Under the Skin (8 page)

‘It won’t go no more,’ he explained dolefully, his eyes crusty slits. ‘No more. That’s the truth. No use arguin’, eh? Eh?’

He grinned fiercely, as if hoping to charm her into dropping some opposing point of view.

‘Engine trouble?’ prompted Isserley.

‘Nah. I ran out of petrol, like,’ he said, snorting with embarrassment. ‘On account of my girlfriend, y’understand. Every minute counts, with her. But I shoulda put in more petrol, seemin’ly.’

He squinted into Isserley’s giant eyes, and she could tell he saw nothing more exotic there than the imagined reproach of a fellow motorist.

‘The fuel gauge is a piece a’shite, you see,’ he elaborated, stepping back from Isserley’s car to display his own. ‘Says empty when it’s near full. Says full when it’s near empty. Can’t listen to a word it tells ya. Ya just have to rely on your memory, y’understand?’ He yanked the door of his car open, as if intending to give Isserley a guided tour of its frailties. The light went on in the cabin – a pale and flickering light, attesting to the vehicle’s dodgy reputation. Beer cans and crisps packets littered the passenger seats.

‘I been up since five this morning,’ the snout-nosed hitcher declared, banging his car’s door shut. ‘Worked ten days straight. Four – five hours sleep a night. Wicked. Wicked. No use complainin’, though, eh? Eh?’

‘Well … can I give you a lift, perhaps?’ suggested Isserley, waving her thin arm in the empty space over her passenger seat, to capture and hold his attention.

‘It’s a can of petrol I’m needin’,’ he said, lurching into the window-frame of Isserley’s car again.

‘I haven’t got any,’ said Isserley, ‘But get into the car anyway. I’ll drive you to a garage, or maybe further. Where were you heading?’

‘To my girlfriend’s place,’ he leered, winching his eyelids up off his eyeballs again. ‘She’s got a temper. She’ll skelp my bot.’

‘Yes, but where is that exactly?’

‘Edderton,’ he said.

‘Get in, then,’ she urged. Edderton was only five miles out of Tain, thirteen miles or so from Ablach Farm. How could she lose? If she had to give him up, she could soothe her disappointment by retreating instantly to the farm; if she took him, so much the better. Either way she’d be safe in her cottage by the time Amlis Vess arrived, and might even sleep through all the brouhaha – as long as nobody came knocking on her door.

Hitcher safely strapped in, Isserley pulled away from the gutter and accelerated up the A9 towards home. She regretted that this stretch of the road was unlit and that she couldn’t legally turn on the cabin light; she would have liked this guy to have the opportunity to examine her properly. She sensed he was dim-witted, and likely just now to be fixated on solving his immediate problems; he might well need extra enticement to talk about himself. The darkness of the road, however, made her too nervous to drive with only her right hand on the steering wheel; he would just have to strain his eyes a bit, that’s all, if he wanted to see her breasts. Admittedly, his eyes looked pretty strained already. She faced front, drove carefully, and left him to it.

She would throw him out on his arse, for sure, the hitcher was thinking, but maybe she’d let him sleep a bitty first.

Ha! No chance! She’d make him look at an oven dish full of dried-out supper, and say it couldn’t be et now even though he’d be desperate to get stuck into it, but she wouldn’t let him of course. That’s what he drove like a maniac up the A9 for, every week, week after week. His girl. His Catriona. He could lift her up and toss her through the window like a vase if he wanted to, and
she
was the one who pushed
him
around. What was that all about, eh? Eh?

This girl who’d picked him up, now.
She'd
probably be all right. As a girlfriend, like. She’d let him sleep when he was dying for it, he could tell. She wouldn’t poke him just when he was drifting off and say, ‘You’re not falling asleep are you?’ Kind eyes, she had. Bloody big knockers, too. Pity she didn’t have any big containers of petrol tucked away somewhere. Still, he couldn’t complain, could he? No use complaining. Face the future with a smile, as the old man always used to say. Mind you, the old man never met Catriona.

Where was this girl going to drive him? Would she be willing to drive him back to his car again if he could get some petrol? He hated to leave his car in a ditch like that. A thief could steal it. Thief’d need petrol, though. But there were probably car thieves driving all around the countryside, with big petrol containers in the boot, just looking for a car like his. How low could some people go, eh? Dog eat dog, that’s what it all boiled down to.

Catriona would murder him if he turned up any later than he already was. That wasn’t so bad in itself, but she wouldn’t let him sleep, this was the thing. If he could get some petrol into his car he could sleep in that, and maybe visit Catriona in the morning. Or sleep in the car all weekend even, sit around in Little Chefs during the day and drive back down to work on Monday morning. Fucking great, eh? Eh?

This girl here wouldn’t mind if he rested his head back on the seat for just a few minutes, would she? He wasn’t much of a talker anyway. ‘Thick as two planks,’ Catriona always said.

But how thick exactly was a plank, eh? It just depended on the plank, didn’t it, eh?

Isserley coughed, to summon him back to consciousness. Coughing didn’t come easily to her, but she tried every so often, just to see if she could pull it off convincingly.

‘Eh? Eh?’ he yapped, his bloodshot eyes and snot-shiny snout leaping out of the dimness like startled wildlife.

‘What do you work at?’ said Isserley. She’d been quiet for a minute, assuming the hitcher was ogling her, but a strangled snort from his direction had let her know he was falling asleep.

‘Woodcutting,’ he said. ‘Timber. Eighteen years in the business, eighteen years behind a chainsaw. Still got two arms and two legs! Heh! Heh! Heh! Not bad, eh? Eh?’

He held his fingers up above the dashboard and wiggled them, presumably to demonstrate that he had all ten.

‘That’s a lot of experience,’ complimented Isserley. ‘You must be well known to all the timber companies.’

‘Yeah.’ He nodded emphatically, his chin almost bouncing off his barrel chest each time. ‘They run when they see me coming. Heh! Heh! Heh! Ya got to keep smiling, eh?’

‘You mean, they’re not satisfied with your work?’

‘They say I’m not a good time-keeper,’ he slurred. ‘I keep the trees waiting too long, y’understand? Late, late, late, that’s me. La-a-a-a-ate …’ His head was slumping, the attenuated vowel describing a slow lapse into oblivion.

‘That’s very unfair,’ Isserley remarked loudly. ‘It’s how well you do your job that matters, not the hours you keep, surely.’

‘Kind words, kind words,’ simpered the woodcutter, staring ever deeper into his lap, his tufty hair slowly rearranging itself on his compact skull.

‘So,’ exclaimed Isserley, ‘you live in Edderton, do you?’

Again he snorted to the surface.

‘Eh? Edderton? My girlfriend lives there. She’s gonna skelp my bot.’

‘So where do
you
live?’

‘Sleep in the car through the week, or bed and breakfast. Work ten days straight, thirteen sometimes. Start five in the morning summertime, seven in winter. Or I’m suppo-o-o-o-sed to …’

She was just about to rouse him from his slump when he roused himself, shifted around in his seat and actually laid his cheek against the headrest, pillow-style. He winked again, and, with a weary obsequious smile, mumbled across to her,

‘Five minutes. Just five minutes.’

Amused, Isserley drove in silence while he slept.

She was mildly surprised when, more or less exactly five minutes later, he jerked awake and stared at her dazedly. While she was thinking of something to say to him, however, he relaxed again, and laid his cheek back against the headrest.

‘’Nother five minutes,’ he pouted placatingly. ‘Five minutes.’

And once more he was gone.

Isserley drove on, this time keeping one eye on the digital clock on the dashboard. Sure enough, some three hundred seconds later, the woodcutter jerked awake again.

‘Five minutes,’ he groaned, turning his other cheek to the headrest.

This went on for twenty minutes. Isserley was in no hurry at first, but then a road sign alerted her to the fact that they would soon be driving past a services turn-off, and she felt she’d better get down to business.

‘This girlfriend of yours,’ she said, the next time he woke. ‘She doesn’t understand you, is that right?’

‘She’s got a temper,’ he admitted, as if he’d been spurred to articulate this for the first time ever. ‘She’ll skelp my bot.’

‘Have you ever thought of leaving her?’

He grinned so broadly it was like an incision slicing his head in two.

‘A good girl is hard to find,’ he chided her, barely moving his lips.

‘Still, if she doesn’t care for you …’ persisted Isserley. ‘For example, would she be worried about you if you didn’t turn up tonight? Would she try to find you?’

He sighed, a long wheezy exhalation of infinite weariness.

‘My money’s good enough for her,’ he said. ‘And,
plus
, I got cancer in the lungs. Lung cancer, in other words. Can’t feel it, but the doctors say it’s there. I might not have long, y’understand? No use giving up a bird in the hand, y’understand? Eh?’

‘Mmm,’ replied Isserley vaguely. ‘I see what you mean.’

Another sign reminding motorists that services were not far ahead flashed by, but the woodcutter was nuzzling into the seat again, mumbling, ‘Five minutes. Just another five minutes.’

And again, he was gone, his boozy breath snortling gently.

Isserley glanced at him. He sat slumped, his head lolling against the headrest, his rubbery mouth open, his red-lidded eyes closed. He might as well have been pricked by the icpathua needles already.

Isserley thought about him as she drove through the soundproof night, weighing up his pros and cons.

On the pro side, the woodcutter’s drunkenness and sleepless excesses were no doubt well understood by all who knew him; nothing would surprise them less than if he failed to turn up wherever he was supposed to be. The car would be found, full of empty alcohol containers, on a windswept ribbon of road through two mountain ranges; there would be no doubt that the driver had stumbled away, drunk, into a frozen expanse of bog and precipice. Police would dutifully search for the body, but be resigned from the outset that it might never be found.

On the con side, the woodcutter was not a healthy specimen: his lungs, by his own admission, were full of cancer. Isserley tried to visualize this; imagined someone slicing him open and being squirted in the face by a stream of malodorous black muck made of burnt cigarette tar and fermented phlegm. However, she suspected this was a lurid fantasy based on her own distaste at the thought of inhaling burning punk into her lungs. It probably bore no relation to what cancer really was.

She frowned, straining to recall her studies. She knew cancer had something to do with runaway cell reproduction … mutant growth. Did that mean that this vodsel had huge abnormal lungs crammed into his chest? She didn’t want to cause any problems for the men back at the farm.

On the other hand, who cared if the lungs were too big? They could surely be discarded whatever size they were.

On the
other
hand, she felt squeamish about bringing a vodsel onto the farm which she knew to be diseased. Not that anyone had ever told her in so many words that it was wrong, but … well, she had her own internal moral sense.

The woodcutter was murmuring in his sleep, a slack-lipped crooning sound like ‘moosh’n, moosh’n, moosh’n’, as if he were trying to placate an animal.

Isserley checked the clock on the dashboard. More than five minutes had elapsed; quite a bit more. She took a deep breath, settled back in her seat, and drove.

An hour or so later, she had bypassed Tain and was approaching the Dornoch Bridge roundabout. It struck her that the weather conditions were so different from what she had experienced earlier that day on the Kessock Bridge that they could have been on a different planet. Lit up against the pitch-black environs by strips of neon on long stalks, the roundabout glowed eerily in the windless, trafficless stillness. Isserley drove onto its steeply ascending spiral, glancing at the woodcutter to see if the blaze of light would wake him. He didn’t stir.

Pootling gently along, high up off the ground, Isserley ‘s car described an arc on the surreal concrete labyrinth. So monstrously ugly was this structure that it could have been mistaken for something from inside the New Estates, were it not for the open sky above. Isserley veered to the left to avoid crossing Dornoch Firth, and started a steep descent into leafy gloom. Her headlights, on full beam, picked out the flank of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Kingdom Hall nestled below, then tunnelled into Tarlogie forest.

Remarkably, it was now that the woodcutter squirmed in his sleep; having failed to react to the merciless lights of the roundabout, he seemed to sense, despite the darkness, the forest pressing in on the narrow road.

‘Moosh’n, moosh’n, moosh’n,’ he crooned wearily.

Isserley leaned forward as she drove, peering into the almost subterranean blackness. She felt fine. The forest’s underground effect was an illusion, after all, and so it could not exert the nauseous claustrophobic power of the New Estates. She knew the barrier keeping out the light overhead was nothing more than a feathery canopy of twigs, beyond which lay a comforting eternity of sky.

Minutes later, the car emerged from the forest into the pastured surrounds of Edderton. The dismal caravan sales-yard welcomed her to this minuscule village. Street lights illuminated the defunct post office and the thatched bus shelter. There was no sign of life.

Isserley flipped the toggle for the indicator, even though there was no vehicle to see it, and brought the car to a stop in a spot where the light was brightest.

She nudged the woodcutter gently with her strong fingers.

‘You’re here,’ she said.

He jerked violently awake, his eyes wild as if he was in immediate danger of being brained with a blunt instrument.