The man at the next counter looked tired, and no wonder. "My wee boy's been poorly," I heard him tell the pharmacist. "He's kept us up all night for three days straight coughin' and cryin' and all."
Then it was my turn to be served and the next thing I heard the man say was "January 1993."
I frowned at this. My youngest daughter was born in 1994, but there's no way I'd refer to her as 'wee', not even out of her hearing. The pharmacist asked the man a few more questions and I studied him surreptitiously. He looked quite young to have a son born in 1993. He also looked out of shape and a little overweight, with the sort of fraught, anxious look you get when you've been staying up all night with sick kids. He had a tattoo of a snake that ran the length of his hairy arm, from wrist to above his elbow, disappearing up the sleeve of thin Hawaiian shirt. I had on a long-sleeved shirt and a fleece (it may be summer, but nobody's told Scotland) and I was still cold; he must be very sleep deprived and run off his feet if he couldn't tell he needed to be more warmly dressed.
"Aye," the man was saying to the pharmacist, "his birthday's 15 August, 2008. He's just turning two."
My eyes popped. Without actually staring, I got a proper look at him. And I realized that there was no way in a thousand years he could have a child born in 1993. His birth year was 1993.
And suddenly I could see it: the boy didn't really look old, he just looked prematurely careworn. Underneath it all, he radiated youth: his elbows and knuckles were still round, his eyes still shone with the innocence of youth, and the seams on his face weren't so much wrinkles as newly-formed stress lines. This exhausted, hassled-looking father of a two-year-old was all of seventeen years old.
Sometimes it takes me a long time to catch on.
"Thanks Oaf-lee!" the woman on the other side was saying to the check-out girl. "I would appreciate that very much. Thanks OAF-lee."
We may have been gone for two years, but I'm proud to say this one only took me a second or two to figure out: oaf-lee is the posh way to say awfully. Ten years of life in the U.K. has taught me a thing or two! I know now that I live in a village, might mean I live in Ae village (the village of Ae is only an hour away from us); that sheers can sound like shoes over the phone, and that too many roundabouts can sound exactly like two mini roundabouts.
Feeling not quite so stupid, I went outside and sat on a bench to wait for my husband. I stared at a woman's shopping bags while she yakked on her mobile. BEATING HEART I read under a large, red heart. The woman nudged the bag with her foot and I saw the word DISEASE. Now I was thoroughly puzzled; I once worked in the cardiology department of a large hospital and I never once heard of beating heart disease. Surely if your heart is beating, that's a good, healthy thing? Perhaps this was a new name for something like tachycardia -- a condition where the heart beats too fast? I made it a point to remember this so I could ask someone later. Then the woman nodded and shifted the bag a few inches and I saw the word TOGETHER. Oh for pity's sake: Beating heart disease together. How could anybody be so thick?
But I'm grateful for small mercies: thank God I didn't end up asking anybody about beating heart disease.
"Were you doing the messages, then?" our neighbor asked as we unloaded the bags from our trunk. I stared at her, open-mouthed and then it clicked. In Scotland, doing the messages is shopping.
I've been out of Scotland too long, it seems. And I'm definitely due a long night's sleep.
