The factory is hot and humid, long rows of women bent double over the low workbenches. The windows, set high into the walls, are sheened with dust and oil so the light that comes through is a sickly nicotine-brown. The women often feel sick, backs permanently stooped from the position of the chairs, lungs filled with dust and fibres. The hours are long, and the foreman is harsh. New arrivals are marked by the muffled screams at their first sight of the workroom, and it is a local saying that it takes a year before the shock of walking in to the endless lines of body parts begins to wear off. You can always tell the long-term employees by their enlarged pupils, accustomed to the semi-gloom, even when they are walking home or cooking or going through their lives outside work.
Maria’s eyes are almost black, her skin sallow and marked with scars. She is working on the skin that goes to the unlucky ones; in front of her are piles of virgin skin, surprisingly heavy. Charlotte has delivered the fresh batch, richly enervated dermis and sebaceous glands all in place, tactile corpuscles left dangling for later re-attachment. She takes her needle up, draws out a few millilitres of pus from her sterilised bucket, and injects her first cyst of the day. When she started she would overfill the holes, leaving open wounds in the skin that got her written up for laziness. She files the tip into a bevel, twists it lightly as she exists the skin leaving a perfect unbroken bulge under the surface. Once the skin has been treated, she takes a small brush and dips it into the red paint that irritates the skin, shading around each mark until it will elicit disgust in the owner. She appears a model worker, diligent and productive. As she licks the tip of her paintbrush with the colour her lips are chapped and bulbous themselves. She wonders who made her skin, what makes hers so lifeless.
Many of the women live in boarding houses, single rooms with four to a shared kitchen and bathroom. The rules for decoration are limiting, but each one carves out their own identity as best they can. Emilia collects candles, everyone knows she skims off a part of the fat reserves to make them burn longer, but she drops enough sweet-smelling oils into the mix that no-one begrudges her that small pleasure. Charlotte drapes fabrics over her bed, tearing pages from magazines of places she wishes she could live and fashioning them as best she can from offcuts. Maria keeps her room bare, lies in bed after she has stripped off her uniform and her skin. She lets the night in through the open window and thinks about a poem she was read as a child, taking on the memories of others. They keep the uneasy peace of communal living, the shared monthly pain and the stacked-up bins, the torn-off loo roll and dampness of towels mouldering on radiators. Take-away containers next to careful meal prep, too many bodies sweating and existing in a small space. Sophie has a bad habit of removing her skin from her torso, wandering down to the kitchen with her flesh hanging around her waist, lymph nodes and milk ducts showing yellow and red for all to see. At night there is a soft sawing noise as the women sleep, a temporary death-rattle. Maria tends to stay awake, her radio tuned to something far away from here in a language she doesn’t speak. The intonation of informative broadcasts and cultural reviews seep into her dreams.
Charlotte has kept a part of her wages under the bed for every month she has worked here. She keeps just enough to live, sleeping on her growing box like a secret. She has always wanted something beautiful for herself, tired of ersatz fripperies. Unlike the other women she takes her overtime, convincing herself that her large pupils would have been beautiful once, belladonna-widened, her pale skin not from endless hours inside the factory, but a marker of beauty. She even knows that her thinness would once have been prized, her dark circles will easily be removed by her parsimony. In the kitchen she tries to disguise the curl of her lips as Sophie bares her flesh, and when she closes her eyes she can almost taste the richness of fat-marbled luxury.
Emilia is working on the nerves. She is one of les petites mains, and her age confers some legitimacy. She looks at the other girls, and sees them as girls, still hopeful even though they come back more drained by the day. She sutures memories into the flesh, separated by type. The most expensive skins are from the best memories, but they are sorted by head office. There are a lot of weddings, first communions—the rarest are a happy losing of a virginity. She is the best seamstress because she dredges through the dregs that are discarded as pointless. Silky slips of being told you are clever when you are seven, the sound of laughter at a joke you told at a party when you thought no-one was listening. She weaves them in like gossamer, taking offcuts and putting them into the skins designated for people who cannot afford the best. When she is having a bad day she weaves in her own bile, drawing it out of her throat and hemming it into the most perfect day up near the bodice. She has found they work best next to the heart, and she sews so deftly that no-one notices when her clothes are sent out.
There is a place where no-one wishes to work, as though the main floor of the factory was somehow a kindness. If the new workers cried when they saw the flesh and fat being worked, they could not imagine the memory workshop. Indeed, it took a particular sort of callousness to invent this. Even the nerve workers know not to ask questions. At night the girls were taken from their beds, there were men whose job this was. The first time was at menses, small ankles still in cotton socks, the mouths covered because the screams were coveted. They made the best and the finest threads, woven into the older women whose thighs spilled over the restraints, whose existence were a richer strain of silver. Even the well-off women were not immune, but their taking tended to happen during childbirth when they were sedated with an epidural. Memories and the sense of self were slopped into buckets casually, hoisted up to the floor and somewhere learning to ride a bicycle or the genuine loving hug of a father fell out, never to be experienced again.
Sophie sloughed off her skin in the workroom. Her sinews were delicately made, factory-new, but this wasn’t done. The foreman came down and asked with mock-concern whether she was feeling well, then pulled up her skin as though she were a child. Women looked up from their stations but averted their eyes, weaving the bone-muscle-hair together depending on where they sat. The whirr of the machinery almost masked the cries that came up from the floor. That night none of the women remembered that one of their colleagues had stripped off her skin, stepped out into the world glistening in splendour, but the buckets that held recollections overflowed with something rich and ripe. This had the potential to be couture.
Orange car lights slide over the darkened ceiling, reflections of raindrops running across the patch of illumination. Maria is trying to pin down a feeling that she knows she has experienced, but like sleep it eludes her. The radio is Icelandic tonight, the cadence soft and pillowy. She invents her own background to what is being discussed, film reviews of things she will never be able to see. The lack, the thing that is missing, forms an indent in her chest that she shakes out like her pillow every morning. She imagines her mind as a box, opening it up in the night and letting the clouded sky fill it in. She wishes that she were not so tired after her day of work to try to find the provenance of her skin. Under her fingertips it feels dehydrated, thickened on the elbows where she rests against the workbench, slackened in the concavity of her stomach between her hips.
The boutiques are designed to be soft; the skins supple and hung in beautiful ranges of shades. Tall vases of flowers make the air smell like a garden on a hot summer evening, and the women who work in the shops flatter and cajole and cosset the customers. Some women have collections of hundreds of skins, but for Charlotte this is a singular trip to wonderland. She is steered towards the cheaper offerings, the sales assistants have seen women like her before, desperate for a slice of a life they could never truly lead. In the dressing rooms (more floral perfume, the lighting diffuse, the sofas velvety and pink) she pulls on her new skin, and the taste of champagne and glittering parties fill her head. There is the tenderness of an embrace and the sensation of warmth on the skin after a day spent idling by the sea. Charlotte begins to cry. She keeps her new skin in the layers of tissue paper and the original box under her bed, only wearing it in private when no-one else in the boarding house can see.
Sophie wakes up feeling clean and renewed. She walks down to start her job at the factory. She is promoted to foreman and led down the stairs to the memory workshop. A day later her room in the boarding house is filled again by a new girl, who spends the evening after her shift not eating, just staring into the darkness after the sun has set.
Emilia is feeling tired. Her joints are pushing at the edges of her skin, it has erythema. She thinks of this part of herself as an it now, having sewn so many. In parts it cannot hold her swollen body, in others it hangs loose over flesh that has been lost. She can hear the snores and the movements of the other women in her house, and wonders whether she is truly ill enough to call off sick the next day. Even in her dreams she merely threads needles, and folds herself down into that word, mere. In six hours she arrives at her work station, takes up the memories of others, and begins.
Charlotte wears her beautiful skin in the night and looks at herself in the mirror. She understands the sensation of being gorgeous —it is not just beauty, it’s the history of beauty that comes with the skin. Every part of her skeleton is more comfortable, the years of work are hidden. She deserves this, she had saved up for it, but underneath that is a throb of the costume. She knows this does not fit, despite it being tailored to her personal contours. The next day, when the women come to the factory, they find an exquisite skin stripped for parts, each labelled and ready to be re-used. There is the scent of alcohol and Charlotte is nowhere to be found.
Maria feels the death of Charlotte keenly. Even though they were not friends they were close, but she cannot find the words to mourn her passing. Compare this to when Emilia dies, and there is an outpouring of grief. Perhaps because they only have a set time limit, the expression becomes the love that was not given in life. Few people liked Emilia, many respected her.
Maria learned how to stitch memories and nerves. One could take pride in one’s job, or the entire enterprise was rendered fruitless; dignity in labour was considered absolute. On a particularly bad day she ran her frustration through the needle and the silver thread blackened, as though exposed to poison. The ladder stitch was neat enough to conceal the horrors of the night she put into the skins. She folded the seam ripper into her apron and took it back to the boarding house.
She began at her armpit, something that was called the underarm in the more expensive skins. Hers was furred with a coarse set of hair, trimmed rather than removed. She had never really taken off her skin before, except for washing. It came off easily, and the air on her viscera was cold. She had nothing to get gooseflesh, so it just contracted and left vague stains on the bedsheets she would soak in peroxide to get out. By the ribs there was a little strain of fattened darkness, silver that had been oxidised. Maria prodded it with her little finger and it burst, oily and disgusting. The baby was there on her chest, ripped away in perpetuity, sometimes taking the idea of the breast up with it, sometimes just being wrenched away. Emelia lay dead in the grave, her grief put into the body of another.
Maria takes up her needle and the thread from the rich baskets that come up from the memory workshop. She sews neatly, and with purpose.
Sylvia Warren is a writer and academic editor. Their fiction has been published in the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Anthology, Minor Literature[s], Open Pen, and Rituals & Declarations amongst others. Twitter: @sylvswarren
minor literature[s] 