Skin Deep (3 page)

‘Come back,’ I whispered. ‘Come
back
.’

He fidgeted, dancing with his front paws on the spot, and then he made his mind up. He shot off towards the boat, yapping.

‘No! Raggs! Heel! Heel!’

But he’d gone, leaving me cowering in the trees.

You have to scrub really hard to get splattered flies off windows.
Especially when there’s a week’s build-up of suicide bomber insects mashed on the glass. Maybe if insects could talk it’d be different. Maybe they’d warn each other in hushed whispers about the danger of Light. Don’t go there, one would say. My cousin went chasing Light. Always a fool, he was. Always after a new thrill and one day he never came back.

Then again, maybe not. The ability to talk didn’t seem to make humans less stupid.

A girl’s voice called out somewhere down the bank and I glanced up. Then a small ginger mutt came hurtling towards me out of the trees, barking like crazy. He slammed into my bucket, sending it into the canal, and then he cannoned into me.

‘Ouch!’

His paws scrabbled at my legs as he bounced up and down, yipping for attention. I crouched down and he leapt on to my knee. ‘Watch it, short stuff. Those are sharp claws.’ His tongue slobbered over my face. ‘All right, calm down. Where’ve you come from?’

‘Raggs! Come back!’ That voice again, sharper, panicking.

I rolled my eyes. What did she think I’d do with him? Wring his neck and throw him in the canal? Psycho narrowboat dog-murderer arrives in sleepy village – shock horror! We’d only been here two days. I’d expected longer before the locals found us and worked out we weren’t on holiday. But that’s villages for you. News travels fast and everybody knows each other’s business. So much for Mum thinking here’d be different.

The dog wanted to stay in my lap and get his ears stroked, but even if he hadn’t, I’d have hung on to his collar just to piss the girl off, stuck-up cow. Besides, he was a mad little pup and he might run into the canal. ‘Can’t have that, Shortie. We’d never find you in there. You’re the same colour as the water.’

‘Raggs! Raggs!’

‘Dead obedient, aren’t you?’ I said to him as he paid no attention to the voice and tried to hook his stumpy front legs over my shoulders so he could wash my hair too.

The girl appeared from out of the willow trees and stormed towards us. There was something odd about the way she walked – head down, hair over her face, shoulders tense. From what I could see, she had potential though – medium height, slim, sort of graceful even though she stomped along with her shoulders round her ears. Shiny hair the colour of a wheat field.

‘Hey, she’s hot,’ I whispered to the dog. ‘Stay here.’

She stopped about halfway, shouting ‘Raggs!’ again, not that it did any good. Her voice hitched on the name like she was close to crying and guilt pricked at me. Maybe she was a stupid up-herself bitch, but she was a girl on a deserted canal bank with a stranger . . . I didn’t like the idea I scared her.

‘Nice dog,’ I called out.

She didn’t come any closer.

‘He just wants to play,’ I shouted, but she still stayed close to the treeline. I gave up and pushed the dog down. ‘Go on, go back.’ He paid as much attention to me as he did to her, jumping straight back on to my legs. I nearly picked him up and took him over to her, but I reckoned I was less threatening crouched down. She started towards us again.

‘Raggs, come
here
!’

‘Who trained him?’ I said, grinning. ‘Cos you should ask for your money back.’

‘Raggs! Now.’

‘I think you’ll have to come and get him.’

‘I’m sorry he bothered you,’ she muttered when she got close enough for me to hear. I opened my mouth to say, ‘It’s all right, no worries,’ but the words choked in my throat when I saw the face behind the curtain of hair.

Jesus, her face . . .

The right side was chewed up by a wide scar running across her cheek, down her jaw and neck and disappearing into the collar of her T-shirt. Fuck, that was a mess. Not an old scar – still purple-red angry. But not brand new either as it was all healed up. The skin there wasn’t smooth like it should be, but rippled and puckered, especially on her neck.

What in hell had happened to her?

I didn’t see the rest of her face at first. The scar was all I could see, my eyes drawn to it like a driver rubbernecking at a crash scene.

She bent down and snatched the dog from me. That broke my trance and I caught a flash of her eyes springing tears before she turned away with the dog under her arm and hurried off.

I scrambled up. ‘Hey, no harm done. He was only playing . . .’

She all but ran down the path away from me.

No wonder she didn’t want to come over and get the dog. She must get that all the time – idiots staring at her with their gobs open, like Frankenstein’s monster had just lumbered into view.

You utter, utter dick! Why did you have to stare like that?’

Should I run after her and apologise? But what would I say . . . ‘Hey, I’m sorry I stared at your face’ . . . Hardly.

She disappeared into the trees.

I felt like shit. She only looked about fourteen and I’d made her cry. I should be ashamed of myself.

And I was.

I fished the bucket out of the canal. She’d gone and there was no way of making it right even if I had a clue where to start.

‘Ryan, I’ve got some tea for you here. Take a break,’ Mum called.

I went inside and Mum handed me tea in an enamel mug. I examined it. ‘What is it?’

‘Nettle.’ She beamed at me. ‘Very cleansing.’

Urgh! Gross. Reminded me of green piss. Not that I’d ever tasted green piss, but I reckoned nettle tea was how it would taste.

‘Did you finish the windows?’

‘No, I knocked the bucket over. I’ll go back out and do it.’

‘Drink your tea first. And you can tell me what you think of some of my new designs.’ Jewellery kit was spread across the table: stones, beads, silver wires and torcs and catches, leather cords.

I sat down on a floor cushion. No chance of chucking the tea in the canal then. Mum held up a silver torc with a jade stone carved into the shape of a dragon.

‘It’s great, Mum. You should make more of those. They’ll sell for sure.’

‘Good. It took me ages to get that right. Very delicate job, especially the tail. What’s wrong with your face?’

‘Nothing. Why?’

‘You keep rubbing it.’ She put her fingers on her right cheek. ‘Here.’

I flushed hot. ‘I do?’

She poked her tongue between her teeth in concentration as she threaded red beads on to a leather thong. ‘Mmm.’ Her hair was piled up in a scrunchie on top of her head. She looked like a pineapple.

‘Mum, if you get injured, like an accident, they can do plastic surgery to take the scars away, can’t they?’

‘Yes, but I don’t think they can make them disappear. Sometimes perhaps, but not always.’

‘What would give you really bad scars?’

‘I’ve no idea. I once saw a child with a terrible scar from pulling a hot pan off the cooker. Why?’

‘Just wondered. I’ll go and finish the windows.’

I filled the bucket again at the sink and managed to chuck the nettle tea away at the same time.

As I scrubbed the rest of the insect debris off the windows, I couldn’t get the puckered skin on the girl’s face out of my head, or the look in her eyes when she’d turned away. She’d have been pretty before that. Nothing incredible, just normal average pretty like a lot of girls are. Kind of cute in a quiet way. If I ran into her again, I wouldn’t stare. After all, I used to hate it when kids stared at me and Mum.

I towed Raggs down the lane away from the canal and we looped through the village so I didn’t have to go near that boat again.
The stupid dog kept pausing to look anxiously at me and I tried to stop the tears rolling down my cheeks.

Even before the accident, that boy would be out of my league. I guessed he was a few years older than me and he was tall, around six foot, but he didn’t have that stretched-out look boys have when they’ve grown too fast. His shoulders were too broad for that and he had a whippy muscled thing going on that made me wonder if he worked out. The honey-coloured hair was streaked blonder on top and his nose had a touch of sunburn as if he spent a lot of time outside. He wasn’t boy-band pretty, but nobody would’ve thought him anything other than good-looking. Especially without a shirt.

If my feelings had gone away when I became ugly, life would be easier, but the wobble in my tummy when I saw a boy like that was still there. Even though he looked at me like I was a monster.

The tears fell faster, blurring the road ahead. ‘It’s all your fault, you useless dog! I told you to come back. I hate you!’

Raggs pulled out of the clump of brambles he was nosing in and ran towards me, his tail wagging.

‘Come on, you. We’re going home.’ Forget the weekend stretching ahead of me. I wanted to go home and crawl under my duvet and hide. Forever.

We passed Charlie in the garden where he was kicking a football around on the lawn. ‘Want to be in goal?’ he yelled as he dribbled the ball along on spindly ten-year-old legs.

‘No!’

He stopped and stared at me in surprise as I hurried into the house, leaving Raggs behind with him. ‘Jen, what’s up?’

I slammed the back door and ran upstairs.

In the bottom of my wardrobe, right at the back and wrapped in a towel, I’d hidden a make-up mirror, the only mirror I still had. I knelt down and unwrapped it with shaking hands. A wave of nausea rose up when I looked in it. It was as bad as ever. Like a horror film. The ugliest thing I’d seen outside the movies. No wonder that boy had looked disgusted. I bet he’d wanted to throw up at the sight of me. I did.

Better to have been Lindsay. Better to be dead than look like this.

The thing that lived inside me since the accident woke again. The thing that chewed me with grinding teeth. I wanted to hurl the mirror across the room. Scream. Break everything in sight. Rip the curtains down. Smash the window. Let the animal thing out.

But good girls don’t do that, don’t make a fuss, don’t upset parents. And I was a good girl so I curled up on the floor and sobbed silently instead.

When they took the bandages off in hospital for the first time, my dad had looked at me and cried. In fourteen years I’d never seen my dad cry, but he sat there and wept as if something inside him had broken. Mum tried to make him to stop, but he couldn’t so a nurse came and led him away gently. They weren’t sure they should give me the mirror after that. Mum and Dad were supposed to support me, but that wasn’t going quite to plan. I had to look in the end though. It couldn’t be put off forever. I told them that.

‘Now remember, you’ve still got a lot of healing left to do. This graft needs to take and it’ll be a while before the colour fades. The mask will reduce the scarring as long as you wear it properly. In a year’s time, it’ll look very different,’ the nurse said.

Mum’s hands trembled as the nurse raised the mirror to my face.

I looked in it and any shred of hope I had was butchered.

They gave me a jab to calm me down and the counsellor came later. Her face swam woozily in front of me. ‘Jenna, I need to check first that you understand what the doctors have told you about your burns.’

Yes, I’m not stupid. Third degree. Full thickness burns. They’ve been through all this with me when they harvested my skin for the grafts, and then again afterwards.

It means the burns are skin deep.

And beauty’s skin deep.

Mum knocked on the door. ‘Jenna, I’m going to the library. Do you want to come?’

No, I never wanted to leave the house again.

But that wouldn’t do. I’d promised I’d go out when the mask came off after those six long months. They’d been patient and hadn’t hassled me before that, but now they took every opportunity to get me out of the house. Refusing would lead to one of those conversations I didn’t have the strength for.

We got into Mum’s red Corsa and she drove carefully into town, making a fifteen-minute journey last twenty. She always expected me to be nervous in cars now, but I wasn’t. How much worse could it get?

Once we were in the library, she left me alone in the Fantasy section while she headed for the Crime and Thriller shelves. I found something I liked the look of and settled into a comfy chair to check it out. I hated taking a book home only to find it was unreadable so I always flicked through the first chapter before deciding.

I heard a voice at the desk counter next to me. ‘Is the craft shop closed?’

I looked up sharply. The boy from the canal . . . He was still in the shorts, but he had a white T-shirt on now.

‘Yes, the lady who runs it has gone for lunch,’ the librarian replied. ‘Can I help?’