Under the Skin

3

ISSERLEY WAS WOKEN next morning by an unusual thing: sunshine.

Normally, she would sleep only a few hours during the night, and then discover herself lying wide-eyed in the claustrophobic dark, her contorted back muscles keeping her hostage in her bed with the threat of needle-sharp pains.

Now she lay blinking in the golden glow of a sun which must have risen quite a while ago. Her attic bedroom, tucked under the steepled roof of the Victorian cottage, had walls which were vertical only half-way up to the ceiling, sloping sharply the rest of the way in line with the roof. From where Isserley lay, her bedroom looked like a hexagonal cubby, lit up like a cell in an irradiated honeycomb. Through one open window, she could see cloudless blue sky; through the other, the complex architecture of oak branches laden with fresh snow. The air was still; the spiderless cobwebs hanging loose from the blistered wooden window-frames hardly stirred.

Only after a minute or two could she detect the almost subsonic hum of the farm’s activity.

She stretched, grunting in discomfort, and threw the bedclothes aside with her legs. The angle of the sunlight was such that her bed was in line for the warmest rays, so she lay exposed for a while, limbs spread in an X-shape, basking her naked skin.

The walls of her bedroom were bare, too. The floor was uncarpeted, an unvarnished lamina of ancient timber boards which would not have passed a spirit-level test. Just under one of the windows, a patch of frost glittered on the floor. Out of curiosity, Isserley reached down to the glass of water next to her bed and lifted it up to the light. The water in it was still liquid – just.

Isserley drank it, even though it crackled slightly in the pouring. After a whole night of lying still and letting nature take its course, her body had attained a simmering circulation that would persist until she’d exercised herself into diurnal metabolism.

In the meantime, she was as warm as a snow goose.

Drinking the water reminded her she had eaten nothing since yesterday’s breakfast. She really must fuel up properly today before going out on the road, if she went out on the road, that is.

After all, who said she had to go out every day of her life? She wasn’t a slave.

The cheap plastic alarm clock on the mantelpiece said it was 9:03. There was no other mechanical apparatus in the room except for the scuffed and grubby portable television wedged in the hearth. Its power cord was plugged into a long extension cable which snaked along the skirting-boards and out the door. Downstairs, somewhere, there was an electrical connection.

Isserley heaved herself out of bed and tested out what it felt like to stand up. It wasn’t too bad. She had grown lax about her exercises, and that made her more stiff and sore than she need be. She could definitely do better.

She walked over to the fireplace and switched on the television. She didn’t need her glasses to watch it. In fact, she didn’t need her glasses at all; the lenses were bits of thick window-pane, pretending to be optical. They gave her nothing but headaches and eyestrain, but she needed them for her job.

On the television, a vodsel chef was instructing an inept female how to fry slivers of kidney. The female giggled in embarrassment as the smoke began to rise. On another channel, multi-coloured furry creatures unlike any Isserley ever saw in real life cavorted and sang songs about the letters of the alphabet. On another channel, a shivering food blender was being demonstrated by hands whose nails were painted peach. On another channel, an animated pig and an animated chicken were flying through space in a rocket-powered jalopy. Clearly, Isserley had missed the news.

She switched off the television, straightened up and took up her position in the centre of the room, to do her back exercises. Doing them properly took time and effort, but she’d been lazy lately, and her body was punishing her for it. She must get back into shape. Pain such as she’d suffered the last few days was simply not necessary. Allowing herself to get unfit proved no point, unless, for some perverse reason, she actually meant to make herself miserable. To make herself regret what she had done.

She didn’t regret what she had done. No.

So, she arched her spine, swivelled her arms, stood on each leg in turn, then on tiptoe, with her arms upstretched and trembling. She held this stance for as long as she possibly could. The tips of her fingers brushed the dangling dead light bulb. Even extended to her full length like this, in a child-sized bedroom, she was well short of touching the ceiling.

Fifteen minutes later, perspiring, shivering a little, she padded over to the wardrobe and selected her clothes for the day, the same clothes as yesterday. The choice, in any case, was from among six identical low-cut tops in different colours, and two pairs of flared trousers, both green velvet. She possessed only one pair of shoes, a custom-made pair which she’d had to return to the shoemaker eight times before she could walk in them. She did not wear underwear, or a bra. Her breasts stayed up by themselves. One less problem to worry about, or two.

Isserley walked out of the back door of her cottage and sniffed the air. The sea breeze was especially spicy today; she would definitely go to the firth as soon as she’d had breakfast.

And afterwards, she must remember to wash and change her clothes, in case she came across another clever guesser like the vodsel with the mollusc in his pocket.

The fields all around her house were shrouded in snow, with patches of dark earth poking through here and there as if the world were a rich fruit cake under cream. In the western field, tiny golden sheep stood marooned in the whiteness, shoving their faces into the snow in search of buried sweetness. In the northern field, a giant mound of turnips on a raft of hay shone like frosted cherries in the sun. To the south, behind the farm steadings and silos, loomed the dense Christmas firs of Carboll Forest. To the east, beyond the farmhouses, churned the North Sea.

There were no farm vehicles anywhere to be seen, and no workers.

The fields were all rented out to various local landowners, who would bring along what was needed at ploughing time, harvesting time, lambing time and so on. In between times, the land lay silent and untouched, and the farm buildings rotted, rusted and grew moss.

In Harry Baillie’s time, several of the steadings had housed cattle through the winters, but that was in the days when there was money in it. The only cattle now were a few of Mackenzie’s bullocks in the field near Rabbit Hill. On the cliffs at the sea-bound rim of Ablach, a hundred or so blackfaced sheep grazed their cheap and salty forage. They were lucky there was a small stream flowing out to sea, as the old cast-iron water troughs were overflowing with the dark spinach of algae, or rusted nutmeg-brown.

No, Ablach’s current owner certainly wasn’t the pillar of the community Harry Baillie had been. He was some sort of Scandinavian, the natives thought, and a mad hermit besides. Isserley knew he had this reputation because, despite her policy of never giving lifts to locals, she’d had hitchers twenty miles up the A9 suddenly start talking about Ablach Farm. The odds against such a thing coming up in conversation with a stranger, even allowing for the sparse population of the Highlands, must be phenomenal, especially since Isserley was careful always to lie about where she lived.

But it must be a smaller world than she thought, because once or twice a year, a talkative hitcher would get onto the subject of incomers and how they were ruining Scotland’s traditional existence, and, sure enough, Ablach would be mentioned. Isserley would play dumb while she heard the story of how a mad Scandinavian had gobbled up Baillie’s farm and then, instead of turning it into one of these European money-spinning ventures, had just let it fall into decay, renting out the fields to the same farmers he’d outbid.

‘It just goes to show,’ one hitcher had told her. ‘Foreigners’ minds don’t work the same as ours. No offence.’

‘No offence taken,’ she’d said, trying to decide if she should dispatch this vodsel back to the place he claimed to know so much about.

‘So where are you from, then?’ he’d asked her.

She couldn’t remember now what she’d replied. Depending on how well-travelled the hitcher seemed to be, she had a number of places she might claim to be from. The former Soviet Union, Australia, Bosnia… even Scandinavia, unless the hitcher was saying nasty things about the mad bastard who’d bought Ablach Farm.

Over the years, though, it was Isserley’s impression that the man she knew as Esswis was slowly winning the grudging respect of the community. To the other farmers he was known as Mr Esswis, and it was accepted that he would conduct all his affairs from inside ‘the Big House’, a cottage twice the size of Isserley’s in the centre of the farm. Unlike her cottage, it had electric power in all its rooms, heating, furniture, carpets, curtains, appliances, bric-a-brac. Isserley didn’t know what Esswis did with these things, but they probably impressed visitors – few though these were.

Isserley didn’t actually know Esswis very well at all, despite the fact that he was the only person in the world who’d been through what she had been through. In theory, then, they had lots to talk about, but in practice they avoided each other.

Shared suffering, she’d found, was no guarantee of intimacy.

The fact that she was a woman and he was a man had nothing to do with it; Esswis rarely socialized with the other men either. He just stayed holed up in his big house, waiting to be useful.

He was, to be honest, virtually a prisoner in there. It was absolutely crucial that he be available twenty-four hours a day in the event of any emergency which might collide Ablach Farm with the outside world. Last year, for example, a carelessly driven pesticide sprayer had killed a stray sheep, not with pesticide or even under the wheels, but in a freak accident, braining the animal with the tip of one of its winglike booms. Mr Esswis had promptly negotiated an arrangement between himself, the owner of the sprayer and the owner of the sheep, nonplussing the other two farmers by accepting full blame for the straying of the animal, as long as unpleasantness and paperwork could be avoided.

That was the sort of thing that earned him his measure of respect in the area, foreign incomer though he was. He would never show his face at a ploughing championship or a ceilidh, everyone knew that now, but maybe it wasn’t because he couldn’t be bothered; there were sympathetic rumours of arthritis, a wooden leg, cancer. He also understood better than most wealthy incomers that times were tough for local farmers, and regularly asked for straw or surplus produce in lieu of rent. Pillar of the community Harry Baillie may have been, but he was a bugger when it came to contracts. With Esswis, a word muttered over the telephone was as good as his signature. And as for the way he tried to discourage tourists from trespassing, confronting them with barbed wire and threats, well, more strength to his arm. The Highlands were not a public park.

Isserley walked to the main path and, sighing with relief at being rid of her glasses for a while, peered across at Esswis’s house. The lights were on in all the rooms. The windows were all shut and opaque with condensation. Esswis could be anywhere in there.

The sensation of fresh snow crunching underfoot was deeply satisfying to Isserley. Just the idea of all that water vapour solidifying by the cloudful and fluttering to earth was miraculous. She couldn’t quite believe it, even after all these years. It was a phenomenon of stupendous and unjustifiably useless extravagance. Yet here it lay, soft and powdery, edibly pure. Isserley scooped a handful off the ground and ate some. It was delicious.

She walked to the largest of the steadings, the one that was in the best, or least shabby, condition. A dilapidated tile roof had been replaced by sheet metal. Whenever stones crumbled out of the walls, the cavities were promptly filled in with cement. The total effect was less like a house and more like a giant box, but these aesthetic sacrifices were necessary. This building must be protected from the elements and from the prying eyes of outsiders. It was the entrance to a much larger secret just below the ground.

Isserley stood in front of the aluminium door and pressed the buzzer underneath the metal signs saying DANGEROUS CHEMICALS and AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Yet another warning sign hung on the door itself, a stylized picture of a skull and two crossed bones.

The intercom crackled abstractly, and she leaned close to it, her lips almost brushing the grille.

‘Isserley,’ she whispered.

The door rolled open and she stepped inside.

Impatient to get out to the firth, Isserley didn’t linger over breakfast. She was back at her cottage within twenty minutes, comfortably full of stodge and carrying a small plastic doggie bag of the German hitcher’s personal effects.

The men down below had seemed pleased to see her, and had expressed concern about her having missed dinner the previous evening.

‘It was a real treat,’ Ensel told her, in a thick provincial dialect of her own language. ‘Shanks of voddissin in serslida sauce. With fresh wild berries for dessert.’

‘Well, never mind,’ Isserley had said, spreading slice after slice of bread with mussanta paste. She never knew what to say to these men, these labourers and process workers she would certainly never even have met in the course of ordinary life back home. Of course it didn’t help that they looked so different from her, and stared at her breasts and her chiselled face whenever they thought she couldn’t see.

They were busy today, and had left her to her meal. But not before passing on an important bit of news: Amlis Vess was coming. Amlis Vess! Coming to Ablach Farm! Tomorrow! He’d sent a message, he was already on his way, they were not to go to any special bother, he wanted to see everything just as it was. Who would have thought it?

Isserley had murmured something noncommittal, and the men hurried off to make more preparations for the big event. Excitement was rare in their lives now that Ablach Farm was well established and they had time on their hands. No doubt this visit from the boss’s son was an almighty thrill compared to spending yet another afternoon gambling with bits of straw or whatever men of their sort did. Left alone in the dining hall, Isserley had served herself a bowl of gushu, but it tasted strangely sour. It was then that she’d noticed that the whole subterranean complex, as well as smelling faintly of male sweat and crap food as always, smelled pungently of cleaning agents and paint. It made her even more determined to get back up into the fresh air as soon as possible.

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.

Isserley walked along the path the generations of sheep-flocks had made, up the tiers of the hill. In her mind, she was already behind the wheel.

When she got back to the cottage, the bonfire had died. There was a halo melted around it, a dark circle of ash and scorched grass in the snow. On the pyre itself, some of the rucksack still lay unconsumed. She pulled the sooty metal support struts out of the ashes and cast them aside, for disposal later. Tomorrow, perhaps, if she was ready for the sea again by then.

She let herself into the house and walked straight to the bathroom.

It, like all the rooms in the house, had a bare and uninhabited appearance, tainted by mildew and the chaff of insects. Dim light leaked in through a tiny window of filthy frosted glass. A jagged shard of mirror slumped crookedly in the alcove behind the sink, reflecting nothing but peeling paintwork. The bathtub was clean but a little rusty, as was the sink. The yawning interior of the lidless toilet bowl, by contrast, was the colour and texture of bark; it had not been used for at least as long as Isserley had lived here.

Pausing only to remove her shoes, Isserley stepped into the ochre-streaked bathtub. Screwed into the wall above her head, there was a shower nozzle which she instructed by means of a Bakelite dial to spurt pressurized water down over her. Even as the torrent sputtered out, she was taking off her clothes and letting them fall into the tub around her feet.

On the rust-mottled ledge of the bath, three different bottles of shampoo stood ready. Together, they had cost exactly five pounds at the Arabella Service Station. Isserley picked up her favourite and squirted the pale green syrup over her hair. Then she squirted more of the stuff over her naked body and, lavishly, down into the sodden heap of clothing at her feet. With one foot she pushed the squelching pile over the plughole to allow the water level in the tub to rise.

She washed her hair carefully, rinsing it over and over. Her hair had always been her best feature, back home. A member of the Elite had once told her that with hair like hers it was out of the question she could possibly be destined for the New Estates: a cheap and fatuous compliment, in retrospect, but thrillingly encouraging at the time. She’d felt as if her passage into a bright future was a matter of physical inevitability, a lush and glossy birthright everyone could see at a glance, and a lucky few could stroke admiringly.

So little of it was left now that she couldn’t bear to cherish it anymore. Most of it would never grow back again, the rest was just a nuisance.

She stroked the skin of her shoulders and arms, checking if she needed to shave again just yet. Her palms, slippery with lather, detected the soft stubble, but she decided she could get away with leaving it for one more day. Lots of females had a bit of hair on them, she’d discovered. Real life wasn’t at all like the smooth images celebrated by magazines and television. Anyway, nobody would see it.

She lathered up her breasts and rinsed them, with distaste. The only good thing about them was that they prevented her seeing what had been done to her down below.

Redirecting the shower nozzle, she turned her attention to the clothes, which now swirled in a shallow pool of sudsy grey water. She trampled them, rinsed them, trampled them some more, then wrung them out in her powerful claws. They would dry out, eventually, in a square of sunlight shining through her bedroom window, or, if that failed, on the back seat of her car.

It was after midday when Isserley finally drove out of the farm. The sun which had been so golden in the morning was barely visible now; the sky had turned slate-grey and hung swollen with undischarged snow. The likelihood of finding any hitch-hikers on the roads, let alone suitable ones, was slim. Yet she was in the mood to do some work, or at least get away from all the fuss she knew was still going on below ground.

On her way past the main steading, she noticed a most unusual sight: Esswis perched on a large wooden stepladder, a tin in one hand and a brush in the other, painting the stone walls white.

Isserley slowed the car to a stop near the foot of the ladder and looked up at Esswis. She was already wearing her glasses and so he wasn’t all that clear, distorted by the glare of the sun. It occurred to her to take her glasses off for a moment, but that seemed impolite, given that Esswis was wearing his.

‘Ahl,’ she said, squinting up, not knowing if she’d done the right thing in stopping.

‘Ahl,’ he replied, as taciturn as the farmer he was supposed to be. Perhaps he was wary of their native language being spoken out in the open, even though there was no-one else around to hear it. Paint dribbled off the end of the brush he was holding, but, apart from frowning, he did nothing about it, as if Isserley’s greeting were some sort of mishap which must be stoically endured. He was wearing overalls and a cap, and paint-spattered green Wellingtons whose secret interiors had taken almost as long to design as Isserley’s shoes.

All things considered, he’d got off more lightly than she had, Isserley felt. He had no breasts, for a start, and more hair on his face.

She waved at the task he was busy with. Only a fraction of the building had been whitened.

‘Is this in honour of Amlis Vess?’ she asked superfluously.

Esswis grunted.

‘Quite a fuss,’ ventured Isserley. ‘Not your idea, surely?’

Esswis scowled and looked down at her in disgust.

‘Fuck Amlis Vess,’ he pronounced, very distinctly, in English, and then turned to continue painting.

Isserley wound up her window and drove on. One by one, feathery snowflakes started spiralling down from the sky.