by Michel Faber
Forty-five minutes later, she was huddled in the grass behind a parking area in Saltburn, straining to vomit. Her mouth was stretched wide open, saliva drooling off the point of her tongue, but when the gush finally came, it went up her nose instead, spraying and bubbling out of her constricted nostrils like carbonated gravy. For a minute she thought she was going to choke to death, or that the vomit was going to scald its way up her tear ducts and drip out of her eyes. But these were delusions of panic, and the spasms subsided before long.
When it was all over, Isserley removed, with trembling hands, the screw top of a large bottle of Aqua Viva – water, apparently. She’d bought it at the same time as the Chicken Roll, just in case the unfamiliar meat didn’t agree with her. She’d strongly suspected it wouldn’t, but she’d given it a chance. The riddle of what she could safely eat would not be solved in a day. Trial and error would teach her what she could get away with. In the meantime, she sucked at the plastic nub of the water bottle, gulping the soothing clear liquid down.
She wouldn’t starve. There were potatoes growing in the fields, turnips scattered for the sheep, apples on the trees. These were all perfectly fit for human consumption, as the men on Ablach Farm proved every day in the Dining Hall. It wasn’t enough, but she would survive. In time, she would discover foods she couldn’t yet imagine, foods which would remind her of the delicacies of her childhood, foods which would make her feel languorous and satisfied and complete.
It was all out there somewhere, she was sure.
Driving back towards her bower by the loch, along the narrow road through the forest, she was alarmed to see a vodsel up ahead, gesturing extravagantly for her to stop. He wasn’t a police officer, he was a hitcher, but he was very agitated, almost dancing on the carriageway itself. She swerved in an attempt to avoid him, but he sprang into her path, spreading his arms wide, forcing her to brake to a sudden halt.
He was a massive specimen, young and superbly muscled beneath his leather jacket, but his face was wild.
‘Ah’m soarry! Ah’m soarry!’ he cried, slamming his palms down on the bonnet of her car, fixing her with an imploring stare. ‘But Ah hud tae make yi stoap!’
‘Please get out of the way!’ called Isserley through the windscreen, revving her engine threateningly. ‘I don’t pick up hitchers!’
‘Mah girrilfriend’s huvin’ a bebby!’ he bawled back at her, waving one meaty arm at an invisible point beyond the forest. ‘Fer pity’s sake! Ah’ve come a hunnert fifty miles, and Ah’ve goat aboot five fuckin’ miles tae go!’
‘I can’t help you!’ shouted Isserley.
‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ!’ he grimaced, slapping himself on the forehead. ‘Ah’m nae gonny pit a hand on yi. Ah’ll jest sit! Yi kin tie me up, pit a knife tae mah throat, Ah dinnae care whit yi dae – mah girrilfriend’s huvin’ a bebby! Ah’m gonny be a faither!’
It was obvious he wasn’t going to let her go, so she opened the passenger door and let him in.
‘Thanks,’ he said, sheepishly. ‘Yir a pal.’
Shona, he was thinking. Hold on, Shona.
Isserley didn’t reply, but jerked the car into motion with an awkward grind of gears. Five miles, and she could be rid of him. And if she didn’t speak, maybe he wouldn’t either.
‘I cannae tell yi whit this means tae me,’ he said hoarsely after a few seconds.
‘It’s OK,’ said Isserley, staring intently at the road ahead. ‘Just let me drive.’
‘I love her so much,’ he said.
‘Good,’ said Isserley.
‘She rang me up last night, when Ah wis already in mah bed, on the rig, y’ken. “Jimmy, Ah’m in labour,” she says. “It’s come on a week early. Ah know yi cannae get home. Ah jest wanted yi tae know.” Ah wis oaff that rig like a rocket!’
‘Good,’ said Isserley.
There was a pause as the car pootled along, at forty-five miles an hour as usual. To Isserley’s eyes, the trees were flashing by on either side, a blur, though she had to admit the deserted road ahead looked static.
‘Kin yi nae drive a wee bitty faster?’ the vodsel asked at last.
‘I’m doing my best,’ Isserley warned him. Even so, she nudged her foot against the accelerator. Then, to take his mind off the car’s speed, she asked him:
‘Is this your first child?’
‘Aye. Aye,’ he enthused, then breathed deep. ‘Immortality·’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Immortality. That’s whit weans are, y’ken? An endless line of weans through history, y’ken? All this life efter death stuff disnae make sense tae me. Dae you believe in it?’
Isserley was having so much trouble decoding his accent and certain key words that she failed to grasp what he was really asking her.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
He was not to be stopped, however. A raw nerve had been touched, even though he was the one who’d touched it.
‘The Wee Free Church says mah bebby’s gonny be a bastard,’ he complained, ‘because me and mah girril’s nae married. Whit’s that all aboot? Fuckin’ prehistoaric, y’ken?’
Isserley pondered this for a second, then smiled and shook her head in defeat.
‘I don’t understand a word you’re saying,’ she confessed.
‘Whit religion are you?’ he immediately asked her.
‘I haven’t got any religion,’ she said.
‘Yir parents, then?’
Isserley thought a moment.
‘Where I come from,’ she replied carefully, ‘religion is … dead.’
The vodsel hummed in sympathy, then carried on with his incomprehensible sermon as they plunged deeper into the forest.
‘Reincarnation quite appeals tae me,’ he said, straining to suppress his excitement. ‘Shona – mah girrilfriend – says it soonds daft, but there’s sumpn in it, Ah reckon. Everythin’s goat a soul, and yi cannae destroy a soul. Plus yi get tae huv anither try – dae better next time. ‘He laughed loudly, showily, as if inviting her to join in.’ Who knows, eh? Ah might come back as a wumman, or a wee beastie!’
Rounding a corner, they sped downwards into a small valley, and Isserley eased her foot down on the brake, simultaneously turning the steering wheel. Without warning, the rattle in the chassis reappeared, beating much louder than ever before, and the whole vehicle shuddered. An instant later, the car reached the lowest point of the slope, and its locked wheels made contact with a grey slick of frost.
Almost in a dream, Isserley felt her vehicle sliding free of the tarmac’s friction, as if it were launching itself on water or into the air. Two big male hands clasped over her own on the steering wheel, and helped her wrench it round, but it made no difference. The car flew smoothly off the edge of the road and, with a ferocious smack, collided with a tree.
Isserley was unconscious only for a second, or so it seemed. Her spirit fell back into her body as if from a height, like it had always done when she’d just stung a vodsel. If anything, the impact of landing seemed gentler than she was used to. Her breathing wasn’t as laboured, and her heart wasn’t hammering. The trees of the forest were almost supernaturally vivid in front of her eyes, until she realized that both her glasses and the windscreen were gone.
She looked down. Her green velvet trousers were sprinkled with broken glass and saturated with dark blood, and a twisted wedge of metal was taking up all the space where she would have expected her knees to be. She felt very little pain, and she guessed this must be because her spine was shattered. The crescent of the steering wheel had penetrated her breasts, leaving her torso uninjured. Her neck, though, felt better than it had for years, and this realization jerked a hysterical sob of laughter and grief from her. Something warm and gelatinous, trapped inside her top and Pennington’s pullover, slid down her abdomen and into her lap. She shuddered in revulsion and fear.
The vodsel was no longer next to her. He’d been thrown through the windscreen. She couldn’t see his body from where she sat.
The torn fabric of one of her trouser legs started making a little flapping, sucking noise, and she felt desperately sick, but managed to look away. She noticed then that the icpathua needles were sticking out of the upholstery of the passenger seat. There’d been a malfunction. Knowing it was absurd, Isserley punched the edge of the seat feebly with a bloodied fist, trying to make the needles retract. They didn’t.
Suddenly, somewhere behind her on the road, a car screeched to a halt, and a car door slammed. Footsteps scattered gravel.
Acting automatically, Isserley reached over to the glovebox and fetched out the first pair of glasses to hand. She jammed them onto her face, and was immediately half-blinded by them: they were real optical lenses, of course, not clear glass.
A figure was looming close to her, leaning towards where the driver’s window had been; a small figure with a haze of pink throat, bright yellow clothing and a halo of dark hair.
‘Are you all right?’ said a tremulous female voice.
Isserley laughed helplessly, snorting a dribble of wetness from one of her nostrils. She wiped it on her wrist, recoiling a little in surprise from the distorted magnification of her arm and unfamiliar feel of wool against her cheek.
‘Don’t move,’ said the female voice, toughening up. ‘I’ll get help. Just sit tight.’
Isserley laughed again, and this time the other woman laughed with her, a nervous hiss.
The blur of colours flitted out of Isserley’s range of vision, and she heard the crackle of undergrowth in front of the car. The woman’s voice came again, louder, almost businesslike.
‘Is this … your partner?’ she called, from what sounded like quite a long way away.
‘A hitcher,’ said Isserley. ‘I didn’t know him.’
‘He’s alive,’ said the woman. ‘He’s breathing.’
Isserley leaned her head back on the seat and inhaled deeply herself, trying to decide how she felt about the vodsel’s survival.
‘Take him with you, please,’ she said after a moment.
‘I can’t,’ said the woman. ‘We’ve got to wait for the ambulance men.’
‘Please, please take him with you,’ said Isserley, squinting into the green and brown haze in search of her.
‘I really can’t,’ insisted the woman, calm now. ‘He’s probably got spinal injuries. He needs expert attention.’
‘I’m worried my car will catch fire,’ said Isserley.
‘Your car won’t catch fire,’ the woman said. ‘Don’t panic. Just stay calm. You’re going to be fine.’
‘At least take his wallet,’ Isserley pleaded. ‘It’ll tell you who he is.’
The undergrowth crackled again, and the bright colours swam back into Isserley’s field of vision. Again the woman was standing at the hole in the driver’s window. A warm, small hand laid itself against Isserley’s neck.
‘Listen, I have to leave you for a few minutes while I find a phone. I’ll be back as soon as I’ve rung an ambulance, OK?’
‘Thank you,’ said Isserley. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed pale collarbones and a curve of bosom inside a peach-coloured top, as the woman leaned over Isserley’s shoulder to lift something off the back seat.
‘The Mercy Hospital isn’t far,’ the woman reassured her. ‘You’ll be away in no time.’
Isserley felt the warm hands on her again, and realized belatedly that her own flesh was frigidly cold. The woman was wrapping her up in the anorak, gently tucking it around her shoulders.
‘You’re going to be all right, OK?’
‘OK,’ nodded Isserley. Thank you.’
The woman disappeared then, and the sound of her car driving off faded into silence.
Isserley removed the spectacles and dropped them into her lap, where they landed with a patter of windscreen glass. She blinked, wondering why things were still out of focus. Tears ran down her cheeks, and her view through the shattered windscreen cleared.
Isserley checked the top of the dashboard, where Yns, at the same time as he’d set up the icpathua network, had installed the other little alteration to the car’s original design: the button for the aviir. Unlike the icpathua connections, which involved fragile electrics and hydraulics that had obviously been damaged in the accident, the connection between the dashboard button and the cylinder of aviir was one simple, sturdy tube, waiting only for a squirt of something foreign into the oily liquid.
The aviir would blow her car, herself, and a generous scoop of earth into the smallest conceivable particles. The explosion would leave a crater in the ground as big and deep as if a meteorite had fallen there.
And she? Where would she go?
The atoms that had been herself would mingle with the oxygen and nitrogen in the air. Instead of ending up buried in the ground, she would become part of the sky: that was the way to look at it. Her invisible remains would combine, over time, with all the wonders under the sun. When it snowed, she would be part of it, falling softly to earth, rising up again with the snow’s evaporation. When it rained, she would be there in the spectral arch that spanned from firth to ground. She would help to wreathe the fields in mists, and yet would always be transparent to the stars. She would live forever. All it took was the courage to press one button, and the faith that the connection had not been broken.
She reached forward a trembling hand.
‘Here I come,’ she said.
UNDER THE SKIN
MICHEL FABER was born in Holland, brought up in Australia and now lives in the Scottish Highlands. His stories have been widely anthologised and his debut collection, Some Rain Must Fall, won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award in 1999, while Under the Skin was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, 2000. He is also the author of two exceptional novellas as well as the immensely ambitious ‘Victorian’ novel, The Crimson Petal and the White, published to outstanding acclaim in 2002. More recently he has written the highly acclaimed The Fahrenheit Twins and The Apple, in which he revisits the world of The Crimson Petal.
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2000
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.
This digital edition first published in 2008
by Canongate Books Ltd
Copyright © Michel Faber 2000
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
The lines from ‘May You Never’ and ‘Over the Hill’ are written by
John Martyn, © 1973 Warlock Music Ltd. Permission has been sought
for the use of the lines from ‘You’re My World’.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 373 2
www.meetatthegate.com
Table of Contents
Under The Skin
Title Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
About the Author
Copyright
