Under the Skin

  Back at the fireside, she pulled the vodsel’s shoes, pullover and dog-haired suit out of the bag, and examined the rest. There wasn’t much there: he’d evidently worn nothing but a stained T-shirt under his pullover, and no underpants. His jacket was empty, and in the pockets of his trousers, apart from car keys and a wallet, there was nothing.

  Laying the pullover on the bonnet of her car to keep it off the dewy grass, she sprinkled the jacket, T-shirt, trousers and shoes with a christening of petrol, then tossed them onto the fire. There was a surprising amount of dog-hair on her hands, which she didn’t want to wipe on her own clothing. With any luck, it would wear off naturally.

  Grunting in discomfort, she knelt to look through the wallet. It was a fat one compared to other wallets she’d seen, but there was little variety inside. Instead of the usual assortment of laminated plastic cards, official concessions and licences, addresses, tickets and sales dockets, there was only money and one sheet of card folded small like a miniature map. The fatness was caused by the sheer bulk of the cash. As well as a few coins, there was a wad of banknotes, mostly twenties with a few tens and fives, adding up to £375. Isserley had never seen so much money before. It was enough to buy five hundred and thirty-five litres of petrol, or a hundred and ninety-two bottles of the blue shampoo, or more than a thousand razor-blades … or … fifty-seven bottles of the fermented potato juice the vodsel had mentioned. She transferred the banknotes to her trousers, distributing them between both pockets to minimize the bulge.

  The sheet of card was a large colour photograph, folded many times. When opened and smoothed out, it showed the vodsel, much younger, embracing a female in a gauzy white dress. Both of them had glossy black hair, rosy cheeks and big crescent smiles. Isserley’s vodsel was clean-shaven, unwrinkled, grime-free. There was no old food on his teeth, and his lips were wet and pink. No doubt she was extrapolating, but she fancied she could tell just from his expression that his happiness was genuine. She wondered what his name had been. There was an ornate signature, Pennington Studio, inscribed on the bottom right-hand margin, which struck Isserley as a foreign name, though the vodsel hadn’t sounded foreign to her.

  Even as Pennington’s clothes burned, Isserley was toying with the idea of rescuing him. Amlis had had no trouble setting a few vodsels free; she could surely do it with just as little bother. The men down there were imbeciles, and most of them would still be asleep.

  But of course it was too late. Pennington would have had his tongue and his balls removed last night. He hadn’t much wanted to live anyway, and he was, hardly likely to have changed his mind by now. He was better left alone.

  Isserley stirred the bonfire with a stick, wondering why she was bothering to be so thorough. Force of habit. She tossed the stick onto the flames, and walked to her car.

  As Isserley drove along the A9, the sun was rising higher above the horizon, recovering from whatever it had suffered behind the snow-capped mountains during the night. Unclouded and at large, it shone with abrupt intensity, casting a generous golden light over all of Ross-shire. Just by being in the right place at the right time, Isserley was part of that landscape too; her hands turned gold on the steering wheel.

  Light as beautiful as this was worth everything, she thought – or damn near everything. Outside the twisted bones and scarred flesh of one’s own body, life wasn’t shit at all.

  Pennington’s pullover still felt a little odd against her skin, but she was getting used to wearing it. She liked the way the cuffs wrapped snugly round her wrists, the tarnished fibres luminescing in the sun. She liked the way she could glance down her breast, and, instead of seeing that repugnant cleavage of artificial fat, get an impression of furriness, an illusion of her natural self.

  Not far up ahead, a hitcher stood beckoning at the roadside. He was young and thin, and held a battered cardboard sign saying nigg. Isserley drove past without even slowing down. The vodsel made a ‘fuck you’ sign in her rear-view mirror, and then turned to be ready for the next car in line.

  * * *

  It was easy to find the spot where she’d picked Pennington up. The carriageway was especially narrow on the stretch leading up to it – that’s why the cars had banked up behind her – and of course there was the P sign to look out for. When she’d found it, she parked her car exactly where she’d stopped the day before, give or take a few feet. She stepped out, locked the doors, and went in search of the nearest farm path into the fields.

  Pennington’s van, too, was easier to find than she’d expected. It was tucked away where she herself would have parked a vehicle if she’d been wanting to hide on this bit of farmland. Shaded by a row of tall trees there stood a ruined mill, roofless and skeletal, against which bales of hay had been piled. The hay had been spoiled by unseasonal weather and left to rot. From the perspective of motorists driving on the A9, there was nothing to be seen except a glimpse of ruins and hay. From the perspective of the farmhouse, half a mile distant, there was only the cluster of trees, sparing the farmer a reminder of blighted resources which would cost money to remove. In the space between the trees and the mill, visible only by trespass, stood Pennington’s van.

  It was a much more luxurious vehicle than Isserley had imagined. She’d pictured a rusty, battered, barely roadworthy thing, dark blue perhaps, with faded writing on the side. Instead it was a glossy cream, finished in polished chrome and unperished black rubber, like one of the brand-new ones on display in Donny’s Garage.

  Inside its lustrous hull, Pennington’s captive dog was jumping from seat to seat, barking frenziedly. Isserley could see that the animal was whooping its lungs out, but through the closed windows the noise was low-pitched and muffled – an ugly racket at close quarters, but one which she doubted would carry very far, even in the dead of night.

  ‘Good boy,’ she said, stepping up to the vehicle.

  It did not occur to Isserley to be afraid as she used Pennington’s keys to unlock the van’s side door. The dog would either run away or attack her; so, either she would watch it scampering into the distance, or she might be forced to kill it. Either way, her conscience would be at rest.

  She swung the door open, and the dog sprang out with what seemed like the velocity of an exhaust backfire. It landed in the grass, almost rolling head-over-heels, then whirled to face Isserley, trembling and twitching. Pure black and white, like a miniature Amlis in animal form, it glowered at her, confused, a rubbery frown wrinkling the down of its dark forehead.

  Isserley left the door of the van open, and walked away, back towards the A9. She was not really surprised when the dog followed her, sniffing at the waist of Pennington’s pullover, which hung down to Isserley’s thighs like a dress. The spaniel’s nose nudged her hip repeatedly, then she felt its wet tongue licking one of her hands. With a groan of distaste, she lifted both her arms into air, surrender-style, as she hurried to her car.

  Pennington’s dog managed to lick her hand one more time while she was making sure she didn’t slam its snout in the car door. It stared up at her through the glass, uncomprehending, as she turned on the ignition.

  ‘You’re on your own now, doggy,’ Isserley said, conscious of course that the dog had no language in common with her.

  Then she drove away, leaving the animal sitting at the side of the road.

  On the homeward journey, Isserley found herself thinking all the same thoughts she’d thought endlessly during the night, about what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

  Of course, there were any number of ways she could go, depending on how much courage she could muster, or how much physical misery she was game to endure. Each plan promised its own sweet rewards, and carried with it its own frightening consequences. But she was tired of weighing one future against another; she’d thought too much.

  It was time to let instinct decide. She would let her fingers dangle within reach of the controls, and if they pressed the toggle down, well … that was how it would be.

  Wi
thin minutes, she was approaching the road-sign that said B9175: Portmahomack and Seaboard Villages. She checked her rear-view mirror and the road up ahead: no-one coming in either direction, to push her forward or hold her back. Her fingers hovered over the indicator. Her foot seemed paralysed on the accelerator. The sign flashed past, the turn-off was swallowed up in the trees, and she was still driving north. The decision was made. She would never see Ablach Farm again.

  A while later, still travelling northwards, Isserley turned her car onto the Dornoch Bridge, and immediately got a queasy feeling in her guts. It wasn’t hunger, though she was certainly feeling that by now. It was premonition. Something was waiting for her on the other side.

  She pulled over, half-way across the bridge, in a parking area provided for tourists. There was a tourist there already, staring over the railings at the glittering firth, binoculars ready for seals or dolphins. Isserley brought her car to a standstill behind his luxury caravan, and cautiously opened her door. The tourist turned to acknowledge her arrival. He was obese and short, with spindly legs: a definite failure to make the grade.

  ‘Hi there.’ He waved, squinting into the sun.

  ‘Hi,’ echoed Isserley, keeping her car between them. Satisfied he would stay where he was, she turned away from him and looked down the length of the bridge to the mainland. Shielding her face with one cupped hand, she removed her glasses and peered into the distance, focusing her huge eyes on the traffic that seemed to be banked up at the roundabout, a little herd of vehicles hesitating to move, as if undecided between the Clashmore and Dornoch roads.

  Then she spotted the headgear of police, ducking and weaving among the vehicles.

  Isserley swung back into her car and revved it into motion. With more skill and boldness than she would have predicted herself capable of, she executed a U-turn in the middle of the bridge – a highly illegal act, no doubt, but one which those tiny far-off police were in no position to pursue. She glanced over her shoulder to check the tourist at the railing: he was staring at her in awe as she drove away, but he wasn’t using his binoculars, so he probably wasn’t trying to fix her appearance or her licence-plate number in his memory.

  I want to go home, she thought, but her decision had been made: she had no home anymore.

  Within a few minutes she was driving southwards past Tain, ignoring the temptation to reconsider. If she’d been willing to turn off the A9 and drive through the centre of the town, she could have come out the other end and followed an alternative route to Portmahomack – and Ablach Farm. But Ablach Farm was closed to her now. Vess Incorporated wouldn’t take care of her if she didn’t deliver the goods, she knew that; it wasn’t going to house and feed her out of the goodness of its heart.

  As for Amlis, he’d said he’d return … but his kind were always lavish with the promises, weren’t they? What about all the men who’d promised to keep her safe as she neared the grading age? ‘The Estates? A beautiful girl like you? Just let them try, Iss, and I ll have a word with my father.’ Spoilt little poseurs, the lot of them. Fuck them, fuck them all.

  It would be very easy to get seduced by this world, Amlis had said, when he touched her arm. It’s very, very beautiful. What had he meant? Could he have been meaning to imply that she was beautiful, too? Why else would he have touched her at that moment? His fingers … But no, of course he hadn’t meant that. He was seeing an ocean and a snowy sky for the first time, with a mutilated cripple sweating next to him. The charms of her scarred flesh could hardly compete with a naked new world, could they?

  There was a pain in her heart. She missed Ablach’s shore already. All that time she’d spent roaming the empty confines of her cottage last night, she could have spent there, walking the moonlit water’s edge, or along the cliffs. But even then she’d probably already known that saying goodbye would only make things harder.

  One of the impossible futures she’d considered, while pacing the rooms of her cottage, was living in a cave on the Ablach shore. There were several caves there, which she’d never explored because of her claustrophobia – which was precisely the problem, of course, with the idea of her living in a cave.

  Also on the beach there was a stone hut (‘the fishing bothy’, Esswis had once called it, with the air of a man who knows everything). Its doors were so weathered and rotten that they swayed in the wind like curtains; its windowless interior was mucky with tar and decomposing sheep turds. The main obstacle to living there, though, was that there was also a large piece of machinery bolted to the floor, a cast-iron mechanism the size of a cow, designed to haul boats onto the seashore. Of course it might not be functional anymore, but there was no way of being certain. There would have been big problems if she was stretched out naked in a corner of the bothy, asleep, and suddenly a boatload of fishermen walked in.

  She’d also considered building herself a little dwelling on the Ablach cliffs somewhere, made of branches, driftwood and maybe those big sheets of corrugated tin she often saw washed up on the shore. But Esswis would surely have noticed if the farm sprouted an extra dwelling, especially if Isserley was missing and he was searching for her. And, as soon as Vess Incorporated was aware she’d run away, that was surely what Esswis would be sent to do.

  Isserley frowned, remembering the police. She couldn’t afford to be stopped by them, because her car was decorated with out-of-date tax stickers, and she had no licences for anything. She must find a place to hide, and stop driving for a while. It was no big challenge; it would be easy. She wasn’t bound to the A9 anymore, after all, but could explore the out-of-the-way roads, where there was little traffic and long stretches of uncleared forest. She could disappear into the trees like a pheasant.

  Three days later, Isserley woke from dreams of sexual release, clutching fur in her fists. It was the hood of the anorak, pillowing her head on the back seat of her car. She was in so much discomfort, yet still filled with the fantasy of orgasm, that she wanted to laugh.

  Her car was nestled in a bower of ferns near the edge of a loch. The tips of twigs actually touched some of the windows, and tiny birds hopped from roof to tree and back again, their fragile claws pattering on the metal. Unseen creatures, possibly ducks or swans, would rustle the tideless water nearby, particularly in the late afternoons. Overhead, the cover was so dense that snowfalls would never reach the ground, and there was more sunlight reflecting off the loch than through the trees.

  All in all, this bower was such a good place to hide that, when Isserley had first eased her car into it a couple of days ago, she’d found another one there already. Fortunately it wasn’t inhabited. It was a mere skeleton of a car: gutted, wheel-less, rusted all the colours of the forest, overgrown with moss. Isserley parked hers right alongside, taking advantage of the extra camouflage.

  Undeniably, the first night had been difficult. The back seat was just a few inches shorter than she was, and those few inches proved crucial to her body’s needs. But she’d survived, and the next two nights were slightly better.

  She hadn’t wanted to sleep in her car, but until she found another place to live, she had no choice. The notion of sleeping under the stars, curled up in a field somewhere, was all very romantic and defiant, but deep down she knew her spine would punish her for it next day. She needed a bed, or at least something soft to lie on. The back seat of her car was at least padded and smooth. And if one morning she woke up in really serious trouble, she could always pull herself up by the headrests of the front seats.

  The ideal place to sleep, the perfect home, if she could have any place in the world she wanted, would be an abandoned lighthouse. But did lighthouses ever get abandoned? She wished they did. They stood on the very edge of the land, right next to the open sea, and their spires reached almost to the clouds. She could imagine herself up there, right at the top, sleeping on a soft mattress with windows all around her, letting the sunlight in as soon as it arrived.

  Right now, she was lying low, growing weak with hunger. She really would
have to eat something today, something more substantial than the raw turnip she’d stolen from a field the night before last.

  As soon as she’d done her exercises, she waded into the icy shallows of the loch and washed herself. Then she shaved, mirror in one hand, blade in the other, dipping shampoo froth into the shimmering water. She hoped the shampoo wouldn’t do any harm to the things that lived in the loch. A few drops of chemical soap into such a vast reservoir of natural purity wouldn’t have much effect, surely?

  For her first hot meal since leaving the farm, she drove to a service station she knew, where she’d bought petrol in the past.

  One day she might conquer her fears and actually drive into a large town, park her car amongst hundreds of other cars, and walk into a supermarket, the way vodsels did when they needed food. That day was far off yet. Only recently, she’d driven past a giant Tesco right next to the A96 to Aberdeen, wondering if she dared venture in. It was so close to the road, she could almost see inside its tinted glass doors. Everything she’d ever seen on television was probably jammed inside that massive concrete steading, with a plague of vodsels picking at it, jostling and lunging for the choicest morsels. No, she wasn’t ready.

  At the service station, she bought twenty pounds worth of petrol. She also selected a pre-packaged meat meal from a self-serve metal and plastic display labelled HAPPY TUM’S®ROADSIDE DINER. There were three choices: Hot Dog, Chicken Roll, and Beef Burger. Each was wrapped in white paper, so that she couldn’t see the contents. She chose the Chicken Roll. She’d heard the television say that Beef was dangerous – potentially deadly, even. If it could kill vodsels, she didn’t like to think what it might do to her. As for the Hot Dog, well … there was something bizarre about going to a lot of trouble to save a dog from death and then eating one a few days later.

  She picked the paper parcel up in her hand and placed it in the microwave oven, then followed the instructions for what buttons to press. Forty-five seconds later, she had her Chicken Roll, steaming hot in her palm.