The Hog’s Head. It looked nice enough, and it was advertising cheap beer. I surveyed the selection and came to the conclusion that it would be best to start out with a double scotch (Bell’s, it’s beautifully sweet) and a pint of Stella Artois. It rounded the tab out to an even five pounds, and as all I had on me was the lone fiver, I figured why not indulge before going back to my hotel.

"Five pounds please," the barman said to me. I obliged and dug into my pocket for the last of the day’s money. I had spent the rest on stupid tours and getting myself fed. Another man called out a drink order and the barman ran down the bar, dealing with one of the locals who was obviously a mate.

"Alright, Davie?" I heard him say as I moved off to a quiet corner. Everything was beautiful. The lager was smooth, the scotch was sweet, and there was a football match on Sky. I thought to myself, "How could my dad have ever let himself move away from here?"

The match was something I’d heard about. It was Hearts against Hibs, a rivalry dating back since the teams had come into existence. Football was a great tradition to the Scots, and as I understood it, there had been something of a shaking of the foundation of the league a few years back. I didn’t really care so much for the history, I just reveled in the match on the screen. The fans in the stadium were chanting along as the Hibs were routing the Hearts two-nil, it was a beautiful thing. I thought to myself that if I could manage to get myself into a Scottish Premiership game, it wouldn’t matter who played or who won, only that I would get to experience it.

From the inside of the pub, the night became beautiful. I was safe from the cold in there and I could even manage to absorb some of the local culture. I had been sitting there quietly sipping my drinks for five minutes when out of the corner of my ear I heard some yelling, "Hey! You there, American! Where’s my five quid?"

I turned in the direction of the bartender to realize that it was me he was yelling at. It should have been obvious, besides a group of men in the corner, I was all alone in the pub. They were Hearts fans crying into their beers over the pitiful play of their team’s striker.

"Excuse me?" was all I could manage to get out to the barman.

"Where’s the five pound you owe me, boy? I see you drinking your drinks, but the register says that you didn’t pay. You got an explanation for this?"

"I paid," I said, "Why not check the register again?"

"I’ve fucking checked the register three times," he shouted back at me, "Now I’m telling you to fucking pay me before a problem arises."

I stood frozen. I had given the man his money, I was sure of it. I walked up to the bar so as not to shout across the pub and disrupt the other five patrons that were watching the game. "Look," I said, "I gave you the five pounds before I sat down, I don’t know what you did with it, but I’m sure I paid." I turned my pockets inside out, "Look, man, I’m broke."

"Let me see your fucking wallet," the barman said in a loud voice. Our conversation was beginning to attract the attention of the men in the corner.

"I left my wallet in my hotel, I just had the cash that was in my pocket. I don’t have any more money, man, I’m telling you."

Despite my best efforts to fly under the radar of the boys in the corner, we had been distracting enough from the match. The smallest one came over, pint in hand. He was all of five foot six with blue jeans and a black tee shirt. He was wearing Puma sneakers and had a very thick accent. "Is there a problem here, son?"

"No, no problem at all," I said back to him.

"I wasn’t fucking talking to you," he said churlishly, "I was asking our boy the pint puller. So let me ask again. Is there a problem here?"

Before I could say my piece, the barman cut in, "This American lad said he hasn’t got the five quid he owes me. Says he fucking paid me already.

The Scot from the corner looked me in the eye, measuring me up. His voice got low, "Are you calling our boy a liar?" His four friends stood up and began to walk over to the bar.

"No, I paid!" I yelped, digging into my pockets once again to prove their emptiness and my innocence.

The smaller man took advantage of my hands being occupied and my eyes being averted. I looked up just in time to see a glass flying at me. I went down like a cheap whore. When I opened my eyes, a curtain of red had replaced the blackness of my eyelids. Then I saw a black boot with brown specks of mud flying at me. I closed my eyes again just before the impact. I coughed violently and through the red haze I could see three of my teeth lying on the hardwood floor in front of me.

I was picked up by some burly hands across my chest. I was hoping they had realized the mistake they made, that I had paid and they were just helping me up. I reached out to my teeth as if salvaging them would mean anything.

They set me upright and I was sure that this misunderstanding had been cleared up. A fist flew at me and I was knocked straight down. There was a pain in my right eye. I was picked up again and this time there was a pain in my left eye. I had stopped opening my eyes when I got picked up, I couldn’t math their strength. Eventually I did try to open my eyes and could only recognize shapes out of my right eye. At least I thought it was my right eye.

The process continued until I had lost all power to support myself. Holding me up had become too difficult for them so they let me stay as I was, a mass of limbs on the floor. That’s when the kicking started. The entire time I was hearing things like, "Fucking posh Americans," and, "Dirty wanker. This’ll teach you," as I kept getting hit. One boot hit me after a particularly long wind up, "That was for Scotland!" a higher pitched voice said.

For Scotland? What the Hell did he mean by that? I was a McEwan, didn’t that make me from Scotland? I wasn’t a citizen, but I was half Scottish. My father emigrated when he had married my mother. I wanted to use that fact as my last weapon of defense, but I knew it wouldn’t have done me any good. A half-Scot; a half-breed. What would their response have been?

"The rest of him is probably English. Kick him again!"

Then I heard a voice that was distinctly the bar man’s start to come in. It was faint at first, then it became a complete roar. "Boys, boys! Stop!" After a while they had obeyed and laid there choking on my own blood. At least the assault had stopped.

"Shit, mates, I feel awful," the boy behind the bar said, "I had his five pounds in my pocket the entire time, I just forgot to put it into the register."

There was dead silence in the room except for the cheers from the TV. It sounded like Hearts had just scored a goal and were attempting to come back. I couldn’t say the same. I waited for something out of the men. I couldn’t tell if they were feeling remorse for their actions or if there were going to just keep on beating me. I had stopped caring one way or the other, I just wanted the pain to go away, I wanted to stop existing.. I swallowed hard against the pain and felt blood and teeth go down my throat. That wasn’t going to feel too good coming out in the morning.

I tried to mutter out something, but all that came out was a gurgle of blood. I spat it out and tried again. Nothing. I was rolling around on the floor like an infant. I had no power. There was nothing I could do, I was at their mercy. I was praying for a quick death.

"In you’re pocket the entire time?" one asked.

"Aye," said the barman.

"Fuck, how were we to know? This boy should have told you to check your pocket."

I couldn’t believe it. I figured that next they’d tell me I had hit myself. I wanted to scream out and show them what I was really made of. I saw myself jumping up and, in a burst of rage and energy, beating them all into my condition. I wanted to use every move I had ever seen in a kung fu movie to teach these men not to fuck with me. Instead I just whimpered, curled into a fetal position, and cupped my genitals to make sure they were still there.

"Fuck, I’ll call an ambulance," someone said. I felt a hand go into my shirt pocket and I heard the sound of paper crumpling.

"Eh, sorry about that, mate," the barman said, "Eh, for your troubles and the like?"

Great. I had gotten my five pounds back. You can imagine my elation at such a prospect. I felt hands go under my armpits and someone started dragging me out the door and up the steps, laying me down on the cold sidewalk.

The distinctive sound of an ambulance came zooming up and I could feel myself being lifted on to a stretcher, "So what happened to the boy?" someone asked. It had to be one of the paramedics; no one else would have cared.

"Weirdest thing," the small man’s voice came through," he was walking down the stairs with a pint in his hand, he tripped, and he fell. The glass smashed through his face, and he landed at the bottom as you see him now. We couldn’t believe the sight of him. The boy must have a really weak constitution to end up like this."

Dead silence. I was waiting for the paramedic to call through to the police on his walkie-talkie, bring these fuckers to justice. I was waiting for the familiar click of the button and crackle of radio static, but instead I heard a chuckle, "A very weak constitution indeed. If the boy was a Scot, none of this would’ve happened."

If I could have sworn out loud I would have. A whole nation judging me on my nationality when they didn’t even care about where I came from. They didn’t care that my blood also came from these hills. When people in the States ask, "What are you?" very few people respond that they are American. Most tell you their heritage. I couldn’t remember how many times I’d been asked that question, but I know that for every time I was asked I replied, "Scottish."

When I woke up, I was in a hospital bed with an assortment of tubes sticking out of me. I wanted to say something, but the task was too difficult with the oxygen mask over my face. I heard some loud beeping and nurses ran into my room to check on my condition. I slipped back into unconsciousness.

The next time I woke up, the oxygen mask was gone, but the tubes were still there. A nurse was changing my bedpan which was rather embarrassing. I asked her how long I had been out for and if I had been in a coma or not. Apparently I had been slipping in and out of consciousness for a day and a half. I only remember waking up once, but she said it had been a pretty common occurrence. I asked about all the beeping that accompanied my waking up. She told me that every time I woke up, my vitals would fluctuate madly, so they’d come rushing in to check on me. Nothing was ever seriously wrong, but they made a fuss just in case something had been wrong.

I remember her words: "Nothing was ever seriously wrong." For some reason I didn’t believe her, I certainly didn’t feel right. It only took me about fifteen minutes to realize I had no depth perception. My left eye wasn’t opening, no matter how hard I tried.

"Please don’t try," the nurse said, "It’s going to be a while before you can use it again."

Fuck. What the hell had happened to me? The words hadn’t been coming out as they should have either, my mouth felt funny. For the first time, I consciously ran my tongue along where most of my teeth should have been, half discovering and half remembering that I had lost most of them in the bar. Then I remembered swallowing one.

"Did I pass my teeth yet?" I asked the nurse.

"Eh, I’m not too sure. We don’t exactly check the fecal matter of our patients for anything out of the usual."

Well, that made perfect sense. Why would you? So long as I wasn’t passing blood out my anus, I’m sure they thought that everything was fine. I tried to stretch my limbs out, hoping that there was at least something working on my body. My legs ached. My left arm was stiff, right arm didn’t move at all.

"It’s broken," the nurse said matter-of-factly, "That must have been a pretty nasty fall down those stairs. How long many steps were there? I’ve seen a lot of falls in my day but nothing like this. And landing on the glass, how did you manage that?"

I was too enraged to answer her question. Did she honestly believe that I had accumulated all this damage falling down a flight of stairs with a pint in my hand? How naïve was she? Did they let people this stupid into the nursing field? Don’t you need common sense to diagnose and to realize what happened to someone? I got fed up with asking myself rhetorical questions, the whole process seemed pointless. "Let me see a mirror."

The nurse just looked at me and hesitated, "We don’t usually allow people in your condition to see themselves until they’ve had a bit more time to heal."

My condition? What the fuck was my condition? Beaten up and missing teeth, how bad could it be? I had a broken arm and was probably black and blue all over, but I wanted to see what had happened. I was the victim, let me be victimized. If it was really as bad as she implied, I wanted to pity myself, "Excuse me, but my condition is beaten to fuck. I didn’t fall down any stairs. Now please get me a mirror."

"I really don’t think I should…"

I lost it, "Get me a fucking mirror!"

Do you know why people tell you they shouldn’t do things? It’s because they really shouldn’t.

The nurse put the handle of a small mirror into my palm and then left the room. Nothing could have prepared me for the shock and horror I witnessed, the shock and horror that was my own face.

I wasn’t just black and blue; I was purple and pink, like raw exposed flesh. My left eye was swollen shut, but the stitches around it also leant to its inability to open. I looked like five week old hamburger. My nose was smashed in, swollen and red, feeling wide enough to land a helicopter on. My lips had stitches too, most of my face did. I opened my mouth. I counted a total of seven teeth in the front and took some comfort in the fact that I was only missing a couple of my molars.

My tongue had a gash in it. Apparently I had bit down hard before I lost most of my teeth. In fact, one of the stitches in my lip was where one of my canines had gone straight through. My hair was still there though, the one identifiable part of my head, along with my ears and my right eye. The funny thing was, I had always hated my ears and my hair, now they were all I had left.

I set down the mirror and began to cry. Not bawling, just a continuous stream of tears running out of my right eye. Nothing was going on in the left one.

"How long am I going to look like this?" I asked.

The nurse looked at the ground and took the mirror back from me. She fumbled with it, putting it back in a drawer before saying, "I’m not really sure. The swelling will go down eventually, and you can get false teeth made, but the scars are always going to stay."

"And my eye?"

"As I said before, the swelling will go down at some point. And it will open again, it is still there. But the scars…"

"How come no tears are coming out of it?

"Well," she started, "You got bashed up pretty good. There could be some damage to many of the parts around it, such as the tear ducts. In fact, you may have sight problems the rest of your life. We can’t tell yet, we haven’t been able to run any tests because we can’t get to it."

I took it all in. I was nervous about asking any more questions that I didn’t want to hear the answers to, "What about the rest of me?"

Again there was a pause as she was conjuring up the memory of what had happened, "You have a lot of bruises over most of your extremities, and your right arm is fractured in a of couple places," she touched my cast as lightly as she could, "Here, and here. You had internal bleeding too, but no cause for panic. Besides that, there were a few broken ribs. You are in quite some state. I must say that I did find it hard to believe you fell down a flight of stairs. Do you remember the men who assaulted you? Do you want to talk to the police?"

"No," I said. Why would I? Were the police really going to go search out five unidentifiable locals so they could appease a tourist? Things like that don’t happen in America, let alone here.

The tears just kept on coming as the nurse hung her head and silently walked out. I spent the time I had thinking about a lot of things. What else was I going to do? I thought about my face the way it had looked before this had happened. Many people used to tell me that I was quite handsome. Hell, I’m done being modest, I want to revel in conceit for a while, because I doubt I can ever do so again. People told me I was gorgeous. My girlfriend was convinced that I was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. I told everyone that I was unimpressed with my face, that I didn’t see what everyone else saw. But those were all lies, I didn’t think I was beautiful, but I did think I was attractive. I was sure of it, so many people couldn’t have been wrong.

But I was never going to see my old face again. I thought back to how I looked before this happened. The last time I saw my face was looking into a mirror behind the bar at the pub. I wasn’t ever going to look the same again. I had finally seen what people were trying to tell me all those years. It’s just too bad I was never going to see it again. Neither would anyone else.

So what if I didn’t look the same; if people, or myself, never saw the same me again? I’d still be there, just in a different a skin. But I’d still have the same thoughts, same ideas, still feel the same way about the same people. It was times like these I felt lucky not to have a girlfriend.

The nurse came in to give me a sleeping pill. I was asleep before I had time to think. But I picked up immediately from where I had left off the night before.

The person in the bed wasn’t me anymore, too much had changed. So much of who I was had been based on my appearance. Without my face, without my body being intact, I had lost my identity. People knew you by your face, people recognized you by the way you talked. I’d lost a lot.

You were characterized by the way you thought, by the way you interacted with people. I’d lost that too. My belief in the human good was gone. I didn’t want to walk down streets alone anymore. I didn’t believe in reason. I believed in might making right, and the meek being too timid to inherit the earth. I’d never inherit anything in my state.

My mind also couldn’t handle the gift that it had received, the knowledge of the worth of my life. People spend their entire lives trying to put a price on themselves. Magazines will tell what some of them are "worth", monetarily speaking. I knew how much I was worth. I wished I had never found out, no one should ever have to carry that knowledge with them.

I don’t know how long I’d been lying there thinking before the same nurse came in. She was always coming in, "You have a visitor."

A man that looked strangely familiar shuffled in behind her, keeping his eyes averted to the ground. He looked familiar alright, but I couldn’t quite see his face, "Eh, cheers," he said to the nurse. That voice. I know that voice.

"Alright, mate?" he asked.

The barman. The fucking barman. What was he doing here? I decided to be very cordial considering I hadn’t had any other visitors, "No."

"So, eh, what happened?"

"Well, I was beat to fuck. I’m pretty sure you were aware of that."

"Look, mate, I’m really sorry," he said, "I really thought you hadn’t paid me. I guess that’s how things go here. You have to pay, you know?"

"I did pay."

"Yeah, eh, sorry bout that," he just looked at the ground. He didn’t understand. For some reason no one here understood. It’s just the fact that this is their culture, this is what happens. I’m an American, and these things don’t happen in my country. Or at least we’re led to believe that. We sat in silence for a few minutes. He couldn’t think of anything to say and I didn’t have anything to say to him. I could have thanked him for his gift of knowledge, but if was a gift I hadn’t wanted anyhow, a gift I couldn’t give back. Like a pink and turquoise sweater knitted for you and received at Christmas that would never fit you in a million years, I was stuck with it.

Finally, he broke the silence, "So, how long are you here for?"

By my calculation, it was Wednesday. I had gotten in on a Saturday, and was scheduled to leave on Friday, but I had run into obvious complications. "Do you mean here in the hospital, or when I was supposed to go home?" I didn’t let him answer, "I was meant to be flying home Friday, but I can’t leave the hospital for a week."

"Do your parents know?"

A wave of panic rushed over me. My parents. They probably hadn’t a clue what had happened. I had my driver’s license that I always carried for identification, but beyond that, I didn’t have any other information on me, there would have been no way to get a hold of someone. This was going to kill my mother, she always worried too much as it was, now she’d probably never let me leave the house again.

"Listen, I feel fucking awful," the bar man said, "Is there anything I can do, like? I don’t know, maybe, like, pay for your airfare since you’re going to be missing your original flight? I can’t help but feel somewhat responsible for all of this."

Somewhat responsible. The understatement of the year. I gave him the finger as best I could, the attempt at unpleasantness sent pain running up my broken arm.

The bar man got up and walked away, shaking his head, "Ingrate," he said to himself and disappeared.

The nurse came back in with a sleeping pill, it was that time of day again. "Excuse me," I said, "but I got a quick question. Do you still have the clothes that I came in with? You didn’t throw them out, did you?"

"No, we still have your clothes, although they’re pretty bloody, somewhat torn."

I got hopeful, "Did my shirt have any money in it?"

"Aye, there was a five pound note in your pocket. Is that what you’re wondering about?"

"Yes, thank you," I said, and opened my mouth to accept the pill. I laid there waiting for sleep to come on, wondering what I could do next. I had to contact my parents. I also needed to contact the airlines and ask if there was any special clause in changing a ticket due to an unnaturally vicious beating in a foreign country. I had much to do and little time to do it in.

I was thinking of framing that little bill when I got home, if I didn’t need it here first. It was worth a lot to me. I closed my eyes and started thinking about all the things I could trade my life for.