Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets

by Jessica Fox

  “There was absolutely no way I could endure more. She was a total sadist.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?” he asked, wiping a tear that had formed under his glasses. I took great pleasure in making Euan laugh. He laughed with his whole body; his shoulders would rise and even his fingers looked as if they were shaking in delight.

  “Soak in the bath for an hour, hoping the rest will come off before yoga class,” I said, unable to cross my legs. “Can you imagine trying to do downward dog with a middle as stiff as a Barbie doll?”

  Euan burst out laughing again. “God, Kelly’s so bad.” He revelled as only an angelic child would in others’ bad behaviour.

  “It says here she is trained in the healing arts of Reiki.” I looked down at the glossy brochure for Kelly’s spa. Despite the horror of the afternoon, I found myself chuckling with almost a fondness for Kelly’s competing fetishes for inflicting pain on the one hand, and fulfilling her entrepreneurial desire to create a business that genuinely heals and pampers people on the other.

  Though I didn’t exactly feel fabulous by the end of it, the afternoon afforded another sense of beauty. My love for Wigtown, if possible, had grown. I glowed in appreciation of its kind and complicated characters and its exquisite uniqueness. Euan wrapped his hand in mine as we drove. A feeling of happiness and ease filled the silence between us and I felt beautifully content.

  Chapter 32

  “Sthira Sukham Asanam. Asana is a steady, comfortable posture.” – Sri Swami Satchidananda, THE YOGI SUTRAS OF PANTANJALI: Health section, front room, left of the cookbooks.

  Holding a wooden box clinking with coins to my chest, I walked back home in the dark from the town hall. Euan had made it to store my donations from yoga. The box had a small slit at the top, and six solid compartments and now housed a handful of coins, not enough to cover the rental of the hall but enough to jingle a metallic tune.

  I had arrived at the hall early, lit some incense and paced around the room, clearing both the air and my thoughts. I was unusually nervous. I hadn’t taught in a while and though I’d been practising a new routine aimed at beginners, I felt unprepared. I didn’t know how many people would appear, or what they’d be like or what they expected. In Los Angeles, the students were generally seasoned yoga connoisseurs, borderline yoga snobs. They knew as much as or even more than their teachers and the yogic stakes were high. Here it would be different. No one, I guessed, had any preconceived ideas of what yoga was or should be. Teaching these beginners would be profound. The weight of responsibility to give them a good first yoga experience was sitting in a perfect lotus position on my shoulders.

  Teaching yoga had never been a conscious ambition, rather it was a matter of convenience. My yoga training had begun in New York, three floors above a restaurant in a tiny sunny studio nestled in mid-Manhattan on the West Side. The studio was on the way home, blocks from my work at public television, and gave me an excuse to unwind and connect with my body after days full of staring at television and computer screens. I had attended so often that it didn’t take long to find myself joining the teacher certification programme. With a group of women, of various ages and from various walks of life, I’d meet regularly for lectures in physiology and philosophy – mostly on the yoga sutras.

  “Loka samasta sukhino bhavantu,” one of my teachers had said, “let’s begin there.”

  A beautiful middle-aged Manhattanite, with the perfect body of a personal trainer, had shot up her hand. “May all beings everywhere be happy and free.”

  “Exactly,” my teacher said.

  I had felt my mind tripping over something, unable to lose itself in the flow of peace and wellbeing that seemed to fill the room. I put my hand up too.

  “Yes? Jessica, something to add?” My teacher said, smiling.

  “Well, I like the sentiment a lot, but what if my experience of happiness and freedom starts impeding on someone else’s sense of happiness and freedom? I may feel free running around the room, for example, but at the same time I could be making someone else feel uncomfortable.”

  A cloud descended over my teacher’s face. “If you don’t like it, Jessica, you don’t have to be here.”

  Apparently the sutras were not up for discussion. We were supposed to appreciate, not argue, and for the rest of the training I had struggled to quell my desire for deeper investigation so as to not impede on my teacher’s, or anyone else’s, sense of happiness.

  In the end, four people attended Wigtown’s first yoga class. I hoped the evening had gone as well as I thought it had. I omitted only two things: hands-on adjustments and saying “om” at the end. The former was because when I had sat gently on one of the women’s backs during child pose, my first hands-on teaching of the evening, she and her friend had started laughing hysterically. The moment I touched any of the four practioners, in fact, their muscles would seize up. Quickly it became clear that the safest way to spend the rest of the class was at the front of the room.

  I also felt it was important not to spring “om” on a beginners’ class. I appreciated that these four people were trying something new and the physicality was enough of a foreign experience without my adding to it, yet. I hoped, if these classes continued, I could do more levels and get deeper into the yoga philosophy. Wigtown yoga could lead to – who knows – Wigtown meditation.

  “Why not?” I said to Euan, who had looked at me with incredulity. “The young people here already wear tracksuits all year round; they won’t even need to change to come to a yoga class.”

  *

  Euan placed his hand on my knee as the cab rumbled along in the dark. A bottle of wine, a gift for our hosts, rested in his kilt-clad lap.

  I had never seen a man in a kilt before, or Euan so well groomed. I stared at him admiringly – he was looking quite handsome, his curly hair resting just above his crisp white shirt, which was tight on his broad shoulders and tucked in at the waist. I glanced at his strong legs. There was something so attractive and thrillingly masculine about a kilt. It was surprisingly erotic.

  “You clean up well,” I said, but Euan wasn’t listening.

  I searched his expression to see if I could discern who or what was occupying such intense energy. A knot formed in my stomach. My mind began to connect a series of separate events and feelings from earlier that day, linking them together until a pattern emerged, like a dot-to-dot puzzle.

  When I had returned home from yoga that evening, I had found Euan in the darkness of the large sitting room, with a glass of wine and his phone in his hand.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. Euan just sat there without responding, looking upset. Had I done something? How could his mood have changed so radically since this afternoon?

  Euan continued to sip his wine. I had taken the hint that he wanted to be alone and gone upstairs, spending extra time getting ready for dinner in the hope of banishing the past two awkward interactions with Euan from my mind. With the wax happily removed after a long soak in the bath, I braved the night cold of our bedroom to slide into a form-hugging red-and-gold vintage halter dress, with a dramatic slit up the side. I felt good, on top of the world again as I came down the stairs, transformed, with my hair done and make-up applied. Euan, at the bottom of the stairs, looked through me.

  “How do I look?” I asked, determined that if he wasn’t going to instigate compliments I would get the ball rolling.

  My hooking for a kind word did the opposite of what I intended. Euan only liked fishing when it applied to salmon, apparently.

  “Civilisations could be built in the time it took you to get ready,” he said, and grabbed his jacket.

  In the cab, as he stared broodingly out of the window, I searched his expression. Things were still so new between us, our connection was still forming, still vulnerable. My heart had started to ache at every odd interaction, curt word or mysterious mood. We had taken a huge risk diving into living together and I wanted things to be perfect, but we were still getting to
know each other; the soft tissue of the relationship was still growing.

  A cloud of panic spread quickly through my mind. The idea that Euan wasn’t happy with me weighed down heavily, threatening to crush my inner optimism. Perhaps we were sitting in silence because he didn’t know how to tell me that he was regretting having me here. Euan wanting me to leave had always been a possibility, though deep down I thought, hoped perhaps, that he’d never feel that way.

  Living most of the time in my head, however, I was used to doing mental yoga. All I needed to do to get out of this rut was to do downward dog of the mind, to look at both sides of the situation. The panic Euan’s mood was triggering could be old anxiety. Just because Euan was moody or quiet, didn’t mean he was sick of me and it certainly didn’t mean he wanted me to go back to America. As I had already deduced, Euan was not Grant. He wouldn’t love me one moment and break up with me the next. In fact, epiphany of epiphanies, Euan’s mood might not even be about me at all.

  Stop being the Hercule Poirot of other people’s feelings, I thought to myself. You two live on top of each other all day – give the poor man some privacy to think and feel without a full mental investigation. If further down the road the relationship doesn’t work out, or he decides he’s not in love with you, so be it. But that’s in the future. You cannot pre-emptively protect yourself – what kind of life is that? Do not ignore your instincts, but try to take what he says and does at face value. If you want to grow and truly be in this relationship, you have to trust him.

  “A warrior’s approach to life is to say yea, yea to it all,” Joseph Campbell would say. I am a bold and confident woman, I repeated in my head. Act like one. Suddenly I felt lighter.

  In the dark, the cab turned off the main road. I peered out in front of me, watching as its headlights revealed a steep drive, with large gates at the end. We eventually passed through the ornate iron gates and approached the courtyard of a small stone castle. In my mind, I replaced the battered blue estate car for a gilded carriage. I was in my element, no longer Jessica but a cross between Morgan le Fay approaching Camelot and Elizabeth Bennet arriving for a ball at Pemberley.

  While most children wanted to be Cinderella or a princess out of a Disney fairy tale, my fantasies were always more unusual, to be Jane Eyre or even Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps an odd combination, especially for an American girl, but I have finally come to the conclusion that it is the BBC’s fault.

  At six years old, when asked on a Wednesday evening if I wanted my father or mother to put me to bed, I had known enough to choose my father. He would then give me two options. I could either chat to Clara the Rabbit, a loved but disgruntled anarchic puppet who complained mostly about bills and the government, or I could ask my father one question – any question – about the universe.

  On a Wednesday night I would choose the latter because I knew that if I asked a difficult enough question, and followed it up with several clarifying whys, then my father would eventually fall asleep in his chair; a victorious moment for any six-year-old but imperative on a Wednesday night.

  And so the Wednesday night ritual would begin. “Why are things getting farther away from us?” I propped myself up against the pillows, settling in.

  “Because the universe is expanding,” replied my father, leaning back in his chair.

  “But how can space expand?” Thrilled, I hugged Chuck Chuck, my stuffed elephant, to my chest. My father continued to talk about space having qualities and looking at light waves to see how, when they travel, they could shift red and blue.

  “If it is expanding, what is it expanding into?” This still counted as one qualifying question. I would usually, at this point, feel more awake than ever as my poor father blinked hard to keep his eyes open.

  When he had explained that it wasn’t expanding into anything, I had started to get upset.

  “But what’s outside the universe?” my six-year-old self demanded. This was getting out of the territory of follow-up questions. I hadn’t been sure he’d answer that one but as I waited, only snores came back in response. He had fallen asleep. I slid out of the bed, triumphantly. I had done it again.

  Downstairs my mother would be watching public television, as they aired the latest BBC period drama on Wednesday evenings. I would sneak behind the sofa and watch with her, until my giggles alerted her to my presence.

  “Oh, your father!” she would sigh and welcome me onto the couch next to her. By the age of eight I had watched and loved every period drama the BBC had aired on American TV, from Jeeves and Wooster to Jane Austen adaptations. As a child I had felt more connected to the past worlds I had seen on the television, the lands of costumes and countryside, than I had the modern American suburb in which I found myself.

  This sense of dislocation manifested itself in a number of awkward and unsuccessful teenage attempts at self-expression. At thirteen, for Halloween I dressed up as Emily Dickinson, a reference that was lost not only on my teenage friends who were more interested in being sexy vampires or playboy bunnies – yes, playboy bunnies at thirteen – but on the adults who handed out candy as we went door to door. Other teenagers learned song lyrics by their favourite bands, I memorised Tennyson, Longfellow and Blake. Even during college I still kept my costume box, but had finally learned to channel that angst, that homesickness for a place and time that I couldn’t touch, into my films.

  That schism, between the past and the present, was perhaps just another genetic inheritance of a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, for whom the tragic past was ever present, my lost relatives being mentioned only in heavy echoes or never mentioned at all, leaving gaping spaces in conversations that echoed even louder. Or perhaps the schism was common to all filmmakers; perhaps we all long for worlds and lands beyond our own and to fall in love with people we’ve never met. Perhaps, as the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim states in The Uses of Enchantment, my fascination with make-believe was because I was “too disappointed in reality to trust its rewards”. But most likely, it was the BBC’s fault. Having exposed an American girl early to dramas and good manners and castles, they carved a longing in me that lasted throughout my childhood, teenage years and into adulthood.

  Now in Scotland, whatever the reason for its existence, that rift was resolving itself. I felt as if my inner world was finally matching the outer one, the expanse of rolling hills, the ruined castles and the sense of mystery hanging in the air like the haar which drifted in silently from the sea.

  “Thanks so much,” Euan said to the cab driver. “If you could pick us up around eleven?”

  The cab slowed, and the light inside popped on. The cab driver nodded as Euan handed him money.

  I stepped out into the cold air and looked up at the looming castle before us. The courtyard echoed with laughter and music from inside, and I took a deep breath as I followed Euan through an unassuming side door. On it was written in a child’s hand: “Guests please this way”.

  *

  Highland dancing was not as complicated as it might first look, but a word to the wise for the complete novice: first wear comfortable shoes as there is a lot of hopping. Second, pick a person of the same gender who looks fairly competent and copy their movements exactly – eventually the dance repeats itself and you’ll learn quickly. Third, and most important by far, wait until everyone has had at least five glasses of wine and champagne before you dance, and then no one will notice that you have no idea what you’re doing.

  The ballroom was bursting with light and energy and I, Elizabeth Bennet, sat observing everything and everyone around me. Deep-red walls gave the grand room, lit by sparkling candles, a warm glow. All around us paintings and portraits hung in gilt frames. Beautifully dressed people passed by, twirling and dancing. The ballroom matched perfectly my BBC-inspired romantic notions of what a ballroom should be like. However, to my disappointment, the witty banter I had seen so many times in Jeeves and Wooster was not present. Instead, the conversations tended to be polite and local, about the weathe
r, fishing, Euan’s parents, family and mutual friends. Underscoring the chatter at the front of the room, a band, playing Highland tunes, held sway.

  After two rounds of embarrassed attempts to Highland-dance, I took a break on a chair, which looked so dainty and delicate that I was afraid it might be for decoration rather than use. My feet were killing me. Even before the dancing there had been a lot of standing. When we first arrived in the castle’s grand hall, we were served drinks below a massive staircase, surrounded by deer heads and old tapestries, and familiar and unfamiliar faces. We had chatted for what seemed like hours, until my stomach had started to growl and the cold of the castle seeped into my bones, turning my lips a faint blue.

  “So, Euan,” an elderly man, with bright salmon-coloured trousers and a green jumper – obviously ignoring the black-tie-only instructions – had said, walking up to us, “who is this lovely American?”

  “This is Jessica,” Euan said, rigid and polite. He looked nervous. “My special friend.”

  The words grated on my ears. Special friend? Euan was clearly so ill at ease with me by his side that I was beginning to feel equally out of place. Once the elderly man found a bowl of crisps, which interested him more than our company, I turned to Euan.

  “Special friend?” I tried to tease, but the words came out angry.

  “Well, you are special.” Euan shifted. “I know, I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to say.”

  “How about your girlfriend?”

  “Of course, yes, okay.” Euan squeezed my arm.

  “Everyone knows I’m living with you,” I said, pulling my arm away. “So what’s your problem?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve gone all cold and formal.”

  “Sorry, it’s just, you know, a change.” Euan smiled sheepishly as if he had just dodged a bullet. “Would you like another drink?”

  At that moment, I could no longer dream myself into Elizabeth Bennet. Standing in the large grand room, I felt more like Eliza Doolittle, ruefully aware that this was Euan’s world, not mine. He knew almost everyone there – they were his friends, parents of friends and friends of his parents – and arriving with me was his first full and open declaration that we were a couple. For someone who hadn’t even been able to tell his own friends that I was coming back, this night was clearly a reason to be uncomfortable, like a social baptism of fire.