Under the Skin (17 page)

‘Does that feel good, yeah?’ he said.

‘Mmmm,’ she replied. There was, of course, no feeling in her breasts at all, but there was plenty of feeling in her spine, which he was pressing against the bowed surface of the car. The cold, electrifying sweat of pain and fear prickled on her shoulders.

He kneaded her breasts for an eternity. His breathing and hers mingled, cloudy in the frigid air. Far above, a pale sun came out and reflected off his dome-like head. The car’s engine made a ticking sound as its parts lost heat and were infiltrated by the chilly weather.

Finally, the hitcher let her nipples go and took a step backwards.

‘Get on your knees,’ he said. While Isserley was hastening to obey, he ran his free hand down the central slit of his overalls, snapping the fasteners softly to reveal a surprisingly white singlet inside the filthy black and yellow wrapping. The overalls unfastened all the way to his crotch, yawning open. He pulled out his genitals, furry scrotal bulb and all. He stepped forward so that his penis swayed in front of her face.

He held the Stanley knife to the nape of her neck and let her feel the edge of the blade through her hair.

‘I don’t wanna feel no teeth, understand?’ he said.

His penis was grossly distended, fatter and paler than a human’s, with a purplish asymmetrical head. At its tip was a small hole like the imperfectly-closed eye of a dead cat.

‘I understand,’ she said.

After a minute with his urine-flavoured flesh in her mouth, the knife-blade on her neck was lifted slightly, replaced by hard stubby fingers.

‘That’s enough,’ he groaned, squeezing a handful of her hair.

Stepping back, he allowed his penis to slip out of her mouth. Without warning, he grabbed her elbow and pulled it upwards. Isserley didn’t have time to tense her muscles into a characteristic vodsel shape, and her arm bent freely at several joints, a zig-zag of unmistakably human angles. The hitcher did not appear to notice. This, more than anything else so far, filled Isserley with nauseous terror.

Once she was standing, the hitcher nudged her further along the car until she was against the bonnet.

‘Turn around,’ he said.

She obeyed, and he immediately grasped her green velvety trousers and tore them down to her knees with a single jolt.

‘Jesus,’ he growled from behind her. ‘You been in a car accident?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’

For a heady moment she thought he was discouraged, but then she felt the flat of his hand on her back, pushing her forward onto the car’s bonnet.

Desperately, she searched for the right word, the word that might make him stop. It was a word she knew, but had only ever seen written – in fact, only this morning, a vodsel had spelled it out. She’d never heard it spoken.

‘Murky,’ she pleaded.

Both his hands were on the small of her back, the butt of the Stanley knife pressing against her spine. His penis was poking and shoving in between her thighs, straining for entry.

‘Please,’ she begged, suddenly inspired. ‘Let me show you. It will be better for you. I promise.’

Allowing herself to slump flat against the bonnet, her breasts and cheek squashed against the smooth metal, she laid her hands on the cheeks of her buttocks and pulled them apart. Her genitals, she knew, were buried forever inside a mass of ugly scar tissue caused by the amputation of her tail. But the scar lines themselves might resemble the cleft of a vodsel’s sex.

‘I don’t see nothing,’ he grunted.

‘Come closer,’ she urged him, turning her head painfully to watch his domed head looming near. ‘It’s there. Look.’

In a flash, exploiting the fact that she was balanced on the bonnet of the car, Isserley flung her arms backwards and upwards. She flung them like two whips, and her aim was precise. Two fingers of each hand plunged into each of the hitcher’s eyes, right up to the knuckles, right inside his hot clammy skull.

Gasping, she yanked her fingers out again and slammed her hands on the car’s bonnet. She managed to right herself just as the baldhead was falling to his knees; in a frenzy, trousers around her ankles, she leapt sidelong out of his way as he pitched forwards, his face rebounding against the bumper with a meaty smack.

‘Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!’ she cried in disgust, wiping her fingers hysterically on her naked thighs. ‘Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!’

She pulled her trousers up and stumbled over to her discarded top, snatching it off the ground where it lay.

‘Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!’ she cried as she fought her way back into the wet and muddy garment. A slick of grit scraped her shoulders and elbows as she pulled the sleeves down to her quaking wrists.

She scrambled back into her car and switched on the ignition. The engine coughed back to life; she revved it noisily. She reversed away from the baldhead’s body, gears clashing, then stalled.

Just as she was about to restart the engine and drive off, she couldn’t resist wiping her fingers one more time, with the cloth she used for the windscreen. She noticed that a sizeable wedge of one of her fingernails was missing. She bashed the steering wheel with her palms. Then she got out of the car and went back to the hitcher’s body to retrieve what must at all costs not be found and analysed.

It took some time, and required her to improvise tools from the surrounding vegetation.

When she’d finished, she got in her car and drove away, back to the main road.

Other cars beeped at her as she tried to turn into their midst.

She had her lights on high beam.

If she wanted to join their peaceable procession, that was not allowed.

ISSERLEY DROVE DIRECTLY
to Tarbat Ness, to a jetty she knew there. It was at the bottom of a short and dangerously steep road marked by a traffic sign depicting a stylized car falling into stylized ocean waves.

Isserley drove carefully, parked neatly near the tip of the jetty, pulled the handbrake back as if retrieving something which might get lost otherwise. Then she leaned her arms on the steering wheel and gave herself permission to feel whatever was coming to her. Nothing came to her.

The sea was dead still and steely grey. Isserley stared at it through the windscreen, unblinking, for a long time. Seals were known to play here; there was a sign saying so, somewhere on the road behind her. She stared at the sea for perhaps two hours, determined that nothing should escape her. The sea grew darker, an expanse of tinted glass. If there were any seals hidden below, none broke the surface.

In time, the tide rose silently, licking at the jetty. Isserley didn’t know if the water would rise so far that her car would be lifted up and carried into the sea. If the water sucked her under she supposed she would have to drown. She’d been a strong swimmer once upon a time, but that was with a very different body from the one she had now.

She tried to motivate herself to switch on the ignition and drive away to safety, but just couldn’t manage it. Thinking of somewhere else she could be was an impossible challenge.
This
was the place she’d decided to go when she’d still had the spirit to make decisions; now that spirit was gone. She would stay here. The sea would either take her or it would leave her be. What did it really matter?

The longer Isserley waited on the jetty, the more she felt as if she had only just arrived, had only been here for a matter of moments. The sun moved across the heavens like the deceptive glow of distant headlights that never got any closer. Water from the North Sea knocked gently on the underside of the car. Isserley continued looking through the windscreen. Something important was eluding her. She would wait here until it came to her. She would wait forever if necessary.

A large cloud in the darkening sky was changing shape all the time. Though she was unaware of any wind, there must be powerful forces up there, shaping the cloud, finding it unsatisfactory, sculpting it into something different. It began as a floating map of a continent, then got compressed into a ship, then grew into something very like a whale. Eventually, towards nightfall, it lapsed into something larger, more diffuse, abstract, meaningless.

Darkness came and Isserley had still not had enough time to decide what to do next. The car rocked slightly, butted from beneath by the haunches of the waves. She would go when she was ready.

The night passed in seconds, surely no more than a few thousand of them. Isserley did not sleep. She sat at the wheel and watched the night pass. Sometime during these dark hours, the sea gave up trying to intimidate her, and slunk away.

At sunrise, Isserley blinked several times. She removed her glasses, but the problem was the windscreen itself, which was misty with condensation. Her own body was steaming hot and clammy, as if she had been sleeping. She could not have been sleeping. It was impossible. She had not let her guard down for an instant.

She switched on the windscreen wipers, to clear the luminous fog. Nothing happened. She switched on the ignition. Her engine coughed feebly and shuddered, then was still.

‘If that’s the way you want it,’ she said aloud. Her voice shook with rage.

She would have to do something about that.

An hour or so later, the windows had cleared by themselves. Isserley became aware of a pain in her side. She brushed at the spot with her fingertips; the fabric of her top was stuck to her flesh with what must be blood. She tugged it loose irritably. She had assumed she was uninjured.

Experimentally, she tried to swivel her hips where she sat, or lift her thighs. Nothing happened. Below the waist, she might as well be dead. She would have to do something about that.

She wound the window of the driver’s side down a fraction and peered through the slit. The tide had retreated from the shore, exposing jellified seaweed, half-decomposed jetsam, and bony rocks pimpled with those little molluscs that people – that vodsels – collected. Whelks. That was the word. Whelks.

In the distance, two figures were walking along the shore, towards Isserley’s jetty. Isserley watched them advance, willing them to turn back. Her beam of thought, for all its furious intensity, failed to cross the divide. They did not turn back.

At a range of fifty metres or so, Isserley identified the figures as a female vodsel and a dog of unverifiable gender. The female vodsel was small and delicate, dressed in a sheepskin coat and a green skirt. Her legs were stick-thin, sheathed in black, shod in green gumboots. The hair on her head was long and thick, blowing across her face. As she walked along the rocks, she called the dog’s name, in a voice wholly unlike a male vodsel’s.

The dog wasn’t naked; it wore a red tartan coat. It wobbled as it walked, struggling to keep its balance on the slimy rocks. It looked around frequently at the female vodsel.

Eventually, when the two of them had come close enough to Isserley for her to consider putting her glasses on, they stopped in their tracks. The female vodsel waved. Then she turned around and walked away, the dog at her heels.

Isserley exhaled in relief. She resumed watching the clouds, watching the sea.

When at last the car seemed to have dried out in the sun, she tried switching on its ignition again. The engine started obediently. She switched it off. She would go when she was ready.

Turning her head to the passenger side, she stared down at the pock-marked seat as she flipped the icpathua toggle. Two silvery needles stabbed through the upholstery, two thin jets of liquid squirted into the air.

Isserley leaned back in her seat, closed her eyes, and started mewling.

ISSERLEY ALWAYS DROVE
straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time. That’s what she’d always done. That’s what she would do now. There was a hitcher in her sights. She drove past him.

She was looking for big muscles. Puny, scrawny specimens were no use to her. This one was puny and scrawny. He was no use to her. She drove on.

It was dawn. The physical world did not exist for her, apart from the ribbon of grey tarmac on which she was driving. Nature was a distraction. She refused to be distracted.

The A9 seemed empty, but you couldn’t trust it. Anything could happen, any time. That’s why she kept her eyes on the road.

Three hours later, there was another hitcher. It was a female. Isserley wasn’t interested in females.

Somewhere on the passenger side, above the wheel, a rattle had started up. She had heard that rattle before. It had pretended to go away, but it had stayed hidden in her car’s body somewhere. Isserley would not tolerate this. She would take her car back to the farm, when she had finished work, and she would find that rattle and she would fix it.

Two and a half hours later, there was another hitcher in her sights. Isserley always drove straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time. So, she drove past him.

He was holding a large cardboard sign that said
PERTH
PLEASE
. He was not bald. He was not wearing overalls. His body was rather top-heavy, a V-shaped torso on long legs. How thin were those legs? His faded jeans were flapping around them; it must be very windy today.

She drove back and appraised him again. His arms were good. His shoulders were excellent. There was a lot of breast on him, even though his waist was lean.

After her U-turn, she drove towards him a third time. He had curly, unruly red hair and wore a thick knitted jumper composed of many different colours of wool. All the thick-knitted-jumper vodsels Isserley had ever met were unemployed, and lived the life of pariahs. Some authority must actually force them to wear these garments, she thought, as a stigma of rank.

This vodsel beckoning to her now must be an outcast. And his legs would fatten up fine.

She pulled off the road, and he ran to the car, smiling.

Isserley opened the passenger door, intending to call out, ‘Do you want a lift?’

It suddenly seemed an absurd thing to say. Of course he wanted a lift. He had a big sign saying
PERTH PLEASE
; she had stopped for him. Nothing could be more self-explanatory. Words were a waste of energy.

In silence, she watched him strap himself in.

‘I … This is very good of you,’ the hitcher said, grinning awkwardly, combing his hands through his abundant hair, which immediately fell back over his eyes. ‘I was getting pretty cold there.’

She nodded gravely, and tried to smile in return. She wasn’t sure if she was managing it. The muscles in her face seemed even less connected to her lips than usual.

The hitcher babbled on: ‘I’ll just leave my sign here at my feet, shall I? You can get to your gears all right, can you?’

She nodded again, and revved the engine. Inwardly, her speechlessness troubled her; she seemed to have lost the power; there was a problem in her throat. Her heart was pounding already, though nothing had happened yet and no decision was on the horizon.

Determined to function normally, she opened her mouth to speak, but it was a mistake. She could sense that the sound rising in her throat would mean nothing to a vodsel, so she swallowed it down again.

The hitcher stroked his chin nervously. He had a soft red beard, so sparse it had been invisible from a distance. He smiled again, and blushed.

Isserley took in a deep, slightly shuddery breath, flipped the indicator and drove off, facing the road ahead.

She would speak when she was ready.

The hitcher fiddled with his sign, trying to catch her eye as he leaned forward. She was not to be caught. He sat back, nonplussed, clasping each of his cold hands inside the other in turn, then sliding them under the fleecy sleeves of his jumper.

He wondered what on earth he could say to put her at ease, and why she’d bothered to pick him up if she didn’t want to talk to him. She must have had a reason. The thing was to guess what her reason might be. Judging from the look on her face before she’d turned away, she was completely knackered; maybe she’d just been falling asleep at the wheel, and decided a hitch-hiker would keep her awake. She’d be expecting him to make small talk, then.

It was an alarming thought; he wasn’t a ‘small talk’ kind of person. Long philosophical one-to-ones were more his thing, like the late-night conversations he had with Cathy when they were both a bit stoned. A pity he couldn’t offer this woman a joint to loosen things up.

Instead, he thought of commenting on the weather. Not in a cheap way, but saying what he really felt on days like this, when the sky was like … like an ocean of snow. It was so mind-blowing the way it could all hang suspended up there, all that solid water, enough of it to bury a whole county in tons of white powdered ice, all of it just floating, way, way up there as easily as a cloud. A miracle.

He looked at the woman again. She was driving like a robot, back straight as a metal bar. He got the impression that the beauties of nature meant nothing to her. There was no common ground there.

‘Hi, I’m William,’ he could say. Maybe it was a bit late now. But he would have to break the silence somehow. She might be going all the way to Perth. If she drove him a hundred and twenty miles without them exchanging a word, he’d be a basket case by the time he arrived.

Maybe the tone of ‘Hi, I’m William’ was a little bit crass, a bit American, like ‘Hi, I’m Arnold, and I’m your waiter for the evening.’ Maybe something more low-key would be better. Like, ‘I’m William, by the way.’ As if he was mentioning it in the middle of an enthusiastic conversation they were already having. Which, sadly, they weren’t.

What was
wrong
with this woman, anyway?

He ruminated for a minute, making an effort to lay aside his own unease and concentrate on her instead. He tried to see her the way Cathy might see her if she was sitting in his seat; Cathy was a genius for sizing people up.

Earnestly striving to connect with his intuitive feminine side, William very quickly came to the conclusion that there must be something badly, badly wrong with this woman. She was in some sort of trouble, some sort of distress. She might even be in shock.

Or maybe he was just being dramatic. Cathy’s friend Dave, the writer,
always
looked as if he was in shock. He’d looked like that all the years they’d known him. He was probably born looking like that. This woman, though: she gave off the weirdest vibes. Weirder even than Dave’s. And she was definitely not in good shape physically.

Her hair was matted, with streaks of something that looked like axle grease slicked through it, and tufts sticking out at odd angles. Here was a woman who hadn’t looked at herself in a mirror for a while, that was for sure. She smelled – stank, really, if he could be so judgemental – of fermenting sweat and seawater.

Her clothes were filthy with dried mud. She’d fallen, maybe, or had some sort of accident. Should he ask her if she was all right? She might be offended if he commented on the state of her clothing. She might even think he was trying to harass her sexually. It was so hard to be friendly, in any genuinely human way, towards female strangers if you were a male. You could be courteous and pleasant, which wasn’t the same thing at all; it was the way you’d treat the staff at the Job Centre. You couldn’t tell a strange woman that you liked her earrings, or that her hair was beautiful – or ask her how she came to have mud on her clothes.

It was over-civilization that caused that, maybe. Two animals, or two primitives, would never worry about that sort of thing. If one was muddy, the other would just start licking or brushing or whatever was needed. There was nothing sexual about it.

Maybe he was being a hypocrite. He
did
recognize this woman as … well … a woman, surely? She was a female; he was a male. These were eternal realities. And, let’s face it, she was wearing amazingly little clothing for the weather. He hadn’t seen so much cleavage in public since well before the snows had set in.

Her breasts were suspiciously firm and gravity-defying for their size, though; maybe she’d had them pumped up with silicone. That was a pity. There were health risks – leakage, cancer. It was so unnecessary. Every woman was beautiful. Small breasts fitted snugly inside your hand and felt warm and complete. That’s what he told Cathy, whenever the latest lingerie catalogue came with the junk mail and she went on a downer.

Maybe this woman was simply wearing one of those fiendishly designed uplift bras. Men could be naive when it came to that sort of stuff. He examined her side, from armpit to waist, for tell-tale signs of underwiring or industrial-strength lace. He saw nothing except a small perforation in the fabric of her top, like a snarl from a spine of barbed wire or a sharp twig. The fabric around the hole was tacky with some sort of dried gunge. Could it be blood? He longed to ask. He wished he were a doctor, so he could ask and get away with it. Could he pretend to be a doctor? He knew a fair bit, from Cathy’s pregnancies, her motorcycle accident, his father’s stroke, Suzie’s addictions.

‘Excuse me, I’m a doctor,’ he could say, ‘and I can’t help noticing …’ But he didn’t approve of lying. Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive, that’s what Shakespeare said. And Shakespeare was no fool.

The more he looked at this girl, the weirder she appeared. Her green velveteen trousers were very seventies retro-chic, if you disregarded the muddy knees, but she definitely didn’t have the legs of a nightclub babe. Trembling slightly under the thin fabric, so short they barely reached the pedals, they might have been the legs of a cerebral palsy sufferer. He turned his head to glance through the space between his seat and hers, half expecting to see a foldable wheelchair wedged into the back. There was only an old anorak, a garment he could well imagine her wearing. Her boots were like Doc Martens, but even chunkier, like Boris Karloff clogs.

Strangest of all, though, was her skin. Every part of her flesh that he could see, except for her pale smooth breasts, had the same peculiar texture to it: a downy look, like the hide of a cat recently spayed, just beginning to grow back the fur. She had scars everywhere: along the edges of her hands, along her collarbones, and especially on her face. He couldn’t see her face now, hidden as it was behind the tangled mane of her hair, but he’d got a pretty good glimpse of it before, and there was scarring along the line of her jaw, her neck, her nose, under her eyes. And then the corrective lenses. They must have the biggest magnification known to optometry, for her eyes to look that big.

He hated to judge anyone by externals. It was the inner person that mattered. But when a woman’s external appearance was this unusual, there was every likelihood it would have shaped the whole of her life. This woman’s story, whatever it was, would be a remarkable one: perhaps tragic, perhaps inspirational.

He longed to ask.

How sad it would be if he never found out. He would spend the rest of his life wondering. He knew that. He’d experienced it before. Once, eight years ago, he’d had a car himself, and given a lift to a man who’d started weeping, right there in the car next to him. William hadn’t asked what was the matter; he’d been too embarrassed, a macho kid of twenty. In time, the man stopped weeping, arrived at his destination, got out of the car, said thanks for the lift. Ever since then, maybe once a week, William would find himself wondering about that man.

‘Are you all right?’ He could ask that, surely. If she wanted to fob him off, she could put him in his place then and there. Or she could answer in a way that left things more open.

William licked his lips, tried to bring the words to his tongue. His heart beat faster, his breathing quickened. The fact that she wasn’t looking at him made things even harder. He considered clearing his throat, like he’d seen men do in the movies, then blushed at how naff that idea was. His sternum was vibrating, or maybe it was his lungs that were doing it, like a bass drum.

This was ridiculous. His heavy breathing was becoming audible now. She would think he was going to jump on her or something.

He took a deep breath and gave up the idea of asking her anything, at least out of the blue. Maybe something would arise naturally later.

If only he could bring Cathy into the conversation, that might reassure her. She would know then that he was some other woman’s partner, the father of two children, a person who wouldn’t dream of raping or molesting anybody. How to bring up the subject, though, if she didn’t ask? He couldn’t just say, ‘By the way, in case you might be wondering, I have a partner, who I love dearly’. That would sound so naff. No, worse than naff: positively creepy, even psychotic.

That’s what lying had done to the world. All the lying that people had been doing since the dawn of time, all the lying they were doing still. The price everyone paid for it was the death of trust. It meant that no two humans, however innocent they might be, could ever approach one another like two animals. Civilization!

William hoped he would remember all this stuff, to discuss it with Cathy when he got home. He had his finger on something important here, he thought.

Although maybe if he told Cathy too much about this woman who’d given him a lift, she’d take it the wrong way. Talking about his old girlfriend Melissa and the walking tour of Catalonia hadn’t gone over too well, he had to admit, even though Cathy had more or less forgiven him by now.

Jesus, why did this girl not speak to him?

Isserley stared ahead of her in despair. She was still unable to speak, the hitcher was evidently unwilling to. As always, it was up to her. Everything was up to her.

A big green traffic sign said there were 110 miles to go before Perth. She ought to tell him how far she was going. She had no idea how far she was going. She glanced into the rearview mirror. The road was empty, difficult to see clearly under the grey, snow-laden light. All she could do was keep
driving, her hands barely moving on the steering wheel, a cry of torment stuck in her throat.