Under the Skin

9

ISSERLEY DROVE DIRECTLY to Tarbat Ness, to a jetty she knew there. It was at the bottom of a short and dangerously steep road marked by a traffic sign depicting a stylized car falling into stylized ocean waves.

Isserley drove carefully, parked neatly near the tip of the jetty, pulled the handbrake back as if retrieving something which might get lost otherwise. Then she leaned her arms on the steering wheel and gave herself permission to feel whatever was coming to her. Nothing came to her.

The sea was dead still and steely grey. Isserley stared at it through the windscreen, unblinking, for a long time. Seals were known to play here; there was a sign saying so, somewhere on the road behind her. She stared at the sea for perhaps two hours, determined that nothing should escape her. The sea grew darker, an expanse of tinted glass. If there were any seals hidden below, none broke the surface.

In time, the tide rose silently, licking at the jetty. Isserley didn’t know if the water would rise so far that her car would be lifted up and carried into the sea. If the water sucked her under she supposed she would have to drown. She’d been a strong swimmer once upon a time, but that was with a very different body from the one she had now.

She tried to motivate herself to switch on the ignition and drive away to safety, but just couldn’t manage it. Thinking of somewhere else she could be was an impossible challenge. This was the place she’d decided to go when she’d still had the spirit to make decisions; now that spirit was gone. She would stay here. The sea would either take her or it would leave her be. What did it really matter?

The longer Isserley waited on the jetty, the more she felt as if she had only just arrived, had only been here for a matter of moments. The sun moved across the heavens like the deceptive glow of distant headlights that never got any closer. Water from the North Sea knocked gently on the underside of the car. Isserley continued looking through the windscreen. Something important was eluding her. She would wait here until it came to her. She would wait forever if necessary.

A large cloud in the darkening sky was changing shape all the time. Though she was unaware of any wind, there must be powerful forces up there, shaping the cloud, finding it unsatisfactory, sculpting it into something different. It began as a floating map of a continent, then got compressed into a ship, then grew into something very like a whale. Eventually, towards nightfall, it lapsed into something larger, more diffuse, abstract, meaningless.

Darkness came and Isserley had still not had enough time to decide what to do next. The car rocked slightly, butted from beneath by the haunches of the waves. She would go when she was ready.

The night passed in seconds, surely no more than a few thousand of them. Isserley did not sleep. She sat at the wheel and watched the night pass. Sometime during these dark hours, the sea gave up trying to intimidate her, and slunk away.

At sunrise, Isserley blinked several times. She removed her glasses, but the problem was the windscreen itself, which was misty with condensation. Her own body was steaming hot and clammy, as if she had been sleeping. She could not have been sleeping. It was impossible. She had not let her guard down for an instant.

She switched on the windscreen wipers, to clear the luminous fog. Nothing happened. She switched on the ignition. Her engine coughed feebly and shuddered, then was still.

‘If that’s the way you want it,’ she said aloud. Her voice shook with rage.

She would have to do something about that.

An hour or so later, the windows had cleared by themselves. Isserley became aware of a pain in her side. She brushed at the spot with her fingertips; the fabric of her top was stuck to her flesh with what must be blood. She tugged it loose irritably. She had assumed she was uninjured.

Experimentally, she tried to swivel her hips where she sat, or lift her thighs. Nothing happened. Below the waist, she might as well be dead. She would have to do something about that.

She wound the window of the driver’s side down a fraction and peered through the slit. The tide had retreated from the shore, exposing jellified seaweed, half-decomposed jetsam, and bony rocks pimpled with those little molluscs that people – that vodsels – collected. Whelks. That was the word. Whelks.

In the distance, two figures were walking along the shore, towards Isserley’s jetty. Isserley watched them advance, willing them to turn back. Her beam of thought, for all its furious intensity, failed to cross the divide. They did not turn back.

At a range of fifty metres or so, Isserley identified the figures as a female vodsel and a dog of unverifiable gender. The female vodsel was small and delicate, dressed in a sheepskin coat and a green skirt. Her legs were stick-thin, sheathed in black, shod in green gumboots. The hair on her head was long and thick, blowing across her face. As she walked along the rocks, she called the dog’s name, in a voice wholly unlike a male vodsel’s.

The dog wasn’t naked; it wore a red tartan coat. It wobbled as it walked, struggling to keep its balance on the slimy rocks. It looked around frequently at the female vodsel.

Eventually, when the two of them had come close enough to Isserley for her to consider putting her glasses on, they stopped in their tracks. The female vodsel waved. Then she turned around and walked away, the dog at her heels.

Isserley exhaled in relief. She resumed watching the clouds, watching the sea.

When at last the car seemed to have dried out in the sun, she tried switching on its ignition again. The engine started obediently. She switched it off. She would go when she was ready.

Turning her head to the passenger side, she stared down at the pock-marked seat as she flipped the icpathua toggle. Two silvery needles stabbed through the upholstery, two thin jets of liquid squirted into the air.

Isserley leaned back in her seat, closed her eyes, and started mewling.