Under the Skin

10

ISSERLEY ALWAYS DROVE straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time. That’s what she’d always done. That’s what she would do now. There was a hitcher in her sights. She drove past him.

She was looking for big muscles. Puny, scrawny specimens were no use to her. This one was puny and scrawny. He was no use to her. She drove on.

It was dawn. The physical world did not exist for her, apart from the ribbon of grey tarmac on which she was driving. Nature was a distraction. She refused to be distracted.

The A9 seemed empty, but you couldn’t trust it. Anything could happen, any time. That’s why she kept her eyes on the road.

Three hours later, there was another hitcher. It was a female. Isserley wasn’t interested in females.

Somewhere on the passenger side, above the wheel, a rattle had started up. She had heard that rattle before. It had pretended to go away, but it had stayed hidden in her car’s body somewhere. Isserley would not tolerate this. She would take her car back to the farm, when she had finished work, and she would find that rattle and she would fix it.

Two and a half hours later, there was another hitcher in her sights. Isserley always drove straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time. So, she drove past him.

He was holding a large cardboard sign that said PERTH PLEASE. He was not bald. He was not wearing overalls. His body was rather top-heavy, a V-shaped torso on long legs. How thin were those legs? His faded jeans were flapping around them; it must be very windy today.

She drove back and appraised him again. His arms were good. His shoulders were excellent. There was a lot of breast on him, even though his waist was lean.

After her U-turn, she drove towards him a third time. He had curly, unruly red hair and wore a thick knitted jumper composed of many different colours of wool. All the thick-knitted-jumper vodsels Isserley had ever met were unemployed, and lived the life of pariahs. Some authority must actually force them to wear these garments, she thought, as a stigma of rank.

This vodsel beckoning to her now must be an outcast. And his legs would fatten up fine.

She pulled off the road, and he ran to the car, smiling.

Isserley opened the passenger door, intending to call out, ‘Do you want a lift?’

It suddenly seemed an absurd thing to say. Of course he wanted a lift. He had a big sign saying PERTH PLEASE; she had stopped for him. Nothing could be more self-explanatory. Words were a waste of energy.

In silence, she watched him strap himself in.

‘I… This is very good of you,’ the hitcher said, grinning awkwardly, combing his hands through his abundant hair, which immediately fell back over his eyes. ‘I was getting pretty cold there.’

She nodded gravely, and tried to smile in return. She wasn’t sure if she was managing it. The muscles in her face seemed even less connected to her lips than usual.

The hitcher babbled on: ‘I’ll just leave my sign here at my feet, shall I? You can get to your gears all right, can you?’

She nodded again, and revved the engine. Inwardly, her speechlessness troubled her; she seemed to have lost the power; there was a problem in her throat. Her heart was pounding already, though nothing had happened yet and no decision was on the horizon.

Determined to function normally, she opened her mouth to speak, but it was a mistake. She could sense that the sound rising in her throat would mean nothing to a vodsel, so she swallowed it down again.

The hitcher stroked his chin nervously. He had a soft red beard, so sparse it had been invisible from a distance. He smiled again, and blushed.

Isserley took in a deep, slightly shuddery breath, flipped the indicator and drove off, facing the road ahead.

She would speak when she was ready.

The hitcher fiddled with his sign, trying to catch her eye as he leaned forward. She was not to be caught. He sat back, nonplussed, clasping each of his cold hands inside the other in turn, then sliding them under the fleecy sleeves of his jumper.

He wondered what on earth he could say to put her at ease, and why she’d bothered to pick him up if she didn’t want to talk to him. She must have had a reason. The thing was to guess what her reason might be. Judging from the look on her face before she’d turned away, she was completely knackered; maybe she’d just been falling asleep at the wheel, and decided a hitch-hiker would keep her awake. She’d be expecting him to make small talk, then.

It was an alarming thought; he wasn’t a ‘small talk’ kind of person. Long philosophical one-to-ones were more his thing, like the late-night conversations he had with Cathy when they were both a bit stoned. A pity he couldn’t offer this woman a joint to loosen things up.

Instead, he thought of commenting on the weather. Not in a cheap way, but saying what he really felt on days like this, when the sky was like… like an ocean of snow. It was so mind-blowing the way it could all hang suspended up there, all that solid water, enough of it to bury a whole county in tons of white powdered ice, all of it just floating, way, way up there as easily as a cloud. A miracle.

He looked at the woman again. She was driving like a robot, back straight as a metal bar. He got the impression that the beauties of nature meant nothing to her. There was no common ground there.

‘Hi, I’m William,’ he could say. Maybe it was a bit late now. But he would have to break the silence somehow. She might be going all the way to Perth. If she drove him a hundred and twenty miles without them exchanging a word, he’d be a basket case by the time he arrived.

Maybe the tone of ‘Hi, I’m William’ was a little bit crass, a bit American, like ‘Hi, I’m Arnold, and I’m your waiter for the evening.’ Maybe something more low-key would be better. Like, ‘I’m William, by the way.’ As if he was mentioning it in the middle of an enthusiastic conversation they were already having. Which, sadly, they weren’t.

What was wrong with this woman, anyway?

He ruminated for a minute, making an effort to lay aside his own unease and concentrate on her instead. He tried to see her the way Cathy might see her if she was sitting in his seat; Cathy was a genius for sizing people up.

Earnestly striving to connect with his intuitive feminine side, William very quickly came to the conclusion that there must be something badly, badly wrong with this woman. She was in some sort of trouble, some sort of distress. She might even be in shock.

Or maybe he was just being dramatic. Cathy’s friend Dave, the writer, always looked as if he was in shock. He’d looked like that all the years they’d known him. He was probably born looking like that. This woman, though: she gave off the weirdest vibes. Weirder even than Dave’s. And she was definitely not in good shape physically.

Her hair was matted, with streaks of something that looked like axle grease slicked through it, and tufts sticking out at odd angles. Here was a woman who hadn’t looked at herself in a mirror for a while, that was for sure. She smelled – stank, really, if he could be so judgemental – of fermenting sweat and seawater.

Her clothes were filthy with dried mud. She’d fallen, maybe, or had some sort of accident. Should he ask her if she was all right? She might be offended if he commented on the state of her clothing. She might even think he was trying to harass her sexually. It was so hard to be friendly, in any genuinely human way, towards female strangers if you were a male. You could be courteous and pleasant, which wasn’t the same thing at all; it was the way you’d treat the staff at the Job Centre. You couldn’t tell a strange woman that you liked her earrings, or that her hair was beautiful – or ask her how she came to have mud on her clothes.

It was over-civilization that caused that, maybe. Two animals, or two primitives, would never worry about that sort of thing. If one was muddy, the other would just start licking or brushing or whatever was needed. There was nothing sexual about it.

Maybe he was being a hypocrite. He did recognize this woman as… well… a woman, surely? She was a female; he was a male. These were eternal realities. And, let’s face it, she was wearing amazingly little clothing for the weather. He hadn’t seen so much cleavage in public since well before the snows had set in.

Her breasts were suspiciously firm and gravity-defying for their size, though; maybe she’d had them pumped up with silicone. That was a pity. There were health risks – leakage, cancer. It was so unnecessary. Every woman was beautiful. Small breasts fitted snugly inside your hand and felt warm and complete. That’s what he told Cathy, whenever the latest lingerie catalogue came with the junk mail and she went on a downer.

Maybe this woman was simply wearing one of those fiendishly designed uplift bras. Men could be naive when it came to that sort of stuff. He examined her side, from armpit to waist, for tell-tale signs of underwiring or industrial-strength lace. He saw nothing except a small perforation in the fabric of her top, like a snarl from a spine of barbed wire or a sharp twig. The fabric around the hole was tacky with some sort of dried gunge. Could it be blood? He longed to ask. He wished he were a doctor, so he could ask and get away with it. Could he pretend to be a doctor? He knew a fair bit, from Cathy’s pregnancies, her motorcycle accident, his father’s stroke, Suzie’s addictions.

‘Excuse me, I’m a doctor,’ he could say, ‘and I can’t help noticing…’ But he didn’t approve of lying. Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive, that’s what Shakespeare said. And Shakespeare was no fool.

The more he looked at this girl, the weirder she appeared. Her green velveteen trousers were very seventies retro-chic, if you disregarded the muddy knees, but she definitely didn’t have the legs of a nightclub babe. Trembling slightly under the thin fabric, so short they barely reached the pedals, they might have been the legs of a cerebral palsy sufferer. He turned his head to glance through the space between his seat and hers, half expecting to see a foldable wheelchair wedged into the back. There was only an old anorak, a garment he could well imagine her wearing. Her boots were like Doc Martens, but even chunkier, like Boris Karloff clogs.

Strangest of all, though, was her skin. Every part of her flesh that he could see, except for her pale smooth breasts, had the same peculiar texture to it: a downy look, like the hide of a cat recently spayed, just beginning to grow back the fur. She had scars everywhere: along the edges of her hands, along her collarbones, and especially on her face. He couldn’t see her face now, hidden as it was behind the tangled mane of her hair, but he’d got a pretty good glimpse of it before, and there was scarring along the line of her jaw, her neck, her nose, under her eyes. And then the corrective lenses. They must have the biggest magnification known to optometry, for her eyes to look that big.

He hated to judge anyone by externals. It was the inner person that mattered. But when a woman’s external appearance was this unusual, there was every likelihood it would have shaped the whole of her life. This woman’s story, whatever it was, would be a remarkable one: perhaps tragic, perhaps inspirational.

He longed to ask.

How sad it would be if he never found out. He would spend the rest of his life wondering. He knew that. He’d experienced it before. Once, eight years ago, he’d had a car himself, and given a lift to a man who’d started weeping, right there in the car next to him. William hadn’t asked what was the matter; he’d been too embarrassed, a macho kid of twenty. In time, the man stopped weeping, arrived at his destination, got out of the car, said thanks for the lift. Ever since then, maybe once a week, William would find himself wondering about that man.

‘Are you all right?’ He could ask that, surely. If she wanted to fob him off, she could put him in his place then and there. Or she could answer in a way that left things more open.

William licked his lips, tried to bring the words to his tongue. His heart beat faster, his breathing quickened. The fact that she wasn’t looking at him made things even harder. He considered clearing his throat, like he’d seen men do in the movies, then blushed at how naff that idea was. His sternum was vibrating, or maybe it was his lungs that were doing it, like a bass drum.

This was ridiculous. His heavy breathing was becoming audible now. She would think he was going to jump on her or something.

He took a deep breath and gave up the idea of asking her anything, at least out of the blue. Maybe something would arise naturally later.

If only he could bring Cathy into the conversation, that might reassure her. She would know then that he was some other woman’s partner, the father of two children, a person who wouldn’t dream of raping or molesting anybody. How to bring up the subject, though, if she didn’t ask? He couldn’t just say, ‘By the way, in case you might be wondering, I have a partner, who I love dearly’. That would sound so naff. No, worse than naff: positively creepy, even psychotic.

That’s what lying had done to the world. All the lying that people had been doing since the dawn of time, all the lying they were doing still. The price everyone paid for it was the death of trust. It meant that no two humans, however innocent they might be, could ever approach one another like two animals. Civilization!

William hoped he would remember all this stuff, to discuss it with Cathy when he got home. He had his finger on something important here, he thought.

Although maybe if he told Cathy too much about this woman who’d given him a lift, she’d take it the wrong way. Talking about his old girlfriend Melissa and the walking tour of Catalonia hadn’t gone over too well, he had to admit, even though Cathy had more or less forgiven him by now.

Jesus, why did this girl not speak to him?

Isserley stared ahead of her in despair. She was still unable to speak, the hitcher was evidently unwilling to. As always, it was up to her. Everything was up to her.

A big green traffic sign said there were 110 miles to go before Perth. She ought to tell him how far she was going. She had no idea how far she was going. She glanced into the rearview mirror. The road was empty, difficult to see clearly under the grey, snow-laden light. All she could do was keep driving, her hands barely moving on the steering wheel, a cry of torment stuck in her throat.

Even if she could bring herself to start a conversation, the thought of how much work it would be to keep it going made her heart sink. He was obviously a typical male of the species; stupid, uncommunicative, yet with a rodent cunning for evasion. She would talk to him, and in return he would grunt, surrender one-word answers to her cleverest questions, lapse into silence at every opportunity. She would play her game, he would play his, on and on, perhaps for hours.

Isserley realized, suddenly, that she just didn’t have the energy to play anymore.

Eyes fixed on the bleak road stretching out in front of her, she was humiliated by the absurd labour of it all, this wearisome nudging and winkling at him as if he were some priceless pearl to be drawn out by infinitesimal degrees from his secretive shell. The patience it required of her was superhuman. And for what? A vodsel the same as all the other vodsels, one of billions infesting the planet. A few parcels’ worth of meat.

Why must she put so much effort into playing this game day after day? Was this how she would spend the rest of her life? Endlessly putting on these performances, turning herself inside out, only to finish up empty-handed (more often than not) and having to start all over again?

She couldn’t bear it.

She looked in her rear-view mirror, then askance at the hitcher. His eyes met hers; he blushed and smirked cretinously, breathing hard. The sheer brute alienness of him hit her like a blow; and, with a heady rush like the nausea after a sudden loss of blood, she hated him.

‘Hasusse,’ she said between clenched teeth, and flipped the icpathua toggle.

He began to fall towards her; she shoved him back with the flat of her hand. He swayed away from her, his big shoulders tipping like a unstable bale of hay, his head bumping against the passenger window. Isserley flicked the indicator and eased the car off the road.

Safely parked in a layby, her motor still on, she pressed the button to darken the windscreen. It was the first time she’d ever been aware of doing so. Usually she was floating somewhere in space when this moment came; today she was solidly anchored in the driver’s seat, her hands on the controls. The glass went deep amber all around her, the world went dark and disappeared, and the little cabin light came on. She leaned her head back against the headrest and removed her glasses, listening to the rumble of distant traffic over the purr of her engine.

Her breathing, she noted, was perfectly normal. Her heart, which admittedly had been labouring a bit when she’d first let the vodsel into her car, was now beating quite tranquilly.

Whatever the problem had been, in the past, with her physical reactions, she seemed finally to have solved it.

She bent down to open the glove compartment. Two tears fell out of her eyes, onto the hitcher’s jeans. She frowned, unable to account for it.

Isserley drove directly back to Ablach Farm, trying to fathom, all the way there, what could possibly be wrong.

Of course the events of yesterday… or was it the day before?… She wasn’t exactly sure how long she had spent on the jetty afterwards… but anyway, those events… well, they had upset her, there was no denying that. But it was all in the past now. Water under the bridge, as the vodsels… as she’d heard it said.

Now she was driving past the abandoned steelworks, almost home, with a nice big vodsel propped up next to her, just like any other day. Life went on, there was work to be done. The past was dwindling, like something shrinking to a speck in the rear-view mirror, and the future was shining through the windscreen, demanding her full attention. She flicked her indicator at the Ablach sign.

As she drove over Rabbit Hill, she was ready to admit that she was perhaps not in such good shape. But, determined to pull herself together without wasting any more time, she already had a vision of what it would take for her to feel better. Something inside her was trapped. Something small: nothing serious. But still trapped.

To complete her recovery, to get herself back to normal, she needed to release it.

She felt sure she knew how.

Parking in front of the steading, she sounded her car’s horn, impatient for the men to come out.

The door rolled open to reveal, as usual, Ensel and the two cronies whose names she’d never bothered to memorize. Ensel, as usual, hurried out to peer through the car’s passenger window at what she’d brought home for them. Isserley braced herself for the usual platitude about the quality of the specimen.

‘Are you all right?’ grimaced Ensel through the glass. He was looking straight at her, ignoring the vodsel slumped under ill-fitting blond wig and sloppily applied anorak. ‘You’re… ah… you have some mud on your clothes.’

‘It will wash off,’ said Isserley frostily.

‘Of course, of course,’ said Ensel, cowed by her tone. He opened the door and the vodsel, poorly balanced, tumbled out like a sack of potatoes. Ensel leapt back in alarm, then snorted self-consciously and tried to rise above the mishap with panache. ‘Um… he’s a good one, isn’t he?’ he leered. ‘One of the best ever.’

Isserley didn’t deign to respond, but threw open her own door and stepped out of the car. Ensel, already busy with the other men dragging the vodsel backwards, registered her approach with a puzzled squint.

‘Something wrong?’ he grunted as he struggled to lift his burden onto a wheeled pallet. The weave of the vodsel’s knitted jumper was very loose and almost useless as a grip-handle.

‘No,’ said Isserley. ‘I’m coming with you, that’s all.’

She strode on ahead and leaned against the steading while the men staggered to catch up, pulling the pallet with the vodsel on it.

‘Uh… is there some problem?’ said Ensel.

‘No,’ said Isserley, calmly watching them bumble through the door at last. ‘I just want to see what happens.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Ensel, bewildered. The other men swivelled their heads to regard each other. Mutely they shuffled across the hangar floor, with Isserley walking beside them.

At the lift, there was an even more embarrassing moment. Clearly, there was only enough room inside for the men and their burden, not for Isserley as well.

‘Um… you know there’s really not that much to see,’ simpered Ensel as he jostled with his companions inside the great drum.

Isserley clawed off her glasses and hung them on the frayed neckline of her top, fixing Ensel with a steely glare as the lift began to seal itself shut.

‘Don’t start without me,’ she warned.

Isserley, standing alone in the dimly lit lift, allowed herself to be borne deeper and deeper into the earth. She passed the Dining and Recreation level, descended lower than the men’s sleeping quarters.

As she sank through the well-oiled, frictionless shaft, she kept her eyes on the seam that would open when she reached Transit Level. Transit Level was three storeys below the ground. There was nothing lower than Transit Level except the vodsel pens themselves.

She’d expected to feel uneasy, even panicky, going down so far. But when the lift stopped moving and the door slid open, all those arm’s-lengths below the ground, Isserley wasn’t aware of any nausea. She knew she was going to be all right. She was going to get what she needed.

The Processing Hall was the largest of the linked maze of rooms that made up Transit Level. Its ceiling was high, its dimensions generous, its lighting fierce, leaving no corner in the slightest shadow. It was like an automobile showroom gutted of its contents and sparsely reappointed for more organic purposes. There was plenty of air, breezing out of the many air-conditioning grilles in the whitewashed walls. There was even a hint of marine tang to it.

The hall was lined on three sides with long metal work-benches, unattended just now. Ensel and the other men, as well as Unser, the Chief Processor, were all gathered in the centre of the room, converged around a mechanical contraption Isserley knew must be the Cradle.

The Cradle, constructed from pieces of farm equipment, was a masterpiece of specialized design. Its base was the cannibalized mechanism of an earthmover, welded to a stainless-steel drinking trough. Mounted on top, chest-high to a human, was a two-metre segment of a grain chute, artfully beaten into an amended shape so that its sharp edges were curled harmlessly in on themselves. Gleaming and elegant like a giant gravy boat, the chute was being tilted mechanically on its unseen fulcrum, assuming a perfectly horizontal position.

The person adjusting the balance of the Cradle was Ensel, smug in his responsibility of personally assisting the Chief Processor; his two cronies were engaged in the less precise task of undressing the vodsel, lying nearby.

Unser, the Chief Processor – or the butcher, as he still insisted on calling himself – was washing himself. He was a compact, wiry man, who would have been scarcely taller than Isserley if he’d been a biped. He had massive knobbly wrists, though, and powerful hands, which he was holding aloft as he squatted on his hindquarters next to a metal tub.

He lifted his almost freakishly small, coarse-bristled head and sniffed the air, as if he was smelling the arrival of an unfamiliar scent – Isserley’s, not the vodsel’s.

‘Uhr-rhum,’ he said. It was the language of neither humans nor vodsels. He was simply clearing his throat.

Isserley had stepped out of the lift, and it had closed behind her. She waited to be challenged or greeted. The men did neither, carrying on with their activities as if she was invisible. Ensel rolled a small metal trolley of shiny instruments into Unser’s reach. The two cronies undressing the vodsel were huffing and puffing with effort, but the sound was smoothed over somewhat by the music all around.

Real music, human music, was being piped into the hall by loudspeakers nestled in the walls. Soft singing and the strumming of instruments imparted a reassuring flavour of home, a pervasive smell of melodies half remembered from childhood. They hissed and hummed soothingly.

The men had already managed to pull off the new arrival’s fleecy jumper and were struggling with the rest. The pale flesh was wreathed in many layers of clothing, like layers of cabbage or radish. There was less actual vodsel inside than Isserley had thought.

‘Careful, careful,’ muttered Unser as the men scrabbled clumsily at the vodsel’s ankles to remove tight woollen socks. An animal’s shanks were close to where its faeces would fall once it was in the pens; any lacerations would be liable to fester.

Panting from exertion, the men finished their task, tossing the last tiny garment on top of a pile. All these years, Isserley had always been handed the vodsels’ clothing and personal effects in a bag, just inside the steading door; this was the first time she’d seen how that bag came to be filled.

‘Uhr-rhum,’ said Unser again. Using his tail for balance, he waddled up against the Cradle on his hind legs, still holding his arms aloft. His arms were shiny black, as black as Amlis’s, in contrast to the rest of his fur, which was grey. However, this was only because his arms had just been washed right up to the shoulders, and the fur was saturated with water, slicked flat.

He looked sharply at Isserley, as if noticing her presence only now.

‘Can I help you?’ he demanded, squeezing the fur on his forearms a bit smoother still with his encircling hands. Drops of water pattered on the floor at his feet.

‘I… just came to watch,’ said Isserley.

The Chief Processor’s suspicious glare burned into her; she realized she was hunching over, her arms folded over her breasts, trying to look as human as possible.

‘Watch?’ Unser repeated in bemusement as the men struggled to lift the vodsel off the floor.

Isserley nodded. She was only too well aware that she had avoided coming here for four years, had only ever spoken to Unser in the dining hall. She hoped he would at least have noticed, from their rare conversations, that she respected him, even feared him a little. He, like her, was a true professional.

Unser cleared his throat again. He was always clearing his throat; he had a disease, the men said.

‘Well… keep well back,’ he advised her gruffly. ‘You look as if you’ve been crawling through the muck.’

Isserley nodded, and took a step backward.

‘OK,’ said Unser. ‘Put him on.’

The vodsel’s lolling body was flopped onto the Cradle, then turned to face the fluorescent ceiling. His limbs were arranged neatly, his shoulders fitted snugly into a special shoulder-shaped indentation which had been sculpted into the metal of the chute. His head came to rest on the lip of the chute, his loose red hair dangling just above the great metal trough.

Throughout all this the vodsel, though placidly flexible, made not the slightest movement himself, except for the autonomic squirming of his testes inside the shrinking scrotal sac.

When the body had been arranged to Unser’s satisfaction and the tray of instruments pushed against the edge of the Cradle, the butcher began his task. Balancing on his tail and one hind leg, he lifted his other hind leg up to the vodsel’s face and hooked two fingers of his foot into the vodsel’s nostrils. An upward tug pulled the animal’s head right back and opened its mouth wide. Pausing only to make sure of his balance, Unser flexed his free hands. Then, from the tray beside him, he selected one silver tool shaped like an elongated letter q, and another shaped like a tiny sickle. Both of these instruments were immediately inserted into the vodsel’s mouth.

Isserley strained to see, but Unser’s big wrists and the twisting motion of his fingers obscured the view as he carved out the vodsel’s tongue. Blood began to gurgle out onto the vodsel’s cheeks as Unser turned to drop his tools on the tray with a clatter. Unhesitatingly he snatched up an electrical appliance resembling a large star-point screwdriver and, squinting with concentration, guided it into the vodsel’s mouth. Flashes of light glowed through the gaps in Unser’s nimble fingers as he searched out the incontinent blood vessels and fried them shut with a crackling buzz.

He was already busy sluicing out the vodsel’s mouth with a suction pump by the time the smell of burning flesh had permeated the air. The vodsel coughed: the first real evidence that, far from being dead, it was suffering from nothing more serious than icpathuasi.

‘That’saboy,’ murmured Unser, tickling the Adam’s apple to make the creature swallow. ‘Uhr-rhum.’

As soon as he was satisfied with the state of the animal’s mouth, Unser turned his attention to the genitals. Taking up a clean instrument, he sliced open the scrotal sac and, with rapid, delicate, almost trembling incisions of his scalpel, removed the testicles. It was a much more straightforward job than the tongue; it took perhaps thirty seconds. Before Isserley had registered what had happened, Unser had already cauterized the bleeding and was sewing the scrotum closed with an expert hand.

‘That’s it,’ he announced, tossing the needle and thread onto the tray. ‘Finished. Uhr-rhum.’ And he looked to his guest.

Isserley blinked back at him across the room. She was having a lot of trouble keeping her breathing under control.

‘I didn’t… realize it would all… be over so soon,’ she admitted hoarsely, still crouching and cringing. ‘I was expecting… a lot more… blood.’

‘Oh yes,’ Unser assured her, combing his fingers through the vodsel’s hair. ‘The speed minimizes the trauma. After all, we don’t want to cause unnecessary suffering, do we? Uhr-rhum.’ He allowed himself a faint smile of pride. ‘A butcher has to be a bit of a surgeon, you know.’

‘Oh, it’s… very impressive,’ complimented Isserley miserably, shivering and hugging herself all the while, ‘the way you do it.’

‘Thank you,’ said Unser, dropping back onto all fours with a groan of relief.

Ensel had made the Cradle tip sideways, and the other men were already hauling the vodsel off it, manoeuvring the body back onto the pallet so it could be rolled to the lift.

Isserley bit her insensate lips to stop herself crying out with frustration. How could it be over so soon! And with so little violence, so little… drama? Her heart was hammering in her chest, her eyes were stinging, her fingernails were clawing holes into her clenched fists. She had a need for release raging inside her, swollen to explosion point, and yet the vodsel’s ordeal was over; he was already on his way to join his kind down in the pens.

‘Don’t drag his feet over the fucking step,’ exclaimed Unser irritably as the men dragged their burden into the lift. ‘I’ve told you a thousand times!’

He cast a knowing glance at Isserley, as if to acknowledge that she, of all people, should have a pretty accurate idea of how many times he could have scolded the men in this way. ‘OK, hundreds maybe,’ he conceded.

The lift closed with a hiss. Isserley and Unser were alone in the big room with the Cradle and the smell of burning.

‘Uhr-rhum,’ announced Unser as the silence grew awkward. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’

Isserley clutched herself tightly, keeping it all in.

‘I was just… wondering,’ she said, ‘Are you… are there any… any monthlings still to be… processed?’

Unser trotted over to the vat of water and plunged his arms into it.

‘No,’ he said, ‘we’ve done as many as we need to.’

The agitation of water harmonized with the music issuing from the loudspeakers.

‘You mean,’ said Isserley, ‘there aren’t any others that are ready?’

‘Oh, there is one left,’ said Unser, extracting his arms and shaking the excess water aside with vehement flicks. ‘But he’ll keep. He can go next time.’

‘Why can’t he go this time?’ pursued Isserley. ‘I’d love to see’ – she bit her lips again – ‘to see the way you do it. The end product.’

Unser smiled modestly as he dropped back onto all fours.

‘The usual quota has been loaded, I’m afraid,’ he remarked with the merest hint of regret.

‘You mean,’ persisted Isserley, ‘there’s no room in the transport ship for more?’

Unser was looking down, examining his hands, lifting them from the wet floor one at a time.

‘Oh, there’s plenty room, plenty room,’ he replied pensively. ‘It’s just that… uhr-rhum… well, They’ (he rolled his eyes heavenwards) ‘are expecting a certain amount of meat, you know. Based on what we usually deliver.If we put any more in, they might expect us to deliver the same amount next month, you see?’

Isserley pressed her hands to her breast, trying to calm the hammering of her heart. There was just too much padding in the way.

‘It’s all right,’ she assured Unser, her voice tight with urgency. ‘I… I can bring in more vodsels. No problem. There’s lots of them around just now. I’m getting better at the job all the time.’

Unser stared at her, frowning, puzzled, obviously not knowing what to make of her.

Isserley stared back, half dead with need. The parts of a woman’s face she could have used to plead with him, to implore him without words, had all been removed or mutilated. Only her eyes remained. They shone brightly as she gazed unblinking through space.

Minutes later, on Unser’s instruction, the last of the month-lings was brought into the Processing Hall.

Unlike the paralysed newcomer who’d preceded him, this one did not need to be carried. He walked upright, meekly, led by two men. In fact, he hardly needed to be led; he shuffled his massive pink self forwards as if in sleep. The men merely nudged him with their flanks whenever he seemed about to stumble or deviate. They accompanied him: that was the word. They accompanied him to the Cradle.

The swollen rigidity of his bulk was such that when he had reached the Cradle and was pushed off-balance, he tipped right over like a felled tree, falling backwards onto the smooth receptacle with a fleshy thwump. He looked surprised as his own elephantine weight carried him down the slippery slope of the chute; all the men had to do was guide his progress so that his shoulders came to rest in the designated hollows.

Isserley had edged closer, aching to see his face. The porcine eyes twinkling in his bald head were too small to read from a distance. At all costs she must not miss what was to be written there.

The monthling’s eyes were blinking rapidly; a frown was forming on his dome-like forehead. Something was going to happen to him which might be beyond his capacity to stoically endure. He had come to rely on his own bulk, his own indifference to discomfort. Now he sensed he was about to be taken out of his depth. Anxiety was growing in him, searching for expression somewhere among the cells of his fully crammed physiognomy.

Sedated though he was, the vodsel struggled, but not with the men who were holding him; rather, with his own memory. It seemed to him he’d seen Isserley somewhere before. Or perhaps he merely recognized she was the only creature in the room who looked anything like him. If anyone was going to do anything for him, it would have to be her.

Isserley edged forward further still, allowing the vodsel to focus on her. She, too, was trying to place him in her memory. His eyelashes, the only hairs remaining on his head, were remarkably long.

So intently was the vodsel striving now to retrieve his memory of Isserley that he seemed not to notice something being lowered towards his forehead that resembled the nozzle of a petrol pump, attached to the base of the Cradle by a long flexible cable. Unser touched the metal tip of the instrument to the unwrinkled flesh of the vodsel’s brow, and squeezed the handle. There was an almost imperceptible dimming of the lights in the building. The vodsel’s eyes blinked just once as the current travelled through his brain and down the filament of his spine. A subtle plume of smoke curled up from a darkening smudge on his brow.

Unser yanked the chin up to expose the neck. With two graceful flicking motions of his wrist, he slashed open the arteries in the vodsel’s neck, then stood back as a jet of blood gushed out, steaming hot and startlingly red against the silvery trough.

‘Yes!’ screamed Isserley involuntarily. ‘Yes!’

Even as her cry was still ringing out in the Processing Hall, all activity had already stopped dead. A terrible silence fell, made worse by a lull in the piped music. Nothing moved except the unstoppable gush of blood from the vodsel’s gaping neck, the frothy liquid glimmering and seething, immersing the vodsel’s face and head, swirling his eyelashes in the tide like sprigs of seaweed. The men – Unser, Ensel and the others – stood frozen. Their eyes were all turned on Isserley.

Isserley cringed so low that she was almost falling forward. She was clenching and unclenching her hands in an agony of frustrated anticipation.

The point of Unser’s knife was hovering over the vodsel’s torso; Isserley knew that the next action must surely be to slit the animal open from neck to crotch, peeling the flesh aside like the front of a pair of overalls. She stared longingly at the knife as it hung in the air for a long moment. Then, devastatingly, Unser withdrew it and allowed it to fall onto the tray.

‘I’m sorry, Isserley,’ he announced quietly, ‘but I don’t think it’s such a good idea for you to be here.’

‘Oh please,’ entreated Isserley, squirming. ‘Don’t let me put you off.’

‘We are doing a job here,’ the Chief Processor reminded her sternly. ‘Feelings don’t enter into it.’

‘Oh, I know, I know,’ cringed Isserley. ‘Please, just carry on as if I’m not here.’

Unser leaned across the Cradle, obscuring her view of the vodsel’s steaming head.

‘I think it would be better if you left,’ he said, with exaggerated clarity. Ensel and the others looked nervously back and forth between him and the object of his disapproval.

‘Look…’ croaked Isserley. ‘What’s all the fuss? Can’t you just… just…’

She glanced down at her hands because she sensed they were being stared at. She was shocked to observe her fingers hacking downwards through the air, as if she were trying to claw something out of the atmosphere with her nails.

‘Ensel,’ said Unser warily. ‘I think Isserley may be… unwell.’

The men started to move across the wet floor towards Isserley, their reflections vibrating in the brilliant sheen.

‘Keep away from me,’ she warned.

‘Please, Isserley,’ said Ensel, still advancing. ‘You look…’ He grimaced awkwardly. ‘It’s terrible to see you looking like this.’

‘Keep away from me,’ she repeated.

In the lurid confines of the Processing Hall, it seemed to Isserley that the light had begun to intensify weirdly, its wattage multiplying second by second. The music also seemed to be sagging out of tune, keening nauseously into her spine. Stinging sweat ran into her eyes and down her back. She was, she remembered suddenly, deep inside the ground. The air was vile, recycled through tons of solid rock, with a horrible fake aroma of sea-spray. She was trapped, surrounded by beings for whom this was all normal.

Suddenly sinewy male arms were rearing up at her from all directions, seizing her wrists, her shoulders, her clothing.

‘Get your stinking paws off me!’ she hissed. But their grip was stronger then her own desperate flails of resistance.

‘No! No-o-o! No-o-o-o!’ she screamed as they pulled her off her feet.

The instant she fell, everything around her began to contract sickeningly. The walls shrugged themselves loose from their foundations and slid towards the centre of the room, as if attracted by the struggle. The ceiling, a massive rectangular slab of concrete furrowed with fluorescent white, also shuddered loose and loomed down on her.

Shrieking, she tried to roll herself into a ball, but she was caught spread-eagled by many strong hands. Then, the walls and ceiling gulped shut on her and she was engulfed in darkness.