It was just, here he was and here she was. It was like… force of nature, wasn’t it? The law of the fucking jungle.
‘So, what brings you out on the road today?’ Isserley said brightly.
‘Settin’ aroond the estate wuz doin’ mah heid in.’
‘In between jobs, then?’
‘Jobs dinnae exist up here. Nae such fuckin’ thing.’
‘The government still expects you to look for them though, doesn’t it?’
This gesture of empathy did not particularly impress him.
‘Ah’m oan a fuckin’ trainin’ schim,’ he fumed. ‘They says, You go find some old fogies and talk shite tae ’em aboot central fuckin’ heatin’ and we’ll tell the government yir oaff the dole, OK? Fuckin’ hush money. Yi ken?’
‘It sucks,’ Isserley agreed, hoping this was the right term for him.
The atmosphere in the car was growing intolerable. Every available cubic millimetre of empty space between him and her was filling up with his malignant breath. She had to make her decision fast; her fingers itched to hit the icpathua toggle. But she must, at all costs, stay calm. To act on impulse was to invite disaster.
Years ago, in the very beginning, she’d stung a hitcher who had asked her, scarcely two minutes after getting into the car, if she liked having a fat cock up each hole. Her English hadn’t been quite as good then, and it had taken her a little while to figure out he wasn’t talking about poultry or sports. By then he’d exposed his penis. She’d panicked and stung him. It had been a very bad decision.
Police had searched for him for weeks. His picture was shown on television and published not just in the newspapers but also in a special magazine for homeless people. He was described as vulnerable. His wife and parents appealed to anyone who might have sighted him. Within days, despite the privacy she’d imagined at the time she picked him up, the investigation turned its spotlight on a grey Nissan estate driven possibly by a woman. Isserley had had to lie low on the farm for what seemed like an eternity. Her faithful car was handed over to Ensel, and he cannibalized it in order to customize the next-best one on the farm, a horrid little monster called Lada.
‘Anyone can make a mistake,’ Ensel had reassured her as he laboured to get her back on the road, his arms smeared with black grease, his eyes bloodshot from the welding flame.
But Isserley’s shame was such that even now she couldn’t think about her failure without an involuntary grunt of distress. It would never happen again: never.
They had reached a stretch of the A9 which was being converted to dual carriage; there were noisy mechanical dinosaurs and uniformed personnel meandering over mounds of soil on either side of the road. The commotion was consoling, in a way.
‘You’re not from this area, are you?’ Isserley said, raising her voice slightly to be heard above the din of great blades slicing into the earth.
‘Nearer tae it than you, Ah kin bet,’ he retorted.
She ignored this jibe, determined to hold on to the conversational thread which might lead to his family, when he startled her by suddenly, violently, winding his window down.
‘He-e-ey Doug-eeee!’ he yelled into the rain, waving one fisted arm out the window.
Isserley glanced up at the rear-view mirror, caught a glimpse of a burly figure in bright yellow reflective clothing standing by an earthmover, waving back hesitantly.
‘Mate ae mine,’ explained her hitcher, winding his window up again.
Isserley took a deep breath, tried to get her heart rate down. She couldn’t take him now, obviously; she had lost her chance. Whether or not he was married with children had become irrelevant in an instant; on balance she would rather not find out, in case he wasn’t.
If only she could stop panting and let go of him!
‘Are those real?’ he said.
‘Pardon?’ It was as much as she could do to speak one word without her breath catching.
‘What yis goat stickin’ oot in front ae yi,’ he elaborated. Yir tits.’
‘This… is as far as I go,’ she said, veering the car into the middle of the road, indicator flashing. By the grace of Providence, they had reached the comforting eyesore of Donny’s Garage in Kildary. WELCOME, the sign said.
‘You seid Invergordon,’ her hitcher protested, but Isserley was already turning across the lanes, homing her car towards the space between the garage and its petrol pumps.
‘There’s a rattle in the chassis somewhere,’ she said. ‘Can’t you hear it?’ Her voice was hoarse and none too even, but it didn’t matter now. ‘I’d better get it looked at. Might be dangerous.’
The car stopped moving. Some kind of life bustled behind the cluttered shop windows of Donny’s Garage: other voices, the creak of large refrigerators, the clink of bottles.
Isserley turned to her hitcher and gently pointed back to the A9.
‘You can try your luck just there,’ she advised. ‘It’s a good spot. Drivers are going quite slowly. I’ll get this car looked at. If you’re still here when I’m finished, I’ll maybe pick you up again.’
‘Dinnae poosh yirself,’ he sneered, but he got out of the car. And then he walked away, he walked away.
Isserley opened her own door and heaved herself out. Standing upright sent a shock of pain through her spine. She steadied herself against the roof of the car and stretched, watching Beetle-brow crossing the road and slouching towards the far gutter. The frigid breeze thrilled the sweat on her skin, blew oxygen straight up her nose.
Nothing bad would happen now.
She extracted one of the petrol pumps from its holster, manipulating the great nozzle awkwardly in her narrow claw. It wasn’t strength she lacked, it was sheer breadth of handspan. She needed two hands to guide the nozzle into the hole. Watching the computerized gauge with care, she squirted exactly five pounds’ worth of petrol into the tank. Five zero zero. She replaced the pump, walked into the building and paid somebody with one of the five-pound notes she’d been saving for just this purpose.
It all took under three minutes. When she emerged, she looked uneasily across the road for the green-and-white form of Beetle-brow. He was gone. Incredibly, someone else had taken him.
Only a couple of hours later, it was already late afternoon and the light was failing; that is, about half past four. Chastened by her experience so close to home with Beetle-brow, Isserley had driven about fifty miles south, past Inverness, almost as far as Tomatin, before turning back empty-handed.
Although it was not unusual for her to have days when she made her pick-up well after dark, this depended wholly on her stamina for driving and her appetite for the game. Just one humiliating encounter could shake her so badly that she would retreat to the farm as soon as possible, to brood on where she’d gone wrong and what she could have done to protect herself.
Isserley was wondering, as she drove, whether or not this Beetle-brow character had shaken her that much.
It was difficult to decide, because her own emotions hid from her. She’d always been like that, even back home – even when she was a kid. Men had a Ways said they couldn’t figure her out, but she couldn’t figure herself out, either, and had to look for clues like anyone else. In the past, the surest sign that an emotion was stuck inside her had been sudden, unwarranted fits of temper, often with regrettable consequences. She didn’t have those tantrums anymore, now that her adolescence was behind her. Her anger was well under control nowadays – which was just as well, given what was at stake. But it did mean it was harder for her to guess what sort of state she might be in. She could glimpse her feelings, but only out of the corner of her eye, like distant headlights reflected in a side mirror. Only by not looking for them directly did she have any chance of spotting them.