‘He’s cheap, my son. Cheap and fast. Labour’s what costs, y’see, when it comes to cars. He’s got a constant stream of ’em passing through his garage. In and out. Genius touch.’
Isserley wasn’t interested. If she wanted a man with a genius touch, she already had one on tap, back at the farm. He’d do anything for her, and he kept his paws to himself – if only just.
‘What about your van?’ she said.
‘Oh, he’ll fix that too. Soon as he gets his hands on it.’
‘Where is it?’
‘About half a mile from where you picked me up,’ he wheezed, stoically amused. ‘I was half-way home with a tonload of whelks in the back. Fuckin’ engine just died on me. But my boy will sort it. Better value than the AA, that lad. When he’s not pissed.’
‘Do you have a business card of your son’s on you?’ Isserley enquired politely.
‘Hold on,’ he grunted.
Again he lifted his meaty rump, which was not destined after all to be injected with icpathua. From his pocket he removed a handful of wrinkled, dog-eared and tarnished cardboard squares, which he shuffled through like playing cards. He selected two, and laid them on the dashboard.
‘One’s me, and one’s my son,’ he said. ‘If you feel like doing a bit of whelk-gathering, get in touch. I’ll come out for any amount over twenty kilos. If you don’t get that much in one day, a couple of days will do it.’
‘But don’t they spoil?’
‘Takes ’em about a week to die. It’s actually good to let ’em sit for a while so as the excess water drains out. And keep the bag closed, or they’ll crawl out and hide under your bed.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ promised Isserley. The rain was easing off at last, allowing her to slow the windscreen wipers down. Light began to seep through the greyness. ‘Here’s Tomich Farm coming up,’ she announced.
‘Another two hundred yards and that’s me,’ said the whelk stud, already unbuckling his seatbelt. ‘Thanks a lot. You’re a little Samaritan.’
She stopped the car where he told her to and he let himself out, squeezing her affectionately on the arm with one big hand before she realized what was happening. If he noticed the hardness and thinness of the limb, he didn’t let on. Ambling off, he waved once without looking back.
Isserley watched him disappear, her arm tingling unpleasantly. Then when he was gone, she frowned into her rear-view mirror, looking for a break in the traffic. She was forgetting him already, apart from a resolution to wash and put on fresh clothes whenever she’d been for a morning walk along the firth.
Indicator ticking, she cruised back onto the road, eyes front.
Her second hitcher was waiting for her quite close to home, so close that she had to think hard about whether she’d ever seen him before. He was young, almost too short, with a beetle brow and hair dyed so blond it was almost white. Despite the cold and the persistent drizzle, he wore only a short-sleeved Celtic T-shirt and military camouflage pants. Vague tattoos disfigured his lean but powerful forearms: skin deep, she reminded herself again.
Deciding, on the southwards approach, that he was a total stranger after all, she stopped for him.
As soon as he’d entered her car and sat down, Isserley sensed he was trouble. It was as if the laws of physics were unsettled by his presence; as if the electrons in the air were suddenly vibrating faster, until they were ricocheting around the confines of the cabin like crazed invisible insects.
‘Gaun anywhir near Redcastle?’ A sour aroma of alcohol sidled over to her.
Isserley shook her head. ‘Invergordon,’ she said. ‘If that’s not worth your while …’
‘Neh, it’s cool,’ he shrugged, drumming on his knees with his wrists, as if responding to the beat of an inbuilt Walkman.
‘OK,’ Isserley said, pulling out from the kerb.
She regretted there wasn’t more traffic: always a bad sign. She also found herself, instinctively, gripping the steering wheel in such a way that her elbows hung down, obscuring her passenger’s view of her breasts. This, too, was a bad sign.
His stare burned through regardless.
Women don’t dress like that, he thought, unless they want a fuck.
The only thing was, she mustn’t expect him to pay. Not like that slag in Galashiels. Buy them a drink and they think they can sting you for twenty pounds. Did he look like some kind of loser?
That road in Invergordon with the Academy in it. That was a good place. Quiet. She could suck him off there. He wouldn’t have to see her ugly face then.
Her tits would dangle between his legs. He’d give them a bit of a squeeze if she did a good job. She’d do her best, he could tell. Breathing hard already she was, like a bitch in heat. Not like that slag in Galashiels. This one would be satisfied with what she could get. Ugly women always were, weren’t they?
Not that he was the kind of guy who could only get ugly women.
It was just, here he was and here she was. It was like … force of nature, wasn’t it? The law of the fucking jungle.
‘So, what brings you out on the road today?’ Isserley said brightly.
‘Settin’ aroond the estate wuz doin’ mah heid in.’
‘In between jobs, then?’
‘Jobs dinnae exist up here. Nae such fuckin’ thing.’
‘The government still expects you to look for them though, doesn’t it?’
This gesture of empathy did not particularly impress him.
‘Ah’m oan a fuckin’ trainin’ schim,’ he fumed. ‘They says, You go find some old fogies and talk shite tae ’em aboot central fuckin’ heatin’ and we’ll tell the government yir oaff the dole, OK? Fuckin’ hush money. Yi ken?’
‘It sucks,’ Isserley agreed, hoping this was the right term for him.
The atmosphere in the car was growing intolerable. Every available cubic millimetre of empty space between him and her was filling up with his malignant breath. She had to make her decision fast; her fingers itched to hit the icpathua toggle. But she must, at all costs, stay calm. To act on impulse was to invite disaster.
Years ago, in the very beginning, she’d stung a hitcher who had asked her, scarcely two minutes after getting into the car, if she liked having a fat cock up each hole. Her English hadn’t been quite as good then, and it had taken her a little while to figure out he wasn’t talking about poultry or sports. By then he’d exposed his penis. She’d panicked and stung him. It had been a very bad decision.
Police had searched for him for weeks. His picture was shown on television and published not just in the newspapers but also in a special magazine for homeless people. He was described as vulnerable. His wife and parents appealed to anyone who might have sighted him. Within days, despite the privacy she’d imagined at the time she picked him up, the investigation turned its spotlight on a grey Nissan estate driven possibly by a woman. Isserley had had to lie low on the farm for what seemed like an eternity. Her faithful car was handed over to Ensel, and he cannibalized it in order to customize the next-best one on the farm, a horrid little monster called Lada.
‘Anyone can make a mistake,’ Ensel had reassured her as he laboured to get her back on the road, his arms smeared with black grease, his eyes bloodshot from the welding flame.
But Isserley’s shame was such that even now she couldn’t think about her failure without an involuntary grunt of distress. It would never happen again: never.