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 always 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 tailing inscrutable little red sedans very like her own. The line seemed to go on forever. The corners of the world were darkening fast.
She was upset, she decided. Also, her back was sore, her tailbone ached and her eyes were stinging after so many hours of peering through thick lenses and rain. If she gave up and went home, she could take off her glasses and give her eyes a rest, lie curled up on her bed, perhaps even sleep: oh, what bliss that would be! Trifling gifts of creature comfort, consolation prizes to soothe away the pangs of failure.
At Daviot, however, she spotted a tall, rangy backpacker holding a cardboard sign that said THURSO. He looked fine. After the usual three approaches, she stopped for him, about a dozen yards ahead of where he stood. In her rear-view mirror she watched him bound towards the car shrugging his backpack off his broad shoulders even as he ran.
He must be very strong, she thought as she reached across for the door handle, to be able to run like that with a heavy load.
Having drawn abreast with her car, the hitcher hesitated at the door she’d opened for him, gripping his garishly coloured swag with long, pale fingers. He smiled apologetically; his rucksack was bigger than Isserley, and clearly wasn’t going to fit on his lap or even the back seat.
Isserley got out of the car and opened the boot, which was always empty apart from a canister of butane fuel and a small fire extinguisher. Together they loaded his burden in.
‘Thank you very much,’ he said, in a serious, sonorous voice which even Isserley could tell was not a product of the United Kingdom.
She returned to the driver’s seat, he to his, and they drove off together just as the sun was taken below the horizon.
‘I’m pleased,’ he said, self-consciously turning his THURSO sign face-down on the lap of his orange track pants. It was sheathed in a clear rainproof folder and contained many pieces of paper, no doubt inscribed with different destinations. ‘It isn’t so easy to get a lift after dark.’
‘People like to see what they’re getting,’ agreed Isserley.
‘That’s understandable,’ he said.
Isserley leaned back against her seat, extended her arms, and let him see what he might be getting.
This lift was a fortunate thing. It meant he might get to Thurso by tonight, and Orkney by tomorrow. Of course Thurso was more than a hundred miles further north, but a car travelling at an average of fifty miles per hour – or even forty, as in this case – could in theory cover the distance in less than three hours.
He hadn’t asked her where she was going yet. Perhaps she would only take him a short way, and then say she was turning off. However, the fact that she had seemed to understand his allusion to the difficulties of hitch-hiking in the dark implied she did not intend to put him back on the road ten miles further on, with darkness falling. She would speak soon, no doubt. He had spoken last. It might be impolite for him to speak again.
