Three

How did it come to this? Where did it all go wrong? How did I, Lexy Campbell, strong modern Scottish woman, end up homeless, jobless, and broke, thousands of miles from everyone and everything I knew, all my belongings locked in a room with a now-expired keycard, my plane ticket useless because I’d missed my flight, my brilliant attempt at being a witness turning me into a bigger suspect every time I re-opened my mouth, and no one I could call for help except … No! No one I could call for help. No exceptions.

Because that—the lack of exceptions, the non-helper, the no one—was where it had all gone wrong.

Bran.

Bran Lancer, to give him his favoured name.

Branston Frederick Lancer the Second, to give him his full name.

Branston Fucking Lancer the Scumbag, to give him the name he’d earned.

I had looked across a crowded room, seen his face, and taken the first step towards the California cop shop where I sat right now.

In my defence, I had just boiled my head. I was at Turnberry for the spa. He was at Turnberry for the golf. And he was so … American. So very … un-Scottish. He was tall, brawny, sun-kissed, and clean! He came off the eighteenth green cleaner than I came out of a sauna. His teeth were like a double row of little oblong paint samples (if a DIY outlet would ever have two rows of fourteen samples of the same paint shade: American Teeth). His hair was by Abercrombie, his nails by Fitch, his clothes … His clothes were god-awful, actually. Elvis wouldn’t have worn them to brunch in his Vegas days, but that’s golf for you. And he was soon out of them anyway.

I took a sip from my plastic cup of tea-possibly-coffee, which had base notes of cocoa as it cooled, and remembered the taste of our first kisses: room-service Champagne and spearmint floss.

I listened to some over-refreshed patriots being brought into the cop shop somewhere a long way from this interview room and remembered the sound of his honey-dipped voice saying, “The crazy is what makes it so sane!”

I looked down at the graffiti scratched into the plastic tabletop—You’ll take my gum when you chip it out of my cold dead jaws, which I thought was pretty funny, and Gil is a douche-nozzle, possibly less so—and I remembered seeing the diamond, sitting in its velvet box, big as an ice cube, glinting with the same fire as his eyes.

It took four months in total from “who’s that” to “I do.” A week at Turnberry, a week in Dundee after he followed me back there, while I saw clients and supervised trainees and he sat in the waiting room flirting with the receptionist and nipping out for nine holes at Carnoustie whenever it stopped raining. Then he gave me the ice cube, mounted his “so crazy it’s sane” argument, and returned to California. Two weeks of Skype sex later, I followed him. My visa waiver allowed me ninety days before I had to get out or go rogue. Day eighty-nine saw us standing in line at city hall. It was so romantic.

Seriously. American brides might want dyed doves at the Four Seasons, but I was from Dundee and standing in line at city hall had all the exotic allure of gas station coffee, drive-thru burgers (with a U!), and right on red.

My heart wasn’t listening to my head, and my guts weren’t listening to my heart. My loins were running the show. When my guts finally told my loins to pipe down and my head told my heart to wise up, there I was, drinking gas station coffee that tasted like fried shoes and eating heinous drive-thru burgers flipped by people who could neither cook nor spell. And I was married to a dentist called Branston with colour-coordinated golfing outfits. Right on red is a wonderful thing, but it’s not enough to base a life on.

“A dentist?” my best friend Alison said, hiccupping from trying not to laugh. “You couldn’t find a traffic warden?”

“You went out with that road-worker that time,” I reminded her.

“That saved us both a fortune in taxis,” she said. I remembered: Dead Cat Cabs. Every Saturday night, Jordie the road-worker would call his pals on the backshift and tell them there was a dead cat on the road outside the club. Dogs have to be investigated. Urban foxes can stay where they drop. But, if someone reports them, the local authority always picks up dead cats. Or, as the case may be, Jordie and his friends. “Anyway,” Alison said, “a road-worker is, in essence, an urban lumberjack. I’ve always been fascinated by the intersection of landscape and masculinities.” She’s a sociologist.

What I wouldn’t give for Jordie, his high-viz jacket, his intersected masculinities, and his Dead Cat Cab to swoop down on this cop shop right now and take me away, squashed on the bench seat with Alison and the backshift. That was a life I understood. This was Bizarro-world, lit only by the sun shining into the rabbit-hole high above me.

Bran’s house should have told me. Should have told me something. He hadn’t reacted to my flat in Dundee, beyond asking where the hall bath was.

“Hall bath?” I echoed.

“Half bath?”

“Wouldn’t the water run out?”

It transpired that he couldn’t shit in the same room he showered in. He went for a walk and hit a caff. But listen! I didn’t know that back then. I mean, if I had heard that, my loins would have washed their hands of him.

Back to his house, though. The Beige Barn. I was never great with houses at the best of times. I lack the nesting instinct. Either that or I just never found the right nest. I couldn’t have cared less when my mum turned my old bedroom into a study. And I left my rented flat in Tay Street without blinking.

The thing about Bran’s Beige Barn was it didn’t have any walls. Oh, it had walls separating it from the outside, but inside it had furniture called rooms. He led me, that first night, into a kind of hangar and started pointing. “Kitchen,” he said, nodding at where some units and appliances were lined up and a sink was set in a big block of dark wood like a sarcophagus just sitting in the middle of the floor, right where you’d bump into it when you were drunk. “Breakfast room,” he said, showing me an oval table on the far side of the sarcophagus. I looked at the door on the table’s other side.

“Through there?” I said.

“A closet,” he answered. Then he pointed to a bigger table with a candlestick on it. “Dining room,” he said. He showed me a telly on the back wall with a couch in front of it. “Family room,” he told me. Finally two couches facing each other, “and formal parlour.”

I turned round, looking at all four corners of the one single solitary room. “Right,” I said. And just like that I understood American divorce rates. There are no bloody walls! If your beloved is bugging the shit out of you, there’s no escape. Don’t get me wrong, British couples can’t stand each other either—thankfully, or I’d be out of a job—but they never see one another unless they pass in the kitchen when they both want a cup of tea.

Bran picked up my suitcase and roller bag and led me through an arch (so close to being a door, but no banana) and along a corridor into …

“Master bedroom,” he said. He nodded at two armchairs and a magazine rack. “And reading room.”

No walls, but there was a bed. There was a huge, high bed with banks of white pillows and a snow-scape of a duvet and I was knackered. I stripped to my t-shirt, wriggled out of my bra, Crocodile Dundee–style, and dropped.

I woke up from the jet lag at half past five. Bran was on his back with his golden arms thrown over his head and the faintest wink of new stubble just beginning to show on his golden chin. I slipped out from beside him and crept away to explore.

There was a two-person shower in the nearest bathroom and a door leading out to a pool! An honest-to-God swimming pool. It was bright blue and shaped like a bean with a little baby bean of hotter water in its inner corner. It sat between the patio, full of very shiny plants in brushed-steel planters, and a lawn of Kermit-green velvet grass stretching to where a grey-painted fence almost hid the neighbour’s velvet grass, blue pool, and beige barn. I shrugged off my t-shirt and dived in.

I hadn’t swum in the scuddy since student days, and never alone, floating on my back in warm water like silk, staring up at a pale pink sky as it slowly turned gold and then the gold turned lilac, promising blue. I smiled, rolled over like a seal, and caught just a glimpse of a pair of wide-open eyes, and an even wider open mouth, before I went under and came up coughing.

There was a young man in jeans, boots, and a white t-shirt standing on the tiles at the edge of the pool trying (now at least) not to look at me.

“Pool,” he said.

“Um,” I said. “Can you get me a towel?” He shook his head. “Can you turn round maybe?” I said, twirling a hand to give him the idea.

He turned his back and that was when I saw Cuento Crystal Clear Pool Service written on his back. I thrashed my way to the edge and slithered out, grabbing my t-shirt and scampering for the bathroom door.

When I had added a towel skirt to my wet t-shirt, I went back out to say a proper hello.

“Sorry about that,” I said, walking up to where he was crouched at the business end of the pool fiddling with a filter. “Thanks for not laughing or puking. Lexy Campbell.” I stuck my hand out.

He shook it, saying six or seven syllables I took to be his name.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said. “Do you come at the same time every day?”

“I don’t speak English,” he said.

“And yo no hablo Español,” I said. “That looks like that then. Adios and … ” The only other thing I knew that wasn’t about food or bullfights was via con Dios, which might come over a bit threatening, so I waggled my eyebrows and went back inside just as two more guys in jeans, boots, and white t-shirts let themselves in through the gate from the drive, carrying what looked suspiciously like plant-shining gear.

“Buenos dias,” I said.

“Que pasa!” said one, to which I had no answer.

In the kitchen a short, round woman with a long black ponytail was going over the wall above the cooker with a feather duster.

“Yo no hablo Español,” I said.

“Me either,” she told me. “I’m from Toronto.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’m kidding,” she answered with a wink. “I’m Lupe,” she added, when I had finished laughing. “From Merry Maids.”

“D’you want some coffee, Lupe?”

She frowned. “You gonna drive like that? No shoes? They won’t serve you.”

That was how I found out Branston didn’t possess a coffeemaker, and there was no way to get any caffeine inside me without driving through a Starbucks. Luckily, Lupe had started her day with a vente and was willing to share. There was God knows what assorted crap in it that wasn’t coffee (definitely cinnamon, vanilla, and big cold blobs of cream), but there was a seam of black stuff somewhere underneath and I could feel it flooding my blood at the first sip.

I padded along the passageway and entered the master bedroom on tiptoe. The bed was empty but, following the sound of rhythmic pounding and clanking, I found Bran in a second bedroom going at a treadmill like a crazed hamster, curling dumbbells up and down in each hand and watching a huge television screen high on the opposite wall where two more golden people were discussing the Nikkei index. They could have been twins. I looked from their faces to Bran’s. They could have been triplets.

“Hiya,” I said.

“Hey!” He jumped off the treadmill, put the dumbbells in their rack, and wrapped his arms round me. “Where were you?”

“Meeting your household,” I said. “Lupe and them. I didn’t catch the pool guy’s name, though.”

Bran shrugged. “Who’s Lupe?” he said. And a bell rang. I wish I could say it was an alarm and I heeded it, but actually it was his phone. He snatched it up, shouted with joy at whoever it was on the other end, and then spent five minutes telling them he couldn’t, he was busy, he couldn’t say, he was tied up all weekend, he wouldn’t free up half an hour even if he could, all the while twinkling at me. When he hung up and threw his phone down again, I snuggled up shamelessly.

“Completely tied up all weekend sounds nice,” I said. “But it’s Tuesday.”

“Right,” he said. “I’m going in late and I’ll leave early. If you give me a ride you can have the car. Knock yourself out. Meet me for lunch. Show me round my own town by moonlight. You’ll find great stuff I’ve missed for ten years. I just know you will. So let go of me and let me finish my workout. Sooner I’m done, sooner I can get you your coffee. What do you get in the morning?”

Back in the here and now, I took another sip of the cop shop’s nameless brew, noticing for the first time that tomato soup definitely came down the same spout as the cocoa, coffee, and tea.

I’m not the first person to fall in love and make a poor decision. I might be the first person trained in relationship psychology to fall in love with a town and marry a dentist, though.