Under the Skin Read Online Free

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