Michel Faber - Under the Skin

She cast her eyes disdainfully over the entire herd of them. Compared to Amlis Vess, they were scabrous grotesques, pea-brained savages. She should never have felt shame about her own deformity; she was no uglier than they were, surely, and infinitely better bred.

‘Is the high-quality meat all gone?’ she enquired, rummaging among the pots and bowls on the serving tables. The memory of her one little taste of the divine marinated steak that Hilis had prepared in honour of Amlis was suddenly haunting her.

‘Sorry, Isserley, it’s in here,’ said the squinty one with the mouldy face whose name she always forgot. He patted his mangy, distended belly and wheezed with laughter.

Isserley beamed pure contempt at him. They ought to feed you on straw, she thought, then turned her back and busied herself with her old standby of bread and mussanta paste. Better to eat that, bland though it was, than take a risk with the blistered fatty sausages and limp wedges of pie: there was no telling what sort of trash was in them.

‘Plenty of pie,’ somebody assured her.

‘No thanks,’ she smiled insincerely, as she leaned against one of the benches, ignoring offers to sit down on the floor with this man or that. Holding one hand under the thinly pasted bread to catch any crumbs that might fall, she began to eat, staring over the men’s heads, planning her day.

‘That fancy meat sure was good,’ recalled Yns the engineer, then, sniggering, quipped: ‘We’ll just have to get a few more visits from Amlis Vess, won’t we?’

Isserley looked down at him, as he grinned back at her with decayed teeth and a glisten of gravy on his snout. Yet despite her distaste, she understood all of a sudden that he was harmless, an impotent drudge, a slave, a disposable means to an end. Imprisoned underground, he was living out an existence scarcely better than what he would have known if he’d stayed in the Estates. To be brutally honest, all these men were falling apart, hair by hair and tooth by tooth, like over-used pieces of equipment, like tools bought cheap for a job that would outlast them. While Isserley roamed the airy spaces of her unrestricted domain, they remained trapped below the barns of Ablach, labouring mindlessly, grubbing in tungsten-lit gloom, breathing stale air, eating whatever offal was too gross to be of value to their masters. Amid much fanfare about escape and pioneering, Vess Incorporated had simply dug them out of one hole and buried them in another.

‘I’m sure there could be some changes made around here,’ Isserley said, ‘without needing a visit from Amlis Vess to justify them.’

This caused more guttural murmurings, meaningless insurrections mumbled by creatures without hope. Only one man spoke up.

‘There’s a rumour Vess Incorporated wants bigger shipments,’ said Ensel. He was eating a mash of green vegetable from a dish, and washing it down with fresh water rather than the ezziin favoured by the others. Isserley realized, with a pang of pity, that he was trying to take care of himself, to keep up some sort of standard. Perhaps, all this time, he’d been saving himself for her, conscientiously discouraging his fur from falling out, fur that was the colour of unrinsed potato and the texture of… of an old anorak hood.

‘I’m sure Vess Incorporated would love us all to work harder,’ she remarked.

Everyone ate in silence for a while.

You shouldn’t have taken the red-haired one, thought Isserley again. It’s over .

She grimaced, and disguised the grimace by biting into her bread. Don’t be so gutless, she chided herself. In a week, it’ll all be forgotten.

As the food dwindled, disappearing serve by serve, its individual smells waned and were replaced by a rising fug of male sweat and fermented alcohol. It was an atmosphere almost guaranteed to inspire disgust in Isserley, but today she was able to rise above it. In fact, she actually began to relax as it sank in that the men who were here now were the only ones she would need to confront. Unser, whom she’d dreaded running into so soon after her disgrace, was nowhere to be seen and the food was vanishing fast. Hilis was absent, too, as he always was by the time the meal was laid out. That was good: that suited her.

She should never have allowed herself to be led into his kitchen, looking back on it now; Hilis had tried to get too intimate with her, had carried on as if they were two of a kind. She wasn’t anybody’s kind – the sooner he understood that, the better it would be for both of them. As for Unser, he’d humiliated her when she was at her most vulnerable, the bastard. She wished she could wipe him off the face of the planet, for having abused his power like that. It was just as well he wasn’t showing his face.

Mealtime was drawing to a close; one of the men had wandered off already, and others were licking and slurping the inner reaches of their bowls and pitchers. Isserley’s relief about Hilis and Unser turned, at last, to curiosity – where were they? Then it dawned on her that it must be all a matter of hierarchy and privilege. Unser and Hilis were a cut above these brawny specimens littered around the dining hall; probably the two of them ate together in some cosy retreat – enjoying a better class of food too, no doubt. What were the two of them feasting on? She’d like to know. Those sealed supply crates that came with every monthly shipment: was it really just stuff like serslida and mussanta in them, or were there secret luxuries she never got to sample? And what about the way Vess Incorporated conveyed its messages to her via Esswis, despite the fact that everything revolved around her? Men and their little power games! She’d tackle these inequalities soon enough.

Isserley spread another slice of bread and mussanta, then helped herself to a bowl of the same green vegetable Ensel had chosen. She was determined always to go off well-fuelled from this day onwards, to make sure she never again succumbed to the humiliating helplessness of hunger far from home. She drank water by the cupful and felt her stomach swelling inside her.

‘We hear another woman might be coming,’ blurted the mouldy-faced man, then sniggered awkwardly under Isserley’s glare.

‘I wouldn’t hold your breath,’ she advised him.

Blinking, the mouldy-faced man went back to his pitcher of ezziin, but Ensel wasn’t so easily cowed.

‘What if they do send someone, though?’ he said thoughtfully. ‘It’d make a big difference to your life wouldn’t it? The way it’s been till now, it must get lonely for you sometimes. All that territory to cover, and just you to cover it.’

‘I manage,’ said Isserley evenly.

‘There’s nothing like friendship, though, is there?’ Ensel persisted.

‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ warned Isserley.

She was out of the dining hall and back on the surface within two minutes.

Mist was rolling in from the invisible horizon as she drove her car onto the A9. The road itself was still clear enough, but the fields on either side were already half lost, silos sinking into the fog, cows and sheep meekly allowing themselves to be swallowed up. A tide of white haze lapped at the grassy shores of the motorway. This is another thing Amlis would have killed to see, Isserley thought. The clouds coming down to earth. Pure water floating through the air like smoke.

There were a million things Amlis would never experience, privileged though he was, beautiful and unscarred though he was. He was a prince returning home, but his kingdom was a slag-heap compared to Isserley’s own domain. Even the Elite, sheltered from the worst of the ugliness, were like prisoners in opulent cages; they would live out their lives without even imagining the beauty that Isserley saw all around her every day. Everything they devoted themselves to was sealed indoors: money, sex, drugs, outrageously expensive food (– ten thousand liss for a fillet of voddissin!). All to distract them from the awful desolation, the darkness, the putrefaction, lying in wait for them just outside the thin skin of their homes.