Under the Skin (15 page)

‘I thought I’d better have a meal,’ announced Isserley in a businesslike tone, ‘before I start work. Is the coast clear?’

‘The coast?’ The mouldy man squinted at her in confusion. His head turned unconsciously in the direction of the firth.

‘I mean, is Amlis Vess safely out of the way?’

‘Oh yeah, he don’t bother us,’ drawled the mouldy man in an accent twice as thick as Ensel’s. ‘He just stays down in the food hall, or down in the vodsel pens, and we get on with the loading up here, no problem.’

Isserley opened her mouth to speak, couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘He won’t do nothing now,’ the mouldy man assured her. ‘Yns and Ensel take it in turns to watch him. He basically just hangs around and talks crap. He don’t care if nobody’s got a clue what he’s on about. Goes and talks to the animals when the humans get sick of him.’

Just for an instant Isserley forgot that the vodsels were tongueless, and was alarmed at the thought of them communicating with Amlis Vess, but she calmed down when the mouldy man laughed coarsely and added, ‘We says to him, “Do the animals talk back to you, then?’”

He laughed again, a despicable whinny tainted by half a lifetime in the Estates. ‘Funny bastard, good for killing the boredom,’ he winked in summation. ‘We’ll want him back when he’s gone.’

‘Well, maybe … if you say so,’ grimaced Isserley, making a break for the lift. ‘Excuse me, I’m starving.’

And she was away.

Amlis Vess was not in the food and recreation hall.

Isserley verified this, by casting one more glance across the sterile, low-ceilinged barracks, then resumed breathing.

The hall, though large, was a simple rectangle, crudely excavated without nooks or recesses, and containing little except for the low dining tables; there was nothing big enough to hide a tall man with strikingly beautiful markings. He simply wasn’t here.

Though the hall itself was empty, the long low bench outside the kitchen was already laid with bowls of condiments, tureens of cold vegetables, tubs of mussanta, loaves of newly baked bread, cakes, pitchers of water and ezziin, large plastic trays of cutlery. A divine smell of roasting was coming out of the kitchen.

Isserley pounced on the bread and cut herself two slices, which she spread liberally with mussanta paste. Pressing them into a sandwich, she started eating, pushing the food past her insensate lips into her yearning mouth. Mussanta had never tasted so delicious. She swallowed hard, chewing energetically, impatient to cut more bread, spread more paste.

The smell from the kitchen was intoxicating. Something much better than usual was cooking in there, something more adventurous than potato in fat. Admittedly Isserley was rarely here when the cooking was being done; she often took her meals cold after the cook had left and most of the men had already eaten. She’d pick at leftovers, trying to look inconspicuous, concealing her distaste at the smell of cooling fat. But this smell today was something else.

Still clutching her sandwich, Isserley edged up to the open door of the kitchen and peeked inside, catching a glimpse of the great brown back of Hilis, the cook. A notoriously sharp-sensed character, he was aware of her presence immediately.

‘Fuck off!’ he yelled cheerfully, before he’d even turned around. ‘Not ready!’

Embarrassed, Isserley made to retreat, but as soon as Hilis swung round and saw who she was, he threw out a singed and sinewy arm in conciliation.

‘Isserley!’ he cried, smiling as broadly as his massive snout allowed. ‘Why must you always eat that crap? You break my heart! Come in here and see what I’m about to serve!’

Awkwardly she ventured into the kitchen, leaving the offending sandwich on the bench outside. Ordinarily, no-one was permitted in here; Hilis was protective of his gleaming domain, beavering away in it alone like an obsessed scientist in a humid and luridly lit laboratory. Oversized silver utensils hung all over the walls like the tools in Donny’s Garage, dozens of specialized implements and gadgets. Transparent jars of spices and bottles of sauce on the shelves and workbenches added some colour to the metallic surfaces, though most of the actual food was stashed away inside refrigerators and metal drums. Hilis himself was unarguably the most vividly organic thing in the kitchen, a thickly furred, powerfully built bundle of nervous energy. Isserley barely knew him; she and he had exchanged perhaps forty sentences over the years.

‘Come on, come on!’ he growled. ‘But watch your step.’

The ovens were inside the floor, so that a human could tend to the food without overbalancing. Hilis hunched over the biggest of them, looking down through the thick glassy door into the glowing recess. Gesturing urgently, he invited Isserley to do the same.

She knelt next to him.

‘Look at that,’ he said with pride.

Inside the oven, shimmering in an orange halo, six spits rotated slowly, each loaded with four or five identical cuts of meat. They were as brown as freshly tilled earth, and smelled absolutely heavenly, sizzling and twinkling in their own juices.

‘Looks good,’ admitted Isserley.

‘It
is
good,’ affirmed Hilis, lowering his twitching nose as close to the glass as he could short of touching. ‘Better than what I’ve usually got to work with, that’s for sure.’

Everyone knew this was a sore point with Hilis: the best cuts of meat were always reserved for the cargo ship, and he was allotted the poorer-quality mince, the necks, offal and extremities.

‘When I heard old man Vess’s son was coming,’ he said, basking in the oven’s orange glow, ‘I assumed I’d be free to put on something special for a change. I wasn’t to know, was I?’

‘But …’ frowned Isserley, puzzling over the delay between Amlis’s arrival and these wonderful steaks revolving in the oven now. Hilis interrupted her, grinning.

‘I had these steaks marinating for twenty-four hours already before the mad bastard even arrived! What was I going to do? Rinse ’em off under the tap? These little fuckers are perfection, I tell you, they are absolute bloody perfection on a skewer. They are going to taste fucking unbelievable!’ Enthusiasm was making Hilis hyperactive.

Isserley stared down at the roasting meat. Its aroma was pushing through the glass and floating straight into her nostrils.

‘You’re smelling it, aren’t you!’ Hilis proclaimed in triumph, as if he was responsible for conjuring up something that had, against all odds, managed to penetrate her pathetically tiny, surgically mutilated nose. ‘Isn’t it glorious!’

Isserley nodded, dizzy with desire.

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

Hilis, unable to keep still, paced around his kitchen in tight circles, fidgeting and fussing.

‘Isserley, please,’ he implored her, transferring a prong and a carving knife back and forth from hand to hand. ‘Please. You’ve
got
to have some of this. Make an old man happy. I
know
you can appreciate good food. You hung around with the Elite when you were a girl, that’s what the men say. You didn’t grow up eating garbage like these dumb goons from the Estates.’

In a state of exhibitionist excitement, he flipped open the lid of the oven, releasing a richly flavoursome blast of heat.

‘Isserley,’ he begged, ‘
Let
me cut you a slice of this. Let me, let me, let me.’

She laughed, embarrassed. ‘Fine, OK!’ she agreed hastily.

He was quick as a spark, his carving technique a performance that could be missed in an eye’s blink.

‘Yesyes
yes
,’ he enthused, springing up. Isserley recoiled slightly as a steaming, sizzling morsel appeared inches from her mouth, impaled on the razor-sharp tip of the carving knife. Gingerly she took the meat between her teeth and tugged it free.

A soft voice sounded from the doorway of the kitchen.

‘You just don’t know what you’re doing,’ sighed Amlis Vess.

‘No unauthorized fucking personnel in my kitchen!’ retorted Hilis instantly.

Amlis Vess took a step backwards; to be fair, very little of him had been inside the room in the first place. Only his startling black face and perhaps the swell of his white breast. His retreat didn’t even look like a retreat, more like a casual realignment of balance, a shifting of his muscles. He came to rest technically outside the room, but with the undiminished intensity of his gaze still taking up a great deal of space inside. And his gaze was directed not at Hilis, but at Isserley.

Isserley chewed what remained of her delicious morsel self-consciously, too unnerved to move. Luckily the meat was virtually melting in her mouth, it was so tender.

‘What’s your problem, Mr Vess?’ she said at last.

Amlis’s jaw tensed in anger and the muscles in his shoulders flexed as if he was considering attacking her, but instead he relaxed abruptly, as if he’d just given himself an injection of something calmative.

‘That meat you’re eating,’ he said softly, ‘is the body of a creature that lived and breathed just like you and me.’

Hilis groaned and rolled his eyes in despair and pity, for the pretensions and dopey confusions of the young. Then, to Isserley’s dismay, he turned his back on it all, applying himself to the work at hand, seizing hold of the nearest cooking pot.

With Amlis’s words still ringing in her ears, Isserley took courage, as she had done last time, by focusing on his upper-class accent, his velvety diction groomed by wealth and privilege. Deliberately, she recalled being petted and then discarded by the Elite; she pictured the authorities who’d decided she would be more suited to a life in the Estates, men with accents just like Amlis Vess’s. She invited that accent in, listening to the sharp chord of resentment it struck deep inside her, letting it reverberate.

‘Mr Vess,’ she said icily, ‘I hate to tell you this, but I really doubt there’s much similarity between the way you and
I
live and breathe, let alone between me and’ – she passed her tongue over her teeth for provocative effect – ‘my breakfast.’

‘We’re all the same under the skin,’ suggested Amlis, a little huffily she thought. She would have to aim for this weak spot of his, his filthy-rich idealist’s need to deny social reality.

‘Funny how you’ve managed to keep your looks, then,’ she sneered, ‘with all the hard backbreaking work you’ve had to do.’

A direct hit, Isserley noted. Amlis seemed poised to spring again, his eyes burning, but then once more he relaxed: another shot of the same drug.

‘This is getting us nowhere,’ he sighed. ‘Come with me.’

Isserley’s mouth fell open in disbelief.

‘Come with you?’

‘Yes,’ said Amlis, as if confirming the finer details of a venture they’d already agreed on. ‘Down below. Down where the vodsels are.’

‘You … you must be joking,’ she said, uttering a short laugh which she’d intended to be contemptuous, but which came out merely shaky.

‘Why not?’ he challenged innocently.

She almost choked on her reply; perhaps it was a tiny thread of meat lodged in her throat. Because I’m so scared of the depths, she was thinking. Because I don’t want to be buried alive again.

‘Because I have work to get on with,’ she said.

He stared intently into her eyes, not aggressively, but as if he was judging the distance, the logistics for a leap into her soul.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘There’s something I’ve seen down there, that I need you to explain. Honestly. I’ve asked the men; none of them know. Please.’

There was a pause, during which she and Amlis stood motionless while Hilis kept the air generously stocked with banging and clashing. Then, astounded, Isserley heard her belated response as if from a great distance. She heard it only vaguely; couldn’t even be sure of the exact wording. But whatever it was, it meant yes. In a dream, to the surreal accompaniment of clashing metal and the sizzle of meat, she was saying yes to him.

He turned, his lithe body flowing away. She followed him, out of Hilis’s kitchen, towards the lift.

Several men were gathered in the dining hall by now, loitering, murmuring, chewing; watching Isserley and Amlis Vess pass among them.

No-one made a move to intervene.

No-one threatened Amlis with death if he dared take another step.

Alarms failed to scream into action when the lift opened for them, nor did the lift’s doors refuse to close when they stepped inside together.

All in all, the universe seemed not to appreciate that anything was amiss.

Utterly bewildered, Isserley stood next to Amlis in the featureless confines of the lift, facing front, but aware of his long dark neck and head somewhere near her shoulder, his smooth flank breathing inches from her hip. The cabin descended noiselessly, arrived with a hiss.

The door slid open, and Isserley moaned softly in claustrophobic distress. Everything out there was steeped in almost complete darkness, as if they had been dropped into a narrow fissure between two strata of compacted rock with only a child’s faltering flashlight to guide them. There was a stench of fermenting urine and faeces, a few spidery contours of wire mesh sketched in by feeble infra-red bulbs, and, swaying everywhere before them, the firefly glints of a swarm of eyes.

‘Do you know where the light is?’ said Amlis politely.

ISSERLEY FUMBLED, AND
found the switch. A flood of harsh light rushed to fill the compound from floor to ceiling, like a tide of seawater into a crevice.

‘Ugh,’ she groaned squeamishly. To be so far inside the earth was a nightmare come true.

‘A nightmare, yes?’ said Amlis Vess.

Isserley looked to him, scared and in need of comfort, but he meant the livestock, of course, not the claustrophobia – she could tell from that infuriating grimace of pity on his face. Typical man: so obsessed with his own idealism he was incapable of feeling empathy for a human being suffering right under his nose.

Isserley stepped clear of the lift, determined not to humiliate herself in front of him. A few moments ago, she’d felt like burying her face in the soft black fur of his neck, clinging to his perfectly balanced body; now she felt like killing him.

‘It’s just the stink of animals,’ she sniffed, eyes averted from him as he padded up to her side. The lift hissed shut behind them and disappeared.

In excavating this deepest of the levels, the men had burrowed out no more of the solid Triassic rock than they absolutely had to. The ceiling was less than seven feet high, and the accumulated steam of cattle breath hung in a haze around the fluorescent strips. The vodsel enclosures, a corona of linked pens all along the walls, took up almost the entire floor space; there was just enough room left down the middle for a walkway. In the cages to the left, the monthlings; to the right, the transitionals; at the deep end, against the far wall facing the lift, the new arrivals.

‘This is your first time, isn’t it?’ came Amlis’s voice.

‘No,’ she retorted irritably, unnerved by how closely he must be watching her body language.

She had, in point of fact, been here just once before, at the very beginning before there were any animals. The men had wanted to show her what they’d constructed in honour of her coming to the farm, all ready and waiting for her vital contribution.

‘Very impressive,’ she’d said, or words to that effect, and fled.

Now, years later, she had returned, with one of the world’s wealthiest young men at her side, because he wanted to ask her a question. ‘Surreal’ did not begin to describe the situation.

The cages were grimier and more cramped than she remembered; the wooden beams pitted and discoloured, the wire mesh soiled, masked in places with the dark putty of faeces and other unidentifiable matter. And of course, the livestock added stench and the looming density of flesh, the humid ambience of recycled breath. In all, there were more than thirty vodsels impounded here, which came as rather a shock to Isserley: she hadn’t realized how hard she must constantly be working.

The few remaining monthlings were huddled together in a mound of fast-panting flesh, the divisions between one muscle-bound body and the next difficult to distinguish, the limbs confused. Hands and feet spasmed at random, as if a co-ordinated response was struggling vainly to emerge from a befuddled collective organism. Their fat little heads were identical, swaying in a cluster like polyps of an anemone, blinking stupidly in the sudden light. You would never guess they’d have the cunning to run if released.

All around the monthlings, their thick spiky carpet of straw glistened with the dark diarrhoea of ripeness. Nothing which might cause the slightest harm to human digestion survived in their massive guts; every foreign microbe had been purged and replaced with only the best and most well-trusted bacteria. They clung to each other, as if to keep their number undiminished. There were four of them left; yesterday there had been five, the day before, six.

Across the neatly swept division, the transitionals in the cages opposite squatted torpidly, each on his own little patch of straw. By dividing the available floor space according to an unspoken, instinctual arithmetic, they managed to keep themselves to themselves, if only by inches. They glowered at Isserley and Amlis, some chewing warily on their unfamiliar new feed, others scratching at hair that was growing sparse and mossy, others clenching their fists in their castrated laps. Though still vaguely differentiated in physique and colouring, they saw their own future constantly before them. They were slowly maturing towards their destiny, towards a natural mean.

At the end of the walkway, the three most recent arrivals were on their feet, leaning against the wire mesh, waving and gesticulating.

‘Ng! Ng! Ng!’ they cried.

Amlis Vess hastened to respond, his luxuriant tail swinging between his powerful silky buttocks as he ran. Isserley followed, advancing slowly and cautiously. She hoped all the vodsels’ tongues had been thoroughly seen to. What Amlis didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

As soon as Isserley had stepped within a body’s length of the enclosure, she was frightened half to death by a large projectile hurtling against the wire from within, bulging the web of metal directly towards her with a juddering crash. For a nauseous moment she was convinced the barrier had been penetrated, but the bulge sprang back and the vodsel collapsed to the floor, bawling in pain and fury. The inside of his gaping mouth was roasted black where the stub of tongue had been cauterized; white spittle clung to his moustache. He struggled to his feet, clearly intending to lunge at Isserley again, but two of the other vodsels seized hold of him and dragged him back from the wire.

Held down by a tall and athletic individual much younger than himself, the excitable vodsel slumped impotently in his nest of straw, his knees jerking. The third creature scrambled forwards and fell to his knees on a patch of soil right near the wire mesh. He stared down into it, grunting and snuffling in distress as if he’d lost something.

‘It’s all right, boy,’ encouraged Amlis earnestly. ‘Do it again. You can do it. I know you can.’

The vodsel bent over the earth, erasing his wild companion’s scuffed footprints from it with the edge of one hand. His empty scrotal sac, still speckled with dried blood from his gelding, swung back and forth as he smoothed the soil and picked fragments of scattered straw out of it. Then he gathered a handful of long straws together, twisted and folded them to make a stiff wand, and began to draw in the dirt.

‘Look!’ Amlis urged.

Isserley watched, disturbed, as the vodsel scrawled a five-letter word with great deliberation, even going to the trouble of fashioning each letter upside down, so that it would appear right-way-up for those on the other side of the mesh.

‘No-one told me they had a language,’ marvelled Amlis, too impressed, it seemed, to be angry. ‘My father always describes them as vegetables on legs.’

‘It depends on what you classify as language, I guess,’ said Isserley dismissively. The vodsel had slumped behind his handiwork, head bowed in submission, eyes wet and gleaming.

‘But what does it
mean
?’ persisted Amlis.

Isserley considered the message, which was
M E R C Y
. It was a word she’d rarely encountered in her reading, and never on television. For an instant she racked her brains for a translation, then realized that, by sheer chance, the word was untranslatable into her own tongue; it was a concept that just didn’t exist.

Isserley stalled, mouth hidden behind one hand, as if finding the stench increasingly hard to take. Though her face was impassive, her mind was racing. How to discourage Amlis from making an unwarranted fuss?

She considered trying to pronounce the strange word with a contortion of her lips and a frown on her brow, as if she were being asked to reproduce a chicken’s cackle or a cow’s moo. Then, if Amlis asked her what it meant, she could honestly say that there was no word for it in the language of human beings. She opened her lips to speak, but realized just in time that this would be a very stupid mistake. For her to speak the word at all dignified it with the status of being a word in the first place; Amlis would no doubt go into ecstasy over the vodsels’ ability to link a pattern of scrawled symbols with a specific sound, however guttural and unintelligible. At a stroke, she would be dignifying the vodsels, in his eyes, with both writing and speech.

But isn’t it true, she asked herself, that they have that dignity?

Isserley pushed the thought away. Just look at these creatures! Their brute bulk, their stink, their look of idiocy, the way the shit oozed up between their fat toes. Had she been so badly butchered, brought so close to an animal state physically, that she was losing her hold on humanity and actually
identifying
with animals? If she wasn’t careful, she would end up living among them, cackling and mooing in meaningless abandon like the cavorting oddities on television.

All this passed through her mind in a couple of seconds. In a second or two more, she had devised her response to Amlis.

‘What do you
mean
, “What does it mean”?’ she exclaimed testily. ‘It’s a scratch mark that means something to vodsels, obviously. I couldn’t tell you what it means.’

She looked straight into Amlis’s eyes, to add the power of conviction to her denial.

‘Well, I can guess what it means,’ he observed quietly.

‘Yes, I’m sure you wouldn’t let a little thing like ignorance stop you,’ sneered Isserley, noticing for the first time that he had a few pure white hairs around his eyelids.

‘All I’m trying to get across to you,’ he persisted, nettled, ‘is that the meat you were eating a few minutes ago is the same meat that is trying to communicate with us down here.’

Isserley sighed and folded her arms across her chest, feeling sick from the fluorescent glare, the laboured breathing of thirty beasts inside a fissure far beneath the ground.

‘It doesn’t communicate to
me
, Amlis,’ she said, then blushed at having carelessly addressed him by his first name. ‘Can we leave now?’

Amlis frowned, and looked down at the scratches in the dirt.

‘Are you sure you don’t know what these marks mean?’ he asked, with a sharp edge of disbelief in his voice.

‘I don’t know what you expect of me,’ Isserley burst out, suddenly near tears. ‘I’m a human being, not a vodsel.’

Amlis looked her up and down, as if only now noticing her horrific disfigurements. He stood there in all his beauty, his black pelt glistening in the humid air, and stared at Isserley, and then at the vodsels and the marks in the dirt.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last, and turned his head towards the lift.

Hours later, as Isserley was driving on the open road, breathing in great mouthfuls of sky from her open window, she thought about how the encounter with Amlis Vess had gone.

She’d coped well, she thought. She had nothing to be ashamed of. He’d been out of line. He had apologized.

The thing about vodsels was, people who knew nothing whatsoever about them were apt to misunderstand them terribly. There was always the tendency to anthropomorphize. A vodsel might do something which resembled a human action; it might make a sound analogous with human distress, or make a gesture analogous with human supplication, and that made the ignorant observer jump to conclusions.

In the end, though, vodsels couldn’t do any of the things that really defined a human being. They couldn’t siuwil, they couldn’t mesnishtil, they had no concept of slan. In their brutishness, they’d never evolved to use hunshur; their communities were so rudimentary that hississins did not exist; nor did these creatures seem to see any need for chail, or even chailsinn.

And, when you looked into their glazed little eyes, you could understand why.

If you were looking clearly, that is.

So, that’s why it was better that Amlis Vess didn’t know that the vodsels had a language.

She’d have to be careful, then, never to speak it in his earshot. It would only provoke him. It would achieve nothing. In a case like this, a little knowledge was more dangerous than none at all.

It was a good thing the vodsels were always unconscious when they were carried into the steading. Then by the time they were up and about again, they’d already been seen to, so they couldn’t make any more noise. That nipped any problems in the bud.

If Amlis could just be kept out of trouble until the transport ship was ready to leave, he need never know any … anything else.

And then, once he was in the ship heading home, he could indulge his overdeveloped conscience, his sentimentality, to his heart’s content. If he wanted to throw what remained of the vodsels overboard as a way of granting the creatures posthumous freedom, he could go right ahead, and it would be someone else’s problem, not hers.

Her
problem was more basic, and self-indulgence didn’t come into it: she had a difficult job to do, and no-one but her could do it.

Driving past Dalmore Farm in Alness, she spotted a hitcher up ahead. He stood out like a beacon on the crest of a hill. She wound her window closed and turned up the heating. Work had begun.

Even from a distance of a hundred metres or more, she could tell that this one was built like a piece of heavy farm machinery, a creature who would put a strain on any set of wheels. His massive bulk was all the more conspicuous for being crammed into yellow reflective overalls. He might have been an experimental traffic fixture.

As Isserley drove closer, she noted that the yellow overalls were so old and tarnished that they were almost black: the colours of rotting banana peel. Overalls as filthy and decrepit as that couldn’t belong to an employee of a company, surely; this fellow must be his own boss; perhaps he didn’t work at all.

That was good. Unemployed vodsels were always a good risk. Although to Isserley they looked just as fit as vodsels who had jobs, she’d found that they were often cast out from their society, isolated and vulnerable. And, once exiled, they seemed to spend the rest of their lives skulking at the peripheries of the herd, straining for a glimpse of the high-ranking males and nubile females they yearned to befriend but could never approach for fear of a swift and savage punishment. In a way, the vodsel community itself seemed to be selecting those of its members it was content to have culled.