Under the Skin by Michel Faber Read Free Book Online Page 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?’
    He pondered for about ninety seconds. Long dark fields dappled with the pale flanks of cows flowed by on either side of them. A sign glowed in the headlights, depicting a stylized Loch Ness Monster in three fluorescent segments.
    ‘The British people,’ the hitcher said at last, ‘are not so concerned with what place they have in the world.’
    Isserley thought this over, briefly. She couldn’t work out whether he was suggesting that the British were admirably self-reliant or deplorably insular. She guessed the ambiguity might be deliberate.
    Night settled all around them. Isserley glanced aside, admired the lines of his lips and cheekbones in the reflected head-and tail-lights.
    ‘Have you been staying with anyone you know in this country, or just in hotels?’ she asked.
    ‘Mainly in youth hostels,’ he replied after a few seconds, as if, in the interests of truth, he’d had to consult a mental record. ‘A family in Wales invited me to stay in their