she suggested breathlessly.
‘No. But I almost became a doctor, which in my case would perhaps have been the same thing. My pairends think I am still studying at the institute. They sent me a very far distance and paid a lot of money so that I could study there. It is very important to them that I must become a doctor. Not just a regular doctor, but a specialist. I have been sending them letters telling them that my reezurch is proceeding very smoothly, Instead, I have been drinking beer and reading books about travel. Now I am here, travelling.’
‘And what do your parents think of that?’
He sighed and looked down into his lap.
‘They don’t know anything about it. I have been training them. So many weeks between letters, then so many weeks more, then so many weeks still more. I always say that I am very busy with my reezurch. I will send them my next letter after I am back in Germany.’
‘What about your friends?’ insisted Isserley. ‘Doesn’t anybody know you’ve gone on this adventure?’
‘I had some good friends back in Bremen before my studies began. At medical school I have many acquaintances who want to become specialists and drive a Porsche.’ He turned towards her in concern, although she was doing her very best to keep calm. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, fine, thank you,’ she panted, and flipped the icpathua toggle.
She knew he would fall against her, turned sideways as he was. She was prepared for it. With her right hand she kept steering straight and true. With her left she shoved his slumping body back into position. The driver of the car behind her would just assume there’d been an attempted kiss and she’d rebuffed it. Kissing in a moving vehicle was universally acknowledged to be dangerous. She’d known that even before she’d learned to drive, had read it in an ancient book about road safety for American teenagers, not long after her arrival in Scotland. It had taken her a long time to fully understand that book, studying it for weeks on end while the television chattered in the background. You could never predict when the television might make something clear that books couldn’t – especially when the books came from charity shops.
The hitcher was toppling towards her again. Again she shoved him back. ‘Behind the wheel of an automobile is no place for canoodling, necking, or “petting”,’ the book had said. For someone new to the language, it was a mysterious injunction. But she’d worked it out soon enough, with the help of television. Legally, you were allowed to do whatever you liked in a car, including have sex – as long as the vehicle wasn’t moving at the time.
Isserley put her left-hand blinker on as she approached a turn-off. Bumf, said the hitcher’s head against the passenger window.
It was past six o’clock when she got back to the farm. Ensel and a couple of the other men helped her remove the hitcher from the car.
‘Best one yet,’ Ensel complimented her.
She nodded wearily. He always said that.
As they were loading the vodsel’s limp body onto the pallet, she ducked back into her car and drove off into the unlit dark, aching and ready for bed.
ISSERLEY WAS WOKEN next morning by an unusual thing: sunshine.
Normally, she would sleep only a few hours during the night, and then discover herself lying wide-eyed in the claustrophobic dark, her contorted back muscles keeping her hostage in her bed with the threat of needle-sharp pains.
Now she lay blinking in the golden glow of a sun which must have risen quite a while ago. Her attic bedroom, tucked under the steepled roof of the Victorian cottage, had walls which were vertical only half-way up to the ceiling, sloping sharply the rest of the way in line with the roof. From where Isserley lay, her bedroom looked like a hexagonal cubby, lit up like a cell in an irradiated honeycomb. Through one open window, she could see cloudless blue sky; through the other, the complex architecture of oak branches laden with fresh snow. The air was still; the spiderless cobwebs hanging loose from the blistered wooden window-frames hardly stirred.
Only after a minute or two could she detect the almost subsonic hum of the farm’s activity.
She stretched, grunting in discomfort, and threw the bedclothes aside with her legs. The angle of the sunlight was such that her bed was in line for the warmest rays, so she lay exposed for a while, limbs spread in an X-shape, basking her naked skin.
The walls of her bedroom were bare, too. The floor was uncarpeted, an unvarnished lamina of ancient timber boards which would not have passed a spirit-level test. Just under one of the windows, a patch of frost glittered on the floor. Out of curiosity, Isserley reached down to the glass of water next to her bed and lifted it up to the light. The water in it was still liquid – just.
Isserley drank it, even though it crackled slightly in the pouring. After a whole night of lying still and letting nature take its course, her body had attained a simmering circulation that would persist until she’d exercised herself into diurnal metabolism.
In the meantime, she was as warm as a snow goose.
Drinking the water reminded her she had eaten nothing since yesterday’s breakfast. She really must fuel up properly today before going out on the road, if she went out on the road, that is.
After all, who said she had to go out every day of her life? She wasn’t a slave.
The cheap plastic alarm clock on the mantelpiece said it was 9:03. There was no other mechanical apparatus in the room except for the scuffed and grubby portable television wedged in the hearth. Its power cord was plugged into a long extension cable which snaked along the skirting-boards and out the door. Downstairs, somewhere, there was an electrical connection.
Isserley heaved herself out of bed and tested out what it felt like to stand up. It wasn’t too bad. She had grown lax about her exercises, and that made her more stiff and sore than she need be. She could definitely do better.
She walked over to the fireplace and switched on the television. She didn’t need her glasses to watch it. In fact, she didn’t need her glasses at all; the lenses were bits of thick window-pane, pretending to be optical. They gave her nothing but headaches and eyestrain, but she needed them for her job.
On the television, a vodsel chef was instructing an inept female how to fry slivers of kidney. The female giggled in embarrassment as the smoke began to rise. On another channel, multi-coloured furry creatures unlike any Isserley ever saw in real life cavorted and sang songs about the letters of the alphabet. On another channel, a shivering food blender was being demonstrated by hands whose nails were painted peach. On another channel, an animated pig and an animated chicken were flying through space in a rocket-powered jalopy. Clearly, Isserley had missed the news.
She switched off the television, straightened up and took up her position in the centre of the room, to do her back exercises. Doing them properly took time and effort, but she’d been lazy lately, and her body was punishing her for it. She must get back into shape. Pain such as she’d suffered the last few days was simply not necessary. Allowing herself to get unfit proved no point, unless, for some perverse reason, she actually meant to make herself miserable. To make herself regret what she had done.
She didn’t regret what she had done. No.
So, she arched her spine, swivelled her arms, stood on each leg in turn, then on tiptoe, with her arms upstretched and trembling. She held this stance for as long as she possibly could. The tips of her fingers brushed the dangling dead light bulb. Even extended to her full length like this, in a child-sized bedroom, she was well short of touching the ceiling.
Fifteen minutes later, perspiring, shivering a little, she padded over to the wardrobe and selected her clothes for the day, the same clothes as yesterday. The choice, in any case, was from among six identical low-cut tops in different colours, and two pairs of flared trousers, both green velvet. She possessed only one pair