by John Grant
Tania joined me in the All Other Passports line at immigration. When the guy at the counter saw her UK passport he frowned and was halfway through pointing her toward the queue for EU nationals when he realized why she was here.
"The business in Iraq?" he said, nodding toward my stumps. His accent was quite thick, and totally different from Tania's non-accent, but I had no difficulty understanding him.
"Yes." I tried to soften my curtness with one of those instant smiles in which I specialized.
"I'm sorry you had the evil luck to be sent there," he said offhandedly, shrugging as he stamped my passport.
I caught my breath. It was exactly the right thing he'd said. No overweening sympathy. No gung-ho denunciations of towel-heads. Just a sort of acceptance and sharing of my misfortune.
He looked me in the eye. "I hope you're bringing the lady back home to stay. It's an ill thing when all the best and prettiest ones get taken away from us."
I laughed. "Just a holiday, I'm afraid."
He shrugged. "Ah, weel."
"Is everyone in Scotland like this?" I asked Tania later, jerking my head toward the terminal building we'd just come out of.
"No," she said with a smile, looking around her for the taxi rank. We'd decided beforehand that it'd be silly to try negotiating the buses into the city center, me with my handlessness and Tania with all the luggage. "But a lot of them are. It's a more laid-back country than you're used to, Quinn. And freer."
As the taxi driver loaded our cases and bags into the trunk of his big black vehicle, he told us he'd take us to Glasgow Central, where our hotel was, for twenty pounds.
"Twenty pounds?" I hissed to Tania as we settled ourselves into the back seat and she reached across me for the tongue of my seat belt. "That's well over fifty bucks! It's only about ten miles, isn't it? He's ripping us off."
"Some things are more expensive here," she replied, jiggling the belt's tongue into its socket. "A lot of things. Just get used to it."
"But ..."
"Think of it as your payment for medical insurance."
That ended the discussion.
Everything in Scotland seemed to be smaller, more enclosed-feeling than at home, I mused during the drive into the city. The dinky little airport. The three-lane highway whose lanes seemed narrower than I'd have expected. Most of the cars were actually cars: there were hardly any SUVs on the road. The transport trucks and buses seemed half the size of real ones. The overall effect was to make me feel I'd strayed into a model of the world, somewhere slightly enchanted. I recognized the sensation. It was the same as I'd felt when visiting miniature villages as a child.
Tania and a uniformed valet whipped us from the taxi into our hotel – which was not so much next to as half-inside Glasgow Central Station – through registration and up to our room. As she stowed away our clothes in drawers and a wardrobe I gazed out the window onto a vista of the railway station, sensing again that odd magic, this time because the double-glazing muffled into silence all but the very loudest of noises. I could hear the announcements over the loudspeakers, but only very faintly and fuzzily, as if they were a long way away and I was wearing faulty earplugs. There was far more grime than would have been tolerated in a station back home. From where I stood, high above, the passengers scurrying around in obedience to their own motivations were as incomprehensible as roaches on an unswept kitchen floor.
"Are you tired?" said Tania from behind me.
I turned and saw she was sitting on the bed, hands between her knees, all our kit and caboodle safely tidied away into appropriate places where I'd be unable to find any of it unassisted. On the bedside table, beside the telephone, lay a stick pen; there was one beside every phone at home, too. It was there for me to pick up in my teeth and dial with in the event of emergency. Next to the pen she'd put one of the bottles of bourbon we'd got at the duty free in Newark, as well as a carton of cigarettes I hadn't realized she'd bought. She'd opened the carton. A pack of Basics lay on the coverlet beside her.
"Smoking?" I said. "I thought you gave that up."
The edge of her mouth quirked. "Your father's three thousand miles away."
"Even so."
"Even so, I've not got anything to light the damn' things with. And I'm too shagged out to go downstairs and get a box of matches from the lobby."
I nodded toward the table underneath the window. Alongside the slightly creased advertisement-stuffed tourist guide to Glasgow, the hotel stationery and the anachronistic blotter, were a book of matches and an ashtray.
"Compliments of the house," I said, trying to keep any judgmental note out of my voice.
"Just be a dear and bring ..." She stopped. Resignation crossed her face as she heaved herself to her feet. "Sorry, I forgot."
She tossed the book of matches onto the bed and went into the bathroom, where I could hear the clattering of glass. A moment later she emerged with a tooth-mug.
"Cigs. Booze. Sleep," she said, gesturing at the bourbon. "The recipe for a happy wife, right now."
We kicked off our shoes and lay side by side on the bed, drinking the raw whiskey. Tania had rinsed out my plastic cup, getting rid of the remains of the glucose drink and replacing it with neat bourbon – to the brim; she wasn't a woman who believed in doing chores twice when once would do. I don't know why we hadn't bought scotch in Newark. Maybe it would have seemed blasphemous, or something, to bring a bottle of scotch to Scotland. I made a resolution to get some in the morning, or, if we woke early enough this evening, tonight. But just at this moment, lying together in what was for me a brand-new country and for Tania a long-abandoned homeland, the bourbon seemed perfectly in keeping. It was a symbol. We were using up, so that we would eventually piss away, the last vestiges of all the emotional and intellectual encumbrances we'd brought with us. I even smoked a couple of her cigarettes – the first time I'd smoked since the stolen guilts of adolescence – although they made my head spin and she laughed at my coughing.
Later, a little clumsily, we got off the bed and I watched her as she bent to pull back the sheets. She undressed me for sleep, and then undressed herself. I don't know if it was the booze or the tiredness or the fact that we were shedding our old selves just as we'd shed the noises of America, but for the first time in four months we made love.
We did this a little clumsily too, but that didn't matter.
~
Two days later, we were driving away from Glasgow, heading roughly northeastward. Tania seemed far more at ease behind the wheel of the rental car than she ever did driving the Nissan at home. Maybe it was that the driver seat was on the opposite side; maybe it was just because the car was that little bit smaller in every respect. I don't know. Whatever the case, I myself had found the differences initially disconcerting, then within a few minutes strangely liberating. They were part and parcel of the past forty-eight hours or so. We'd spent most of one day just wandering around, picking up a few things (including a bottle of Laphroaig) in the Glasgow shops; we'd spent most of the second day in the Burrell Collection, where I gazed at the foreignness of the Scottish exhibits while Tania gazed at the foreignness of everything else. In between, we'd eaten two excellent Indian meals and a bad hamburger meal. We'd also made love half a dozen times more, another rediscovery of the ancient arts.
"Where are we going?" I asked for the thousandth time.
"You'll find out when we get there," she said, laughing at the repetition of the exchange.
I glanced sideways at her, watching suburbs speed backwards past her face. There was a shiny vivacity in her eyes, focused on the road ahead, that I'd not seen in far too long.
"Second glen on the right, then straight on 'til morning, sort of thing?" I said.
She began to speak, then paused, then spoke. "That's probably a more accurate description than most," she said primly.
I brushed my hair back from my forehead with my smaller lump of pink plastic. There was still novelty in the gesture. Since Iraq I'd let my hair
grow, and it was now longer than I'd ever had it. The other, larger, prosthetic was still in their shared case, somewhere in the trunk behind us.
Unknown to me, Tania had packed the plastic hands for the trip to Scotland, "just in case". When I'd discovered this, instead of flying into a temper I'd asked her to strap on the left one for me – just the one, as a form of compromise with my arrogance. The thing itched like hell sometimes if I kept it on too long, but the agonies of my previous experience were just a memory. We'd discovered in one of the Indian restaurants that, if Tania wedged a spoon firmly between the useless thumb and the equally inflexible fingers, I could feed myself – messily and sloppily at first, as the biriani-streaked front of one of my shirts testified, but I'd improved rapidly with practice. Spaghetti was a distant dream, but perhaps the day would come.
The waiters in the restaurant had watched the performance with a friendly amusement, once or twice pointlessly offering help. This was the curious thing I'd discovered in Glasgow: the complete acceptance by everyone of my disability as just a part of who I was, nothing special. There was the occasional startled glance when people first encountered me, but otherwise it was as if handless men were on every street corner. At home in Jersey, on the rare occasions when I allowed Tania to take me out, I received looks that could be pitying, or sickly fascinated, or even derisory. Once in a supermarket, as I'd dawdled aimlessly behind Tania and her shopping cart, a trio of prepubescent boys had seen fit to follow me, taunting. Their parents, nearby, hadn't intervened until Tania, when she'd finally cottoned on to what was happening, had laid into the kids with a few – quite a lot of – acid words. One of the mothers, springing to the defence of her little angel, had angrily retorted: "Well, what can you expect?"
There was none of that in Glasgow. Nor, either, was there any perceivable reaction to our being a "racially mixed couple". I suppose the fact that we were both Americans outweighed any differences there might be between us.
In Scotland it doesn't take you long to drive anywhere. The kind of journey I was accustomed to at home would have had us driving into the sea before it was halfway through. Even so, it seemed to take a good while to leave the urban smear behind. At last, though, the road narrowed from four lanes to three, the central reservation being discarded. Then we were down to two lanes, and ultimately to what seemed to my American eye to be more like one and a half. The countryside we went through was at first rather drab, in terms of its landforms and its vegetation both; the greens were duller and more muted than at home, as if they'd forgotten to wash their faces this morning.
And then things finally began to change. The road became twistier, its progress punctuated by lots of small rises and falls – some of them not so small. The car labored in a few places as we struggled to reach a crest. The hills were taller and rockier, crowding around us; when we saw them ahead of us in the distance, they had that mysterious purple color I'd read about but only rarely seen at home. We had the way more or less to ourselves; on the rare occasions we came across a tractor or another car, Tania slowed down as the two vehicles manoeuvred carefully past each other. Each time, she and the other driver would say a few words of greeting, usually about the weather, in one case about a lost sheep. As far as I could gather – the accents were becoming less intelligible to me here, directly counter to Tania's predictions – it was an extremely interesting sheep.
"Tell me something more about your folks," I said when we'd left him and his battered paint-free zone of a truck. She'd never mentioned anything except the basics: Dad, Mom – "Mum", I mean – sisters Alysson and Joanna, brother Alan. Unlike me, who had two fat albums filled with badly focused snapshots and stiff formal portraits of my family, she possessed no photographs of her kin. There were phone calls every week or two – in the old days I'd been required to say a few phatic words to one in-law or another, but not since Iraq – and letters from her mother at least as often, although I'd never noticed Tania writing back. My wife's memories seemed to begin when she'd moved to London. It wasn't as if she were particularly secretive – far from it, in fact. I once joked that I knew more about what her boyfriends before me had been like in bed than I did about her family. She'd given me a cold look and asked me to pass the potatoes.
"I'm going to be meeting them soon enough," I added. "You might as well warn me what to expect."
She thought this over for a few moments, frowning to herself, tilting her head to one side while still watchfully regarding the next curve in the road, letting her foot ease off the pedal a tad as if that would help her deliberations.
"They're the kind of people that you just need to take them the way they are, Quinn. You've got a vile habit of trying to mould people into what you want them to be – you got it from your dad, although heaven be thankful you're not as bad as he is. My folks, they're ... they're not moldable, if that's a proper word. If you try to think of them as anything other than themselves, they won't change. But maybe you will."
It wasn't much of a description, and she refused to add to it. I had images of a commune of merry left-over hippies, passing the joints around and forgetting to wash.
Well, I could cut it – of that I was sure. Despite what Tania had said, I was as adaptable as anyone. There'd been plenty of dope in Iraq – it was the only way most of us knew how to get through what was happening – so the prospect of the drugs didn't bother me. Might take a toke or two myself, if ...
We came to a place where the road faded out, just beyond a small, dilapidated farmhouse that seemed to be entirely populated by mangy-looking dogs, who watched with suspicious boredom as we drove by. The metal and the low roadside walls stopped abruptly, but two confident-looking ruts carried on across the fields. Tania didn't slow the car or otherwise seem to notice the change in surface.
"It's pretty remote where they live, is it?" I said.
She giggled, and now she did slow the car a little. "I can't see too many townships around here, can you, Quinn?" She nodded ahead of us, where there was little to be seen except sheep-spattered browny-green slopes and, beyond, two greater hills seeming to intersect in a pronounced V-shaped notch. "That's where we're heading. To the – what was it you called it? Ah, yes. To the second glen on the right, straight on 'til morning."
"Not literally, I hope?"
"Hm?"
"'Til morning, I mean. That's about fifteen, sixteen hours away."
She threw back her head and laughed. If it hadn't been for the ruts we might have driven off the track.
"No," she said. "Mornings are the last thing you'll need to worry about."
It was a puzzling remark, but then a lot had been puzzling me since – oh, since about the time we'd said our goodbyes to the man who'd lost his sheep. Tania was changing, changing even as I sat beside her in the car. We'd pulled into a layby at one point so we could both have a pee (an operation whose mechanics were made possible for me, just, by the lump of plastic at the end of my arm). She went first, and as she emerged from the scraggly bush there'd been no earthly reason to hide behind, I observed the way her stride had changed. It was as if she'd lost about half her weight and was in danger of floating off the ground if she didn't remember to tether herself there. And there was a glow about her that wasn't entirely explicable by the prospect of her seeing her family for the first time in years. I had the odd illusion that the land across which we moved was feeding her, somehow – and doing so with a full willingness. This was her country. She reigned here with the contented respect of her great, silent subject. There was a communion between her and the very soil unlike anything I could imagine myself experiencing back home in my own native land.
As she'd climbed back into the car and I rocked myself to and fro in my seat, preparing to swing myself out for my own pee, I'd noticed how many birds seemed to be singing around us. God knew where they'd been perching – the trees in this region weren't anything to write home about, being largely of the variety that are obviously not dead yet, but thinking about it. As we bump
ed along the rutted track, now, I wondered if, were I to roll my window down, I'd hear the songs of just as many birds, even though we were in the middle of nowhere.
"How long to go?" I asked after a few more minutes' silence.
"We'll be there very soon, Quinn," she reassured me, adopting the voice of mothers everywhere when the brats in the back are being a pain in the ass.
"Yes, Mommy," I responded, joining in the game, "but how soon?"
"You haud yer wheesht, Jimmie, or your dad'll stop the car and gie ye a good skelping."
"Huh?"
For the next half-hour or so, as the ground beneath us got less and less kempt and the sun, poised midway down the afternoon sky, pondered whether or not to call it a day, she regaled me with Scotticisms. Before giving me the translation in each case, she insisted I make a few guesses myself. The laughter between us got louder and more uncontrollable as my guesses grew progressively more obscene.
"No, Quinn" – this in schoolmistressly tone – "'fit rod?' does not mean a healthy ..."
She suddenly paused. We'd gone round so many twists and turns since leaving Glasgow that I'd lost my orientation, but we were clearly now heading more or less due west. Directly in front of us, the sun was settling into the notch I'd seen earlier between the two hills.
When Tania spoke next, her voice was different – quieter, lower, slower, barely more than a breath.
"Ohhh, Quinn, we're almost there." This seemed to be as much to herself as to me. "The sun's opening the gates for us."
I squinted at her, wondering what in the hell she was talking about. She didn't notice my attention.
And, as I watched, she quite deliberately lifted her hands off the steering wheel, leaving the car to guide itself.
In any other circumstances I'd have panicked entirely. No way was I able to grab the wheel, not with a single chunk of badly sculpted, lifeless plastic in place of hands. As it was, there washed across me like calming warm air the conviction that her action was a perfectly natural one, that everything around us was as it should be, as if ourselves and the car scuttling along the now nearly invisible track were tucked inside a cocoon where things were ...
