Serena Coady
hardened skin
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The technology isn’t there yet, but some scents can be lifted from the screen. A home cook sliding chunks of garlic into a pool of butter. An elephant startled from sleep. An orgy of three woolly men, pounding as if their lives depended on it. The cooking video emitted a caramel scent, the elephant, raw earth and bitter fruit, and the porn, a cedarwood cologne by Hugo Boss. She didn’t know how she had come across these videos, only that her morning (and quite possibly her entire day) depended on them. By keeping close watch of the sizzling garlic, the waking elephant, and the banging men, and immersing herself in their worlds through their imagined scents, she was able to keep her eyes off a fourth video—a video that was only available to her.
Alexander sent it while she was asleep. They hadn’t spoken in about a year, and in that time, he had adopted a dog. Not just any dog, a darling dog—if the video was anything to go by. At attention, its ears resembled corn chips, and when they flopped down they looked more like horse saddles (the world’s smallest). Its paws weren’t in proportion with its body just yet, but they were surely capable of unleashing hell upon the sofa. While only an IKEA starter piece, to her and Alexander the sofa had been a treasured, L–shaped token of adulthood and domesticity.
She watched the video again. As the puppy played with the tug rope, her focus shifted to the hand gripping it. It was the most she had seen of Alexander in some time. The fingers were thick and the nails were trimmed in his usual style: neat, militaristic. The palms weren’t visible in the video, but she could map out the familiar terrain of calluses and hardened skin.
Sweat collected at the base of her neck. In previous summers, when Berlin became uncomfortably hot, storms usually rolled in and gave everyone a break. But it was September and the heat had been stubborn. For days, it dragged itself from country to country, eventually clamping down on most of continental Europe. People responded to the heat in unique and feral ways. A friend in London sent her a photo of a 70-year-old man riding the Underground in nothing but briefs. Upon seeing the flash go off, he dropped his underwear and exposed his wilting behind to the camera. In France, hundreds of people died. In Germany, locals surrendered their bodies to anything containing 100 litres of liquid or more. If packed swimming pools were to one’s taste, then Prinzenbad was the spot, but if the body simply couldn’t wait, there was always the fountain by the TV tower.
There were fires just an hour outside of Berlin. Strong winds fanned the ames that tore through forest and grass. Helicopters circled above, fighting to keep them out. Between the walls of her at, smaller battles were being waged. She could brave the heat to attend a lecture on Matisse, or, she could stay in bed and watch the video. Taking her sweet time, she propped herself up onto her elbows, swept her legs off the bed, and felt the warmth of the floorboards beneath her feet. As she went to the window, she felt a heaviness in her limbs; each movement leaden and protracted, as if she were a mollusc desiccating in the sun. She used to make a habit of flinging her curtains open at the first trace of light. She had overheard someone on the U-Bahn say that this one simple trick helped lower the risk of rickets. But when she mentioned it to someone in class they laughed and informed her that ‘rachitis’ was something that only struck children. Now, when she parted her curtains, it was to keep watch.
The at was what people her age called ‘a steal’, but what her father considered ‘a little bit dear.’ It was the only place that didn’t ask for six months of bank statements or worse, a letter of recommendation from the ghosts of renter’s past. This included the landlord who believed a bar fridge was suitable for a flatshare of four people, plus a cat on a strict deworming schedule. She told her London friends that the at was an altbau with original parquet flooring and plenty of natural light. She also said it was located in the ‘East London of Berlin’. She hoped that any one of these embellishments might lure people over, and this would turn into a slow trickle of friends relocating to her new, chosen city. Since the move, she had visited London for countless celebrations, dropping a small fortune on flights, gifts, and time off work. During that summer, she had attended two 30th birthdays and an engagement. She had even dragged herself to a gender reveal party. But in three years, not one of her friends had returned the favour. No one had come.
A neon-haired teenager in gorpcore trousers prowled the street below. There was also an older couple laden with piercings and a young man pushing a futuristic, joyless-looking pram. She spread her fingers across the windowsill, leaning towards the glass for a closer look. It wouldn’t be long, she thought. More people would arrive, the rent would go up, and she would need to move. The energy it would take to move again seemed impossible to muster. What seemed doable was whatever was going on in her messages. So, she pulled out her phone, and began to type.
‘Is that dog small, or are those hands large?’ she wrote.
Before she could hit send, or imagine what Alexander’s fingers would feel like in the lower part of her mouth, her phone rang. Her sister did not sound good. She very rarely did.
‘Did you get it?’ Sylvi asked.
‘Get what?’ she said.
‘The message I sent! The screenshot.’
She clicked out of the unsent message to Alexander and into Sylvi’s messages. There, she found details of a conversation between her and an individual named Garrett.
‘It’s like ferret, except with a G,’ Sylvi said. ‘His name is Fegget?’ she said.
‘Ha, ha.’
They had been dating for two months. Sylvi told her sister that earlier that week, Ferret had fallen ill. Man u, she said. Like a good girlfriend—or whatever the term they had agreed on—she went to his house with everything one might need during a period of infirmity: home-cooked meals, a hoodie, and some menthol JUULs. As she was leaving, he told her to find his dogs and let them in. But she couldn’t, she was late for her shift. For days, they fought about this small act of defiance. Eventually, he got over it when he realised that by not speaking to her, he couldn’t have sex with her. So, they made nice. They were lying in his bed, intertwined, when Sylvi ran her fingers along his chest tattoos, and asked how many he had. In return, he asked for her number. But Sylvi didn’t have any tattoos.
‘People still care about the body count?’ she said.
‘Apparently! You know what he said when I told him? That he was gonna be sick. Said he couldn’t believe there’d been so many guys, so many girls, inside me,’ Sylvi said.
‘The guy speaks in such poetic terms. Wait, what was his number? Did you ask?’ she said.
‘Of course I bloody did. And do you know what he said?’
‘That you were his first?’
‘That he’d slept with twice as many people as I had.’
Then Sylvi’s voice went to a faraway place, and she heard tapping. She wanted to warn her sister about this man, who she knew she was currently messaging—right there, on their call—but she didn’t. The last time she made her concerns known about one of her new partners, Sylvi didn’t speak to her for months.
‘I gotta go,’ Sylvi said.
‘Now?’ she said.
‘Hmm? Yeah. Got pasta on the stove. Slipped my mind.’
‘Sure. Just—let me know how it all goes, okay? Love you, sis.’
Before the call ended, she tried to think of something constructive, or even something hopeful, to say—but the only things she could think of sounded like it would come from their father. After the call, she googled Ferret and landed on a recent photo of his back. It was angry and red, with a fresh tattoo of creeping thorns, soaring doves, and the words: ‘Trust no one. Even the devil was once an angle.’ Immediately, her eyes were wet, her cheeks were shaking, and her body was hunched over. It was the best thing she had seen in weeks. For a moment, she forgot that Ferret was a real person; a person her big sister had chosen to make dinners for and share the intimate details of her life with. She clicked out of every tab with Ferret’s name on it. Then, she immediately hit Ctrl+Shift+T to bring up the last one, but only so she could screenshot the tattoo for record keeping. She was about to replay Alexander’s video, but then she remembered she hadn’t even replied. She was almost certain that she wouldn’t send the message, but then she thought about the kind of man Alexander was in contrast to someone like Ferret, and suddenly, the distinction felt like something she needed to celebrate. She pressed send.
When it wasn’t grotesquely hot, and Berlin dipped into darkness at 3.45pm, she revisited past conversations with Alexander. While winter made her body feel old and dormant, these messages offered a kind of quiet renewal. ‘Stroke’ and ‘control’ became the most searched for terms in her messages. Occasionally, the searches turned up strays. There was her grandmother’s second (and final) stroke and the time Sylvi spent so much time shopping for Turkish cigarettes in duty–free that she didn’t make it through passport control in time for her flight. With perseverance, the search would deliver on the goods, and a portrait of Alexander would begin to take shape. It wasn’t an image of the man in totality, but one in relation to her, and in all the ways he had wanted her. Alexander had always been imaginative about claiming her as his—almost pathologically so. He once said that she was the only person who could bring out this side of him, scrape it right out of the reserved, regimented front he put out to everyone else. But she didn’t agree. She knew when a gift was god-given, when it had been plucked from Zeus’ box of talents and passed down from the great azure. For her, Alexander’s best work had been the August 2019 in–flight exchange. When she was boarding a plane in Venice, he messaged, listing all the ways he wanted to physically control her once she was back in London. As she walked to her seat, most of the men on the plane looked up at her, and instantly, she was full of shame. Not because the nerve endings in her chest had given her away, but because the men had perfectly human partners sitting right next to them. When she made it to her seat, she messaged Alexander about it. He was quick to write back.
‘They wouldn’t be able to stand up if they knew the things you were capable of,’ Alexander said.
In those days, there was no framework for how they spoke to each other. Now, she worried she had violated a new and unspoken agreement. The fact that he had read her message, but not replied, was unsettling. The worst possible outcome would be his version of: ‘We have received your message and appreciate you writing to us. We have passed on your inquiry to the relevant team.’ Or worse, something that only addressed the dog portion of the message, and not the hands part, like: ‘Yes, the puppy is 25 centimetres tall.’ The only thing that reassured her was that, at first glance, ‘small dog’ and ‘large hands’ seemed like purely anatomical remarks. After all, hands were good for a number of things, like tending to a modest vegetable patch on a rooftop terrace, propping up a small child as they threw up, or pouring each third of a consolatory negroni after a hard day’s work.
It had been three years of not very much. In all the perfunctory messages and birthday wishes since the breakup, they had been careful—they had been good. But on that day, she felt things shifting. And then she saw his response.
‘You of all people know the size of my hands,’ wrote Alexander.
Immediately, a new picture arrived. The puppy. It was dozing away, stretched across the cool, amber tiles of his kitchen. The corn chips were pressed into a flat line and the sofa destroyers were folded beneath its chin. She knew what it was. It was a safety net, his way of saying there was still a chance to return to speaking nicely. Then, her phone rang, and for a second she thought it was him.
‘What’s new, mama?’ Eli said. ‘It’s hot. Far too hot,’ she said.
She didn’t feel like talking—Alexander was online, waiting—but knew it would be wrong to exclude her closest friend from the morning’s affairs. Nevertheless, Eli had matters of his own to discuss.
‘Oh my god. London is a nightmare. My clients have been hosting parties like it’s bloody VE day. It’s like they’ve never seen the sun. Oh! Oh god. I just remembered something. But it’s kind of depressing if I’m being totally honest,’ Eli said.
He hesitated, worried that what he was about to say might put her ‘vibrational energy’ into a tailspin. She told him that it wasn’t a thing, and that he should come out with it already.
‘The other week, I was planning a launch for a new jewellery label—designs hideous, money gorgeous—and my point of contact is the lead designer’s EA. It’s always the EA. So! The planning process ends up being this short, intense period of very close contact. Fortunately, the EA is lovely. A real delight to work with,’ Eli said.
‘Lucky you,’ she said.
‘Right?! So, a few weeks later, once the launch is done and dusted, the designer calls me. I assume she wishes to solicit my services and professionally waterboard me once again, and in a way… she does. She asks if I remember Tess, her EA, as if I didn’t just spend days pulling together a last–minute miracle with her. Anyway, she asks if I can help plan an event for Tess. And I ask, what kind of event? And she says, her funeral.’
‘What?’
‘Tess took her own life.’
She listened as Eli explained how he spent the next week picking out tasteful orals, sourcing handmade candles, and working with a calligrapher to write memorial cards. And then, on the day of the funeral, Tess’s parents decided to go minimal—no decor, no owers, nothing.
‘And what can I say? Sorry, I know your daughter is currently dead, but actually, I’ve ordered all the stu her boss wanted?’ Eli said.
She didn’t know what to say about Tess, so they spoke about high school and how disappointed they were that no one had surprised them with astonishing displays of success or failure. It had been more than a decade and the biggest news was who did not get married in their early twenties. By the end of the conversation, the two of them resolved to mind their own business and become better people—kinder people.
‘Do you miss London?’ Eli said.
‘I miss the people, sometimes,’ she said.
‘Mama. Just say it’s me! Say I’m the one thing you miss.’
She didn’t know how to tell him that she missed one person in London, and that it wasn’t him. She realised that if she told Eli about the video and the messages, he wouldn’t give her the firm hand she needed. Instead, he would drop a link to an Etsy store where she could buy an outfit made of leather floss and fishing hooks. Then, he would tell her to pour out a glass of old vine Gamay, check her teeth for stains, and call Alexander—camera on.
When she and Alexander were together, the way Eli watched him made her nervous. She never felt that way when women studied him as he towered over her, shoulders broad and expression indeterminate. But with Eli, she didn’t think there was an upper limit to his charisma. When she first introduced the two of them at one of Eli’s dinner parties, he said he loved Alexander’s ‘look.’ At first, she interpreted this to mean his no-nonsense togetherness, his hair that was trimmed every 10 days—an anomaly in their friendship group—but the more she thought about it, the more she wondered whether Eli had noticed it, too. The coldness.
Once the call ended, another message was waiting for her.
‘Is there anything you imagine my hands doing?’ Alexander wrote.
Before she could fold her body into a crescent moon and draft up a small document of lth, she heard a voice outside her window. The ponytailed man in charge of the hostel across the street—the man she imagined was responsible for the 2.2 out of 5 rating—was being yelled at by a petite and intense woman. The woman screamed the words over and over until it sounded like the wheels of a train whipping around.
‘Fick dich! Fick dich!’ she cried.
Suddenly, the neighbour’s head emerged between his linen drapes. It was his custom. Every time there was chaos in the street, he would be there, smoking without inhaling. It was his cover, a way to dine upon the drama without looking like someone who might record the worst day of your life and share it to one of the neighbourhood group chats. She knew this particular neighbour had never looked over at her window. In fact, none of them had. She wondered what might happen if they did, whether they would see how all these mornings of private indecision had made her an empty woman.
It was too late to attend the lecture, but not too late to keep far away from her phone. She could wash, head into the studio, and begin work on a new greeting card. At the maker’s market, these would be snapped up by young lovers who saw Valentine’s Day as gauche but necessary in the scheme of a relationship. She decided to begin with the bath. She turned on the tap, allowing the water to get scorching hot before remembering the temperature outside. She let it cool, hurling in handfuls of bath salt (far more than she needed). She hopped in and let the water swallow her, the undissolved pebbles of salt grinding against her thighs. As she opened her eyes, stinging and raw, she peered up at the light refracting through the water—a reminder of the world waiting. She wondered what could be more important than happy little dogs and man hands. Nothing, she thought. In her mind, she was out of the bath, out of Berlin, and in Alexander’s bed. There, she could face him. There, she could be driven into his well–laundered sheets with a flat hand to her hip bone.
She wondered how Henri might feel if he was the one receiving her messages that day. She hadn’t thought about him all day, not even once—a fact that delighted her. They had been dating since early spring and at no point did it seem appropriate to tell him about the indecencies that rattled around inside her. She tried to tell him, once. As soon as she hit send, she saw him read it, and start to type. Henri’s response time thrilled her, but the response itself did not. When she saw the words he had come up with, it felt like she had been hollowed out. His message read: ‘Wow! Someone’s horny!’ And that was it.
Two weeks after she first met Alexander, she sent him a photo: her bare body lit by a SAD lamp. After that, things moved quickly. He later said that this act—not the image itself, but the instinctive way she presented it to him—was what bound them together. She loved that with Alexander, she could do no wrong. It was a first for her. If she ever behaved in a way that might be deemed by others as indecent or vile, he only rewarded her for it. In the month before the relationship ended and she had moved away, she landed on a crucial realisation—that she needed to be hungered for, and to be told, in precise terms, why. Alexander had done that for her.
She towelled off and walked over to the window, resting her cheek against the warm glass. The late afternoon sun tiptoed along the rooftops, casting golden streaks on the hostel bunk beds across the street. She wanted, badly, to part with the idea that she was living in her own version of Belle de Jour. She wanted to go about her day as if she had things to do and matters that required her attention. Growing up, or the idea of it, appealed to her. The process of mellowing out, of life revealing a higher purpose to surrender herself to. But she couldn’t imagine a time when a love triangle didn’t make her feel something. She unlatched the window, pulled it open, and let the hot air sweep inside. As she walked back to the bed, she considered that it might not be a bad thing—the disquiet coiled around her insides. Maybe it kept her going.
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Serena Coady is a Malaysian-Australian writer living in London. Her writing has been published by The Independent, Dazed, i-D, Vox, Harper’s Bazaar, frankie, Elle, CNN, Refinery29, and more. She is currently studying an MA in Dramaturgy & Writing for Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London.
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