When she’d got the news that she was going to be sent there, Isserley had made a fierce and solemn vow to stay healthy and beautiful against the odds. Refusing point-blank to be changed physically would be her revenge on the powers that be, her recoiling kick of defiance. But would she have had a hope, really? No doubt everybody vowed at first that they wouldn’t allow themselves to be transformed into a beast, with hunched back, scarred flesh, crumbling teeth, missing fingers, cropped hair. But that’s how they all ended up, didn’t they? Would she have been any different, if she’d gone there rather than here?
Of course not. Of course not. And now, the way things had turned out, she didn’t look any worse now than the worst Estate trash, did she?… or not much worse, anyway. And look what she’d got in exchange!
She looked at the whole wide world, from her rocky vantage point on the shore of Ablach Farm. It was unbelievably marvellous. She felt like running about in it forever – except that she couldn’t run anymore.
Not that she’d have been doing any running in the Estates. She’d have been shambling around spiritlessly, along with all the other losers and low-lifes, in underground corridors of bauxite and compacted ash. She’d have been working her guts out in a moisture filtration plant or an oxygen factory, toiling in filth like a maggot among other maggots.
Instead, here she was, free to wander in an unbounded wilderness swirling with awesome surpluses of air and water.
And all she had to do in return, when it came right down to essentials, was walk on two legs.
Of course that wasn’t all she’d had to do.
To stop herself thinking about the more embittering specifics of her sacrifice, Isserley abruptly decided to get back to work. There was only so much freedom she could wallow in before she began to grow uneasy. Work was the cure.
She’d already thrown the German hitcher’s keys and wristwatch into the sea, where they would be re-shaped and re-textured along with all the other jetsam of the millennia. The empty plastic bag she had tucked into the waistband of her trousers, to avoid littering the beach. It was littered enough already with ugly plastic flotsam from passing ships and oil rigs; one day she would light a giant bonfire on the shore and burn all the rubbish on it. She kept forgetting to bring the equipment, that’s all.
Now she retrieved her shoes and pulled them on, with some difficulty, over her icy and somewhat swollen feet. She’d overdone the exposure to the cold, perhaps. A few hours in her little overheated car would put her to rights.
She strode over the shore towards the grassy fringe of pasture. Her sheep had rejoined its flock, far away now on the upper reaches of the hill. Trying to discern which sheep was the one she’d spoken to, Isserley stumbled and almost fell, made clumsy by the shoes; she must keep her eyes on where she was stepping. Intricate tangles of bleached and sundried seaweed lay scattered at the very edge of the living vegetation, resembling the skeletons, or parts of skeletons, of nonexistent creatures. In amongst these deceptive simulacra, authentic husks of cannibalized seagulls fluttered in the wind. Sometimes, but not today, there was a dead seal, its back flippers tangled in an off cut of fishing net, its body hollowed out by other citizens of the sea.
Isserley walked along the path the generations of sheep-flocks had made, up the tiers of the hill. In her mind, she was already behind the wheel.
When she got back to the cottage, the bonfire had died. There was a halo melted around it, a dark circle of ash and scorched grass in the snow. On the pyre itself, some of the rucksack still lay unconsumed. She pulled the sooty metal support struts out of the ashes and cast them aside, for disposal later. Tomorrow, perhaps, if she was ready for the sea again by then.
She let herself into the house and walked straight to the bathroom.
It, like all the rooms in the house, had a bare and uninhabited appearance, tainted by mildew and the chaff of insects. Dim light leaked in through a tiny window of filthy frosted glass. A jagged shard of mirror slumped crookedly in the alcove behind the sink, reflecting nothing but peeling paintwork. The bathtub was clean but a little rusty, as was the sink. The yawning interior of the lidless toilet bowl, by contrast, was the colour and texture of bark; it had not been used for at least as long as Isserley had lived here.
Pausing only to remove her shoes, Isserley stepped into the ochre-streaked bathtub. Screwed into the wall above her head, there was a shower nozzle which she instructed by means of a Bakelite dial to spurt pressurized water down over her. Even as the torrent sputtered out, she was taking off her clothes and letting them fall into the tub around her feet.
On the rust-mottled ledge of the bath, three different bottles of shampoo stood ready. Together, they had cost exactly five pounds at the Arabella Service Station. Isserley picked up her favourite and squirted the pale green syrup over her hair. Then she squirted more of the stuff over her naked body and, lavishly, down into the sodden heap of clothing at her feet. With one foot she pushed the squelching pile over the plughole to allow the water level in the tub to rise.
She washed her hair carefully, rinsing it over and over. Her hair had always been her best feature, back home. A member of the Elite had once told her that with hair like hers it was out of the question she could possibly be destined for the New Estates: a cheap and fatuous compliment, in retrospect, but thrillingly encouraging at the time. She’d felt as if her passage into a bright future was a matter of physical inevitability, a lush and glossy birthright everyone could see at a glance, and a lucky few could stroke admiringly.
So little of it was left now that she couldn’t bear to cherish it anymore. Most of it would never grow back again, the rest was just a nuisance.
She stroked the skin of her shoulders and arms, checking if she needed to shave again just yet. Her palms, slippery with lather, detected the soft stubble, but she decided she could get away with leaving it for one more day. Lots of females had a bit of hair on them, she’d discovered. Real life wasn’t at all like the smooth images celebrated by magazines and television. Anyway, nobody would see it.
She lathered up her breasts and rinsed them, with distaste. The only good thing about them was that they prevented her seeing what had been done to her down below.
Redirecting the shower nozzle, she turned her attention to the clothes, which now swirled in a shallow pool of sudsy grey water. She trampled them, rinsed them, trampled them some more, then wrung them out in her powerful claws. They would dry out, eventually, in a square of sunlight shining through her bedroom window, or, if that failed, on the back seat of her car.
It was after midday when Isserley finally drove out of the farm. The sun which had been so golden in the morning was barely visible now; the sky had turned slate-grey and hung swollen with undischarged snow. The likelihood of finding any hitch-hikers on the roads, let alone suitable ones, was slim. Yet she was in the mood to do some work, or at least get away from all the fuss she knew was still going on below ground.
On her way past the main steading, she noticed a most unusual sight: Esswis perched on a large wooden stepladder, a tin in one hand and a brush in the other, painting the stone walls white.
Isserley slowed the car to a stop near the foot of the ladder and looked up at Esswis. She was already wearing her glasses and so he wasn’t all that clear, distorted by the glare of the sun. It occurred to her to take her glasses off for a moment, but that seemed impolite, given that Esswis was wearing his.