intercom crackled abstractly, and she leaned close to it, her lips almost brushing the grille.
‘Isserley,’ she whispered.
The door rolled open and she stepped inside.
* * *
Impatient to get out to the firth, Isserley didn’t linger over breakfast. She was back at her cottage within twenty minutes, comfortably full of stodge and carrying a small plastic doggie bag of the German hitcher’s personal effects.
The men down below had seemed pleased to see her, and had expressed concern about her having missed dinner the previous evening.
‘It was a real treat,’ Ensel told her, in a thick provincial dialect of her own language. ‘Shanks of voddissin in serslida sauce. With fresh wild berries for dessert.’
‘Well, never mind,’ Isserley had said, spreading slice after slice of bread with mussanta paste. She never knew what to say to these men, these labourers and process workers she would certainly never even have met in the course of ordinary life back home. Of course it didn’t help that they looked so different from her, and stared at her breasts and her chiselled face whenever they thought she couldn’t see.
They were busy today, and had left her to her meal. But not before passing on an important bit of news: Amlis Vess was coming. Amlis Vess! Coming to Ablach Farm! Tomorrow! He’d sent a message, he was already on his way, they were not to go to any special bother, he wanted to see everything just as it was. Who would have thought it?
Isserley had murmured something noncommittal, and the men hurried off to make more preparations for the big event. Excitement was rare in their lives now that Ablach Farm was well established and they had time on their hands. No doubt this visit from the boss’s son was an almighty thrill compared to spending yet another afternoon gambling with bits of straw or whatever men of their sort did. Left alone in the dining hall, Isserley had served herself a bowl of gushu, but it tasted strangely sour. It was then that she’d noticed that the whole subterranean complex, as well as smelling faintly of male sweat and crap food as always, smelled pungently of cleaning agents and paint. It made her even more determined to get back up into the fresh air as soon as possible.
The walk back to the cottage through the snow cleared her sinuses and helped the food settle. Clasping the doggie bag between her legs, she unlocked the front door of her house and let herself in to the living room, which was vacant and bare apart from some large piles of twigs and branches scattered over the floor.
She gathered an armful of the best ones and carried them out to the back yard, letting them fall along with the doggie bag onto the snowy earth. Those twigs that were the correct shape she arranged into a little pyre, the rest she kept in reserve.
Next she unlocked and swung open the rusty doors of the small cast-iron shed adjacent to her cottage. She laid the palms of her hands on the bonnet of her car, feeling how icy-cold it was; she hoped it would start when the time came. For the moment, however, this wasn’t her concern. She opened the boot and fetched out the German hitcher’s rucksack. It, too, was affected by the overnight freeze: not frosty exactly, but damp and chilled, as if from a refrigerator.
Isserley carried the rucksack out into the yard, having first checked that there was no-one around. There wasn’t a soul. She lit the bottom twigs of the pyre. The wood was bone-dry, having been gathered months ago and kept indoors ever since: it crackled into flame immediately.
When upended, the backpack proved to be an unexpected cornucopia. More had been fitted into it than seemed concordant with the laws of physics. The most extraordinary variety of things, too, all tucked away in dozens of plastic boxes and bottles and pouches and slits and zip pockets, arranged and interleaved with great ingenuity. Isserley threw them, one by one, onto the fire. Multicoloured food containers squirmed and collapsed in a bubbling petroleum stink. T-shirts and underpants, thrown unfolded onto the flames, yawned black holes to let smoke exhale. Socks sizzled. A small cardboard box of prescription medicine exploded with a pop. A transparent cylindrical canister containing a little plastic figurine wearing Scottish national costume went through several stages, the last of which was the collapse of the naked pink doll, its limbs fusing, face-first into the flames.
The dearth of highly flammable items was putting a strain on the fire and, once a pair of trousers was added, it threatened to die. Isserley selected some dry twigs and laid them on in strategic places. The foldout maps of England, Wales and Scotland were useful too; loosely screwed up to facilitate aeration, they burned excitably.
Hidden near the bottom of the rucksack was a pink toiletries bag which contained not toiletries but a passport. Isserley hesitated over this item, wondering whether she could use a passport herself: she’d never seen one before, at least not in the flesh, so to speak. She flipped through its pages, examining it curiously.
The hitcher’s picture was in there, as well as his name, age, date of birth and so on. These things meant nothing to Isserley, but she was intrigued by how, in the photograph, he looked chubbier and pinker than he had been in reality, and yet also queerly less substantial. His expression was one of crestfallen stoicism. Strange how a specimen like him, well cared for, healthy, free to roam the world, and blessed with a perfection of form which would surely have allowed him to breed with a greater selection of females than average, could still be so miserable. By contrast, other males, scarred by neglect, riddled with diseases, spurned by their kind, were occasionally known to radiate a contentment that seemed to arise from something more enigmatic than mere stupidity.
This inability of some of the most superbly fit and well-adapted vodsels to be happy while they were alive was, for Isserley, one of the great mysteries she encountered in her job, and one which her years of experience had only made more puzzling. There was no point discussing this with Esswis, much less with the other men on the farm. Well-intentioned though they were, she’d long ago discovered they lacked a spiritual side.
Isserley looked up and noticed she’d let the fire burn low, and rummaged around for something highly combustible. The hitcher’s plastic pouch of signs was the first thing to hand, and she shook the sheaf of papers out onto the snow. She tossed them on the fire one by one: THURSO, GLASGOW, CARLISLE and half a dozen others, right down to SCHOTTLAND. They burned brightly enough, but were consumed in moments. The pyre was rapidly congealing into a smouldering porridge of ash and molten plastic unlikely to make much impact on the biggest item left, the rucksack itself.
Isserley hurried back to the shed and fetched out a can of petrol. She sloshed the gleaming fuel liberally all over the backpack and tossed it gingerly onto the flickering mound. The blaze revived with an intoxicating vomp.
Isserley had one last look at the passport. She decided that if she was going to risk holding onto documents, a driver’s licence might come in handier. In any case, she noticed belatedly that the gender of the passport’s owner was specified and that his height was officially certified to be 1 metre 90 centimetres. Isserley smiled and threw the little red book onto the fire.
From the doggie bag, the wallet went onto the pyre too, once she had removed the paper money. Some of the money was not legal tender in the United Kingdom; this she discarded. The sterling she could add to her supply for buying petrol. It was just as well she never bought anything else, for her hands stank of petrol now and she’d passed this smell onto the banknotes.
A visit to the seashore and a shower afterwards seemed like a better idea than ever. Then she would go out for a drive. If she felt like it. Hitchers would be thin on the ground anyway, on a snowy day. Amlis Vess would just have to understand that.
Isserley walked along the pebbled shore of the Moray Firth, drinking in the beauty of the great
