“…a director cannot help projecting his own state of mind on to the stage.” Peter Brook, THE EMPTY SPACE: Drama section, the Garden Room, second building out the back.
Vincent was a tall, thin man, whose gentle manners were better suited to a knight in shining armour than a mechanic in blue overalls. He was stooped, like a willow tree, after years of bending over cars, and the effect was that he looked like he was constantly taking a humble bow.
I adored him. The screenwriter in me wanted Vincent, the golden-hearted bachelor and Cambridge graduate, to be a spy – perhaps a sleeper agent sent into the backwoods to be the eyes and ears of the country. And yet the possibility that Vincent was south-west Scotland’s James Bond was as unlikely as pirates still existing in Wigtown’s now drained bay. Piracy and political intrigue in Wigtown were things of the past – as deep and buried as the Bookshop’s foundations – and belonged to a time when there were troubles in Northern Ireland or even further back, when the Isle of Man was notorious reputation for smuggling.
Vincent silently guided me around his garage, the side garden of which was littered with cars from various eras. I explained that I needed to find an automatic car to rent or a cheap one to buy – something that made Vincent lean back onto his heels, and ponder.
This was a harder mission than it sounded. Automatic cars were not easy to come by, especially in Wigtown, so Euan had tried to teach me how to drive stick shift, using his red van. My driving had been like riding a bucking bronco, until finally I had hit my stride going three miles per hour. Tears had streamed down my face. I’d been terrified. This was Euan’s work vehicle, critical to his livelihood – what if I damaged it? On the right side of the van, a man who had been walking his dog passed us.
“A pedestrian just overtook you.” Euan hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry himself.
“What if I hit them?” My heart had beat out of control. “I want to get out, I hate this.”
Euan had started laughing. “You’re doing fine, Jessica. I bet you can put it into a higher gear.”
The car stalled again, and lurched forward. The burning smell of transmission reached my nostrils. My voice increased in volume, hysterical. “I’m going to wreck your van. This is stupid.”
“No, it’s not, the van is fine. Try again. Try driving home.” Euan was patient, encouraging.
“I hate this!” I shouted back.
I turned on the engine and started off slowly.
“You’re doing so well. Now bring it into a higher gear.”
The main road into Wigtown loomed before us. Left. Left. Left. I had kept on chanting, not trusting I’d know which side of the road to pull out on.
“Now you’ll stop before pulling out, okay, Jessy? And put on the handbrake.” Euan started to relax but I stiffened. The road up to Wigtown was a steep hill, and I pictured myself stalling, slipping backwards, unable to stop and squashing anything in my path.
When we approached the crossroads, the car slowed and stalled. We lurched forward again and Euan screamed, “Handbrake!!” My right hand grabbed for the handbrake and instead I got the door-handle. Euan jumped to the rescue, and lifted the handbrake himself.
“I told you,” I said. I quickly turned off the engine and leapt out of the car.
“Where are you going, Fox?” Euan shouted out of the window. “Come back, try again!”
“I’m walking. It’s faster!” I yelled, and found a tree to sit under and cry.
Vincent shoved his hands into his pockets, leaning against a car, half overgrown with grass and rust. “So, you’re living in Wigtown permanently then?”
“I hope so, as long as I stay far away from Euan’s kitchen.” I smiled. His expressive eyebrows rose.
When I told Vincent about my various cooking disasters, his usually neutral expression melted into a large smile. He laughed, his sloping shoulders bouncing in amusement. “Now don’t worry about that,” he said, patting me on the back. “Euan should be making you candlelit dinners every evening.”
As Vincent wandered ahead to inspect a small blue car for me, I looked after him affectionately. Suddenly I knew exactly what Vincent was – this shy, bachelor who lived quietly in a cottage outside town wasn’t a spy at all: he was a romantic.
*
Being the daughter of an engineer, it was thrilling for me to just pick out a car and drive off without the lengthy headache of checks and research and inspection. My hands proudly gripped the steering wheel of my not-so-new dark blue Citroen Saxo, the heat blasting in the cramped front seats and a cold chill coming in from the sun roof, which didn’t shut all the way. Vincent had suggested he inspect the car before I road-tested it, but I said no, despite my father’s voice echoing words of caution in my head. Gail Sheehy, in her book Passages, would say that those parental voices, as we mature into adulthood, should be replaced by our own judgements as we learn from experimentation and experience. Buying this potential blue death trap was my experiment – my belated teenage rebellion – and it felt fabulous.
I had fallen in love with the car the moment I laid eyes on its small retro frame. Besides having a sun roof, it was automatic, a hatchback, and had a new CD player, plus the most important feature: it was inexpensive. Vincent had generously said I could rent to buy, offering a price that was affordable as long as my bits of consulting work continued in the States.
Wigtown’s winding streets challenged my little Citroen Saxo, and it shook as it gripped the steep curves. I had decided to test-drive my new car with a celebratory shopping mission to Dumfries and was now regretting the ambition of my first Scottish drive. Dumfries, the largest city near Wigtown, was about an hour away.
I slowed, chanting “left, left, left” as cars to my right passed at terrifyingly close distances. Driving on country roads was unlike anything else I had experienced. There was barely enough room for two small cars to pass each other, and it was a mystery to me how Euan’s van, like an American football player training in ballet, could so easily manoeuvre the close impasses with grace.
At my first roundabout, my heart thudded so loudly in my ears that it drowned out any noise. It felt counter-intuitive to follow the cars clockwise. My muscle memory was resisting driving this way and my shoulders were tense.
“Left, left, left,” I chanted as I gripped the wheel and sped around three quarters of the circle. The car carefully followed the outside kerb and pulled out onto the A75 exit. To my relief, the road quickly widened here and became comfortably straight. I was driving abroad, in my own car and, after panic, I felt a wave of pride. With the long stretch of highway before me, I considered this mission practically over and a roaring success.
The sound of a phone buzzing filled the car. I looked down and saw Euan’s old mobile, which he insisted I carry with me, flashing. I scrambled to reach it while my eyes were glued to the road. I grabbed it, flipping it open.
“Where are you?” Euan’s voice echoed from the phone’s small speaker. He sounded concerned.
“I’m on my way to Dumfries,” I gushed. Euan had left for a book deal early that morning and hadn’t been privy to my trip to Vincent’s, or around when I returned with my new blue car.
“When you say ‘on your way’,” Euan said slowly, “do you mean in a car, and you’re on the road driving?”
“Yep.”
Euan’s voice became louder. “In what car?”
“In a car I just bought off Vincent.”
“Oh God.”
“Look, I can’t talk, I’m driving.” I emphasised the last word for dramatic effect.
“Okay, fine, but please call me if you need anything.”
I hung up quickly and dropped the phone onto the neighbouring seat. My fingers fiddled with the dials on the radio, and BBC Radio 4 finally blasted out loud from my new garish speakers and subwoofer as my car made its way along the A75.
*
I was down the road from the major Dumfries roundabout when I heard the explosion.
I had turned off the radio and slowed, preparing to enter a supersized roundabout. This would be the first of many in short succession, and I had taken a deep breath. When there was a break in the traffic, I quickly pulled out into the first of the four lanes, and began circling around the track, unable to remember where I was supposed to exit. Euan and I had done this route many times before, and I had tried to pay attention, knowing one day I’d end up in this situation, but now everything felt different. Finishing one circuit slowly, with cars beeping behind me, I panicked and pulled out into the nearest exit. Luckily, this exit turned out to be the right one.
That’s when the explosion happened. It came from underneath the back of the car – like four guns going off – the bang so loud that I screamed and let go of the wheel. My limbs felt weak, my mind blanked and I could feel a tingling sensation in my gums, something I hadn’t felt since I was eight years old and frozen in stage fright at my first piano recital. I tried to keep on driving but the engine now sounded like an angry lion and I could hear the dull scrape of metal against concrete. Cars whizzed by, honking, and I realised I was on the wrong side of the road.
Another small roundabout was now just feet ahead of me. I pulled out from the wrong lane and would, like a bowling ball, have taken out several cars had I not luckily found the circle empty. Heading anti-clockwise, I took the closest exit and hung onto the car as it sputtered and leapt. Another small explosion sounded, this time closer to the front of the car, and automatically I pulled into the driveway of a McDonald’s, a fact that still today makes me feel slightly grateful to an otherwise loathed food chain. As I headed over a speed bump, just inside the parking lot, the car slowed with a painful loud grunt and died.
It was only in the silence that followed that I realised I had been crying. I sat there shaking, thinking it could have been much worse, as my mind filled with the angry faces I had witnessed on the drivers. I had only once been in an accident previously, when I was sixteen, and that wasn’t even close to the near catastrophe this could have been.
It had been my first day driving with my brand-new licence and to celebrate the occasion my father allowed me to drive his car to school. In the late afternoon, I had felt so cool walking out of Lexington High School, keys in hand, telling my friends I would see them later because I was driving home. My boyfriend had run up to me and asked for a ride. New drivers, as I well knew, weren’t allowed to take passengers, unless accompanied by an adult. But my boyfriend had often taken me home in his car and, though nervous, I felt it was only fair to reciprocate.
Not wanting to be caught, I offered him a ride home on the condition that he hid in the back. Surprisingly, he accepted. As I pulled out of a side street on my way to his house, into a four-way intersection, I suddenly panicked. Cars flew by on both sides, passing faster than bullets. No one slowed to let me through, and as I inched my way into the middle of the road, cars swerved around me. Shaking, I put the car into reverse. And then, backing up onto a side street, without looking in the rearview mirror, I crashed. I had turned to see a massive white SUV sitting there, waiting to pull out onto the main road.
The SUV had been fine, not a scratch on it, while the back of my father’s car was dented and his light was broken. The driver had waited as I got out, crying hysterically, and had tried to calm me down. His empathy had turned to shock when he looked up to see a young teenage boy jump out from the crushed boot and run down the street.
My trembling hands adjusted the Citroen’s rearview mirror. Tears poured down my cheeks and I tried to quickly wipe them away. I glanced behind me to see if any cars were waiting impatiently to get their fast food. The driveway was empty, but, to my horror, strewn across the McDonald’s parking lot and on to the road, were pieces of my car.
It was as if the innards of my car had instantaneously burst and splattered across the road. I walked along the sidewalk, passing pipes, bolts, cylinders and odd pieces of metal. Across the way, a large man in a hooded sweatshirt came running over. He was unfit and panted as he approached, speaking in a friendly, thick local accent.
“You okay, pet?” he asked kindly.
My mouth was numb. I could hardly speak. “I don’t know how this happened.”
“Here,” he said, bending down to grab one of the pipes, “I’ll help you.” He wrapped his large hand around a piece of metal and screamed, throwing it back down and yelling obscenities. “It’s hot, it’s fucking hot!”
Two more men came over and carefully lifted bits of car onto the side of McDonald’s carefully mulched and manicured lawn. Though my car had let me down, my faith in Dumfries and Galloway only grew in the next few hours. I was so well looked after by these strangers on their way to work that I ran inside and bought them each an Egg McMuffin. My heroes gratefully accepted their rewards and reluctantly, I called Euan.
“My car exploded,” I breathed.
There was a pause. “What do you mean, exploded? Where are you?”
As I told him what happened, he gave me Vincent’s phone number through fits of laughter.
“I’m glad you’re finding this all very amusing.”
“You’re obviously fine, Jessy. Adventure seems to find you. On the bright side, you can still go shopping. There’s an auction house right down the road from where you are.”
When I walked into the Bookshop later that afternoon, it felt as if I had been gone for months. Vincent, my knight in shining blue overalls, had picked me up in Dumfries and promised to have my car sorted in days. He was horrified that I had driven it to Dumfries without getting it properly looked over.
“Then these nice men helped me put the bits of my car on the sidewalk,” I said, standing in the cold kitchen, leaning against the table as Euan slid a roast, covered in onions and roasted potatoes, into the oven.
“Pavement. You mean pavement, not sidewalk.” Euan shook his head. Whenever Euan was annoyed about something, he would turn into Henry Higgins. His corrections of my speech were like pulling the plug on a bath: all the energy drained from what I was saying, leaving me little desire to continue.
“What’s that sound?” I asked, wandering over to the window. Outside, in the darkness of the garden, I could hear an other-worldy low rumble.
“Frogs,” Euan replied, handing me a stack of warm plates. “In the pond.”
I had never heard a sound like it – like a gurgling baritone chorus. “I thought it was the pipes in the bathroom.”
“The bathroom? Do you have a bath in the downstairs loo?”
“The restroom then.”
“Do you go there to have a rest?”
I sighed. I couldn’t win. Boot not trunk, pavement not sidewalk, autumn not fall, acclimatised not acclimated, courgette not zucchini, aubergine not eggplant.
When I had first arrived, I had already known enough not to use the American “fannypack”, something that inspired hysterics from Euan’s employee Hannah, but I had learned the hard way about trousers. One snowy December day, I had horrified both Euan’s parents by declaring that I hadn’t packed enough pants.
“Two countries divided by a common language,” Euan teased me, but I didn’t smile back. Today, with my adventurous ride to Dumfries, I felt like I had survived an important right of passage. I was living, eating, speaking and now driving in Scotland, and starting to truly feel at home in Galloway. However, in one sentence Euan had reduced me back to alien status. The only person I had been fooling into thinking I was acclimated, excuse me, acclimatised, was myself.
“So finish the story,” Euan continued, handing me a cold glass of red wine. Everything in the kitchen was frozen, and Euan would often tell people, without exaggeration, that in the winter we put things in the refrigerator to “warm them up”. “What happened after people helped you pick bits of your car up from the pavement?”
I glared at him. I had never wanted to accept the idea of something called “The Cultural Divide”, believing that people were people. Any failure to relate to another culture, I thought, showed a lack of flexibility and curiosity of the mind rather than a real disconnect. However, living with Euan was beginning to convince me that “The Cultural Divide” was not some fictitious national landmark, but represented a true impasse – a gap between us as vast and impressive as the Grand Canyon. “The Cultural Divide” meant there were things I could never share with Euan; it meant misunderstandings and bickerings. It also, to be fair, meant we avoided the rut of relationship boredom and predictability. On good days it kept us fresh and interested in one another. “The Cultural Divide” kept us on our toes.
Instead of finishing my story, I helped Euan slice carrots in silence. I had always – eventually – grown antsy in my past boyfriends’ company, knowing them so well that familiarity had bred contempt. Instead of feeling as if there were two people in a relationship, the relationship had taken over and it had come to feel like one shapeless, bland experience with no mystery or sense of excitement lingering around the corner. I would feel trapped, as if I had joined the Borg, my identity lost in the amorphous cloud of me, him, us. Euan was different. No matter how much time we spent together, there was something distant and separate about him. Perhaps being with Euan would always feel like that – a mix of familiarity and distance. Perhaps the distance I felt was “The Cultural Divide” and instead of keeping us apart, it would by nature of its separateness, keep us together.
*
“Why are we having so much food for dinner?” I asked, chewing on a raw carrot and peering curiously as Euan lit candles, placing each carefully in the centre of the table. “Are we having people over?”
“I thought you’d have worked that out by now, Jessy.”
“You said Callum, Rebecca and the kids are coming.” Opening the door to the oven, I peaked at the massive roast inside. “But this is enough to feed them for weeks.”
“Well, a friend of mine is staying over too. I’m sure I told you. And Olive may be joining us.”
“Olive, as in the woman you used to date?”
“Only a couple of times. She rang to tell me that she had moved into the area so I thought it would be nice to invite her over to dinner.”
“…with your girlfriend?”
Euan was silent.
“Does she know I’m here?”
“Yes, of course. I mean, I don’t know, I assume so.”
“Jesus, Euan, honestly. You’re totally clueless sometimes.”
Euan’s face darkened, hurt.
“So who is this other friend, then?” I sighed, trying to relax into the night ahead.
Euan passed by me, trying to get to the oven. “Her name is Heather. I knew her at uni but haven’t seen her in ages. She’s over from Dublin to visit her parents in Dumfries.”
“Does she know about me?”
“Yes, she knows about you.”
“It’s a fair question.” I shook my head, abandoning my cold glass of wine, and went out into the hall. A fire was growing inside my belly as the doorbell rang.
*
Euan and I lay in bed, not speaking. The evening, predictably, had been a disaster. I had opened the door to find Olive waiting patiently outside, dressed for a romantic night for two, wearing heavy eye make-up and a slinky black dress, and holding a bottle of wine. She had looked bewildered to see me.
“Is this where Euan who owns this shop lives?” she asked, pointing to the sign and cocking her head.
“Yes, come on in, we’re expecting you.” I had tried to sound gracious and took the bottle of wine. Confused, she followed me upstairs, her tight dress making an irritating rubbing sound as she slinked close behind me.
In the kitchen, I quickly got her a glass of wine, feeling that she might need one as well, and introduced myself as Euan’s girlfriend. Her face sort of froze in the no-man’s-land between politeness and sheer panic. Before she could say anything in reply, the familiar, happy voices of Callum, Rebecca and the children sounded from down the hall. They entered the kitchen all smiles and “hellos”, cancelling out the bizarre developing energy. Euan’s uni friend, Heather, arrived soon after.
Heather was tall and blonde, in her mid-forties and stunningly beautiful. Olive no longer concerned me. Rather, I looked on curiously as Heather held onto Euan’s arm as she laughed, and brushed her hair aside as he handed her a glass of wine. For two people who had just reconnected, there already seemed to be a private library of inside jokes and knowing glances that I was not privy to. Throughout the meal, the spark of energy between Heather and Euan was palpable, and I wondered, in hurt embarrassment, if I was the only one who had noticed.
I wasn’t. It didn’t take long for poor, confused Olive to find an excuse to leave, and I envied her her swift exit. For the rest of the evening, Callum shot me glances, his eyebrows raised, looking concerned. Wanting time alone, I suggested Euan take the others into the sitting room while I cleaned up. Unfortunately, Heather hung back to help me with the dishes. Instead of helping, she leaned her long, thin body against the kitchen worktop, watching me curiously as if I were some exotic animal in a zoo.
“So you’re Jessica.” She said my name as if it was difficult to pronounce.
My blood suddenly boiled, hotter than the water filling up the tub in the sink, which was now scalding my hands. I turned off the tap and pretended to be very interested in washing the dishes. She might as well have said, “Euan never mentions you”. What could I say in response? I didn’t want to look simple, ignorant of their relationship, whatever that might be. Nor did I want to seem defensive in any way. So instead I took a page from Euan’s book, and said nothing.
This seemed to irritate Heather, who came closer. “Euan’s lovely, isn’t he?”
Again, I met her loaded comment with silence. I didn’t know how one created a stony silence but I hoped mine was befitting a glacier. I straightened my shoulders, trying to keep my expression serene, as I stared at the dishes floating in the sink.
“I have no idea why he doesn’t think you’re the one for him,” Heather continued in an almost conspiratorial whisper. “I think you’re gorgeous.” She poured herself more wine. Realising I wasn’t going to play ball, she stood for what felt like cavernous minutes, before at last leaving the room.
The bedroom’s air was icy cold, but did nothing to distract me from remembering Heather’s words, “he doesn’t think you’re the one for him”, which ran on a masochistic loop over and over in my mind. Euan rolled towards me, bringing much needed warmth to my side of the bed.
“I’m really sorry, Jessy.”
“You told her that I wasn’t the one for you.” My fairytale dream of Scotland, and my bookshop owner, started to crumble in my mind in cloudy puffs of dirt and rubble.
“I don’t know why I ever said that. It was ages ago. I guess I felt that way then, but I don’t now,” Euan’s sleepy voice sounded concerned and sincere.
I was getting a lot of practice at creating stony silences.
“There is no one else for me but you.” Euan said dreamily. I let him snuggle up next to me, despite my mounting anger.
I half believed him. Euan was not deceptive, just indecisive. I now knew what being a ditherer meant: someone who was confused. His feelings kept being dragged back into the past by the shadows of ex-girlfriends, or being pulled into the future towards new people he had not yet met, but they only rarely seemed to reside here in the present, in this relationship, with me.
I have never liked the term a “thin line between love and hate”. Feeling angry towards someone I deeply loved has always felt less like two sides of a coin and more like two opposing forces, anti-matter meeting matter, a negation of realities. It’s like Bruno Bettelheim’s observation that for a child to express anger towards his or her mother, a duality needs to occur, splitting her into the good witch and the bad witch, or the fairy godmother and the evil stepmother. Unfortunately, I was old enough to know that people are complicated and no matter how angry I was, there were not two Euans, the good and bad – but one. Truth existed not in separation but in contradiction. This was Euan. I was furious and I didn’t want to be, for there was nothing to be furious about – I had fallen in love with the totality of him, all the dithering sides of him. However, it didn’t mean I had to like how conflicted he was, or live with it.
I felt I was losing some imaginary battle over the forces of fate and love. My vision, as visions should, brought with it a journey whose rewards were things I deeply needed but never had anticipated: a place of perfect beauty where I found a sense of belonging, peace from shpilkus, a break from ambition, new kindred spirits and most important of all: love. Everything was working so perfectly so I couldn’t understand why the biggest piece of the puzzle, Euan, was falling out of place.
Euan ran his fingers through my hair in a sleepy, careless manner. “I wouldn’t know what to do without you.” His words were heartfelt but fuzzy, as if he felt that way but wasn’t confident about why.
In the darkness of the bedroom, I stared up at the ceiling. I had left my life in Los Angeles, I had changed my job, my routine, my friends – everything. I had embraced the change fully, going with the flow of what felt right, so why wasn’t it working? The pea was sprouting and the crack was widening.
The answer suddenly became clear. I had been the one making all the decisions. My face flushed with embarrassed recognition as I saw how my directing instinct, without films to channel the energy into, had gone berserk on my own life. I was the one who had made all the small and big decisions to make our relationship happen, and perhaps it was because of, not in spite of, all the risks I had taken to get here that I was so committed. Euan, however, had never really had to make any decisions at all; everything had happened to him and the result was a massive imbalance.
This had been my dream, my adventure, and Euan had never had the privilege of having that kind of ritual to create his future. He was just a willing accomplice in this scenario. I suddenly saw it from his point of view. He had been descended on by an enthusiastic American who was supposed to stay for a couple of months but had ended up taking over his house, changing his routine, invading his social circle and never leaving. What had started as a trial run had suddenly turned into a long-term, permanent relationship and no matter how happy he was or content he felt, he probably didn’t feel as if he had had any part in making it happen. Where I thought he should feel lucky, he very likely felt bewildered.
My mind tried to come up with an appropriate plan of action, but like James Lapine’s Cinderella when she decided to leave her shoe for the prince to find on the palace steps, “I knew what my decision was, and it was not to decide”. It was still just a glimmer of an idea, not a fully formed thought, but I wouldn’t direct this relationship any more. Maybe I would leave and give Euan the space and time to figure out the mystery of who and what he wanted. Then, if what he wanted was me, he could come and get me. Suddenly I was flooded with excited anticipation. There would be no dithering, no drama and no warning; he would just arrive on my doorstep on a date we both agreed to. The spark of the idea faded in intensity as I began to fall asleep. I had come to him, travelled halfway around the world to show my affection and commitment. It was time for him to take the same risk.