Under the Skin

  He was ready to go.

  She pressed a button and the amber faded from the windows like dispersion in reverse. The world outside was still chilly and bright. There was a lull in the traffic. She had about two hours ‘grace before the icpathua wore off, yet she was only fifty minutes’ drive from home. And it was only 9:35. She was doing well after all.

  She turned the key in the ignition. As the engine started up, the rattling noise that had worried her earlier on made itself heard again.

  She would have to look into that when she got back to the farm.

  2

  NEXT 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 milita
ry 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?