Under the Skin by Michel Faber Read Free Book Online

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