Free Skin by Mo Hayder Page A

oldest friend, Kaiser, but he’d never had sympathy for Thom. Anyway, she’d leant on him too much in the last few days. She dropped the phone into her lap and leant back in the seat. The air coming in was sweet, warm and full of buttercups, bringing with it a sense of the west, a sense of the sea out past Bristol and Wales. She’d known these lanes all her life. She’d grown up here with the views of the seven sacred hills, the Georgian townhouses of Bath cradled between them, with the distant view of Sally-in-the-Wood and beyond it the Avon valley.
    She thought about Thom, about how everyone had worried over him as a child. He was underweight, too small for his age. He got infections easily, learnt to walk late, and always seemed to find the fastest way to trouble. Mum and Dad had had to dig deep to keep their patience with him. And sometimes they’d failed.
    She remembered coming in from the garden one day. Out of the sunlight, into the cool. It was the school holidays and her parents were in but the house was silent, which made her hesitate and go upstairs quietly. She found her mother first, sitting on the edge of the bed in the big double room. She was dressed in shorts and green Scholl sandals, and was staring at herself in the mirror. Her long white fingers pressed a pair of headphones to her ears and something about her posture, about the tension in her hands, the way her feet were crabbed up in the sandals, told Flea not to approach. Then Jill Marley had looked at her daughter. There was no expression on her face. They held each other’s eyes for almost a minute. Then Jill had turned back to the mirror.
    The door to Thom’s room on the other side of the landing was half open. Flea tiptoed over to it and inside saw an odd tableau. Dad was in the middle of the room, kneeling. Thom, who was about eight at the time, stood a pace away, facing him. They weren’t speaking or moving, just staring at each other. Dad’s face had the look on it that he sometimes got when he was determined to do something, as if he believed the force of his gaze was enough to cut through mountains. At first Flea thought they were having a conversation. Then she saw it wasn’t a conversation they were in the middle of. It was violence.
    David Marley took a breath, closed his eyes and slapped his son across the face. It wasn’t the first slap that afternoon, Flea knew. She could tell that this had been going on for a long time: Dad staring at Thom, Thom staring back, every few seconds Dad lifting his hand and slapping him. She understood what was happening, too. Dad was trying to make Thom react. But he wouldn’t. She could’ve told Dad he was wasting his time. Thom stood, mouth slightly open, eyes focused in mid-air. He wouldn’t react. He wouldn’t cry. That was just Thom for you. Irritating, distant and otherworldly. Not quite with it.
    And now he was all she had left in the world. With Mum and Dad gone, Thom was all she had left to convince her that their childhood had really happened.
    After their parents’ accident Thom had refused to move back into the family home with his sister and now he lived in a thirties semi on the outskirts of Bristol. It was built identically to the others in the street, with tile-hung walls and diamond-shaped leaded panes in the windows. It was tidy. There was an empty milk bottle with a note in it on the immaculately swept doorstep. Thom hadn’t been able to find a job in years and recently his energy had gone into tending the tiny house while his girlfriend went out to work. Thom – poor, hopeless Thom, so ill-equipped to deal with the world. And so, so stupid .
    ‘You should have called first.’ He opened the door a crack, just allowing his face to peer through. ‘ You should have called. Why didn’t you? ’
    ‘ I did call ,’ she hissed. ‘ Your phone was switched off .’ She stepped forward, pushing the door, expecting him to give way. But he didn’t. ‘Thom. You know why I’m