Michel Faber - Under the Skin

‘I need to know she’ll still be there when I get back,’ he pleaded.

‘Mm,’ said Isserley. Sweat was stinging the fingers of her left hand and her wrist ached. ‘Excuse me,’ she whispered. ‘I… I have to pull over for a minute. I’m not… feeling so good.’

The car was already travelling at a crawl. She allowed it to roll into the nearest parking area and brought it to a halt. The engine shuddered and was still. Supporting herself with one quivering fist against the steering wheel, she wound open a window with the other.

‘You’re not a well girl, are you?’

She shook her head, unable to speak.

They sat in silence for a while, as the fresh air blew in. Isserley breathed deeply, and so did the vodsel. He seemed to be struggling with something, just as she was.

Eventually he said, in a low desolate tone, but very distinctly:

‘Life is shit, you know that?’

‘I don’t know,’ sighed Isserley. ‘This world is very beautiful.’

He grunted disdainfully.

Leave it to the animals, I reckon. Leave the whole fucking lot to the animals.’ That seemed to be his final word on the subject, but then when he saw that Isserley had begun to cry, he lifted his filthy hand and hesitantly pawed the air near Isserley’s shoulder. Thinking better of it, he folded both his hands into his lap and looked away, out of the passenger window.

‘I’ve had my outing for today,’ he said softly. ‘How about you just let me out here?’

Isserley looked him straight in the eyes. They were shiny with unwept tears, and she could see a tiny Isserley reflected in each one.

‘I understand,’ she said, and flipped the icpathua toggle. The vodsel’s head tipped against the glass of the passenger window and rested there. The wispy grey hair growing out of his neck fluttered in the breeze.

Isserley wound up her window and pressed the button to make the glass turn dark. As soon as the interior of the car was dim and private, she pulled the vodsel back from the side window and turned his face to the front. His eyes were closed. He looked peaceful, not shocked and apprehensive like the others. He might have been sleeping, snoozing an over-long journey away, a slumber of a thousand light-years.

Isserley opened the glove box and selected a wig and a pair of spectacles. She fetched the anorak from the back seat. She dressed her fellow-traveller carefully, smoothing his dull, faded hair under a mop as black and glossy as his own might once have been. His brows were warm and bristly against the scarred flesh of her palms.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’

When he was ready to go, she lightened the windows and started the car. She was less than twenty minutes from home, traffic permitting.

Back on Ablach Farm, Ensel was first out of the steading as usual, to greet her. Everything, it seemed, was back to normal.

Isserley opened the passenger door, and Ensel appraised what was sitting there.

‘A beauty,’ he complimented her. One of the best ever.’

That’s when Isserley finally lost it.

‘Don’t say that!’ she screamed at the top of her voice. ‘ Why must you always fucking say that!’

Flinching at the violence of her response, Ensel seized hold of the body between them. Isserley seized hold too, struggling to keep him upright as he was dragged along the seat into the outstretched arms of the waiting men. ‘He’s not the best,’ she raged as she clutched and pushed. ‘He’s not the worst. He’s just a… just a…’ Slipping from all their grasps, the body fell heavily on the stony ground. Isserley shrieked in fury, ‘Fuck you! ’

Leaving the scabrous beasts to their bumbling and grunting, she drove to her cottage in a cloud of dust.

Two hours later, just as she was starting to calm down, she found Esswis’s note in her pocket, and re-read it, this time forcing herself to decipher the last few lines. Vess Incorporated had just one extra request of her, it seemed. They were wondering if she could perhaps see her way clear to supplying them with a vodsel female, preferably one with intact eggs. There was no need to process the female. Just wrap her up carefully, send her along, and Vess Incorporated would take care of the rest.

NAKED AND AFRAID of sleep, Isserley roamed her house from room to room, in the dark, hour upon hour. Her route was spiral, beginning in her bedroom, then along the landing to the other bedroom she never used, then downstairs to the rotten-floored hallway, the empty master bedroom, the front room filled with twigs and branches, the gutted kitchen, the clammy bathroom. She paced each one, going over and over in her mind the story of her life so far, and what she could do in the future.

Among the things she considered, to take her through until the morning at least, was knocking down the inner walls of the cottage. The idea came to her in the front room downstairs, when she’d suddenly picked up a big stick and swung it with all her strength against the nearest surface. It was very satisfying: the plaster exploded on impact, exposing a dark cavity and a rib of rough wood. She hit it again, and more fell away. Maybe she would turn the house into one big room. Maybe she would knock the whole fucking place down.

After bashing the wall for twenty minutes or so, she had a hole barely big enough to crawl through, and wielding the stick had ceased giving her the satisfaction of the first few blows. The scar-line where her sixth finger had been amputated was throbbing in pain, and the savagery of her swings was doing something bad to her spine. So, she gave up, and resumed pacing. Her bare feet collected debris. She moved from room to room, tapping the walls with her nails. The house creaked and rustled. Outside in the trees of Ablach Farm, owls were calling to each other, screaming like human women in orgasm. The wind was swollen with the sound of waves crashing on the sea-shore. Somewhere in the farther distance, a foghorn blew.

It was well after midnight when Isserley finally went to bed, too tired to think any more. She had a number of half-formed plans now, and she hoped she’d stayed awake long enough to make sure the sun would be up by the time she awoke.

She slept deeply, for what seemed like a very long time, but when she resurfaced, gasping in terror, it was still pitch dark. The sheets were tangled tightly around her legs, damp and humid, slightly abrasive with grains of plaster, fragments of twig, dirt. She touched herself all over: the flesh of her arms and shoulders was as hot as meat newly fetched from the oven, but her legs were stone cold. Of all the phases of sleep to be woken from, this was the worst.

Cruelly, even though her system hadn’t got round to restoring its equilibrium, it had still managed to squeeze in her usual nightmare about being buried alive, abandoned, condemned to die in an airless prison.

And yet… was it her usual nightmare? Glimpsing its after-image as it faded from her mind, she realized there was something different about it. The way it had made her feel was the same as always, but for the first time, the creature at the centre of the drama seemed to be someone other than herself. Not at the beginning, no: at the beginning it was unmistakably Isserley, being led down into the bowels of the earth. But by the end she seemed to have changed shape, size and species. And in those last anxious seconds before waking, the dream hadn’t been about a human being anymore, but a dog, trapped inside a vehicle in the middle of nowhere. Her master wasn’t coming back, and she was going to die.

As soon as she was fully awake, Isserley disentangled herself from the bedclothes, hugged her cold legs in her warm arms, and began to argue herself back from the brink of panic.