Under the Skin

by Michel Faber

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she sneered, miserable with desire to stroke the white plush of his chest, to follow the line of his silky flank. ‘I can see how it’s damaged you.’

  ‘Not all damage is obvious,’ he said in a soft voice.

  ‘No,’ she retaliated bitterly, ‘but it’s the obvious damage that gets those heads turning, don’t you find? The brand everyone recognizes, eh, Mr Vess?’

  Alarmingly, he reared up, stood at her shoulder, and lowered his head close to hers, shockingly close.

  ‘Isserley, listen to me,’ he urged her, the black down of his face bristling, the warm breath from his mouth tickling her neck. ‘Do you think I can’t see that half of your face has been carved off? Do you think I haven’t noticed that you’ve had strange humps grafted onto you, your breasts removed, your tail amputated, your fur shaved off? Do you think I can’t imagine how you might feel about these things?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ she wheezed, her eyes stinging.

  ‘Of course I can see what’s been done to you, but what I’m really interested in is the inner person,’ he pressed on.

  ‘Oh please, Amlis: spare me this shit,’ groaned Isserley, looking away from him as the tears squirmed out of her eyes and ran down one cheek to disappear inside the ugly stoma of her mutilated ear.

  ‘Do you think nobody is capable of noticing you’re a human being underneath?’ he exclaimed.

  ‘If your kind had noticed I was a fucking human being they wouldn’t have sent me to the Estates, would they?’ she yelled back at him.

  ‘Isserley, I didn’t send you to the Estates.’

  ‘Oh no,’ she raged, ‘nobody has any individual responsibility, do they?’

  She turned violently away from him, forgetting to brace herself for the pain. It shot down her spine, like a skewer piercing her from ribcage to rectum. Amlis was at her side the instant she screamed.

  ‘Let me help you,’ he said, wrapping one arm around her shoulders, and his tail around the small of her back.

  ‘Leave me alone!’ she wept.

  ‘Let’s get you sitting up first,’ was his response.

  He helped haul her to her knees, his velvety, bony forehead brushing against her throat, then immediately he backed away, allowing her to find her centre of gravity.

  She flexed her stiff limbs, feeling the spastic tension deep inside her flesh, the lingering thrill of his touch on the surface. Her shoulder-blades cracked dangerously as she rotated them; she couldn’t afford to worry about what sort of impression she made now. She looked around for Amlis, saw he’d just made a brief foray deeper inside the hold.

  ‘Here, have some of this,’ he said, approaching her on three limbs, holding up a clump of something vegetal in his free hand. He seemed quite serious, which struck Isserley as unaccountably funny.

  ‘I don’t approve of drugs,’ she protested, then immediately burst out laughing, her fragile defences unhinged by pain. Wiping fresh tears from her cheeks, she accepted a mossy sprig of icpathua from him and put it into her mouth.

  ‘I just chew it, do I?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘After a while it turns into a sort of cud, and you don’t even have to think about it anymore.’

  Half an hour later, Isserley felt much better. A feeling of anaesthesia, even well-being, was disseminating through her body. She was doing her exercises, right in front of Amlis Vess, and she didn’t mind. He was going on and on about the evils of meat-eating, and everything he said seemed to her pathetic and amusing. He really was a very amusing young man, if you didn’t take his sanctimonious ravings too much to heart. Enjoying the low tones of his voice as it droned, she gyrated her limbs slowly, trying to focus on her own body, chewing the bitter weed over and over.

  ‘You know,’ Amlis was saying, ‘since people have started eating meat, some mysterious new diseases have been reported. There have been unexplained deaths.’

  Isserley smirked; his preachings of doom were solemnly hilarious.

  ‘Even the Elite are hinting there may be dangers,’ he insisted.

  ‘Well,’ she replied airily, ‘All I can say is that everything is done to the highest standards at this end.’

  She snorted with laughter again, and, to her surprise, so did he.

  ‘How much does a fillet of voddissin cost, anyway, back home?’ she enquired, stretching her arms up towards the night sky.

  ‘About nine, ten thousand liss.’

  She stopped her gyrations to look at him in disbelief. Ten thousand liss was, for an ordinary person, a whole month’s worth of water and oxygen.

  ‘Are you joking?’ she gaped, her hands falling to her sides.

  ‘If it costs less than nine thousand, you can bet it’s been adulterated with something else.’

  ‘But … who can afford that?’

  ‘Almost no-one. Which makes it fantastically desirable, of course.’

  Amlis sniffed thoughtfully at a stack of scarlet meat under viscose wrapping, as if trying to decide whether he’d smelled it, back home, in its final form. ‘If someone wants to bribe an official, flatter a client … seduce a woman .. There’s no better way.’

  Isserley still couldn’t quite grasp it.

  ‘Ten thousand liss …’ she marvelled.

  ‘In fact,’ Amlis went on, ‘meat is so valuable that they’re actually trying to make it grow in laboratories.’

  ‘Do me out of a job, huh?’ said Isserley, getting back to her exercises.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Amlis. ‘Vess Industries spends a fortune on transport.’

  ‘I’m sure they can easily afford it.’

  ‘Of course they can. But they’d rather not bother, all the same.’

  Isserley stretched her arms out horizontally and slowly skimmed them through the air.

  ‘Rich people will always want the real thing,’ she declared.

  Amlis played with his leaf, manipulating it as much as he could without destroying it.

  ‘There are plans,’ he said, ‘to market meat to the poor, in a debased form. My father’s cagey about it, of course. But I happen to know there have been some pretty weird experiments done. It’s business. My father would chop the planet into pieces if he thought there was profit in it.’

  Isserley was spinning slowly on her feet, like a propeller or a weather-vane. It was something she could not have done if her body hadn’t been tampered with. In a shy way, she was showing off to Amlis.

  ‘There’s a rather nasty snack food,’ he was explaining, ‘that’s very popular in the Estates – very thin slices of a starchy tuber fried in fat and then dried to a crisp. Vess Incorporated has been flavouring these with some kind of vodsel by-product. The demand is phenomenal.’

  ‘Trash will eat trash,’ said Isserley, stretching to the skies again.

  There was a hissing sound from outside the ship. Isserley and Amlis peered over the edge of the hull down into the steading, and watched Ensel and another man step out of the lift. The other two men gazed back at them across the empty expanse of concrete.

  ‘Just checking,’ called Ensel, his coarse voice reverberating hollowly against the metal walls, ‘to see if you were all right.’

  ‘I’m fine, Ensel,’ replied Isserley, barely acknowledging him. ‘And Mr Vess is quite safe.’

  ‘Uh … right,’ said Ensel. ‘Right.’ And without another word he turned tail and re-entered the lift, followed by his companion. Another hiss, and they were gone.

  Amlis, at Isserley’s shoulder, spoke quietly.

  ‘Ensel really cares about you, you know.’

  ‘Well, he can go fuck himself with his own tail,’ said Isserley, and licked the icpathua cud back out of her cheek for further chewing.

  Above their heads, it had started raining again, just lightly. Amlis looked up into the blackness, in wonder and puzzlement. The stars were gone; a haze had replaced them, and the luminous floating disc had moved almost out of sight. Droplets of water pattered against his fur, disappearing instantly into the dark smooth part
s, glistening and trembling on his woolly white breast. Hesitantly, he reared up on his hind limbs, leaning back on his tail, and opened his mouth. Isserley had not seen his tongue before. It was as red and clean as the petal of an anemone flower.

  ‘Isserley,’ he said, swallowing. ‘Is it true about the sea?’

  ‘Mmm?’ She was enjoying the rain on her face; she wished it would pour down.

  ‘I heard the men talk about it,’ Amlis continued. ‘A body of water that sort of … lies right next to the land and stays there permanently. They’ve seen it in the distance. They say it’s vast, and that you go there all the time.’

  ‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘It’s true.’

  The aperture in the steading roof was starting to roll shut; Ensel had evidently decided she’d had quite enough fresh air.

  ‘And when I was letting those poor vodsels go,’ said Amlis, ‘even though it was pitch dark, I saw … what looked like … trees, except absolutely enormous, taller than this building.’ His plummy accent was pitiable now; he was like a child, trying to sum up the grandeur of the universe in the stilted language of the playpen.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she smiled. ‘It’s all true. It’s all out there.’

  The steading roof had been shut now, though; the outside world was gone.

  ‘Take me out to see it, please,’ Amlis said suddenly, his voice echoing faintly in the hangar.

  ‘Out of the question,’ she responded flatly.

  ‘It’s dark,’ he urged her. ‘We wouldn’t be seen.’

  ‘Out of the question,’ she repeated.

  ‘Is it vodsels you’re worried about? How dangerous can those dumb animals possibly be?’ he pleaded.

  ‘Very dangerous,’ she assured him.

  ‘To life and limb, or to the smooth running of Vess Industries?’

  ‘I don’t give a shit about Vess Industries.’

  ‘Then take me,’ he entreated. ‘In your vehicle. I’ll behave myself, I promise. I just want to look. Please.’

  ‘I said no.’

  Minutes later, Isserley was driving slowly under the tangled bower of tree-branches, past Esswis’s farmhouse. The lights were on, as usual. Isserley’s car lights were off. She could see well enough by the light of the moon, and she didn’t have to bother with her glasses. Besides, she had travelled this path hundreds of times on foot.

  ‘Who built these houses?’ asked Amlis, squatting on the passenger seat, his hands on the edge of the dashboard.

  ‘We did,’ said Isserley evenly. She was pleased no houses were visible beyond the farm, and that her own decrepit cottage looked like something that might have been cobbled together from bits of stone and debris lying about. Of Esswis’s far grander dwelling she said: ‘That one was built for Esswis. He’s sort of my boss. He mends the fences, organizes the animal feed, that sort of thing.’

  They passed close by Esswis’s house, close enough for Amlis to see the condensation-clouded windows, with their chunky wooden ornaments on the sills.

  ‘Who carved those?’

  Isserley glanced at the sculptures.

  ‘Oh, Esswis,’ she said, automatically as they drove past. But the lie might, she suddenly realized, be the truth after all. Glowing, fading, in her mind’s eye was a row of driftwood shapes, whittled and honed to a skeletal elegance, frozen in balletic attitudes of torture, lined up side by side behind the double glazing. Maybe this was how Esswis filled the lonelier hours of winter.

  Isserley drove through the open fields, where massive round hay-bales lay scattered like black holes in the horizon. One field lay fallow, the opposite one was lush with the dark secretive greenery of potatoes. Here and there, bushes and trees that served no agricultural purpose sprouted up towards the heavens, displaying hardy flowers or long fragile twigs, each according to its kind.

  Isserley knew what Amlis must be feeling: here was plant life that did not need to be grown in tanks or grubbed out of chalky, slimy soil, but that grew straight up into the air like a gush of joy. Here was acre upon acre of tranquil fecundity, taking care of itself with no apparent help from humans. And he was seeing Ablach’s fields in winter: if only he could see what happened here in spring!

  She drove very, very slowly. The path to the shore wasn’t designed for two-wheel-drive vehicles and she didn’t want to damage her car. Also, she was nagged by an irrational fear that a bump in the track might jolt her right hand off the steering wheel and she’d trip the icpathua toggle by mistake. Although Amlis wasn’t belted in and kept shifting around on the seat in his excitement, the needles might still get him.

  At the great gate at the end of the Ablach path, not far short of the cliffs, Isserley stopped the car and turned off the engine. From here there was a clear view of the North Sea, which was silver tonight, under a sky whose eastern reaches were grey with advancing snow, while the west was still bright with the moon and stars.

  ‘Oh,’ said Amlis feebly.

  He was in shock, more or less, she could tell. He stared straight ahead at the immense, impossible waters, and she stared at the side of his face, secure in the knowledge that he was unaware of her longing.

  After a long time, Amlis was ready to ask a question. Isserley knew what it was going to be before he even opened his mouth, and answered him before he could speak.

  ‘That thin line of brightness there,’ she pointed. ‘That’s where the sea ends. Well, it doesn’t really end there, it goes on forever. But that’s where our perception of it ends. And above that: that’s where the sky begins. You see?’

  It was almost cruelly poignant, but delightful too, the way Amlis seemed to regard her as the custodian of an entire world, as if it belonged to her. Which, perhaps, it did.

  The terrible price she’d paid had made this world her own, in a sense. She was showing Amlis what could be the natural domain of anyone willing to submit to the ultimate sacrifice – a sacrifice no-one but she had dared to make. Well, she and Esswis. But Esswis rarely left his farmhouse. Too devastated, probably, by his disfigurement. The beauties of nature meant nothing to him; they were insufficient consolation. She, by contrast, kept pushing herself out there to see what there was to be seen. She exposed herself daily to the great impartial skies, glad to be consoled.

  In time, a flock of sheep walked single-file along the fringe of cliff at Ablach’s boundary. Their fleeces glowed in the moonlight, their black faces almost invisible against the tenebrous gorse.

  ‘What are those?’ marvelled Amlis, his nose almost squashed against the windscreen.

  ‘They’re called sheep,’ Isserley told him.

  ‘How do you know?’

  Isserley thought fast.

  ‘That’s what they call themselves,’ she said.

  ‘You speak their language?’ he goggled as the creatures trotted past.

  ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘A few words.’

  He watched them, every last one of them, his head moving closer and closer to Isserley’s as he followed their slow progress out of his experience.

  ‘Have you tried using them for meat?’ asked Amlis.

  Isserley was dumbfounded. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘How do I know what you people have got up to?’

  Isserley blinked repeatedly, fumbling for something to say. How could he even think of such a thing? Was it a ruthlessness that linked father and son?

  ‘They’re … they’re on all fours, Amlis, can’t you see that? They’ve got fur – tails – facial features not that different from ours …’

  ‘Listen,’ he began testily, ‘if you’re going to eat the flesh of a living creature …’

  Isserley sighed; she yearned to just place her forefinger against his lips and quieten him.

  ‘Please,’ she implored, as the last of the sheep vanished into a tunnel of gorse. ‘Don’t spoil this.’

  But, typical man, he was not to be dissuaded from wrecking the perfection of the moment; he only chose a different tack.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘
I’ve talked to the men quite a lot.’

  ‘What men?’

  ‘The men you work with.’

  ‘I work alone.’

  Amlis took a deep breath; began again.

  ‘The men say you’re not yourself.’

  Isserley snorted contemptuously. This would be Ensel he had in mind. Ensel, all mange and scars and swollen balls, spilling his guts to the visiting big shot. Man-to-man confessions.

  Sensing the poison of hatred trickling back into her system, she was sad, almost ashamed: what a relief it had been to be without it, if only for a little while! Could this little cud she’d been chewing really have such a placating effect? She turned to Amlis, and smiled awkwardly.

  ‘Have you got any more … uh …’ Don’t make me say the word, she thought.

  Amlis handed her another sprig of icpathua, from the clump he’d brought along.

  ‘The men are saying you’ve changed,’ he said. ‘Has anything bad happened to you?’

  With his gift to her still in her hand, Isserley did her best to keep her bitterness in check.

  ‘Oh, the odd stroke of bad luck, from time to time. Wealthy young men promising they’ll take care of me, then standing by as I get sent down to the shithole. My body being carved up. That sort of thing.’

  ‘I mean just recently.’

  Isserley leaned her head back against the seat, adding the icpathua to what she still had in her mouth.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she sighed. ‘I have a difficult job, that’s all. It has its ups and downs. You wouldn’t understand.’

  On the horizon, a cloud of snow was gathering with great speed. She knew he hadn’t a clue what it was, and cherished this knowledge.

  ‘Why not quit?’ he suggested.

  ‘Quit?’

  ‘Quit. Just stop doing it.’

  Isserley rolled her eyes up to heaven, or the ceiling of her car. The upholstery of that ceiling was, she noticed, in some decay.

  ‘I’m sure Vess Incorporated would be most impressed,’ she sighed. ‘Your old man would send me his personal best wishes, I’m sure.’

  Amlis laughed dismissively.

  ‘You think my father is going to come all the way out here and bite you in the neck?’ he said. ‘He’ll just send somebody to take your place. There are hundreds of people begging for the chance.’