Chapter five: Ladies and gentlemen, we are suspended between worlds.

The next morning, at breakfast, Dad’s sporting a curious, lopsided grin. 

“Did you sleep well?” the young girl says as she comes to take our order.

We nod and smile. 

“What would you like this fine morning?” she asks.

“The full English,” Dad says, handing his menu back, his head lowered. “Or I suppose you should say the full Scottish here,” he mumbles, managing to casually dismiss both the validity of the menu and the nation itself.

Today’s a big day. It’s a trip to Oban. Whisky distillery, boat tour, time at leisure. Or, as we will come to find out, two hours shopping for plastic flowers in many, many gift shops. Mum is on the hunt for souvenirs. 

When breakfast arrives Dad’s still looking oddly pensive. His jaw looks like it’s been punched out of alignment. I'm starting to wonder if he’s had a mini stroke in the night. He sips his tea tentatively and starts to slice into his breakfast. 

He takes a mouthful of bacon. His teeth seem to chew to a different beat than the rest of his face. It’s like I’m watching an old VHS video of him and there’s a glitch in the tape.

“It’s no good,” he says, spitting something out into a napkin. “I was really looking forward to that bacon as well.”

He hands me the napkin, presenting what I first register as a pearly sliver of back bacon.  Eventually my eyes refocus, and I realise it’s not bacon, it’s Dad’s top row of teeth; the soft contours of his upper palate are snapped cleanly into two halves. 

“What’s happened?” I ask.

“Dad broke his teeth this morning,” Mum says. “He thought he could just put them back in. He tried to stick them together with my nail varnish.”

It’s true, I can see an iridescent streak of Midnight Lilac etched along the fault line. 

“It’s your mother,” Dad says. “Who puts Cadbury’s eclairs in the fridge?”

“Why were you having a chocolate eclair before breakfast?” I ask.

“I woke up hungry,” he says. 

“I put the eclairs in the fridge because I thought they’d melt,” Mum says. “I told him to suck it. But he never listens.”

It’s April in the Western Highlands. The chances of toffee liquifying are slim, I suggest.

An idea strikes me. The village shop is just over the road from the hotel. Maybe, I say, they sell superglue? Maybe we can snatch victory from the jaws of chocolate eclair-defeat?

“It’s either that or see if there’s an emergency dentist in Oban,” I suggest.

Dad has a different set of priorities. “I’m not missing the whisky distillery,” he says. “You don’t need teeth for that.”

I gulp down my scrambled eggs and leave Dad sucking on a piece of toast. 

---

The shopkeeper greets me with a cheery hello as I squeeze through the store’s tightly-packed aisles stuffed with Lynx gift boxes, Barbie dolls and pre-mixed sheep dip.

Eventually I give up the hunt and head back to the counter.

“Do you have any superglue?” I ask.

“Oh yes,” the woman says. “Liquid, gel or pen?” 

This throws me. 

“Is it for wood, or metal or plastic?” she offers, sensing my momentary confusion. 

“Hmmmm,” I say, weighing up the options. “I’d say plastic. It’s for my Dad’s false teeth.’

The woman performs a dramatic eye roll. “It’s not really for human mouths,” she frowns. Then, realising she was about to lose the sale, changes tack. “Ah, well, you’re not the first,” she says, unhooking a packet of glue from a wall of precious essential items behind her. “And you won’t be the last. Are you staying at the hotel?”

“We are,” I say, reluctant to pursue this curious new line of conversation any further. I hand over my money and head to the door. “Thanks a lot. Fingers crossed,” I say.

Back at the hotel I grab Dad’s moist parcel from him – he’s since moved on to yoghurt and looks like he’s regained control of the situation – and head up to my room. Despite the brightness of the morning, my bedroom’s not ideally lit for precision dental work. It’s a poky single facing out into an internal, sunless courtyard.  I’d open the window if I wanted a second-hand cloud of blueberry vape smoke from the skulking kitchen staff.

Dad’s dentures have split into two jagged pink scimitars. I spread glue over both edges and, in doing so, manage to stick my finger and thumb onto one of them. Dad’s teeth are hinged to my hand like I’m a Francis Bacon painting. 

I bolt to the bathroom and hold my grinning hand under a running tap of scalding water. The teeth are not budging. I visualise my future self strolling around the bar at the Oban distillery, being offered a dram at the end of the tour, and raising my toothy fist to take a sip. This can not happen.

It’s this thought that makes me rip the teeth away from my flesh in one painful, but ultimately successful, movement.

On my second attempt I manage to fuse the denture’s two halves together smoothly. I hold them in place for a minute, and trot, triumphantly, to Mum and Dad’s bedroom.

Dad slips them into his mouth. They seem to lock into place like a finely tooled machine part. 

“Hey, Dave, you’ve done a terrific job on these,” he grins. “I’m looking forward to my crab claws later now.” 

“Don’t push it, Dad, ” I say. “These have to last you a week.”

I snatch the bag of eclairs from his bedside table. “And I’ll be taking these,” I say. “Let’s get down, the coach is leaving soon.”

---

I enjoy the coach outings more than I’d imagined. Perched up high, I get to see the Scotland-over-the-hedges places I don’t usually see when I travel up here in the car with Stuart and my dog, Ben. 

I see the manicured estates that meet the waters of Loch Lomond, the glinting burns that chase us along twisting single track roads, tumbling down into shadowy ravines, and the darkly-wooded glens illuminated with bluebells and yellow flag iris. 

We see the same mountains, of course, but they feel out of reach; inaccessible. We hurtle past all the little turn offs Stuart and I usually take, to forest walks and hilltop hikes. Our coach stops for outlet villages and visitor centres only. This is Scotland by proxy, witnessed through the filter of calendars and coasters. 

But that’s fine, I think. We’ve been here. We’ve done that. 

I look around at my fellow passengers.  I see them smiling, and pointing things out as we pass. Each of us is tracing out our own map of Scotland; conjuring up images from holidays past and putting ourselves back in the picture.

"That's where we saw the red stag, when we stopped in the layby, remember?”

“Look, there’s the old bridge where we stopped for a picnic with the kids.”  

For a moment, the kids are young again. We all are. 

We’ve earned the right to be cushioned in an air-conditioned Mercedes coach, while Wendy hands out lukewarm teas and coffees. We’re all time travellers in a landscape built on the steady accretion of our memories.

That’s the trouble with Scotland. It lulls you into thinking that time is an abstract concept. When the underlying bedrock, the Lewisian gneiss of northwest Scotland, is half as old as the Earth itself, what’s a lifetime, anyway?

The plate photographs of mountains and rivers captured in my Dad’s 1967 edition of the Readers’ Digest book of Great Scottish Drives look exactly like the images captured in the reel of film unspooling in our panoramic windows. 

Once, no doubt, the quilting know-alls hiked up to the hanging valley in Glen Coe with a hip flask full of Glenfiddich; the teachers battled to set up their ridge tent in a force ten gale in the mist-shrouded wastelands of Rannoch Moor.  

A couple behind me are talking about the time they were bitten alive by a cloud of midges that followed them all the way up Glen Nevis. “At least we don’t need our sprays this time,” the man says. “Much more civilised,” his wife agrees.  

It’s a consolation of sorts. But I’m not sure whether they believe it. Or whether, with each passing set-piece of Highland scenery, they wonder where all those years went. Wasn’t it only yesterday they were running through the heather? When did civilised holidays beat freedom and joints that flexed without complaint?

I look at Mum and Dad and wonder the same thing. Not so long ago, they were taking the mountain roads too, Dad’s Cortina groaning its way to the Rest and Be Thankful viewpoint or the Falls of Falloch. Each day a sketchy, self-contained adventure: no itinerary to follow, no Caithness Glass factory visit to stretch out the day til teatime.

Mum turns to me. “Where are we going today, again, Dave?”

“Oban,” I say.

“Do you think I’ll be able to buy some gypsy grass there?” she asks.

“We can try,” I say.

Right now, I have no desire to climb a Monro, or run across the powder-soft sands of some Hebridean beach. I want to help mum hunt down plastic flowers in a thrift shop. 

Travelling on a coach, I’m starting to think, is like being in a space capsule. We're suspended between worlds. The view outside our window is is of a place at once familiar, and yet distant. We’re so detached from it we hardly notice that it’s accelerating away from us.