Read Online Under the Skin by Michel Faber - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Michel Faber
Tags: General Fiction
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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 uncovered world.
To her right, trillions of litres of water surged between Ablach’s beach and an invisible Norway beyond the horizon. To her left, steep gorse-encrusted hills led up to the farm. Stretching endlessly behind and ahead of her was the peninsula’s edge, whose marshy pasture, used for grazing sheep, ended abruptly at the brink of the tide in a narrow verge of rock, curdled and sculpted by prehistoric fire and ice. It was along this verge that Isserley most loved to walk.
The variety of shapes, colours and textures under her feet was, she believed, literally infinite. It must be. Each shell, each pebble, each stone had been made what it was by aeons of submarine or subglacial massage. The indiscriminate, eternal devotion of nature to its numberless particles had an emotional importance for Isserley; it put the unfairness of human life into perspective.
Cast ashore, perhaps only briefly before being fetched back for another million years of polishing and re-shaping, the stones lay so serene beneath her naked feet. She would have liked to collect each of them for an infinitely complex display, a rockery for which she was personally responsible but which was so vast that she could never walk from one end of it to the other. In a sense, the Ablach shore was already such a rockery, except that she’d had no hand in preparing it, and she wished keenly to play some part in the design.
She picked up a pebble now, a smooth bell with a silky hole right through it. Its colours were stripes of orange, silver and grey. Another stone at her feet was spherical, pure black. She dropped the bell-shaped one and picked up the black globe instead. Even as she was lifting it, a bright pink and white crystal egg caught her eye. The challenge was exquisitely hopeless.
She dropped the black globe and straightened up, peering out across the ocean, across the dematerializing furrows of the waves.
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 uncovered world.
To her right, trillions of litres of water surged between Ablach’s beach and an invisible Norway beyond the horizon. To her left, steep gorse-encrusted hills led up to the farm. Stretching endlessly behind and ahead of her was the peninsula’s edge, whose marshy pasture, used for grazing sheep, ended abruptly at the brink of the tide in a narrow verge of rock, curdled and sculpted by prehistoric fire and ice. It was along this verge that Isserley most loved to walk.
The variety of shapes, colours and textures under her feet was, she believed, literally infinite. It must be. Each shell, each pebble, each stone had been made what it was by aeons of submarine or subglacial massage. The indiscriminate, eternal devotion of nature to its numberless particles had an emotional importance for Isserley; it put the unfairness of human life into perspective.
Cast ashore, perhaps only briefly before being fetched back for another million years of polishing and re-shaping, the stones lay so serene beneath her naked feet. She would have liked to collect each of them for an infinitely complex display, a rockery for which she was personally responsible but which was so vast that she could never walk from one end of it to the other. In a sense, the Ablach shore was already such a rockery, except that she’d had no hand in preparing it, and she wished keenly to play some part in the design.
She picked up a pebble now, a smooth bell with a silky hole right through it. Its colours were stripes of orange, silver and grey. Another stone at her feet was spherical, pure black. She dropped the bell-shaped one and picked up the black globe instead. Even as she was lifting it, a bright pink and white crystal egg caught her eye. The challenge was exquisitely hopeless.
She dropped the black globe and straightened up, peering out across the ocean, across the dematerializing furrows of the waves.
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