Read Under Your Skin for Free Online

to think about what to tell her, and how to tell it. And I must ring Philip. It’s terrible that I haven’t. During my mother’s final illness, I was on the phone to him every day. It’s peculiar, disturbing, that I haven’t spoken to him yet. Another sign, if I needed one, of the distance between us. I get to my feet and collect the DI’s mug, rolling up my sleeves as an indication that I am about to wash up. I see him looking at my arms. I follow his eyes. My inner forearms are scratched and grazed, seed pearlsof dried blood at the crease, and my bracelet’s gone, the bracelet Philip gave me for my birthday. I must have dropped it. That isn’t what the policeman is interested in, though. I give my wrists a rub.
    “Undergrowth,” I say. “When I was pushing through. I didn’t even notice. Good thing I was wearing a long-sleeved dress for the show or viewers would have been sending me literature on self-harm. Be nice to me,” I add, in an American accent (why?): “I am literally scarred by the experience.”
    Luckily, he doesn’t seem to hear. He is putting his jacket back on. It is greasy around the cuffs and at the hem where his fingers have held on to tug at the zip.
    “I just need to take a DNA swab for elimination purposes,” he says, “and I tell you what would be really helpful: the trainers you were wearing this morning. For the tread.”
    “Of course.”
    He rummages in his inside pocket for a plastic bag and cotton bud and, in a sudden, almost hilariously humiliating sequence, I have opened my mouth, emitting a little haze of lemon and ginger, and he has stabbed the cotton bud in, pulled it out, and sealed it in his little bag. I leave the kitchen in a hurry and run upstairs. I pound the stairs more noisily than I need to. I let out a laugh. He had that plastic bag there, waiting. I think of boys I knew in the past, in my Yeovil teenage years, and the ever-ready foil-creased Durex in their back pockets. In the bedroom, I make a silent scream at my own face in the dressing-table mirror, just to release some tension. I grab the trainers from the cupboard and run back down. When I pass Marta’s room on the half-landing, I hear music from behind the door—a thumping electronic sound, too much bass for my liking.
    DI Perivale is in the room that opens to the right of the front door—he has just wandered in there by himself, as if he owned the place. It is two rooms knocked through, a pale, creamy, sumptuous display of a room, glass coffee tables and sink-in-able sofas andpuffed-up cushions, a room, of course, we never use, and DI Perivale is standing by one of the fireplaces, looking at the framed photographs.
    He picks one up. I know what it is from here. It is of Philip and me on our wedding day. I am laughing into the camera, and Philip has one arm round my waist, pulling me to him. Philip, wild dark hair, wide-eyed, ridiculously boyish, is in a baggy charity-shop suit. I’m wearing a wrinkly white dress—in that clingy polyester that was the edge of cool back then; it shrunk up when you washed it; you had to pull it into shape with the iron. In the awkward sideways pose you strike when you think you have to squeeze to fit into the frame, I look as if I am about to topple down the steps of Chelsea Town Hall. I remember thinking, I can’t believe he’s chosen me! He’s married me! We had a party in the pub, and the rest of the weekend we spent in our flat with no clothes on, because we were newlyweds, newly- mets —we’d known each other six months—and those were the days when we couldn’t get enough of each other.
    DI Perivale holds the photograph out and to my surprise I have to resist the temptation to dash it from his hands. I make some comment about how young we look, but he has an odd expression on his face, as if there is something I am not getting.
    “Is it just me?” he says.
    “Is what just you?”
    He shakes his head, getting rid of a thought. “Sorry. Nothing. It’s