The Skin Map Read Online Free PDF Page A

strange interlude, put it behind him; to never, ever breathe a word about it to another living soul. This resolve carried him all the way to his girlfriend’s tower-block apartment building and her front door.
    He knocked.
    There was a click and the door swung open. “You’re late!”
    “What? No kiss? No cheery greeting?”
    Wilhelmina frowned, but gave him a quick, dry peck on the cheek. “You’re still late.”
    “Yeah, sorry about that. I had this—” He stopped abruptly and retrenched. “I mean, my Oyster card was out, so I had to walk.”
    “And that took you eight hours?”
    “Huh?” he wondered. “No, really.”
    She moved away from the doorway, and he stepped in, kicking off his damp shoes. Her flat was ample by London standards, clean as a dental hygienist’s treatment room and nearly as cold. Wilhelmina was nothing if not tidy—perhaps owing to the fact that she had once been a dental hygienist, briefly, before chucking it in—too many people, too many mouths—to become a baker.
    She still filled people’s mouths, albeit in a different and, for her, much more satisfying way.
    As Kit watched her slouch back to her big blue sofa, which was her habitual nest, he was once more impressed with the idea that he simply had to get a better girlfriend at first opportunity. Dressed in black slacks and a black turtleneck with the horrible, ratty, hand-knitted purple scarf she wore everywhere, with her feet stuffed into flat-heeled, sheepskin boots, she was a dead ringer for the undertaker’s anemic daughter. Why, he wondered, did she have to look so austere? Whatever happened to sugar and spice? When enumerating the qualities he desired in a mate, vim and vigour, a zest for life, and a keenness of mind and intellect came quite near the top of the list. Wilhelmina’s idea of excitement was an extra scoop of sultanas in the cinnamon buns. Her intellect might have been keen enough—if anyone could ever catch her awake long enough to stimulate her into meaningful conversation.
    Her job at Giovanni’s Rustic Italian Bakery—“Artisan Breads Our Specialty”—meant that she had to rise every weekday morning in the wee hours to be at work by four o’clock to fire up the ovens and mix the first of the day’s dough. She finished work just after one in the afternoon, was completely exhausted by six in the evening, and usually sound asleep by eight—all of which meant one hardly ever saw her when she wasn’t yawning, stifling a yawn, or having just yawned. If sleep were an Olympic event, Wilhelmina Klug could have slept for Team GB.
    Her eyelids drooped, and her shoulders too. Like many tall girls, she had developed the round-shouldered, hunched-over posture that would in time grow into a widow’s hump; in Wilhelmina’s case, since marriage seemed so very remote, it would be a spinster’s hump.
    Everything about her was retiring. Even her chin receded.
    Her hair was mousy, both in colour and texture: very fine, shiny, and slightly bristly; and she wore it aggressively short. The better to keep it out of the pastry, she claimed, but the style was far from flattering. She had large, dark eyes that might in themselves have been pretty if not for the matching large dark circles beneath them.
    Wilhelmina was no catch. As one of Kit’s colleagues put it after spending a rare evening with the unfortunate couple: “For warmth and affection, mate, you’d be better off with a pair of ferrets and a hot-water bottle.”
    Kit could not disagree.
    But until something better came along, she was, for him, it. And, despite her many obvious flaws, and his continually renewed determination to do better in the dating game, he inexplicably turned up time and again outside her door. It was as if his feet had a mind of their own and weren’t over-fussy about whose table they parked themselves under.
    “Well?” she said.
    “Sorry? Am I missing something here?”
    “You’re late, dope. You promised to go help me pick out