by John Grant
Tania turned to me, then glanced back over her shoulder. Without thinking, I followed her gaze.
Behind us the sky was growing dark. The great train of her dress seemed to belong to both of us, not her alone, as it spread itself across the swathe of night.
Earlier it had been the clouds. Now it was the moon and stars.
And:
"Damn that fucking idiot in the Volvo," said Tania, jamming her foot down on the brake.
~
All the way back through the outskirts of Glasgow, she prattled away about how good it had been to see her family after such a long time, how she was worried her dad was looking so much older these days, how Alysson had settled down a bit now she had a wean on the way ...
I just let the words pass by me at a distance, much like the tenements and shop windows on the far side of the car window. Wherever Tania had spent the afternoon, it didn't seem to be where I had been. We'd driven out to some place in the back of beyond by the side of an anonymous loch, and we'd met the new in-laws and had a meal and watched Dad show off his new electrically powered lawnmower, and Alan had nicked his finger while carving the lamb – probably because he'd had a drop too much of the sherry while we'd been waiting for the recalcitrant potatoes to cook. A perfectly normal afternoon meeting in-laws, in other words. This surely must have been what really happened.
So then how in the hell had I managed to hallucinate that we'd gone somewhere else entirely?
I didn't have much experience of hallucinations – although I'd smoked the occasional joint in Iraq and before, I'd steered well clear of anything harder, including the hallucinogens that were endemic in the camps – but it seemed to me that my experience had been far too vivid, far too complete, to have been simply a fever dream. I could still taste the frothy beer we'd drunk, still touch with my tongue the greasy scum the mutton had left on the back of my teeth. Yet ... yet wouldn't those sensations be just the same if instead we'd had the cozy family visit Tania was describing? In themselves they proved nothing at all. Besides, the things I'd thought I'd seen – the shiny silver sky, the dress that became the clouds or the stars, the grass blades tipped with a color the human eye couldn't encompass – surely none of these could have any existence outside of dreams, or fevers, or both?
By the time we'd handed over the car to the hotel valet for parking and made our way into the supremely gilt and polished lobby, I'd more or less succeeded in persuading myself that everything I'd undergone during the afternoon had been a product of abnormal psychology. Perhaps I'd picked up a dose of food poisoning at one of the restaurants we'd been in. It was evident from Tania's still flowing chatter that I'd acted completely normally during the visit to her family, that no one had noticed me behaving in any way unusually – or, if they had, they hadn't commented on the fact to Tania. Perhaps they'd simply put down any apparent eccentricities of mine to the fact that I was a Yank – hell, a country that could have Il Buce as its leader must be straining at the seams with people who were a bit touched in the head.
As we waited for the elevator – the lift – I felt the weight of a bottle in my coat pocket.
"... and what was nicest of all, I think," Tania was saying, her fingers laced beneath her chin, her face glowing with happiness, "was that when Mum and I were alone in the kitchen coping with the dishes, she said how much she and Dad liked you, really liked you. They both fell in love with you, Quinn. They both think of you now as being truly their son. Mum was so funny. She told me, all very sober and pompous, you understand" – Tania dropped her voice into an appropriate caricature – "that, a fine man like you, I was to be sure not to be such a silly wee flibbertigibbet that I went and lost you. I just about died. I mean, she hasn't spoken to me like that since ..."
"Loachy," I said quietly as the elevator pinged to announce its arrival. We were the only ones waiting for it. "Tania, Loachy, however you want me to call you, none of this is anything like what happened to me."
The almost manic vivacity stripped itself away from her instantly. In its place there came across her face an expression I couldn't at first identify.
Then I recognized it: contentment. What had confused me was its complete lack of correspondence to her words and her body language. Clutching my left arm and its lifeless hand, she pulled me into the elevator car and stabbed at the button for our floor, all the while continuing to yammer about the perfectly ordinary family reunion we'd enjoyed. She was sending me two messages at once, the more important one being the one that wasn't conveyed in her words: that I'd in some way lived up to her aspirations for me by remembering the truth of the afternoon, not the official account. I was the investigative journalist who'd come good, who to everyone's surprise had succeeded in weaseling his way behind the curtain of propagandist lies and got the scoop – only for some reason my editor wasn't allowed to congratulate me publicly on the feat.
The same forked understanding hung around us like a haze all the way along the plushly carpeted, tastefully decorated, forbiddingly empty corridor from the elevator to our room. Once we were inside, I expected her to open up to me honestly, but still she persisted in the pretence, moving briskly about, hanging up her coat, spending a couple of minutes in the bathroom peeing and sprucing up her face, talking incessantly about nothing that mattered. After I'd used the bathroom myself – "Look, Ma! No hands! Well, not really ..." – I came out to find her sitting on the bed holding the pint bottle, turning it over in her hands, looking at it the way you look at a book you've already read. She must have fished it out of my pocket while I'd been doing my best not to spray the apricot floor-tiles.
"I can't read that," I said, sitting down beside her, reaching out to touch the crudely lettered label with fingers that couldn't feel it. "What does it say?"
"It's in the old tongue."
"Yes, darling, I'd guessed it was Gaelic from the way it looks like someone's sloshed their alphabet soup over the edge of the bowl."
Tania shook her head, not smiling, still looking at the bottle, not at me. "An older tongue than Gaelic, Quinn," she said so softly I could hardly hear her.
I narrowed my eyes, trying to think what languages might have been spoken in Scotland before Gaelic came along.
"Pictish?" I hazarded.
Now she turned her head toward me. She smiled, but it was the saddest smile I'd ever seen on her face.
"You're getting warmer, husband mine, but you've centuries more to go."
I gave up. "What does it say?"
She looked at the label as if reading it again. "Near as it matters, it says, 'The Hard Stuff'."
I tapped the bottle again. "Pretty potent, huh? A hundred fifty proof, sort of thing?"
"Potent, yes," she said, inclining her head. The warm glow of the bedside light paradoxically returned to her face some of that cold austerity I'd seen earlier in the day. "You'll be finding out soon enough."
"A single malt, is it?"
She thought about this, still holding her head to one side.
"More like a blend."
I was disappointed. To be honest, although I could tell the difference between Laphroaig, which I liked in small quantities, and Glenfiddich, which I thought was more like paint stripper than liquor, most scotches tasted about the same to me. But I'd been told countless authoritative times, not least by Tania herself, that the malts were the aristocrats, the blends merely stopgap measures or "cooking whisky". I'd expected a bottle with this provenance to contain something more exotic than I could have found in the room's minibar.
Tania could tell what I was thinking by the way I shifted my seating on the bed.
"It depends on what you put into the blend," she said, "how fine it turns out to be. I told you what was in this one, Quinn."
"Your folks?" I'd assumed her comment back at the valley's rim had been whimsical.
She nodded. "This isn't just a whisky we're giving you. As it says on the label, it's the hard stuff."
"It smells like scotch."
&n
bsp; "Well, it would, wouldn't it?"
"Shall I get the ...? Oh." Sometimes even I forgot about my disability.
"Yes," she said, to my surprise. "You do the fetching. Just the one glass, though. You can manage that, can't you?" She cast her eye at my plastic hand, lying on my knee. "This is a drink you'll be having on your own, lover man. It's not one I can share with you."
Perplexed, I went and got one of the glasses from the bathroom. If I put my hand vertically above it and then jammed the rim between the thumb and the side of the index finger, I could carry it. The stratagem wasn't going to work for drinking out of it, though.
I put the glass down on the bedside table, shaking it free with a little difficulty. "Fill 'e up."
"Not yet, Quinn. You're not ready yet."
"Who says? It's been a long day, and an extremely confusing one – for me, at least – and I cannot remember a time when I've needed a belt more than now."
"Stay standing," she said, looking up at me as I moved to sit down beside her again. "It'll be easier for us that way."
I didn't know what she was talking about, but of course I did what she told me.
Tania stood up and, facing me, pushed my jacket back off my shoulders, then worked the sleeves off my arms. The garment dropped to the floor. Then she got to work on the buttons of my shirt, which in due course followed the jacket. All the while, her fingers moved with an almost trancelike slowness, performing each action with the minimum of effort and yet with the grace and flow of some stately parade.
The net effect was to make me more rampant than I could remember being since my teens.
With the same exquisite slowness, Tania unbuckled the belt of my pants and worked the zipper down.
"A fine upstanding military gentleman, I see," she remarked with an affectionate little grin. It was the same cliché with which she'd teased me when first we'd undressed each other, years ago. Her hair brushed the side of my erection as she pushed my pants and shorts to the floor, but she didn't react in any way to the contact. Instead, kneeling there, she pulled the laces of my shoes untied.
"Sit down on the bed now, Quinn," she said.
I sat, and raised my legs to let her tug off shoes, socks, the rest of my clothing.
When she had me completely naked, still kneeling in front of me, she looked me in the eyes with that same sad smile I'd seen before. It was the kind of smile lovers or kin bear when one of them is about to depart on a long journey.
She stood up and leaned across me, pulling the pillows out from under the coverlet and puffing them up against the headboard. I put my arm as much around her hips as I could, feeling the denimed curve of her rear against the soft skin above the tangled mess of scar tissue where my wrist had once been, and tried to pull her down to me.
"No," she said, quietly but firmly, like a nurse rejecting the advances of a bedridden lecher. "Not now, Quinn. Not now."
Once she had the pillows arranged to her satisfaction, she took a pace back from the bedside.
"Prop yourself up against them, darling. Make yourself as comfortable as you can. You've got the night ahead of you."
The words were like a splash of cold sea spray on my face.
"What do you mean? Won't you be here? Where are you going?"
"It's where you're going that matters, Quinn."
"I'm not going anywhere. I'm naked as the day I was born, woman. I'd get arrested. Particularly with ..."
Tania glanced at my tumescence with a sort of weary but loving spousal tolerance: men will be men, they think with their balls, what can you expect?
"It's been pleasing to see my old friend back in the landscape again," she said with a dry little chuckle. "Seems a shame to waste it, but ..."
She let the word hang.
"Later?" I said.
"Aye, later, maybe. Have you not got yourself settled yet? You've got some serious drinking to do."
Not until I was arranged to her satisfaction on the bed, with my back against the pillows on the headboard, would she speak again. By this time my penis had quietened. I'd begun to realize that this whole ... whole ceremony had far too much of the nature of a farewell about it.
"Where are you going?" I said again to her, this time putting it into my voice that I was wanting an answer.
"Oh, just somewhere around."
"Where?"
"You don't need me any longer, Quinn."
I struggled to sit more upright. "What are you trying to tell me, Tania? Are you leaving me? Is that what you and your mother were really talking about in the kitchen? Or wherever. I know I've been a bastard to live with ever since Iraq, but ... but this afternoon taught me something – this whole trip to Scotland has taught me something. I can feel the old me, the old Quinn, coming back, and he's here to stay. Now's not the time to give up on me, darling – I promise you ... Or" – it wasn't credible, but it was the best straw a perplexed and bleeding man with a plastic hand could find – "or is there someone else I don't know about?"
The cruel monarch was suddenly back in the room, her eyes a green blaze of fury. When she spoke her words were clipped into arrows of ice that pinned me to the pillows.
"That is a question you should never have thought to ask, Quinn Hogarth. You have demeaned me, and I do not take kindly to that."
And then she relaxed her shoulders again. "No, darling. There's no one. I love you as much as I ever have – more, if anything. Believe me, this is all because of the love I have for you. If I loved you any the less, I'd ... well, I'd not have wasted the ... the opportunity you presented me." She bit her lip, eyes dancing. "To put it in the politest possible terms."
Despite myself, I smiled too – more in relief that I'd escaped the full force of her regal ire than anything else.
"And now," she said.
Tania didn't complete the sentence, but, her movements crisp, reached for the bottle by the bedside and twisted its cork out. She sniffed the open top, appreciating the fumes, then poured the pale amber liquid into the hotel's tooth glass.
When she'd done and the tumbler was full to the brim, there was still about an inch left in the bottle. She looked at the remaining liquid accusingly, then very deliberately tipped it, too, into the glass.
It all went in, but the glass didn't overflow.
"Wait a moment," she said, and went to burrow through one of the drawers, pulling out the screw-topped plastic drinking cup I'd barely used since our arrival in Glasgow. For a moment I thought she was going to decant the liquor into it, but instead she just pulled out the straw.
"You'll need this, at least at first," she said, popping it into the glass. Still the meniscus held and there was no overflow.
"Kiss me," I said. "You owe me a kiss. Please."
"Before I go," she replied. "I'm not gone yet."
I knew I should be doing something more by way of protesting – I should be leaping from the bed and having a showdown with her, or going on my bended knee to plead with her – but it was as if there was something hypnotic in the air, so that all I could do was follow the flow of events with a sort of unhappy complaisance. She was the one who was in entire control of what would happen. For me to try to redirect things would be not just a challenge to her authority but a disruption of the natural order. I had the sense that all this had been written down before somewhere, and that I – and, for that matter, Tania – had no choice but to follow that unread script. A tiny part of me rebelled against this uncomfortable tranquility, but I ignored it as I would have ignored a butterfly on the field of battle: something irrelevant whose prettiness I might have the time to appreciate later.
So I watched her lethargically as she neatly folded my clothes and piled them on the ottoman that sat in front of the window table. She unravelled my socks and tucked them neatly into the openings of my shoes, then placed the shoes side by side under the ottoman. Lastly she came across to the bed once more and, assuming no disagreement from me, unstrapped the sad pink prosthetic from my arm. She placed the paro
dy of flesh on top of the heap of my clothing.
Then she stood facing me, her hands cupped together like a virgin's in front of her crotch.
"Don't ever, ever forget how much I love you, Quinn. And ... and remember what I said. I'll be around."
She took two quick, determined steps to the bedside, as if concerned her resolve might desert her, and looked down on me where I sat.
"I believe you requested a kiss, sir," she said with mock coyness.
Her lips were fire on mine.
I don't mean what the words would mean in a purple novel. I felt as if I were being kissed by and kissing flame. The pain was nearly as intense as I'd suffered when I'd first come stumbling back out of unconsciousness after the device had exploded in front of me in Falluja, but where that had been hostile agony this was exquisitely pleasurable. Her tonguetip flickered against mine and I almost screamed, but still I forced myself against her.
Then she was on the far side of the room, standing by the door, her hand on its handle, half-shadowed because the weak glow of the bedside lamp barely reached that far.
"Drink, Quinn," she said, gesturing with her head to tell me what I should do.
I leaned to my side, fumbling the bent plastic straw around with the stump of my arm until it pointed toward my lips.
I took it into my mouth, my eyes still on Tania's silently standing figure.
"I've enjoyed beyond words having you as my husband, Quinn," she whispered. "My sweet lover. But you no longer need me."
Before she'd finished speaking she'd turned the handle of the door and was gone into the anonymity of the hotel corridor.
I let out a long breath, and drank.
~
I was a mist, a haar, that clung close to the land, creeping into every last one of its crevices, becoming almost absorbed by it yet retaining my own self, my own separateness. I became the inverse of trees, taking their shapes into myself, their convexities being reproduced with perfect fidelity as concavities within me. Flying birds and running animals – human animals among them – were streams of their passage through me. Stones and mountains formed new parts of me, too, as did valleys and the shore.