Free Under the Skin by Michel Faber Page A

have been any different, if she’d gone there rather than here?
    Of course not. Of course not. And now, the way things had turned out, she didn’t look any worse now than the worst Estate trash, did she? … or not much worse, anyway. And look what she’d got in exchange!
    She looked at the whole wide world, from her rocky vantage point on the shore of Ablach Farm. It was unbelievably marvellous. She felt like running about in it forever – except that she couldn’t run anymore.
    Not that she’d have been doing any running in the Estates. She’d have been shambling around spiritlessly, along with all the other losers and low-lifes, in underground corridors of bauxite and compacted ash. She’d have been working her guts out in a moisture filtration plant or an oxygen factory, toiling in filth like a maggot among other maggots.
    Instead, here she was, free to wander in an unbounded wilderness swirling with awesome surpluses of air and water.
    And all she had to do in return, when it came right down to essentials, was walk on two legs.
    Of course that wasn’t all she’d had to do.
    To stop herself thinking about the more embittering specifics of her sacrifice, Isserley abruptly decided to get back to work. There was only so much freedom she could wallow in before she began to grow uneasy. Work was the cure.
    She’d already thrown the German hitcher’s keys and wristwatch into the sea, where they would be re-shaped and re-textured along with all the other jetsam of the millennia. The empty plastic bag she had tucked into the waistband of her trousers, to avoid littering the beach. It was littered enough already with ugly plastic flotsam from passing ships and oil rigs; one day she would light a giant bonfire on the shore and burn all the rubbish on it. She kept forgetting to bring the equipment, that’s all.
    Now she retrieved her shoes and pulled them on, with some difficulty, over her icy and somewhat swollen feet. She’d overdone the exposure to the cold, perhaps. A few hours in her little overheated car would put her to rights.
    She strode over the shore towards the grassy fringe of pasture. Her sheep had rejoined its flock, far away now on the upper reaches of the hill. Trying to discern which sheep was the one she’d spoken to, Isserley stumbled and almost fell, made clumsy by the shoes; she must keep her eyes on where she was stepping. Intricate tangles of bleached and sundried seaweed lay scattered at the very edge of the living vegetation, resembling the skeletons, or parts of skeletons, of nonexistent creatures. In amongst these deceptive simulacra, authentic husks of cannibalized seagulls fluttered in the wind. Sometimes, but not today, there was a dead seal, its back flippers tangled in an off cut of fishing net, its body hollowed out by other citizens of the sea.
    Isserley walked along the path the generations of sheep-flocks had made, up the tiers of the hill. In her mind, she was already behind the wheel.
    When she got back to the cottage, the bonfire had died. There was a halo melted around it, a dark circle of ash and scorched grass in the snow. On the pyre itself, some of the rucksack still lay unconsumed. She pulled the sooty metal support struts out of the ashes and cast them aside, for disposal later. Tomorrow, perhaps, if she was ready for the sea again by then.
    She let herself into the house and walked straight to the bathroom.
    It, like all the rooms in the house, had a bare and uninhabited appearance, tainted by mildew and the chaff of insects. Dim light leaked in through a tiny window of filthy frosted glass. A jagged shard of mirror slumped crookedly in the alcove behind the sink, reflecting nothing but peeling paintwork. The bathtub was clean but a little rusty, as was the sink. The yawning interior of the lidless toilet bowl, by contrast, was the colour and texture of bark; it had not been used for at least as long as Isserley had lived here.
    Pausing only to remove her shoes, Isserley