Thin Skin Read online

  To my parents who, other than this acknowledgement, are too supportive and wise to write about in a novel.

  In memory of Hilary Small (1978-2001)

  ‘I realize I make exactly the same scream whether a great white is attacking me or there’s a piece of seaweed brushing my leg.’

  –Axl Rose

  Contents

  Cast of Characters

  part one

  how it ended

  how it started

  different men’s beds

  scott says

  to do list

  nap time

  the red-knuckle ride

  drew barrymore or natalie portman?

  best policy

  change of address

  way back when

  out of cash

  why sebastian should have been happy I dumped him

  compare and contrast

  i love you, fuck off

  pa

  co-starring

  the new world order

  maybe he just doesn’t fancy her

  part two

  a challenge

  a ghost

  the hustle

  appraisal

  i was there first

  rachel’s story

  critical respect

  rachel loses it

  thank you

  fat ass

  i invented russell crowe

  get me out of here

  the bug man

  the morning after

  last chance

  bad room-mate

  the other side

  sebastian sorts it out

  eastern european irritation

  ethnic wisdom

  i used to be frightened of flowers

  time to get up now

  you again?

  going-home present

  stick a fork in me, I’m done

  flavors

  the start

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Also Available by Emma Forrest

  Cast of Characters

  Ruby (a fuck-up)

  Liev (a lost love)

  Rachel (a grown-up)

  Sean (an auteur)

  Aslan (an empty vessel)

  Sebastian (a beauty)

  Scott (a mistake)

  Cyrinda (a room-mate)

  part one

  how it ended

  ‘Mother’, I muttered under my breath, but the bartender thought I was saying ‘another’ and brought me a fresh vodka tonic. I used to say it all the time: ‘Mother’, ‘Mommy’, ‘Mom’. As a mantra, sometimes, when I couldn’t think. ‘Quit it!’ she’d giggle. ‘You’re making me nervous.’ She was the only mother I know of who really giggled: ‘tee hee hee hee’ she’d honk, like a Frenchman in a comedy skit. She was the only mother I know of who said ‘motherfucker’ – not often, but when she did say it, listening to a politician on the radio, or surveying the poor workmanship of the man who cleaned our windows, it was with barely suppressed delight.

  I lit a cigarette and looked out of the window, watching the blue sky tear under the weight of pink. When the blue bounced back, it was bruised and damaged, five shades closer to black than it had been before. The keyboard whirr emanating from the practice space beneath the sidewalk offered funereal condolences on the sky’s loss. Suddenly the music stopped. The grating on the sidewalk scraped, clanged and opened. Into the semi-light blinked Aslan, fumbling in his pocket for a Marlboro.

  Cigarette in mouth, he looked at the stars. I stared hard at him, ten feet away, but he did not lose his concentration and he did not stop staring at the sky until the moment he took the last drag on his cigarette. Then, as if snapped out of a slumber, as though all the stars had been turned up like bright lights signaling closing time, he jolted back to life. He stubbed the Marlboro underfoot and headed back into the basement, pulling the grating closed behind him.

  Without stopping to consider whether or not he wanted to see me, I paid the check and left the bar. I didn’t bother to check my reflection on the way out. If I had, I would have seen a mad woman, although I might have dismissed that as bad lighting.

  I tapped on the grating but there was no response. I knelt down, the concrete kissing my knee lustlessly through the rip in my jeans. With all my might, I lifted up the grating and followed the stairs down toward the sound.

  The keyboard stopped. ‘Who’s there?’ asked Aslan.

  ‘It’s me.’ He offered no recognition, so I added, ‘Ruby.’

  He nodded but did not reply.

  ‘How are you doing, Aslan? Long time no see. The rest of filming went really great. I wish you could have come to the wrap party. I hear you’re really good in it.’

  Aslan, whose name was the most nervous-sounding part of my terrified sentence, went back to playing his keyboard and I stood there feeling sick and stupid in the dark. Because there was so little light in the basement he could not see me clearly and I turned my weirdness up louder so he would know he had to help. If he heard, he didn’t help. He just turned the keyboard up louder and kept playing.

  I sat miserably on the bottom step and tried to will myself into another attempt at conversation. Every time I opened my mouth, I felt his dislike slap hard against my teeth. My God, I cringed, Aslan is a flower child. Aslan hates no one. He’s famous for it. He loves the wind and the trees and the flowers. But the wind and the trees and the flowers are a whole lot easier to love or even to like than I am.

  Finally, in a voice so quiet that the law of diminishing returns ensured it pierced the room, I threw him a question he could not ignore. ‘Aslan? Am I going to die?’ Because I couldn’t think of anything to say. Not ‘How’s the music going?’ or ‘What’s up?’ or even ‘I like your shirt’. All I could do was sit at the foot of the stairs as the cars rolled overhead and ask again, ‘Am I going to die?’

  ‘I don’t care to discuss it,’ he sniffed.

  And he packed up the keyboard, packed up the drum kit, packed up the bass that was lying on its side. When he could pack up no more, he laid the instruments in a corner of the dank room and walked past me, up the stairs and out into the world. I followed him. He turned once, to secure the grating with a padlock. And then he was gone, carried along by his anger, out of sight before I had time to break down for him.

  I am going to die.

  Om. Om. Om.

  I am going to die.

  Tonight’s the night, baby.

  It was only a suggestion that rose to the surface because I was trying to get a good-looking boy to pay attention to me. Although he studiously ignored me, when he stormed off, the suggestion was still there, unwilling to leave me by myself, worried about me, worried that I might do something bad.

  ‘Do something good, Ruby. Do something to help you and everyone around you: kill yourself.’

  ‘If you will hold my hand.’

  ‘I will be with you all the way.’

  So the thought of suicide and I walked home, arm in arm, laughing at the wind like young lovers. It was a considerable walk, but we didn’t really notice how many blocks westwards we were pounding, because we had so much to talk about.

  ‘Wait there,’ I said, as I put my key in the door. ‘My landlord is very strict. I am not supposed to bring things like you home with me.’

  ‘Things like me?’ huffed the thought of suicide.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. But you know what I mean.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ soothed the thought. ‘Let’s just get on with it.’

  how it started

  I remember when Liev left. He washed his face before he did it, as if he wanted to be neat to break my heart.

  I cried every day for a month. At the
end of the month there were no more tears and what came out was like the bile after vomit. I struggled for air as the tearless sobs racked through my small frame. My father was impressed. It was the first truly great display of emotion I had ever shown. He had always been disappointed at how sensible I was, how calm and easy-going. As a baby I would mew rather than scream. Now I was his perfect daughter. He even sat on my bed and held me, stroked my hair and called me his ‘sweet, sensitive baby’. I wanted to enjoy it. Although I could see his arms around me and his hands in my hair, I couldn’t feel them.

  It didn’t help that we met there, in my parents’ house. I was still living at home and he was lodging. Like my parents and me, Liev was an artist. He was considerably better than I. His art was far more imposing and complete than mine, which seemed inevitable since he was physically so much bigger than me; his huge hand could cover my entire face. In bed, I liked to lie across his chest, like a cat, and have him stroke my hair.

  Although he discouraged me from sucking my thumb as I slept, it was an old habit I had never managed to shake.

  From the start, Liev had babied me. Bought me stuffed toys from the children’s store, shampoo in the shape of a cat, invented a story for me about a magic bunny rabbit. I felt myself regressing, but it was so pleasant, like an afternoon nap stretched out over months. He helped me get to sleep, held me tight in the crook of his huge arm. I twirled the fur on his wrist to help myself nod off. I was so anxious back then. I was anxious about my painting, that it didn’t measure up to my parents’ expectations, that I could never emerge from their shadow. I would throw tantrums, convinced my work was childish, unformed and crude.

  My parents approved of the relationship. Mother took a photo of us entwined on the hammock that hung in the garden. Liev read to me as he petted my hair. After he left I lay in the hammock and couldn’t read because the tears had blurred my vision. I couldn’t eat because I only liked food when Liev cooked it, or when Liev undid the wrapper. I couldn’t even find it in myself to tie my own shoelaces.

  ‘Go with it, Ruby,’ gushed my father. ‘Utilize this pain. Use it to create, to start a revolution. A revolution in your heart and in your art.’

  My art hung on the bedroom wall, Paul Klee-esque animal daubings.

  My parents had a dinner party the night before he left. Several famous actors, artists and musicians attended. My father spent the evening sequestered on the porch with a Hollywood starlet. Her slip was showing at the dinner table, and so were her intentions. Mother hid herself away in the kitchen, stirring things that didn’t need to be stirred and leaving well alone the things that ought to have been unsettled.

  There had been a huge kerfuffle that week because I had dyed my hair blond, by myself in Mother’s bathroom. There were chunks of dark amongst the light where I hadn’t been able to reach. My father winced every time I floated past, a cloud of angry blond. He liked to think of me as his little baby when he liked to think of me at all.

  The starlet was a blond, although it was better done than mine.

  Although I didn’t usually drink, I tipped back two glasses of champagne in rapid succession before Liev snatched the glass from my hand. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  The bubbles kicked against my stomach and I named them in my head, these bubble babies. Out loud, I hissed, ‘You like me to be perfect, Liev, pure vestal virgin. But fuck you. I’ll drink if I like.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that. You don’t have to talk like that to get my attention.’

  ‘Don’t I? I saw you looking at her too. Why don’t you both fuck her?’

  ‘Ruby!’

  The tears began to roll down my round pink cheeks.

  Suddenly I breathed, ‘I want to go to bed. Take me to bed.’

  I was scooped up in his arms, a bedraggled, stinking romance heroine.

  ‘Tuck me in, Liev.’

  He tucked me in. My lipstick had been wiped away. Beneath the stench of cigarettes, my hair still smelled faintly of peroxide.

  I reached forward to kiss him goodnight. In a flash, my tongue was in his mouth, melting on his gums like cotton candy. For a moment his tongue met mine, a sliver of a soupçon of the tip.

  ‘Baby,’ I whispered as he rested his mouth on mine. ‘Baby, I want to fuck.’

  He pulled away from me. Like lips freed from an ice cube, he felt completely refreshed and totally burned. Shivering, he walked over to the en-suite bathroom. Fading into sleep, I watched him wash his face.

  I slept well that night, dreaming of him. He thought of me all night too, but did not sleep. By the time I woke up, hungover but fizzy with love, he had already been gone for several hours. Discovering his absence, I waited until eleven to wake my parents. By lunchtime I had taken up residence on the windowsill, my face pressed against the glass. By afternoon I had retreated to bed. A week later I was still there.

  ‘Daddy, oh Daddy. I thought we had so much time together. I was just getting to know him. I thought we had the rest of our lives.’

  I couldn’t even bring myself to masturbate because I had to think of him to come.

  ‘I’ll never love again.’

  ‘Ruby,’ my father sighed, pushing aside a stuffed toy as he squeezed me tight, ‘you’re twelve years old.’

  ‘But I feel it. I feel it here.’ I lay my hand on my pale, protruding stomach. For the rest of my life, I would wake with a start, in different men’s beds, wondering where he was, with whom and if it had all been a dream.

  different men’s beds

  I hadn’t meant to cry during sex. And I hadn’t meant to go mute for the next hour while Scott shook me and begged, ‘What? What have I done?’ And I hadn’t meant to stay awake whilst he was sleeping. And I never planned to abandon the sleeping man who had just served his grieving wife with divorce papers. I didn’t mean to make dicks hard. I just wanted to sleep in someone else’s bed. I didn’t want to have to wash my sheets and I didn’t want to sleep on them either. I’d pretend there was nothing between Scott’s legs, like a Ken doll, but then it would snake up, inflate and get hard. I wouldn’t touch it, but it would touch me.

  I tiptoed out. The sleeping man had left his wife because I forced him to. But it was all a terrible case of mistaken identity. I had believed I wanted him enough to take him from her. Then as soon as I had him, I realized it was like thinking a new kind of shampoo was going to change my life. I thought of Scott less as a lover than as a hair-care product.

  The night I left him, it wasn’t night-time anymore. It was the early hours of the morning, close, by my estimate, to the hour Liev must have left me. Just like me, the day I woke up to a dying mother and absent lover, the sleeping man wouldn’t know what he had done wrong either.

  I had gone out there to audition for a hundred-million-dollar Roman epic. Every actress in Hollywood was fixated on it because it was a great role, or they knew it was going to be a smash, or they knew they’d look cute in sandals. Big, big names deigned to take screen tests. As I walked down the hallway to the hotel suite to meet the producers, Jennifer Lopez was on her way out with her entourage, their cellphones ringing in harmony. She looked like a silent film star and I wondered if she had ever seen a silent film or if she couldn’t bear to be around quiet.

  The producers told me how great I looked and I told them they looked great too. They did. It’s only in high fashion that the females working behind the scenes – the editors, journalists and designers – are shockingly ugly. These women were as pretty as actresses but obviously not self-loathing enough. Even with my good face on, they saw in me the worst of what might have been if they hadn’t gotten over their pre-pubescent dreams of stardom.

  They had me read with the actor already cast as the villain. I was auditioning to be his sister and I tried, hard as I could, to make my face more like his, but I guess they just thought I was grimacing because they let me go after a couple of lines.

  I visited a psychic the morning of my audition who told me, ‘I see a future for you inv
olving thick kohl eyeliner.’ She recognized me. She had read in the trade papers that I was up for the film. LA psychics watch the trade papers closely.

  At the hotel bar that night, Scott picked me up and I let him because I knew, before he opened his mouth, that he would mean nothing to me. We went back to my room where I threw up in the bathroom and then went back in the living room and gave him head on the sofa. I didn’t brush my teeth before I did it. I was trying to poison him. Like an idiot, he rang me the next day. And the next. He rang from his office and his Porsche and the health club and the set of the film he was producing. He offered to have me cast in his next project but I wouldn’t let him. I could never have lived with myself if all those awful blow-jobs were actually in exchange for something. Pretending I was poisoning him was enough for me. When I realized, too late, that he wasn’t sick or dying and seemed to be getting happier and, God forbid, more moral the more time he spent with me, I had to cut him loose.

  I hacked off my hair in the bathroom, as if disguising myself at the scene of a crime. I had seen pictures of his wife. She was pretty. Clearly caught between trophy wife and career woman. She had honey highlights in her hair, but I could see she was really a brunette. Her eyes were dark as marbles. I imagined her taking them out of their sockets at night and rolling them across the floor, giggling in pink silk pajamas: ‘tee hee hee hee’.

  I dyed my hair a lot that year. I was always escaping from the scene of a crime. Calling a cab from a payphone outside Mel’s 24-hour drive-in, I made it to the first plane of the new day. The other passengers in first class eyed me with curiosity and disdain.

  I sat in my seat and listened to my Walkman. I felt the music coming out of me, as much as it went in. I thought about the sounds I made during sex. Sometimes I had to keep myself from laughing. I felt nothing. At worst, it hurt. At best, it was an irritation, like a fly buzzing around my head. I thought about speak-singing at the end of pop songs: ‘I’m crazy for you,’ Madonna said, dropping from her Minnie Mouse squeak to a deep, throaty purr. I said it once in bed, for my own amusement: ‘I’m crazy for you.’ Scott’s breath quickened.