‘You all right, Louise?’ asked the vodsel next to her. ‘Fell oot the wrong side ae bed the day?’
She nodded. ‘Working too hard,’ she sighed.
‘Ah thoat so,’ he affirmed sympathetically. ‘Well, cheer up: you goat the weekend, mind!’
Isserley smiled. She did indeed have the weekend – and so did he. His workmates would not be expecting to see him until Monday, and even then, if he failed to turn up, they would assume he was having trouble getting back from Glasgow. She would take him after all. He would do fine.
‘So, where will you stay when you get to Glasgow?’ she said, her finger hovering over the icpathua toggle in anticipation of the usual mumbles about mates and hotels.
‘Mah mam,’ he replied promptly.
‘Your mam?’
‘Mah mam,’ he confirmed. ‘She’s greht. A raver at hert, y’ken? She wouldy went tae see John Martyn wi’ me, if it wisnae for the cold wither.’
‘How nice,’ said Isserley, curling her fingers away from the icpathua toggle and wrapping them around the blistered steering wheel.
Conversation was minimal for the remainder of the journey. The Country and Western tape played until it ended, and Dave turned it over, making the most of what was on offer. The jovially doleful singer yodelled on and on about sweet memories, long highways and lost chances.
‘You know, I think I’ve outgrown this music,’ Isserley told Dave at last. ‘I liked it years ago, but now I’m ready to move on. Maybe I’ll get some John Martyn next.’
‘Brilliant,’ he said encouragingly.
At Pitlochry, she set him down at the roadside and drove off with a wink of her tail-lights.
He was still waiting there, holding his little GLASGOW sign, when she drove past him on the other side of the road five minutes later. If he saw her (which she was almost sure he did) he must have wondered what had gone wrong.
By two o’clock the sun had been lured deep into a slate-grey sea of cloud: more snow on the way. If it came sooner rather than later, dark would fall almost immediately rather than waiting another hour and a half; only the seriously deranged and the desperate would be venturing out to hitch then. Isserley doubted she had the energy to deal with the seriously deranged today, or the good luck to find the desperate. As far as her day’s work went, it was probably realistic to regard it as being over as soon as the first snowflake fell.
And then? Where would she go then? Not back to Ablach Farm, if there was any alternative – somewhere more private, where no-one was subjecting her to surveillance or speculation. Somewhere only she knew about.
Maybe she could try sleeping at Fearn Abbey – sleeping there all night long, that is, not just for a doze. Was a bed really so essential? She could manage without one and sleep like a normal human being for just one night, surely! Let Ensel and his cronies rack their brains over what had become of her, while she slept under the stars, in utter privacy.
A stupid idea, she knew. Her spine would never let her get away with it. You couldn’t expect to be able to lie down on an unyielding surface and curl snugly into yourself, when you’d had half your backbone amputated and metal pins inserted into what was left. Inescapably, there was a price to be paid for sitting upright at the wheel of a motor car.
Driving north again now, Isserley was functioning on autopilot, watching for hitchers and, further off the road, for seals on the Moray Firth. Much more vivid on the screen of her attention, though, was a mental picture of her own soft bed on the farm: how she yearned to be lying in it! How wonderful it would feel to stretch out in her usual X-shape, passing on to the mattress the burden of keeping her back in order. The old bed, broken in by generations of vodsels, had just the right amount of ‘give’: sagging enough to allow her spine to relax and curve a little, but not so much that the metal clamps stabbed into her tendons the way they mercilessly did whenever she slumped too much at the wheel. Pathetic, but there it was.
She wished the men wouldn’t always come rushing out of the steading whenever she returned, whether she had a vodsel for them or not. How had this stupid habit arisen in the first place? Couldn’t they just wait, until she gave them some sort of signal? Why couldn’t she just drive into the farm unobserved and unnoticed sometimes, slip into her cottage and go to sleep? Was there some good reason why she had never been given the power to switch off the farm’s alarm systems as she approached? Could it be that the fuss that always surrounded her return was someone’s bright idea, to make sure she felt the pressure to deliver? Who would think of such a thing? They could go fuck themselves, whoever they were. Old man Vess probably set up these little schemes to keep his workers in line; he was probably just as twisted and crazy as his son, but in a different direction…
Suddenly, with a sickening lurch, she found herself transported, as if through space and time, into a strange and terrifying emergency: while electronic horns screamed all around her, she was lost in a darkening nowhere, mesmerized by the dazzling approach of a dilating light. She had no sense of herself as moving; she might have been a pedestrian staring up at a falling meteorite or a firebomb. Frozen, she waited for death to blaze her into extinction.
Only when the first vehicle had screeched past her, detonating her side mirror with a loud bang and a shower of glass, did Isserley appreciate where she was and what was going on. Still dazzled by headlights, she wrenched the steering wheel counterclockwise as several more vehicles slewed narrowly past her, whumping the side of her car with scuds of displaced air.
Then, as abruptly as it had flared, the danger was whisked into the past, and Isserley’s was just one of a line of cars driving on a twilit road, neatly on course for Thurso.
At the first opportunity, Isserley pulled over into a layby and sat there for a while, quaking and sweating, as the night and the snow silently let themselves fall.
She hadn’t died, but was bewildered at the thought that she might have. How terrifyingly fragile human life was, that it could be forfeited in an unnoticed instant, during a few degrees’ deviation in direction. Survival was something that couldn’t be taken for granted: it depended on concentration and luck.
It made you think.
This incident was the closest call she’d ever had on the roads, even including her first anxious days behind the wheel. And whose fault was it? Isserley had no doubt: Amlis Vess again. Four long years she had been driving, and in all that time she had never caused any problem. She must be the most careful driver in the world, so what had been so different about today? Amlis Vess, that’s what. He and his infantile act of sabotage had managed to send her very nearly into the jaws of death.
What the fuck was he doing here anyway? He couldn’t tell the difference between a vodsel and his own arse! Who was responsible for letting him get onto that cargo ship? Didn’t old man Vess know his own son was dangerous? With so much at stake, wasn’t anybody in control?
It took another few minutes for Isserley to calm down enough to realize she was raving. Raving inside herself, that is. Even now that she was aware of it, it was still almost impossible to think clearly. All day there had been waves of irrationality rising towards her, threatening to pull her under. She must force herself to take stock of her more urgent practical needs. Anger at Amlis Vess, paranoia about Ensel and his dimwitted cronies – these things would keep until she was safely off the road. (Stilclass="underline" wasn’t it striking how not one of the men had come to her defence when Vess had been attacking her! – they were all boys together, no fucking doubt – or was there something more to it than that?) Never mind, never mind: check the fuel gauge.