Under the Skin Page 8

  This girl who’d picked him up, now. She'd probably be all right. As a girlfriend, like. She’d let him sleep when he was dying for it, he could tell. She wouldn’t poke him just when he was drifting off and say, ‘You’re not falling asleep are you?’ Kind eyes, she had. Bloody big knockers, too. Pity she didn’t have any big containers of petrol tucked away somewhere. Still, he couldn’t complain, could he? No use complaining. Face the future with a smile, as the old man always used to say. Mind you, the old man never met Catriona.

  Where was this girl going to drive him? Would she be willing to drive him back to his car again if he could get some petrol? He hated to leave his car in a ditch like that. A thief could steal it. Thief’d need petrol, though. But there were probably car thieves driving all around the countryside, with big petrol containers in the boot, just looking for a car like his. How low could some people go, eh? Dog eat dog, that’s what it all boiled down to.

  Catriona would murder him if he turned up any later than he already was. That wasn’t so bad in itself, but she wouldn’t let him sleep, this was the thing. If he could get some petrol into his car he could sleep in that, and maybe visit Catriona in the morning. Or sleep in the car all weekend even, sit around in Little Chefs during the day and drive back down to work on Monday morning. Fucking great, eh? Eh?

  This girl here wouldn’t mind if he rested his head back on the seat for just a few minutes, would she? He wasn’t much of a talker anyway. ‘Thick as two planks,’ Catriona always said.

  But how thick exactly was a plank, eh? It just depended on the plank, didn’t it, eh?

  Isserley coughed, to summon him back to consciousness. Coughing didn’t come easily to her, but she tried every so often, just to see if she could pull it off convincingly.

  ‘Eh? Eh?’ he yapped, his bloodshot eyes and snot-shiny snout leaping out of the dimness like startled wildlife.

  ‘What do you work at?’ said Isserley. She’d been quiet for a minute, assuming the hitcher was ogling her, but a strangled snort from his direction had let her know he was falling asleep.

  ‘Woodcutting,’ he said. ‘Timber. Eighteen years in the business, eighteen years behind a chainsaw. Still got two arms and two legs! Heh! Heh! Heh! Not bad, eh? Eh?’

  He held his fingers up above the dashboard and wiggled them, presumably to demonstrate that he had all ten.

  ‘That’s a lot of experience,’ complimented Isserley. ‘You must be well known to all the timber companies.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He nodded emphatically, his chin almost bouncing off his barrel chest each time. ‘They run when they see me coming. Heh! Heh! Heh! Ya got to keep smiling, eh?’

  ‘You mean, they’re not satisfied with your work?’

  ‘They say I’m not a good time-keeper,’ he slurred. ‘I keep the trees waiting too long, y’understand? Late, late, late, that’s me. La-a-a-a-ate …’ His head was slumping, the attenuated vowel describing a slow lapse into oblivion.

  ‘That’s very unfair,’ Isserley remarked loudly. ‘It’s how well you do your job that matters, not the hours you keep, surely.’

  ‘Kind words, kind words,’ simpered the woodcutter, staring ever deeper into his lap, his tufty hair slowly rearranging itself on his compact skull.

  ‘So,’ exclaimed Isserley, ‘you live in Edderton, do you?’

  Again he snorted to the surface.

  ‘Eh? Edderton? My girlfriend lives there. She’s gonna skelp my bot.’

  ‘So where do you live?’

  ‘Sleep in the car through the week, or bed and breakfast. Work ten days straight, thirteen sometimes. Start five in the morning summertime, seven in winter. Or I’m suppo-o-o-o-sed to …’

  She was just about to rouse him from his slump when he roused himself, shifted around in his seat and actually laid his cheek against the headrest, pillow-style. He winked again, and, with a weary obsequious smile, mumbled across to her,

  ‘Five minutes. Just five minutes.’

  Amused, Isserley drove in silence while he slept.

  She was mildly surprised when, more or less exactly five minutes later, he jerked awake and stared at her dazedly. While she was thinking of something to say to him, however, he relaxed again, and laid his cheek back against the headrest.

  ‘’Nother five minutes,’ he pouted placatingly. ‘Five minutes.’

  And once more he was gone.

  Isserley drove on, this time keeping one eye on the digital clock on the dashboard. Sure enough, some three hundred seconds later, the woodcutter jerked awake again.

  ‘Five minutes,’ he groaned, turning his other cheek to the headrest.

  This went on for twenty minutes. Isserley was in no hurry at first, but then a road sign alerted her to the fact that they would soon be driving past a services turn-off, and she felt she’d better get down to business.

  ‘This girlfriend of yours,’ she said, the next time he woke. ‘She doesn’t understand you, is that right?’

  ‘She’s got a temper,’ he admitted, as if he’d been spurred to articulate this for the first time ever. ‘She’ll skelp my bot.’

  ‘Have you ever thought of leaving her?’

  He grinned so broadly it was like an incision slicing his head in two.

  ‘A good girl is hard to find,’ he chided her, barely moving his lips.

  ‘Still, if she doesn’t care for you …’ persisted Isserley. ‘For example, would she be worried about you if you didn’t turn up tonight? Would she try to find you?’

  He sighed, a long wheezy exhalation of infinite weariness.

  ‘My money’s good enough for her,’ he said. ‘And, plus, I got cancer in the lungs. Lung cancer, in other words. Can’t feel it, but the doctors say it’s there. I might not have long, y’understand? No use giving up a bird in the hand, y’understand? Eh?’

  ‘Mmm,’ replied Isserley vaguely. ‘I see what you mean.’

  Another sign reminding motorists that services were not far ahead flashed by, but the woodcutter was nuzzling into the seat again, mumbling, ‘Five minutes. Just another five minutes.’

  And again, he was gone, his boozy breath snortling gently.

  Isserley glanced at him. He sat slumped, his head lolling against the headrest, his rubbery mouth open, his red-lidded eyes closed. He might as well have been pricked by the icpathua needles already.

  Isserley thought about him as she drove through the soundproof night, weighing up his pros and cons.

  On the pro side, the woodcutter’s drunkenness and sleepless excesses were no doubt well understood by all who knew him; nothing would surprise them less than if he failed to turn up wherever he was supposed to be. The car would be found, full of empty alcohol containers, on a windswept ribbon of road through two mountain ranges; there would be no doubt that the driver had stumbled away, drunk, into a frozen expanse of bog and precipice. Police would dutifully search for the body, but be resigned from the outset that it might never be found.

  On the con side, the woodcutter was not a healthy specimen: his lungs, by his own admission, were full of cancer. Isserley tried to visualize this; imagined someone slicing him open and being squirted in the face by a stream of malodorous black muck made of burnt cigarette tar and fermented phlegm. However, she suspected this was a lurid fantasy based on her own distaste at the thought of inhaling burning punk into her lungs. It probably bore no relation to what cancer really was.

  She frowned, straining to recall her studies. She knew cancer had something to do with runaway cell reproduction … mutant growth. Did that mean that this vodsel had huge abnormal lungs crammed into his chest? She didn’t want to cause any problems for the men back at the farm.

  On the other hand, who cared if the lungs were too big? They could surely be discarded whatever size they were.

  On the other hand, she felt squeamish about bringing a vodsel onto the farm which she knew to be diseased. Not that anyone had ever told her in so many words that it was wrong, but … well, she had her own internal moral sense.<
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  The woodcutter was murmuring in his sleep, a slack-lipped crooning sound like ‘moosh’n, moosh’n, moosh’n’, as if he were trying to placate an animal.

  Isserley checked the clock on the dashboard. More than five minutes had elapsed; quite a bit more. She took a deep breath, settled back in her seat, and drove.

  An hour or so later, she had bypassed Tain and was approaching the Dornoch Bridge roundabout. It struck her that the weather conditions were so different from what she had experienced earlier that day on the Kessock Bridge that they could have been on a different planet. Lit up against the pitch-black environs by strips of neon on long stalks, the roundabout glowed eerily in the windless, trafficless stillness. Isserley drove onto its steeply ascending spiral, glancing at the woodcutter to see if the blaze of light would wake him. He didn’t stir.

  Pootling gently along, high up off the ground, Isserley ‘s car described an arc on the surreal concrete labyrinth. So monstrously ugly was this structure that it could have been mistaken for something from inside the New Estates, were it not for the open sky above. Isserley veered to the left to avoid crossing Dornoch Firth, and started a steep descent into leafy gloom. Her headlights, on full beam, picked out the flank of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Kingdom Hall nestled below, then tunnelled into Tarlogie forest.

  Remarkably, it was now that the woodcutter squirmed in his sleep; having failed to react to the merciless lights of the roundabout, he seemed to sense, despite the darkness, the forest pressing in on the narrow road.

  ‘Moosh’n, moosh’n, moosh’n,’ he crooned wearily.

  Isserley leaned forward as she drove, peering into the almost subterranean blackness. She felt fine. The forest’s underground effect was an illusion, after all, and so it could not exert the nauseous claustrophobic power of the New Estates. She knew the barrier keeping out the light overhead was nothing more than a feathery canopy of twigs, beyond which lay a comforting eternity of sky.

  Minutes later, the car emerged from the forest into the pastured surrounds of Edderton. The dismal caravan sales-yard welcomed her to this minuscule village. Street lights illuminated the defunct post office and the thatched bus shelter. There was no sign of life.

  Isserley flipped the toggle for the indicator, even though there was no vehicle to see it, and brought the car to a stop in a spot where the light was brightest.

  She nudged the woodcutter gently with her strong fingers.

  ‘You’re here,’ she said.

  He jerked violently awake, his eyes wild as if he was in immediate danger of being brained with a blunt instrument.

  ‘Wha-wha-where?’ he waffled.

  ‘Edderton,’ she said. ‘Where you wanted to be.’

  He blinked several times, struggling to believe her, then squinted through the windscreen and the passenger window.

  ‘Zaddafact?’ he marvelled, orienting himself in the oasis of familiar aridity outside. Clearly, he was having to concede that nowhere else could look quite like this.

  ‘Gee, this is … I dunno …’ he wheezed, grinning with embarrassment and anxiety and self-satisfaction. ‘I must of fell asleep, eh?’

  ‘I guess you must have,’ said Isserley.

  The woodcutter blinked again, then tensed up, peering nervously through the windscreen at the deserted street.

  ‘I hope my girlfriend’s not out,’ he grimaced. ‘I hope she don’t see you.’ He looked at Isserley, his brow wrinkling as he considered the possibility that this might offend her. ‘What I mean to say is,’ he added, even as he was fumbling to unclasp his seatbelt, ‘she’s got a temper. She’s what-would-you-say … jealous. Aye: jealous.’

  Already out of the car, he hesitated to slam the door before he had found the right words to leave her with.

  ‘And you’re’ – he drew a deep, rasping breath – ‘beautiful,’ he beamed.

  Isserley smiled back, bone-weary all of a sudden.

  ‘Bye for now,’ she said.

  * * *

  Isserley sat in her car for a long time, engine off, in the pool of light near the thatched bus stop in Edderton village. Whatever was needed to enable her to leave, she lacked it just now.

  While waiting for whatever it was to be granted her, she rested her arms on the steering wheel, and her chin on her arms. She didn’t have much of a chin, and what little she did have was the result of much suffering and surgical ingenuity. Being able to rest it on her arms was a small triumph, or maybe a humiliation, she could never decide which.

  Eventually, she removed her glasses. A stupid risk to take, even in this somnolent village, but the sensation of tears collecting inside the plastic rims and leaking through onto her cheeks was unbearable in the end. She wept and wept, keening softly in her own language, watching the street carefully in case any vodsels strayed out. Nothing happened, and time stubbornly refused to pass.

  She looked up into the rear-view mirror, adjusting the angle of her head until what she saw reflected was just her moss-green eyes and the fringe of her hair. This little sliver of face, poorly illumined, was the only bit she could look at nowadays without self-loathing, the only bit which had been left alone. This little sliver was a window into her sanity. She had sat in her car like this many times over the years, staring through that window.

  A pair of headlights glimmered on the horizon, and Isserley put her glasses back on. By the time the vehicle arrived in Edderton, quite some time later, she had pulled herself together.

  The vehicle was a plum-coloured Mercedes with tinted windows, and it winked its lights at Isserley as it passed through the village. It was a friendly gesture, nothing to do with warning or the codes of traffic. Just one vehicle saluting another of a vaguely similar shape and colour, in ignorance of the contents inside.

  Isserley started her own car and turned it round, following her unknown well-wisher out of Edderton and into the forest.

  All the way back to Ablach, she thought about Amlis Vess and what he might think when he learned she had come back empty-handed. Would he assume that the reason why she was hidden away in her cottage was embarrassment at her lack of success? Well, let him. Perhaps her failure, if that’s how he chose to see it, would make clear to him that her job was not an easy one. Pampered dilettante that he was, he probably imagined it was like picking wildflowers from the side of the road, or … or whelks from the sea-shore, if he had the faintest notion what whelks were, or what a sea-shore looked like. Esswis was right: fuck him!

  Maybe she should have taken the woodcutter after all. How massive his arms had been! – such massive chumps, bigger than any she’d ever encountered. He would have been good for something, surely. Ah, but the cancer … She really would have to find out whether cancer made any difference, for future reference. It was no use asking the men on the farm, though. They were thick; typical Estates types.

  Ablach Farm was snowy pale and as quiet as ever when she drove up its overgrown private road. There were actually two roads leading into the farm, one nominally for heavy machinery, but both were cracked and bumpy and wild with weeds, and Isserley used either depending on her mood. Tonight she turned into the one supposedly for cars, though no cars except hers ever drove on it. Already at the mouth of Ablach, a cluster of signs warned of death, poison, and the full penalty of law. Just passing these signs, Isserley knew, triggered alarms in the farm buildings a quarter of a mile ahead.

  She liked this road, especially one gorse-infested stretch of it which she called Rabbit Hill, where colonies of rabbits lived and could be depended on to hop across at any time of day or night. Isserley always drove very slowly here, taking great care not to run over these winsome little creatures.

  Through the camouflage of trees at the top of the road she glimpsed the lights of Esswis’s farmhouse, remembered their awkward conversation that morning. Hazily though she knew him, she could well imagine his back would be torturing him by now, and she felt pity, contempt (he could have said no, couldn’t he?), and a queasy pang of kinship.<
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  She drove past the stable, illuminating its blistered door in a flash of orange and black. There were no horses in there, only a pet project of Ensel’s.

  ‘It’ll work, I know it will,’ he’d told her, just days before abandoning it and letting Esswis tow it away. She’d shown no interest, of course. Men of his sort could bore you to death if you encouraged them.

  The main steading, when she pulled up to it, was ridiculously white, its fresh paint glowing in the moonshine. As soon as she’d switched off her engine, the great metal door rolled open and several men hurried out. Ensel, first as always, peered into the passenger window.

  ‘I couldn’t get anything,’ said Isserley.

  Ensel poked his snout inside the cabin, much as the woodcutter had done, and sniffed the alcoholic upholstery. ‘I can smell it wasn’t for want of trying,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, well,’ responded Isserley, hating herself for what she was about to say, but saying it anyway, ‘Amlis Vess will just have to appreciate it isn’t as easy as all that.’

  Ensel noted her discomposure, smiled. His teeth weren’t so good, and he knew it; for her sake, he lowered his head.

  ‘You got a big one yesterday, anyway,’ he said. ‘One of the best ever.’

  Isserley stared into his eyes, yearning to be sure whether, just for once, the compliment was sincere. As soon as she caught herself yearning, she yanked this contemptible little shoot of sentimentality out by the root. Estate trash, she thought, looking away, determined to get herself locked up safely in her cottage as soon as possible. She’d had far too long a day.

  ‘You look exhausted,’ said Ensel. The other men had already gone back inside; he was attempting a private moment with her, the way he sometimes did, always at lamentably inopportune times.

  ‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘It would be fair to say that.’