‘Where’s here?’ she asked, nodding her head at the open road, hoping to remind him how far she had taken him already.
‘Milnafua.’ He sniggered, as if self-conscious about the name.
To Isserley, Milnafua sounded perfectly normal; more normal in fact than London or Dundee, which she had some trouble getting her tongue round. She appreciated, however, that to him it represented some outlandish extreme.
‘There’s no work anywhere up there,’ is there, she suggested, hoping she was striking a matter-of-fact, masculine note of sympathy.
‘Don’t I know it,’ he mumbled. Then, with a startling boost of volume and pitch: ‘Still, got to keep trying, eh?’
Looking at him in disbelief, she confirmed what he was playing at: a pathetic gesture towards optimism, missing the mark by miles. He was even smiling, his face sheened with sweat, as if he’d suddenly become convinced it was dangerous to admit to too much sloth, as if there could be serious consequences for admitting to her that his life was spent on the dole. Was it all her fault for telling him she was a lawyer? Had she made him afraid that she’d get him in trouble? Or that one day she might turn out to have some official power over him? Could she apologize, laughing, for her deception and start all over again? Tell him she sold computer software or clothes for the larger lady?
A big green sign at the side of the road announced how many miles remained before Dingwall and Inverness: not very many. The land had fallen away on the left side, revealing the gleaming shore of the Cromarty Firth. The tide was low, all the rocks and sands exposed. A solitary seal languished on one of those rocks, as if stranded.
Isserley bit her lip, slowly adjusting to her mistake. Lawyer, saleswoman, housewife: it wouldn’t have made any difference. He was wrong for her, that’s all. She had picked up the wrong type. Again.
Yes, it was obvious now what this big, touchy bruiser was up to. He was going to Bradford to visit his wife, or at least his children.
This made him a bad risk, from her point of view. Things could get very complicated when there were children involved. Much as she wanted him – it was sinking in now how much she’d already invested in the idea of having him – she didn’t want complications. She would have to give him up. She would have to put him back.
They both sat in silence for the rest of the journey, as if conscious of having let each other down.
Traffic had accumulated all around them; they were caught up in an orderly queue of vehicles crossing the multi-laned tightrope of Kessock Bridge. Isserley glanced at her hitcher, felt a pang of loss at finding him turned away from her, staring down at the industrial estates of the Inverness shore far below. He was appraising a dismal toy-town of prefab ugliness as intently as he had admired her breasts not so long ago. Tiny trucks disappearing into factory mouths: that was what made sense to him now.
Isserley kept to the left, drove faster than she’d done all day. It wasn’t just the pace demanded by the traffic around her; she wanted to get this over with as soon as possible. The tiredness had returned with a vengeance; she longed to find a shady bower off the road, lean her head against the seat and sleep a while.
On the far side, where the bridge rejoined the mainland, she negotiated the roundabout with pained and earnest concentration, to avoid being caught up in the town-bound traffic and herded to Inverness. She didn’t even bother to disguise her grimace of anxiety as she did this: she had already lost him, after all.
However, to fill the silence of their last few moments together, she offered him a small parting consolation.
‘I’ll drive you just a bit further, get you past the Aberdeen turn-off. Then at least you’ll know all the cars passing you are going south.’
‘Great, yeah,’ he said passionlessly.
‘Who knows?’ she jollied him. ‘You might get to Bradford by tonight.’
‘Bradford?’ he frowned, turning to challenge her. ‘Who says I’m going to Bradford?’
‘To see your kids?’ she reminded him.
There was an awkward pause, then:
‘I never see my kids,’ he stated flatly. ‘I don’t even know where they live, exactly. Somewhere in Bradford, that’s as much as I know. Janine – my ex-wife – doesn’t want anything to do with me. I don’t exist anymore as far as she’s concerned.’ He peered straight ahead, as if roughly calculating all the thousands of places that lay south, and comparing that number to what he himself amounted to.
‘Bradford was years ago, anyway,’ he said. ‘She could’ve moved to fuckin’ Mars by now, for all I know.’
‘So …’ enquired Isserley, changing gear with such clumsiness that the gearbox made a hideous grinding noise, ‘where are you hoping to get to today?’
Her hitcher shrugged. ‘Glasgow will do me,’ he told her. ‘There’s some good pubs there.’
Noticing her looking past him at the signs announcing imminent parking areas, it registered with him that she was about to discharge him from the car. Abruptly he mustered a last incongruous burst of conversational energy, fuelled by bitterness.
‘It beats sitting in the Commercial Hotel in Alness with a bunch of old boilers listening to some idiot singin’ fuckin’ “Copacabana”.’
‘But where will you sleep?’
‘I know a couple of guys in Glasgow,’ he told her, faltering again, as if that last squirt of fuel had already sputtered into the atmosphere, ‘It’s just a matter of running into them, that’s all. They’ll be there somewhere. It’s a small world, eh?’
Isserley was staring ahead at the snow-capped mountains. It looked like a pretty big world to her.
‘Mm,’ she said, unable to share his vision of how Glasgow might greet him. Sensing this, he made a small mournful gesture, an opening out of his beefy hands to show there was nothing in them.
‘Although people can always let you down, eh?’ he said. ‘That’s why you always got to have a plan B.’
And he swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bulging like a real one stuck in his neck.
Isserley nodded approvingly, trying not to let her feelings show. She was covered in sweat now, cold chills running down her back like electric currents. Her heart hammered so hard her breasts shook; she disciplined herself to take just one deep breath instead of many shallow ones. Keeping her right hand clamped securely to the steering wheel she checked the rear-view mirror, the other lane, her speed, the hitcher.
Everything was ideal, everything pointed to this moment.
Noticing her excitement, he grinned at her uncertainly, removing his hands from his lap with an awkward jerk, as if waking up, dazed, to something that might yet be expected of him. She grinned back in reassurance, nodding almost imperceptibly as if to say ‘Yes’.
Then the middle finger of her left hand flipped a little toggle on the steering wheel.
It might have been for the headlights or the indicators, or for the windscreen wipers. It was neither. It was the icpathua toggle, the trigger for the needles inside the passenger seat, to make them spring up silently from their little sheath-like burrows in the upholstery.
The hitcher flinched as they stung him through the fabric of his jeans, one needle in each buttock. His eyes, by chance, were facing the rear-view mirror, but no-one but Isserley witnessed the expression in them; the nearest vehicle was a giant lorry labelled FARMFOODS which was far away still, its driver an insect head behind tinted glass. In any case, the hitcher’s look of surprise was momentary; the dose of icpathua was adequate for body sizes considerably larger than his. He lost consciousness and his head lolled back into the padded hollow of the headrest.
Isserley