Under the Skin

by Michel Faber

  The rest of her was a funny shape, though. Long skinny arms with big knobbly elbows – no wonder her top was long sleeved. Knobbly wrists too, and big hands. Still, with tits like that …

  They were really odd, actually, those hands. Bigger than you’d think they’d be, to look at the rest of her, but narrow too, like … chicken feet. And tough, like she’d done hard labour with them, maybe worked in a factory. He couldn’t see her legs properly, she was wearing those horrible flared seventies trousers that were back in fashion – shiny green, for Christ’s sake – and what looked like Doc Martens, but there was no disguising how short her legs were. Still, those tits … They were … like … they were like … He didn’t know what to compare them to. They looked pretty fucking good, nestled next to one another there, with the sun shining on them through the windscreen.

  Never mind the tits, though: what about the face? Well, he couldn’t see it just now; she had to actually turn towards him for him to see it, because of her haircut. She had thick, fluffy hair, mouse-brown, hanging down straight so he couldn’t even see her cheeks when she was facing front. It was tempting to imagine a beautiful face hidden behind that hair, a face like a pop singer or an actress, but he knew different. In fact, when she’d turned towards him, her face had kind of shocked him. It was small and heart-shaped, like an elf in a kiddie’s book, with a perfect little nose and a fantastic big-lipped curvy mouth like a supermodel. But she had puffy cheeks and was also wearing the thickest glasses he’d seen in his life: they magnified her eyes so much they looked about twice normal size.

  She was a weird one all right. Half Baywatch babe, half little old lady.

  She drove like a little old lady. Fifty miles an hour, absolute max. And that shoddy old anorak of hers on the back seat – what was that all about? She had a screw loose, probably. Nutter, probably. And she talked funny – foreign, definitely.

  Would he like to fuck her?

  Probably, if he got the chance. She’d probably be a much better fuck than Janine, that was for sure.

  Janine. Christ, it was amazing how just thinking of her could bring him right down. He’d been in a great mood until now. Good old Janine. If ever your spirits are getting too up, just think of Janine. Jesus … couldn’t … he just forget it? Just look at this girl’s tits, blazing in the sun, like … He knew what they looked like now: they looked like the moon. Well, two moons.

  ‘So, what are you doing in Inverness?’ he said suddenly.

  ‘Business,’ she said.

  ‘What do you do?’

  Isserley thought for a moment. It was so long since anything had been said, she’d forgotten what she’d decided to be this time.

  ‘I’m a lawyer.’

  ‘No kidding?’

  ‘No kidding.’

  ‘Like on TV?’

  ‘I don’t watch TV.’ This was true, more or less. She’d watched it almost constantly when she’d first come to Scotland, but nowadays she only watched the news and occasionally a snatch of whatever happened to be on while she was exercising.

  ‘Criminal cases?’ he suggested.

  She looked him briefly in the eyes. There was a spark there that might be worth fanning.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she shrugged. Or tried to. Shrugging while driving was a surprisingly difficult physical trick, especially with breasts like hers.

  ‘Anything juicy?’ he pushed.

  She squinted into her rear-view mirror, slowing the car to allow a Volkswagen pulling a caravan to overtake.

  ‘What would you think was juicy?’ she enquired as the manoeuvre slipped gently into place.

  ‘I don’t know …’ he sighed, sounding doleful and playful at the same time. ‘A man kills his wife ’cause she’s playing around with another guy.’

  ‘I may have had one of those,’ Isserley said noncommittally.

  ‘And did you nail him?’

  ‘Nail him?’

  ‘Did you get him sent down for life?’

  ‘What makes you think I wouldn’t be defending him?’ she smirked.

  ‘Oh, you know: women together against men.’

  His tone had grown distinctly odd: despondent, even bitter, and yet flirtatious. She had to think hard how best to respond.

  ‘Oh, I’m not against men,’ she said at last, changing lanes reflectively. ‘Especially men who get a raw deal from their women.’

  She hoped that would open him up.

  But instead he was silent and slumped a little in his seat. She looked aside at him, but he didn’t allow eye contact, as if she’d failed to respect some limit. She settled for reading the inscription on his T-shirt, AC/DC, it said, and in large embossed letters, BALLBREAKER. She had no idea what on earth this might mean, and felt suddenly out of her depth with him.

  Experience had taught her there was nothing to do about that but try to go deeper.

  ‘Are you married?’ she asked.

  ‘Was,’ he stated flatly. Sweat was glistening beneath the hairline of his big prickly head; he ran his thumb under the seatbelt as if it were smothering him.

  ‘You won’t be so keen on lawyers, then,’ she suggested.

  ‘It was OK,’ he said. ‘Clean break.’

  ‘No children, then?’

  ‘She got ’em. Good luck to her.’ He said this as if his wife were a distant and repugnant country on which there was no point trying to impose the customs of a more civilized society.

  ‘I didn’t mean to pry,’ said Isserley.

  ‘S’alright.’

  They drove on. What had seemed like growing intimacy between them hardened into mutual unease.

  Ahead of them, the sun had risen above the car’s roof, leaving the windscreen filled with a harsh unpunctuated whiteness that threatened to become painful. The forest on the driver’s side thinned out and was replaced by a steep embankment infested with creepers and bluebells. Signs printed in several languages unknown to Isserley reminded foreigners not to drive on the wrong side of the road.

  The temperature inside the car was approaching stifling, even for Isserley, who could tolerate extremes without particularly caring. Her glasses were starting to fog up, but she couldn’t take them off now: he mustn’t see her eyes without them. A slow, subtle trickle of perspiration ran down her neck onto her breastbone, hesitating on the brink of her cleavage. Her hitcher seemed not to notice. His hands were drumming desultorily on his inner thighs to some tune she couldn’t hear; as soon as he realized she was watching, he stopped abruptly and folded his hands limply over his crotch.

  What on earth had happened to him? What had brought on this dismal metamorphosis? Just as she’d grown to appreciate how attractive a prospect he was, he seemed to be shrinking before her eyes; he wasn’t the same male she’d taken into her car twenty minutes ago. Was he one of those inadequate lugs whose sexual self-confidence depended on not being reminded of any real females? Or was it her fault?

  ‘You can open a window if you’re too hot,’ she offered.

  He nodded, didn’t even speak.

  Isserley pressed her foot gingerly down on the accelerator, hoping this would please him. But he just sighed and settled further back in his seat, as if what he considered to be an insignificant increase in speed only reminded him how slowly they were getting nowhere.

  Maybe she shouldn’t have said she was a lawyer. Maybe a shop assistant or an infant teacher would have brought him out more. It was just that she’d taken him to be a rough, robust kind of character; she’d thought he might have a criminal history he’d start to talk about, as a way of teasing her, testing her out. Maybe the only truly safe thing she could have been was a housewife.

  ‘Your wife,’ she rejoined, striving for a reassuring, companionable, male sort of tone, a tone he might expect from a drinking buddy. ‘Did she get the house?’

  ‘Yeah … well … no …’ He drew a deep breath. ‘I had to sell it, and give her half. She went to live in Bradford. I stayed on here.’

  ‘Where’s here?’ s
he asked, nodding her head at the open road, hoping to remind him how far she had taken him already.

  ‘Milnafua.’ He sniggered, as if self-conscious about the name.

  To Isserley, Milnafua sounded perfectly normal; more normal in fact than London or Dundee, which she had some trouble getting her tongue round. She appreciated, however, that to him it represented some outlandish extreme.

  ‘There’s no work anywhere up there,’ is there, she suggested, hoping she was striking a matter-of-fact, masculine note of sympathy.

  ‘Don’t I know it,’ he mumbled. Then, with a startling boost of volume and pitch: ‘Still, got to keep trying, eh?’

  Looking at him in disbelief, she confirmed what he was playing at: a pathetic gesture towards optimism, missing the mark by miles. He was even smiling, his face sheened with sweat, as if he’d suddenly become convinced it was dangerous to admit to too much sloth, as if there could be serious consequences for admitting to her that his life was spent on the dole. Was it all her fault for telling him she was a lawyer? Had she made him afraid that she’d get him in trouble? Or that one day she might turn out to have some official power over him? Could she apologize, laughing, for her deception and start all over again? Tell him she sold computer software or clothes for the larger lady?

  A big green sign at the side of the road announced how many miles remained before Dingwall and Inverness: not very many. The land had fallen away on the left side, revealing the gleaming shore of the Cromarty Firth. The tide was low, all the rocks and sands exposed. A solitary seal languished on one of those rocks, as if stranded.

  Isserley bit her lip, slowly adjusting to her mistake. Lawyer, saleswoman, housewife: it wouldn’t have made any difference. He was wrong for her, that’s all. She had picked up the wrong type. Again.

  Yes, it was obvious now what this big, touchy bruiser was up to. He was going to Bradford to visit his wife, or at least his children.

  This made him a bad risk, from her point of view. Things could get very complicated when there were children involved. Much as she wanted him – it was sinking in now how much she’d already invested in the idea of having him – she didn’t want complications. She would have to give him up. She would have to put him back.

  They both sat in silence for the rest of the journey, as if conscious of having let each other down.

  Traffic had accumulated all around them; they were caught up in an orderly queue of vehicles crossing the multi-laned tightrope of Kessock Bridge. Isserley glanced at her hitcher, felt a pang of loss at finding him turned away from her, staring down at the industrial estates of the Inverness shore far below. He was appraising a dismal toy-town of prefab ugliness as intently as he had admired her breasts not so long ago. Tiny trucks disappearing into factory mouths: that was what made sense to him now.

  Isserley kept to the left, drove faster than she’d done all day. It wasn’t just the pace demanded by the traffic around her; she wanted to get this over with as soon as possible. The tiredness had returned with a vengeance; she longed to find a shady bower off the road, lean her head against the seat and sleep a while.

  On the far side, where the bridge rejoined the mainland, she negotiated the roundabout with pained and earnest concentration, to avoid being caught up in the town-bound traffic and herded to Inverness. She didn’t even bother to disguise her grimace of anxiety as she did this: she had already lost him, after all.

  However, to fill the silence of their last few moments together, she offered him a small parting consolation.

  ‘I’ll drive you just a bit further, get you past the Aberdeen turn-off. Then at least you’ll know all the cars passing you are going south.’

  ‘Great, yeah,’ he said passionlessly.

  ‘Who knows?’ she jollied him. ‘You might get to Bradford by tonight.’

  ‘Bradford?’ he frowned, turning to challenge her. ‘Who says I’m going to Bradford?’

  ‘To see your kids?’ she reminded him.

  There was an awkward pause, then:

  ‘I never see my kids,’ he stated flatly. ‘I don’t even know where they live, exactly. Somewhere in Bradford, that’s as much as I know. Janine – my ex-wife – doesn’t want anything to do with me. I don’t exist anymore as far as she’s concerned.’ He peered straight ahead, as if roughly calculating all the thousands of places that lay south, and comparing that number to what he himself amounted to.

  ‘Bradford was years ago, anyway,’ he said. ‘She could’ve moved to fuckin’ Mars by now, for all I know.’

  ‘So …’ enquired Isserley, changing gear with such clumsiness that the gearbox made a hideous grinding noise, ‘where are you hoping to get to today?’

  Her hitcher shrugged. ‘Glasgow will do me,’ he told her. ‘There’s some good pubs there.’

  Noticing her looking past him at the signs announcing imminent parking areas, it registered with him that she was about to discharge him from the car. Abruptly he mustered a last incongruous burst of conversational energy, fuelled by bitterness.

  ‘It beats sitting in the Commercial Hotel in Alness with a bunch of old boilers listening to some idiot singin’ fuckin’ “Copacabana”.’

  ‘But where will you sleep?’

  ‘I know a couple of guys in Glasgow,’ he told her, faltering again, as if that last squirt of fuel had already sputtered into the atmosphere, ‘It’s just a matter of running into them, that’s all. They’ll be there somewhere. It’s a small world, eh?’

  Isserley was staring ahead at the snow-capped mountains. It looked like a pretty big world to her.

  ‘Mm,’ she said, unable to share his vision of how Glasgow might greet him. Sensing this, he made a small mournful gesture, an opening out of his beefy hands to show there was nothing in them.

  ‘Although people can always let you down, eh?’ he said. ‘That’s why you always got to have a plan B.’

  And he swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bulging like a real one stuck in his neck.

  Isserley nodded approvingly, trying not to let her feelings show. She was covered in sweat now, cold chills running down her back like electric currents. Her heart hammered so hard her breasts shook; she disciplined herself to take just one deep breath instead of many shallow ones. Keeping her right hand clamped securely to the steering wheel she checked the rear-view mirror, the other lane, her speed, the hitcher.

  Everything was ideal, everything pointed to this moment.

  Noticing her excitement, he grinned at her uncertainly, removing his hands from his lap with an awkward jerk, as if waking up, dazed, to something that might yet be expected of him. She grinned back in reassurance, nodding almost imperceptibly as if to say ‘Yes’.

  Then the middle finger of her left hand flipped a little toggle on the steering wheel.

  It might have been for the headlights or the indicators, or for the windscreen wipers. It was neither. It was the icpathua toggle, the trigger for the needles inside the passenger seat, to make them spring up silently from their little sheath-like burrows in the upholstery.

  The hitcher flinched as they stung him through the fabric of his jeans, one needle in each buttock. His eyes, by chance, were facing the rear-view mirror, but no-one but Isserley witnessed the expression in them; the nearest vehicle was a giant lorry labelled FARMFOODS which was far away still, its driver an insect head behind tinted glass. In any case, the hitcher’s look of surprise was momentary; the dose of icpathua was adequate for body sizes considerably larger than his. He lost consciousness and his head lolled back into the padded hollow of the headrest.

  Isserley flipped another toggle, her fingers trembling ever so slightly. The gentle tick of the indicator lights 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 T
oyota 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.