Under The Skin - Michel Faber

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set the rhythm of her breathing as she allowed the car to drift off the road and smoothly enter the lay-by. The speedometer wobbled to zero; the car stopped moving; the engine stalled, or maybe she turned off the ignition. It was over.

      As always at this moment, she saw herself as if from a height; an aerial view of her little red Toyota parked in its little asphalt parenthesis. The FARMFOODS lorry roared past on the straight.

      Then, as always, Isserley fell from her vantage point, a dizzying drop, and plunged back into her body. Her head slammed against the headrest, quite a lot harder than his had done, and she inhaled shudderingly. Gasping, she clung to the steering wheel, as if it might stop her falling further down, into the bowels of the earth.

      Finding her way back to ground level always took a little while. She counted her breaths, slowly getting them down to six a minute. Then she unclenched her hands from the steering wheel, laid them over her stomach. That was always oddly comforting.

      When at last the adrenaline had ebbed and she was feeling calmer, she re-applied herself to the job in hand. Vehicles were humming past from both directions, but she could only hear them, not see them. The glass of all the car’s windows had turned dark amber, at the touch of a button on the dashboard. She was never aware of having touched that button; it must happen during the adrenaline rush. She only remembered that always, by the time she was at this point, the windows were already dark.

      Something massive drove past, vibrating the ground, sweeping a black shadow across the car. She waited till it was gone.

      Then she opened the glove box and fetched out the wig. It was a wig for males, but blond and curly. She turned to the hitcher, who was still frozen in position, and placed the wig carefully on his head. She smoothed some wayward locks over his ears, pecked at the fringe with her sharp fingernails to help it settle over the forehead. She leaned back and evaluated the total effect, made some more adjustments. Already he looked much like all the others she had picked up; later, when his clothes were off, he would look more or less identical.

      Next she scooped a handful of different spectacles from the glove box and selected an appropriate pair. She slid them into position over the hitcher’s nose and ears.

      Finally she retrieved the anorak from the back seat, allowing the hitcher’s own coat to slip onto the floor. The anorak was actually only the front half of the garment; the back had been cut away and discarded. She arranged the fur-lined facade over the hitcher’s upper torso, tucking the edges of the sleeves round his arms, draping the bisected hood over his shoulders.

      He was ready to go.

      She pressed a button and the amber faded from the windows like dispersion in reverse. The world outside was still chilly and bright. There was a lull in the traffic. She had about two hours ‘grace before the icpathua wore off, yet she was only fifty minutes’ drive from home. And it was only 9:35. She was doing well after all.

      She turned the key in the ignition. As the engine started up, the rattling noise that had worried her earlier on made itself heard again.

      She would have to look into that when she got back to the farm.

       2

      NEXT DAY, ISSERLEY drove for hours in sleet and rain before finding anything. It was as if the bad weather had kept all the eligible males indoors.

      Despite peering so intently through her windscreen that she began to get mesmerized by the motion of the wipers, she could identify nothing on the road except the ghostly tail-lights of other rainswept vehicles crawling through the noonday twilight.

      The only pedestrians, let alone hitch-hikers, she had seen all morning were a couple of tubby youths with crewcut heads and plastic knapsacks, splashing in a gutter near the Invergordon underpass. Schoolkids, late or playing truant. They had turned at her approach and shouted something too heavily accented for her to understand. Their rain-soaked heads looked like a couple of peeled potatoes, each with a little splat of brown sauce on top; their hands seemed gloved in bright green foil: the wrappers of crisps packets. In her rear-view mirror, Isserley had watched their waddling bodies recede to coloured blobs finally swallowed up in the grey soup of the rain.

      Driving past Alness for the fourth time, she could scarcely believe there was nobody there. It was usually such a good spot, because so many motorists were loath to pick up anybody they suspected might be from Alness. A grateful hitcher had explained this to Isserley not long ago: Alness was known, he said, as ‘Little Glasgow’, and gave the area ‘a bad name’. Illegal pharmaceutical substances were freely available, leading to broken windows and females giving birth too young. Isserley had never been to Alness itself, though it was only a mile off the road. She just drove past it on the A9.

      Today, she drove past it over and over again, hoping one of its leather-jacketed reprobates might finally come forward, thumbing a lift to a better place. None did.

      She considered going farther, crossing the bridge and trying her luck beyond Inverness. There, she was likely to find hitchers who were more organized and purposeful than the ones closer to home, with thermos flasks and little cardboard placards saying ABERDEEN or GLASGOW.

      Ordinarily, she had no objection to going a long way to find what she was looking for; it was not uncommon for her to drive as far as Pitlochry before turning back. Today, however, she was superstitious about travelling too far from home. Too many things could go wrong in the wet. She didn’t want to end up stranded somewhere, her engine churning feebly against a deluge. Who said she had to bring somebody home every day, anyway? One a week should be enough to satisfy any reasonable person.

      Giving up around midday, she headed back north, playing with the notion that if she announced resolutely enough to the universe that she’d abandoned all hope, she might be offered something after all.

      Sure enough, not far from the sign inviting motorists to visit picturesque seaboard villages on the B9175, she spotted a miserable-looking biped thumbing the watery air in the snubstream of the traffic. He was on the other side of the road from her, lit up by the headlights of a procession of vehicles sweeping past. She had no doubt he would still be there when she’d doubled back.

      ‘Hello!’ she called out, swinging the passenger door open for him.

      ‘Thank Christ for that,’ he exclaimed, leaning one arm on the edge of the door as he poked his dripping face into the car. ‘I was beginning to think there was no justice in the world.’

      ‘How’s that?’ said Isserley. His hands were grimy, but large and well-formed. They’d clean up nicely, with detergent.

      ‘I always pick up hitchers,’ he asserted, as if refuting a malicious slur. ‘Always. Never drive past one, if I’ve got room in the van.’

      ‘Neither do I,’ Isserley assured him, wondering how long he was intending to stand there ushering rain into her car. ‘Hop in.’

      He swung in, his big waterlogged. rump centering him on the seat like the bottom of a lifebuoy. Steam was already rising before he’d even shut the door; his casual clothes were soaked through and squeaked like a shammy as he settled himself.

      He was older than she’d taken him to be, but fit. Did wrinkles matter? They shouldn’t: they were only skin deep, after all.

      ‘So, the one bloody time I need a lift,’ he blustered on, ‘what happens? I walk half a bloody mile to the main road in the pissing rain, and do you think any bugger will stop for me?’

      ‘Well …’ Isserley smiled. ‘I stopped, didn’t I?’

      ‘Aye, well you’re car number two thousand and bloody fifty, I can tell you,’ he said, squinting at her as if she was missing the point.

      ‘Have you been counting?’ she challenged him sportively.

      ‘Aye,’ he sighed. ‘Well, rough head-count, you know.’ He shook his head, sending droplets flying off his bushy eyebrows and abundant quiff.

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