‘I’m leaving tonight,’ he said.
Still she seemed unable to grasp what he could possibly mean.
‘The ship,’ he reminded her, ‘is leaving in a couple of hours. I’m going to be on it, of course.’
She sat very still, taking the information in.
‘It’s not like you to do what you’re told,’ she joked feebly, after a while.
‘I need to get back home,’ explained Amlis, ‘to talk about what I’ve seen here. People need to be told what’s being done with their blessing.’
Isserley laughed harshly. ‘So it’s Amlis the Crusader,’ she sneered, ‘bringing the light of truth to the whole human race.’
He grinned, hurt twinkling in his eyes. ‘You’re a cynical creature, Isserley. Listen, if it’s easier for you to digest, you could say I’ve got no ideals really. You could say I just want to go back and annoy the hell out of my father.’
She smiled wearily. The snow had almost completely obscured the windscreen by now; she would have to shift it soon, or she’d start feeling claustrophobic.
‘Parents, eh?’ griped Amlis awkwardly, trying to maintain a fragile bridge between them. ‘Fuck ’em.’ The vulgarism sounded forced and self-conscious coming from him; he’d misjudged his tone, lost his grip a little. And, shyly, he reached across and laid a hand gently on her arm.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it would be very easy to get seduced by this world. It’s very, very… beautiful.’
Isserley lifted her arms up to take hold of the steering wheel. His hand slipped off her as she found the ignition unerringly in the gloom. The engine thrummed into life, the headlights came on.
‘I’ll drive you back to the steading, then,’ Isserley said. ‘Time’s getting away.’
Back at the steading, the great aluminium door was open a crack, and Isserley could see Ensel’s snout already poking through. He’d have been sweating, she could well imagine, all through the hours of Amlis’s absence; he was probably on guard duty. Let’s see him come out now and tell her that this catch of hers was the best ever, the little creep.
Ensel stayed right where he was, however, waiting.
Isserley reached across Amlis’s body to open the passenger side door, the mechanism of which was defeating him. Her forearm brushed momentarily against his fur, and she smelled the warm flesh underneath. The door swung open, letting in a blast of cold air and feathery snowflakes.
‘Aren’t you coming in?’ Amlis asked.
‘I have my own place to go to,’ Isserley told him. ‘And I’ve got work in the morning.’
One last time he locked eyes with her, a flash of antagonism sparking between them. Then:
‘Take care of yourself,’ he muttered, lowering himself out of the car onto the white ground. ‘There’s a voice inside you. Listen to what it says.’
‘It says fuck off,’ she said, but she was smiling crookedly, and crying too.
He padded through the snow, towards the door which was rolling open for him.
‘I’ll come back sometime,’ he called, turning his head over his shoulder as he walked. Then, grinning: ‘If I can get transport, of course.’
Isserley drove to her cottage, parked the car in the garage, walked herself into the house. Since she’d last been home, mysterious trespassers had slipped some glossy leaflets under her front door. An assortment of vodsels far too puny to make the grade wanted her to vote for them in an election; Scotland’s future was at stake and the power lay in her hands. There was also a note from Esswis, which Isserley did not attempt to read. Instead, she went straight to bed, covered her naked body in blankets, and wept and wept for hours.
The little numbers on her depleted digital clock had stopped flashing altogether, but she estimated it was about four in the morning when the transport ship finally launched itself with its characteristic groan.
Afterwards, she listened to the roof of the steading rolling shut. Then, soothed by the music of the waves playing in the stillness of Ablach, she rocked herself to sleep.
12
FOLDING HER ARMS across her breasts, palms on shoulders, and closing her eyes, Isserley allowed herself to slip under the water. Giving the sorely punished muscles and bones of her neck permission to let her head go, she felt her hair swirl up towards the surface as her heavy little skull sank like a stone. The world disappeared into darkness, and the familiar sounds of Ablach Farm were swallowed up into a numb aquatic murmur.
The rest of Isserley’s body sank more hesitantly than her head, at first trying out a new centre of gravity, attemping to float, before it too descended towards the bottom. Bubbles leaked out of her ears and nose. Her mouth was slightly open, not breathing.
After a minute or two, she opened her eyes. Through the shimmering water and the waving seaweed of her hair, she could see a glow of sunlight, distorted, like a distant glimpse of an open door at the end of a dark corridor. As her lungs began to hurt, this light began to dilate, then throb in rhythm with her labouring heartbeat. It was time to come up for air.
Pushing up from the bottom, she splashed through the surface with her head and shoulders, gasping fresh oxygen, wiping her streaming hair back from her face, blinking and snuffling. Her vertebrae shifted and clicked, a sickening gristle sound trapped deep inside the flesh, as the weight settled back on her shoulders.
In the world outside the water, the sunlight had ceased to shimmer and pulsate: it shone through the soiled window of the bathroom, warm and constant. The nozzle of the shower was lit up like a lamp, and ceiling cobwebs luminesced like wisps of sheepswool caught on a barbed-wire fence. The ceramic top of the toilet cistern was almost too bright to look at, so Isserley let her eyes rest on its waxy torso. The pale blue letters tattooed there, ARMITAGE SHANKS, were as incomprehensible as ever, despite Isserley’s years of learning the language. The hot-water tank gulped and belched, the way it always did when Isserley had a bath instead of a shower. At her feet, the rusted brass taps gurgled and hissed. The green plastic bottle of shampoo said EVERYDAY USE. Everything was back to normal. Amlis Vess was gone, and she remained, and it was already tomorrow. She should have known from the beginning that it would end like this.
Isserley leaned her head back, resting the base of her aching skull on the ceramic lip of the bath. On the ceiling directly above the tub, the pus-coloured paint hung in intricate shards and blisters, eroded by years of steam. Several coats of paint, like thin geological layers, had been penetrated by this attrition. It was the closest thing Isserley had yet found, in this world, to the landscape of her childhood. She lowered her eyes.
Her body was invisible below the reflective surface of the water, except for the tips of her toes and the curves of her breasts. She stared down at those alien mounds of flesh, easily imagining them as something other than what they were. Marooned like this in the sunlit water, they reminded her of rocks in the ocean, revealed by the tide. Stones on her chest, pushing her down. Amlis Vess had never seen her without these artificial tumours bulging out of her; would never know that she had once had a smooth breast worthy of his. Hard and sleek, with glossy auburn fur which men could hardly keep themselves from stroking.
She closed her eyes tightly, enduring the exquisitely unpleasant sensation of water trickling out of her mutilated ears. As if taking advantage of this lapse in vigilance, a dribble of scalding water leaked abruptly from the hot tap onto her left foot. Isserley hissed in surprise, and clenched her toes into a fist. How strange, she thought, that such tiny, trivial discomforts could still matter, when Amlis was gone and she was ready to die.
In the rusty soap dish hooked onto the side of the bathtub lay several new razor blades wrapped in cardboard. She unsheathed one of them, flicking the cardboard away. Reaching down to the grimy tiled floor, she picked up the mirror she’d brought downstairs with her. She held it above her, angled it to get the best light, looking herself straight in the face.