Beneath the Skin

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Authors: Sandra Ireland
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he’d seen before. She looked as though she wanted to tell him to bugger off, it’s none of your business, but she didn’t. She just got up and belted her coat even tighter and he was sorry then, because he’d been sort of enjoying the company. He missed conversation. You couldn’t have a cosy chat with Alys.
    â€˜We have to be getting back. William has homework to do. What are you doing here anyway?’ Her foot nudged up against the Tesco bag and they both looked down as if there lay the answer to the question.
    Walt reached down and hauled the bag onto his knee. ‘Your sister sent me to a charming man called Moodie to collect a prop for her latest artwork .’ The last word lingered in his mouth. He ripped away the plastic bag with a flourish.
    â€˜Christ,’ said Mouse. ‘What next?’

12
    â€˜One mini gallows.’ Walt handed the package to Alys, pleased that his hand was as steady as his gaze. She’d been threading wire through the skull of a magpie with a tiny pair of pliers but when she saw the bag she dropped them on the bench, falling on the package like a child on sweets. The Tesco bag fluttered to the ground.
    â€˜Amazing! Moodie is so good! ’
    â€˜Is that how he makes a living? Designing miniature instruments of death and destruction?’ He was joking, but not quite.
    Alys brushed the dead magpie to one side and set the thing up on the workbench. ‘Is it any worse than what you do for a living?’
    â€˜Did.’
    She’d stopped listening. He moved to stand beside her, watching her in profile. There was a gluttonous look about her, and he couldn’t resist asking about her plans.
    â€˜My piece will be called The Death of the Wren , my homage to Walter . . .’
    â€˜Potter. I got that. So what poor creatures are you sacrificing for this?’
    She turned to face him then. The light in her eye had frozen to pale silver and she held the gallows like a crucifix. He wondered who was the vampire. He picked up the pliers from the bench, tested them against his thumbnail. The swelling had subsided and the nail was still intact, although it felt weird down at the base.
    â€˜Robert, I don’t know if you’re cut out for this job. I’m not sure you have an artistic temperament.’
    The memory of the art therapy came back like a punch in the stomach. Traumatic memories can remain frozen in the body’s central nervous system, the doctor had said. Was that why he felt so cold all the time, so cold inside? Like he’d eaten a block of ice.
    A person will react to get through the experience, but the trauma remains unprocessed. The doctor had been an okay guy. Decent and earnest, just like Melissa the art therapist. They were all earnest, that was the thing. They all meant well, but they couldn’t see inside his head, couldn’t see the things he’d seen. Was still seeing. A person might get a sensory memory, like a sound or sight or smell, that is reminiscent of the trauma and all of a sudden they are experiencing it all over again. The past wasn’t just with him, he was walking back through it, picking his way through a daily minefield of ‘unprocessed trauma’.
    Alys was still talking, half to herself. Her words didn’t make sense. They seemed to be coming from some place inside the magpie’s skull. Echoing. She was threading a wire through his brain and he could feel the cauterising heat of it and he felt himself slipping away. He was back in the art therapy place, back with Melissa, and his soul was the colour of a bruise as she held it up, glistening, in the light.
    The mask is a masterpiece. A work of art so good it lifts his heart, and for the briefest moment he thinks, it’s working, art therapy works and all the claptrap professionals might really know their stuff.
    Oh, he’d listened to the introduction: ‘Trauma often affects the non-verbal part of the brain,

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