Read Online Under the Skin by Michel Faber - Free Book Online Page A

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