Before You Fly

Shelley Mead had paid up front for every hour a man was going to spend with his hands on her bare back.

The street door beside the launderette was green, and somebody had painted it so many times the letterbox had sunk into it like a thumb into dough. Shelley stood in front of it at ten to ten with her bag on her shoulder and her hair clipped up so hard off her neck that she could feel every pin, and she did not ring the bell yet, because she was early and she did not like being early for anybody.

Sixpenny Row was doing its Thursday morning. The launderette was already breathing warm soap out across the pavement, two dryers going round with nobody watching them. Over the road the barber's shutter was up and the board was out on the kerb, a corner broken off it, turned so the damage faced the wall. Three doors down the kebab place had its red sign burning into broad July daylight as if nobody had told it what time it was. A bus went past at the top, on the main road, and the box junction let it.

She had paid in full. That was the thing she kept coming back to, standing there. Two weeks ago, at the consultation, she had looked at the drawing he had made of her back and said yes to it in about four seconds flat, and then she had asked for the total and paid the lot by bank transfer that evening, sitting on her own sofa in Peckham with a cup of tea going cold. Not a deposit. The whole figure. He had looked at her across his drawing table when she told him she was going to do that, and said, "You don't need to," and she had said, "I know I don't," and that had been that.

She had done it on purpose. Paid off, it was a bill. It was the gas, the council tax, the phone. It was a thing she had bought from a man who was good at his job, and when you had bought something you did not owe anybody anything else for it. She had fifteen years of fly floors behind her and nine months of tour in front of her, and she wanted the piece done and on her and nothing else hanging off it.

At five to ten she rang.

He came down himself. She heard him on the stair, unhurried, and then the door opened and Royston Rawle filled most of it. He was a big man, and he stood the way big men stand when they have spent their lives being careful in small rooms, a little back from the threshold so she had space to come in. Black T-shirt, heavy cotton, sitting close across the chest. The forearms bare and covered, wrist to elbow, in bold old traditional work: a swallow, a dagger, a woman's head in a sailor's cap, a panther coming up the inside of the left arm. Dark trousers with a crease in them. Polished shoes. His head was shaved so clean it took the light from the street.

"Morning, Shelley."

"Morning."

"You've eaten?"

"Porridge and a banana. And a bacon roll, but I'm not counting that as a meal, that was moral support."

The corner of his mouth went, very slightly, and came back. "Good. Up you come."

The stair was narrow and steep and smelled of the launderette all the way up, warm cotton and something floral under it. She went first, because he held the door and waited for her to, and she was aware the whole way up of exactly where he was behind her, two steps down, not close. At the top a second door stood open on the room.

She had seen it once before, at the consultation, but she had been looking at the drawing then and not at the room. It was one long space running back from a window that looked straight down over the Row. Bare boards, sanded pale. White walls. At the far end a hand-basin, a steel cabinet, the squat little autoclave and the yellow sharps bin. Nearer the window his drawing table, with a lamp clamped to it and paper weighted flat with a roll of tape. And in the middle, where the light was best, the bench: long and black and padded, with a daylight lamp on a jointed arm reaching over it like a heron waiting for a fish. A steel trolley beside it, already laid. Through the boards came the faint warmth and hum of the dryers underneath, as if the building had a pulse.

"Bag on the chair," he said. "Water's there. Loo's on the landing if you need it, and you'll tell me if you need it. Don't sit there being polite with a full bladder for an hour, I've had people faint over less."

"I won't."

"Everybody says that."

She put her bag on the chair. She was wearing what she had worked out was the sensible thing to wear: a black halter-neck that tied at the nape and fell away to nothing at the back, leaving her bare from her shoulders to the waistband of low black trousers that sat on her hips and fitted properly, because she had spent good money on the fit. Boots. She had stood in front of her bedroom mirror at half seven that morning with her back to it, looking over her shoulder at all that pale skin and the long hollow of her spine, and thought, well, that's the last time you'll see it empty.

He went to the trolley. Before he touched anything on it, he unbuckled the watch on his left wrist, a gold-faced thing on a leather strap, and laid it face-down on the steel, square to the edge. He did it the way she clipped on a harness, without looking, a hand that had done it ten thousand times.

"Right," he said. "Drawing."

He brought it over from the table. She had looked at it so often on her phone since the consultation that she could have drawn it herself in the dark: a peregrine in the stoop, wings pulled back and half open across the shoulder blades, its whole body made into a line that dived straight down the spine. Underneath, falling away from it, the hemp lines of a rope fall, loose and heavy, and at the small of the back a single cleat with the rope belayed round it. Bold black and grey. A lot of skin left open. The fly floor and the flight, he had said at the consultation, both at once, and she had had to look out of the window for a second.

"Still happy with it?"

"Yes."

"Still happy, or you don't want to waste my morning?"

"Still happy," she said. "I'd tell you."

He looked at her a moment longer, the way he had looked at her when she said she would pay the lot, as if he was checking her for flaws in the grain, and then nodded. "Stand at the mirror for me. Back to it. Not like that. How you actually stand."

There was a long mirror on the wall by the basin. She went and stood with her back to it, and he came behind her and did not touch her yet.

"You're standing for me," he said. "Stand for yourself. Like you're on your floor, waiting on a cue."

So she did. She let her weight go into her heels and her shoulders go back and down the way they went when she had a line in her hands and a stage manager in her ear, and something in the room changed a fraction, because he made a small sound in his chest, not quite a word.

"There," he said. "That's the back I'm working on. Not the one you bring to a mirror."

He put the drawing up beside her on the glass and stood looking from one to the other for a long time. She could see him over her own shoulder: the heavy-lidded eyes, the short black beard squared off at the jaw, the deep brown of his skin against all that white wall, and the absolute stillness of somebody thinking about where a line went. He was not looking at her the way men looked at her. She knew that look and this was not it. He was looking at her the way she looked at a piece of set before she flew it out, working out its weight, where it would want to swing, where it would catch.

That should have been easier to stand than the other thing. It was not.

"Your left shoulder sits higher than your right," he said. "About a centimetre. You carry on that side."

"I haul on that side."

"I know. I'm going to drop the left wing a hair so it reads level when you're standing. When you're lying down it'll look wrong to me. It'll be right on you."

"All right."

"I'm telling you so you don't think I've made a mistake."

"I wouldn't have known."

"No," he agreed, "but you'd have been on a plane wondering."

He put the stencil on standing. The cold wipe of the solution first, across both shoulder blades, and then the paper laid on and smoothed with the flat of his hand, slow, from the middle out. She felt the size of his palm through the paper, and the heat of it, and she stood exactly as still as she stood with a piece of scenery hanging over a stage full of actors. When he peeled the paper back he had her look in the mirror, a hand mirror held behind her so she could see the purple ghost of the wings sitting on her own skin.

"Yes?"

"Yes."

"Bench, then. Face down. Arms where they're comfortable, not where you think they should be."

She untied the halter at her nape and held the front against herself and lay down on the bench, and he put a folded towel under her hips and a rolled one under her ankles without asking whether she wanted them, and she did. The padding was firm and slightly warm from the room. Up close it smelled of green soap and clean vinyl. He adjusted the lamp, and the light came down on her back white and flat as a work light on a dark stage, and she closed her eyes against the brightness of it and heard him sit, heard the snap of gloves, the small sounds of the trolley.

"This is the outline," he said. "Shoulders and wings first. Four hours today, and I'll call breaks. You don't need to call them, but you can. First one I put in, I'll tell you. After that I won't, unless something changes."

"Fine."

"First one."

It was a hot scratch, a cat's claw dragged slow across the top of her shoulder, and it went on, and on, and kept going. She breathed. It was not as bad as she had built it up to be and it was not nothing. It was a thing she could hold.

He settled. That was the only word she had for it afterwards. She felt him settle: his left forearm laid across the small of her back, heavy and still, the weight of it pinning her gently and completely to the bench, and his gloved hand spread on her shoulder blade stretching the skin taut, and then the machine going and the line going in, and his breathing behind it, slow, very slow, like a man asleep.

She had held weight in the dark for other people her whole working life. She knew how to do it. You found the place in yourself where a thing could sit and you put it there, and you did not think about it, and you watched the cue light and the stage below, and the weight stayed where you had put it. So she did that. She put the sting along her shoulder somewhere it could sit, and she lay there and thought about the tour. Nine months. Sydney first, then Melbourne, then the long hop across. Deputy head of flys, on a floor that would be hers, after fifteen years of being the person who was very good and was not the one going. She thought about kit lists. She thought about whether she needed new gloves or whether her old ones had another year in them.

"Breathe out, Shelley."

She had not known she was holding it. She let it go, and the line went on through the space where her breath had been.

The first hour went like that. He did not talk much. When he did it was plain and practical: a hand on her shoulder to say hold, a lifted needle and the cold wipe of the green soap, a quiet "good" that was about the skin and not about her. At the end of it he sat back and peeled off his gloves and told her to sit up slowly and drink some water, and she did, holding the halter to her front with one arm, the room tipping a bit and then settling. The dryers below had changed note. Out of the window the barber was standing in his doorway with a cup of something, watching the street.

"How's it going?" she said.

"It's going in nicely. You've got good skin for it. Takes the line clean."

She waited for him to say something else and he did not, and that was correct, that was what she had paid for, and she lay back down.

It was in the second hour that it started to get harder to stay where she had put herself. Not the pain. The pain was a steady thing, a hot, grinding sting along the wing's leading edge, worse where it went over the bone, and she could hold it. It was him. It was the forearm. It did not move. Whatever his other hand was doing, however the needle travelled, that weight stayed laid across the small of her back, warm through the glove-cuff and the inked skin, as if it was the one fixed point in the room and everything else was hung off it. And his breathing. Long and slow and even, so close behind her that she could feel it go out across the wet line on her shoulder, cool on the heat.

She caught herself, some time into the third hour, breathing with him.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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