There’s a lot in this story to unpack, and the more deeply you look into it, the more there is to see. I read flensing in this story as a physical weaponization of capitalism, the ability to finally commercialize the essence of something in a way that I’m sure companies today would kill to acquire. What did you see in the act of flensing while writing “The Cut Cares Not for the Flesh”?

Flensing itself is just an essentialised transaction, really. The knife is a tool, and it depends on how you use it. So for me it’s really about how that action shapes a person—not capitalism but the man capitalism makes. And I wanted this paragon of money to be a complete failure, so Robert is incapable of creation. He’s the transaction made manifest, this guy so wrapped up in valuing everything that he can only view the world in terms of advantage and acquisition. It’s why he can only replace Annie with Melanie, and has a pornographic sense of intimacy—this use of sex that obliterates sensuality. It’s why he thinks he’s above the rules. And it’s why he becomes the traded commodity, used by the Consent, without ever realising.

Meanwhile, Annie immediately recognises flensing as a miracle. She doesn’t ask for anything. She just wants to change her life and knows that she needs other people to do that. She knows that intimacy doesn’t have firm lines, that we shape those we love as much as they shape us. She’s a terrible capitalist, but I think she finds happiness and fulfilment.

This story came about after I spent a year publishing for financial advisors, in a job that I hated. Excellent editorial colleagues, woeful industry. Financial advisors make their fortunes by learning the arbitrary rules of finance so other people don’t have to, and that’s fine. But the worst of them sell you the lie that it’s all so normal, and everyone else is weird for not choosing to be rich. Except it’s finance that’s weird. It’s simultaneously quantifiable reality and illusory fiction. Money is their deeply, deeply strange god, their cult recondite and banal.

One’s identity being easily mutable—a good thing in moderation? Or an inherent disaster?

I think we exist in a state of continuous growth, which has been a source of increasingly vast relief to me every day I get further away from puberty. But it’s a slow, gradual process of accreting new modes in my life—writer, publisher, dad, adult (occasionally), someone (at long last) happy with themselves. Mutability gave me all of that, through learning skills, understanding my own predilections and behaviour, and my most excellent loved ones.

But also, I went to a twenty-year reunion with uni friends this summer and it was screamingly clear to me that no one ever changes, not in the fundamentals. Old dynamics snapped back into place, conversations dropped decades past were revitalised in seconds, and a familiar tight, not-quite-comfortable feeling settled on my shoulders as I remembered I’m exactly the same flippant neurotic I was at eighteen.

So I don’t think we are easily mutable—the potentially drastic effects of trauma on personality aside—I think it’s the work of life. The bounties and disasters of it come from whether you are able to shape your world to what you need. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to do that. I’ve seen circumstance overwhelm others.

When I googled the term, I found that the term “flensing” has historically been used in whaling, separating the blubber of the whale from the meat. How does this play into the story?

Well now I feel exposed . . . In all honestly, I was most of all looking for a cool-sounding synonym for “cutting.” But the profane qualities are right. It’s a transgressive term—where it was once functional, transactional—because we have proven whales are complex, intelligent beings with sophisticated social and emotional worlds. So it’s perhaps not that far from what happens to Robert, a life reduced to slices, sold off to the highest bidder.

Annie really goes through a transformation in this story, from Suzanne to Adi to bird to masked flenser. It seems to be the happiest and most at peace she’s ever felt. Is it that she finds comfort and agency in the ever-changing chaos, or is it in the communal anonymity that she finds herself?

I wrote Annie’s story to try and get at the wealth of communities and embracing change, most of all, as a counterpoint to Robert’s isolation. I don’t see it as anonymity, rather a complete intimacy where all of the women in the Consent share their lives to the full. None of them is diminished as an individual by their exchanges, and they are all enhanced.

I think she sees the truth of the Talbot immediately, where Robert only possibly gets it right at the end. It’s why we lose sight of her very quickly, when Suzanne and Carla are taking it in turns with Robert. Note that Annie is told about the menagerie straight away, by Carla and Suzanne, then completely ignores it and heads outside to become a pandemonium of parakeets. She’s really captivated by the culture of “informed consent flensing” that exists outside the club. The Talbot is her gateway, and Robert’s destination. So perhaps she doesn’t actually change personality, but by using the transaction as synthesis instead of ownership she is able to iterate her life to happiness and fulfilment.

Of course Robert is the one to suggest the body swap with Melanie, of course he’s the one to break the contract, and of course he breaks the golden rule of removing a Flenser’s mask that seals his fate. It’s the classic “won’t ask for directions” toxic trait of masculinity, that false confidence in the system being designed for him to benefit. What were you conveying about this attitude of entitlement to power (at least, that is how I read him) with Robert?

I see Robert as a victim as much as the perpetrator. He’s absolutely abusive and dehumanises everyone around him, but the financial world is legal and lucrative, and widely praised as having value for society. Which is nuts, because it’s made-up limits for something that doesn’t actually exist, but we all pretend does. Pounds and dollars are snarks, and they’re rich because we all say they are. Roberts will exist as long as that lifestyle is permitted.

Extreme wealth seems to function as mental illness for many people, as it depends on a dehumanisation of everyone else to normalise the excess (like that hit documentary series, Succession). Perhaps it’s entitlement to power; perhaps it’s losing the perspective to see how unreal life becomes. (You’ll be shocked to hear I vote left btw.)

It’s a gilded cage, but Robert’s problem is he’s stuck inside his life with himself, and that’s what brings about his downfall. It’s total wish-fulfilment on my part, as it hardly ever happens in reality—but I doubt I’ll ever shake the feeling that wealth is a toxicity we need to purge, and I guess Robert is my patient zero.