When it was all over, Isserley removed, with trembling hands, the screw top of a large bottle of Aqua Viva – water, apparently. She’d bought it at the same time as the Chicken Roll, just in case the unfamiliar meat didn’t agree with her. She’d strongly suspected it wouldn’t, but she’d given it a chance. The riddle of what she could safely eat would not be solved in a day. Trial and error would teach her what she could get away with. In the meantime, she sucked at the plastic nub of the water bottle, gulping the soothing clear liquid down.
She wouldn’t starve. There were potatoes growing in the fields, turnips scattered for the sheep, apples on the trees. These were all perfectly fit for human consumption, as the men on Ablach Farm proved every day in the Dining Hall. It wasn’t enough, but she would survive. In time, she would discover foods she couldn’t yet imagine, foods which would remind her of the delicacies of her childhood, foods which would make her feel languorous and satisfied and complete.
It was all out there somewhere, she was sure.
Driving back towards her bower by the loch, along the narrow road through the forest, she was alarmed to see a vodsel up ahead, gesturing extravagantly for her to stop. He wasn’t a police officer, he was a hitcher, but he was very agitated, almost dancing on the carriageway itself. She swerved in an attempt to avoid him, but he sprang into her path, spreading his arms wide, forcing her to brake to a sudden halt.
He was a massive specimen, young and superbly muscled beneath his leather jacket, but his face was wild.
‘Ah’m soarry! Ah’m soarry!’ he cried, slamming his palms down on the bonnet of her car, fixing her with an imploring stare. ‘But Ah hud tae make yi stoap!’
‘Please get out of the way!’ called Isserley through the windscreen, revving her engine threateningly. ‘I don’t pick up hitchers!’
‘Mah girrilfriend’s huvin’ a bebby!’ he bawled back at her, waving one meaty arm at an invisible point beyond the forest. ‘Fer pity’s sake! Ah’ve come a hunnert fifty miles, and Ah’ve goat aboot five fuckin’ miles tae go!’
‘I can’t help you!’ shouted Isserley.
‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ!’ he grimaced, slapping himself on the forehead. ‘Ah’m nae gonny pit a hand on yi. Ah’ll jest sit! Yi kin tie me up, pit a knife tae mah throat, Ah dinnae care whit yi dae – mah girrilfriend’s huvin’ a bebby! Ah’m gonny be a faither!’
It was obvious he wasn’t going to let her go, so she opened the passenger door and let him in.
‘Thanks,’ he said, sheepishly. ‘Yir a pal.’
Shona, he was thinking. Hold on, Shona.
Isserley didn’t reply, but jerked the car into motion with an awkward grind of gears. Five miles, and she could be rid of him. And if she didn’t speak, maybe he wouldn’t either.
‘I cannae tell yi whit this means tae me,’ he said hoarsely after a few seconds.
‘It’s OK,’ said Isserley, staring intently at the road ahead. ‘Just let me drive.’
‘I love her so much,’ he said.
‘Good,’ said Isserley.
‘She rang me up last night, when Ah wis already in mah bed, on the rig, y’ken. “Jimmy, Ah’m in labour,” she says. “It’s come on a week early. Ah know yi cannae get home. Ah jest wanted yi tae know.” Ah wis oaff that rig like a rocket!’
‘Good,’ said Isserley.
There was a pause as the car pootled along, at forty-five miles an hour as usual. To Isserley’s eyes, the trees were flashing by on either side, a blur, though she had to admit the deserted road ahead looked static.
‘Kin yi nae drive a wee bitty faster?’ the vodsel asked at last.
‘I’m doing my best,’ Isserley warned him. Even so, she nudged her foot against the accelerator. Then, to take his mind off the car’s speed, she asked him:
‘Is this your first child?’
‘Aye. Aye,’ he enthused, then breathed deep. ‘Immortality·’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Immortality. That’s whit weans are, y’ken? An endless line of weans through history, y’ken? All this life efter death stuff disnae make sense tae me. Dae you believe in it?’
Isserley was having so much trouble decoding his accent and certain key words that she failed to grasp what he was really asking her.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
He was not to be stopped, however. A raw nerve had been touched, even though he was the one who’d touched it.
‘The Wee Free Church says mah bebby’s gonny be a bastard,’ he complained, ‘because me and mah girril’s nae married. Whit’s that all aboot? Fuckin’ prehistoaric, y’ken?’
Isserley pondered this for a second, then smiled and shook her head in defeat.
‘I don’t understand a word you’re saying,’ she confessed.
‘Whit religion are you?’ he immediately asked her.
‘I haven’t got any religion,’ she said.
‘Yir parents, then?’
Isserley thought a moment.
‘Where I come from,’ she replied carefully, ‘religion is… dead.’
The vodsel hummed in sympathy, then carried on with his incomprehensible sermon as they plunged deeper into the forest.
‘Reincarnation quite appeals tae me,’ he said, straining to suppress his excitement. ‘Shona – mah girrilfriend – says it soonds daft, but there’s sumpn in it, Ah reckon. Everythin’s goat a soul, and yi cannae destroy a soul. Plus yi get tae huv anither try – dae better next time. ‘He laughed loudly, showily, as if inviting her to join in.’ Who knows, eh? Ah might come back as a wumman, or a wee beastie!’
Rounding a corner, they sped downwards into a small valley, and Isserley eased her foot down on the brake, simultaneously turning the steering wheel. Without warning, the rattle in the chassis reappeared, beating much louder than ever before, and the whole vehicle shuddered. An instant later, the car reached the lowest point of the slope, and its locked wheels made contact with a grey slick of frost.
Almost in a dream, Isserley felt her vehicle sliding free of the tarmac’s friction, as if it were launching itself on water or into the air. Two big male hands clasped over her own on the steering wheel, and helped her wrench it round, but it made no difference. The car flew smoothly off the edge of the road and, with a ferocious smack, collided with a tree.
Isserley was unconscious only for a second, or so it seemed. Her spirit fell back into her body as if from a height, like it had always done when she’d just stung a vodsel. If anything, the impact of landing seemed gentler than she was used to. Her breathing wasn’t as laboured, and her heart wasn’t hammering. The trees of the forest were almost supernaturally vivid in front of her eyes, until she realized that both her glasses and the windscreen were gone.
She looked down. Her green velvet trousers were sprinkled with broken glass and saturated with dark blood, and a twisted wedge of metal was taking up all the space where she would have expected her knees to be. She felt very little pain, and she guessed this must be because her spine was shattered. The crescent of the steering wheel had penetrated her breasts, leaving her torso uninjured. Her neck, though, felt better than it had for years, and this realization jerked a hysterical sob of laughter and grief from her. Something warm and gelatinous, trapped inside her top and Pennington’s pullover, slid down her abdomen and into her lap. She shuddered in revulsion and fear.