by Michel Faber
Somewhere on the passenger side, above the wheel, a rattle had started up. She had heard that rattle before. It had pretended to go away, but it had stayed hidden in her car’s body somewhere. Isserley would not tolerate this. She would take her car back to the farm, when she had finished work, and she would find that rattle and she would fix it.
Two and a half hours later, there was another hitcher in her sights. Isserley always drove straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time. So, she drove past him.
He was holding a large cardboard sign that said PERTH PLEASE. He was not bald. He was not wearing overalls. His body was rather top-heavy, a V-shaped torso on long legs. How thin were those legs? His faded jeans were flapping around them; it must be very windy today.
She drove back and appraised him again. His arms were good. His shoulders were excellent. There was a lot of breast on him, even though his waist was lean.
After her U-turn, she drove towards him a third time. He had curly, unruly red hair and wore a thick knitted jumper composed of many different colours of wool. All the thick-knitted-jumper vodsels Isserley had ever met were unemployed, and lived the life of pariahs. Some authority must actually force them to wear these garments, she thought, as a stigma of rank.
This vodsel beckoning to her now must be an outcast. And his legs would fatten up fine.
She pulled off the road, and he ran to the car, smiling.
Isserley opened the passenger door, intending to call out, ‘Do you want a lift?’
It suddenly seemed an absurd thing to say. Of course he wanted a lift. He had a big sign saying PERTH PLEASE; she had stopped for him. Nothing could be more self-explanatory. Words were a waste of energy.
In silence, she watched him strap himself in.
‘I … This is very good of you,’ the hitcher said, grinning awkwardly, combing his hands through his abundant hair, which immediately fell back over his eyes. ‘I was getting pretty cold there.’
She nodded gravely, and tried to smile in return. She wasn’t sure if she was managing it. The muscles in her face seemed even less connected to her lips than usual.
The hitcher babbled on: ‘I’ll just leave my sign here at my feet, shall I? You can get to your gears all right, can you?’
She nodded again, and revved the engine. Inwardly, her speechlessness troubled her; she seemed to have lost the power; there was a problem in her throat. Her heart was pounding already, though nothing had happened yet and no decision was on the horizon.
Determined to function normally, she opened her mouth to speak, but it was a mistake. She could sense that the sound rising in her throat would mean nothing to a vodsel, so she swallowed it down again.
The hitcher stroked his chin nervously. He had a soft red beard, so sparse it had been invisible from a distance. He smiled again, and blushed.
Isserley took in a deep, slightly shuddery breath, flipped the indicator and drove off, facing the road ahead.
She would speak when she was ready.
The hitcher fiddled with his sign, trying to catch her eye as he leaned forward. She was not to be caught. He sat back, nonplussed, clasping each of his cold hands inside the other in turn, then sliding them under the fleecy sleeves of his jumper.
He wondered what on earth he could say to put her at ease, and why she’d bothered to pick him up if she didn’t want to talk to him. She must have had a reason. The thing was to guess what her reason might be. Judging from the look on her face before she’d turned away, she was completely knackered; maybe she’d just been falling asleep at the wheel, and decided a hitch-hiker would keep her awake. She’d be expecting him to make small talk, then.
It was an alarming thought; he wasn’t a ‘small talk’ kind of person. Long philosophical one-to-ones were more his thing, like the late-night conversations he had with Cathy when they were both a bit stoned. A pity he couldn’t offer this woman a joint to loosen things up.
Instead, he thought of commenting on the weather. Not in a cheap way, but saying what he really felt on days like this, when the sky was like … like an ocean of snow. It was so mind-blowing the way it could all hang suspended up there, all that solid water, enough of it to bury a whole county in tons of white powdered ice, all of it just floating, way, way up there as easily as a cloud. A miracle.
He looked at the woman again. She was driving like a robot, back straight as a metal bar. He got the impression that the beauties of nature meant nothing to her. There was no common ground there.
‘Hi, I’m William,’ he could say. Maybe it was a bit late now. But he would have to break the silence somehow. She might be going all the way to Perth. If she drove him a hundred and twenty miles without them exchanging a word, he’d be a basket case by the time he arrived.
Maybe the tone of ‘Hi, I’m William’ was a little bit crass, a bit American, like ‘Hi, I’m Arnold, and I’m your waiter for the evening.’ Maybe something more low-key would be better. Like, ‘I’m William, by the way.’ As if he was mentioning it in the middle of an enthusiastic conversation they were already having. Which, sadly, they weren’t.
What was wrong with this woman, anyway?
He ruminated for a minute, making an effort to lay aside his own unease and concentrate on her instead. He tried to see her the way Cathy might see her if she was sitting in his seat; Cathy was a genius for sizing people up.
Earnestly striving to connect with his intuitive feminine side, William very quickly came to the conclusion that there must be something badly, badly wrong with this woman. She was in some sort of trouble, some sort of distress. She might even be in shock.
Or maybe he was just being dramatic. Cathy’s friend Dave, the writer, always looked as if he was in shock. He’d looked like that all the years they’d known him. He was probably born looking like that. This woman, though: she gave off the weirdest vibes. Weirder even than Dave’s. And she was definitely not in good shape physically.
Her hair was matted, with streaks of something that looked like axle grease slicked through it, and tufts sticking out at odd angles. Here was a woman who hadn’t looked at herself in a mirror for a while, that was for sure. She smelled – stank, really, if he could be so judgemental – of fermenting sweat and seawater.
Her clothes were filthy with dried mud. She’d fallen, maybe, or had some sort of accident. Should he ask her if she was all right? She might be offended if he commented on the state of her clothing. She might even think he was trying to harass her sexually. It was so hard to be friendly, in any genuinely human way, towards female strangers if you were a male. You could be courteous and pleasant, which wasn’t the same thing at all; it was the way you’d treat the staff at the Job Centre. You couldn’t tell a strange woman that you liked her earrings, or that her hair was beautiful – or ask her how she came to have mud on her clothes.
It was over-civilization that caused that, maybe. Two animals, or two primitives, would never worry about that sort of thing. If one was muddy, the other would just start licking or brushing or whatever was needed. There was nothing sexual about it.
Maybe he was being a hypocrite. He did recognize this woman as … well … a woman, surely? She was a female; he was a male. These were eternal realities. And, let’s face it, she was wearing amazingly little clothing for the weather. He hadn’t seen so much cleavage in public since well before the snows had set in.
Her breasts were suspiciously firm and gravity-defying for their size, though; maybe she’d had them pumped up with silicone. That was a pity. There were health risks – leakage, cancer. It was so unnecessary. Every woman was beautiful. Small breasts fitted snugly inside your hand and felt warm and complete. That’s what he told Cathy, whenever the latest lingerie catalogue came with the junk mail and she went on a downer.
Maybe this woman was simply wearing one of those fiendishly designed uplift bras. Men could be naive when it came to that sort of stuff. He examined her side, from armpit to waist, for tell-tale signs of underwiri
ng or industrial-strength lace. He saw nothing except a small perforation in the fabric of her top, like a snarl from a spine of barbed wire or a sharp twig. The fabric around the hole was tacky with some sort of dried gunge. Could it be blood? He longed to ask. He wished he were a doctor, so he could ask and get away with it. Could he pretend to be a doctor? He knew a fair bit, from Cathy’s pregnancies, her motorcycle accident, his father’s stroke, Suzie’s addictions.
‘Excuse me, I’m a doctor,’ he could say, ‘and I can’t help noticing …’ But he didn’t approve of lying. Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive, that’s what Shakespeare said. And Shakespeare was no fool.
The more he looked at this girl, the weirder she appeared. Her green velveteen trousers were very seventies retro-chic, if you disregarded the muddy knees, but she definitely didn’t have the legs of a nightclub babe. Trembling slightly under the thin fabric, so short they barely reached the pedals, they might have been the legs of a cerebral palsy sufferer. He turned his head to glance through the space between his seat and hers, half expecting to see a foldable wheelchair wedged into the back. There was only an old anorak, a garment he could well imagine her wearing. Her boots were like Doc Martens, but even chunkier, like Boris Karloff clogs.
Strangest of all, though, was her skin. Every part of her flesh that he could see, except for her pale smooth breasts, had the same peculiar texture to it: a downy look, like the hide of a cat recently spayed, just beginning to grow back the fur. She had scars everywhere: along the edges of her hands, along her collarbones, and especially on her face. He couldn’t see her face now, hidden as it was behind the tangled mane of her hair, but he’d got a pretty good glimpse of it before, and there was scarring along the line of her jaw, her neck, her nose, under her eyes. And then the corrective lenses. They must have the biggest magnification known to optometry, for her eyes to look that big.
He hated to judge anyone by externals. It was the inner person that mattered. But when a woman’s external appearance was this unusual, there was every likelihood it would have shaped the whole of her life. This woman’s story, whatever it was, would be a remarkable one: perhaps tragic, perhaps inspirational.
He longed to ask.
How sad it would be if he never found out. He would spend the rest of his life wondering. He knew that. He’d experienced it before. Once, eight years ago, he’d had a car himself, and given a lift to a man who’d started weeping, right there in the car next to him. William hadn’t asked what was the matter; he’d been too embarrassed, a macho kid of twenty. In time, the man stopped weeping, arrived at his destination, got out of the car, said thanks for the lift. Ever since then, maybe once a week, William would find himself wondering about that man.
‘Are you all right?’ He could ask that, surely. If she wanted to fob him off, she could put him in his place then and there. Or she could answer in a way that left things more open.
William licked his lips, tried to bring the words to his tongue. His heart beat faster, his breathing quickened. The fact that she wasn’t looking at him made things even harder. He considered clearing his throat, like he’d seen men do in the movies, then blushed at how naff that idea was. His sternum was vibrating, or maybe it was his lungs that were doing it, like a bass drum.
This was ridiculous. His heavy breathing was becoming audible now. She would think he was going to jump on her or something.
He took a deep breath and gave up the idea of asking her anything, at least out of the blue. Maybe something would arise naturally later.
If only he could bring Cathy into the conversation, that might reassure her. She would know then that he was some other woman’s partner, the father of two children, a person who wouldn’t dream of raping or molesting anybody. How to bring up the subject, though, if she didn’t ask? He couldn’t just say, ‘By the way, in case you might be wondering, I have a partner, who I love dearly’. That would sound so naff. No, worse than naff: positively creepy, even psychotic.
That’s what lying had done to the world. All the lying that people had been doing since the dawn of time, all the lying they were doing still. The price everyone paid for it was the death of trust. It meant that no two humans, however innocent they might be, could ever approach one another like two animals. Civilization!
William hoped he would remember all this stuff, to discuss it with Cathy when he got home. He had his finger on something important here, he thought.
Although maybe if he told Cathy too much about this woman who’d given him a lift, she’d take it the wrong way. Talking about his old girlfriend Melissa and the walking tour of Catalonia hadn’t gone over too well, he had to admit, even though Cathy had more or less forgiven him by now.
Jesus, why did this girl not speak to him?
Isserley stared ahead of her in despair. She was still unable to speak, the hitcher was evidently unwilling to. As always, it was up to her. Everything was up to her.
A big green traffic sign said there were 110 miles to go before Perth. She ought to tell him how far she was going. She had no idea how far she was going. She glanced into the rearview mirror. The road was empty, difficult to see clearly under the grey, snow-laden light. All she could do was keep driving, her hands barely moving on the steering wheel, a cry of torment stuck in her throat.
Even if she could bring herself to start a conversation, the thought of how much work it would be to keep it going made her heart sink. He was obviously a typical male of the species; stupid, uncommunicative, yet with a rodent cunning for evasion. She would talk to him, and in return he would grunt, surrender one-word answers to her cleverest questions, lapse into silence at every opportunity. She would play her game, he would play his, on and on, perhaps for hours.
Isserley realized, suddenly, that she just didn’t have the energy to play anymore.
Eyes fixed on the bleak road stretching out in front of her, she was humiliated by the absurd labour of it all, this wearisome nudging and winkling at him as if he were some priceless pearl to be drawn out by infinitesimal degrees from his secretive shell. The patience it required of her was superhuman. And for what? A vodsel the same as all the other vodsels, one of billions infesting the planet. A few parcels’ worth of meat.
Why must she put so much effort into playing this game day after day? Was this how she would spend the rest of her life? Endlessly putting on these performances, turning herself inside out, only to finish up empty-handed (more often than not) and having to start all over again?
She couldn’t bear it.
She looked in her rear-view mirror, then askance at the hitcher. His eyes met hers; he blushed and smirked cretinously, breathing hard. The sheer brute alienness of him hit her like a blow; and, with a heady rush like the nausea after a sudden loss of blood, she hated him.
‘Hasusse,’ she said between clenched teeth, and flipped the icpathua toggle.
He began to fall towards her; she shoved him back with the flat of her hand. He swayed away from her, his big shoulders tipping like a unstable bale of hay, his head bumping against the passenger window. Isserley flicked the indicator and eased the car off the road.
Safely parked in a layby, her motor still on, she pressed the button to darken the windscreen. It was the first time she’d ever been aware of doing so. Usually she was floating somewhere in space when this moment came; today she was solidly anchored in the driver’s seat, her hands on the controls. The glass went deep amber all around her, the world went dark and disappeared, and the little cabin light came on. She leaned her head back against the headrest and removed her glasses, listening to the rumble of distant traffic over the purr of her engine.
Her breathing, she noted, was perfectly normal. Her heart, which admittedly had been labouring a bit when she’d first let the vodsel into her car, was now beating quite tranquilly.
Whatever the problem had been, in the past, with her physical reactions, she seemed finally to have solved it.
She bent down to op
en the glove compartment. Two tears fell out of her eyes, onto the hitcher’s jeans. She frowned, unable to account for it.
Isserley drove directly back to Ablach Farm, trying to fathom, all the way there, what could possibly be wrong.
Of course the events of yesterday … or was it the day before? … She wasn’t exactly sure how long she had spent on the jetty afterwards … but anyway, those events … well, they had upset her, there was no denying that. But it was all in the past now. Water under the bridge, as the vodsels … as she’d heard it said.
Now she was driving past the abandoned steelworks, almost home, with a nice big vodsel propped up next to her, just like any other day. Life went on, there was work to be done. The past was dwindling, like something shrinking to a speck in the rear-view mirror, and the future was shining through the windscreen, demanding her full attention. She flicked her indicator at the Ablach sign.
As she drove over Rabbit Hill, she was ready to admit that she was perhaps not in such good shape. But, determined to pull herself together without wasting any more time, she already had a vision of what it would take for her to feel better. Something inside her was trapped. Something small: nothing serious. But still trapped.
To complete her recovery, to get herself back to normal, she needed to release it.
She felt sure she knew how.
Parking in front of the steading, she sounded her car’s horn, impatient for the men to come out.
The door rolled open to reveal, as usual, Ensel and the two cronies whose names she’d never bothered to memorize. Ensel, as usual, hurried out to peer through the car’s passenger window at what she’d brought home for them. Isserley braced herself for the usual platitude about the quality of the specimen.
‘Are you all right?’ grimaced Ensel through the glass. He was looking straight at her, ignoring the vodsel slumped under ill-fitting blond wig and sloppily applied anorak. ‘You’re … ah … you have some mud on your clothes.’
