Michel Faber - Under the Skin

Suddenly sinewy male arms were rearing up at her from all directions, seizing her wrists, her shoulders, her clothing.

‘Get your stinking paws off me!’ she hissed. But their grip was stronger then her own desperate flails of resistance.

‘No! No-o-o! No-o-o-o!’ she screamed as they pulled her off her feet.

The instant she fell, everything around her began to contract sickeningly. The walls shrugged themselves loose from their foundations and slid towards the centre of the room, as if attracted by the struggle. The ceiling, a massive rectangular slab of concrete furrowed with fluorescent white, also shuddered loose and loomed down on her.

Shrieking, she tried to roll herself into a ball, but she was caught spread-eagled by many strong hands. Then, the walls and ceiling gulped shut on her and she was engulfed in darkness.

BEFORE SHE WAS even properly conscious, Isserley was already aware of two smells, surreally blended: raw meat and recent rainfall. She opened her eyes. The endless night sky was all above her, glittering with a million distant stars.

She was lying on her back, in a vehicle with an open top, parked in a garage with an open roof.

It wasn’t her car; it wasn’t a car at all, she realized slowly. She was lying inside the splayed flip-top hull of the transport ship, under a yawning aperture in the steading roof.

‘I persuaded them the fresh air would do you good,’ said Amlis Vess, somewhere not so far away.

Isserley tried to turn her head to find him, but her neck was so stiff it might have been clamped in a vice. Barely breathing for fear of bringing on the pain, she lay very still, wondering what was raising her head up from the metal floor. With her clammy fingers she felt, alongside her paralysed hips, the texture of what lay beneath her: a rough woven mat, of the kind humans liked to sleep on.

‘When they brought you out of the lift, you seemed to be choking, almost suffocating,’ Amlis went on. ‘I wanted to take you outside, but the other men wouldn’t let me. And they refused to take you out themselves, either. So I got them to agree to this.’

‘Thanks,’ she murmured passionlessly. ‘I’m sure I would have survived regardless.’

‘Yes,’ he conceded, ‘no doubt you would.’

Isserley examined the sky more closely. There was still a trace of violet in it, and the moon was only just edging into view. It might be six o’clock in the evening, seven at the latest. She tried to lift her head. The response from her body was not so good.

‘Can I help you?’ said Amlis.

‘I’m just resting,’ she assured him. ‘I’ve had a very tiring day.’

Minutes passed. Isserley strove to adjust to her predicament, which struck her as both awful and laughable. She wiggled her toes, and then tried to wiggle her hips, unobtrusively. A needle of pain went through her tailbone.

Amlis Vess tactfully refrained from commenting on her sharp intake of breath. Instead he said, ‘I’ve been watching the sky ever since I got here.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Isserley. Her eyes felt unpleasantly encrusted when she blinked. She longed to wipe them.

‘Nothing I imagined really prepared me for it,’ Amlis went on. His sincerity was unmistakable, and Isserley found it oddly touching.

‘I felt the same, at first,’ she said.

‘It’s pure blue during the day,’ he observed, as if she might not have noticed this yet and he was calling her attention to it. Confronted with the sheer earnestness of his enthusiasm, she suddenly felt like shrieking with laughter.

‘Yes, it is,’ she agreed.

‘And many other colours,’ he added.

She really did have to laugh then, a snort that was mostly pain.

‘Yes, many,’ she said through clenched teeth. At last she had managed to lift her hands up, and clasped them across her belly, in a way she found comforting. Inch by inch, she was coming back to life.

‘You know,’ Amlis went on, ‘Some water fell out of the sky not so long ago.’ His voice was a little higher than usual, vulnerable with awe. ‘It just fell out of the sky. In little droplets, thousands of them close together. I looked up to see where they were coming from. They seemed to be materializing out of nowhere. I couldn’t believe it. Then I opened my mouth to the sky. Some droplets fell straight in. It was an indescribable feeling. As if nature was actually trying to nurture me.’

Isserley stroked the fabric of her top over her belly; it was slightly damp, but not very. The rain mustn’t have lasted very long.

‘The water stopped falling as abruptly as it started,’ said Amlis. ‘But even now the smell of everything has changed.’

Isserley was able to turn her head slightly now. She ascertained that she’d been laid out in front of one of the ship’s refrigerators. The base of her skull was resting on a broad pedal bar at the base of the unit, whose function was to raise the lid when stepped on. Her head wasn’t heavy enough to raise the lid; that required the body weight of a man.

To the right of her, on the metal floor almost at her shoulder, lay two trays of meat covered in transparent viscose. One tray was prime steaks, dark auburn and interleaved. The other, larger tray was densely packed with offal: bleached entrails perhaps, or brains. They smelled strong, even through the wrapping. The men really ought to have finished putting them away before leaving her here.

She turned her head to the left. Amlis was sitting some distance from her, beautiful as ever, his back limbs curled under him, his arms erect, his head raised slightly towards the open steading roof. She caught a glimpse of his sharp white teeth; he was eating something.

‘You needn’t have stayed with me,’ she said, trying to lift her knees without him noticing the effort it took.

‘I sit here most of the day and night,’ he explained. ‘The men won’t let me out of the building, of course. But I see the most extraordinary things just through this hole in the roof.’ However, he turned his attention to her now, and stood up to move closer to where she lay. She heard the gentle tick of his clawed fingers on the metal floor as he padded along.

He stopped a respectful distance from her body, an arm’s length perhaps, and let his haunches drop again, legs curling underneath. His arms remained erect, the tousled white fur of his breast pushing out between them. She had forgotten how black the down on his head was, how golden his eyes.

‘All this meat doesn’t put you off?’ she suggested tauntingly.

He ignored the barb in her comment.

‘It’s all dead now,’ he said simply. ‘There’s nothing I can do about that now, is there?’

‘I thought you might still be working on the minds and hearts of the men, you know,’ pursued Isserley, hearing herself overdoing the sarcasm.

‘Well, I did my best,’ said Amlis, in a self-deprecating purr. ‘But I can tell when a challenge is hopeless. Anyway, it’s not your minds I need to change.’ And he glanced round at the contents of the ship’s hull, acknowledging the scale of the slaughter and its commercial purpose.

Isserley watched his neck and shoulders, the way his fur was so soft it fluttered in the breeze. Her grasp on her ill-will towards him was growing weak, now that she was imagining him resting his warm fleecy breast on her back, his white teeth gently biting her neck.

‘What are you eating?’ she demanded, because his jaws seemed to be in constant motion.

‘I’m not eating anything,’ he declared insouciantly, and resumed chewing.

Isserley felt a flash of contempt: he was like all rich powerful people – smugly comfortable with lying, arrogantly indifferent to the evidence of other people’s senses. She pulled a face of disapproval, as if to say, Have it your way. He read this at once, despite the alienness of her features.