She dropped the black globe and straightened up, peering out across the ocean, across the dematerializing furrows of the waves. Then she looked the other way, to find the boulder on top of which she’d left her shoes. They were still there, the laces trembling in the breeze.
She was taking a risk in baring her feet to the world, but in the unlikely event that anyone else were to stray onto the beach, she’d see them coming for hundreds of metres or more. By the time they were close enough to see her feet, she could easily retrieve her shoes, or even wade into the water if need be. The relief she felt in allowing her long toes to splay over the rocky shore, curling round the stones, was inexpressible. Whose business but her own, anyway, were the risks she took? She was doing a job no-one else could do, and coming up with the goods year after year. Amlis Vess, if he had the audacity to find fault with her, would do well to remember that.
She walked on, veering nearer to the lapping of the tide. The shallow pools between the larger rocks were crammed with what she now knew were called whelks, though they appeared to be the ‘piddly wee ones’ the market did not require. She took one out of the glacial brine and lifted it up to her mouth, venturing the tip of her tongue into its glaireous hole. Its flavour was acrid; an acquired taste no doubt.
She put the whelk back into its pool, gently so as not to make a noise. She had a visitor of sorts.
A sheep had strayed onto the pebbled shore not far from her, and was sniffing boulders as large as itself, licking them experimentally. Isserley was intrigued: she hadn’t thought sheep could walk on such a surface, had thought their hooves wouldn’t permit it. But here it was, stepping across the treacherous morass of stones and shells with apparent ease.
Isserley approached stealthily, balancing gingerly on the fingers of her feet. She barely breathed, for fear of startling her fellow-traveller.
It was so hard to believe the creature couldn’t speak. It looked so much as if it should be able to. Despite its bizarre features, there was something deceptively human about it, which tempted her, not for the first time, to reach across the species divide and communicate.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Ahl,’ she said.
‘Wiin,’ she said.
These three greetings, which had no effect on the sheep except to make it scramble away, exhausted all the languages Isserley knew.
She wasn’t exactly a linguist, admittedly.
But then no linguist would ever have applied for her job, that was for sure. Only desperate people with no prospects except being dumped in the New Estates would have considered it.
And even then, only if they were out of their minds.
She had been totally crazy, looking back on it. Deliriously insane. But it had all turned out for the best, after all. The best decision she’d ever made. A very small personal sacrifice, really, if it avoided a lifetime buried in the Estates – a brutishly short lifetime, by all accounts.
In fact, whenever she found herself grieving over what had been done to her once-beautiful body in order for her to be sent here, she reminded herself what people who’d lived in the New Estates for any length of time looked like. Decay and disfigurement were obviously par for the course down there. Maybe it was the overcrowding, or the bad food or the bad air or the lack of medical care, or just the inevitable result of living underground. But there was an unmistakable ugliness about Estate trash, an almost subhuman taint.
When she’d got the news that she was going to be sent there, Isserley had made a fierce and solemn vow to stay healthy and beautiful against the odds. Refusing point-blank to be changed physically would be her revenge on the powers that be, her recoiling kick of defiance. But would she have had a hope, really? No doubt everybody vowed at first that they wouldn’t allow themselves to be transformed into a beast, with hunched back, scarred flesh, crumbling teeth, missing fingers, cropped hair. But that’s how they all ended up, didn’t they? Would she have been any different, if she’d gone there rather than here?
Of course not. Of course not. And now, the way things had turned out, she didn’t look any worse now than the worst Estate trash, did she? … or not much worse, anyway. And look what she’d got in exchange!
She looked at the whole wide world, from her rocky vantage point on the shore of Ablach Farm. It was unbelievably marvellous. She felt like running about in it forever – except that she couldn’t run anymore.
Not that she’d have been doing any running in the Estates. She’d have been shambling around spiritlessly, along with all the other losers and low-lifes, in underground corridors of bauxite and compacted ash. She’d have been working her guts out in a moisture filtration plant or an oxygen factory, toiling in filth like a maggot among other maggots.
Instead, here she was, free to wander in an unbounded wilderness swirling with awesome surpluses of air and water.
And all she had to do in return, when it came right down to essentials, was walk on two legs.
Of course that wasn’t all she’d had to do.
To stop herself thinking about the more embittering specifics of her sacrifice, Isserley abruptly decided to get back to work. There was only so much freedom she could wallow in before she began to grow uneasy. Work was the cure.
She’d already thrown the German hitcher’s keys and wristwatch into the sea, where they would be re-shaped and re-textured along with all the other jetsam of the millennia. The empty plastic bag she had tucked into the waistband of her trousers, to avoid littering the beach. It was littered enough already with ugly plastic flotsam from passing ships and oil rigs; one day she would light a giant bonfire on the shore and burn all the rubbish on it. She kept forgetting to bring the equipment, that’s all.
Now she retrieved her shoes and pulled them on, with some difficulty, over her icy and somewhat swollen feet. She’d overdone the exposure to the cold, perhaps. A few hours in her little overheated car would put her to rights.
She strode over the shore towards the grassy fringe of pasture. Her sheep had rejoined its flock, far away now on the upper reaches of the hill. Trying to discern which sheep was the one she’d spoken to, Isserley stumbled and almost fell, made clumsy by the shoes; she must keep her eyes on where she was stepping. Intricate tangles of bleached and sundried seaweed lay scattered at the very edge of the living vegetation, resembling the skeletons, or parts of skeletons, of nonexistent creatures. In amongst these deceptive simulacra, authentic husks of cannibalized seagulls fluttered in the wind. Sometimes, but not today, there was a dead seal, its back flippers tangled in an off cut of fishing net, its body hollowed out by other citizens of the sea.
Isserley walked along the path the generations of sheep-flocks had made, up the tiers of the hill. In her mind, she was already behind the wheel.
When she got back to the cottage, the bonfire had died. There was a halo melted around it, a dark circle of ash and scorched grass in the snow. On the pyre itself, some of the rucksack still lay unconsumed. She pulled the sooty metal support struts out of the ashes and cast them aside, for disposal later. Tomorrow, perhaps, if she was ready for the sea again by then.
She let herself into the house and walked straight to the bathroom.
It, like all the rooms in the house, had a bare and uninhabited appearance, tainted by mildew and the chaff of insects. Dim light leaked in through a tiny window of filthy frosted glass. A jagged shard of mirror slumped crookedly in the alcove behind the sink, reflecting nothing but peeling paintwork. The bathtub was clean but a little rusty, as was the sink. The yawning interior of the lidless toilet bowl, by contrast, was the colour and texture of bark; it had not been used for at least as long as Isserley had lived here.
Pausing only to remove her shoes, Isserley stepped into