Lately, she suspected her feelings were getting swallowed up, undigested, inside purely physical symptoms. Her backache and eye-strain were sometimes much worse than usual, for no real reason; at these times, there was probably something else troubling her.
Another tell-tale sign was the way perfectly ordinary events could bring her down, like being overtaken by a school bus on a gloomy afternoon. If she was in reasonable shape, the sight of that great shield-shaped back window crowded with jeering, gesticulating adolescents didn’t perturb her in the least. Today, however, the spectacle of them hovering above her, like an image on a giant screen she must meekly follow for miles, filled her with despond. The way they gurned and grimaced, and smeared their grubby hands in the condensation, seemed an expression of malevolence towards her personally.
Eventually the bus turned off the A9, leaving Isserley tailing inscrutable little red sedans very like her own. The line seemed to go on forever. The corners of the world were darkening fast.
She was upset, she decided. Also, her back was sore, her tailbone ached and her eyes were stinging after so many hours of peering through thick lenses and rain. If she gave up and went home, she could take off her glasses and give her eyes a rest, lie curled up on her bed, perhaps even sleep: oh, what bliss that would be! Trifling gifts of creature comfort, consolation prizes to soothe away the pangs of failure.
At Daviot, however, she spotted a tall, rangy backpacker holding a cardboard sign that said THURSO. He looked fine. After the usual three approaches, she stopped for him, about a dozen yards ahead of where he stood. In her rear-view mirror she watched him bound towards the car shrugging his backpack off his broad shoulders even as he ran.
He must be very strong, she thought as she reached across for the door handle, to be able to run like that with a heavy load.
Having drawn abreast with her car, the hitcher hesitated at the door she’d opened for him, gripping his garishly coloured swag with long, pale fingers. He smiled apologetically; his rucksack was bigger than Isserley, and clearly wasn’t going to fit on his lap or even the back seat.
Isserley got out of the car and opened the boot, which was always empty apart from a canister of butane fuel and a small fire extinguisher. Together they loaded his burden in.
‘Thank you very much,’ he said, in a serious, sonorous voice which even Isserley could tell was not a product of the United Kingdom.
She returned to the driver’s seat, he to his, and they drove off together just as the sun was taken below the horizon.
‘I’m pleased,’ he said, self-consciously turning his THURSO sign face-down on the lap of his orange track pants. It was sheathed in a clear rainproof folder and contained many pieces of paper, no doubt inscribed with different destinations. ‘It isn’t so easy to get a lift after dark.’
‘People like to see what they’re getting,’ agreed Isserley.
‘That’s understandable,’ he said.
Isserley leaned back against her seat, extended her arms, and let him see what he might be getting.
This lift was a fortunate thing. It meant he might get to Thurso by tonight, and Orkney by tomorrow. Of course Thurso was more than a hundred miles further north, but a car travelling at an average of fifty miles per hour – or even forty, as in this case – could in theory cover the distance in less than three hours.
He hadn’t asked her where she was going yet. Perhaps she would only take him a short way, and then say she was turning off. However, the fact that she had seemed to understand his allusion to the difficulties of hitch-hiking in the dark implied she did not intend to put him back on the road ten miles further on, with darkness falling. She would speak soon, no doubt. He had spoken last. It might be impolite for him to speak again.
Her accent was not, in his opinion, a Scottish one.
Perhaps she was Welsh; the people in Wales had spoken a little like her. Perhaps she was European, though not from any of the countries he knew.
It was unusual for a woman to pick him up. Women almost invariably drove past, the older ones shaking their heads as if he were attempting some highly dangerous folly like somersaulting across the traffic, the younger ones looking pained and nervous as if he had already managed to reach inside their cars and molest them. This woman was different. She was friendly and had very big breasts which she was showing off to him. He hoped she was not wanting him for a sexual experience of some kind.
Unless it was to be in Thurso.
He could not see her face when she was looking ahead, which was a pity. It had been very remarkable. She wore the thickest corrective lenses he had ever seen. In Germany, he doubted that a person with such severe visual impairment would be approved for a driver’s licence. Her posture was, in his opinion, suggestive of some spinal problem. Her hands were large and yet unusually narrow. The skin on the edge of her hand, along her pinkie and down to the wrist, had a horny smoothness that was texturally quite different from the rest, suggesting scar tissue following surgery. Her breasts were perfect, flawless; perhaps they, too, were the product of surgery.
She was turning towards him now. Mouth-breathing, as if her perfectly sculpted little nose had indeed been sculpted by a plastic surgeon and had proved to be too small for her needs. Her magnified eyes were a little bloodshot with tiredness, but startlingly beautiful, in his opinion. The irises were hazel and green, glowing like… like illuminated microscope slides of some exotic bacterial culture.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘What is there for you in Thurso?’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘Perhaps nothing.’
He was, she noticed now, superbly built. Deceptively lean, but all muscle. He could probably have run alongside her car for a mile, if she drove slowly enough.
‘And if there is nothing?’ she said.
He pulled a face which she assumed was his culture’s equivalent of a shrug. ‘I’m going there because I have never been there,’ he explained.
The prospect seemed to fill him with ennui and enthusiasm all at once. Thick grey-blond eyebrows were gathering over his pale blue eyes like a stormcloud.
‘You’re travelling through the entire country?’ she prompted.
‘Yes.’ His enunciation was precise and slightly emphatic, but not arrogant; more as if he needed to push each utterance up a modest-sized hill before it could be released. ‘I began in London ten days ago.’
‘Travelling alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘For the first time?’
‘When I was young I have travelled a lot in Europe with my pairends.’ (This last word, as he pronounced it, was the first one Isserley had trouble decoding.) ‘But I think, in a way, I saw everything through my pairends’ eyes. Now, I want to see things through my own eyes.’ He looked at her nervously, as if confirming how foolish he’d been to engage with a foreign stranger on this level.
‘Do your parents understand this?’ enquired Isserley, relaxing as she found her way with him, allowing her foot to sink down a little on the accelerator.
‘I hope they will understand,’ he said, frowning uneasily.
Tempting though it was to pursue this connective cord to its far-off umbilicus, Isserley sensed she’d found out as much about his ‘pairends’ as he was prepared to tell her, at least for the moment. Instead, she asked, ‘What country are you from?’
‘Germany,’ he answered. Again he regarded her nervously, as if he expected she might be violent towards him without warning. She tried to reassure him by tuning her conversation to the standards of seriousness he seemed to aim for himself.
‘And what, so far, do you find is the thing that makes this country most different from yours?’