Under The Skin. Michel Faber
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as Isserley was considering finding a place to pull in and doze for a while, she spotted a silhouetted figure just below the horizon. Instantly she roused herself and dilated her eyelids attentively, pushing her glasses on straight. She checked her face and hair in the rear-view mirror. Experimentally, she pouted her lips, which were red as lipstick.
Driving past the hitcher the first time, she noted he was a male, quite tall, broad-shouldered, casually dressed. He was using both thumb and forefinger, rather slackly, as if he’d been waiting ages. Or maybe he didn’t want to appear too eager.
On the way back, she noted he was quite young, with a very short haircut in the penal Scottish style. His clothing was drab as mud. What he had inside it filled up his jacket impressively, although whether with muscle or fat remained to be seen.
Driving towards him the final time, Isserley realized he really was uncommonly tall. He was staring at her, possibly figuring out that he had already seen her a couple of minutes before, as there wasn’t much other traffic. Nevertheless, he didn’t beckon to her any more urgently, just kept his hand lazily extended. Begging was not his style.
She slowed down and brought her car to a standstill right in front of him.
‘Hop in,’ she said.
‘Cheers,’ he said breezily as he swung into the passenger seat.
Just from that one word, delivered without a smile despite the smiley facial muscles involved, Isserley already knew something about him. He was the type who needed to swerve round the saying of thanks, as if gratitude were a trap. In his world, there was nothing Isserley could do for him that would put him in her debt; everything was only natural. She had stopped to pick him up off the side of the road; fine. Why not? She was giving him, for free, something a taxi would have charged him a fortune for, and what he said to that was ‘Cheers’, as if she were a drinking pal and had just done him a trifling, perfunctory favour like sliding an ashtray into his reach.
‘No problem,’ responded Isserley, as if he’d thanked her anyway. ‘Where are you heading?’
‘South,’ he said, looking south.
A long second idled by, then he pulled the seatbelt across his torso as if reluctantly conceding this was the only way to get the two of them moving.
‘Just south?’ she enquired as she eased the car away from the kerb, careful, as always, to flip the toggle for the indicators rather than the headlights or the windscreen wipers or the icpathua.
‘Well … it depends,’ he said. ‘Where are you heading?’
She made a calculation in her head, then looked at his face to judge where he might figure in it.
‘I haven’t decided yet,’ she said. ‘Inverness, to begin with.’
‘Inverness is fine with me.’
‘But you’d like to go further?’
‘I’ll go as far as I can get.’
Another car had appeared suddenly in her rear-view mirror and she had to gauge its intentions; by the time she was able to turn back to the hitcher his face was impassive. Had his remark been impish arrogance? Sexual innuendo? Or just dull matter-of-fact?
‘Waiting long?’ she asked, to tease out more of his wit.
‘Pardon?’
He blinked at her, interrupted in the act of unzipping his jacket. Was the challenge of pulling a zip and simultaneously listening to a simple question more than his intellect could manage? He had a thin black scab etched across his right eyebrow, almost healed – a drunken fall maybe? The whites of his eyes were clear, his hair had been washed in the not too distant past, he didn’t smell – was he just stupid?
‘Where I picked you up,’ she elaborated. ‘Had you been standing there long?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t have a watch.’
She glanced down at his nearest wrist; it was big, with fine golden hairs, and two blueish veins passing over onto the backs of his hands.
‘Well, did it feel long?’
He seemed to think this over for a moment.
‘Yeah.’
He grinned. His teeth weren’t so good.
In the world outside, the sun’s rays intensified abruptly as if some responsible agency had just noticed they were shining at half the recommended power. The windscreen lit up like a lamp and beamed ultraviolet rays onto Isserley and the hitcher, pure heat with the nip of breeze neatly filtered out. The car’s heater was on full as well, so the hitcher was soon squirming in his seat, taking his jacket off altogether. Isserley watched him surreptitiously, watched the mechanics of his biceps and triceps, the roll of his shoulders.
‘OK if I put this on the back seat?’ he presumed, bundling the jacket up in his big hands.
‘Sure,’ she said, noting the ripples of muscle momentarily expressing themselves through his T-shirt as he twisted round to toss the jacket on top of her own. His abdomen was a bit fatty – beer, not muscle – but nothing too gross. The bulge in his jeans was promising, although most of it was probably testicles.
Comfortable now, he settled back in his seat and flashed her a smile seasoned by a lifetime of foul Scottish fodder.
She smiled back, wondering how much the teeth really mattered.
She could sense herself moving closer to deciding. In fact, to be honest, she was more than half-way already, and her breathing was quickening.
She made an effort to forestall the adrenaline as it leaked from her glands, by sending calming messages into herself, swallowing them down. All right, yes, he was good: all right, yes, she wanted him: but she must know a little more about him first. She must avoid the humiliation of committing herself, of allowing herself to believe he would be coming with her, and then finding out he had a wife or a girlfriend waiting.
If only he would make some conversation. Why was it always the desirable ones that sat in silence, and the misshapen rejects that prattled away unprompted? She’d had one miserable creature who’d removed a voluminous parka to reveal spindly arms and a pigeon chest: within minutes he was telling her his whole life’s story. The brawny ones were more likely to stare into space, or make pronouncements about the world in general, deflecting personal questions with the reflex skill of athletes.
Minutes flashed by and her hitcher seemed content to say nothing. Yet at least he was taking the trouble to peek at her body – in particular at her breasts. In fact, as far as she could tell from glancing sideways and meeting his own furtive eyes, he was keen for her to face front so he could ogle her undetected. OK, then: she would let him have a good stare, to see what difference it might make. The Evanton turn-off was coming soon, anyhow, and she needed to concentrate on her driving. She craned forward a little, exaggerating her concentration on the road, and allowed herself to be examined in earnest.
Immediately she felt his gaze beaming all over her like another kind of ultraviolet ray, and no less intense.
Isserley wondered, oh how she wondered, what she looked like to him, in his alien innocence. Did he notice the trouble she had gone to for him? She straightened her back against the seat, pushing her chest out.
The hitcher noticed all right.
Fantastic tits on this one, but God, there wasn’t much of her otherwise. Tiny – like a kid peering up over the steering wheel. How tall would she be? Five foot one, maybe, standing up. Funny how a lot of women with the best tits were really really short. This girl obviously knew she had a couple of ripe ones, the way she had them sitting pretty on the scoop of a low-cut top. That’s why this car was heated like an oven, of course: so she could wear a skimpy black top and air her boobs for all to see – for him to see.
The rest of her was a funny shape, though. Long skinny arms with big knobbly elbows – no wonder her top was long