‘Oh,’ said Isserley.
She should, she felt, have listened to her own misgivings before night felclass="underline" only the deranged would be hitching afterwards. Never mind: the turn-off for the seaboard villages was only a few minutes away, and she could get rid of this character then, unless he was heading for her neck of the woods himself, of course. She hoped not. She was feeling ghastly again, exhaustion and an inexplicable misery throbbing in her system like poison.
‘Those bastards are sitting in judgement over there,’ the dog breeder blustered, stabbing his fingers clumsily into the chocolate selection, ‘far away from this fucking country – excuse my French – and they don’t have a fucking clue. YunderstandwhatI’msaying?’
‘Mm. I’m turning off in a minute,’ she said, frowning and weaving her head from side to side as she searched the gloom for the familiar B9175 sign.
His reaction to her being momentarily preoccupied like this was sudden and vehement.
‘Jesus Christ!’ he groaned. ‘You’re not even listening. A bunch of foreigners from over your way fucked up my whole life, yunderstand? One year I’ve got eighty grand in the bank, a Wolseley, a wife, more dogs than I can shake a stick at. Five years later, I’ve got sweet FA! Living alone in a prefab infucking Bonar Bridge, with a fucking Mondeo rusting in the back yard! Looking for work as a fucking gardener! Where’s the sense in that, eh? You tell me!’
The indicator was already ticking, flashing in the dimness of the cabin. Isserley slowed the car down in anticipation of the turn, checked the surviving mirrors for traffic. Then she turned to face him, meeting his glazed little eyes with her own enormous ones.
‘No sense at all,’ she assured him, flipping the icpathua toggle.
Back on the farm, Ensel was first out of the steading as always, bounding up to the car with an almost grotesque eagerness. His two companions were still silhouetted in the light, slow to follow, as if bowing to some ritual privilege of Ensel’s.
‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ said Isserley irritably as he poked his snout through the passenger window to admire the paralysed vodsel.
‘Do what?’ he retorted, blinking.
Isserley leaned across the dog-breeder’s lap to unlock the door.
‘Rush out to see what I’ve got,’ she grunted, half blinded by a stab of pain in her spine. The door opened and the vodsel’s body tipped out into Ensel’s arms. The other men crowded around to help him.
‘Couldn’t I come and let you know,’ persisted Isserley, straightening up gingerly, ‘if I’ve got anything, and otherwise just go straight to my cottage without any fuss?’
Ensel was fumbling about, trying to find a secure grip on the vodsel’s torso. The cow leather of the creature’s jacket, alarmingly, had just unzipped itself with a heavy lurch of unrelated flesh.
‘But we don’t mind if you haven’t managed to get anything,’ protested Ensel in a wounded tone. ‘Nobody blames you.’
Isserley gripped the steering wheel and fought back tears of rage and exhaustion.
‘It’s not about whether I’ve managed to get anything or not,’ she sighed. ‘Sometimes I’m… tired, that’s all. I want to be alone.’
Ensel backed away from the car, dragging his bit of the vodsel onto the waiting trolley, frowning with effort as he and his companions wheeled their burden backwards towards the light. Frowning too, perhaps, at the way she’d just attacked him.
‘I just… we’re just trying to help, that’s all,’ he called to her miserably.
Isserley laid her head on her arms, slumping over the steering wheel.
‘Oh God,’ she moaned under her breath. This really was too much on top of a hard day’s work in impossible circumstances and a narrow escape from death: having to juggle the fragile complexities of human emotions.
‘Forget it!’ she yelled, peering straight down into the darkness at her feet, an oily confusion of foot pedals, filthy rubber matting, leather gloves and spilled chocolates. ‘We’ll talk about it in the morning!’
By the time the steading door had rolled shut and silence had returned to Ablach Farm, Isserley was weeping again, so that her glasses, when she finally removed them, almost slipped out of her fingers.
Men, she thought.
7
WHEN ISSERLEY FINALLY clawed her way back to the surface from a black hole of sleep, she opened her eyes to find that it was still dark. Floating in a void, her little clock’s digital numbers were feeble and flickering, and said zero, zero, zero, zero. The internal power source needed replacing. She should have anticipated this, she thought, instead of… instead of what? Instead of wasting money on a box of chocolates she had no intention of eating.
She lay tangled in the bedclothes, confused, disoriented and mildly anxious. Though she could see nothing in the blackness except the flickering clock, she suddenly had a vivid mental picture of the floor of her car, the last thing she could recall seeing before plummeting into sleep. She must remember to clear out the spilled chocolates before driving off again, or else they would get squashed underfoot. She’d seen the dog breeder bite into one. They had some sort of goo inside them that would make a sticky mess and no doubt decompose in time.
She’d let things veer a little out of control lately; she must restore some order at the earliest opportunity.
Isserley had no idea how many hours she had slept; whether the long winter night was still young or would soon be ending. It was even possible she’d slept through the brief pale hours of daylight, and that it was now already the dark afternoon of the following day.
She tried to gauge from how she was feeling how long she had been unconscious. She was as warm as an overheated engine, sweat simmering out of those parts of her that could still sweat. That meant, assuming she could still trust her cycles, that she had slept either a very short or a very long time.
She stretched her limbs cautiously; the pain was no worse than usual, but usual was bad. She would have to get up and do her exercises, regardless of what time it was, or she would end up unable to get up at all, trapped in a cage of her own bone and muscle.
Moonlight was sketching some detail into her bedroom now as the pupils of her eyes at last began to dilate. Because her room was bare, though, the details were things like cracks in the walls, shards of peeled paint, functionless light switches, and, in the hearth, the dull pearly gleam of the sleeping television. Parched, Isserley fumbled for the glass of water beside the bed, but it was empty. She raised it to her lips and tipped it upside down just to make sure. Empty. Never mind: she could wait. She was strong. Needs could not bully her.
She sat up, clumsily disentangled herself from the bed-sheets, and launched herself off the mattress onto the floor, landing crookedly, almost pitching sideways. A long needle of pain stabbed through the base of her spine, the amputation site; she’d tried to steady her balance with her tail again. She swayed back and forth, finding her new centre of gravity; the palms of her feet, damp with perspiration, adhered slightly to the frigid floorboards.
The moonlight was not enough to do her exercises by. She didn’t know why she should need to see her limbs in order to exercise them, but she did. It was as if, in too profound a darkness, she could not be sure what sort of creature she was. She needed to verify what remained of her body.
Perhaps the television, as well as providing some illumination, would serve to orient her. Unreality was swirling all around her like the delirious miasmas above the oxygen pits at the heart of the Estates; she had been dreaming again.
After dreams of the pits, it would have been comforting to wake up in the sunlight of a safe world. Failing that, it would have been reassuring to see the clock glowing promisingly at her. But if she could have neither, she could do without.