Read Under the Skin for Free Online Page B

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.
    Lately, she suspected her feelings were getting swallowed up, undigested, inside purely physical symptoms. Her backache and eye-strain were sometimes much worse than usual, for no real reason; at these times, there was probably something else troubling her.
    Another tell-tale sign was the way perfectly ordinary events could bring her down, like being overtaken by a school bus on a gloomy afternoon. If she was in reasonable shape, the sight of that great shield-shaped back window crowded with jeering, gesticulating adolescents didn’t perturb her in the least. Today, however, the spectacle of them hovering above her, like an image on a giant screen she must meekly follow for miles, filled her with despond. The way they gurned and grimaced, and smeared their grubby hands in the condensation, seemed an expression of malevolence towards her personally.
    Eventually the bus turned off the A9, leaving Isserley