Under the Skin

13

NAKED AND AFRAID of sleep, Isserley roamed her house from room to room, in the dark, hour upon hour. Her route was spiral, beginning in her bedroom, then along the landing to the other bedroom she never used, then downstairs to the rotten-floored hallway, the empty master bedroom, the front room filled with twigs and branches, the gutted kitchen, the clammy bathroom. She paced each one, going over and over in her mind the story of her life so far, and what she could do in the future.

Among the things she considered, to take her through until the morning at least, was knocking down the inner walls of the cottage. The idea came to her in the front room downstairs, when she’d suddenly picked up a big stick and swung it with all her strength against the nearest surface. It was very satisfying: the plaster exploded on impact, exposing a dark cavity and a rib of rough wood. She hit it again, and more fell away. Maybe she would turn the house into one big room. Maybe she would knock the whole fucking place down.

After bashing the wall for twenty minutes or so, she had a hole barely big enough to crawl through, and wielding the stick had ceased giving her the satisfaction of the first few blows. The scar-line where her sixth finger had been amputated was throbbing in pain, and the savagery of her swings was doing something bad to her spine. So, she gave up, and resumed pacing. Her bare feet collected debris. She moved from room to room, tapping the walls with her nails. The house creaked and rustled. Outside in the trees of Ablach Farm, owls were calling to each other, screaming like human women in orgasm. The wind was swollen with the sound of waves crashing on the sea-shore. Somewhere in the farther distance, a foghorn blew.

It was well after midnight when Isserley finally went to bed, too tired to think any more. She had a number of half-formed plans now, and she hoped she’d stayed awake long enough to make sure the sun would be up by the time she awoke.

She slept deeply, for what seemed like a very long time, but when she resurfaced, gasping in terror, it was still pitch dark. The sheets were tangled tightly around her legs, damp and humid, slightly abrasive with grains of plaster, fragments of twig, dirt. She touched herself all over: the flesh of her arms and shoulders was as hot as meat newly fetched from the oven, but her legs were stone cold. Of all the phases of sleep to be woken from, this was the worst.

Cruelly, even though her system hadn’t got round to restoring its equilibrium, it had still managed to squeeze in her usual nightmare about being buried alive, abandoned, condemned to die in an airless prison.

And yet… was it her usual nightmare? Glimpsing its after-image as it faded from her mind, she realized there was something different about it. The way it had made her feel was the same as always, but for the first time, the creature at the centre of the drama seemed to be someone other than herself. Not at the beginning, no: at the beginning it was unmistakably Isserley, being led down into the bowels of the earth. But by the end she seemed to have changed shape, size and species. And in those last anxious seconds before waking, the dream hadn’t been about a human being anymore, but a dog, trapped inside a vehicle in the middle of nowhere. Her master wasn’t coming back, and she was going to die.

As soon as she was fully awake, Isserley disentangled herself from the bedclothes, hugged her cold legs in her warm arms, and began to argue herself back from the brink of panic.

Of course the dog she’d dreamed of was yesterday’s vodsel’s dog, but there was no need to be having nightmares about it. The animal would be just fine. Its master would have left the windows of his van open a fraction, surely. And even if he hadn’t, vehicles weren’t exactly vacuum-sealed, and the weather was cool. As for imagining the dog was going to starve to death, well, that was stupid. When the dog got hungry, it would start barking, and eventually people would get irritated by the noise and search out where it was coming from. In any case, what was so important about the fate of a dog? Dogs died every day. She’d seen the flattened carcasses of lots of them on the A9, had driven over the remains herself, rather than swerve dangerously. They made a barely perceptible bump under the tyres. Their consciousness was rudimentary.

Isserley rubbed her eyes and looked up. She’d put fresh batteries in the clock yesterday, as part of reclaiming a grip on her life: it now glowed 4:09. Maybe it would have been better not to know how many hours she still had to wait for sunrise. Maybe it would have been better not to wake up at all.

She crawled out of bed, crippled as usual. What heaven it would be to get revenge on the surgeons who’d done this to her! She’d never even seen their faces: she’d been drugged into oblivion by the time they’d stuck their knives in. And now they were probably boasting to Vess Incorporated how much they’d learned from their mistakes, how there was no comparison between the miracles they could perform now and the crude experiments that had been Esswis and Isserley. In a fair world, she would be given the opportunity, before she died, to tie those surgeons to a slab and do a bit of experimenting of her own. They could watch, tongueless, as she carved their genitals away. To keep their noise down, she’d give them big chunks of their own severed tails to chew on. Their anuses would clench as she penetrated their spines with iron skewers. Their eyes would blink blood as she sculpted brave new faces for them.

Isserley switched on the television and began her exercises.

‘I can’t endure a lifetime without love,’ a voice whispered into her dark bedroom. The image materialized, a black-and-white little female clinging onto a broad-shouldered male looking away from her, towards the sky.

‘Don’t be silly,’ he chided her gently. ‘You won’t have to.’

Isserley reached out her foot to change the channel just as a sleek aeroplane flew off into dramatic gloom, propellers twirling.

Warm colours suffused the screen, abstract and mutable. The camera image pulled back, sharpening into an iridescent circle of wet glass held between a giant thumb and forefinger, like a single spectacle lens smeared with soup.

‘Cultures such as this one,’ said an authoritative voice, ‘may literally be growing a cure for cancer.’

Isserley stood staring into the fire she had made, almost mesmerized. She’d built a much larger pyre of twigs and branches than usual, and the flames blazed gold and apricot in the dawn. With effort she roused herself and walked past her car, which was already clear of the shed and facing out of the farm, engine running. Isserley limped across to the steading, her shoes scuffing awkwardly along the stony ground. There was something wrong at the base of her spine which exercise hadn’t yet managed to fix.

‘Isserley,’ she spoke into the intercom.

No-one answered, but the great metal door rolled open. Just inside, as expected, sat the black plastic bag filled with the personal effects of the last vodsel. She grabbed it and left the steading immediately, just in case whoever was on duty was coming up from the earth’s depths for a chat.

Back at the fireside, she pulled the vodsel’s shoes, pullover and dog-haired suit out of the bag, and examined the rest. There wasn’t much there: he’d evidently worn nothing but a stained T-shirt under his pullover, and no underpants. His jacket was empty, and in the pockets of his trousers, apart from car keys and a wallet, there was nothing.

Laying the pullover on the bonnet of her car to keep it off the dewy grass, she sprinkled the jacket, T-shirt, trousers and shoes with a christening of petrol, then tossed them onto the fire. There was a surprising amount of dog-hair on her hands, which she didn’t want to wipe on her own clothing. With any luck, it would wear off naturally.

Grunting in discomfort, she knelt to look through the wallet. It was a fat one compared to other wallets she’d seen, but there was little variety inside. Instead of the usual assortment of laminated plastic cards, official concessions and licences, addresses, tickets and sales dockets, there was only money and one sheet of card folded small like a miniature map. The fatness was caused by the sheer bulk of the cash. As well as a few coins, there was a wad of banknotes, mostly twenties with a few tens and fives, adding up to £375. Isserley had never seen so much money before. It was enough to buy five hundred and thirty-five litres of petrol, or a hundred and ninety-two bottles of the blue shampoo, or more than a thousand razor-blades… or… fifty-seven bottles of the fermented potato juice the vodsel had mentioned. She transferred the banknotes to her trousers, distributing them between both pockets to minimize the bulge.

The sheet of card was a large colour photograph, folded many times. When opened and smoothed out, it showed the vodsel, much younger, embracing a female in a gauzy white dress. Both of them had glossy black hair, rosy cheeks and big crescent smiles. Isserley’s vodsel was clean-shaven, unwrinkled, grime-free. There was no old food on his teeth, and his lips were wet and pink. No doubt she was extrapolating, but she fancied she could tell just from his expression that his happiness was genuine. She wondered what his name had been. There was an ornate signature, Pennington Studio, inscribed on the bottom right-hand margin, which struck Isserley as a foreign name, though the vodsel hadn’t sounded foreign to her.

Even as Pennington’s clothes burned, Isserley was toying with the idea of rescuing him. Amlis had had no trouble setting a few vodsels free; she could surely do it with just as little bother. The men down there were imbeciles, and most of them would still be asleep.

But of course it was too late. Pennington would have had his tongue and his balls removed last night. He hadn’t much wanted to live anyway, and he was, hardly likely to have changed his mind by now. He was better left alone.

Isserley stirred the bonfire with a stick, wondering why she was bothering to be so thorough. Force of habit. She tossed the stick onto the flames, and walked to her car.

As Isserley drove along the A9, the sun was rising higher above the horizon, recovering from whatever it had suffered behind the snow-capped mountains during the night. Unclouded and at large, it shone with abrupt intensity, casting a generous golden light over all of Ross-shire. Just by being in the right place at the right time, Isserley was part of that landscape too; her hands turned gold on the steering wheel.

Light as beautiful as this was worth everything, she thought – or damn near everything. Outside the twisted bones and scarred flesh of one’s own body, life wasn’t shit at all.

Pennington’s pullover still felt a little odd against her skin, but she was getting used to wearing it. She liked the way the cuffs wrapped snugly round her wrists, the tarnished fibres luminescing in the sun. She liked the way she could glance down her breast, and, instead of seeing that repugnant cleavage of artificial fat, get an impression of furriness, an illusion of her natural self.

Not far up ahead, a hitcher stood beckoning at the roadside. He was young and thin, and held a battered cardboard sign saying nigg. Isserley drove past without even slowing down. The vodsel made a ‘fuck you’ sign in her rear-view mirror, and then turned to be ready for the next car in line.

It was easy to find the spot where she’d picked Pennington up. The carriageway was especially narrow on the stretch leading up to it – that’s why the cars had banked up behind her – and of course there was the P sign to look out for. When she’d found it, she parked her car exactly where she’d stopped the day before, give or take a few feet. She stepped out, locked the doors, and went in search of the nearest farm path into the fields.

Pennington’s van, too, was easier to find than she’d expected. It was tucked away where she herself would have parked a vehicle if she’d been wanting to hide on this bit of farmland. Shaded by a row of tall trees there stood a ruined mill, roofless and skeletal, against which bales of hay had been piled. The hay had been spoiled by unseasonal weather and left to rot. From the perspective of motorists driving on the A9, there was nothing to be seen except a glimpse of ruins and hay. From the perspective of the farmhouse, half a mile distant, there was only the cluster of trees, sparing the farmer a reminder of blighted resources which would cost money to remove. In the space between the trees and the mill, visible only by trespass, stood Pennington’s van.

It was a much more luxurious vehicle than Isserley had imagined. She’d pictured a rusty, battered, barely roadworthy thing, dark blue perhaps, with faded writing on the side. Instead it was a glossy cream, finished in polished chrome and unperished black rubber, like one of the brand-new ones on display in Donny’s Garage.

Inside its lustrous hull, Pennington’s captive dog was jumping from seat to seat, barking frenziedly. Isserley could see that the animal was whooping its lungs out, but through the closed windows the noise was low-pitched and muffled – an ugly racket at close quarters, but one which she doubted would carry very far, even in the dead of night.

‘Good boy,’ she said, stepping up to the vehicle.

It did not occur to Isserley to be afraid as she used Pennington’s keys to unlock the van’s side door. The dog would either run away or attack her; so, either she would watch it scampering into the distance, or she might be forced to kill it. Either way, her conscience would be at rest.

She swung the door open, and the dog sprang out with what seemed like the velocity of an exhaust backfire. It landed in the grass, almost rolling head-over-heels, then whirled to face Isserley, trembling and twitching. Pure black and white, like a miniature Amlis in animal form, it glowered at her, confused, a rubbery frown wrinkling the down of its dark forehead.

Isserley left the door of the van open, and walked away, back towards the A9. She was not really surprised when the dog followed her, sniffing at the waist of Pennington’s pullover, which hung down to Isserley’s thighs like a dress. The spaniel’s nose nudged her hip repeatedly, then she felt its wet tongue licking one of her hands. With a groan of distaste, she lifted both her arms into air, surrender-style, as she hurried to her car.

Pennington’s dog managed to lick her hand one more time while she was making sure she didn’t slam its snout in the car door. It stared up at her through the glass, uncomprehending, as she turned on the ignition.

‘You’re on your own now, doggy,’ Isserley said, conscious of course that the dog had no language in common with her.

Then she drove away, leaving the animal sitting at the side of the road.

On the homeward journey, Isserley found herself thinking all the same thoughts she’d thought endlessly during the night, about what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

Of course, there were any number of ways she could go, depending on how much courage she could muster, or how much physical misery she was game to endure. Each plan promised its own sweet rewards, and carried with it its own frightening consequences. But she was tired of weighing one future against another; she’d thought too much.

It was time to let instinct decide. She would let her fingers dangle within reach of the controls, and if they pressed the toggle down, well… that was how it would be.

Within minutes, she was approaching the road-sign that said B9175: Portmahomack and Seaboard Villages. She checked her rear-view mirror and the road up ahead: no-one coming in either direction, to push her forward or hold her back. Her fingers hovered over the indicator. Her foot seemed paralysed on the accelerator. The sign flashed past, the turn-off was swallowed up in the trees, and she was still driving north. The decision was made. She would never see Ablach Farm again.

A while later, still travelling northwards, Isserley turned her car onto the Dornoch Bridge, and immediately got a queasy feeling in her guts. It wasn’t hunger, though she was certainly feeling that by now. It was premonition. Something was waiting for her on the other side.

She pulled over, half-way across the bridge, in a parking area provided for tourists. There was a tourist there already, staring over the railings at the glittering firth, binoculars ready for seals or dolphins. Isserley brought her car to a standstill behind his luxury caravan, and cautiously opened her door. The tourist turned to acknowledge her arrival. He was obese and short, with spindly legs: a definite failure to make the grade.

‘Hi there.’ He waved, squinting into the sun.

‘Hi,’ echoed Isserley, keeping her car between them. Satisfied he would stay where he was, she turned away from him and looked down the length of the bridge to the mainland. Shielding her face with one cupped hand, she removed her glasses and peered into the distance, focusing her huge eyes on the traffic that seemed to be banked up at the roundabout, a little herd of vehicles hesitating to move, as if undecided between the Clashmore and Dornoch roads.

Then she spotted the headgear of police, ducking and weaving among the vehicles.

Isserley swung back into her car and revved it into motion. With more skill and boldness than she would have predicted herself capable of, she executed a U-turn in the middle of the bridge – a highly illegal act, no doubt, but one which those tiny far-off police were in no position to pursue. She glanced over her shoulder to check the tourist at the railing: he was staring at her in awe as she drove away, but he wasn’t using his binoculars, so he probably wasn’t trying to fix her appearance or her licence-plate number in his memory.

I want to go home, she thought, but her decision had been made: she had no home anymore.

Within a few minutes she was driving southwards past Tain, ignoring the temptation to reconsider. If she’d been willing to turn off the A9 and drive through the centre of the town, she could have come out the other end and followed an alternative route to Portmahomack – and Ablach Farm. But Ablach Farm was closed to her now. Vess Incorporated wouldn’t take care of her if she didn’t deliver the goods, she knew that; it wasn’t going to house and feed her out of the goodness of its heart.

As for Amlis, he’d said he’d return… but his kind were always lavish with the promises, weren’t they? What about all the men who’d promised to keep her safe as she neared the grading age? ‘The Estates? A beautiful girl like you? Just let them try, Iss, and I ll have a word with my father.’ Spoilt little poseurs, the lot of them. Fuck them, fuck them all.

It would be very easy to get seduced by this world, Amlis had said, when he touched her arm. It’s very, very beautiful. What had he meant? Could he have been meaning to imply that she was beautiful, too? Why else would he have touched her at that moment? His fingers… But no, of course he hadn’t meant that. He was seeing an ocean and a snowy sky for the first time, with a mutilated cripple sweating next to him. The charms of her scarred flesh could hardly compete with a naked new world, could they?

There was a pain in her heart. She missed Ablach’s shore already. All that time she’d spent roaming the empty confines of her cottage last night, she could have spent there, walking the moonlit water’s edge, or along the cliffs. But even then she’d probably already known that saying goodbye would only make things harder.

One of the impossible futures she’d considered, while pacing the rooms of her cottage, was living in a cave on the Ablach shore. There were several caves there, which she’d never explored because of her claustrophobia – which was precisely the problem, of course, with the idea of her living in a cave.

Also on the beach there was a stone hut (‘the fishing bothy’, Esswis had once called it, with the air of a man who knows everything). Its doors were so weathered and rotten that they swayed in the wind like curtains; its windowless interior was mucky with tar and decomposing sheep turds. The main obstacle to living there, though, was that there was also a large piece of machinery bolted to the floor, a cast-iron mechanism the size of a cow, designed to haul boats onto the seashore. Of course it might not be functional anymore, but there was no way of being certain. There would have been big problems if she was stretched out naked in a corner of the bothy, asleep, and suddenly a boatload of fishermen walked in.

She’d also considered building herself a little dwelling on the Ablach cliffs somewhere, made of branches, driftwood and maybe those big sheets of corrugated tin she often saw washed up on the shore. But Esswis would surely have noticed if the farm sprouted an extra dwelling, especially if Isserley was missing and he was searching for her. And, as soon as Vess Incorporated was aware she’d run away, that was surely what Esswis would be sent to do.

Isserley frowned, remembering the police. She couldn’t afford to be stopped by them, because her car was decorated with out-of-date tax stickers, and she had no licences for anything. She must find a place to hide, and stop driving for a while. It was no big challenge; it would be easy. She wasn’t bound to the A9 anymore, after all, but could explore the out-of-the-way roads, where there was little traffic and long stretches of uncleared forest. She could disappear into the trees like a pheasant.

Three days later, Isserley woke from dreams of sexual release, clutching fur in her fists. It was the hood of the anorak, pillowing her head on the back seat of her car. She was in so much discomfort, yet still filled with the fantasy of orgasm, that she wanted to laugh.

Her car was nestled in a bower of ferns near the edge of a loch. The tips of twigs actually touched some of the windows, and tiny birds hopped from roof to tree and back again, their fragile claws pattering on the metal. Unseen creatures, possibly ducks or swans, would rustle the tideless water nearby, particularly in the late afternoons. Overhead, the cover was so dense that snowfalls would never reach the ground, and there was more sunlight reflecting off the loch than through the trees.

All in all, this bower was such a good place to hide that, when Isserley had first eased her car into it a couple of days ago, she’d found another one there already. Fortunately it wasn’t inhabited. It was a mere skeleton of a car: gutted, wheel-less, rusted all the colours of the forest, overgrown with moss. Isserley parked hers right alongside, taking advantage of the extra camouflage.

Undeniably, the first night had been difficult. The back seat was just a few inches shorter than she was, and those few inches proved crucial to her body’s needs. But she’d survived, and the next two nights were slightly better.

She hadn’t wanted to sleep in her car, but until she found another place to live, she had no choice. The notion of sleeping under the stars, curled up in a field somewhere, was all very romantic and defiant, but deep down she knew her spine would punish her for it next day. She needed a bed, or at least something soft to lie on. The back seat of her car was at least padded and smooth. And if one morning she woke up in really serious trouble, she could always pull herself up by the headrests of the front seats.

The ideal place to sleep, the perfect home, if she could have any place in the world she wanted, would be an abandoned lighthouse. But did lighthouses ever get abandoned? She wished they did. They stood on the very edge of the land, right next to the open sea, and their spires reached almost to the clouds. She could imagine herself up there, right at the top, sleeping on a soft mattress with windows all around her, letting the sunlight in as soon as it arrived.

Right now, she was lying low, growing weak with hunger. She really would have to eat something today, something more substantial than the raw turnip she’d stolen from a field the night before last.

As soon as she’d done her exercises, she waded into the icy shallows of the loch and washed herself. Then she shaved, mirror in one hand, blade in the other, dipping shampoo froth into the shimmering water. She hoped the shampoo wouldn’t do any harm to the things that lived in the loch. A few drops of chemical soap into such a vast reservoir of natural purity wouldn’t have much effect, surely?

For her first hot meal since leaving the farm, she drove to a service station she knew, where she’d bought petrol in the past.

One day she might conquer her fears and actually drive into a large town, park her car amongst hundreds of other cars, and walk into a supermarket, the way vodsels did when they needed food. That day was far off yet. Only recently, she’d driven past a giant Tesco right next to the A96 to Aberdeen, wondering if she dared venture in. It was so close to the road, she could almost see inside its tinted glass doors. Everything she’d ever seen on television was probably jammed inside that massive concrete steading, with a plague of vodsels picking at it, jostling and lunging for the choicest morsels. No, she wasn’t ready.

At the service station, she bought twenty pounds worth of petrol. She also selected a pre-packaged meat meal from a self-serve metal and plastic display labelled HAPPY TUM’S^®ROADSIDE DINER. There were three choices: Hot Dog, Chicken Roll, and Beef Burger. Each was wrapped in white paper, so that she couldn’t see the contents. She chose the Chicken Roll. She’d heard the television say that Beef was dangerous – potentially deadly, even. If it could kill vodsels, she didn’t like to think what it might do to her. As for the Hot Dog, well… there was something bizarre about going to a lot of trouble to save a dog from death and then eating one a few days later.

She picked the paper parcel up in her hand and placed it in the microwave oven, then followed the instructions for what buttons to press. Forty-five seconds later, she had her Chicken Roll, steaming hot in her palm.

Forty-five minutes later, she was huddled in the grass behind a parking area in Saltburn, straining to vomit. Her mouth was stretched wide open, saliva drooling off the point of her tongue, but when the gush finally came, it went up her nose instead, spraying and bubbling out of her constricted nostrils like carbonated gravy. For a minute she thought she was going to choke to death, or that the vomit was going to scald its way up her tear ducts and drip out of her eyes. But these were delusions of panic, and the spasms subsided before long.

When it was all over, Isserley removed, with trembling hands, the screw top of a large bottle of Aqua Viva – water, apparently. She’d bought it at the same time as the Chicken Roll, just in case the unfamiliar meat didn’t agree with her. She’d strongly suspected it wouldn’t, but she’d given it a chance. The riddle of what she could safely eat would not be solved in a day. Trial and error would teach her what she could get away with. In the meantime, she sucked at the plastic nub of the water bottle, gulping the soothing clear liquid down.

She wouldn’t starve. There were potatoes growing in the fields, turnips scattered for the sheep, apples on the trees. These were all perfectly fit for human consumption, as the men on Ablach Farm proved every day in the Dining Hall. It wasn’t enough, but she would survive. In time, she would discover foods she couldn’t yet imagine, foods which would remind her of the delicacies of her childhood, foods which would make her feel languorous and satisfied and complete.

It was all out there somewhere, she was sure.

Driving back towards her bower by the loch, along the narrow road through the forest, she was alarmed to see a vodsel up ahead, gesturing extravagantly for her to stop. He wasn’t a police officer, he was a hitcher, but he was very agitated, almost dancing on the carriageway itself. She swerved in an attempt to avoid him, but he sprang into her path, spreading his arms wide, forcing her to brake to a sudden halt.

He was a massive specimen, young and superbly muscled beneath his leather jacket, but his face was wild.

‘Ah’m soarry! Ah’m soarry!’ he cried, slamming his palms down on the bonnet of her car, fixing her with an imploring stare. ‘But Ah hud tae make yi stoap!’

‘Please get out of the way!’ called Isserley through the windscreen, revving her engine threateningly. ‘I don’t pick up hitchers!’

‘Mah girrilfriend’s huvin’ a bebby!’ he bawled back at her, waving one meaty arm at an invisible point beyond the forest. ‘Fer pity’s sake! Ah’ve come a hunnert fifty miles, and Ah’ve goat aboot five fuckin’ miles tae go!’

‘I can’t help you!’ shouted Isserley.

‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ!’ he grimaced, slapping himself on the forehead. ‘Ah’m nae gonny pit a hand on yi. Ah’ll jest sit! Yi kin tie me up, pit a knife tae mah throat, Ah dinnae care whit yi dae – mah girrilfriend’s huvin’ a bebby! Ah’m gonny be a faither!’

It was obvious he wasn’t going to let her go, so she opened the passenger door and let him in.

‘Thanks,’ he said, sheepishly. ‘Yir a pal.’

Shona, he was thinking. Hold on, Shona.

Isserley didn’t reply, but jerked the car into motion with an awkward grind of gears. Five miles, and she could be rid of him. And if she didn’t speak, maybe he wouldn’t either.

‘I cannae tell yi whit this means tae me,’ he said hoarsely after a few seconds.

‘It’s OK,’ said Isserley, staring intently at the road ahead. ‘Just let me drive.’

‘I love her so much,’ he said.

‘Good,’ said Isserley.

‘She rang me up last night, when Ah wis already in mah bed, on the rig, y’ken. “Jimmy, Ah’m in labour,” she says. “It’s come on a week early. Ah know yi cannae get home. Ah jest wanted yi tae know.” Ah wis oaff that rig like a rocket!’

‘Good,’ said Isserley.

There was a pause as the car pootled along, at forty-five miles an hour as usual. To Isserley’s eyes, the trees were flashing by on either side, a blur, though she had to admit the deserted road ahead looked static.

‘Kin yi nae drive a wee bitty faster?’ the vodsel asked at last.

‘I’m doing my best,’ Isserley warned him. Even so, she nudged her foot against the accelerator. Then, to take his mind off the car’s speed, she asked him:

‘Is this your first child?’

‘Aye. Aye,’ he enthused, then breathed deep. ‘Immortality·’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Immortality. That’s whit weans are, y’ken? An endless line of weans through history, y’ken? All this life efter death stuff disnae make sense tae me. Dae you believe in it?’

Isserley was having so much trouble decoding his accent and certain key words that she failed to grasp what he was really asking her.

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

He was not to be stopped, however. A raw nerve had been touched, even though he was the one who’d touched it.

‘The Wee Free Church says mah bebby’s gonny be a bastard,’ he complained, ‘because me and mah girril’s nae married. Whit’s that all aboot? Fuckin’ prehistoaric, y’ken?’

Isserley pondered this for a second, then smiled and shook her head in defeat.

‘I don’t understand a word you’re saying,’ she confessed.

‘Whit religion are you?’ he immediately asked her.

‘I haven’t got any religion,’ she said.

‘Yir parents, then?’

Isserley thought a moment.

‘Where I come from,’ she replied carefully, ‘religion is… dead.’

The vodsel hummed in sympathy, then carried on with his incomprehensible sermon as they plunged deeper into the forest.

‘Reincarnation quite appeals tae me,’ he said, straining to suppress his excitement. ‘Shona – mah girrilfriend – says it soonds daft, but there’s sumpn in it, Ah reckon. Everythin’s goat a soul, and yi cannae destroy a soul. Plus yi get tae huv anither try – dae better next time. ‘He laughed loudly, showily, as if inviting her to join in.’ Who knows, eh? Ah might come back as a wumman, or a wee beastie!’

Rounding a corner, they sped downwards into a small valley, and Isserley eased her foot down on the brake, simultaneously turning the steering wheel. Without warning, the rattle in the chassis reappeared, beating much louder than ever before, and the whole vehicle shuddered. An instant later, the car reached the lowest point of the slope, and its locked wheels made contact with a grey slick of frost.

Almost in a dream, Isserley felt her vehicle sliding free of the tarmac’s friction, as if it were launching itself on water or into the air. Two big male hands clasped over her own on the steering wheel, and helped her wrench it round, but it made no difference. The car flew smoothly off the edge of the road and, with a ferocious smack, collided with a tree.

Isserley was unconscious only for a second, or so it seemed. Her spirit fell back into her body as if from a height, like it had always done when she’d just stung a vodsel. If anything, the impact of landing seemed gentler than she was used to. Her breathing wasn’t as laboured, and her heart wasn’t hammering. The trees of the forest were almost supernaturally vivid in front of her eyes, until she realized that both her glasses and the windscreen were gone.

She looked down. Her green velvet trousers were sprinkled with broken glass and saturated with dark blood, and a twisted wedge of metal was taking up all the space where she would have expected her knees to be. She felt very little pain, and she guessed this must be because her spine was shattered. The crescent of the steering wheel had penetrated her breasts, leaving her torso uninjured. Her neck, though, felt better than it had for years, and this realization jerked a hysterical sob of laughter and grief from her. Something warm and gelatinous, trapped inside her top and Pennington’s pullover, slid down her abdomen and into her lap. She shuddered in revulsion and fear.

The vodsel was no longer next to her. He’d been thrown through the windscreen. She couldn’t see his body from where she sat.

The torn fabric of one of her trouser legs started making a little flapping, sucking noise, and she felt desperately sick, but managed to look away. She noticed then that the icpathua needles were sticking out of the upholstery of the passenger seat. There’d been a malfunction. Knowing it was absurd, Isserley punched the edge of the seat feebly with a bloodied fist, trying to make the needles retract. They didn’t.

Suddenly, somewhere behind her on the road, a car screeched to a halt, and a car door slammed. Footsteps scattered gravel.

Acting automatically, Isserley reached over to the glovebox and fetched out the first pair of glasses to hand. She jammed them onto her face, and was immediately half-blinded by them: they were real optical lenses, of course, not clear glass.

A figure was looming close to her, leaning towards where the driver’s window had been; a small figure with a haze of pink throat, bright yellow clothing and a halo of dark hair.

‘Are you all right?’ said a tremulous female voice.

Isserley laughed helplessly, snorting a dribble of wetness from one of her nostrils. She wiped it on her wrist, recoiling a little in surprise from the distorted magnification of her arm and unfamiliar feel of wool against her cheek.

‘Don’t move,’ said the female voice, toughening up. ‘I’ll get help. Just sit tight.’

Isserley laughed again, and this time the other woman laughed with her, a nervous hiss.

The blur of colours flitted out of Isserley’s range of vision, and she heard the crackle of undergrowth in front of the car. The woman’s voice came again, louder, almost businesslike.

‘Is this… your partner?’ she called, from what sounded like quite a long way away.

‘A hitcher,’ said Isserley. ‘I didn’t know him.’

‘He’s alive,’ said the woman. ‘He’s breathing.’

Isserley leaned her head back on the seat and inhaled deeply herself, trying to decide how she felt about the vodsel’s survival.

‘Take him with you, please,’ she said after a moment.

‘I can’t,’ said the woman. ‘We’ve got to wait for the ambulance men.’

‘Please, please take him with you,’ said Isserley, squinting into the green and brown haze in search of her.

‘I really can’t,’ insisted the woman, calm now. ‘He’s probably got spinal injuries. He needs expert attention.’

‘I’m worried my car will catch fire,’ said Isserley.

‘Your car won’t catch fire,’ the woman said. ‘Don’t panic. Just stay calm. You’re going to be fine.’

‘At least take his wallet,’ Isserley pleaded. ‘It’ll tell you who he is.’

The undergrowth crackled again, and the bright colours swam back into Isserley’s field of vision. Again the woman was standing at the hole in the driver’s window. A warm, small hand laid itself against Isserley’s neck.

‘Listen, I have to leave you for a few minutes while I find a phone. I’ll be back as soon as I’ve rung an ambulance, OK?’

‘Thank you,’ said Isserley. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed pale collarbones and a curve of bosom inside a peach-coloured top, as the woman leaned over Isserley’s shoulder to lift something off the back seat.

‘The Mercy Hospital isn’t far,’ the woman reassured her. ‘You’ll be away in no time.’

Isserley felt the warm hands on her again, and realized belatedly that her own flesh was frigidly cold. The woman was wrapping her up in the anorak, gently tucking it around her shoulders.

‘You’re going to be all right, OK?’

‘OK,’ nodded Isserley. Thank you.’

The woman disappeared then, and the sound of her car driving off faded into silence.

Isserley removed the spectacles and dropped them into her lap, where they landed with a patter of windscreen glass. She blinked, wondering why things were still out of focus. Tears ran down her cheeks, and her view through the shattered windscreen cleared.

Isserley checked the top of the dashboard, where Yns, at the same time as he’d set up the icpathua network, had installed the other little alteration to the car’s original design: the button for the aviir. Unlike the icpathua connections, which involved fragile electrics and hydraulics that had obviously been damaged in the accident, the connection between the dashboard button and the cylinder of aviir was one simple, sturdy tube, waiting only for a squirt of something foreign into the oily liquid.

The aviir would blow her car, herself, and a generous scoop of earth into the smallest conceivable particles. The explosion would leave a crater in the ground as big and deep as if a meteorite had fallen there.

And she? Where would she go?

The atoms that had been herself would mingle with the oxygen and nitrogen in the air. Instead of ending up buried in the ground, she would become part of the sky: that was the way to look at it. Her invisible remains would combine, over time, with all the wonders under the sun. When it snowed, she would be part of it, falling softly to earth, rising up again with the snow’s evaporation. When it rained, she would be there in the spectral arch that spanned from firth to ground. She would help to wreathe the fields in mists, and yet would always be transparent to the stars. She would live forever. All it took was the courage to press one button, and the faith that the connection had not been broken.

She reached forward a trembling hand.

‘Here I come,’ she said.