Under Your Skin by Sabine Durrant

scuffing a clump of grass back and forth with his Prada-encased toe.
    The playground is full of people I recognize—parents from school, neighbors I’ve seen around. Most of them notice me and glance away. I’m not very good at making friends. I’m busy, not there at the right times, and even when I am—those hanging around moments, like school pickup, I’m self-conscious. More to the point, Philip isn’t keen on meeting new people. He doesn’t have time, he says, to put in the effort—the getting-to-know-you conversations, the dinner parties . . . . We have enough friends already he says. He may well be right, but such intractability has its drawbacks at moments like this. I wish Millie still needed pushing on a swing, or guiding up the steps of the slide, so I would have something to do with my hands, an object to lean on, but she is horsing about in the bushes with a gaggle of others. Climbing frames pall by the time you are eight. I can understand that. Who needs modular outdoor play when there’s a real tree to dangle from? I sit on a bench, leaning forward on my knees, trying to look perky.
    I catch others’ eyes and smile. I do up a little girl’s shoelaces. A toddler tumbles into a puddle next to me and I scoop him up and put him back on his feet.
    “Gaby!”
    Phew. It’s like being picked last in school games. It’s Jude Morris, mother of a child in Millie’s class. I don’t know her well, but I like the look of her. When we first met a few months ago, she told me she used to be a corporate lawyer. “And now I channel all that energy and education into powder paints and playdates and PTAevents. I’m that woman. I’m that sad.” She is the first person I’ve met in ages who hasn’t immediately told me how moved they were by some interview I’ve just done—possibly because she’s had the sense never to watch one—or make me think, by being a bit standoffish themselves, that I need putting in my place.
    She plonks herself down next to me. “So,” she launches, in a semiwhisper, “what a thing to happen. Here! I expect you’ve heard. Have you seen the police tape? I mean, horrendous. I’m so shaken up.”
    It hasn’t occurred to me that anyone else might be shaken up.
    “I know,” I say, smiling. “Extraordinary.”
    A couple of other women sidle over. I remember both their names—Margot, who has a sporty boy in Millie’s class, and Suzanne, whose daughter is a natural actress—I’ve seen her in drama club. They probably know who I am, too, but they do this thing of addressing Jude, not me. They know her better, I suppose, but I find myself trying hard to make them talk to me. I like the look of them, too. I realize I want them to be my friends.
    Margot, a neat German woman with wonderful cheekbones, tells Jude she’s heard it was a man walking his dog who found the body, on Friday afternoon. She screws up her face. “I think the dog was rolling in it.”
    “No!” I say.
    “It’s true,” Suzanne tells Jude. Round her neck is a series of colorful Tibetan scarves, which she adjusts, disentangling an avalanche of hair. “My dog rolls in awful things—dead rats and fox poo. Anything disgusting he can find.”
    “Ughhh!” I say.
    They talk about dogs and their habits for a bit. Then Jude mentions auto-asphyxiation, and someone else ventures prostitution. Margot, pursing her lips, says she heard the corpse was naked.
    “Oh!” I say. The word corpse is not one that has entered my mind.It is so absolute, so removed from life and humanity. Dead flesh. Dryness. Finality. A naked corpse, disengaged from my experience, my moments with her.
    “I know,” they both say, acknowledging me for the first time.
    “I can’t believe she was naked,” I say. “What do you think happened? God, it is almost unbearable, isn’t it? And so close to us.”
    Margot looks at me. “You never think it, do you? You always think this stuff happens somewhere else.”
    Suzanne says, “Perhaps