The vodsel was no longer next to her. He’d been thrown through the windscreen. She couldn’t see his body from where she sat.
The torn fabric of one of her trouser legs started making a little flapping, sucking noise, and she felt desperately sick, but managed to look away. She noticed then that the icpathua needles were sticking out of the upholstery of the passenger seat. There’d been a malfunction. Knowing it was absurd, Isserley punched the edge of the seat feebly with a bloodied fist, trying to make the needles retract. They didn’t.
Suddenly, somewhere behind her on the road, a car screeched to a halt, and a car door slammed. Footsteps scattered gravel.
Acting automatically, Isserley reached over to the glovebox and fetched out the first pair of glasses to hand. She jammed them onto her face, and was immediately half-blinded by them: they were real optical lenses, of course, not clear glass.
A figure was looming close to her, leaning towards where the driver’s window had been; a small figure with a haze of pink throat, bright yellow clothing and a halo of dark hair.
‘Are you all right?’ said a tremulous female voice.
Isserley laughed helplessly, snorting a dribble of wetness from one of her nostrils. She wiped it on her wrist, recoiling a little in surprise from the distorted magnification of her arm and unfamiliar feel of wool against her cheek.
‘Don’t move,’ said the female voice, toughening up. ‘I’ll get help. Just sit tight.’
Isserley laughed again, and this time the other woman laughed with her, a nervous hiss.
The blur of colours flitted out of Isserley’s range of vision, and she heard the crackle of undergrowth in front of the car. The woman’s voice came again, louder, almost businesslike.
‘Is this… your partner?’ she called, from what sounded like quite a long way away.
‘A hitcher,’ said Isserley. ‘I didn’t know him.’
‘He’s alive,’ said the woman. ‘He’s breathing.’
Isserley leaned her head back on the seat and inhaled deeply herself, trying to decide how she felt about the vodsel’s survival.
‘Take him with you, please,’ she said after a moment.
‘I can’t,’ said the woman. ‘We’ve got to wait for the ambulance men.’
‘Please, please take him with you,’ said Isserley, squinting into the green and brown haze in search of her.
‘I really can’t,’ insisted the woman, calm now. ‘He’s probably got spinal injuries. He needs expert attention.’
‘I’m worried my car will catch fire,’ said Isserley.
‘Your car won’t catch fire,’ the woman said. ‘Don’t panic. Just stay calm. You’re going to be fine.’
‘At least take his wallet,’ Isserley pleaded. ‘It’ll tell you who he is.’
The undergrowth crackled again, and the bright colours swam back into Isserley’s field of vision. Again the woman was standing at the hole in the driver’s window. A warm, small hand laid itself against Isserley’s neck.
‘Listen, I have to leave you for a few minutes while I find a phone. I’ll be back as soon as I’ve rung an ambulance, OK?’
‘Thank you,’ said Isserley. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed pale collarbones and a curve of bosom inside a peach-coloured top, as the woman leaned over Isserley’s shoulder to lift something off the back seat.
‘The Mercy Hospital isn’t far,’ the woman reassured her. ‘You’ll be away in no time.’
Isserley felt the warm hands on her again, and realized belatedly that her own flesh was frigidly cold. The woman was wrapping her up in the anorak, gently tucking it around her shoulders.
‘You’re going to be all right, OK?’
‘OK,’ nodded Isserley. Thank you.’
The woman disappeared then, and the sound of her car driving off faded into silence.
Isserley removed the spectacles and dropped them into her lap, where they landed with a patter of windscreen glass. She blinked, wondering why things were still out of focus. Tears ran down her cheeks, and her view through the shattered windscreen cleared.
Isserley checked the top of the dashboard, where Yns, at the same time as he’d set up the icpathua network, had installed the other little alteration to the car’s original design: the button for the aviir. Unlike the icpathua connections, which involved fragile electrics and hydraulics that had obviously been damaged in the accident, the connection between the dashboard button and the cylinder of aviir was one simple, sturdy tube, waiting only for a squirt of something foreign into the oily liquid.
The aviir would blow her car, herself, and a generous scoop of earth into the smallest conceivable particles. The explosion would leave a crater in the ground as big and deep as if a meteorite had fallen there.
And she? Where would she go?
The atoms that had been herself would mingle with the oxygen and nitrogen in the air. Instead of ending up buried in the ground, she would become part of the sky: that was the way to look at it. Her invisible remains would combine, over time, with all the wonders under the sun. When it snowed, she would be part of it, falling softly to earth, rising up again with the snow’s evaporation. When it rained, she would be there in the spectral arch that spanned from firth to ground. She would help to wreathe the fields in mists, and yet would always be transparent to the stars. She would live forever. All it took was the courage to press one button, and the faith that the connection had not been broken.
She reached forward a trembling hand.
‘Here I come,’ she said.
About the Author
MICHEL FABER was born in Holland, brought up in Australia and now lives in the Scottish Highlands. His stories have been widely anthologised and his debut collection, Some Rain Must Fall, won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award in 1999, while Under the Skin was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, 2000. He is also the author of two exceptional novellas as well as the immensely ambitious ‘Victorian’ novel, The Crimson Petal and the White, published to outstanding acclaim in 2002. More recently he has written the highly acclaimed The Fahrenheit Twins and The Apple, in which he revisits the world of The Crimson Petal.
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2000
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.
This digital edition first published in 2008 by Canongate Books Ltd
Copyright © Michel Faber 2000
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
The lines from ‘May You Never’ and ‘Over the Hill’ are written by John Martyn, © 1973 Warlock Music Ltd. Permission has been sought for the use of the lines from ‘You’re My World’.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 373 2