Under the Skin (2 page)

‘OK if I put this on the back seat?’ he presumed, bundling the jacket up in his big hands.

‘Sure,’ she said, noting the ripples of muscle momentarily expressing themselves through his T-shirt as he twisted round to toss the jacket on top of her own. His abdomen was a bit fatty – beer, not muscle – but nothing too gross. The bulge in his jeans was promising, although most of it was probably testicles.

Comfortable now, he settled back in his seat and flashed her a smile seasoned by a lifetime of foul Scottish fodder.

She smiled back, wondering how much the teeth really mattered.

She could sense herself moving closer to deciding. In fact, to be honest, she was more than half-way already, and her breathing was quickening.

She made an effort to forestall the adrenaline as it leaked from her glands, by sending calming messages into herself, swallowing them down. All right, yes, he was good: all right, yes, she wanted him: but she must know a little more about him first. She must avoid the humiliation of committing herself, of allowing herself to believe he would be coming with her, and then finding out he had a wife or a girlfriend waiting.

If only he would make some conversation. Why was it always the desirable ones that sat in silence, and the misshapen rejects that prattled away unprompted? She’d had one miserable creature who’d removed a voluminous parka to reveal spindly arms and a pigeon chest: within minutes he was telling her his whole life’s story. The brawny ones were more likely to stare into space, or make pronouncements about the world in general, deflecting personal questions with the reflex skill of athletes.

Minutes flashed by and her hitcher seemed content to say nothing. Yet at least he was taking the trouble to peek at her body – in particular at her breasts. In fact, as far as she could tell from glancing sideways and meeting his own furtive eyes, he was keen for her to face front so he could ogle her undetected. OK, then: she would let him have a good stare, to see what difference it might make. The Evanton turn-off was coming soon, anyhow, and she needed to concentrate on her driving. She craned forward a little, exaggerating her concentration on the road, and allowed herself to be examined in earnest.

Immediately she felt his gaze beaming all over her like another kind of ultraviolet ray, and no less intense.

Isserley wondered, oh how she wondered, what she looked like to him, in his alien innocence. Did he notice the trouble she had gone to for him? She straightened her back against the seat, pushing her chest out.

The hitcher noticed all right.

Fantastic tits on this one, but God, there wasn’t much of her otherwise. Tiny – like a kid peering up over the steering wheel. How tall would she be? Five foot one, maybe, standing up. Funny how a lot of women with the best tits were really really short. This girl obviously knew she had a couple of ripe ones, the way she had them sitting pretty on the scoop of a low-cut top. That’s why this car was heated like an oven, of course: so she could wear a skimpy black top and air her boobs for all to see – for
him
to see.

The rest of her was a funny shape, though. Long skinny arms with big knobbly elbows – no wonder her top was long sleeved. Knobbly wrists too, and big hands. Still, with tits like that …

They were really odd, actually, those hands. Bigger than you’d think they’d be, to look at the rest of her, but narrow too, like … chicken feet. And tough, like she’d done hard labour with them, maybe worked in a factory. He couldn’t see her legs properly, she was wearing those horrible flared seventies trousers that were back in fashion – shiny green, for Christ’s sake – and what looked like Doc Martens, but there was no disguising how short her legs were. Still, those tits … They were … like … they were like … He didn’t know what to compare them to. They looked pretty fucking good, nestled next to one another there, with the sun shining on them through the windscreen.

Never mind the tits, though: what about the face? Well, he couldn’t see it just now; she had to actually turn towards him for him to see it, because of her haircut. She had thick, fluffy hair, mouse-brown, hanging down straight so he couldn’t even see her cheeks when she was facing front. It was tempting to imagine a beautiful face hidden behind that hair, a face like a pop singer or an actress, but he knew different. In fact, when she’d turned towards him, her face had kind of shocked him. It was small and heart-shaped, like an elf in a kiddie’s book, with a perfect little nose and a fantastic big-lipped curvy mouth like a supermodel. But she had puffy cheeks and was also wearing the thickest glasses he’d seen in his life: they magnified her eyes so much they looked about twice normal size.

She was a weird one all right. Half Baywatch babe, half little old lady.

She
drove
like a little old lady. Fifty miles an hour, absolute max. And that shoddy old anorak of hers on the back seat – what was that all about? She had a screw loose, probably. Nutter, probably. And she talked funny – foreign, definitely.

Would he like to fuck her?

Probably, if he got the chance. She’d probably be a much better fuck than Janine, that was for sure.

Janine. Christ, it was amazing how just thinking of her could bring him right down. He’d been in a great mood until now. Good old Janine. If ever your spirits are getting too up, just think of Janine. Jesus … couldn’t … he just forget it? Just look at this girl’s tits, blazing in the sun, like … He knew what they looked like now: they looked like the moon. Well, two moons.

‘So, what are you doing in Inverness?’ he said suddenly.

‘Business,’ she said.

‘What do you do?’

Isserley thought for a moment. It was so long since anything had been said, she’d forgotten what she’d decided to be this time.

‘I’m a lawyer.’

‘No kidding?’

‘No kidding.’

‘Like on TV?’

‘I don’t watch TV.’ This was true, more or less. She’d watched it almost constantly when she’d first come to Scotland, but nowadays she only watched the news and occasionally a snatch of whatever happened to be on while she was exercising.

‘Criminal cases?’ he suggested.

She looked him briefly in the eyes. There was a spark there that might be worth fanning.

‘Sometimes,’ she shrugged. Or tried to. Shrugging while driving was a surprisingly difficult physical trick, especially with breasts like hers.

‘Anything juicy?’ he pushed.

She squinted into her rear-view mirror, slowing the car to allow a Volkswagen pulling a caravan to overtake.

‘What would you think was juicy?’ she enquired as the manoeuvre slipped gently into place.

‘I don’t know …’ he sighed, sounding doleful and playful at the same time. ‘A man kills his wife ’cause she’s playing around with another guy.’

‘I may have had one of those,’ Isserley said noncommittally.

‘And did you nail him?’

‘Nail him?’

‘Did you get him sent down for life?’

‘What makes you think I wouldn’t be defending him?’ she smirked.

‘Oh, you know: women together against men.’

His tone had grown distinctly odd: despondent, even bitter, and yet flirtatious. She had to think hard how best to respond.

‘Oh, I’m not against men,’ she said at last, changing lanes reflectively. ‘Especially men who get a raw deal from their women.’

She hoped that would open him up.

But instead he was silent and slumped a little in his seat. She looked aside at him, but he didn’t allow eye contact, as if she’d failed to respect some limit. She settled for reading the inscription on his T-shirt,
AC
/
DC
, it said, and in large embossed letters,
BALLBREAKER
. She had no idea what on earth this might mean, and felt suddenly out of her depth with him.

Experience had taught her there was nothing to do about that but try to go deeper.

‘Are you married?’ she asked.

‘Was,’ he stated flatly. Sweat was glistening beneath the hairline of his big prickly head; he ran his thumb under the seatbelt as if it were smothering him.

‘You won’t be so keen on lawyers, then,’ she suggested.

‘It was OK,’ he said. ‘Clean break.’

‘No children, then?’

‘
She
got ’em. Good luck to her.’ He said this as if his wife were a distant and repugnant country on which there was no point trying to impose the customs of a more civilized society.

‘I didn’t mean to pry,’ said Isserley.

‘S’alright.’

They drove on. What had seemed like growing intimacy between them hardened into mutual unease.

Ahead of them, the sun had risen above the car’s roof, leaving the windscreen filled with a harsh unpunctuated whiteness that threatened to become painful. The forest on the driver’s side thinned out and was replaced by a steep embankment infested with creepers and bluebells. Signs printed in several languages unknown to Isserley reminded foreigners not to drive on the wrong side of the road.

The temperature inside the car was approaching stifling, even for Isserley, who could tolerate extremes without particularly caring. Her glasses were starting to fog up, but she couldn’t take them off now: he mustn’t see her eyes without them. A slow, subtle trickle of perspiration ran down her neck onto her breastbone, hesitating on the brink of her cleavage. Her hitcher seemed not to notice. His hands were drumming desultorily on his inner thighs to some tune she couldn’t hear; as soon as he realized she was watching, he stopped abruptly and folded his hands limply over his crotch.

What on earth had happened to him? What had brought on this dismal metamorphosis? Just as she’d grown to appreciate how attractive a prospect he was, he seemed to be shrinking before her eyes; he wasn’t the same male she’d taken into her car twenty minutes ago. Was he one of those inadequate lugs whose sexual self-confidence depended on not being reminded of any real females? Or was it her fault?

‘You can open a window if you’re too hot,’ she offered.

He nodded, didn’t even speak.

Isserley pressed her foot gingerly down on the accelerator, hoping this would please him. But he just sighed and settled further back in his seat, as if what he considered to be an insignificant increase in speed only reminded him how slowly they were getting nowhere.

Maybe she shouldn’t have said she was a lawyer. Maybe a shop assistant or an infant teacher would have brought him out more. It was just that she’d taken him to be a rough, robust kind of character; she’d thought he might have a criminal history he’d start to talk about, as a way of teasing her, testing her out. Maybe the only truly safe thing she could have been was a housewife.

‘Your wife,’ she rejoined, striving for a reassuring, companionable, male sort of tone, a tone he might expect from a drinking buddy. ‘Did she get the house?’

‘Yeah … well … no …’ He drew a deep breath. ‘I had to sell it, and give her half. She went to live in Bradford. I stayed on here.’

‘Where’s here?’ she asked, nodding her head at the open road, hoping to remind him how far she had taken him already.

‘Milnafua.’ He sniggered, as if self-conscious about the name.

To Isserley, Milnafua sounded perfectly normal; more normal in fact than London or Dundee, which she had some trouble getting her tongue round. She appreciated, however, that to him it represented some outlandish extreme.

‘There’s no work anywhere up there,’ is there, she suggested, hoping she was striking a matter-of-fact, masculine note of sympathy.

‘Don’t I know it,’ he mumbled. Then, with a startling boost of volume and pitch: ‘Still, got to keep trying, eh?’

Looking at him in disbelief, she confirmed what he was playing at: a pathetic gesture towards optimism, missing the mark by miles. He was even smiling, his face sheened with sweat, as if he’d suddenly become convinced it was dangerous to admit to too much sloth, as if there could be serious consequences for admitting to her that his life was spent on the dole. Was it all her fault for telling him she was a lawyer? Had she made him afraid that she’d get him in trouble? Or that one day she might turn out to have some official power over him? Could she apologize, laughing, for her deception and start all over again? Tell him she sold computer software or clothes for the larger lady?

A big green sign at the side of the road announced how many miles remained before Dingwall and Inverness: not very many. The land had fallen away on the left side, revealing the gleaming shore of the Cromarty Firth. The tide was low, all the rocks and sands exposed. A solitary seal languished on one of those rocks, as if stranded.

Isserley bit her lip, slowly adjusting to her mistake. Lawyer, saleswoman, housewife: it wouldn’t have made any difference. He was wrong for her, that’s all. She had picked up the wrong type. Again.

Yes, it was obvious now what this big, touchy bruiser was up to. He was going to Bradford to visit his wife, or at least his children.

This made him a bad risk, from her point of view. Things could get very complicated when there were children involved. Much as she wanted him – it was sinking in now how much she’d already invested in the idea of having him – she didn’t want complications. She would have to give him up. She would have to put him back.

They both sat in silence for the rest of the journey, as if conscious of having let each other down.

Traffic had accumulated all around them; they were caught up in an orderly queue of vehicles crossing the multi-laned tightrope of Kessock Bridge. Isserley glanced at her hitcher, felt a pang of loss at finding him turned away from her, staring down at the industrial estates of the Inverness shore far below. He was appraising a dismal toy-town of prefab ugliness as intently as he had admired her breasts not so long ago. Tiny trucks disappearing into factory mouths: that was what made sense to him now.

Isserley kept to the left, drove faster than she’d done all day. It wasn’t just the pace demanded by the traffic around her; she wanted to get this over with as soon as possible. The tiredness had returned with a vengeance; she longed to find a shady bower off the road, lean her head against the seat and sleep a while.