Scot on the Rocks Read online

  Todd had started asking intrusive questions about a week after I first met him. He could hardly be expected not to: for one, he was happily married and, like all happily married people, he’d turned into Mrs Bennet before the end of the toasts at his wedding and now wanted to marry off everyone in his life, starting with me. For another thing, he was Todd. He had no boundaries. He didn’t recognize the category ‘boundary’ as part of life. He couldn’t spell ‘boundary’. Didn’t know how to pronounce it. Got nothing but a short burst of static if anyone said it. With a gun to his head and a set of magnetic letters, he couldn’t write ‘boundary’ on the door of a fridge.

  But Roger, Todd’s husband, was at it too. He was a doctor, a paediatrician, and he met a lot of other doctors in the course of a day, including a widowed thoracic surgeon who attended a whisky-tasting club every fourth Friday.

  ‘I hate whisky,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ said Roger.

  ‘Everyone hates whisky. It’s the world’s best-kept secret.’

  ‘I know,’ said Roger. ‘But you understand it. You know it’s not bourbon. You can name distilleries. You wouldn’t drink it with ice.’

  ‘I’d drink it with Dr Pepper if it would take the taste away,’ I said. ‘What are you up to?’

  Roger smiled and said nothing until Todd had floated up to the other end of the Last Ditch’s swimming pool, where we were all trying to survive a triple-digit day. When his beloved was out of earshot, Roger said, all in one breath, ‘If you don’t go out with him to this whisky tasting Todd’s going to try to get you to go to the Scottish games and make me go too to grease the introduction please Lexy I can’t be near all those bagpipes I’ll cry.’

  ‘Scottish games?’ I said. ‘Highland games, you mean? Cabers? Sword dancing? People who know their family tree back to the fourteen hundreds? Jesus Christ, why didn’t you say? When’s the whisky thing?’

  My God, it was dull. And the smell!

  The surgeon was well groomed and well dressed, attractive in a surgeon-y sort of way, which was mostly an air of extreme confidence from always being in charge of everything. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Scottish geography, based entirely on whisky production, and a strange earnest literalness that it took me two hours to realize was a complete lack of a sense of humour. He truly had no sense of humour at all, as if it had been neatly excised by a skilful colleague. And once I started to suspect as much, I had to keep checking.

  ‘I thought a thorax was a Dr Seuss character,’ I said.

  ‘No, that’s a Lorax,’ he said. ‘The thorax is the area of the body …’ I assume he kept talking until he’d produced a whole sentence, but I stopped listening so I can’t be sure.

  ‘But of course, I thought Dr Seuss was a TV therapist,’ I tried next.

  ‘No, that’s Dr Ruth,’ he said. ‘Dr Seuss was a writer of …’ I think he got a paragraph out of that.

  I told him about the time a lorryload of dried soup-mix fell into the River Tay and what the newspapers managed by way of headlines. He voiced concern for the wildlife. I told him about the time I said Ted Bundy was my favourite poet, when I meant Ted Hughes, but Edmund Blunden had got in the way and confused me.

  ‘I don’t recall that Ted Bundy published any poetry,’ he said.

  There was no second date.

  Later in the summer, when Noleen said she had the perfect man for me, I said nothing could be worse than what I’d been through already and agreed to meet him. I think it was an act of lesbian revenge. At least if I tell myself that, I can just about manage not to smack Noleen every morning as soon as I’m up to punish her. Before she and Kathi met and married, I’m sure they had years and years of being set up with ‘the perfect woman’ by straight friends who thought the main indication of some woman being perfect for some other woman was that she was a woman who was into women. And was single. And breathing.

  This perfect man Noleen shoved me at with a foot in the small of my back was indeed a breathing, single, straight male. Perfection. He was forty years old, lived alone, ran a business that provided filtered water for offices (and, I’m assuming, motel reception areas) and was – he told me – the number-one fan of California’s most famous competitive dog groomer. Whose name is Cat. He showed me a photo on his phone of a poodle groomed to look like the front of a tiger and the back of a flamingo.

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘And this is … your dog?’

  ‘I don’t own a dog. I do have a shadow-puppet theatre.’

  I filed that for the time being and carried on with my main line of questioning. ‘So the owner of the dog lets you … pays you … You pay to …?’ Now I was looking at a poodle that seemed to have a koala bear climbing its back leg and a snake climbing its front, or maybe it was a snake and a koala who were posing on a poodle-shaped climbing frame; it was hard to say.

  ‘No, I’m not a groomer. Just a fan. I follow the pros – Cat and the rest of them – around the dog shows. I’m going to South Carolina next weekend. I don’t suppose you’re free?’

  To fly 3,000 miles to watch my date watch a woman make a poodle look like a magic-eye picture of Dory and Nemo? ‘Damn it,’ I said. ‘I’ve got clients all weekend. Otherwise, you know …’

  I batted open the door of the Last Ditch reception with the flats of both hands, making Noleen flub the handful of fishbowl business cards she was sorting into alphabetical order for the mailing list. ‘Did you know?’ I said.

  ‘Heh heh heh,’ she said.

  ‘Sicko,’ I said.

  ‘What sicko?’ said Noleen. ‘He’s an innocent lover of lovers of animal art. Don’t be so closed-minded.’

  ‘Not him,’ I said, with an involuntary shudder. ‘You.’

  So, when Kathi told me to be in the Skweeky Kleen Laundromat attached to the motel at six p.m. one late-autumn day and went as far as to insist I put on some mascara and pull a comb through my ‘nest’ – her word – I told her I wasn’t interested in whisky bores, shadow-puppet-cum-poodle-dyeing fans or any other kind of documentary-worthy freak she might have unearthed.

  ‘Guaranteed freak-free,’ she said. ‘Twin brothers, coming to pick up ten Eton shirts, five blue and five white, like they do after work every Thursday. They’re lawyers. They need good shirts.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Which one of them is it you’re throwing me at?’

  She lifted her eyebrows and tucked her lips in, a very Kathi expression, but one which would take many years of study, high on a mountain in Nepal, to decode.

  ‘Either?’ I guessed.

  Kathi’s lips disappeared completely.

  ‘Oh God. Both?’ I said, backing away.

  ‘I didn’t think you were so …’ she began, the cheeky cow.

  ‘That’s incest,’ I said. ‘That’s disgusting.’ I had got to the door and I stopped dead. ‘Wait, they’re not conjoined, are they? Sorry. I didn’t mean to be horrible.’

  ‘No, they’re not conjoined,’ Kathi said. ‘They’re just very close. They’re lovely guys.’

  ‘I think their shirts might be their best feature,’ I said. ‘Say, Kathi, if you ever do meet anyone you find freaky, please don’t tell me, eh?’

  Thus, I didn’t really have a leg to stand on, the day in midwinter when Todd announced he couldn’t stand to see me ‘dicking around’ any longer and was taking over. The only surprise was that he announced it and gave me some warning. After all, when he and Kathi had mounted a coup on my business, neither of them had found that worth mentioning. It was only when I saw three names on one of my own business cards as I handed it over one day that I realized what had happened.

  As a relationship counsellor, with a consultation room at the back of the houseboat, in what was probably meant to be a parlour, while I worked towards state accreditation and, in the meantime, listened and clucked, offered tissues – the good ones, with aloe vera – and tried not to give advice like ‘dump him’, because it’s bad for repeat business, I didn’t
think there were any loose ends in my professional life for two new partners to pull on.

  But I reckoned without Todd and Kathi. Kathi can’t help it; she’s a germophobe, so of course she was going to check whether anyone in the throes of life improvement was willing to include their house in the general detoxification. As for Todd? Well, he’s got his own problems. He lives at the Last Ditch Motel with his paediatrician husband, instead of in their art deco five-bedroom up in the suburbs, because of a rampant case of cleptoparasitosis and because there’s nothing like a germophobe motel owner for making sure there are no bugs – crawling, flying, burrowing or even imaginary – to trouble the faintest cleptoparasitastic heart. But that doesn’t explain why he’s offering makeovers to my clients instead of practising as the anaesthetist he is. Well, only in a roundabout sort of way. The hospital board won’t let him back while his delusions are rampant, so he’s bored stiff. Add to this what we already know about his boundaries (lack of, total) and I suppose it does make sense, if you half shut your eyes and turn sideways.

  It was just before Christmas that he really laid into me, asking me to sign an agreement to go on a date per month for three months if he offered six choices, four dates from eight choices, or five out of ten, and a penalty involving body-hair removal (boundaries) if I flaked for more than two consecutive weeks out of any seven, or any three weeks at all out of nine.

  He had printed it out and stapled it together. He had brought a pen.

  ‘You can’t flake out of more than two weeks without flaking out of three,’ I said. ‘That’s very inefficient contractual language. Make it four out of nine and we’ve got a deal.’

  Todd sucked at maths. Sometimes it made me glad he wasn’t doling out fractions of three different anaesthetics depending on body weight and minutes taken per procedure. At that moment, he pretended to consider the deal, then nodded.

  I amended the wording, got him to initial the changes, signed the bottom and post-dated the whole thing for after the holidays – which to Brits like me means January the sixth, the fifth being Twelfth Night; no matter that to Todd it would mean the 26th of December because Americans fail so badly at Christmas they don’t even have Boxing Day.

  He started nagging me nice and early anyway, which was as big a surprise as the sun going down and then – major twist – coming up again, but I had managed to wriggle out of consequences until now, telling him that the two-week flake was moot, given the four-in-total clause, because he hadn’t specified and/or over either/or and any vagueness in a contract is settled in favour of the party who didn’t write it.

  When I had got through four dateless weeks on that basis, he really thought he had me on the second clause, going as far as to drop an ‘Aha!’ as he burst into my bedroom on the relevant morning, boundary-free as ever.

  ‘Four weeks since you signed, Lexy,’ he said. ‘I’ve set you up for tonight with a—’

  ‘Does the contract say seven-day period or calendar week?’ I croaked from the depths of my duvet.

  ‘Neither.’

  ‘See you Monday, then.’

  ‘This is some bullshit right here,’ he said, standing over my bed and glaring at me.

  ‘Any vagueness in the wording of a contract,’ I said, ‘as we’ve discussed before—’

  He banged the door behind him.

  Then he tried again, but I got him on four-week periods versus calendar months, forward projections of nine-week periods as yet undetermined with respect to numbers of hook-ups completed, threw in a leap-year loophole that gave him a headache behind one eye and almost made me feel guilty, and finally arrived at today.

  When he let himself into my bedroom on the morning after Valentine’s Day, still in his early-morning caffeine-run ensemble of draped cashmere, I had come to terms with it all and was telling myself that, (a) I had to have some sort of up-to-date relationship experience if I was going to keep being a relationship guru with any self-respect, (b) Todd was married to a gorgeous hunk of baby doctor and had inevitably high standards as a result, and (c) I had seriously considered sitting on one of the washing machines in the Skweek a couple of days back, when the load was unbalanced and the drum starting bucking. It was time for me to put my toe back in the socket, come what may.

  ‘Coffee,’ Todd said. ‘Tall, hot, black and slightly bitter. You like your coffee like I marry my men.’ It was an old joke, its job being to celebrate our closeness. I opened one eye. Why was he being nice to me?

  ‘Cheers,’ I said, reaching out a hand for it.

  ‘What did you take your mascara off with last night? The pillow again? Don’t you care about eyelash mites?’

  ‘Eyelash mites are microscopic, unrelated to make-up and completely natural,’ I said.

  ‘Ew,’ said Todd. ‘Rather you than me.’

  I don’t know if he really believed he was free of them, or if he pretended as much in an act of self-soothing, but he sat down a long way off and blinked quite a bit.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Hit me. Do your worst. I’ll be a good little sacrificial lamb and do what I’m told.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Todd said. ‘I’ve come to break some bad news.’

  I sat up.

  ‘It’s none of us,’ he added hastily. ‘Roger, Kathi, Nolly, Diego, Della – all fine.’

  ‘My mum and—?’

  ‘—dad are both fine,’ said Todd. ‘As far as I know.’

  ‘Who isn’t?’ I said. ‘Tell me, before I throw this coffee over you. Who died?’

  ‘Mama Cuento.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘What? Mama Cuento.’

  ‘I didn’t know she was still alive,’ I said. There was a massive statue of Mama Cuento where First Street crossed Main Street; I assumed – coming from a land where most statues were of dead monarchs and admirals – that the original was long gone.

  ‘What?’ said Todd again. ‘We saw her not three nights ago. Drink some coffee and wake your brain. She was standing proud as ever until last night and then sometime in the small hours someone knocked her off her plinth.’

  ‘The statue!’ I said. ‘Got it. A drunk driver? Isn’t there a camera?’

  ‘Not a drunk driver,’ Todd said. ‘At least, yes they must have been driving and they might have been drunk, but not too drunk to get a strap round a gazillion tons of bronze and winch her on to the back of a monster truck.’

  ‘Hang on – she’s gone?’ I said. ‘Someone stole her?’

  ‘I saw the news van heading up there when I was in line for coffee, so I followed. Quite a crowd, a lot of weeping, laying of flowers, all that. So I flirted my way in front of the camera and said Trinity was offering free counselling to anyone affected by this … What did I say …? Blow to the civic heart of our town.’

  ‘That’s the bad news you’ve come to break?’ I said. ‘The fact that I’ll be working for nothing all day, mopping tears of grief about a nicked statue?’

  ‘So cynical,’ said Todd. ‘No, the bad news is that there’s been an assault on an important cultural emblem. The free publicity’s a silver lining. But you need to get your lazy ass up there to First and Main, and get your picture taken before the newshounds melt away.’

  ‘Because I’m so much more camera-ready than you?’ I said.

  ‘Because we can’t have people seeing me and getting their hopes up then finding out it’s your shoulder they’ll be sobbing on,’ Todd said. Can’t fault his honesty.

  Can fault his memory, though. He was so busy drumming up business and inserting us into the heart of the tragedy he’d forgotten all about my love life. Take the win, Lexy, I told myself, throwing back the covers and heading into my midget shower room, hot coffee still in hand.

  THREE

  I’d assumed Todd’s take on statue-grief was bogus, although I hadn’t bothered arguing: when he gets that look in his eye, it’s easier to go along. So, I let him pick an outfit for me, French-plait my hair, apply three individual false lashes on each eye and a slick
of nude gloss on my lips, cheeks and what he insists on calling my ‘crease’ – he means eyelid – to finish me off with a winter glow that would pop for the camera. I’m quoting.

  Twenty minutes later, we were in the heart of downtown, right by the patio of La Cucaracha, looking at the plinth where Mama Cuento’s broad bare feet usually stood. And it wasn’t bogus at all; I found myself buying one of the tealights in glass holders that an even more enterprising individual than Todd was already selling from a cart for five bucks a pop and adding it to the impromptu altar growing just outside the crime-scene tape.

  Just inside the crime-scene tape, Soft Cop – a walking marshmallow of a police officer – and Detective Molly ‘Mike’ Rankinson, the closest thing I had in town to an arch nemesis, were standing close together, I assume discussing the case. The cold February air plumed around them as they spoke and lent a noir-ish touch, as if they were smoking. I couldn’t imagine what there was to speak about. Mama Cuento was gone. The perps must be caught on some camera somewhere. And the insurance would surely replace her. Unless the cops were hashing out the best method to take plaster casts of unusual footprints, this looked a lot like making sure they got on the evening news. But the cameraman from the local NBC affiliate was resting against his van, while the reporter sat warming up inside, drinking what looked like hot chocolate through a straw.

  ‘That woman’s drinking hot chocolate through a straw,’ I said to Todd. ‘Do you think she hates sea life that much?’

  ‘Lip line,’ Todd said. ‘You should see what slurping your joe on the hoof has done to yours, Lexy.’ He speeded up as we got close to the van. ‘Hoyt?’ he said. ‘Lola? This is my colleague I was telling you about. The counselling expert. Lexy? Lola from the news. And Hoyt.’

  It took her less than a minute to find her mark, flip her glossy black hair and get her smile in gear. Todd shoved me into position beside her.

  ‘I’m joined now by Dr Lexy Cameron, who has volunteered clinical time to help any Cuento-ite affected by the desecration of the cultural treasure at the heart of this close-knit community. Dr Cameron, before we get into that, can you tell me what Mama Cuento means to you? And how you feel to have lost her?’