10
ISSERLEY ALWAYS DROVE straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time. That’s what she’d always done. That’s what she would do now. There was a hitcher in her sights. She drove past him.
She was looking for big muscles. Puny, scrawny specimens were no use to her. This one was puny and scrawny. He was no use to her. She drove on.
It was dawn. The physical world did not exist for her, apart from the ribbon of grey tarmac on which she was driving. Nature was a distraction. She refused to be distracted.
The A9 seemed empty, but you couldn’t trust it. Anything could happen, any time. That’s why she kept her eyes on the road.
Three hours later, there was another hitcher. It was a female. Isserley wasn’t interested in females.
Somewhere on the passenger side, above the wheel, a rattle had started up. She had heard that rattle before. It had pretended to go away, but it had stayed hidden in her car’s body somewhere. Isserley would not tolerate this. She would take her car back to the farm, when she had finished work, and she would find that rattle and she would fix it.
Two and a half hours later, there was another hitcher in her sights. Isserley always drove straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time. So, she drove past him.
He was holding a large cardboard sign that said PERTH PLEASE. He was not bald. He was not wearing overalls. His body was rather top-heavy, a V-shaped torso on long legs. How thin were those legs? His faded jeans were flapping around them; it must be very windy today.
She drove back and appraised him again. His arms were good. His shoulders were excellent. There was a lot of breast on him, even though his waist was lean.
After her U-turn, she drove towards him a third time. He had curly, unruly red hair and wore a thick knitted jumper composed of many different colours of wool. All the thick-knitted-jumper vodsels Isserley had ever met were unemployed, and lived the life of pariahs. Some authority must actually force them to wear these garments, she thought, as a stigma of rank.
This vodsel beckoning to her now must be an outcast. And his legs would fatten up fine.
She pulled off the road, and he ran to the car, smiling.
Isserley opened the passenger door, intending to call out, ‘Do you want a lift?’
It suddenly seemed an absurd thing to say. Of course he wanted a lift. He had a big sign saying PERTH PLEASE; she had stopped for him. Nothing could be more self-explanatory. Words were a waste of energy.
In silence, she watched him strap himself in.
‘I… This is very good of you,’ the hitcher said, grinning awkwardly, combing his hands through his abundant hair, which immediately fell back over his eyes. ‘I was getting pretty cold there.’
She nodded gravely, and tried to smile in return. She wasn’t sure if she was managing it. The muscles in her face seemed even less connected to her lips than usual.
The hitcher babbled on: ‘I’ll just leave my sign here at my feet, shall I? You can get to your gears all right, can you?’
She nodded again, and revved the engine. Inwardly, her speechlessness troubled her; she seemed to have lost the power; there was a problem in her throat. Her heart was pounding already, though nothing had happened yet and no decision was on the horizon.
Determined to function normally, she opened her mouth to speak, but it was a mistake. She could sense that the sound rising in her throat would mean nothing to a vodsel, so she swallowed it down again.
The hitcher stroked his chin nervously. He had a soft red beard, so sparse it had been invisible from a distance. He smiled again, and blushed.
Isserley took in a deep, slightly shuddery breath, flipped the indicator and drove off, facing the road ahead.
She would speak when she was ready.
The hitcher fiddled with his sign, trying to catch her eye as he leaned forward. She was not to be caught. He sat back, nonplussed, clasping each of his cold hands inside the other in turn, then sliding them under the fleecy sleeves of his jumper.
He wondered what on earth he could say to put her at ease, and why she’d bothered to pick him up if she didn’t want to talk to him. She must have had a reason. The thing was to guess what her reason might be. Judging from the look on her face before she’d turned away, she was completely knackered; maybe she’d just been falling asleep at the wheel, and decided a hitch-hiker would keep her awake. She’d be expecting him to make small talk, then.
It was an alarming thought; he wasn’t a ‘small talk’ kind of person. Long philosophical one-to-ones were more his thing, like the late-night conversations he had with Cathy when they were both a bit stoned. A pity he couldn’t offer this woman a joint to loosen things up.
Instead, he thought of commenting on the weather. Not in a cheap way, but saying what he really felt on days like this, when the sky was like… like an ocean of snow. It was so mind-blowing the way it could all hang suspended up there, all that solid water, enough of it to bury a whole county in tons of white powdered ice, all of it just floating, way, way up there as easily as a cloud. A miracle.
He looked at the woman again. She was driving like a robot, back straight as a metal bar. He got the impression that the beauties of nature meant nothing to her. There was no common ground there.
‘Hi, I’m William,’ he could say. Maybe it was a bit late now. But he would have to break the silence somehow. She might be going all the way to Perth. If she drove him a hundred and twenty miles without them exchanging a word, he’d be a basket case by the time he arrived.
Maybe the tone of ‘Hi, I’m William’ was a little bit crass, a bit American, like ‘Hi, I’m Arnold, and I’m your waiter for the evening.’ Maybe something more low-key would be better. Like, ‘I’m William, by the way.’ As if he was mentioning it in the middle of an enthusiastic conversation they were already having. Which, sadly, they weren’t.
What was wrong with this woman, anyway?
He ruminated for a minute, making an effort to lay aside his own unease and concentrate on her instead. He tried to see her the way Cathy might see her if she was sitting in his seat; Cathy was a genius for sizing people up.
Earnestly striving to connect with his intuitive feminine side, William very quickly came to the conclusion that there must be something badly, badly wrong with this woman. She was in some sort of trouble, some sort of distress. She might even be in shock.
Or maybe he was just being dramatic. Cathy’s friend Dave, the writer, always looked as if he was in shock. He’d looked like that all the years they’d known him. He was probably born looking like that. This woman, though: she gave off the weirdest vibes. Weirder even than Dave’s. And she was definitely not in good shape physically.
Her hair was matted, with streaks of something that looked like axle grease slicked through it, and tufts sticking out at odd angles. Here was a woman who hadn’t looked at herself in a mirror for a while, that was for sure. She smelled – stank, really, if he could be so judgemental – of fermenting sweat and seawater.
Her clothes were filthy with dried mud. She’d fallen, maybe, or had some sort of accident. Should he ask her if she was all right? She might be offended if he commented on the state of her clothing. She might even think he was trying to harass her sexually. It was so hard to be friendly, in any genuinely human way, towards female strangers if you were a male. You could be courteous and pleasant, which wasn’t the same thing at all; it was the way you’d treat the staff at the Job Centre. You couldn’t tell a strange woman that you liked her earrings, or that her hair was beautiful – or ask her how she came to have mud on her clothes.