On the far side, where the bridge rejoined the mainland, she negotiated the roundabout with pained and earnest concentration, to avoid being caught up in the town-bound traffic and herded to Inverness. She didn’t even bother to disguise her grimace of anxiety as she did this: she had already lost him, after all.
However, to fill the silence of their last few moments together, she offered him a small parting consolation.
‘I’ll drive you just a bit further, get you past the Aberdeen turn-off. Then at least you’ll know all the cars passing you are going south.’
‘Great, yeah,’ he said passionlessly.
‘Who knows?’ she jollied him. ‘You might get to Bradford by tonight.’
‘Bradford?’ he frowned, turning to challenge her. ‘Who says I’m going to Bradford?’
‘To see your kids?’ she reminded him.
There was an awkward pause, then:
‘I never see my kids,’ he stated flatly. ‘I don’t even know where they live, exactly. Somewhere in Bradford, that’s as much as I know. Janine – my ex-wife – doesn’t want anything to do with me. I don’t exist anymore as far as she’s concerned.’ He peered straight ahead, as if roughly calculating all the thousands of places that lay south, and comparing that number to what he himself amounted to.
‘Bradford was years ago, anyway,’ he said. ‘She could’ve moved to fuckin’ Mars by now, for all I know.’
‘So …’ enquired Isserley, changing gear with such clumsiness that the gearbox made a hideous grinding noise, ‘where
are
you hoping to get to today?’
Her hitcher shrugged. ‘Glasgow will do me,’ he told her. ‘There’s some good pubs there.’
Noticing her looking past him at the signs announcing imminent parking areas, it registered with him that she was about to discharge him from the car. Abruptly he mustered a last incongruous burst of conversational energy, fuelled by bitterness.
‘It beats sitting in the Commercial Hotel in Alness with a bunch of old boilers listening to some idiot singin’ fuckin’ “Copacabana”.’
‘But where will you sleep?’
‘I know a couple of guys in Glasgow,’ he told her, faltering again, as if that last squirt of fuel had already sputtered into the atmosphere, ‘It’s just a matter of running into them, that’s all. They’ll be there somewhere. It’s a small world, eh?’
Isserley was staring ahead at the snow-capped mountains. It looked like a pretty big world to her.
‘Mm,’ she said, unable to share his vision of how Glasgow might greet him. Sensing this, he made a small mournful gesture, an opening out of his beefy hands to show there was nothing in them.
‘Although people can always let you down, eh?’ he said. ‘That’s why you always got to have a plan B.’
And he swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bulging like a real one stuck in his neck.
Isserley nodded approvingly, trying not to let her feelings show. She was covered in sweat now, cold chills running down her back like electric currents. Her heart hammered so hard her breasts shook; she disciplined herself to take just one deep breath instead of many shallow ones. Keeping her right hand clamped securely to the steering wheel she checked the rear-view mirror, the other lane, her speed, the hitcher.
Everything was ideal, everything pointed to this moment.
Noticing her excitement, he grinned at her uncertainly, removing his hands from his lap with an awkward jerk, as if waking up, dazed, to something that might yet be expected of him. She grinned back in reassurance, nodding almost imperceptibly as if to say ‘Yes’.
Then the middle finger of her left hand flipped a little toggle on the steering wheel.
It might have been for the headlights or the indicators, or for the windscreen wipers. It was neither. It was the icpathua toggle, the trigger for the needles inside the passenger seat, to make them spring up silently from their little sheath-like burrows in the upholstery.
The hitcher flinched as they stung him through the fabric of his jeans, one needle in each buttock. His eyes, by chance, were facing the rear-view mirror, but no-one but Isserley witnessed the expression in them; the nearest vehicle was a giant lorry labelled
FARMFOODS
which was far away still, its driver an insect head behind tinted glass. In any case, the hitcher’s look of surprise was momentary; the dose of icpathua was adequate for body sizes considerably larger than his. He lost consciousness and his head lolled back into the padded hollow of the headrest.
Isserley flipped another toggle, her fingers trembling ever so slightly. The gentle tick of the indicator lights set the rhythm of her breathing as she allowed the car to drift off the road and smoothly enter the lay-by. The speedometer wobbled to zero; the car stopped moving; the engine stalled, or maybe she turned off the ignition. It was over.
As always at this moment, she saw herself as if from a height; an aerial view of her little red Toyota parked in its little asphalt parenthesis. The
FARMFOODS
lorry roared past on the straight.
Then, as always, Isserley fell from her vantage point, a dizzying drop, and plunged back into her body. Her head slammed against the headrest, quite a lot harder than his had done, and she inhaled shudderingly. Gasping, she clung to the steering wheel, as if it might stop her falling further down, into the bowels of the earth.
Finding her way back to ground level always took a little while. She counted her breaths, slowly getting them down to six a minute. Then she unclenched her hands from the steering wheel, laid them over her stomach. That was always oddly comforting.
When at last the adrenaline had ebbed and she was feeling calmer, she re-applied herself to the job in hand. Vehicles were humming past from both directions, but she could only hear them, not see them. The glass of all the car’s windows had turned dark amber, at the touch of a button on the dashboard. She was never aware of having touched that button; it must happen during the adrenaline rush. She only remembered that always, by the time she was at this point, the windows were already dark.
Something massive drove past, vibrating the ground, sweeping a black shadow across the car. She waited till it was gone.
Then she opened the glove box and fetched out the wig. It was a wig for males, but blond and curly. She turned to the hitcher, who was still frozen in position, and placed the wig carefully on his head. She smoothed some wayward locks over his ears, pecked at the fringe with her sharp fingernails to help it settle over the forehead. She leaned back and evaluated the total effect, made some more adjustments. Already he looked much like all the others she had picked up; later, when his clothes were off, he would look more or less identical.
Next she scooped a handful of different spectacles from the glove box and selected an appropriate pair. She slid them into position over the hitcher’s nose and ears.
Finally she retrieved the anorak from the back seat, allowing the hitcher’s own coat to slip onto the floor. The anorak was actually only the front half of the garment; the back had been cut away and discarded. She arranged the fur-lined facade over the hitcher’s upper torso, tucking the edges of the sleeves round his arms, draping the bisected hood over his shoulders.
He was ready to go.
She pressed a button and the amber faded from the windows like dispersion in reverse. The world outside was still chilly and bright. There was a lull in the traffic. She had about two hours ‘grace before the icpathua wore off, yet she was only fifty minutes’ drive from home.
And
it was only 9:35. She was doing well after all.
She turned the key in the ignition. As the engine started up, the rattling noise that had worried her earlier on made itself heard again.
She would have to look into that when she got back to the farm.
NEXT DAY, ISSERLEY
drove for hours in sleet and rain before finding anything. It was as if the bad weather had kept all the eligible males indoors.
Despite peering so intently through her windscreen that she began to get mesmerized by the motion of the wipers, she could identify nothing on the road except the ghostly tail-lights of other rainswept vehicles crawling through the noonday twilight.
The only pedestrians, let alone hitch-hikers, she had seen all morning were a couple of tubby youths with crewcut heads and plastic knapsacks, splashing in a gutter near the Invergordon underpass. Schoolkids, late or playing truant. They had turned at her approach and shouted something too heavily accented for her to understand. Their rain-soaked heads looked like a couple of peeled potatoes, each with a little splat of brown sauce on top; their hands seemed gloved in bright green foil: the wrappers of crisps packets. In her rear-view mirror, Isserley had watched their waddling bodies recede to coloured blobs finally swallowed up in the grey soup of the rain.
Driving past Alness for the fourth time, she could scarcely believe there was nobody there. It was usually such a good spot, because so many motorists were loath to pick up anybody they suspected might be
from
Alness. A grateful hitcher had explained this to Isserley not long ago: Alness was known, he said, as ‘Little Glasgow’, and gave the area ‘a bad name’. Illegal pharmaceutical substances were freely available, leading to broken windows and females giving birth too young. Isserley had never been to Alness itself, though it was only a mile off the road. She just drove past it on the A9.
Today, she drove past it over and over again, hoping one of its leather-jacketed reprobates might finally come forward, thumbing a lift to a better place. None did.
She considered going farther, crossing the bridge and trying her luck beyond Inverness. There, she was likely to find hitchers who were more organized and purposeful than the ones closer to home, with thermos flasks and little cardboard placards saying
ABERDEEN
or
GLASGOW
.
Ordinarily, she had no objection to going a long way to find what she was looking for; it was not uncommon for her to drive as far as Pitlochry before turning back. Today, however, she was superstitious about travelling too far from home. Too many things could go wrong in the wet. She didn’t want to end up stranded somewhere, her engine churning feebly against a deluge. Who said she had to bring somebody home every day, anyway? One a week should be enough to satisfy any reasonable person.
Giving up around midday, she headed back north, playing with the notion that if she announced resolutely enough to the universe that she’d abandoned all hope, she might be offered something after all.
Sure enough, not far from the sign inviting motorists to visit picturesque seaboard villages on the B9175, she spotted a miserable-looking biped thumbing the watery air in the snubstream of the traffic. He was on the other side of the road from her, lit up by the headlights of a procession of vehicles sweeping past. She had no doubt he would still be there when she’d doubled back.
‘Hello!’ she called out, swinging the passenger door open for him.
‘Thank Christ for that,’ he exclaimed, leaning one arm on the edge of the door as he poked his dripping face into the car. ‘I was beginning to think there was no justice in the world.’
‘How’s that?’ said Isserley. His hands were grimy, but large and well-formed. They’d clean up nicely, with detergent.
‘I always pick up hitchers,’ he asserted, as if refuting a malicious slur. ‘Always. Never drive past one, if I’ve got room in the van.’
‘Neither do I,’ Isserley assured him, wondering how long he was intending to stand there ushering rain into her car. ‘Hop in.’
He swung in, his big waterlogged. rump centering him on the seat like the bottom of a lifebuoy. Steam was already rising before he’d even shut the door; his casual clothes were soaked through and squeaked like a shammy as he settled himself.
He was older than she’d taken him to be, but fit. Did wrinkles matter? They shouldn’t: they were only skin deep, after all.
‘So, the one bloody time
I
need a lift,’ he blustered on, ‘what happens? I walk half a bloody mile to the main road in the pissing rain, and do you think any bugger will stop for me?’
‘Well …’ Isserley smiled. ‘
I
stopped, didn’t I?’
‘Aye, well you’re car number two thousand and bloody fifty, I can tell you,’ he said, squinting at her as if she was missing the point.
‘Have you been counting?’ she challenged him sportively.
‘Aye,’ he sighed. ‘Well, rough head-count, you know.’ He shook his head, sending droplets flying off his bushy eyebrows and abundant quiff. ‘Can you drop me off somewhere near Tomich Farm?’
Isserley made a mental calculation. She had ten minutes only, driving slowly, to get to know him.
‘Sure,’ she said, admiring the steely density of his neck and the width of his shoulders, determined not to disqualify him merely on the grounds of age.
He sat back, satisfied, but after a couple of seconds a glimmer of bafflement appeared on his stubbled spade of a face. Why were they not moving?
‘Seatbelt,’ she reminded him.
He strapped himself in as if she had just asked him to bow three times to a god of her choice.
‘Death traps,’ he mumbled derisively, fidgeting in a faint miasma of his own steam.
‘It’s not me that wants it,’ she assured him. ‘I just can’t afford to be stopped by the police, that’s all.’
‘Ach, police,’ he scoffed, as if she were admitting to a fear of mice or mad cow disease. But there was an undertone of paternal indulgence in his voice, and he wiggled his shoulders experimentally, to demonstrate how he was adjusting to his confinement.
Isserley smiled and drove off with him, lifting her arms high on the steering wheel to show him her breasts.
She’d better watch those, the hitcher thought. Or they’ll fall into her Corn Flakes.
Mind you, this girl needed
something
going for her, with glasses as thick as that and no chin. Nicki, his own daughter, was no pearl of beauty either, and to be honest she didn’t even make the most of what she’d got. Still, if she really was studying to become a lawyer instead of just boozing his allowance away in Edinburgh, maybe she’d end up being some use to him after all. Like, she could maybe find a few extra loopholes in the EU regulations.
What did
this
girl do for a crust? Her hands weren’t quite right. No, they weren’t normal at all. She’d buggered them up, maybe, in some heavy manual job when she was too young to handle it and too stupid to complain. Chicken-plucking. Fish-gutting.
She lived by the sea, definitely. Smelled of it. Fresh today. Maybe she worked for one of the local fishermen. Mackenzie was known to take women on, if they were strong enough and not too much trouble.
Was this girl trouble?
She was tough, that was for sure. Probably had been through hell, growing up funny-looking in one of those little seaboard villages. Balintore. Hilton. Rockfield. No, not Rockfield. He knew every single person in Rockfield.
How old was she? Eighteen, maybe. Her hands were forty. She drove like she was pulling a wonky trailer-load of hay over a narrow bridge. Sat like she had a rod up her arse. Any shorter and she’d need a couple of pillows on the seat. Maybe he’d suggest that to her – maybe she’d bite his head off if he did. Probably illegal, anyway. Highway Code regulation number three million and sixty. She’d be scared to tell them where to shove it. She’d rather suffer.
And she
was
suffering. The way she moved her arms and legs. The heating turned up full. She’d done some damage there somewhere along the line. A car accident, maybe? She had guts, then, to keep driving. A tough little bird.
Could he help her out, maybe?
Could she be any use to him?
‘You live near the sea, am I right?’ he said.
‘How can you tell?’ Isserley was surprised; she had made no conversation yet, assuming he needed more time to appraise her body.
‘Smell,’ he stated bluntly. ‘I can smell the sea on your clothes. Dornoch Firth? Moray Firth?’
It was alarming, this point-blank accuracy. She would never have expected it; he had the half-smiling, half-grimacing squint of the dull-witted. There was black engine oil on the sleeves of his shabby polyester jacket. Pale scars littered his tanned face like imperfectly erased graffiti.
Of his two guesses, she picked the one that was wrong.
‘Dornoch,’ she said.
‘I haven’t seen you around,’ he said.
‘I only arrived a few days ago,’ she said.
Her car had caught up now with the procession of vehicles that had passed him by. A long trail of tail-lights stretched, fading, into the distance. That was good. She dropped back into first gear and crawled along, absolved from speed.
‘You working?’ he asked.
Isserley’s brain was functioning optimally now, barely distracted by the steady pace of the traffic. She deduced he was probably the type who knew someone in every conceivable profession, or at least in those professions he didn’t despise.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m unemployed.’
‘You need a fixed address to get benefits,’ he pointed out, quick as a flash.
‘I don’t believe in the dole.’ She was getting the hang of him at last, and suspected this reply would please him.
‘Looking for work?’
‘Yes,’ she said, slowing down even further to allow a luminous white Mini into the queue. ‘But I don’t have much education. And I’m not that strong.’
‘Tried gathering whelks?’
‘Whelks?’
‘Whelks. It’s one of my lines of business. People just like yourself gather ’em. I sell ’em on.’
Isserley pondered for a few seconds, assessing whether she had enough information to proceed.
‘What are whelks?’ she said at last.
He grinned through his haze of steam.
‘Molluscs, basically. You’ll’ve seen ’em, living where you live. But I’ve got one here, as it happens.’ He lifted one cheek of his meaty buttocks towards her, to fish around in his right trouser pocket.
‘There’s the fella,’ he said, holding a dull grey shell up to her eye level. ‘I always keep one in my pocket, to show people.’
‘That’s very foresightful of you,’ complimented Isserley.
‘It’s to show people the size that’s wanted. There’s piddly wee ones, y’see, size of peas, that aren’t worth the bother of picking up. But these big fellas are just fine.’
‘And I could just gather them and get money for it?’
‘Nothing simpler,’ he assured her. ‘Dornoch’s good for ’em. Millions of ’em there, if you go at the right time.’
‘When is the right time?’ Isserley asked. She had hoped he’d have taken his jacket off by now, but he seemed content to swelter and evaporate.
‘Well, what you do,’ he told her, ‘is get yourself a book of the tides. Costs about 75p from the Coastguard Authority. You check when it’s low tide, go to the shore and just rake ’em in. Soon as you’ve got enough, you give me a tinkle and I come and collect.’
‘What are they worth?’
‘Plenty, in France and Spain. I sell ’em to restaurant suppliers – they can’t get enough of ’em, especially in winter. Most people only gather in summer, y’see.’
‘Too cold for the whelks in winter?’
‘Too cold for the people. But you’d do all right. Wear rubber gloves, that’s my tip. The thin ones, like women use for washing dishes.’
Isserley almost pressed him to be specific about what she, rather than he, could earn from whelk-gathering; he had the gift of half persuading her to consider possibilities which were in fact absurd. She had to remind herself that it was him she was interested in getting to know, not herself.
‘So: this whelk-selling business – does it support you? I mean, do you have a family?’
‘I do all sorts of things,’ he said, dragging a metal comb through his thick hair. ‘I sell car tyres for silage pits. Creosote. Paint. My wife makes lobster creels. Not for lobsters – no fuckin’ lobsters left. But American tourists buy ’em, if they’re painted up nice. My son does a bit of the whelk-gathering himself. Fixes cars too. He could sort that rattle in your chassis no bother.’
‘I might not be able to afford it,’ retorted Isserley, discomfited again by the sharpness of his observation.
‘He’s cheap, my son. Cheap and fast. Labour’s what costs, y’see, when it comes to cars. He’s got a constant stream of ’em passing through his garage. In and out. Genius touch.’
Isserley wasn’t interested. If she wanted a man with a genius touch, she already had one on tap, back at the farm. He’d do anything for her, and he kept his paws to himself – if only just.
‘What about
your
van?’ she said.
‘Oh, he’ll fix that too. Soon as he gets his hands on it.’
‘Where is it?’
‘About half a mile from where you picked me up,’ he wheezed, stoically amused. ‘I was half-way home with a tonload of whelks in the back. Fuckin’ engine just died on me. But my boy will sort it. Better value than the AA, that lad. When he’s not pissed.’
‘Do you have a business card of your son’s on you?’ Isserley enquired politely.
‘Hold on,’ he grunted.
Again he lifted his meaty rump, which was not destined after all to be injected with icpathua. From his pocket he removed a handful of wrinkled, dog-eared and tarnished cardboard squares, which he shuffled through like playing cards. He selected two, and laid them on the dashboard.
‘One’s me, and one’s my son,’ he said. ‘If you feel like doing a bit of whelk-gathering, get in touch. I’ll come out for any amount over twenty kilos. If you don’t get that much in one day, a couple of days will do it.’
‘But don’t they spoil?’
‘Takes ’em about a week to die. It’s actually good to let ’em sit for a while so as the excess water drains out. And keep the bag closed, or they’ll crawl out and hide under your bed.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ promised Isserley. The rain was easing off at last, allowing her to slow the windscreen wipers down. Light began to seep through the greyness. ‘Here’s Tomich Farm coming up,’ she announced.