Under the Skin by Michel Faber

doesn’t understand you, is that right?’
    ‘She’s got a temper,’ he admitted, as if he’d been spurred to articulate this for the first time ever. ‘She’ll skelp my bot.’
    ‘Have you ever thought of leaving her?’
    He grinned so broadly it was like an incision slicing his head in two.
    ‘A good girl is hard to find,’ he chided her, barely moving his lips.
    ‘Still, if she doesn’t care for you …’ persisted Isserley. ‘For example, would she be worried about you if you didn’t turn up tonight? Would she try to find you?’
    He sighed, a long wheezy exhalation of infinite weariness.
    ‘My money’s good enough for her,’ he said. ‘And, plus , I got cancer in the lungs. Lung cancer, in other words. Can’t feel it, but the doctors say it’s there. I might not have long, y’understand? No use giving up a bird in the hand, y’understand? Eh?’
    ‘Mmm,’ replied Isserley vaguely. ‘I see what you mean.’
    Another sign reminding motorists that services were not far ahead flashed by, but the woodcutter was nuzzling into the seat again, mumbling, ‘Five minutes. Just another five minutes.’
    And again, he was gone, his boozy breath snortling gently.
    Isserley glanced at him. He sat slumped, his head lolling against the headrest, his rubbery mouth open, his red-lidded eyes closed. He might as well have been pricked by the icpathua needles already.
    Isserley thought about him as she drove through the soundproof night, weighing up his pros and cons.
    On the pro side, the woodcutter’s drunkenness and sleepless excesses were no doubt well understood by all who knew him; nothing would surprise them less than if he failed to turn up wherever he was supposed to be. The car would be found, full of empty alcohol containers, on a windswept ribbon of road through two mountain ranges; there would be no doubt that the driver had stumbled away, drunk, into a frozen expanse of bog and precipice. Police would dutifully search for the body, but be resigned from the outset that it might never be found.
    On the con side, the woodcutter was not a healthy specimen: his lungs, by his own admission, were full of cancer. Isserley tried to visualize this; imagined someone slicing him open and being squirted in the face by a stream of malodorous black muck made of burnt cigarette tar and fermented phlegm. However, she suspected this was a lurid fantasy based on her own distaste at the thought of inhaling burning punk into her lungs. It probably bore no relation to what cancer really was.
    She frowned, straining to recall her studies. She knew cancer had something to do with runaway cell reproduction … mutant growth. Did that mean that this vodsel had huge abnormal lungs crammed into his chest? She didn’t want to cause any problems for the men back at the farm.
    On the other hand, who cared if the lungs were too big? They could surely be discarded whatever size they were.
    On the other hand, she felt squeamish about bringing a vodsel onto the farm which she knew to be diseased. Not that anyone had ever told her in so many words that it was wrong, but … well, she had her own internal moral sense.
    The woodcutter was murmuring in his sleep, a slack-lipped crooning sound like ‘moosh’n, moosh’n, moosh’n’, as if he were trying to placate an animal.
    Isserley checked the clock on the dashboard. More than five minutes had elapsed; quite a bit more. She took a deep breath, settled back in her seat, and drove.
    An hour or so later, she had bypassed Tain and was approaching the Dornoch Bridge roundabout. It struck her that the weather conditions were so different from what she had experienced earlier that day on the Kessock Bridge that they could have been on a different planet. Lit up against the pitch-black environs by strips of neon on long stalks, the roundabout glowed eerily in the windless, trafficless stillness. Isserley drove onto its steeply ascending spiral, glancing at the woodcutter to see if the blaze