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 house for a couple of days.’
‘That was kind of them,’ murmured Isserley, observing the lights of the Kessock Bridge winking in the distance. ‘Are they expecting you back on the way home?’
‘No, I think not,’ he said, after having pushed that particular utterance up a very steep hill indeed. ‘I believe I… offended them in some way. I don’t know how. I think my English is not as good as it needs to be in certain situations.’
‘It sounds excellent to me.’
He sighed. ‘That is the problem perhaps. If it was worse, there would be an expectation of…’ He laboured silently, then let the sentence roll back down the mountain. ‘There would not be the automatic expectation of shared understanding.’
Even in the dimness she could tell that he was fidgeting, clenching his big hands. Perhaps he could hear her beginning to breathe faster, although the change was surely, she felt, quite subtle this time.
‘What do you do back in Germany?’ she asked.
‘I’m a student… well, no,’ he corrected. ‘When I get back to Germany I will be unemployed.’
‘You’ll live with your parents, perhaps?’ she hinted.
‘Mm,’ he said blankly.
‘What were you studying? Before your studies ended?’
There was a pause. A grimy black van with a noisy exhaust overtook Isserley, muffling the sound of her own respiration.
‘My studies did not end,’ the hitcher announced at last. ‘I walked away from them. I am a fugitive, you could say.’
‘A fugitive?’ echoed Isserley, flashing him an encouraging smile.
He smiled back, sadly.
‘Not from justice,’ he said, ‘but from a medical institute.’
‘You mean… you’re a psychotic?’ she suggested breathlessly.
‘No. But I almost became a doctor, which in my case would perhaps have been the same thing. My pairends think I am still studying at the institute. They sent me a very far distance and paid a lot of money so that I could study there. It is very important to them that I must become a doctor. Not just a regular doctor, but a specialist. I have been sending them letters telling them that my reezurch is proceeding very smoothly, Instead, I have been drinking beer and reading books about travel. Now I am here, travelling.’
‘And what do your parents think of that?’
He sighed and looked down into his lap.
‘They don’t know anything about it. I have been training them. So many weeks between letters, then so many weeks more, then so many weeks still more. I always say that I am very busy with my reezurch. I will send them my next letter after I am back in Germany.’
‘What about your friends?’ insisted Isserley. ‘Doesn’t anybody know you’ve gone on this adventure?’
‘I had some good friends back in Bremen before my studies began. At medical school I have many acquaintances who want to become specialists and drive a Porsche.’ He turned towards her in concern, although she was doing her very best to keep calm. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, fine, thank you,’ she panted, and flipped the icpathua toggle.
She knew he would fall against her, turned sideways as he was. She was prepared for it. With her right hand she kept steering straight and true. With her left she shoved his slumping body back into position. The driver of the car behind her would just assume there’d been an attempted kiss and she’d rebuffed it. Kissing in a moving vehicle was universally acknowledged to be dangerous. She’d known that even before she’d learned to drive, had read it in an ancient book about road safety for American teenagers, not long after her arrival in Scotland. It had taken her a long time to fully understand that book, studying it for weeks on end while the television chattered in the background. You could never predict when the television might make something clear that books couldn’t – especially when the books came from charity shops.
The hitcher was toppling towards her again. Again she shoved him back. ‘Behind the wheel of an automobile is no place for canoodling, necking, or “petting”,’ the book had said. For someone new to the language, it was a mysterious injunction. But she’d worked it out soon enough, with the help of television. Legally, you were allowed to do whatever you liked in a car, including have sex – as long as the vehicle wasn’t moving at the time.
Isserley put her left-hand blinker on as she approached a turn-off. Bumf, said the hitcher’s head against the passenger window.
It was past six o’clock when she got back to the farm. Ensel and a couple of the other men helped her remove the hitcher from the car.
‘Best one yet,’ Ensel complimented her.
She nodded wearily. He always said that.
As they were loading the vodsel’s limp body onto the pallet, she ducked back into her car and drove off into the unlit dark, aching and ready for bed.
3
ISSERLEY WAS WOKEN next morning by an unusual thing: sunshine.
Normally, she would sleep only a few hours during the night, and then discover herself lying wide-eyed in the claustrophobic dark, her contorted back muscles keeping her hostage in her bed with the threat of needle-sharp pains.
Now she lay blinking in the golden glow of a sun which must have risen quite a while ago. Her attic bedroom, tucked under the steepled roof of the Victorian cottage, had walls which were vertical only half-way up to the ceiling, sloping sharply the rest of the way in line with the roof. From where Isserley lay, her bedroom looked like a hexagonal cubby, lit up like a cell in an irradiated honeycomb. Through one open window, she could see cloudless blue sky; through the other, the complex architecture of oak branches laden with fresh snow. The air was still; the spiderless cobwebs hanging loose from the blistered wooden window-frames hardly stirred.
Only after a minute or two could she detect the almost subsonic hum of the farm’s activity.
She stretched, grunting in discomfort, and threw the bedclothes aside with her legs. The angle of the sunlight was such that her bed was in line for the warmest rays, so she lay exposed for a while, limbs spread in an X-shape, basking her naked skin.
The walls of her bedroom were bare, too. The floor was uncarpeted, an unvarnished lamina of ancient timber boards which would not have passed a spirit-level test. Just under one of the windows, a patch of frost glittered on the floor. Out of curiosity, Isserley reached down to the glass of water next to her bed and lifted it up to the light. The water in it was still liquid – just.
Isserley drank it, even though it crackled slightly in the pouring. After a whole night of lying still and letting nature take its course, her body had attained a simmering circulation that would persist until she’d exercised herself into diurnal metabolism.