Under the Skin Read online

  Not that he was the kind of guy who could only get ugly women.

  It was just, here he was and here she was. It was like … force of nature, wasn’t it? The law of the fucking jungle.

  ‘So, what brings you out on the road today?’ Isserley said brightly.

  ‘Settin’ aroond the estate wuz doin’ mah heid in.’

  ‘In between jobs, then?’

  ‘Jobs dinnae exist up here. Nae such fuckin’ thing.’

  ‘The government still expects you to look for them though, doesn’t it?’

  This gesture of empathy did not particularly impress him.

  ‘Ah’m oan a fuckin’ trainin’ schim,’ he fumed. ‘They says, You go find some old fogies and talk shite tae ’em aboot central fuckin’ heatin’ and we’ll tell the government yir oaff the dole, OK? Fuckin’ hush money. Yi ken?’

  ‘It sucks,’ Isserley agreed, hoping this was the right term for him.

  The atmosphere in the car was growing intolerable. Every available cubic millimetre of empty space between him and her was filling up with his malignant breath. She had to make her decision fast; her fingers itched to hit the icpathua toggle. But she must, at all costs, stay calm. To act on impulse was to invite disaster.

  Years ago, in the very beginning, she’d stung a hitcher who had asked her, scarcely two minutes after getting into the car, if she liked having a fat cock up each hole. Her English hadn’t been quite as good then, and it had taken her a little while to figure out he wasn’t talking about poultry or sports. By then he’d exposed his penis. She’d panicked and stung him. It had been a very bad decision.

  Police had searched for him for weeks. His picture was shown on television and published not just in the newspapers but also in a special magazine for homeless people. He was described as vulnerable. His wife and parents appealed to anyone who might have sighted him. Within days, despite the privacy she’d imagined at the time she picked him up, the investigation turned its spotlight on a grey Nissan estate driven possibly by a woman. Isserley had had to lie low on the farm for what seemed like an eternity. Her faithful car was handed over to Ensel, and he cannibalized it in order to customize the next-best one on the farm, a horrid little monster called Lada.

  ‘Anyone can make a mistake,’ Ensel had reassured her as he laboured to get her back on the road, his arms smeared with black grease, his eyes bloodshot from the welding flame.

  But Isserley’s shame was such that even now she couldn’t think about her failure without an involuntary grunt of distress. It would never happen again: never.

  They had reached a stretch of the A9 which was being converted to dual carriage; there were noisy mechanical dinosaurs and uniformed personnel meandering over mounds of soil on either side of the road. The commotion was consoling, in a way.

  ‘You’re not from this area, are you?’ Isserley said, raising her voice slightly to be heard above the din of great blades slicing into the earth.

  ‘Nearer tae it than you, Ah kin bet,’ he retorted.

  She ignored this jibe, determined to hold on to the conversational thread which might lead to his family, when he startled her by suddenly, violently, winding his window down.

  ‘He-e-ey Doug-eeee!’ he yelled into the rain, waving one fisted arm out the window.

  Isserley glanced up at the rear-view mirror, caught a glimpse of a burly figure in bright yellow reflective clothing standing by an earthmover, waving back hesitantly.

  ‘Mate ae mine,’ explained her hitcher, winding his window up again.

  Isserley took a deep breath, tried to get her heart rate down. She couldn’t take him now, obviously; she had lost her chance. Whether or not he was married with children had become irrelevant in an instant; on balance she would rather not find out, in case he wasn’t.

  If only she could stop panting and let go of him!

  ‘Are those real?’ he said.

  ‘Pardon?’ It was as much as she could do to speak one word without her breath catching.

  ‘What yis goat stickin’ oot in front ae yi,’ he elaborated. Yir tits.’

  ‘This … is as far as I go,’ she said, veering the car into the middle of the road, indicator flashing. By the grace of Providence, they had reached the comforting eyesore of Donny’s Garage in Kildary. WELCOME, the sign said.

  ‘You seid Invergordon,’ her hitcher protested, but Isserley was already turning across the lanes, homing her car towards the space between the garage and its petrol pumps.

  ‘There’s a rattle in the chassis somewhere,’ she said. ‘Can’t you hear it?’ Her voice was hoarse and none too even, but it didn’t matter now. ‘I’d better get it looked at. Might be dangerous.’

  The car stopped moving. Some kind of life bustled behind the cluttered shop windows of Donny’s Garage: other voices, the creak of large refrigerators, the clink of bottles.

  Isserley turned to her hitcher and gently pointed back to the A9.

  ‘You can try your luck just there,’ she advised. ‘It’s a good spot. Drivers are going quite slowly. I’ll get this car looked at. If you’re still here when I’m finished, I’ll maybe pick you up again.’

  ‘Dinnae poosh yirself,’ he sneered, but he got out of the car. And then he walked away, he walked away.

  Isserley opened her own door and heaved herself out. Standing upright sent a shock of pain through her spine. She steadied herself against the roof of the car and stretched, watching Beetle-brow crossing the road and slouching towards the far gutter. The frigid breeze thrilled the sweat on her skin, blew oxygen straight up her nose.

  Nothing bad would happen now.

  She extracted one of the petrol pumps from its holster, manipulating the great nozzle awkwardly in her narrow claw. It wasn’t strength she lacked, it was sheer breadth of handspan. She needed two hands to guide the nozzle into the hole. Watching the computerized gauge with care, she squirted exactly five pounds’ worth of petrol into the tank. Five zero zero. She replaced the pump, walked into the building and paid somebody with one of the five-pound notes she’d been saving for just this purpose.

  It all took under three minutes. When she emerged, she looked uneasily across the road for the green-and-white form of Beetle-brow. He was gone. Incredibly, someone else had taken him.

  Only a couple of hours later, it was already late afternoon and the light was failing; that is, about half past four. Chastened by her experience so close to home with Beetle-brow, Isserley had driven about fifty miles south, past Inverness, almost as far as Tomatin, before turning back empty-handed.

  Although it was not unusual for her to have days when she made her pick-up well after dark, this depended wholly on her stamina for driving and her appetite for the game. Just one humiliating encounter could shake her so badly that she would retreat to the farm as soon as possible, to brood on where she’d gone wrong and what she could have done to protect herself.

  Isserley was wondering, as she drove, whether or not this Beetle-brow character had shaken her that much.

  It was difficult to decide, because her own emotions hid from her. She’d always been like that, even back home – even when she was a kid. Men had a Ways said they couldn’t figure her out, but she couldn’t figure herself out, either, and had to look for clues like anyone else. In the past, the surest sign that an emotion was stuck inside her had been sudden, unwarranted fits of temper, often with regrettable consequences. She didn’t have those tantrums anymore, now that her adolescence was behind her. Her anger was well under control nowadays – which was just as well, given what was at stake. But it did mean it was harder for her to guess what sort of state she might be in. She could glimpse her feelings, but only out of the corner of her eye, like distant headlights reflected in a side mirror. Only by not looking for them directly did she have any chance of spotting them.

  Lately, she suspected her feelings were getting swallowed up, undigested, inside purely physical symptoms. Her backache and eye-strain were sometimes much worse than usual, for no
real reason; at these times, there was probably something else troubling her.

  Another tell-tale sign was the way perfectly ordinary events could bring her down, like being overtaken by a school bus on a gloomy afternoon. If she was in reasonable shape, the sight of that great shield-shaped back window crowded with jeering, gesticulating adolescents didn’t perturb her in the least. Today, however, the spectacle of them hovering above her, like an image on a giant screen she must meekly follow for miles, filled her with despond. The way they gurned and grimaced, and smeared their grubby hands in the condensation, seemed an expression of malevolence towards her personally.

  Eventually the bus turned off the A9, leaving Isserley tailing inscrutable little red sedans very like her own. The line seemed to go on forever. The corners of the world were darkening fast.

  She was upset, she decided. Also, her back was sore, her tailbone ached and her eyes were stinging after so many hours of peering through thick lenses and rain. If she gave up and went home, she could take off her glasses and give her eyes a rest, lie curled up on her bed, perhaps even sleep: oh, what bliss that would be! Trifling gifts of creature comfort, consolation prizes to soothe away the pangs of failure.

  At Daviot, however, she spotted a tall, rangy backpacker holding a cardboard sign that said THURSO. He looked fine. After the usual three approaches, she stopped for him, about a dozen yards ahead of where he stood. In her rear-view mirror she watched him bound towards the car shrugging his backpack off his broad shoulders even as he ran.

  He must be very strong, she thought as she reached across for the door handle, to be able to run like that with a heavy load.

  Having drawn abreast with her car, the hitcher hesitated at the door she’d opened for him, gripping his garishly coloured swag with long, pale fingers. He smiled apologetically; his rucksack was bigger than Isserley, and clearly wasn’t going to fit on his lap or even the back seat.

  Isserley got out of the car and opened the boot, which was always empty apart from a canister of butane fuel and a small fire extinguisher. Together they loaded his burden in.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ he said, in a serious, sonorous voice which even Isserley could tell was not a product of the United Kingdom.

  She returned to the driver’s seat, he to his, and they drove off together just as the sun was taken below the horizon.

  ‘I’m pleased,’ he said, self-consciously turning his THURSO sign face-down on the lap of his orange track pants. It was sheathed in a clear rainproof folder and contained many pieces of paper, no doubt inscribed with different destinations. ‘It isn’t so easy to get a lift after dark.’

  ‘People like to see what they’re getting,’ agreed Isserley.

  ‘That’s understandable,’ he said.

  Isserley leaned back against her seat, extended her arms, and let him see what he might be getting.

  This lift was a fortunate thing. It meant he might get to Thurso by tonight, and Orkney by tomorrow. Of course Thurso was more than a hundred miles further north, but a car travelling at an average of fifty miles per hour – or even forty, as in this case – could in theory cover the distance in less than three hours.

  He hadn’t asked her where she was going yet. Perhaps she would only take him a short way, and then say she was turning off. However, the fact that she had seemed to understand his allusion to the difficulties of hitch-hiking in the dark implied she did not intend to put him back on the road ten miles further on, with darkness falling. She would speak soon, no doubt. He had spoken last. It might be impolite for him to speak again.

  Her accent was not, in his opinion, a Scottish one.

  Perhaps she was Welsh; the people in Wales had spoken a little like her. Perhaps she was European, though not from any of the countries he knew.

  It was unusual for a woman to pick him up. Women almost invariably drove past, the older ones shaking their heads as if he were attempting some highly dangerous folly like somersaulting across the traffic, the younger ones looking pained and nervous as if he had already managed to reach inside their cars and molest them. This woman was different. She was friendly and had very big breasts which she was showing off to him. He hoped she was not wanting him for a sexual experience of some kind.

  Unless it was to be in Thurso.

  He could not see her face when she was looking ahead, which was a pity. It had been very remarkable. She wore the thickest corrective lenses he had ever seen. In Germany, he doubted that a person with such severe visual impairment would be approved for a driver’s licence. Her posture was, in his opinion, suggestive of some spinal problem. Her hands were large and yet unusually narrow. The skin on the edge of her hand, along her pinkie and down to the wrist, had a horny smoothness that was texturally quite different from the rest, suggesting scar tissue following surgery. Her breasts were perfect, flawless; perhaps they, too, were the product of surgery.

  She was turning towards him now. Mouth-breathing, as if her perfectly sculpted little nose had indeed been sculpted by a plastic surgeon and had proved to be too small for her needs. Her magnified eyes were a little bloodshot with tiredness, but startlingly beautiful, in his opinion. The irises were hazel and green, glowing like … like illuminated microscope slides of some exotic bacterial culture.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘What is there for you in Thurso?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘Perhaps nothing.’

  He was, she noticed now, superbly built. Deceptively lean, but all muscle. He could probably have run alongside her car for a mile, if she drove slowly enough.

  ‘And if there is nothing?’ she said.

  He pulled a face which she assumed was his culture’s equivalent of a shrug. ‘I’m going there because I have never been there,’ he explained.

  The prospect seemed to fill him with ennui and enthusiasm all at once. Thick grey-blond eyebrows were gathering over his pale blue eyes like a stormcloud.

  ‘You’re travelling through the entire country?’ she prompted.

  ‘Yes.’ His enunciation was precise and slightly emphatic, but not arrogant; more as if he needed to push each utterance up a modest-sized hill before it could be released. ‘I began in London ten days ago.’

  ‘Travelling alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For the first time?’

  ‘When I was young I have travelled a lot in Europe with my pairends.’ (This last word, as he pronounced it, was the first one Isserley had trouble decoding.) ‘But I think, in a way, I saw everything through my pairends’ eyes. Now, I want to see things through my own eyes.’ He looked at her nervously, as if confirming how foolish he’d been to engage with a foreign stranger on this level.

  ‘Do your parents understand this?’ enquired Isserley, relaxing as she found her way with him, allowing her foot to sink down a little on the accelerator.

  ‘I hope they will understand,’ he said, frowning uneasily.

  Tempting though it was to pursue this connective cord to its far-off umbilicus, Isserley sensed she’d found out as much about his ‘pairends’ as he was prepared to tell her, at least for the moment. Instead, she asked, ‘What country are you from?’

  ‘Germany,’ he answered. Again he regarded her nervously, as if he expected she might be violent towards him without warning. She tried to reassure him by tuning her conversation to the standards of seriousness he seemed to aim for himself.

  ‘And what, so far, do you find is the thing that makes this country most different from yours?’

  He pondered for about ninety seconds. Long dark fields dappled with the pale flanks of cows flowed by on either side of them. A sign glowed in the headlights, depicting a stylized Loch Ness Monster in three fluorescent segments.

  ‘The British people,’ the hitcher said at last, ‘are not so concerned with what place they have in the world.’

  Isserley thought this over, briefly. She couldn’t work out whether he was suggesting that the British were admirably self-reliant or deplorably insula
r. She guessed the ambiguity might be deliberate.

  Night settled all around them. Isserley glanced aside, admired the lines of his lips and cheekbones in the reflected head-and tail-lights.

  ‘Have you been staying with anyone you know in this country, or just in hotels?’ she asked.

  ‘Mainly in youth hostels,’ he replied after a few seconds, as if, in the interests of truth, he’d had to consult a mental record. ‘A family in Wales invited me to stay in their house for a couple of days.’

  ‘That was kind of them,’ murmured Isserley, observing the lights of the Kessock Bridge winking in the distance. ‘Are they expecting you back on the way home?’

  ‘No, I think not,’ he said, after having pushed that particular utterance up a very steep hill indeed. ‘I believe I … offended them in some way. I don’t know how. I think my English is not as good as it needs to be in certain situations.’

  ‘It sounds excellent to me.’

  He sighed. ‘That is the problem perhaps. If it was worse, there would be an expectation of …’ He laboured silently, then let the sentence roll back down the mountain. ‘There would not be the automatic expectation of shared understanding.’

  Even in the dimness she could tell that he was fidgeting, clenching his big hands. Perhaps he could hear her beginning to breathe faster, although the change was surely, she felt, quite subtle this time.

  ‘What do you do back in Germany?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m a student … well, no,’ he corrected. ‘When I get back to Germany I will be unemployed.’

  ‘You’ll live with your parents, perhaps?’ she hinted.

  ‘Mm,’ he said blankly.

  ‘What were you studying? Before your studies ended?’

  There was a pause. A grimy black van with a noisy exhaust overtook Isserley, muffling the sound of her own respiration.

  ‘My studies did not end,’ the hitcher announced at last. ‘I walked away from them. I am a fugitive, you could say.’

  ‘A fugitive?’ echoed Isserley, flashing him an encouraging smile.

  He smiled back, sadly.