Under the Skin

by Michel Faber

  As soon as Isserley had stepped within a body’s length of the enclosure, she was frightened half to death by a large projectile hurtling against the wire from within, bulging the web of metal directly towards her with a juddering crash. For a nauseous moment she was convinced the barrier had been penetrated, but the bulge sprang back and the vodsel collapsed to the floor, bawling in pain and fury. The inside of his gaping mouth was roasted black where the stub of tongue had been cauterized; white spittle clung to his moustache. He struggled to his feet, clearly intending to lunge at Isserley again, but two of the other vodsels seized hold of him and dragged him back from the wire.

  Held down by a tall and athletic individual much younger than himself, the excitable vodsel slumped impotently in his nest of straw, his knees jerking. The third creature scrambled forwards and fell to his knees on a patch of soil right near the wire mesh. He stared down into it, grunting and snuffling in distress as if he’d lost something.

  ‘It’s all right, boy,’ encouraged Amlis earnestly. ‘Do it again. You can do it. I know you can.’

  The vodsel bent over the earth, erasing his wild companion’s scuffed footprints from it with the edge of one hand. His empty scrotal sac, still speckled with dried blood from his gelding, swung back and forth as he smoothed the soil and picked fragments of scattered straw out of it. Then he gathered a handful of long straws together, twisted and folded them to make a stiff wand, and began to draw in the dirt.

  ‘Look!’ Amlis urged.

  Isserley watched, disturbed, as the vodsel scrawled a five-letter word with great deliberation, even going to the trouble of fashioning each letter upside down, so that it would appear right-way-up for those on the other side of the mesh.

  ‘No-one told me they had a language,’ marvelled Amlis, too impressed, it seemed, to be angry. ‘My father always describes them as vegetables on legs.’

  ‘It depends on what you classify as language, I guess,’ said Isserley dismissively. The vodsel had slumped behind his handiwork, head bowed in submission, eyes wet and gleaming.

  ‘But what does it mean?’ persisted Amlis.

  Isserley considered the message, which was M E R C Y. It was a word she’d rarely encountered in her reading, and never on television. For an instant she racked her brains for a translation, then realized that, by sheer chance, the word was untranslatable into her own tongue; it was a concept that just didn’t exist.

  Isserley stalled, mouth hidden behind one hand, as if finding the stench increasingly hard to take. Though her face was impassive, her mind was racing. How to discourage Amlis from making an unwarranted fuss?

  She considered trying to pronounce the strange word with a contortion of her lips and a frown on her brow, as if she were being asked to reproduce a chicken’s cackle or a cow’s moo. Then, if Amlis asked her what it meant, she could honestly say that there was no word for it in the language of human beings. She opened her lips to speak, but realized just in time that this would be a very stupid mistake. For her to speak the word at all dignified it with the status of being a word in the first place; Amlis would no doubt go into ecstasy over the vodsels’ ability to link a pattern of scrawled symbols with a specific sound, however guttural and unintelligible. At a stroke, she would be dignifying the vodsels, in his eyes, with both writing and speech.

  But isn’t it true, she asked herself, that they have that dignity?

  Isserley pushed the thought away. Just look at these creatures! Their brute bulk, their stink, their look of idiocy, the way the shit oozed up between their fat toes. Had she been so badly butchered, brought so close to an animal state physically, that she was losing her hold on humanity and actually identifying with animals? If she wasn’t careful, she would end up living among them, cackling and mooing in meaningless abandon like the cavorting oddities on television.

  All this passed through her mind in a couple of seconds. In a second or two more, she had devised her response to Amlis.

  ‘What do you mean, “What does it mean”?’ she exclaimed testily. ‘It’s a scratch mark that means something to vodsels, obviously. I couldn’t tell you what it means.’

  She looked straight into Amlis’s eyes, to add the power of conviction to her denial.

  ‘Well, I can guess what it means,’ he observed quietly.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure you wouldn’t let a little thing like ignorance stop you,’ sneered Isserley, noticing for the first time that he had a few pure white hairs around his eyelids.

  ‘All I’m trying to get across to you,’ he persisted, nettled, ‘is that the meat you were eating a few minutes ago is the same meat that is trying to communicate with us down here.’

  Isserley sighed and folded her arms across her chest, feeling sick from the fluorescent glare, the laboured breathing of thirty beasts inside a fissure far beneath the ground.

  ‘It doesn’t communicate to me, Amlis,’ she said, then blushed at having carelessly addressed him by his first name. ‘Can we leave now?’

  Amlis frowned, and looked down at the scratches in the dirt.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t know what these marks mean?’ he asked, with a sharp edge of disbelief in his voice.

  ‘I don’t know what you expect of me,’ Isserley burst out, suddenly near tears. ‘I’m a human being, not a vodsel.’

  Amlis looked her up and down, as if only now noticing her horrific disfigurements. He stood there in all his beauty, his black pelt glistening in the humid air, and stared at Isserley, and then at the vodsels and the marks in the dirt.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last, and turned his head towards the lift.

  Hours later, as Isserley was driving on the open road, breathing in great mouthfuls of sky from her open window, she thought about how the encounter with Amlis Vess had gone.

  She’d coped well, she thought. She had nothing to be ashamed of. He’d been out of line. He had apologized.

  The thing about vodsels was, people who knew nothing whatsoever about them were apt to misunderstand them terribly. There was always the tendency to anthropomorphize. A vodsel might do something which resembled a human action; it might make a sound analogous with human distress, or make a gesture analogous with human supplication, and that made the ignorant observer jump to conclusions.

  In the end, though, vodsels couldn’t do any of the things that really defined a human being. They couldn’t siuwil, they couldn’t mesnishtil, they had no concept of slan. In their brutishness, they’d never evolved to use hunshur; their communities were so rudimentary that hississins did not exist; nor did these creatures seem to see any need for chail, or even chailsinn.

  And, when you looked into their glazed little eyes, you could understand why.

  If you were looking clearly, that is.

  So, that’s why it was better that Amlis Vess didn’t know that the vodsels had a language.

  She’d have to be careful, then, never to speak it in his earshot. It would only provoke him. It would achieve nothing. In a case like this, a little knowledge was more dangerous than none at all.

  It was a good thing the vodsels were always unconscious when they were carried into the steading. Then by the time they were up and about again, they’d already been seen to, so they couldn’t make any more noise. That nipped any problems in the bud.

  If Amlis could just be kept out of trouble until the transport ship was ready to leave, he need never know any … anything else.

  And then, once he was in the ship heading home, he could indulge his overdeveloped conscience, his sentimentality, to his heart’s content. If he wanted to throw what remained of the vodsels overboard as a way of granting the creatures posthumous freedom, he could go right ahead, and it would be someone else’s problem, not hers.

  Her problem was more basic, and self-indulgence didn’t come into it: she had a difficult job to do, and no-one but her could do it.

  Driving past Dalmore Farm in Alness, she spotted a hitcher up ahead. He stood out like a beacon on the crest of a hill.
She wound her window closed and turned up the heating. Work had begun.

  Even from a distance of a hundred metres or more, she could tell that this one was built like a piece of heavy farm machinery, a creature who would put a strain on any set of wheels. His massive bulk was all the more conspicuous for being crammed into yellow reflective overalls. He might have been an experimental traffic fixture.

  As Isserley drove closer, she noted that the yellow overalls were so old and tarnished that they were almost black: the colours of rotting banana peel. Overalls as filthy and decrepit as that couldn’t belong to an employee of a company, surely; this fellow must be his own boss; perhaps he didn’t work at all.

  That was good. Unemployed vodsels were always a good risk. Although to Isserley they looked just as fit as vodsels who had jobs, she’d found that they were often cast out from their society, isolated and vulnerable. And, once exiled, they seemed to spend the rest of their lives skulking at the peripheries of the herd, straining for a glimpse of the high-ranking males and nubile females they yearned to befriend but could never approach for fear of a swift and savage punishment. In a way, the vodsel community itself seemed to be selecting those of its members it was content to have culled.

  Isserley reached the hitcher and drove past him, at her usual leisurely speed. He registered her passing, her apparent snub of him, with a squint of indifference; he knew perfectly well that his rotting banana colours would be rejected as an unsuitable match for the taupe upholstery of most cars. But there were plenty more motorists where Isserley came from, he seemed to be thinking, so stuff her.

  She assessed him while she drove on. Undoubtedly he had more than enough meat on him; too much, perhaps. Fat was a bad thing: not only was it worthless padding that had to be discarded, but it infiltrated deep inside – or so Unser, the chief processor, had once told her. Fat blighted good meat like a burrowing worm.

  This hitcher might well be all muscle, though. She pulled off the road, waited for the right time, and carefully executed a U-turn.

  The other thing was: he was totally bald, not a hair on his head – which didn’t matter, she supposed, since if she took him he would end up hairless anyway. But what made vodsels go hairless before their time? She hoped it wasn’t some defect that would affect the quality of the meat, a disease of some kind. A disembodied voice on television had told her once that victims of cancer went bald. This hitcher in the yellow overalls – there he was again now! – didn’t strike her as a victim of cancer; he looked as if he could demolish a hospital with his bare hands. And what about that vodsel she’d had in the car a while back, the one who had cancer of the lung? He’d had plenty of hair, as far as she could recall.

  She drove past the baldhead again, confirming that he had enough muscle on him to satisfy anyone. As soon as possible, she made another U-turn.

  It was funny, really, that she’d never had a totally bald hitcher before. Statistically, she ought to have. His shining hairless head, coupled with his steely physique and queer clothing, might account for these irrational misgivings she felt, as she slowed to stop for him.

  ‘Want a lift?’ she called unnecessarily, as he lumbered up to the door she was opening.

  ‘Ta,’ he said, trying to ease himself in. His overalls squeaked comically as he doubled over; she released the seat lock, to give him more room.

  He seemed embarrassed by her kindness, and, once seated, looked straight ahead through the windscreen while he fumbled with the seatbelt; he had to pull out the strap for what seemed like yards before it would encompass his girth.

  ‘Right,’ he said as soon as the buckle had clicked.

  She drove off, with him blushing beside her, his face a pink melon set atop a bulging stack of grimy yellow.

  After a full minute, the hitcher at last turned slowly towards her. He looked her up and down. He turned back to the window.

  He was thinking, My lucky day.

  ‘My lucky day,’ he said.

  ‘I hope so,’ said Isserley, in a tone of warm good humour, while an inexplicable chill travelled down her spine. ‘Where are you heading?’

  The question hung in the air, cooled like uneaten food, and finally congealed. He continued staring ahead.

  Isserley considered repeating the question, but felt oddly self-conscious about doing so. In fact, she felt self-conscious altogether. Without being aware of it, she was hunching over slightly, leaning her elbows forward, obscuring her breasts.

  ‘Nice pair of tits you’ve got there,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. The atmosphere in the cabin instantly began to throb with agitated molecules.

  ‘They didn’t grow overnight,’ he sniggered.

  ‘No, they didn’t,’ she agreed.

  Her real teats, budding naturally from her abdomen, had been surgically removed in a separate operation from the one that had grafted these puffy artificial ones onto her chest. The surgeons had used pictures from a magazine sent by Esswis as a guide.

  ‘Biggest I’ve seen for a long time,’ the hitcher added, evidently reluctant to leave off mining such a rich conversational seam.

  ‘Mm,’ said Isserley, taking note of a road sign and making some quick calculations. One day she would have to tell Esswis that never, in all her far-ranging travels outside his little domain of fields and fences, had she seen a female vodsel with breasts like the ones in his magazine.

  ‘Were you standing long?’ she asked, to change the subject.

  ‘Long enough,’ he grunted.

  ‘Where are you hoping to get to?’ She hoped that perhaps by now, the question might have penetrated his brain.

  ‘I’ll decide that when I get there,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I’m afraid I’m only going as far as Evanton,’ she said. ‘It’s a change of scene for you, anyway.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he sniffed. ‘No problem.’

  Again the molecules writhed between them invisibly, in silence.

  ‘So what takes you out on the road today?’ she said brightly.

  ‘Things to do, that’s all.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to be nosy,’ she went on. ‘I’m just curious about people, that’s all.’

  ‘S’ alright. Man of few words, that’s me.’ He said this as if this were a special distinction conferred on him by birth, like wealth or good looks. Helplessly, Isserley thought of Amlis.

  ‘You’re a bit of a goer, aren’t you?’ challenged the hitcher.

  ‘I—I beg your pardon?’ she said, unfamiliar with the term.

  ‘Sex,’ he explained flatly, his big melon head blushing again. ‘On the brain. I can spot it a mile off. You love it, don’t you?’

  Isserley shifted uneasily in her seat and checked the rearview mirror.

  ‘Actually, I’m always working too hard to think about it,’ she said, trying for a casual tone.

  ‘Bullshit,’ he retorted passionlessly. ‘You’re thinking about it right now.’

  ‘I’m thinking about … about problems at work, actually,’ she volunteered. She hoped he would ask her what her work was. She would be a plainclothes police officer, she’d decided.

  ‘A girl like you don’t need to think,’ he snorted.

  It was about eight minutes’ drive to Evanton. She should have said Ballachraggan, which was half the distance, but he might have been annoyed to be taken for such a short ride.

  ‘I bet a good few guys have touched those, yeah?’ he suggested abruptly, as if kick-starting a conversation she’d been cack-handed enough to let stall.

  ‘Not very many,’ she declared. The precise tally was none, in truth.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said, leaning back on the headrest, half closing his eyes.

  ‘Well … it’s true,’ sighed Isserley, disconsolately. According to the digital clock, only fifty seconds had passed.

  However, the universe seemed at last to have heard her prayer. The hitcher’s eyes narrowed, then shut in what might have been slumber. His head sank a little into
the grimy upturned collar of his overalls. Minutes went by, and little by little the purring of the engine and the rolling grey tide of the road reclaimed a reality they had lost. Evanton was only a couple of miles away by the time the baldhead spoke again.

  ‘You know what gets me?’ he said, slightly more animated now.

  ‘No, what gets you?’ Isserley was sagging in relief, gratefully feeling the air grow less dense, the molecules moving more calmly.

  ‘Them supermodels,’ he said.

  Isserley thought first of sophisticated automobiles, then thought he must mean the animated drawings which flickered on television early in the mornings: stylized females flying through space wearing elbow-length gloves and thigh-high boots. Just in time, as she opened her mouth to speak, she remembered the true meaning of the term: she’d glimpsed one of these extraordinary creatures on the news once.

  ‘You like them?’ she guessed.

  ‘Hate ’em.’

  ‘They earn a lot more than you or me, don’t they?’ she remarked, flailing, even now, to find some point of entry into his life.

  ‘For doing fuck all,’ he said.

  ‘Life can be unfair,’ she offered.

  He frowned and pursed his lips, preparing perhaps for some arduous unburdening.

  ‘Some of them supermodels,’ he observed, ‘like Kate Moss and that black one, well … it mystifies me. Mystifies me.’

  He spoke the word as if it were something very expensive he’d found lying in the street somewhere, which would ordinarily be far outside his purchasing power, but which he now intended to flaunt to everyone.

  ‘What mystifies you?’ said Isserley, quite lost.

  ‘Where’s the tits on ’em, that’s what I want to know!’ he exclaimed, cupping one huge hand in front of his own chest. ‘Supermodels, and they got no tits! How’s that work?’

  ‘I don’t know who decides these things,’ conceded Isserley miserably, as the atmosphere in the cabin swarmed once more.

  ‘Queers, I bet,’ he grunted. ‘What would they care about tits? That’s the answer, I reckon.’