Take No Prisoners (37 page)

"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 bumped 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 ...

Where things were
done differently
.

That was how it was as we drove through the gateway the blood-red sunshine filled.

~

The blinding glare of the sunlight shattered, revealing itself to me as clouds of rusty-winged insects that fluttered away, their group interest caught by something else as I waved my arm, shooing them.

How could I have imagined they were sunlight? The sun was at its noon height in an unblemished silver sky. Tania and I were walking hand-in-hand through ankle-deep grass and little black-button-eyed wildflowers across a gently curving foothill. The flowers were mainly pink and white, though there were blues and yellows scattered here and there, as well as some distinctly more exotic colors, ones I couldn't quite find a name for. The grass was the unnatural green of Astroturf, but its fresh smell told me it was real, not plastic. There was a curious blur across the ground; it took me a few moments to realize that the tip of each blade of grass was stained a faint, airy violet, the color that ultraviolet might have if you could see it, the color of the faint breeze that both warmed and cooled my face.

And all around us there was birdsong, although I could see no birds.

My mind hopped back a pace or two.

Real, not plastic,
I had been thinking.

I could feel Tania's fingers curled around mine.

I glanced down at the hand that was holding hers, then at the other.

"I'm ..." I began.

"Hush," she said quietly. "There's no need to be saying anything, Quinn."

Again her voice had changed. The precision of her non-accent had become more than it had ever been, so that I had the impression I was listening not to a voice but to pure language. At the same time there was something archaic in it, too.

I dragged my eyes away from the hand of mine that was in hers and followed the line of her bare arm up to her face. Gone were the blue jeans and the sensible striped blouse she'd put on this morning. She was wearing a dress the same color as the tips of the grass-blades, and as insubstantial-seeming. The neck of it was high, prim, so that the bareness of her arms was a near-uncanny incongruity. The hem of the dress, I saw out of the corner of my vision, brushed the grass we walked upon, and trailed out behind her like half-seen downy feathers.

She trod the ground as lightly as the feathers rustled, as if her body had given up all of its matter to the sky.

Tania turned her head slowly toward me, meeting my gaze.

These were the eyes of my wife I was looking into, of my Tania, and yet they were no eyes I'd ever seen before. I was gazing into shady green corridors that retreated infinitely far back, into places and times where I was not entirely certain I wanted to go. Her lips were thinner, her mouth a little wider, and was there a trace of an unaccustomed cruelty in the laughter lines at the corners? The porcelain whiteness of her skin had become almost opalescent. Her hair was the pale, pale shade of highly polished pure gold, where the yellowness is more of an idea than a hue. In it she wore a coronet plaited of the variously colored field flowers that sprinkled the field we walked through. Her forehead was unmarked. The eyebrows beneath it, darker than her head hair, were fine lines that seemed to have been painted on rather than grown; one was raised a little above the other, giving her an expression I might have interpreted as cold cynicism had it been on any other face.