Under The Skin. Michel Faber
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… chicken feet. And tough, like she’d done hard labour with them, maybe worked in a factory. He couldn’t see her legs properly, she was wearing those horrible flared seventies trousers that were back in fashion – shiny green, for Christ’s sake – and what looked like Doc Martens, but there was no disguising how short her legs were. Still, those tits … They were … like … they were like … He didn’t know what to compare them to. They looked pretty fucking good, nestled next to one another there, with the sun shining on them through the windscreen.
Never mind the tits, though: what about the face? Well, he couldn’t see it just now; she had to actually turn towards him for him to see it, because of her haircut. She had thick, fluffy hair, mouse-brown, hanging down straight so he couldn’t even see her cheeks when she was facing front. It was tempting to imagine a beautiful face hidden behind that hair, a face like a pop singer or an actress, but he knew different. In fact, when she’d turned towards him, her face had kind of shocked him. It was small and heart-shaped, like an elf in a kiddie’s book, with a perfect little nose and a fantastic big-lipped curvy mouth like a supermodel. But she had puffy cheeks and was also wearing the thickest glasses he’d seen in his life: they magnified her eyes so much they looked about twice normal size.
She was a weird one all right. Half Baywatch babe, half little old lady.
She drove like a little old lady. Fifty miles an hour, absolute max. And that shoddy old anorak of hers on the back seat – what was that all about? She had a screw loose, probably. Nutter, probably. And she talked funny – foreign, definitely.
Would he like to fuck her?
Probably, if he got the chance. She’d probably be a much better fuck than Janine, that was for sure.
Janine. Christ, it was amazing how just thinking of her could bring him right down. He’d been in a great mood until now. Good old Janine. If ever your spirits are getting too up, just think of Janine. Jesus … couldn’t … he just forget it? Just look at this girl’s tits, blazing in the sun, like … He knew what they looked like now: they looked like the moon. Well, two moons.
‘So, what are you doing in Inverness?’ he said suddenly.
‘Business,’ she said.
‘What do you do?’
Isserley thought for a moment. It was so long since anything had been said, she’d forgotten what she’d decided to be this time.
‘I’m a lawyer.’
‘No kidding?’
‘No kidding.’
‘Like on TV?’
‘I don’t watch TV.’ This was true, more or less. She’d watched it almost constantly when she’d first come to Scotland, but nowadays she only watched the news and occasionally a snatch of whatever happened to be on while she was exercising.
‘Criminal cases?’ he suggested.
She looked him briefly in the eyes. There was a spark there that might be worth fanning.
‘Sometimes,’ she shrugged. Or tried to. Shrugging while driving was a surprisingly difficult physical trick, especially with breasts like hers.
‘Anything juicy?’ he pushed.
She squinted into her rear-view mirror, slowing the car to allow a Volkswagen pulling a caravan to overtake.
‘What would you think was juicy?’ she enquired as the manoeuvre slipped gently into place.
‘I don’t know …’ he sighed, sounding doleful and playful at the same time. ‘A man kills his wife ’cause she’s playing around with another guy.’
‘I may have had one of those,’ Isserley said noncommittally.
‘And did you nail him?’
‘Nail him?’
‘Did you get him sent down for life?’
‘What makes you think I wouldn’t be defending him?’ she smirked.
‘Oh, you know: women together against men.’
His tone had grown distinctly odd: despondent, even bitter, and yet flirtatious. She had to think hard how best to respond.
‘Oh, I’m not against men,’ she said at last, changing lanes reflectively. ‘Especially men who get a raw deal from their women.’
She hoped that would open him up.
But instead he was silent and slumped a little in his seat. She looked aside at him, but he didn’t allow eye contact, as if she’d failed to respect some limit. She settled for reading the inscription on his T-shirt, AC/DC, it said, and in large embossed letters, BALLBREAKER. She had no idea what on earth this might mean, and felt suddenly out of her depth with him.
Experience had taught her there was nothing to do about that but try to go deeper.
‘Are you married?’ she asked.
‘Was,’ he stated flatly. Sweat was glistening beneath the hairline of his big prickly head; he ran his thumb under the seatbelt as if it were smothering him.
‘You won’t be so keen on lawyers, then,’ she suggested.
‘It was OK,’ he said. ‘Clean break.’
‘No children, then?’
‘She got ’em. Good luck to her.’ He said this as if his wife were a distant and repugnant country on which there was no point trying to impose the customs of a more civilized society.
‘I didn’t mean to pry,’ said Isserley.
‘S’alright.’
They drove on. What had seemed like growing intimacy between them hardened into mutual unease.
Ahead of them, the sun had risen above the car’s roof, leaving the windscreen filled with a harsh unpunctuated whiteness that threatened to become painful. The forest on the driver’s side thinned out and was replaced by a steep embankment infested with creepers and bluebells. Signs printed in several languages unknown to Isserley reminded foreigners not to drive on the wrong side of the road.
The temperature inside the car was approaching stifling, even for Isserley, who could tolerate extremes without particularly caring. Her glasses were starting to fog up, but she couldn’t take them off now: he mustn’t see her eyes without them. A slow, subtle trickle of perspiration ran down her neck onto her breastbone, hesitating on the brink of her cleavage. Her hitcher seemed not to notice. His hands were drumming desultorily on his inner thighs to some tune she couldn’t hear; as soon as he realized she was watching, he stopped abruptly and folded his hands limply over his crotch.
What on earth had happened to him? What had brought on this dismal metamorphosis? Just as she’d grown to appreciate how attractive a prospect he was, he seemed to be shrinking before her eyes; he wasn’t the same male she’d taken into her car twenty minutes ago. Was he one of those inadequate lugs whose sexual self-confidence depended on not being reminded of any real females? Or was it her fault?
‘You can open a window if you’re too hot,’ she offered.
He nodded, didn’t even speak.
Isserley pressed her foot gingerly down on the accelerator, hoping this would please him. But he just sighed and settled further back in his seat, as if what he considered to be an insignificant increase in speed only reminded him how slowly they were getting nowhere.
Maybe she shouldn’t have said she was a lawyer. Maybe a shop assistant or an infant teacher would have brought him out more. It was just that she’d taken him to be a rough, robust kind of character; she’d thought he might have a criminal history he’d start to talk about, as a way of teasing her, testing her out. Maybe the only truly safe thing she could have been was a housewife.
‘Your wife,’ she rejoined, striving for a reassuring, companionable,