The Skin Map (2 page)

So far, so good, he thought as he charged down the narrow walkway—really, nothing more than an alley providing service access for the shops on the parallel streets. After walking for two minutes, he started looking for the crossing street at the end. Two more minutes passed . . . He should have reached the end by now, shouldn’t he?

Then it started to rain.

Kit picked up his speed as the rain poured into the alley from low, swirling clouds overhead. He hunched his shoulders, put his head down, and ran. A wind rose out of nowhere and whipped down the length of the blank brick canyon, driving the rain into his eyes.

He stopped.

Pulling his phone from his pocket, he flipped open the screen. No signal.

“Bloody useless,” he muttered.

Drenched to the skin, water dripping from the ends of his hair and tip of his nose, he shoved the phone back into his pocket. Enough of this, he decided. Abort mission. He made a swift about-face and, shoes squelching with every step, headed back the way he had come. Good news: the wind ceased almost at once and the rain dwindled away; the storm diminished as quickly as it had arisen.

Dodging one oily puddle after another, he jogged along and had almost regained the alley entrance at Grafton Street when he heard someone calling him—at least, he thought that is what he had heard. But with the spatter of rain from the eaves of the buildings round about, he could not be sure.

He slowed momentarily, and a few steps later he heard the call again—unmistakable this time: “Hello!” came the cry. “Wait!”

Keep moving,
said the voice inside his head. As a general rule it kept him from getting tangled in the craziness of London’s vagrant community. He glanced over his shoulder to see a white-haired man stumbling toward him out of the damp urban canyon. Where had he come from? Most likely a drunk who had been sleeping it off in a doorway. Roused by the storm, he had seen Kit and recognized an easy mark. Such was life; he prepared to be accosted.

“Sorry, mate,” Kit called back over his shoulder as he turned away. “I’m skint.”

“No! Wait!”

“No change. Sorry. Got to run.”

“Cosimo, please.”

That was all the vagrant said, but it welded Kit to the spot.

He turned and looked again at the beggar. Tall, and with a full head of thick silvery hair and a neatly trimmed goatee, he was dressed in charity-shop chic: simple white shirt, dark twill trousers, both sturdy, but well-worn. The fact that he stuffed the cuffs of his trousers into his high-top shoes and wore one of those old-timey greatcoats that had a little cape attached to the shoulders made him look like a character out of Sherlock Holmes.

“Look, do I know you?” asked Kit as the fellow hastened nearer.

“I should hope so, my boy,” replied the stranger. “One would think a fellow would know his own great-grandfather.”

Kit backed away a step.

“Sorry I’m late,” continued the old man. “I had to make certain I wasn’t followed. It took rather longer than I anticipated. I was beginning to fear I’d missed you altogether.”

“Excuse me?”

“So, here we are. All’s well that ends well, what?”

“Listen, mate,” protested Kit. “I think you’ve got the wrong guy.”

“What a joy it is to meet you at long last, my son,” replied the old gentleman, offering his hand. “Pure joy. But of course, we haven’t properly met. May I introduce myself ? I am Cosimo Livingstone.” He made a very slight bow.

“Okay, so what’s the joke?” demanded Kit.

“Oh, it is no joke,” the old man assured him. “It’s quite true.”

“No—you’re mistaken.
I
am Cosimo Livingstone,” he insisted. “And anyway, how do you know my name?”

“Would you mind very much if we discussed this walking? We really should be moving along.”

“This is nuts. I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“Ah, well, I think you’ll find that you don’t have much choice.”

“Not true.”

“Sorry?”

“Listen, mate, I don’t know how you got hold of my name, but you must have me mixed up with someone else,” Kit said, hoping to sound far more composed than he actually felt at the moment. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t know you and I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“Fair enough,” replied the stranger. “What would it take to change your mind?”

“Forget it,” said Kit, turning away. “I’m out of here.”

“What sort of proof would you like? Names, birth dates, family connections—that sort of thing?”

He started off. “I’m not listening.”

“Your father is John. Your mother is Harriet. You were born in Weston-super-Mare, but your family soon moved to Manchester, where your father worked as a managerial something or other in the insurance trade and your mother was a school administrator. When you were twelve, your family upped sticks again and resettled in London. . . .”

Kit halted. He stood in the middle of the alley, wrestling with the twin sensations of alarm and disbelief. He turned around slowly.

The old man stood smiling at him. “How am I doing so far?”

Even in the uncertain light of the alley, the family resemblance was unmistakable—the strong nose, the heavy jaw and broad brow, the hair that rippled like waves from the forehead, the broad lips and dark eyes, just like his father’s and obnoxious Uncle Leonard’s. It was all of a basic design that Kit had seen repeated with greater or lesser variation in family members his entire life.

“Since university—Manchester, Media Studies, whatever
that
is—you have been working here and there, doing nothing of any real value—”

“Who are you?” demanded Kit. “How do you know these things?”

“But I’ve already told you,” chuckled the old gentleman. “I am your great-grandfather.”

“Oh, yeah? Would this be the great-grandfather who went down to the shops for a loaf of bread one morning and never came back? The same who abandoned a wife and three kids in Marylebone in 1893?”

“Dear me, you know about that, do you? Well, lamentably, yes. But it wasn’t a loaf of bread; it was milk and sausages.” The old man’s gaze grew keen. “Tell me, what did
you
go out for this morning?”

Kit’s mouth went dry.

“Hmm?” replied the stranger. “What was it? Tin of beans? Daily paper? This is how it always happens, don’t you see?”

“No . . . ,” said Kit, feeling more unhinged by the second.

“It’s a family proclivity, you might say. A talent.” The older man took a step nearer. “Come with me.”

“Why, in the name of everything that’s holy, would I go anywhere with you?”

“Because, my dear boy, you are a lonely twenty-seven-year-old bachelor with a worthless education, a boring no-hope job, a stalled love life, and very few prospects for the improvement of your sad lot.”

“How dare you! You don’t know anything about me.”

“But I know
everything
about you, old chap.” The old man took another step closer. “I thought we had already established that.”

“Yeah? What else?”

The elder gentleman sighed. “I know that you are an overworked drone in a soul-destroying cube farm where you have been passed over for promotion two times in the last nine months. The last time you don’t know about because they didn’t even bother telling you.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“You spend too much time alone, too much time watching television, and too little time cultivating the inner man. You live in a squalid little flat in what is referred to as a no-go zone from which your friends, of whom you see less and less, have all fled for the suburbs long ago with wives and sprogs in tow. You are exceedingly unlucky in love, having invested years in a romantic relationship which, as you know only too well, is neither romantic nor much of a relationship. In short, you have all the social prospects of a garden gnome.”

Kit had to admit that except for the low crack about his love life, the old geezer was remarkably close to the mark.

“Is that enough?”

“Who
are
you?”

“I’m the man who has come to rescue you from a life of quiet desperation and regret.” He smiled again. “Come, my boy. Let’s sit down over a cup of coffee and discuss the matter like gentlemen. I’ve gone to a very great deal of trouble to find you. At the very least, you could spare me a few minutes out of your busy life.”

Kit hesitated.

“Cup of coffee—thirty minutes. What could it hurt?”

Trepidation and curiosity wrestled one another for a moment. Curiosity won. “Okay,” he relented. “Twenty minutes.”

The two started walking toward the street. “I’ve got to call my girlfriend and tell her I’ll be a little late,” Kit said, pulling out his phone. He flipped it open and pressed the speed-dial key for Mina’s number. When nothing happened, he glanced at the screen to see the “Network Not Connected” message blinking at him. He waved the phone in the air, then looked again. Still no tiny bars indicating a signal.

“Not working?” asked the older man, watching him with a bemused expression.

“Must be the buildings,” mumbled Kit, indicating the close brick walls on either hand. “Blocking the signal.”

“No doubt.”

They continued on, and upon approaching the end of the alley, Kit thought he heard a sound at once so familiar, and yet so strange, it took him a full two seconds to place it. Children laughing? No, not children. Seagulls.

He had little time to wonder about this, for at that moment they stepped from the dim alleyway and into the most dazzling and unusual landscape Kit had ever seen.

CHAPTER 2
In Which Lines Are Drawn, and Crossed

B
efore his bewildered eyes spread a scene he had only ever glimpsed in movies: a busy wharf with a three-masted schooner moored to the dock and, beyond it, the grand sweep of a sparkling, blue-green bay. The brilliant, sun-washed air was loud with the cackle of seagulls hovering and diving for scraps of fish and refuse as fishermen in the smaller boats hefted wicker baskets full of silver fish to women in blue bonnets and grey shawls over long calico dresses. Broad black headlands rose on either side of the wide scoop of the bay and, between these craggy promontories, a tidy town of small white houses climbed the slopes. Stocky men in short, baggy trousers and droopy shirts, with straw hats on their heads, pushed handcarts and drove mule teams along the seafront, helping to unload hessian-wrapped bundles from the tall ship.

Gone was King's Cross with its towering office blocks and narrow Regency roads clogged with cars and double-decker buses, with its innumerable coffee shops and takeaways, betting parlours, and news agents, the Betjeman Arms, the post office, the community college. No more the world-beating urban sprawl of metropolitan London with its dense clusters of neighbourhoods and shopping districts connected with traffic-bound streets and four-lane highways.

Everything familiar that Kit had known with the solid certainty of concrete had vanished utterly—and with it his own concrete certainty in bricks-and-mortar reality. It had all been replaced with a seaside vista at once so charming, so evocative, so quaint and winsome it could have been a painting in the National Gallery. And then the stench hit him—a stringent pong of fish guts, rotting vegetables, and tar. He felt woozy, and his stomach squirmed with a queasy feeling.

Turning hastily back to the alleyway, he saw that it was still there, still straight and narrow, its length deeply shadowed as if to shield a dreadful secret. “Where . . . ?” he said, gulping air. “Where are we?”

“No need to speak until you’re ready.”

Kit turned his wondering eyes to the bustling panorama before him—the tall ship, the muscled stevedores, the fishermen in their floppy felt hats, the fishwives in their wooden clogs and head scarves—and tried to make sense of what he was seeing and remain calm in the face of what he considered a shocking dislocation. “What happened to King's Cross?”

“All in good time, dear boy. Can you walk? Perhaps we can forget the coffee—have a drink instead. Fancy a pint?”

Kit nodded.

“It isn’t far,” the old gentleman informed him. “This way.”

Dragging his rattled self together, Kit followed his guide out onto the waterfront. It felt as if he were walking on borrowed legs. The boardwalk seemed to lurch and shift with every awkward step.

“You are doing marvellously well. When it first happened to me, I couldn’t even stand up.”

They passed along a row of tiny shops and boathouses and simple dwellings, Kit’s mind reeling as he tried to take in everything at once. Away from the fetid alley, the air was cleaner, though still filled with the scent of the sea: fish and seaweed, wet hemp, salt, and rocks.

“In answer to your previous question,” the old man said, “this place is called Sefton-on-Sea.”

Judging from what he could observe, the town appeared to be one of those forgotten coastal villages that had been frozen in time by a local council intent on capitalising on the tourist trade; a settlement that time forgot. Sefton-on-Sea was more authentically old-fashioned and picturesque than any West Coast fishing village Kit had ever seen. As a reenactment theme park, the place put all others in the shade.

“Here we are,” said the elder man. “Come in. We’ll have a drink and get to know one another better.”

Kit looked around to see that they were standing at the door of a substantial brick house with a painted wooden sign that said O
LD
S
HIP
I
NN
. He allowed himself to be led through the door and stepped into a dark room with low ceilings, a few tables and benches, and a tin-topped bar. A few snugs lined the perimeter of the pub, which was presided over by a broad-beamed young woman convincingly costumed in a cap of plain linen and a long white ale-stained apron. She greeted them with a smile. There was no one else in the place.

“Two pints of your best, Molly,” called the old man, leading his docile companion to a stool in the corner. “Sit yourself down, my boy. We’ll get some ale in you and you’ll begin to feel more yourself.”

“You come here often?” Kit asked, trying to force some lightness into his voice.