Under the Skin

4

IT WAS AS SHE was crossing a concrete tightrope, high up in the air, that Isserley admitted to herself that she absolutely did not want to meet Amlis Vess.

She was driving towards the midpoint of the Kessock Bridge, gripping the steering wheel in anticipation of fierce side-wands trying to sweep her little red car into space. She was acutely conscious of the weight of the cast-iron undercarriage beneath her, the purchase of the tyres on the bitumen – paradoxical reminders of solidity. The car might have been protesting how heavy and immovable it was, in its fear of being moved.

You-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou! jeered the atmosphere.

At intervals along the bridge were trembling metal signs depicting a stylized net inflated by the thrust of a gale. This, like all traffic symbols, had been a meaningless hieroglyphic to Isserley when she’d first studied it, long ago. Now it appealed directly to her second nature, and made her seize hold of the wheel as if it were an animal desperate to break free. Her hands were locked tight; she imagined she could see a heartbeat pulsing between the knuckles.

And yet, when she muttered under her breath that she would not let herself be pushed off course, no, not by anything, it wasn’t the side-winds she was thinking of, but Amlis Vess. He was blowing in from somewhere much more dangerous than the North Sea, and she could not predict the effect he’d have. Whatever it turned out to be, she certainly wouldn’t be able to negate it just by keeping a tight grip on her car’s steering wheel.

She was past the mid-point now, minutes away from the Inverness end. Burring slowly forwards in the outer lane, she flinched every time a faster vehicle roared past her; the wind pressure would drop away suddenly, then swing back with a vengeance. To her left, the air was swirling with seagulls, a chaos of white birds endlessly falling towards the water, then hovering just above the firth, sinking gradually, as if caught in sediment. Isserley returned her attention to the distant outskirts of Inverness, and tried to force herself to tread harder on the accelerator. Judging by her speedometer, she wasn’t succeeding. You-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou! cried the wind all the rest of the way.

Cruising safely off the bridge at the far end, she hugged the slow lane, tried her best to breathe deeply and unclench her hands. The pressure had died down almost at once; she could drive normally, function normally. She was on terra firma now, in control, blending in perfectly, and doing a job only she could do. Nothing Amlis Vess thought or said could change that: nothing. She was indispensable.

The word troubled her, though. Indispensable. It was a word people tended to resort to when dispensability was in the air.

She tried to imagine herself being dispensed with; tried to imagine it honestly and unflinchingly. Perhaps some other person would be prepared to make the same sacrifices she and Esswis had made, and take her place. She and Esswis had been desperate, in their different ways; might not other people be equally desperate? It was hard to imagine. No-one could be as desperate as she had been. And then, anyone new to the job would be inexperienced, untested. With mind-boggling amounts of money at stake, would Vess Incorporated take such a risk?

Probably not. But it was difficult for Isserley to draw much comfort from this, because the thought of being genuinely indispensable was troubling too.

It meant that Vess Incorporated would never let her go.

It meant that she would have to do this job forever. It meant that a day would never come when she could enjoy the world without worrying about the creatures crawling on its surface.

All of which, Isserley reminded herself irritably, should have nothing whatsoever to do with Amlis Vess. How could it? Whatever the reason for young Amlis’s visit, it must be a purely personal one, unconnected to Vess Incorporated. Just hearing the name Amlis Vess was no reason to get all excited.

OK, granted, Amlis was the big man’s son, but there was no sign of him inheriting the big man’s empire. Amlis didn’t even have a job at Vess Incorporated – he’d never had a job of any kind – and he couldn’t possibly have any power to make decisions on the Corporation’s behalf. In fact, to the best of Isserley’s knowledge, Amlis actually felt disdain for the world of business and was a big failure in his father’s eyes. He was trouble, but not for Isserley. There was nothing to fear from him dropping in, however inexplicably, on Ablach Farm.

So why did she want to avoid him so badly?

She had nothing against the boy himself (or the man? – how old would he be by now?); he hadn’t asked to be the sole heir of the world’s biggest corporation. He’d done nothing to offend her personally, and in the past she’d followed his exploits with amusement. He was always in the news, for the usual rich-young-pretender reasons. One time, he shaved all his hair off, as an initiation rite into a bizarre religious sect which he joined in a blitz of publicity and left, weeks later, with no comment to the press. Another time, he and his father were reported to be bitterly estranged over Amlis’s support of extremists in the Middle East. Another time, he made a public statement that icpathua, when used in small enough doses, was a harmless euphoric that should not be against the law. Countless times, some girl or other made a fuss, claiming to be pregnant with his baby.

All in all, he was just another typical rich kid with a colossal fortune hanging over his head.

Isserley’s second nature, alert while she’d been busy brooding, fetched her back into the driver’s seat to notice something important: a hitch-hiker standing in the distance, opposite the first of the many garish roadside diners between Inverness and the South. She listened to her own breathing, assessing whether she’d calmed down enough to take the challenge on. She felt she had.

At closer quarters, though, the figure at the roadside proved to be a female, harried-looking, grey-haired, shabbily dressed. Isserley drove straight past, ignoring the appeal to shared gender in the eyes. A single instant was enough to communicate injury and dejection, then the figure was a dwindling fleck in the rear-view mirror.

Isserley was all geared up now, grateful to have had her mind on something other than Amlis Vess. Fortuitously, another hitcher was standing only a couple of miles further on. This one was a male, and fairly impressive on first sight, but unfortunately positioned in a spot where only the most foolhardy motorist would consider stopping. Isserley flashed her headlights, hoping to let him know that she might have picked him up had he not made it so dangerous for her to do so. She doubted that a simple flash of lights could communicate this; more likely he would simply assume she was beaming out ill-will, a jab of mockery.

All was not necessarily lost, though – perhaps she would see him again later on the way back, by which time he might have walked to a safer spot. Over the years, Isserley had learned that life often offered a second chance: she had even picked up hitchers who, many hours and miles before, she’d observed climbing gratefully into someone else’s car.

So, optimistic, Isserley drove on.

She drove all day, backwards and forwards between Inverness and Dunkeld, over and over. The sun set. The snow, which had retreated during the morning, returned. One of the windscreen wipers developed an annoying squeal. Fuel had to be bought. Through it all, nobody suitable reached out to her.

By six o’clock, she had just about decided why she was dreading meeting Amlis Vess so much.

It had nothing to do with his status really; she was an invaluable part of the business, he a thorn in its side, so he probably had more to fear from Vess Incorporated than she did. No, the main reason why she was dreading him was simpler than that.

It was because Amlis Vess was from home.

When he set eyes on her, he would see her the way any normal person from home would see her, and he would be shocked, and she would helplessly have to watch him being shocked. She knew from experience what this felt like; would do anything to avoid feeling it again. The men she worked with on the farm had been shocked too, at first, but they were used to her now, more or less; they could go about their business without gawping (though if there was a lull in activities she always felt their eyes on her). No wonder she tended to keep to her cottage – and why Esswis did too, she guessed. Being a freak was so wearying.

Amlis Vess, never having seen her before, would recoil. He’d be expecting to see a human being, and he would see a hideous animal instead. It was that moment of… of the sickening opposite of recognition that she just couldn’t cope with.

She decided to return to the farm immediately, lock herself in her cottage, and wait until Amlis Vess had come and gone.

In the mountainous desolation of Aviemore she caught a hitcher in her headlights. A little gargoyle gesturing in a flare of illumination, registering almost as an after-image on the retina; a little gargoyle foolishly attached to a spot where cars would be whizzing by him at maximum speed. Isserley’s maximum speed being about fifty, however, she had time to notice him. He seemed awfully keen to be picked up.

Passing him, Isserley thought seriously about whether she wanted a hitcher just now. She waited for clues from the universe.

The snow had died down again, the windscreen wipers lay still, the motor was purring nicely, she was perhaps in slight danger of dozing off. Isserley slowed, cruised to a stop in a bus bay, and let the car idle, headlights dimmed. The Monadhliath Mountains loomed on one side of her, the Cairngorms on the other. She was alone with them. She closed her eyes, slid her fingertips under the rims of her glasses and rubbed her big satiny eyelids. A massive tanker roared into view, flooding the cabin of Isserley’s car with light. She waited until it had gone, then revved her engine and flicked on the indicator.

On the second approach, passing by on the other side of the road, she noted that the hitcher was small and barrel-chested, with lots of exposed flesh so darkly tanned it resisted being bleached by the full beam of headlights. This time she observed that he was standing not far from a car which was parked, or possibly stuck, in a ditch off the road. It was a shabby blue Nissan estate, scratched and battered all over but not in such a conspicuously fresh way as to suggest an accident. Both hitcher and car seemed upright and in one piece, although the one was making exaggerated gestures to draw attention to the other.

Isserley drove on for a couple of miles, reluctant to involve herself in anything that might already be of interest to the police or a vehicle rescue service. Eventually, however, she reasoned that if a stranded motorist had any expectation of being found by such authorities, he surely wouldn’t be trying to hitch. She turned around then, and drove back.

The final approach revealed the hitcher to be an odd creature, even by Scottish standards. Though not much taller than Isserley, with a wizened, wispy-haired little head and spindly legs, he had improbably massive arms, shoulders and torso, as if these had been transplanted onto him from a much beefier creature. He was wearing a frayed and faded flannelette shirt, sleeves rolled up, and seemed impervious to the cold, thumbing the bitter air with almost clownish enthusiasm, making elaborate gestures towards his decrepit Nissan. Isserley wondered momentarily whether she had seen him somewhere before, then realized she was confusing him with certain cartoon characters on early-morning television. His kind weren’t the title characters, though; they were the ones who got squashed flat by giant mallets or burnt to a crisp by exploding cigars.

She decided to stop for him. He had more muscle mass packed in between his neck and hips, after all, than many vodsels twice his size had on their entire bodies.

Seeing her slow down and veer towards him, he nodded idiotically and held two stiff-thumbed fists aloft in an expression of triumph, as if awarding her two points for her decision. Above the crunch of gravel, Isserley thought she could hear a throaty whoop.

She parked as close as she could to the stranger’s own car without snaring her wheels in the ditch, and trusted that her flashing rear lights would warn any motorists coming up behind her. This really was a very awkward spot, and she was curious to find out if the hitcher would acknowledge it. That would already tell her something worth knowing about him.

She wound down the passenger window as soon as she’d pulled on the handbrake, and the hitcher immediately poked his tiny head into the car. He was smiling broadly, a mouthful of crooked brown-edged teeth inside two leathery crescents of lip. His brown face was bristly, wrinkled and scarred, with a mottled snout of a nose and two spectacularly bloodshot chimpanzee eyes.

‘She’s gonna skelp my bot, I tell ya,’ he leered, breathing alcohol into the car.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘My girlfriend. She’s gonna skelp my bot,’ he repeated, his grin deepening to a grimace. ‘I shoulda been at her place by teatime. That’s always when I’m supposed to be there. And it never happens, can you believe it, eh?’ He slumped a little in the window-frame and his eyes closed slowly, as if the power that was keeping his eyelids up had abruptly run out. With effort he roused himself, and continued, ‘Every week this same thing.’

‘What same thing?’ asked Isserley, trying not to pull a face at the beer fumes.

He winked, laboriously. ‘She’s got a temper.’ Eyes falling shut again, he sniggered, like a cartoon tomcat in the shadow of a falling bomb.

Isserley found him actually quite good-looking compared to other vodsels, but his mannerisms were distinctly odd and made her wonder if he was mentally defective. Would an imbecile be given a licence to drive? Why was he just hanging in her window-frame, simpering, when both their cars were liable to get annihilated by a passing lorry? Nervously she glanced in her rear-view mirror to confirm no speeding vehicles were coming up behind.

‘What happened to your car?’ she asked, hoping to shift his attention to the heart of the matter.

‘It won’t go no more,’ he explained dolefully, his eyes crusty slits. ‘No more. That’s the truth. No use arguin’, eh? Eh?’

He grinned fiercely, as if hoping to charm her into dropping some opposing point of view.

‘Engine trouble?’ prompted Isserley.

‘Nah. I ran out of petrol, like,’ he said, snorting with embarrassment. ‘On account of my girlfriend, y’understand. Every minute counts, with her. But I shoulda put in more petrol, seemin’ly.’

He squinted into Isserley’s giant eyes, and she could tell he saw nothing more exotic there than the imagined reproach of a fellow motorist.

‘The fuel gauge is a piece a’shite, you see,’ he elaborated, stepping back from Isserley’s car to display his own. ‘Says empty when it’s near full. Says full when it’s near empty. Can’t listen to a word it tells ya. Ya just have to rely on your memory, y’understand?’ He yanked the door of his car open, as if intending to give Isserley a guided tour of its frailties. The light went on in the cabin – a pale and flickering light, attesting to the vehicle’s dodgy reputation. Beer cans and crisps packets littered the passenger seats.

‘I been up since five this morning,’ the snout-nosed hitcher declared, banging his car’s door shut. ‘Worked ten days straight. Four – five hours sleep a night. Wicked. Wicked. No use complainin’, though, eh? Eh?’

‘Well… can I give you a lift, perhaps?’ suggested Isserley, waving her thin arm in the empty space over her passenger seat, to capture and hold his attention.

‘It’s a can of petrol I’m needin’,’ he said, lurching into the window-frame of Isserley’s car again.

‘I haven’t got any,’ said Isserley, ‘But get into the car anyway. I’ll drive you to a garage, or maybe further. Where were you heading?’

‘To my girlfriend’s place,’ he leered, winching his eyelids up off his eyeballs again. ‘She’s got a temper. She’ll skelp my bot.’

‘Yes, but where is that exactly?’

‘Edderton,’ he said.

‘Get in, then,’ she urged. Edderton was only five miles out of Tain, thirteen miles or so from Ablach Farm. How could she lose? If she had to give him up, she could soothe her disappointment by retreating instantly to the farm; if she took him, so much the better. Either way she’d be safe in her cottage by the time Amlis Vess arrived, and might even sleep through all the brouhaha – as long as nobody came knocking on her door.

Hitcher safely strapped in, Isserley pulled away from the gutter and accelerated up the A9 towards home. She regretted that this stretch of the road was unlit and that she couldn’t legally turn on the cabin light; she would have liked this guy to have the opportunity to examine her properly. She sensed he was dim-witted, and likely just now to be fixated on solving his immediate problems; he might well need extra enticement to talk about himself. The darkness of the road, however, made her too nervous to drive with only her right hand on the steering wheel; he would just have to strain his eyes a bit, that’s all, if he wanted to see her breasts. Admittedly, his eyes looked pretty strained already. She faced front, drove carefully, and left him to it.

She would throw him out on his arse, for sure, the hitcher was thinking, but maybe she’d let him sleep a bitty first.

Ha! No chance! She’d make him look at an oven dish full of dried-out supper, and say it couldn’t be et now even though he’d be desperate to get stuck into it, but she wouldn’t let him of course. That’s what he drove like a maniac up the A9 for, every week, week after week. His girl. His Catriona. He could lift her up and toss her through the window like a vase if he wanted to, and she was the one who pushed him around. What was that all about, eh? Eh?

This girl who’d picked him up, now. She'd probably be all right. As a girlfriend, like. She’d let him sleep when he was dying for it, he could tell. She wouldn’t poke him just when he was drifting off and say, ‘You’re not falling asleep are you?’ Kind eyes, she had. Bloody big knockers, too. Pity she didn’t have any big containers of petrol tucked away somewhere. Still, he couldn’t complain, could he? No use complaining. Face the future with a smile, as the old man always used to say. Mind you, the old man never met Catriona.

Where was this girl going to drive him? Would she be willing to drive him back to his car again if he could get some petrol? He hated to leave his car in a ditch like that. A thief could steal it. Thief’d need petrol, though. But there were probably car thieves driving all around the countryside, with big petrol containers in the boot, just looking for a car like his. How low could some people go, eh? Dog eat dog, that’s what it all boiled down to.

Catriona would murder him if he turned up any later than he already was. That wasn’t so bad in itself, but she wouldn’t let him sleep, this was the thing. If he could get some petrol into his car he could sleep in that, and maybe visit Catriona in the morning. Or sleep in the car all weekend even, sit around in Little Chefs during the day and drive back down to work on Monday morning. Fucking great, eh? Eh?

This girl here wouldn’t mind if he rested his head back on the seat for just a few minutes, would she? He wasn’t much of a talker anyway. ‘Thick as two planks,’ Catriona always said.

But how thick exactly was a plank, eh? It just depended on the plank, didn’t it, eh?

Isserley coughed, to summon him back to consciousness. Coughing didn’t come easily to her, but she tried every so often, just to see if she could pull it off convincingly.

‘Eh? Eh?’ he yapped, his bloodshot eyes and snot-shiny snout leaping out of the dimness like startled wildlife.

‘What do you work at?’ said Isserley. She’d been quiet for a minute, assuming the hitcher was ogling her, but a strangled snort from his direction had let her know he was falling asleep.

‘Woodcutting,’ he said. ‘Timber. Eighteen years in the business, eighteen years behind a chainsaw. Still got two arms and two legs! Heh! Heh! Heh! Not bad, eh? Eh?’

He held his fingers up above the dashboard and wiggled them, presumably to demonstrate that he had all ten.

‘That’s a lot of experience,’ complimented Isserley. ‘You must be well known to all the timber companies.’

‘Yeah.’ He nodded emphatically, his chin almost bouncing off his barrel chest each time. ‘They run when they see me coming. Heh! Heh! Heh! Ya got to keep smiling, eh?’

‘You mean, they’re not satisfied with your work?’

‘They say I’m not a good time-keeper,’ he slurred. ‘I keep the trees waiting too long, y’understand? Late, late, late, that’s me. La-a-a-a-ate…’ His head was slumping, the attenuated vowel describing a slow lapse into oblivion.

‘That’s very unfair,’ Isserley remarked loudly. ‘It’s how well you do your job that matters, not the hours you keep, surely.’

‘Kind words, kind words,’ simpered the woodcutter, staring ever deeper into his lap, his tufty hair slowly rearranging itself on his compact skull.

‘So,’ exclaimed Isserley, ‘you live in Edderton, do you?’

Again he snorted to the surface.

‘Eh? Edderton? My girlfriend lives there. She’s gonna skelp my bot.’

‘So where do you live?’

‘Sleep in the car through the week, or bed and breakfast. Work ten days straight, thirteen sometimes. Start five in the morning summertime, seven in winter. Or I’m suppo-o-o-o-sed to…’

She was just about to rouse him from his slump when he roused himself, shifted around in his seat and actually laid his cheek against the headrest, pillow-style. He winked again, and, with a weary obsequious smile, mumbled across to her,

‘Five minutes. Just five minutes.’

Amused, Isserley drove in silence while he slept.

She was mildly surprised when, more or less exactly five minutes later, he jerked awake and stared at her dazedly. While she was thinking of something to say to him, however, he relaxed again, and laid his cheek back against the headrest.

‘’Nother five minutes,’ he pouted placatingly. ‘Five minutes.’

And once more he was gone.

Isserley drove on, this time keeping one eye on the digital clock on the dashboard. Sure enough, some three hundred seconds later, the woodcutter jerked awake again.

‘Five minutes,’ he groaned, turning his other cheek to the headrest.

This went on for twenty minutes. Isserley was in no hurry at first, but then a road sign alerted her to the fact that they would soon be driving past a services turn-off, and she felt she’d better get down to business.

‘This girlfriend of yours,’ she said, the next time he woke. ‘She doesn’t understand you, is that right?’

‘She’s got a temper,’ he admitted, as if he’d been spurred to articulate this for the first time ever. ‘She’ll skelp my bot.’

‘Have you ever thought of leaving her?’

He grinned so broadly it was like an incision slicing his head in two.

‘A good girl is hard to find,’ he chided her, barely moving his lips.

‘Still, if she doesn’t care for you…’ persisted Isserley. ‘For example, would she be worried about you if you didn’t turn up tonight? Would she try to find you?’

He sighed, a long wheezy exhalation of infinite weariness.

‘My money’s good enough for her,’ he said. ‘And, plus, I got cancer in the lungs. Lung cancer, in other words. Can’t feel it, but the doctors say it’s there. I might not have long, y’understand? No use giving up a bird in the hand, y’understand? Eh?’

‘Mmm,’ replied Isserley vaguely. ‘I see what you mean.’

Another sign reminding motorists that services were not far ahead flashed by, but the woodcutter was nuzzling into the seat again, mumbling, ‘Five minutes. Just another five minutes.’

And again, he was gone, his boozy breath snortling gently.

Isserley glanced at him. He sat slumped, his head lolling against the headrest, his rubbery mouth open, his red-lidded eyes closed. He might as well have been pricked by the icpathua needles already.

Isserley thought about him as she drove through the soundproof night, weighing up his pros and cons.

On the pro side, the woodcutter’s drunkenness and sleepless excesses were no doubt well understood by all who knew him; nothing would surprise them less than if he failed to turn up wherever he was supposed to be. The car would be found, full of empty alcohol containers, on a windswept ribbon of road through two mountain ranges; there would be no doubt that the driver had stumbled away, drunk, into a frozen expanse of bog and precipice. Police would dutifully search for the body, but be resigned from the outset that it might never be found.

On the con side, the woodcutter was not a healthy specimen: his lungs, by his own admission, were full of cancer. Isserley tried to visualize this; imagined someone slicing him open and being squirted in the face by a stream of malodorous black muck made of burnt cigarette tar and fermented phlegm. However, she suspected this was a lurid fantasy based on her own distaste at the thought of inhaling burning punk into her lungs. It probably bore no relation to what cancer really was.

She frowned, straining to recall her studies. She knew cancer had something to do with runaway cell reproduction… mutant growth. Did that mean that this vodsel had huge abnormal lungs crammed into his chest? She didn’t want to cause any problems for the men back at the farm.

On the other hand, who cared if the lungs were too big? They could surely be discarded whatever size they were.

On the other hand, she felt squeamish about bringing a vodsel onto the farm which she knew to be diseased. Not that anyone had ever told her in so many words that it was wrong, but… well, she had her own internal moral sense.

The woodcutter was murmuring in his sleep, a slack-lipped crooning sound like ‘moosh’n, moosh’n, moosh’n’, as if he were trying to placate an animal.

Isserley checked the clock on the dashboard. More than five minutes had elapsed; quite a bit more. She took a deep breath, settled back in her seat, and drove.

An hour or so later, she had bypassed Tain and was approaching the Dornoch Bridge roundabout. It struck her that the weather conditions were so different from what she had experienced earlier that day on the Kessock Bridge that they could have been on a different planet. Lit up against the pitch-black environs by strips of neon on long stalks, the roundabout glowed eerily in the windless, trafficless stillness. Isserley drove onto its steeply ascending spiral, glancing at the woodcutter to see if the blaze of light would wake him. He didn’t stir.

Pootling gently along, high up off the ground, Isserley ‘s car described an arc on the surreal concrete labyrinth. So monstrously ugly was this structure that it could have been mistaken for something from inside the New Estates, were it not for the open sky above. Isserley veered to the left to avoid crossing Dornoch Firth, and started a steep descent into leafy gloom. Her headlights, on full beam, picked out the flank of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Kingdom Hall nestled below, then tunnelled into Tarlogie forest.

Remarkably, it was now that the woodcutter squirmed in his sleep; having failed to react to the merciless lights of the roundabout, he seemed to sense, despite the darkness, the forest pressing in on the narrow road.

‘Moosh’n, moosh’n, moosh’n,’ he crooned wearily.

Isserley leaned forward as she drove, peering into the almost subterranean blackness. She felt fine. The forest’s underground effect was an illusion, after all, and so it could not exert the nauseous claustrophobic power of the New Estates. She knew the barrier keeping out the light overhead was nothing more than a feathery canopy of twigs, beyond which lay a comforting eternity of sky.

Minutes later, the car emerged from the forest into the pastured surrounds of Edderton. The dismal caravan sales-yard welcomed her to this minuscule village. Street lights illuminated the defunct post office and the thatched bus shelter. There was no sign of life.

Isserley flipped the toggle for the indicator, even though there was no vehicle to see it, and brought the car to a stop in a spot where the light was brightest.

She nudged the woodcutter gently with her strong fingers.

‘You’re here,’ she said.

He jerked violently awake, his eyes wild as if he was in immediate danger of being brained with a blunt instrument.

‘Wha-wha-where?’ he waffled.

‘Edderton,’ she said. ‘Where you wanted to be.’

He blinked several times, struggling to believe her, then squinted through the windscreen and the passenger window.

‘Zaddafact?’ he marvelled, orienting himself in the oasis of familiar aridity outside. Clearly, he was having to concede that nowhere else could look quite like this.

‘Gee, this is… I dunno…’ he wheezed, grinning with embarrassment and anxiety and self-satisfaction. ‘I must of fell asleep, eh?’

‘I guess you must have,’ said Isserley.

The woodcutter blinked again, then tensed up, peering nervously through the windscreen at the deserted street.

‘I hope my girlfriend’s not out,’ he grimaced. ‘I hope she don’t see you.’ He looked at Isserley, his brow wrinkling as he considered the possibility that this might offend her. ‘What I mean to say is,’ he added, even as he was fumbling to unclasp his seatbelt, ‘she’s got a temper. She’s what-would-you-say… jealous. Aye: jealous.’

Already out of the car, he hesitated to slam the door before he had found the right words to leave her with.

‘And you’re’ – he drew a deep, rasping breath – ‘beautiful,’ he beamed.

Isserley smiled back, bone-weary all of a sudden.

‘Bye for now,’ she said.

Isserley sat in her car for a long time, engine off, in the pool of light near the thatched bus stop in Edderton village. Whatever was needed to enable her to leave, she lacked it just now.

While waiting for whatever it was to be granted her, she rested her arms on the steering wheel, and her chin on her arms. She didn’t have much of a chin, and what little she did have was the result of much suffering and surgical ingenuity. Being able to rest it on her arms was a small triumph, or maybe a humiliation, she could never decide which.

Eventually, she removed her glasses. A stupid risk to take, even in this somnolent village, but the sensation of tears collecting inside the plastic rims and leaking through onto her cheeks was unbearable in the end. She wept and wept, keening softly in her own language, watching the street carefully in case any vodsels strayed out. Nothing happened, and time stubbornly refused to pass.

She looked up into the rear-view mirror, adjusting the angle of her head until what she saw reflected was just her moss-green eyes and the fringe of her hair. This little sliver of face, poorly illumined, was the only bit she could look at nowadays without self-loathing, the only bit which had been left alone. This little sliver was a window into her sanity. She had sat in her car like this many times over the years, staring through that window.

A pair of headlights glimmered on the horizon, and Isserley put her glasses back on. By the time the vehicle arrived in Edderton, quite some time later, she had pulled herself together.

The vehicle was a plum-coloured Mercedes with tinted windows, and it winked its lights at Isserley as it passed through the village. It was a friendly gesture, nothing to do with warning or the codes of traffic. Just one vehicle saluting another of a vaguely similar shape and colour, in ignorance of the contents inside.

Isserley started her own car and turned it round, following her unknown well-wisher out of Edderton and into the forest.

All the way back to Ablach, she thought about Amlis Vess and what he might think when he learned she had come back empty-handed. Would he assume that the reason why she was hidden away in her cottage was embarrassment at her lack of success? Well, let him. Perhaps her failure, if that’s how he chose to see it, would make clear to him that her job was not an easy one. Pampered dilettante that he was, he probably imagined it was like picking wildflowers from the side of the road, or… or whelks from the sea-shore, if he had the faintest notion what whelks were, or what a sea-shore looked like. Esswis was right: fuck him!

Maybe she should have taken the woodcutter after all. How massive his arms had been! – such massive chumps, bigger than any she’d ever encountered. He would have been good for something, surely. Ah, but the cancer… She really would have to find out whether cancer made any difference, for future reference. It was no use asking the men on the farm, though. They were thick; typical Estates types.

Ablach Farm was snowy pale and as quiet as ever when she drove up its overgrown private road. There were actually two roads leading into the farm, one nominally for heavy machinery, but both were cracked and bumpy and wild with weeds, and Isserley used either depending on her mood. Tonight she turned into the one supposedly for cars, though no cars except hers ever drove on it. Already at the mouth of Ablach, a cluster of signs warned of death, poison, and the full penalty of law. Just passing these signs, Isserley knew, triggered alarms in the farm buildings a quarter of a mile ahead.

She liked this road, especially one gorse-infested stretch of it which she called Rabbit Hill, where colonies of rabbits lived and could be depended on to hop across at any time of day or night. Isserley always drove very slowly here, taking great care not to run over these winsome little creatures.

Through the camouflage of trees at the top of the road she glimpsed the lights of Esswis’s farmhouse, remembered their awkward conversation that morning. Hazily though she knew him, she could well imagine his back would be torturing him by now, and she felt pity, contempt (he could have said no, couldn’t he?), and a queasy pang of kinship.

She drove past the stable, illuminating its blistered door in a flash of orange and black. There were no horses in there, only a pet project of Ensel’s.

‘It’ll work, I know it will,’ he’d told her, just days before abandoning it and letting Esswis tow it away. She’d shown no interest, of course. Men of his sort could bore you to death if you encouraged them.

The main steading, when she pulled up to it, was ridiculously white, its fresh paint glowing in the moonshine. As soon as she’d switched off her engine, the great metal door rolled open and several men hurried out. Ensel, first as always, peered into the passenger window.

‘I couldn’t get anything,’ said Isserley.

Ensel poked his snout inside the cabin, much as the woodcutter had done, and sniffed the alcoholic upholstery. ‘I can smell it wasn’t for want of trying,’ he said.

‘Yes, well,’ responded Isserley, hating herself for what she was about to say, but saying it anyway, ‘Amlis Vess will just have to appreciate it isn’t as easy as all that.’

Ensel noted her discomposure, smiled. His teeth weren’t so good, and he knew it; for her sake, he lowered his head.

‘You got a big one yesterday, anyway,’ he said. ‘One of the best ever.’

Isserley stared into his eyes, yearning to be sure whether, just for once, the compliment was sincere. As soon as she caught herself yearning, she yanked this contemptible little shoot of sentimentality out by the root. Estate trash, she thought, looking away, determined to get herself locked up safely in her cottage as soon as possible. She’d had far too long a day.

‘You look exhausted,’ said Ensel. The other men had already gone back inside; he was attempting a private moment with her, the way he sometimes did, always at lamentably inopportune times.

‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘It would be fair to say that.’

She recalled another occasion, a year or two ago, when he’d had her trapped like this – him leaning into the car, her foolish enough to have turned off the motor. He’d told her conspiratorially, almost tenderly, that he’d got her a present. ‘Thanks,’ she’d said, taking the mysterious little parcel from him and tossing it onto the seat beside her. Unwrapping it later, she’d found an almost transparently thin fillet of braised voddissin – a delicacy which Ensel must surely have stolen. Nestled in greaseproof paper, it winked at her, still moist and warm, irresistible and disgusting at the same time. She’d eaten it, even licked the juices from the creases in the paper, but she never mentioned it to Ensel afterwards, and that was the end of that. Still he tried, in other ways, to impress her.

‘Amlis Vess will probably arrive in the early hours,’ he was saying now, leaning further into the car. His hands were dirty and gnarled with scabs. ‘Tonight,’ he added, in case there was some misunderstanding.

‘I’ll be asleep,’ said Isserley.

‘Nobody knows how long he’s coming for. He might leave again, on the same ship, as soon as the cargo is loaded.’ Ensel used one hand to mime a ship departing, a precious opportunity swallowed up into the void.

‘Well, I guess all will be revealed when the time comes,’ said Isserley brightly, wishing she hadn’t switched off the ignition.

‘So… shall I let you know?’ suggested Ensel.

‘No,’ said Isserley, striving to keep her voice level. ‘No, I don’t think so. You can say Isserley says hello and goodbye, how’s that? Now, I really must get to my bed.’

‘Of course,’ said Ensel, bowing out of the window-frame.

Bastard, thought Isserley as she drove off. Tired and vulnerable, she’d lost concentration and let slip that little detail about going to her bed. No doubt Ensel would relish that, share it with the other men, this titillating proof of her subhumanity. Had she shaken him off sooner, he would never have been any the wiser; he and the other men would have carried on assuming that when Isserley slept, in that secretive cottage of hers, she slept like a human being, on the ground.

Instead, in one humiliating instant, she’d thoughtlessly given him the gift of the tawdry truth, a vision of an ugly freak sleeping on a strange oblong structure of iron and cloth-wrapped kapok, her body wreathed in sheets of old linen, just like a vodsel.