Tell Me When to Breathe

Four hours in, Shona's thigh had stopped being a thigh and become a surface, which was the point at which Lamin did his best work, and it had never occurred to him to wonder what it was like to be the surface.

It was a heron, black and grey, standing in reeds that ran from the top of her outer thigh down towards the knee, and he had been building the water under it since one o'clock. Soft shading with the big mag, the machine set low and slow, the needle doing almost nothing on each pass and the passes doing everything. You did not draw water. You took the light out of it a little at a time until what was left looked wet. Shona was a regular, three pieces in his chair over six years, and she lay on her side on the second station with her head on her folded arm and her phone face down on the tray, and she had not said a word since about half two, which was a client he could have kissed.

Under the lamp there was her leg and his hands and a pool of hard white light, and the rest of the shop went to grey around it. He was aware of the rest of it the way you are aware of weather. Manny at the first chair on the other side of the long mirror, working a forearm, his radio low. Toby behind the counter, breaking down a tray and then breaking it down again. Roz's heater going behind the curtain at the back, and the smell under everything of green soap and machine oil and the wet coats on the hooks. The rain had come and gone on the front window all day. It was the last Monday in March and the clocks had gone forward on Sunday, and the light outside had that new, unearned look of an evening that was going to last.

He wore a fitted black T-shirt that sat close on his shoulders and the sleeves of other men's work down both arms to the wrist, and his locs were tied back at the nape with a plain black band so nothing swung into the field. The black overshirt hung on the back of the door. His two silver rings were on the left hand, which was the hand that stretched skin, and the right hand was empty of anything except the machine.

On the inside of the right wrist, below the heel of the palm, there was a patch of bare skin about the size of a matchbox. Every artist who had ever traded work with him had asked about it and every one of them had been told the same thing: that was where the machine sat, and you did not ink the place you worked from. It was the only untouched skin on that arm. He had never once thought about it as skin.

"You all right?" he said.

"Mm," Shona said into her arm.

"Ten minutes on this bit and I'll give you a stretch."

"I'm fine."

She was. He could see she was. Her breathing had gone long and even an hour ago and stayed there, and the muscle under his left hand had quit bracing against the needle, and the colour around the work was the right colour. He knew what four hours did to a body and this one had taken it well. He went back into the water.

It went on the pull of a long curve, low down where the reeds bent. He was taking the shading out from the heron's legs in one slow sweep, wrist doing the work and forearm steady on the folded arm rest, the machine humming its small dry hum into the bones of his hand the way it had for twenty years, and something on the inside of his wrist went click.

It was not loud. It was a tiny sound, private, felt rather than heard, like a knuckle going, and on the end of it came heat. White heat, bright and narrow, from the bare patch straight up into the heel of his hand.

He did not stop. That was the first thing he would think about, later, in the kitchenette, with the kettle roaring: that the instinct had not been to stop. The instinct had been to finish the line. You did not lift off halfway through a sweep. You lifted at the end of it, where the line wanted to end, and so he kept his wrist moving because the line was not finished, and the needle went sideways.

Not far. A millimetre, perhaps less. But he saw it, the tip of the grouping shiver off the curve and come back, and the shiver went on after it came back. A tremor in the machine that was not the machine. His hand, doing something he had not told it to do.

He lifted off.

The shop did not notice. Manny's machine kept up its buzz on the other side of the mirror. Toby put something in the sharps bin. Shona did not move. Lamin sat with the machine held an inch above her skin and watched his own hand shake, very slightly, in the white light, and could not make it stop.

He put the machine down on the tray. He flexed the fingers. Pain went through the inside of the wrist like a wire pulled tight, and the fingers closed about halfway and declined to go further.

All right. All right. He picked the machine up again in a different grip, lower down, taking the weight more through the thumb, and set the needle back on the line where it had left it.

The vibration came up into the wrist and the heat came with it, and the needle shook.

"Lamin."

Roz was standing in the gap of the piercing-room curtain at the back, one nitrile glove half off, the silver hoops in her ears still moving from the turn of her head. She was brown-skinned and small in the gap, and she had the look she kept for about twice a year. He had not heard her get up. He did not know how long she had been there.

"I'm fine," he said.

"Put it down."

"I've got twenty minutes on this."

"You've got no minutes on it." She came down the room and stood at the end of the station, just outside his light, and looked at his hand on the machine and then at his face. "I heard it from in there. You went quiet. You never go quiet. Put it down, love."

He did not want to put it down. He wanted to tell her that the line was eighty per cent of the way across and there was a reed in the way and a client on the table who had booked this Monday last June. He wanted to tell her that his hand had always held. He looked at the needle. It was shaking.

He put it down.

"Manny," Roz said, without raising her voice and without turning round.

Manny's machine stopped. There was a short pause in which the whole shop seemed to hear itself, the radio and the heater and the rain starting again on the window. Then Manny came round the end of the mirror, peeling his gloves, and stood beside Roz and looked at the wrist, which Lamin was now holding in his left hand against his chest without having decided to.

"What did it do?"

"Clicked."

"Clicked and what."

"And now it shakes."

Manny looked at him for a long moment. He was a bigger man than Lamin through the shoulders, and still in the way big men learn to be still in small rooms, and he did not say any of the things he could have said. He said, "Toby. Clean tray and a fresh mag at Lamin's station. Five minutes." And to Shona, who had lifted her head off her arm and was looking at all three of them with the expression of a woman who has realised the conversation is about her leg: "You're fine. He's done his wrist. I'm going to finish your shading, if you'll let me, and he's going to stand there and tell me where it goes."

"Oh my God," Shona said. "Lamin. Is it bad?"

"It's fine."

Roz made a noise in her throat that was not quite a laugh, and went back through the curtain.

He stood at Manny's shoulder for forty minutes and talked a man he respected through the water at the heron's feet. Manny had a good soft hand and a different pressure, heavier, and every pass he made Lamin could feel in his own arm as though the pass were his. Lighter there. Let it fade out before the reed. No — pull it longer, the reed sits on top. Manny did what he said, mostly. Once he did not, and the shading came out a shade darker than Lamin would have taken it, and it was fine. It was fine, and Lamin would see it every time Shona came in, and he would not say anything about it, ever, because it was fine.

Then it was done, and Manny stood up with his back cracking, and stepped aside.

Wrapping was Lamin's. Nobody said so. Manny moved to the sink and Toby came round with the film and stood there holding it, and Lamin pulled a fresh glove on his left hand with his teeth and his right hand held against his stomach, and cleaned the heron down.

Green soap, the spray cold, the paper towel folded so it never dragged. Then the thin layer of ointment, worked on with the side of two fingers in the direction the work ran so nothing pulled. He did it left-handed and it took him twice as long and it was as good as he had ever done it, as good as it was for anybody, because there was no version of this job where the wrap got worse because you were having a bad day.

"Hold it there," he said to Toby, and Toby held the end of the film to the top of Shona's thigh while Lamin smoothed it down the length of the piece with the flat of his left hand, keeping it close, no air, running the edge down with his thumb.

"I can do that bit, if you want," Toby said. "I can do it, like, proper. I done Manny's on Friday."

"Hold the film."

"I'm only saying I could."

"I know you could. Hold the film."

Toby held the film. Lamin taped the edges. Then he gave Shona the aftercare in the voice he used for aftercare, low and plain, the same words in the same order he had said them perhaps eight thousand times: film off tomorrow, wash it with your hand, not a flannel, pat it, don't rub it, thin layer, no baths, no sun, no picking, ring the shop if anything looks wrong. She knew it all. She had heard it from him three times before. She listened anyway, which was what good clients did.

At the counter, with her coat on, she looked at his right hand where he had it resting on the glass.

"You should get that seen to," she said. "Proper seen to. Not just—" She made a vague gesture that took in him and the shop and what she obviously assumed was his whole approach to life.

"I will."

"He won't," Roz said from behind the curtain.

Shona laughed and went out under the bell, into the rain and the long new light, and the door shut on its own weight behind her.

The diary was open on the counter. He had not meant to look at it.

It was Roz's A4 week-to-view, the pages gone soft at the corners with handling, the biro on its string lying across this week's Wednesday. Every line of every day was in her handwriting, because the shop had not trusted a screen with its bookings since before his time. He turned back a page and then forward one. His name was in the second-chair column down every day of the week and every day of the week after, and the week after that, and when he turned a fistful of pages at once and let them fall open somewhere in the summer it was still there. Initials, times, a word or two. R/forearm cont. Back pc — sit 3. Fineline wrist, deposit pd. He knew without counting that it ran to Christmas. He had been nine months out for four years. People messaged him from other cities to ask if he would take a day in the spring after next.

He turned it back to today and closed it.

By eight the shop was shut. Toby had gone home to Barking under protest. Manny had rung Fran to say he would be another half hour, in the voice he used for her, which was not his shop voice and which he did not seem to know he had. Roz had done the front lights at the switch by the flash wall and gone through to the kitchenette to put the kettle on, and in the dark the street sign across the road had come into its own. It laid its red bar across the front window and the counter and up the back wall, the way it did every night, and Lamin sat on the brown sofa along the back with the red across his knees and his arm in his lap.

The wrist had swollen. Not much. The bare patch on the inside had gone tight and shiny, the skin over the little-finger side of it puffed up under the bone so the bone had gone soft at the edges, and there was heat in it he could feel with the back of his other hand. He had a bag of frozen peas from the freezer drawer of the fridge under the counter wrapped in a tea towel and he had been sitting with them on it for twenty minutes, which was what he would have told anybody else to do, and he was surprised by how much he resented doing it.

Roz came down the room with two mugs and held one out to him, handle first, on the right.

He reached for it without thinking. His fingers went round the handle and closed and did not close. The handle sat against his palm and his fingers lay on it and told him, very calmly and from a long way off, that they were not going to take the weight of a mug of tea. A white thread of pain ran up from the wrist and his hand opened by itself.

Roz did not let go of the mug. She had not been going to. She moved it round to his left hand, and he took it with the left, and she sat down at the other end of the sofa with her own.

Neither of them said anything for a bit. The radiator ticked. A car went past outside and its lights swung through the red and out again.

"Twenty years," he said.

"I know."

"And it's never once—" He stopped, because there was nowhere for that sentence to go that was not self-pity, and he had heard enough men in his chair tell him what their bodies had never once done.

Manny came out of the back office with his coat on over one shoulder and his phone in his hand. He stood in the red and looked at the frozen peas and the mug in the wrong hand.

"Don't go on a list," he said.

"What?"

"You're going to go to your GP, they'll tell you to rest it and give you a referral, and you'll be on a list for physio till August. Don't." He was already scrolling. "Pay for someone. Someone good. Today, tomorrow. Before you do the thing you're going to do."

"What am I going to do?"

Manny gave him a look that took about a second and covered all of it: the four hours, the shaking needle, the machine picked up twice. "You know what you're going to do. You're going to strap it up and go back on it Wednesday and tell yourself it feels all right."

Behind him, at the end of the sofa, Roz drank her tea very pointedly and said nothing at all.

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

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