Under the Skin (6 page)

The walk back to the cottage through the snow cleared her sinuses and helped the food settle. Clasping the doggie bag between her legs, she unlocked the front door of her house and let herself in to the living room, which was vacant and bare apart from some large piles of twigs and branches scattered over the floor.

She gathered an armful of the best ones and carried them out to the back yard, letting them fall along with the doggie bag onto the snowy earth. Those twigs that were the correct shape she arranged into a little pyre, the rest she kept in reserve.

Next she unlocked and swung open the rusty doors of the small cast-iron shed adjacent to her cottage. She laid the palms of her hands on the bonnet of her car, feeling how icy-cold it was; she hoped it would start when the time came. For the moment, however, this wasn’t her concern. She opened the boot and fetched out the German hitcher’s rucksack. It, too, was affected by the overnight freeze: not frosty exactly, but damp and chilled, as if from a refrigerator.

Isserley carried the rucksack out into the yard, having first checked that there was no-one around. There wasn’t a soul. She lit the bottom twigs of the pyre. The wood was bone-dry, having been gathered months ago and kept indoors ever since: it crackled into flame immediately.

When upended, the backpack proved to be an unexpected cornucopia. More had been fitted into it than seemed concordant with the laws of physics. The most extraordinary variety of things, too, all tucked away in dozens of plastic boxes and bottles and pouches and slits and zip pockets, arranged and interleaved with great ingenuity. Isserley threw them, one by one, onto the fire. Multicoloured food containers squirmed and collapsed in a bubbling petroleum stink. T-shirts and underpants, thrown unfolded onto the flames, yawned black holes to let smoke exhale. Socks sizzled. A small cardboard box of prescription medicine exploded with a pop. A transparent cylindrical canister containing a little plastic figurine wearing Scottish national costume went through several stages, the last of which was the collapse of the naked pink doll, its limbs fusing, face-first into the flames.

The dearth of highly flammable items was putting a strain on the fire and, once a pair of trousers was added, it threatened to die. Isserley selected some dry twigs and laid them on in strategic places. The foldout maps of England, Wales and Scotland were useful too; loosely screwed up to facilitate aeration, they burned excitably.

Hidden near the bottom of the rucksack was a pink toiletries bag which contained not toiletries but a passport. Isserley hesitated over this item, wondering whether she could use a passport herself: she’d never seen one before, at least not in the flesh, so to speak. She flipped through its pages, examining it curiously.

The hitcher’s picture was in there, as well as his name, age, date of birth and so on. These things meant nothing to Isserley, but she was intrigued by how, in the photograph, he looked chubbier and pinker than he had been in reality, and yet also queerly less substantial. His expression was one of crestfallen stoicism. Strange how a specimen like him, well cared for, healthy, free to roam the world, and blessed with a perfection of form which would surely have allowed him to breed with a greater selection of females than average, could still be so miserable. By contrast, other males, scarred by neglect, riddled with diseases, spurned by their kind, were occasionally known to radiate a contentment that seemed to arise from something more enigmatic than mere stupidity.

This inability of some of the most superbly fit and well-adapted vodsels to be happy while they were alive was, for Isserley, one of the great mysteries she encountered in her job, and one which her years of experience had only made more puzzling. There was no point discussing this with Esswis, much less with the other men on the farm. Well-intentioned though they were, she’d long ago discovered they lacked a spiritual side.

Isserley looked up and noticed she’d let the fire burn low, and rummaged around for something highly combustible. The hitcher’s plastic pouch of signs was the first thing to hand, and she shook the sheaf of papers out onto the snow. She tossed them on the fire one by one:
THURSO, GLASGOW, CARLISLE
and half a dozen others, right down to
SCHOTTLAND
. They burned brightly enough, but were consumed in moments. The pyre was rapidly congealing into a smouldering porridge of ash and molten plastic unlikely to make much impact on the biggest item left, the rucksack itself.

Isserley hurried back to the shed and fetched out a can of petrol. She sloshed the gleaming fuel liberally all over the backpack and tossed it gingerly onto the flickering mound. The blaze revived with an intoxicating vomp.

Isserley had one last look at the passport. She decided that if she was going to risk holding onto documents, a driver’s licence might come in handier. In any case, she noticed belatedly that the gender of the passport’s owner was specified and that his height was officially certified to be 1 metre 90 centimetres. Isserley smiled and threw the little red book onto the fire.

From the doggie bag, the wallet went onto the pyre too, once she had removed the paper money. Some of the money was not legal tender in the United Kingdom; this she discarded. The sterling she could add to her supply for buying petrol. It was just as well she never bought anything else, for her hands stank of petrol now and she’d passed this smell onto the banknotes.

A visit to the seashore and a shower afterwards seemed like a better idea than ever. Then she would go out for a drive.
If
she felt like it. Hitchers would be thin on the ground anyway, on a snowy day. Amlis Vess would just have to understand that.

Isserley walked along the pebbled shore of the Moray Firth, drinking in the beauty of the great uncovered world.

To her right, trillions of litres of water surged between Ablach’s beach and an invisible Norway beyond the horizon. To her left, steep gorse-encrusted hills led up to the farm. Stretching endlessly behind and ahead of her was the peninsula’s edge, whose marshy pasture, used for grazing sheep, ended abruptly at the brink of the tide in a narrow verge of rock, curdled and sculpted by prehistoric fire and ice. It was along this verge that Isserley most loved to walk.

The variety of shapes, colours and textures under her feet was, she believed, literally infinite. It must be. Each shell, each pebble, each stone had been made what it was by aeons of submarine or subglacial massage. The indiscriminate, eternal devotion of nature to its numberless particles had an emotional importance for Isserley; it put the unfairness of human life into perspective.

Cast ashore, perhaps only briefly before being fetched back for another million years of polishing and re-shaping, the stones lay so serene beneath her naked feet. She would have liked to collect each of them for an infinitely complex display, a rockery for which she was personally responsible but which was so vast that she could never walk from one end of it to the other. In a sense, the Ablach shore was already such a rockery, except that she’d had no hand in preparing it, and she wished keenly to play some part in the design.

She picked up a pebble now, a smooth bell with a silky hole right through it. Its colours were stripes of orange, silver and grey. Another stone at her feet was spherical, pure black. She dropped the bell-shaped one and picked up the black globe instead. Even as she was lifting it, a bright pink and white crystal egg caught her eye. The challenge was exquisitely hopeless.

She dropped the black globe and straightened up, peering out across the ocean, across the dematerializing furrows of the waves. Then she looked the other way, to find the boulder on top of which she’d left her shoes. They were still there, the laces trembling in the breeze.

She was taking a risk in baring her feet to the world, but in the unlikely event that anyone else were to stray onto the beach, she’d see them coming for hundreds of metres or more. By the time they were close enough to see her feet, she could easily retrieve her shoes, or even wade into the water if need be. The relief she felt in allowing her long toes to splay over the rocky shore, curling round the stones, was inexpressible. Whose business but her own, anyway, were the risks she took? She was doing a job no-one else could do, and coming up with the goods year after year. Amlis Vess, if he had the audacity to find fault with her, would do well to remember that.

She walked on, veering nearer to the lapping of the tide. The shallow pools between the larger rocks were crammed with what she now knew were called whelks, though they appeared to be the ‘piddly wee ones’ the market did not require. She took one out of the glacial brine and lifted it up to her mouth, venturing the tip of her tongue into its glaireous hole. Its flavour was acrid; an acquired taste no doubt.

She put the whelk back into its pool, gently so as not to make a noise. She had a visitor of sorts.

A sheep had strayed onto the pebbled shore not far from her, and was sniffing boulders as large as itself, licking them experimentally. Isserley was intrigued: she hadn’t thought sheep could walk on such a surface, had thought their hooves wouldn’t permit it. But here it was, stepping across the treacherous morass of stones and shells with apparent ease.

Isserley approached stealthily, balancing gingerly on the fingers of her feet. She barely breathed, for fear of startling her fellow-traveller.

It was so hard to believe the creature couldn’t speak. It looked so much as if it should be able to. Despite its bizarre features, there was something deceptively human about it, which tempted her, not for the first time, to reach across the species divide and communicate.

‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Ahl,’ she said.

‘Wiin,’ she said.

These three greetings, which had no effect on the sheep except to make it scramble away, exhausted all the languages Isserley knew.

She wasn’t exactly a linguist, admittedly.

But then no linguist would ever have applied for her job,
that
was for sure. Only desperate people with no prospects except being dumped in the New Estates would have considered it.

And even then, only if they were out of their minds.

She
had been totally crazy, looking back on it. Deliriously insane. But it had all turned out for the best, after all. The best decision she’d ever made. A very small personal sacrifice, really, if it avoided a lifetime buried in the Estates – a brutishly short lifetime, by all accounts.

In fact, whenever she found herself grieving over what had been done to her once-beautiful body in order for her to be sent here, she reminded herself what people who’d lived in the New Estates for any length of time looked like. Decay and disfigurement were obviously par for the course down there. Maybe it was the overcrowding, or the bad food or the bad air or the lack of medical care, or just the inevitable result of living underground. But there was an unmistakable ugliness about Estate trash, an almost subhuman taint.

When
she
’d got the news that she was going to be sent there, Isserley had made a fierce and solemn vow to stay healthy and beautiful against the odds. Refusing point-blank to be changed physically would be her revenge on the powers that be, her recoiling kick of defiance. But would she have had a hope, really? No doubt
everybody
vowed at first that
they
wouldn’t allow themselves to be transformed into a beast, with hunched back, scarred flesh, crumbling teeth, missing fingers, cropped hair. But that’s how they all ended up, didn’t they? Would
she
have been any different, if she’d gone there rather than here?

Of course not. Of course not. And now, the way things had turned out, she didn’t look any worse now than the worst Estate trash, did she? … or not
much
worse, anyway. And look what she’d got in exchange!

She looked at the whole wide world, from her rocky vantage point on the shore of Ablach Farm. It was unbelievably marvellous. She felt like running about in it forever – except that she couldn’t run anymore.

Not that she’d have been doing any running in the Estates. She’d have been shambling around spiritlessly, along with all the other losers and low-lifes, in underground corridors of bauxite and compacted ash. She’d have been working her guts out in a moisture filtration plant or an oxygen factory, toiling in filth like a maggot among other maggots.

Instead, here she was, free to wander in an unbounded wilderness swirling with awesome surpluses of air and water.

And all she had to do in return, when it came right down to essentials, was walk on two legs.

Of course that wasn’t all she’d had to do.

To stop herself thinking about the more embittering specifics of her sacrifice, Isserley abruptly decided to get back to work. There was only so much freedom she could wallow in before she began to grow uneasy. Work was the cure.

She’d already thrown the German hitcher’s keys and wristwatch into the sea, where they would be re-shaped and re-textured along with all the other jetsam of the millennia. The empty plastic bag she had tucked into the waistband of her trousers, to avoid littering the beach. It was littered enough already with ugly plastic flotsam from passing ships and oil rigs; one day she would light a giant bonfire on the shore and burn all the rubbish on it. She kept forgetting to bring the equipment, that’s all.

Now she retrieved her shoes and pulled them on, with some difficulty, over her icy and somewhat swollen feet. She’d overdone the exposure to the cold, perhaps. A few hours in her little overheated car would put her to rights.

She strode over the shore towards the grassy fringe of pasture. Her sheep had rejoined its flock, far away now on the upper reaches of the hill. Trying to discern which sheep was the one she’d spoken to, Isserley stumbled and almost fell, made clumsy by the shoes; she must keep her eyes on where she was stepping. Intricate tangles of bleached and sundried seaweed lay scattered at the very edge of the living vegetation, resembling the skeletons, or parts of skeletons, of nonexistent creatures. In amongst these deceptive simulacra, authentic husks of cannibalized seagulls fluttered in the wind. Sometimes, but not today, there was a dead seal, its back flippers tangled in an off cut of fishing net, its body hollowed out by other citizens of the sea.