Said Fox News: “So, yeah, we think that Perfection is, maybe, reprogramming your brain.”
(And ten minutes later: “Tonight we’re asking the question: Is Islam fundamentally violent and incompatible with the American way of life?”)
In the end, I settled on Byron’s spectacles. I photographed them, when was this? Korea — the first time I broke into Byron’s room, I photographed everything she had, but her glasses might be the best thing I have to go on.
I bought a map of Scotland from the student union shop, pinned it to my bedroom wall. Marked a dot for every single optician in the country. Not as many as I’d feared, really, not once you were north of Dundee. Couple of hundred at most.
Printed out Byron’s picture, from several angles, over several years.
Printed out a blown-up picture of her glasses.
Printed onto thick paper wrapped in plastic a reasonable approximation of a Lothian Police warrant card, and then bought an antique badge that looked legal enough to stick to the inside of my wallet for flashing in a stranger’s face. How many people knew what an actual warrant looked like?
Checked out of the hall of residence after a breakfast of baked beans, fried eggs, fried sausages, fried bacon, fried potatoes and a glass of cold milk, and with my one rucksack of worldly goods on my back went forth to find opticians.
Chapter 102
In Edinburgh, the poverty is carefully hidden, pushed out by gentrification to the tower blocks and estates, out of sight, out of mind, the cleansing of the streets, the bankrupt crawl of the tram towards Leith, the spreading of high-performance baby prams.
There are forty-two opticians to see, and only twenty-nine bother to look at my warrant card, ask the nature of my business. The rest just stare at the photo of the spectacles, the picture of the woman in my hand and say no, no no. Even if she came here, we don’t stock those frames. That’s fine: I didn’t think it likely she’d get her eyes tested in Edinburgh, she spoke of a cottage, loneliness, the sea — but I will be thorough. I will eliminate all options.
In the fashionable shops, their shelves lined wall-to-wall with frames, a woman with legs that never end, a tiny body balanced on their high-heeled protuberances, shakes her head and says, “They’re very last year, aren’t they?” and means it, and looks askance when she sees the look on my face and adds, “Well, I mean, in terms of what we’d sell, yes?” and begins to flush, having been caught Speaking Stupid as a habit of her work.
In Leith, a man with deep, dark south Asian skin and a turban on his head tuts and says, “Ah, a missing woman. My mother vanished some years ago, but alas, we found her again.”
At Edinburgh Airport there is a purveyor of glasses on the wrong side of customs. I buy a ticket to London, cross the border, go to the shop, find nothing, wave my police badge to exit the other way.
I steal a car from the long-term airport parking, and drive to Livingston, Bathgate, Armadale, Whitburn. The accents along the border, in Lindsay and Jedburgh, are thicker and harder to penetrate than in Edinburgh, as if, so close to England, these little Scottish villages have sworn to be more Scottish than the Scots, wearing their cultural identity like a sword and shield. Up yours, English!
In Jedburgh I have cream tea by a rolling stream carved through a snow-soaked valley. The butcher across the road has won “Best Haggis in Scotland” for nearly ten years running, bar the odd off-year when he was pushed into second place. The butcher wears a white apron, striped red and white sleeves and a little straw hat. When he comes in for his cuppa, the snow clings to the edge of the boater, and his nose is bright red.
In Hawick, I take refuge from the increasingly bad weather in a pub hotel, and tell the lady behind the counter about my journey through southern Scotland, following the course of a stream from the sea to Teviothead, where it finally shatters into the hills.
She pours mulled wine and says, “And what’s this woman done, that you’re looking for?”
“Wanted in connection with a murder inquiry.”
“Really? But she looks harmless!”
“We think she helped kill those people in Venice.”
“No — the 206?”
Everyone knows about the 206, even in Hawick, with its floral competitions and empty hanging baskets, waiting for the spring; its monument to the soldier-children who drove back English invaders, its betting shops and quietly churning textile mills, its pride in being itself — even here.
“You know, I think it’s shocking what those people did to themselves,” mused my landlady, as the smell of wood smoke drifted through the pub and a man with flaxen hair cursed two cherries at the fruit machine. “I mean, the things you hear — surgery, brain surgery too, living your life by what a machine tells you, buying what a machine tells you and for what? To be perfect? When did we stop learning to just love ourselves for who we are, that’s what I want to know?”
I smiled over the rim of my hot cup, and wondered if this woman knew what it was to love yourself, to forgive yourself, to be at peace with yourself, or if these words too weren’t merely the end product of another algorithm churning out words into the void. Love yourself, whispers Perfection, forgive yourself — here, have £5 off your first “love yourself” forgiveness session, two thousand points upon completion of the course…
In Newton Stewart I took a day to walk the local area, climbed into the forest, looked down on pine and scrubland, found a concrete obelisk raised up to the highest point, sat alone and ate jam and peanut butter sandwiches, met a dog walker on the way back down said, where have you come from?
Oh, about, about, he replied. I don’t really think about where I walk any more.
The ferry to the Isle of Arran left from Ardrossan. The sea was sick and bucking, the skies grey, the wind howling, stranding me in Brodick for the night. I walked from one end of the town and back again in twenty minutes, found the B&B already booked up, slept in the back of my car, was woken at midnight by a seagull landing, its fat white body thumping hard against the metal roof. My breath shimmered in the air and in the morning the optician was closed anyway, so I drove round the island, and had fish and chips in Blackwaterfoot, and went to a perfumer and took the tour, listened to an explanation of all their works (“floral, fruity, woody, faecal odours, oh yes, I did say faecal, the low note catches the attention and then the higher scents keep it; ambergris is simply whale poo you know”) said, thank you, very interesting, ate a duck egg for breakfast the next morning and went at last to the optician, who said no, never seen her before, sorry.
Rode the ferry back to Ardrossan, then over the waters again, to Campbeltown, and up that narrow spit of land towards the highlands and the north.
A month, two more stolen cars.
I stayed one night in a spa hotel on the edge of Loch Tay, because I stank, because I hadn’t washed my clothes in weeks, because my eyes hurt and my back was sore. It cost more than I’d spent in the last four days of driving, but I ran along the northern edge of the loch, seven miles to the halfway point, then seven miles back, and sank into the sauna on my return and stretched out every bone until it cracked, and took my clothes down to the laundry room and sat in hotel-supplied pyjamas and a dressing gown watching them spin, spin, spin, and had blueberries for breakfast and talked with a husband and wife in their seventies, he an ex-neurosurgeon, she an ex-cardiac surgeon, who’d married in Glasgow after the Cuban Missile Crisis and now came up here once a year, every year, to walk the scrubland before the purple flowers grew.
“Some people call it bleak,” she said, “but I think there is a kind of beauty in emptiness. It lets you remember that you’re there, that you matter.”