The hostel we stayed in was noisy at night, and I would lie awake listening to arguments and makings-up coming from the rooms on our floor. Through open windows came songs and the sounds of smashing glass and horses’ hooves, the aching cries of gulls that were smaller and bolder than those in the north. I would run my hand over the ridges of Magnus Tulloch’s arm, pull it closer to me, and he would murmur in his sleep and curl his body around mine. This is home now, I would tell myself. All the home I want. I will belong here one day.

There were reminders all the time that I did not yet belong. When people talked to me, I had to listen carefully. I could not always understand what they were saying, and they were just as puzzled by me—maybe more.

Magnus Tulloch told me to be patient, about this, about many things. The further you go, he would say, pulling the brush through my hair each night, the longer it takes for the new ta take on the ease of the old.

It helped when we moved from the hostel to a wee cottage in Martha Street. Just Magnus Tulloch and me. Our landlady lived in a larger cottage on the same sandy block of land, and I canna say she was the most welcoming kind of woman, no. But there was a sweetness to those days that could not be soured away by the stranger-ness, nor by Mrs Laskon, and it was something to do with … I am trying to think of the right word. Possibility, yes, perhaps that’s it. Every morning when Magnus Tulloch left for work, I would watch his rangy figure from the window, shrugging into a gansey I’d knitted, and had washed and mended and folded so often that it felt like the shape of my hands was stitched into the olive green wool. After crouching to check the bicycle tyres hadn’t softened overnight, he’d take his leave with that half-kiss half-wave he’d send flying into the sky like bird flutter, and it always made me think of some words by Emily Dickinson I had copied into the back of my Forget-Me-Not Annual:

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words

And never stops at all

I would watch Magnus Tulloch riding down Martha Street, the sun and my hands warming his back, and I would tell myself: there is nothing that might not happen in this new, bright world.

Even so, they lived together—the stranger-ness and the sweetness—one never sending the other away. I hadn’t expected it would take so long for the stranger-feelings to go. I could never have guessed it would be two whole years.

~