bangs his fist down hard on the table at the last word, and I flinch. I haven’t seen him angry like this since the night it happened, and with the nightmare fresh in my mind it’s too much. Tears sting the back of my already sore eyes and I stare fixedly down at my plate. Whatever I say is going to piss him off now; it’s like we’ve been slowly simmering away inside this house-shaped pressure cooker, and now it’s starting to whistle and shake and someone needs to let all the steam out or it’s going to blow us both clean away.

‘I’m lonely, Dad,’ I confess, embarrassed and desperate all at once. ‘I was never exactly Little Miss Popular or anything, I know, but I had friends, I had people I could talk to –’

‘You’ve got me!’ he shouts, and I’m scared. I push my chair back from the table and I don’t know whether to run upstairs, or outside, or what. So I just sit there, staring at my feet, waiting for this to end.

‘All of this,’ he waves a hand at the house in general, ‘it’s all for you, Chlo. So you can be comfortable. So your recovery can be as pleasant as I can possibly make it. To make up for the way things were… in the beginning. And in the meantime, I spend every waking moment trying to fix you – trying so damn hard to fix you – and now I’m not good enough to even talk to?’

He doesn’t normally drink, and I wonder if it’s the beer that’s making him like this. I don’t even know where he got it from, I never see any in the fridge. What if he has a stash of it down in the basement? What if he drinks more and more, gets angrier and angrier…

My head’s telling me to shut up and back off, but my mouth is off again before I can stop it.

‘What am I even supposed to talk to you about? There’s… nothing. I have no life!’

He stands up and kicks his chair back in one fast, aggressive move, and crosses to the sink, turning his back to me as he stares out of the window. I see his knuckles tightening and whitening against the sideboard.

‘You have a life, Chloe,’ he says coldly, quietly, and it’s scarier than when he shouts. ‘Don’t ever call it “nothing”. Not after what it cost.’

Mum was terrified of him that night, and I was scared for her, but not scared of Dad as such. It’s my turn now though. I want to be sick. I want to run. He’s angry at me, and he’s frightening me; my mouth opens, and I know I’m only going to make it worse, but I do it anyway.

‘I can’t stay like this… be like this. It’s too much. You have no idea what it’s like, Dad. You can’t keep me locked up forever. It doesn’t make it all just go away. It just traps it all in with me.’

He doesn’t say anything for so long that I start to wonder if I actually said it out loud after all. And then finally he says, ‘If I let you out, what do you think will happen?’

‘I don’t know,’ I fire back automatically. ‘You tell me.’

This is something we’ve skirted around so many times. Maybe we can finally get it all out in the open now. Maybe this is the way to put the nightmares to bed. I suppose there’s only one way to find out.

Dad sighs, and his shoulders drop. It’s as if all the tension goes out of him at once, and I’m not sure if he’s stalling, or if the discussion is over before it’s even started. He fusses around the sink for a bit, rinsing a couple of mugs, and taking deep breaths, and then he finally comes and sits back down. I scoot my chair back in to the table. We’re right back where we started, but everything has changed.

‘They’d kill me,’ he says, simply.

I look up and see that he’s deadly serious. I always thought, I don’t know, I mean, they’re the government. You don’t think about them killing anyone. Not here, I mean, this is good ol’ Blighty. Maybe a fine, or a few months in prison for breach of contract or something. But killing?

‘But Dad, they’re…’

‘Yes, I know. They’re the Good Guys. We’re all on the same side. Only they’re not, Chloe. Your mum was right about that. There’s absolutely nothing good about them.’

Well, clearly I need to think more carefully about whether I actually want to know the answer before I ask a question. Bloody hell.

‘And that’s nothing,’ he goes on, ‘compared to what they’d do to you.’

Oh. Well, good, that helps.

He moves his chair closer to mine and puts a hand on my arm. I pull away from him.

‘I don’t want to make things worse for you,’ he says. ‘But when it comes to things like leaving the house, or talking to people, you need to know. You need to understand. Nowhere’s safe from them Chloe, not really, not yet. When it comes down to it, yes, this house is still a cage for you – but it won’t be forever, I promise. Right now though, you need to be invisible. You need to not exist. For both our sakes.’

I take a deep breath in, and nod slowly, giving him what he wants because I suddenly have a question to ask. A massive question.

My voice drops almost to a whisper. ‘Why did you do it?’

I don’t think I even really expect him to answer. But he does – without hesitation, like he’s been practicing… justifying it to himself in his head all this time.

‘Because if I hadn’t, someone else would have. Because I wanted to know how far the boundaries of science as we know it could be pushed. Because I could. There are a thousand reasons Chloe. Because I thought I could make a difference, a positive difference. Because it was an opportunity I’d never get again.’

He’s misunderstood me completely. I didn’t mean why did he work for them – although it is a good question, and I don’t interrupt him. Because if there’s ‘absolutely nothing good about them’, then yeah, why work for them in the first place?

‘They told us the project would save lives, potentially millions of lives. It wasn’t until we were a couple of years into the work that things started to go sour, and by then, we were all in far too deep to ever get out. But you need to understand Chloe, it started out as a group of people trying to do a wholly good thing. They showed us video footage, wave after wave of soldiers being wiped out en masse – IEDs, poisonous gas, machine gun fire, a hundred different ways, all of them unforgettably horrific. Things that none of us could ever un-see. And then they asked us the question: what if, instead of sending fresh troops out to replace them, more lambs to the slaughter, we could just reanimate the fallen? What if. Whatever you want to think about the morals of doing something like that, of controlling a dead body, of all the things you’d have to put a person through… that’s someone who’s already dead, Chlo. That’s someone whose life is already lost, and has been lost trying to save the lives of others. If they could finish their original mission, no one else would need to be sent out after them. No one else would have to be killed. It was a beautiful concept. It was flawless.’

I think I’d draw the line at beautiful, and I don’t think I’d go anywhere near flawless, but I can understand his thinking at least. And I think Mum could have done, as well, if he’d explained it like this.

You’re just like him.

‘Then why didn’t you tell Mum? If you honestly believed it was a good thing… why did you never tell her about it? You lied to her for years Dad, decades even –’

‘I signed the official secrets act Chloe, that’s not something you can take lightly. It’s not a contract you can brush off, it’s a law in itself. And it’s a dangerous one. I’d have been insane to tell her. She knew who I worked for, and that I was involved with medical research. I never once lied to her.’

I’m desperate to blurt out the parental staple that he was definitely being ‘economical with the truth’, but at the same time I don’t want him to stop talking. I want to get all of this out in the open at long last, and this could be my only chance. I bite my tongue, and wait for more.

‘My job was to focus on brainwaves for the first few years, she knew I was involved in neuroscience, and cardiac arrest interlinked with it all later on, she knew that too. She knew every area I was working within, even if she didn’t know the reasons why. And she never once had an issue with it until the day she found out that it was for the military. You know how your mum feels… felt… about war. If she could’ve just calmed down, thought clearly past it…’

He trails off, sadly, but I don’t want him to stop.

‘How did she find out?’

He drops his head into his hands on the table, and tries to wipe away a rogue tear without me seeing.

‘My laptop. I must have left it unlocked, I still don’t know how… it auto-locked… but she jumped on it to use the internet for something. Said she couldn’t be bothered turning hers on, and mine was just sitting there.’ He stops and takes a few breaths before carrying on. ‘One of my browser links went to a video of our latest field trial. Project Rise. She said she clicked it accidentally. I don’t understand any of it… it was like she went looking.’

I catch his eye, wondering if he’s really suggesting that Mum hacked his work laptop somehow. Mum, whose only involvement with computers was solitaire and the odd email where it couldn’t be avoided. He looks away, and goes on.

‘Without any context Chloe it would’ve looked… vile, abhorrent, inexcusable, all the things she yelled at me that night. She wouldn’t let me explain.’

He stops again.

‘Explain what?’

He doesn’t answer me.

‘Dad, I’m listening. What wouldn’t she let you explain?’

He covers his eyes with his hands before answering.

‘We had to test our work, under carefully controlled conditions. We couldn’t just follow some soldiers around and wait for them to get shot. There had to be a rigged simulation. There was no other way of doing it, no other way we could know. Five lives were lost that could potentially save five million. And we almost had it working – almost got it right on that first run. No one had ever done anything like it before, it was ground breaking, we didn’t have any test cases to look back over, no past trials to consult. There was no other way.’ He doesn’t even try to hide the tears now. ‘Three of them got back up, just like we hoped, but when we gave them the first basic command they wouldn’t… they couldn’t… there were some… issues… with control. It looked awful, really awful, but it actually saved us years of theoretical research – seeing it… being able to test it like that. We got some incredible data, took comprehensive notes. They didn’t die for nothing, Chloe. They gave us everything.’

Wow. Well, there’s not much you can say to that really, is there.

Mum watched Dad’s government cronies kill some soldiers, try to reanimate them, and fail.

No wonder.

No bloody wonder.

I feel sick. Sick everywhere, not just in my stomach. My whole head is just full of… sickness. What he did. What I am because of what he did. All of it. In fact, I don’t just feel sick, I am sick. A sick perversion. A fallen, failed weapon. Created by evil, for evil. Because it’s never just about saving lives with the military, is it? It’s always as much about ending them as anything else. My head’s spinning. It’s too much, all of it, too much to take in. What did they tell their families? How the hell would they have got volunteers for something like that anyway? Oh, my god, were they volunteers? What if they didn’t…? I close my eyes and clamp my hands over my ears because if this is how the world is, how my world is, then I don’t want to see or hear any more. I’m rocking backwards and forwards in my seat slightly, and I feel like I’m caught up in a terrible storm: seasick and scared, only it’s not water that I’m riding on, it’s a sea of dead, decaying bodies and it’s all my fault.