Beneath the Skin by Sandra Ireland Page B

glass.’
    She sighed. ‘Just one. A small one.’
    â€˜I’ll stick on this pizza, to soak it up.’ He laughed at her scowl. He didn’t know why he was suddenly in a good mood, not with the way the last couple of hours had gone. He ripped open the pizza box and switched on the oven. The wine was a dry white, nice and chilled. He found two glasses and poured. The anticipation warmed him.
    â€˜So Alys was the wild one . . . when you were bairns?’
    Mouse smiled. ‘We were both wild. We lived in a castle, back then, so we had plenty room to be wild.’
    â€˜A castle? I’m impressed.’
    â€˜Don’t be. It was a dump. Crumbling about our ears. Mum hated it but it had been in Dad’s family for ages and I don’t think he saw what she saw – the damp and the mice and the endless cleaning. We didn’t see it either, as wee ones. We just enjoyed the space.’
    â€˜So tell me about it. I’ve never met anyone who lived in a castle before.’ He sat down and took a sip of his wine. She coloured a little, flattered by the attention.
    â€˜Oh God. There were draughts and leaks and it was dark everywhere, and most times when you put the light on, the bulbs would blow. Dad said it was the damp and the old wiring. Alys said it was the ghosts sucking up all the energy. She has a great imagination. I suppose my favourite place was down by the old cow byre that Dad used as a garage. I used to hide there, in amongst the weeds. I can still smell the crushed nettles and dock leaves . . . I loved the foxgloves. You could make the little purple bells pop if you squeezed them the right way, or you could wear them on your fingers like fairy thimbles.’
    She looked suddenly very young. ‘I remember my mother pegging sheets out on the rope. She’d prop it up with a forked pole, and the laundry used to dance in the wind.’
    Her eyes sparkled when she looked at him, but there must have been something in his face – she stopped and raised the glass to her lips, taking a cautious sip. ‘Sorry. I’m being boring.’
    â€˜No, no. I was just thinking of my mother’s washing line.’
    â€˜Not your mother?’ she teased.
    â€˜Nope. Just the washing line.’ He drained his glass in one gulp and got to his feet. The chair scraped harshly on the floor. ‘I’ll check on the pizza.’

19
    Mam’s washing line is wrapped so tight around a limb of the old tree that the rope has rubbed a gall in the bark. Robert isn’t that good on trees; not like Steven who can name trees, garden birds and movie stars like he’s eaten an encyclopaedia. The tree smells like the green disinfectant Mam puts down the bog and its bark . . . He loves its bark. It’s thick and scabby, like a pine cone, with deep cracks you can stick your fingertips in. Sometimes it flakes away and the wood beneath is all smooth and dewy like new skin.
    They’re all up in the tree: Robert and Steven and Tom, perched in the lower branches like cats. Tom’s a ginger tom, but you can’t say that or he’ll clout you. They’ve been watching a Western; the villain had been hoisted into a tree and hanged, his dusty spurred boots jerking in mid-air. Mam had come in and turned off the telly and they’d all groaned, and she’d snapped, ‘Get outside and play. Watching all that rubbish.’
    So they’d fled to the back garden. Sitting up in the tree with legs wrapped around branches they eye the washing line and wonder what hanging is like. Robert is worried about how tight the rope is around the branch.
    â€˜It’s making it bleed, look.’
    â€˜That’s sap.’ Steven peers at the wound over his glasses. ‘Tree blood.’
    â€˜I think we should untie it.’
    â€˜Mam’d kill you,’ says Steven, screwing up his nose.
    â€˜Do you bleed when they hang you?’
    â€˜Man,