Under My Skin Read Online Free Page B

was always the chance of getting the hell out into Reading for a night off. From the sound of it, Reading was clearly the most exciting thing that had happened to most of them. They were not so much boring as unformed. Oh, to be that young again.
    Finding out that much proved easy. But when it came to casual inquiries about problems, all I got was the occasional whine about schoolgirl bitchiness in the dorms and missing their boyfriends.
    Luckily Martha, with the notorious G5 massage machine, was more forthcoming.
    Take away the nails and I have to tell you G5 rates as one of life’s great experiences: the human equivalent of those car washes where huge pillars of vibrating fluff rub your bodywork all over. By the time we got to the polishing stage I was rendered almost inarticulate with pleasure, but as mine is a vocation as well as a job, through it all I kept talking.
    So, bless her cotton socks, did Martha. She was a handsome woman, with black hair and soft olive skin, probably in her mid-to late twenties, and with a nicely tuned sense of humor. That she was good at her job was proved by the selection of thank-you cards tacked to the wall: “Thanks for helping me relax,” “A week was not enough!” I had read them while I was supposed to be undressing. I had also checked the massage head, just because—given all the trouble with the worms—Carol would not have had time to.
    “Sponge,” Martha said. “I think you’ll like it. Most people do.”
    I lay on my front first and she spread powder over my back and shoulders and down my legs. She had good hands—confident, not at all tentative. I was pleased to have them on me, even if they did remind me of how long it was since anyone else’s had been there.
    My stomach grumbled softly, just to draw attention to its continued bad treatment.
    “Hungry,” she said softly. A statement rather than a question.
    “Mmm,” I murmured, wondering if any of the popcorn had maybe fallen into my coat pocket.
    “That shows it’s doing you good,” she stated with what I thought was admirably concealed irony.
    She worked on for a while in silence. But once given the cue was quite happy to chatter more, about both the place and herself. She’d been there for almost a year. It was her third job and she was looking to move on. She’d already done the see-the-world stint on the cruise ships only to discover that all that glitters isn’t gold—I mean, where’s the glamour in spending twelve hours a day in a room without a window while the Caribbean sun shone on the rich folks out on deck? Anyway, she was more ambitious than that. Wanted to run her own salon. And to do that she was going to have to move to London. She had sent off a number of applications already, so presumably she didn’t feel the need to be that loyal anymore. Whatever the reasons, we were getting on famously.
    “You couldn’t stay here and climb up the ladder, then?” She was halfway across my back with the sponge attachment and speech was becoming an effort.
    “Hardly. There’s only one pair of shoes I’d like to be in here. And I don’t think she’s planning on taking them off.”
    How right you are, I thought. “So, you’ll go?”
    “If I can get the right job. I certainly don’t intend to spend the rest of my life in an overage girl’s school.”
    “Are you talking about the staff or guests?”
    Martha laughed. “Do you have to sleep in shared rooms?”
    “I got the impression they treated you quite well.”
    “Oh, it’s not bad. We’re just not taken that seriously.”
    “And you think you should be?”
    “Put it this way, I think it’s probably our skills and relationships with the clients which make this place really work. I mean”—she lowered her voice—“no one comes here for the food.”
    I twisted my head to see whether or not the remark might have maggots in it, but she was concentrating hard on the machine, moving into my shoulders with a particularly deep stroke of