As for Amlis, he’d said he’d return… but his kind were always lavish with the promises, weren’t they? What about all the men who’d promised to keep her safe as she neared the grading age? ‘The Estates? A beautiful girl like you? Just let them try, Iss, and I ll have a word with my father.’ Spoilt little poseurs, the lot of them. Fuck them, fuck them all.
It would be very easy to get seduced by this world, Amlis had said, when he touched her arm. It’s very, very beautiful. What had he meant? Could he have been meaning to imply that she was beautiful, too? Why else would he have touched her at that moment? His fingers… But no, of course he hadn’t meant that. He was seeing an ocean and a snowy sky for the first time, with a mutilated cripple sweating next to him. The charms of her scarred flesh could hardly compete with a naked new world, could they?
There was a pain in her heart. She missed Ablach’s shore already. All that time she’d spent roaming the empty confines of her cottage last night, she could have spent there, walking the moonlit water’s edge, or along the cliffs. But even then she’d probably already known that saying goodbye would only make things harder.
One of the impossible futures she’d considered, while pacing the rooms of her cottage, was living in a cave on the Ablach shore. There were several caves there, which she’d never explored because of her claustrophobia – which was precisely the problem, of course, with the idea of her living in a cave.
Also on the beach there was a stone hut (‘the fishing bothy’, Esswis had once called it, with the air of a man who knows everything). Its doors were so weathered and rotten that they swayed in the wind like curtains; its windowless interior was mucky with tar and decomposing sheep turds. The main obstacle to living there, though, was that there was also a large piece of machinery bolted to the floor, a cast-iron mechanism the size of a cow, designed to haul boats onto the seashore. Of course it might not be functional anymore, but there was no way of being certain. There would have been big problems if she was stretched out naked in a corner of the bothy, asleep, and suddenly a boatload of fishermen walked in.
She’d also considered building herself a little dwelling on the Ablach cliffs somewhere, made of branches, driftwood and maybe those big sheets of corrugated tin she often saw washed up on the shore. But Esswis would surely have noticed if the farm sprouted an extra dwelling, especially if Isserley was missing and he was searching for her. And, as soon as Vess Incorporated was aware she’d run away, that was surely what Esswis would be sent to do.
Isserley frowned, remembering the police. She couldn’t afford to be stopped by them, because her car was decorated with out-of-date tax stickers, and she had no licences for anything. She must find a place to hide, and stop driving for a while. It was no big challenge; it would be easy. She wasn’t bound to the A9 anymore, after all, but could explore the out-of-the-way roads, where there was little traffic and long stretches of uncleared forest. She could disappear into the trees like a pheasant.
Three days later, Isserley woke from dreams of sexual release, clutching fur in her fists. It was the hood of the anorak, pillowing her head on the back seat of her car. She was in so much discomfort, yet still filled with the fantasy of orgasm, that she wanted to laugh.
Her car was nestled in a bower of ferns near the edge of a loch. The tips of twigs actually touched some of the windows, and tiny birds hopped from roof to tree and back again, their fragile claws pattering on the metal. Unseen creatures, possibly ducks or swans, would rustle the tideless water nearby, particularly in the late afternoons. Overhead, the cover was so dense that snowfalls would never reach the ground, and there was more sunlight reflecting off the loch than through the trees.
All in all, this bower was such a good place to hide that, when Isserley had first eased her car into it a couple of days ago, she’d found another one there already. Fortunately it wasn’t inhabited. It was a mere skeleton of a car: gutted, wheel-less, rusted all the colours of the forest, overgrown with moss. Isserley parked hers right alongside, taking advantage of the extra camouflage.
Undeniably, the first night had been difficult. The back seat was just a few inches shorter than she was, and those few inches proved crucial to her body’s needs. But she’d survived, and the next two nights were slightly better.
She hadn’t wanted to sleep in her car, but until she found another place to live, she had no choice. The notion of sleeping under the stars, curled up in a field somewhere, was all very romantic and defiant, but deep down she knew her spine would punish her for it next day. She needed a bed, or at least something soft to lie on. The back seat of her car was at least padded and smooth. And if one morning she woke up in really serious trouble, she could always pull herself up by the headrests of the front seats.
The ideal place to sleep, the perfect home, if she could have any place in the world she wanted, would be an abandoned lighthouse. But did lighthouses ever get abandoned? She wished they did. They stood on the very edge of the land, right next to the open sea, and their spires reached almost to the clouds. She could imagine herself up there, right at the top, sleeping on a soft mattress with windows all around her, letting the sunlight in as soon as it arrived.
Right now, she was lying low, growing weak with hunger. She really would have to eat something today, something more substantial than the raw turnip she’d stolen from a field the night before last.
As soon as she’d done her exercises, she waded into the icy shallows of the loch and washed herself. Then she shaved, mirror in one hand, blade in the other, dipping shampoo froth into the shimmering water. She hoped the shampoo wouldn’t do any harm to the things that lived in the loch. A few drops of chemical soap into such a vast reservoir of natural purity wouldn’t have much effect, surely?
For her first hot meal since leaving the farm, she drove to a service station she knew, where she’d bought petrol in the past.
One day she might conquer her fears and actually drive into a large town, park her car amongst hundreds of other cars, and walk into a supermarket, the way vodsels did when they needed food. That day was far off yet. Only recently, she’d driven past a giant Tesco right next to the A96 to Aberdeen, wondering if she dared venture in. It was so close to the road, she could almost see inside its tinted glass doors. Everything she’d ever seen on television was probably jammed inside that massive concrete steading, with a plague of vodsels picking at it, jostling and lunging for the choicest morsels. No, she wasn’t ready.
At the service station, she bought twenty pounds worth of petrol. She also selected a pre-packaged meat meal from a self-serve metal and plastic display labelled HAPPY TUM’S®ROADSIDE DINER. There were three choices: Hot Dog, Chicken Roll, and Beef Burger. Each was wrapped in white paper, so that she couldn’t see the contents. She chose the Chicken Roll. She’d heard the television say that Beef was dangerous – potentially deadly, even. If it could kill vodsels, she didn’t like to think what it might do to her. As for the Hot Dog, well… there was something bizarre about going to a lot of trouble to save a dog from death and then eating one a few days later.
She picked the paper parcel up in her hand and placed it in the microwave oven, then followed the instructions for what buttons to press. Forty-five seconds later, she had her Chicken Roll, steaming hot in her palm.
Forty-five minutes later, she was huddled in the grass behind a parking area in Saltburn, straining to vomit. Her mouth was stretched wide open, saliva drooling off the point of her tongue, but when the gush finally came, it went up her nose instead, spraying and bubbling out of her constricted nostrils like carbonated gravy. For a minute she thought she was going to choke to death, or that the vomit was going to scald its way up her tear ducts and drip out of her eyes. But these were delusions of panic, and the spasms subsided before long.