Читать книгу Under The Skin - Michel Faber - Страница 7
ОглавлениеNEXT DAY, ISSERLEY drove for hours in sleet and rain before finding anything. It was as if the bad weather had kept all the eligible males indoors.
Despite peering so intently through her windscreen that she began to get mesmerized by the motion of the wipers, she could identify nothing on the road except the ghostly tail-lights of other rainswept vehicles crawling through the noonday twilight.
The only pedestrians, let alone hitch-hikers, she had seen all morning were a couple of tubby youths with crewcut heads and plastic knapsacks, splashing in a gutter near the Invergordon underpass. Schoolkids, late or playing truant. They had turned at her approach and shouted something too heavily accented for her to understand. Their rain-soaked heads looked like a couple of peeled potatoes, each with a little splat of brown sauce on top; their hands seemed gloved in bright green foil: the wrappers of crisps packets. In her rear-view mirror, Isserley had watched their waddling bodies recede to coloured blobs finally swallowed up in the grey soup of the rain.
Driving past Alness for the fourth time, she could scarcely believe there was nobody there. It was usually such a good spot, because so many motorists were loath to pick up anybody they suspected might be from Alness. A grateful hitcher had explained this to Isserley not long ago: Alness was known, he said, as ‘Little Glasgow’, and gave the area ‘a bad name’. Illegal pharmaceutical substances were freely available, leading to broken windows and females giving birth too young. Isserley had never been to Alness itself, though it was only a mile off the road. She just drove past it on the A9.
Today, she drove past it over and over again, hoping one of its leather-jacketed reprobates might finally come forward, thumbing a lift to a better place. None did.
She considered going farther, crossing the bridge and trying her luck beyond Inverness. There, she was likely to find hitchers who were more organized and purposeful than the ones closer to home, with thermos flasks and little cardboard placards saying ABERDEEN or GLASGOW.
Ordinarily, she had no objection to going a long way to find what she was looking for; it was not uncommon for her to drive as far as Pitlochry before turning back. Today, however, she was superstitious about travelling too far from home. Too many things could go wrong in the wet. She didn’t want to end up stranded somewhere, her engine churning feebly against a deluge. Who said she had to bring somebody home every day, anyway? One a week should be enough to satisfy any reasonable person.
Giving up around midday, she headed back north, playing with the notion that if she announced resolutely enough to the universe that she’d abandoned all hope, she might be offered something after all.
Sure enough, not far from the sign inviting motorists to visit picturesque seaboard villages on the B9175, she spotted a miserable-looking biped thumbing the watery air in the snubstream of the traffic. He was on the other side of the road from her, lit up by the headlights of a procession of vehicles sweeping past. She had no doubt he would still be there when she’d doubled back.
‘Hello!’ she called out, swinging the passenger door open for him.
‘Thank Christ for that,’ he exclaimed, leaning one arm on the edge of the door as he poked his dripping face into the car. ‘I was beginning to think there was no justice in the world.’
‘How’s that?’ said Isserley. His hands were grimy, but large and well-formed. They’d clean up nicely, with detergent.
‘I always pick up hitchers,’ he asserted, as if refuting a malicious slur. ‘Always. Never drive past one, if I’ve got room in the van.’
‘Neither do I,’ Isserley assured him, wondering how long he was intending to stand there ushering rain into her car. ‘Hop in.’
He swung in, his big waterlogged. rump centering him on the seat like the bottom of a lifebuoy. Steam was already rising before he’d even shut the door; his casual clothes were soaked through and squeaked like a shammy as he settled himself.
He was older than she’d taken him to be, but fit. Did wrinkles matter? They shouldn’t: they were only skin deep, after all.
‘So, the one bloody time I need a lift,’ he blustered on, ‘what happens? I walk half a bloody mile to the main road in the pissing rain, and do you think any bugger will stop for me?’
‘Well …’ Isserley smiled. ‘I stopped, didn’t I?’
‘Aye, well you’re car number two thousand and bloody fifty, I can tell you,’ he said, squinting at her as if she was missing the point.
‘Have you been counting?’ she challenged him sportively.
‘Aye,’ he sighed. ‘Well, rough head-count, you know.’ He shook his head, sending droplets flying off his bushy eyebrows and abundant quiff. ‘Can you drop me off somewhere near Tomich Farm?’
Isserley made a mental calculation. She had ten minutes only, driving slowly, to get to know him.
‘Sure,’ she said, admiring the steely density of his neck and the width of his shoulders, determined not to disqualify him merely on the grounds of age.
He sat back, satisfied, but after a couple of seconds a glimmer of bafflement appeared on his stubbled spade of a face. Why were they not moving?
‘Seatbelt,’ she reminded him.
He strapped himself in as if she had just asked him to bow three times to a god of her choice.
‘Death traps,’ he mumbled derisively, fidgeting in a faint miasma of his own steam.
‘It’s not me that wants it,’ she assured him. ‘I just can’t afford to be stopped by the police, that’s all.’
‘Ach, police,’ he scoffed, as if she were admitting to a fear of mice or mad cow disease. But there was an undertone of paternal indulgence in his voice, and he wiggled his shoulders experimentally, to demonstrate how he was adjusting to his confinement.
Isserley smiled and drove off with him, lifting her arms high on the steering wheel to show him her breasts.
She’d better watch those, the hitcher thought. Or they’ll fall into her Corn Flakes.
Mind you, this girl needed something going for her, with glasses as thick as that and no chin. Nicki, his own daughter, was no pearl of beauty either, and to be honest she didn’t even make the most of what she’d got. Still, if she really was studying to become a lawyer instead of just boozing his allowance away in Edinburgh, maybe she’d end up being some use to him after all. Like, she could maybe find a few extra loopholes in the EU regulations.
What did this girl do for a crust? Her hands weren’t quite right. No, they weren’t normal at all. She’d buggered them up, maybe, in some heavy manual job when she was too young to handle it and too stupid to complain. Chicken-plucking. Fish-gutting.
She lived by the sea, definitely. Smelled of it. Fresh today. Maybe she worked for one of the local fishermen. Mackenzie was known to take women on, if they were strong enough and not too much trouble.
Was this girl trouble?
She was tough, that was for sure. Probably had been through hell, growing up funny-looking in one of those little seaboard villages. Balintore. Hilton. Rockfield. No, not Rockfield. He knew every single person in Rockfield.
How old was she? Eighteen, maybe. Her hands were forty. She drove like she was pulling a wonky trailer-load of hay over a narrow bridge. Sat like she had a rod up her arse. Any shorter and she’d need a couple of pillows on the seat. Maybe he’d suggest that to her – maybe she’d bite his head off if he did. Probably illegal, anyway. Highway Code regulation number three million and sixty. She’d be scared to tell them where to shove it. She’d rather suffer.
And she was suffering. The way she moved her arms and legs. The heating turned up full. She’d done some damage there somewhere along the line. A car accident, maybe? She had guts, then, to keep driving. A tough little bird.
Could he help her out, maybe?
Could she be any use to him?
‘You live near the sea, am I right?’ he said.
‘How can you tell?’ Isserley was surprised; she had made no conversation yet, assuming he needed more time to appraise her body.
‘Smell,’ he stated bluntly. ‘I can smell the sea on your clothes. Dornoch Firth? Moray Firth?’
It was alarming, this point-blank accuracy. She would never have expected it; he had the half-smiling, half-grimacing squint of the dull-witted. There was black engine oil on the sleeves of his shabby polyester jacket. Pale scars littered his tanned face like imperfectly erased graffiti.
Of his two guesses, she picked the one that was wrong.
‘Dornoch,’ she said.
‘I haven’t seen you around,’ he said.
‘I only arrived a few days ago,’ she said.
Her car had caught up now with the procession of vehicles that had passed him by. A long trail of tail-lights stretched, fading, into the distance. That was good. She dropped back into first gear and crawled along, absolved from speed.
‘You working?’ he asked.
Isserley’s brain was functioning optimally now, barely distracted by the steady pace of the traffic. She deduced he was probably the type who knew someone in every conceivable profession, or at least in those professions he didn’t despise.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m unemployed.’
‘You need a fixed address to get benefits,’ he pointed out, quick as a flash.
‘I don’t believe in the dole.’ She was getting the hang of him at last, and suspected this reply would please him.
‘Looking for work?’
‘Yes,’ she said, slowing down even further to allow a luminous white Mini into the queue. ‘But I don’t have much education. And I’m not that strong.’
‘Tried gathering whelks?’
‘Whelks?’
‘Whelks. It’s one of my lines of business. People just like yourself gather ’em. I sell ’em on.’
Isserley pondered for a few seconds, assessing whether she had enough information to proceed.
‘What are whelks?’ she said at last.
He grinned through his haze of steam.
‘Molluscs, basically. You’ll’ve seen ’em, living where you live. But I’ve got one here, as it happens.’ He lifted one cheek of his meaty buttocks towards her, to fish around in his right trouser pocket.
‘There’s the fella,’ he said, holding a dull grey shell up to her eye level. ‘I always keep one in my pocket, to show people.’
‘That’s very foresightful of you,’ complimented Isserley.
‘It’s to show people the size that’s wanted. There’s piddly wee ones, y’see, size of peas, that aren’t worth the bother of picking up. But these big fellas are just fine.’
‘And I could just gather them and get money for it?’
‘Nothing simpler,’ he assured her. ‘Dornoch’s good for ’em. Millions of ’em there, if you go at the right time.’
‘When is the right time?’ Isserley asked. She had hoped he’d have taken his jacket off by now, but he seemed content to swelter and evaporate.
‘Well, what you do,’ he told her, ‘is get yourself a book of the tides. Costs about 75p from the Coastguard Authority. You check when it’s low tide, go to the shore and just rake ’em in. Soon as you’ve got enough, you give me a tinkle and I come and collect.’
‘What are they worth?’
‘Plenty, in France and Spain. I sell ’em to restaurant suppliers – they can’t get enough of ’em, especially in winter. Most people only gather in summer, y’see.’
‘Too cold for the whelks in winter?’
‘Too cold for the people. But you’d do all right. Wear rubber gloves, that’s my tip. The thin ones, like women use for washing dishes.’
Isserley almost pressed him to be specific about what she, rather than he, could earn from whelk-gathering; he had the gift of half persuading her to consider possibilities which were in fact absurd. She had to remind herself that it was him she was interested in getting to know, not herself.
‘So: this whelk-selling business – does it support you? I mean, do you have a family?’
‘I do all sorts of things,’ he said, dragging a metal comb through his thick hair. ‘I sell car tyres for silage pits. Creosote. Paint. My wife makes lobster creels. Not for lobsters – no fuckin’ lobsters left. But American tourists buy ’em, if they’re painted up nice. My son does a bit of the whelk-gathering himself. Fixes cars too. He could sort that rattle in your chassis no bother.’
‘I might not be able to afford it,’ retorted Isserley, discomfited again by the sharpness of his observation.
‘He’s cheap, my son. Cheap and fast. Labour’s what costs, y’see, when it comes to cars. He’s got a constant stream of ’em passing through his garage. In and out. Genius touch.’
Isserley wasn’t interested. If she wanted a man with a genius touch, she already had one on tap, back at the farm. He’d do anything for her, and he kept his paws to himself – if only just.
‘What about your van?’ she said.
‘Oh, he’ll fix that too. Soon as he gets his hands on it.’
‘Where is it?’
‘About half a mile from where you picked me up,’ he wheezed, stoically amused. ‘I was half-way home with a tonload of whelks in the back. Fuckin’ engine just died on me. But my boy will sort it. Better value than the AA, that lad. When he’s not pissed.’
‘Do you have a business card of your son’s on you?’ Isserley enquired politely.
‘Hold on,’ he grunted.
Again he lifted his meaty rump, which was not destined after all to be injected with icpathua. From his pocket he removed a handful of wrinkled, dog-eared and tarnished cardboard squares, which he shuffled through like playing cards. He selected two, and laid them on the dashboard.
‘One’s me, and one’s my son,’ he said. ‘If you feel like doing a bit of whelk-gathering, get in touch. I’ll come out for any amount over twenty kilos. If you don’t get that much in one day, a couple of days will do it.’
‘But don’t they spoil?’
‘Takes ’em about a week to die. It’s actually good to let ’em sit for a while so as the excess water drains out. And keep the bag closed, or they’ll crawl out and hide under your bed.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ promised Isserley. The rain was easing off at last, allowing her to slow the windscreen wipers down. Light began to seep through the greyness. ‘Here’s Tomich Farm coming up,’ she announced.
‘Another two hundred yards and that’s me,’ said the whelk stud, already unbuckling his seatbelt. ‘Thanks a lot. You’re a little Samaritan.’
She stopped the car where he told her to and he let himself out, squeezing her affectionately on the arm with one big hand before she realized what was happening. If he noticed the hardness and thinness of the limb, he didn’t let on. Ambling off, he waved once without looking back.
Isserley watched him disappear, her arm tingling unpleasantly. Then when he was gone, she frowned into her rear-view mirror, looking for a break in the traffic. She was forgetting him already, apart from a resolution to wash and put on fresh clothes whenever she’d been for a morning walk along the firth.
Indicator ticking, she cruised back onto the road, eyes front.
Her second hitcher was waiting for her quite close to home, so close that she had to think hard about whether she’d ever seen him before. He was young, almost too short, with a beetle brow and hair dyed so blond it was almost white. Despite the cold and the persistent drizzle, he wore only a short-sleeved Celtic T-shirt and military camouflage pants. Vague tattoos disfigured his lean but powerful forearms: skin deep, she reminded herself again.
Deciding, on the southwards approach, that he was a total stranger after all, she stopped for him.
As soon as he’d entered her car and sat down, Isserley sensed he was trouble. It was as if the laws of physics were unsettled by his presence; as if the electrons in the air were suddenly vibrating faster, until they were ricocheting around the confines of the cabin like crazed invisible insects.
‘Gaun anywhir near Redcastle?’ A sour aroma of alcohol sidled over to her.
Isserley shook her head. ‘Invergordon,’ she said. ‘If that’s not worth your while …’
‘Neh, it’s cool,’ he shrugged, drumming on his knees with his wrists, as if responding to the beat of an inbuilt Walkman.
‘OK,’ Isserley said, pulling out from the kerb.
She regretted there wasn’t more traffic: always a bad sign. She also found herself, instinctively, gripping the steering wheel in such a way that her elbows hung down, obscuring her passenger’s view of her breasts. This, too, was a bad sign.
His stare burned through regardless.
Women don’t dress like that, he thought, unless they want a fuck.
The only thing was, she mustn’t expect him to pay. Not like that slag in Galashiels. Buy them a drink and they think they can sting you for twenty pounds. Did he look like some kind of loser?
That road in Invergordon with the Academy in it. That was a good place. Quiet. She could suck him off there. He wouldn’t have to see her ugly face then.
Her tits would dangle between his legs. He’d give them a bit of a squeeze if she did a good job. She’d do her best, he could tell. Breathing hard already she was, like a bitch in heat. Not like that slag in Galashiels. This one would be satisfied with what she could get. Ugly women always were, weren’t they?
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 always 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 insular. 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.
‘Not from justice,’ he said, ‘but from a medical institute.’
‘You mean … you’re a psychotic?’ she suggested breathlessly.
‘No. But I almost became a doctor, which in my case would perhaps have been the same thing. My pairends think I am still studying at the institute. They sent me a very far distance and paid a lot of money so that I could study there. It is very important to them that I must become a doctor. Not just a regular doctor, but a specialist. I have been sending them letters telling them that my reezurch is proceeding very smoothly, Instead, I have been drinking beer and reading books about travel. Now I am here, travelling.’
‘And what do your parents think of that?’
He sighed and looked down into his lap.
‘They don’t know anything about it. I have been training them. So many weeks between letters, then so many weeks more, then so many weeks still more. I always say that I am very busy with my reezurch. I will send them my next letter after I am back in Germany.’
‘What about your friends?’ insisted Isserley. ‘Doesn’t anybody know you’ve gone on this adventure?’
‘I had some good friends back in Bremen before my studies began. At medical school I have many acquaintances who want to become specialists and drive a Porsche.’ He turned towards her in concern, although she was doing her very best to keep calm. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, fine, thank you,’ she panted, and flipped the icpathua toggle.
She knew he would fall against her, turned sideways as he was. She was prepared for it. With her right hand she kept steering straight and true. With her left she shoved his slumping body back into position. The driver of the car behind her would just assume there’d been an attempted kiss and she’d rebuffed it. Kissing in a moving vehicle was universally acknowledged to be dangerous. She’d known that even before she’d learned to drive, had read it in an ancient book about road safety for American teenagers, not long after her arrival in Scotland. It had taken her a long time to fully understand that book, studying it for weeks on end while the television chattered in the background. You could never predict when the television might make something clear that books couldn’t – especially when the books came from charity shops.
The hitcher was toppling towards her again. Again she shoved him back. ‘Behind the wheel of an automobile is no place for canoodling, necking, or “petting”,’ the book had said. For someone new to the language, it was a mysterious injunction. But she’d worked it out soon enough, with the help of television. Legally, you were allowed to do whatever you liked in a car, including have sex – as long as the vehicle wasn’t moving at the time.
Isserley put her left-hand blinker on as she approached a turn-off. Bumf, said the hitcher’s head against the passenger window.
It was past six o’clock when she got back to the farm. Ensel and a couple of the other men helped her remove the hitcher from the car.
‘Best one yet,’ Ensel complimented her.
She nodded wearily. He always said that.
As they were loading the vodsel’s limp body onto the pallet, she ducked back into her car and drove off into the unlit dark, aching and ready for bed.
