Under the Skin Read Free Page B

bluebells. Signs printed in several languages unknown to Isserley reminded foreigners not to drive on the wrong side of the road.
    The temperature inside the car was approaching stifling, even for Isserley, who could tolerate extremes without particularly caring. Her glasses were starting to fog up, but she couldn’t take them off now: he mustn’t see her eyes without them. A slow, subtle trickle of perspiration ran down her neck onto her breastbone, hesitating on the brink of her cleavage. Her hitcher seemed not to notice. His hands were drumming desultorily on his inner thighs to some tune she couldn’t hear; as soon as he realized she was watching, he stopped abruptly and folded his hands limply over his crotch.
    What on earth had happened to him? What had brought on this dismal metamorphosis? Just as she’d grown to appreciate how attractive a prospect he was, he seemed to be shrinking before her eyes; he wasn’t the same male she’d taken into her car twenty minutes ago. Was he one of those inadequate lugs whose sexual self-confidence depended on not being reminded of any real females? Or was it her fault?
    ‘You can open a window if you’re too hot,’ she offered.
    He nodded, didn’t even speak.
    Isserley pressed her foot gingerly down on the accelerator, hoping this would please him. But he just sighed and settled further back in his seat, as if what he considered to be an insignificant increase in speed only reminded him how slowly they were getting nowhere.
    Maybe she shouldn’t have said she was a lawyer. Maybe a shop assistant or an infant teacher would have brought him out more. It was just that she’d taken him to be a rough, robust kind of character; she’d thought he might have a criminal history he’d start to talk about, as a way of teasing her, testing her out. Maybe the only truly safe thing she could have been was a housewife.
    ‘Your wife,’ she rejoined, striving for a reassuring, companionable, male sort of tone, a tone he might expect from a drinking buddy. ‘Did she get the house?’
    ‘Yeah … well … no …’ He drew a deep breath. ‘I had to sell it, and give her half. She went to live in Bradford. I stayed on here.’
    ‘Where’s here?’ she asked, nodding her head at the open road, hoping to remind him how far she had taken him already.
    ‘Milnafua.’ He sniggered, as if self-conscious about the name.
    To Isserley, Milnafua sounded perfectly normal; more normal in fact than London or Dundee, which she had some trouble getting her tongue round. She appreciated, however, that to him it represented some outlandish extreme.
    ‘There’s no work anywhere up there,’ is there, she suggested, hoping she was striking a matter-of-fact, masculine note of sympathy.
    ‘Don’t I know it,’ he mumbled. Then, with a startling boost of volume and pitch: ‘Still, got to keep trying, eh?’
    Looking at him in disbelief, she confirmed what he was playing at: a pathetic gesture towards optimism, missing the mark by miles. He was even smiling, his face sheened with sweat, as if he’d suddenly become convinced it was dangerous to admit to too much sloth, as if there could be serious consequences for admitting to her that his life was spent on the dole. Was it all her fault for telling him she was a lawyer? Had she made him afraid that she’d get him in trouble? Or that one day she might turn out to have some official power over him? Could she apologize, laughing, for her deception and start all over again? Tell him she sold computer software or clothes for the larger lady?
    A big green sign at the side of the road announced how many miles remained before Dingwall and Inverness: not very many. The land had fallen away on the left side, revealing the gleaming shore of the Cromarty Firth. The tide was low, all the rocks and sands exposed. A solitary seal languished on one of those rocks, as if stranded.
    Isserley bit her lip, slowly adjusting to her mistake. Lawyer, saleswoman,