Under the Skin (5 page)

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.

ISSERLEY WAS WOKEN
next morning by an unusual thing: sunshine.

Normally, she would sleep only a few hours during the night, and then discover herself lying wide-eyed in the claustrophobic dark, her contorted back muscles keeping her hostage in her bed with the threat of needle-sharp pains.

Now she lay blinking in the golden glow of a sun which must have risen quite a while ago. Her attic bedroom, tucked under the steepled roof of the Victorian cottage, had walls which were vertical only half-way up to the ceiling, sloping sharply the rest of the way in line with the roof. From where Isserley lay, her bedroom looked like a hexagonal cubby, lit up like a cell in an irradiated honeycomb. Through one open window, she could see cloudless blue sky; through the other, the complex architecture of oak branches laden with fresh snow. The air was still; the spiderless cobwebs hanging loose from the blistered wooden window-frames hardly stirred.

Only after a minute or two could she detect the almost subsonic hum of the farm’s activity.

She stretched, grunting in discomfort, and threw the bedclothes aside with her legs. The angle of the sunlight was such that her bed was in line for the warmest rays, so she lay exposed for a while, limbs spread in an X-shape, basking her naked skin.

The walls of her bedroom were bare, too. The floor was uncarpeted, an unvarnished lamina of ancient timber boards which would not have passed a spirit-level test. Just under one of the windows, a patch of frost glittered on the floor. Out of curiosity, Isserley reached down to the glass of water next to her bed and lifted it up to the light. The water in it was still liquid – just.

Isserley drank it, even though it crackled slightly in the pouring. After a whole night of lying still and letting nature take its course, her body had attained a simmering circulation that would persist until she’d exercised herself into diurnal metabolism.

In the meantime, she was as warm as a snow goose.

Drinking the water reminded her she had eaten nothing since yesterday’s breakfast. She really must fuel up properly today before going out on the road,
if
she went out on the road, that is.

After all, who said she had to go out every day of her life? She wasn’t a slave.

The cheap plastic alarm clock on the mantelpiece said it was 9:03. There was no other mechanical apparatus in the room except for the scuffed and grubby portable television wedged in the hearth. Its power cord was plugged into a long extension cable which snaked along the skirting-boards and out the door. Downstairs, somewhere, there was an electrical connection.

Isserley heaved herself out of bed and tested out what it felt like to stand up. It wasn’t too bad. She had grown lax about her exercises, and that made her more stiff and sore than she need be. She could definitely do better.

She walked over to the fireplace and switched on the television. She didn’t need her glasses to watch it. In fact, she didn’t need her glasses at all; the lenses were bits of thick window-pane, pretending to be optical. They gave her nothing but headaches and eyestrain, but she needed them for her job.

On the television, a vodsel chef was instructing an inept female how to fry slivers of kidney. The female giggled in embarrassment as the smoke began to rise. On another channel, multi-coloured furry creatures unlike any Isserley ever saw in real life cavorted and sang songs about the letters of the alphabet. On another channel, a shivering food blender was being demonstrated by hands whose nails were painted peach. On another channel, an animated pig and an animated chicken were flying through space in a rocket-powered jalopy. Clearly, Isserley had missed the news.

She switched off the television, straightened up and took up her position in the centre of the room, to do her back exercises. Doing them properly took time and effort, but she’d been lazy lately, and her body was punishing her for it. She
must
get back into shape. Pain such as she’d suffered the last few days was simply not necessary. Allowing herself to get unfit proved no point, unless, for some perverse reason, she actually meant to make herself miserable. To make herself regret what she had done.

She didn’t regret what she had done. No.

So, she arched her spine, swivelled her arms, stood on each leg in turn, then on tiptoe, with her arms upstretched and trembling. She held this stance for as long as she possibly could. The tips of her fingers brushed the dangling dead light bulb. Even extended to her full length like this, in a child-sized bedroom, she was well short of touching the ceiling.

Fifteen minutes later, perspiring, shivering a little, she padded over to the wardrobe and selected her clothes for the day, the same clothes as yesterday. The choice, in any case, was from among six identical low-cut tops in different colours, and two pairs of flared trousers, both green velvet. She possessed only one pair of shoes, a custom-made pair which she’d had to return to the shoemaker eight times before she could walk in them. She did not wear underwear, or a bra. Her breasts stayed up by themselves. One less problem to worry about, or two.

Isserley walked out of the back door of her cottage and sniffed the air. The sea breeze was especially spicy today; she would definitely go to the firth as soon as she’d had breakfast.

And afterwards, she must remember to wash and change her clothes, in case she came across another clever guesser like the vodsel with the mollusc in his pocket.

The fields all around her house were shrouded in snow, with patches of dark earth poking through here and there as if the world were a rich fruit cake under cream. In the western field, tiny golden sheep stood marooned in the whiteness, shoving their faces into the snow in search of buried sweetness. In the northern field, a giant mound of turnips on a raft of hay shone like frosted cherries in the sun. To the south, behind the farm steadings and silos, loomed the dense Christmas firs of Carboll Forest. To the east, beyond the farmhouses, churned the North Sea.

There were no farm vehicles anywhere to be seen, and no workers.

The fields were all rented out to various local landowners, who would bring along what was needed at ploughing time, harvesting time, lambing time and so on. In between times, the land lay silent and untouched, and the farm buildings rotted, rusted and grew moss.

In Harry Baillie’s time, several of the steadings had housed cattle through the winters, but that was in the days when there was money in it. The only cattle now were a few of Mackenzie’s bullocks in the field near Rabbit Hill. On the cliffs at the sea-bound rim of Ablach, a hundred or so blackfaced sheep grazed their cheap and salty forage. They were lucky there was a small stream flowing out to sea, as the old cast-iron water troughs were overflowing with the dark spinach of algae, or rusted nutmeg-brown.

No, Ablach’s current owner certainly wasn’t the pillar of the community Harry Baillie had been. He was some sort of Scandinavian, the natives thought, and a mad hermit besides. Isserley knew he had this reputation because, despite her policy of never giving lifts to locals, she’d had hitchers twenty miles up the A9 suddenly start talking about Ablach Farm. The odds against such a thing coming up in conversation with a stranger, even allowing for the sparse population of the Highlands, must be phenomenal, especially since Isserley was careful always to lie about where she lived.

But it must be a smaller world than she thought, because once or twice a year, a talkative hitcher would get onto the subject of incomers and how they were ruining Scotland’s traditional existence, and, sure enough, Ablach would be mentioned. Isserley would play dumb while she heard the story of how a mad Scandinavian had gobbled up Baillie’s farm and then, instead of turning it into one of these European money-spinning ventures, had just let it fall into decay, renting out the fields to the same farmers he’d outbid.

‘It just goes to show,’ one hitcher had told her. ‘Foreigners’ minds don’t work the same as ours. No offence.’

‘No offence taken,’ she’d said, trying to decide if she should dispatch this vodsel back to the place he claimed to know so much about.

‘So where are
you
from, then?’ he’d asked her.

She couldn’t remember now what she’d replied. Depending on how well-travelled the hitcher seemed to be, she had a number of places she might claim to be from. The former Soviet Union, Australia, Bosnia … even Scandinavia, unless the hitcher was saying nasty things about the mad bastard who’d bought Ablach Farm.

Over the years, though, it was Isserley’s impression that the man she knew as Esswis was slowly winning the grudging respect of the community. To the other farmers he was known as
Mr
Esswis, and it was accepted that he would conduct all his affairs from inside ‘the Big House’, a cottage twice the size of Isserley’s in the centre of the farm. Unlike her cottage, it had electric power in all its rooms, heating, furniture, carpets, curtains, appliances, bric-a-brac. Isserley didn’t know what Esswis did with these things, but they probably impressed visitors – few though these were.

Isserley didn’t actually know Esswis very well at all, despite the fact that he was the only person in the world who’d been through what
she
had been through. In theory, then, they had lots to talk about, but in practice they avoided each other.

Shared suffering, she’d found, was no guarantee of intimacy.

The fact that she was a woman and he was a man had nothing to do with it; Esswis rarely socialized with the other men either. He just stayed holed up in his big house, waiting to be useful.

He was, to be honest, virtually a prisoner in there. It was absolutely crucial that he be available twenty-four hours a day in the event of any emergency which might collide Ablach Farm with the outside world. Last year, for example, a carelessly driven pesticide sprayer had killed a stray sheep, not with pesticide or even under the wheels, but in a freak accident, braining the animal with the tip of one of its winglike booms. Mr Esswis had promptly negotiated an arrangement between himself, the owner of the sprayer and the owner of the sheep, nonplussing the other two farmers by accepting full blame for the straying of the animal, as long as unpleasantness and paperwork could be avoided.

That was the sort of thing that earned him his measure of respect in the area, foreign incomer though he was. He would never show his face at a ploughing championship or a ceilidh, everyone knew that now, but maybe it wasn’t because he couldn’t be bothered; there were sympathetic rumours of arthritis, a wooden leg, cancer. He also understood better than most wealthy incomers that times were tough for local farmers, and regularly asked for straw or surplus produce in lieu of rent. Pillar of the community Harry Baillie may have been, but he was a bugger when it came to contracts. With Esswis, a word muttered over the telephone was as good as his signature. And as for the way he tried to discourage tourists from trespassing, confronting them with barbed wire and threats, well, more strength to his arm. The Highlands were not a public park.

Isserley walked to the main path and, sighing with relief at being rid of her glasses for a while, peered across at Esswis’s house. The lights were on in all the rooms. The windows were all shut and opaque with condensation. Esswis could be anywhere in there.

The sensation of fresh snow crunching underfoot was deeply satisfying to Isserley. Just the idea of all that water vapour solidifying by the cloudful and fluttering to earth was miraculous. She couldn’t quite believe it, even after all these years. It was a phenomenon of stupendous and unjustifiably useless extravagance. Yet here it lay, soft and powdery, edibly pure. Isserley scooped a handful off the ground and ate some. It was delicious.

She walked to the largest of the steadings, the one that was in the best, or least shabby, condition. A dilapidated tile roof had been replaced by sheet metal. Whenever stones crumbled out of the walls, the cavities were promptly filled in with cement. The total effect was less like a house and more like a giant box, but these aesthetic sacrifices were necessary. This building must be protected from the elements and from the prying eyes of outsiders. It was the entrance to a much larger secret just below the ground.

Isserley stood in front of the aluminium door and pressed the buzzer underneath the metal signs saying
DANGEROUS
CHEMICALS
and
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
. Yet another warning sign hung on the door itself, a stylized picture of a skull and two crossed bones.

The intercom crackled abstractly, and she leaned close to it, her lips almost brushing the grille.

‘Isserley,’ she whispered.

The door rolled open and she stepped inside.

*
*
*

Impatient to get out to the firth, Isserley didn’t linger over breakfast. She was back at her cottage within twenty minutes, comfortably full of stodge and carrying a small plastic doggie bag of the German hitcher’s personal effects.

The men down below had seemed pleased to see her, and had expressed concern about her having missed dinner the previous evening.

‘It was a real treat,’ Ensel told her, in a thick provincial dialect of her own language. ‘Shanks of voddissin in serslida sauce. With fresh wild berries for dessert.’

‘Well, never mind,’ Isserley had said, spreading slice after slice of bread with mussanta paste. She never knew what to say to these men, these labourers and process workers she would certainly never even have met in the course of ordinary life back home. Of course it didn’t help that they looked so different from her, and stared at her breasts and her chiselled face whenever they thought she couldn’t see.

They were busy today, and had left her to her meal. But not before passing on an important bit of news: Amlis Vess was coming. Amlis Vess! Coming to Ablach Farm! Tomorrow! He’d sent a message, he was already on his way, they were not to go to any special bother, he wanted to see everything just as it was. Who would have thought it?

Isserley had murmured something noncommittal, and the men hurried off to make more preparations for the big event. Excitement was rare in their lives now that Ablach Farm was well established and they had time on their hands. No doubt this visit from the boss’s son was an almighty thrill compared to spending yet another afternoon gambling with bits of straw or whatever men of their sort did. Left alone in the dining hall, Isserley had served herself a bowl of gushu, but it tasted strangely sour. It was then that she’d noticed that the whole subterranean complex, as well as smelling faintly of male sweat and crap food as always, smelled pungently of cleaning agents and paint. It made her even more determined to get back up into the fresh air as soon as possible.