Under The Skin. Michel Faber
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see what they’re getting,’ agreed Isserley.
‘That’s understandable,’ he said.
Isserley leaned back against her seat, extended her arms, and let him see what he might be getting.
This lift was a fortunate thing. It meant he might get to Thurso by tonight, and Orkney by tomorrow. Of course Thurso was more than a hundred miles further north, but a car travelling at an average of fifty miles per hour – or even forty, as in this case – could in theory cover the distance in less than three hours.
He hadn’t asked her where she was going yet. Perhaps she would only take him a short way, and then say she was turning off. However, the fact that she had seemed to understand his allusion to the difficulties of hitch-hiking in the dark implied she did not intend to put him back on the road ten miles further on, with darkness falling. She would speak soon, no doubt. He had spoken last. It might be impolite for him to speak again.
Her accent was not, in his opinion, a Scottish one.
Perhaps she was Welsh; the people in Wales had spoken a little like her. Perhaps she was European, though not from any of the countries he knew.
It was unusual for a woman to pick him up. Women almost invariably drove past, the older ones shaking their heads as if he were attempting some highly dangerous folly like somersaulting across the traffic, the younger ones looking pained and nervous as if he had already managed to reach inside their cars and molest them. This woman was different. She was friendly and had very big breasts which she was showing off to him. He hoped she was not wanting him for a sexual experience of some kind.
Unless it was to be in Thurso.
He could not see her face when she was looking ahead, which was a pity. It had been very remarkable. She wore the thickest corrective lenses he had ever seen. In Germany, he doubted that a person with such severe visual impairment would be approved for a driver’s licence. Her posture was, in his opinion, suggestive of some spinal problem. Her hands were large and yet unusually narrow. The skin on the edge of her hand, along her pinkie and down to the wrist, had a horny smoothness that was texturally quite different from the rest, suggesting scar tissue following surgery. Her breasts were perfect, flawless; perhaps they, too, were the product of surgery.
She was turning towards him now. Mouth-breathing, as if her perfectly sculpted little nose had indeed been sculpted by a plastic surgeon and had proved to be too small for her needs. Her magnified eyes were a little bloodshot with tiredness, but startlingly beautiful, in his opinion. The irises were hazel and green, glowing like … like illuminated microscope slides of some exotic bacterial culture.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘What is there for you in Thurso?’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘Perhaps nothing.’
He was, she noticed now, superbly built. Deceptively lean, but all muscle. He could probably have run alongside her car for a mile, if she drove slowly enough.
‘And if there is nothing?’ she said.
He pulled a face which she assumed was his culture’s equivalent of a shrug. ‘I’m going there because I have never been there,’ he explained.
The prospect seemed to fill him with ennui and enthusiasm all at once. Thick grey-blond eyebrows were gathering over his pale blue eyes like a stormcloud.
‘You’re travelling through the entire country?’ she prompted.
‘Yes.’ His enunciation was precise and slightly emphatic, but not arrogant; more as if he needed to push each utterance up a modest-sized hill before it could be released. ‘I began in London ten days ago.’
‘Travelling alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘For the first time?’
‘When I was young I have travelled a lot in Europe with my pairends.’ (This last word, as he pronounced it, was the first one Isserley had trouble decoding.) ‘But I think, in a way, I saw everything through my pairends’ eyes. Now, I want to see things through my own eyes.’ He looked at her nervously, as if confirming how foolish he’d been to engage with a foreign stranger on this level.
‘Do your parents understand this?’ enquired Isserley, relaxing as she found her way with him, allowing her foot to sink down a little on the accelerator.
‘I hope they will understand,’ he said, frowning uneasily.
Tempting though it was to pursue this connective cord to its far-off umbilicus, Isserley sensed she’d found out as much about his ‘pairends’ as he was prepared to tell her, at least for the moment. Instead, she asked, ‘What country are you from?’
‘Germany,’ he answered. Again he regarded her nervously, as if he expected she might be violent towards him without warning. She tried to reassure him by tuning her conversation to the standards of seriousness he seemed to aim for himself.
‘And what, so far, do you find is the thing that makes this country most different from yours?’
He pondered for about ninety seconds. Long dark fields dappled with the pale flanks of cows flowed by on either side of them. A sign glowed in the headlights, depicting a stylized Loch Ness Monster in three fluorescent segments.
‘The British people,’ the hitcher said at last, ‘are not so concerned with what place they have in the world.’
Isserley thought this over, briefly. She couldn’t work out whether he was suggesting that the British were admirably self-reliant or deplorably insular. She guessed the ambiguity might be deliberate.
Night settled all around them. Isserley glanced aside, admired the lines of his lips and cheekbones in the reflected head-and tail-lights.
‘Have you been staying with anyone you know in this country, or just in hotels?’ she asked.
‘Mainly in youth hostels,’ he replied after a few seconds, as if, in the interests of truth, he’d had to consult a mental record. ‘A family in Wales invited me to stay in their house for a couple of days.’
‘That was kind of them,’ murmured Isserley, observing the lights of the Kessock Bridge winking in the distance. ‘Are they expecting you back on the way home?’
‘No, I think not,’ he said, after having pushed that particular utterance up a very steep hill indeed. ‘I believe I … offended them in some way. I don’t know how. I think my English is not as good as it needs to be in certain situations.’
‘It sounds excellent to me.’
He sighed. ‘That is the problem perhaps. If it was worse, there would be an expectation of …’ He laboured silently, then let the sentence roll back down the mountain. ‘There would not be the automatic expectation of shared understanding.’
Even in the dimness she could tell that he was fidgeting, clenching his big hands. Perhaps he could hear her beginning to breathe faster, although the change was surely, she felt, quite subtle this time.
‘What do you do back in Germany?’ she asked.
‘I’m a student … well, no,’ he corrected. ‘When I get back to Germany I will be unemployed.’
‘You’ll live with your parents, perhaps?’ she hinted.
‘Mm,’ he said blankly.
‘What were you studying? Before your studies ended?’
There was a pause. A grimy black van with a noisy exhaust overtook Isserley, muffling the sound of her own respiration.
‘My studies did not end,’ the hitcher announced at last. ‘I walked away from them. I am a fugitive, you could say.’
‘A fugitive?’ echoed Isserley, flashing him an encouraging smile.
He smiled back, sadly.
‘Not from justice,’ he said, ‘but