Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Facts and Fictions
Acknowledgements
SCOT ON THE ROCKS
Catriona McPherson
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First world edition published 2020
in Great Britain and 2021 in the USA by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.
Trade paperback edition first published
in Great Britain and the USA 2021 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.
This eBook edition first published in 2020 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited.
Copyright © 2020 by Catriona McPherson.
The right of Catriona McPherson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-9031-3 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-739-2 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0461-5 (e-book)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
This eBook produced by
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This is for Sharon Tenbergen, with love and thanks.
ONE
‘It’s the most lud-i-crous taaaaiiiiime of the year!’ I sang to myself as I traipsed through the streets of downtown Cuento, en route to the Yummy Parlor Szechuan Restaurant and Takeaway.
When I was a kid, back in Dundee – or Dundee, Scotland, as they call it here – St Valentine’s Day meant a card if someone fancied you, knew your address and had a stamp; a bunch of flowers if you had a boyfriend who hadn’t worked off whatever he did at the New Year’s Eve party; or a white furry teddy bear with a red satin chest if you were really slow on the uptake and the sickening Christmas present you got from the guy who’d buy a teddy bear for Valentine’s Day hadn’t made you dump him yet. Maybe some wives put love notes in the lunch boxes of some husbands. Maybe some husbands put chocolates on the pillows of some wives. My dad bought my mum a card once. She opened it at the breakfast bar, frowned, said, ‘For crying out loud, Keith,’ and ripped the front off to use for a shopping list.
She would keel over in her tartan slippers and hit the ground stone dead if she could see Cuento on Valentine’s Day. Every shop window had a mammoth eruption of bright red and bright pink – two colours that, newsflash, do not go – and it didn’t matter whether the eruption was balloons, ribbons, fabric, flowers, table linen, stuffed animals, stationery, garden tools (because of course the hardware store had got in on the act) or iced cakes, the result looked like a giant shiny haemorrhoid. A new kind of giant haemorrhoid that could also give you a migraine if you looked at it too long.
The bars and restaurants were worse than the shops. Every table on every covered patio and in every show-off window was set for two, with a cheap red candle already dripping wax on to a fake red rose, and two deluded numpties gawping at each other across a hiked-up plate of dodgy oysters while a server twisted the cork out of a hiked-up bottle of domestic fizz.
Some of the girl numpties were ripping open tiny pink and red packages and popping open the velvet lid inside with the practised flick of a gel tip. To be fair, these scenes could be quite entertaining. I stopped at La Cucaracha and pretended to look at the menu purely to watch one of them play out. The gift in question was silver earrings and either the male numpty who had bought them, or a sociopath in the jewellery shop, had been dumb enough to put them in a very small, square, white-and-gold-for-God’s-sake box that looked, even to my inexpert eye, like it had been conceived and manufactured expressly to house a diamond solitaire. She held it, still closed, against her heaving chest, gazing at him with shiny eyes. He realized – a second too late – what she was thinking. She saw him realize – also a second too late – just as she was lifting the plump, white lid on its little gold hinge. And there they were, the pair of them: dismayed, mortified, furious, resentful, ungrateful, hate in their hearts and still a whole evening to get through. Happy Valentine’s Day!
It was almost enough to make me glad I getting myself a Chinese takeaway for one to go home and watch Britbox. Almost.
But the rot had spread even here, to my favourite of Cuento’s eateries. I loved this place. For a start, there was the glamour – irresistible to all foreigners – of Chinese food in one of those waxy little decapitated pyramids, just like in the movies. Truly, it made me feel like the lost seventh Friend to pluck one from my fridge, sniff it, wince and eat it anyway. Also, their meals were blistering hot. I had got mightily sick of lukewarm, litigation-avoiding food in the just-over-a-year I’d lived here and I’d come to appreciate deeply the way the cooks at the Yummy Parlor handed over soup that would still be bubbling when you got it home, seeming to say, Sue us if you like, ya wimp. It won’t put the skin back on your tongue.
I was guessing at what they said, of course. And that was the last reason I adored the Yum. The customer service was appalling. They were surly, unbending, pretty sarcastic even in English and obviously hilarious in Cantonese, flinging around judgements about the customers and not trying to pretend they weren’t. Whenever the endless beaming smiles and bottomless obliging service of the typical Californian really started to unsettle me, there was nowhere like the Yum to remind me of home. With a curled lip and a rolled eye, they could cure my homesickness before they’d licked their pencil and laughed at my order.
So, obviously, I had told myself after work, no one would be clueless enough to bring a Valentine’s date here. I could get my honey-and-walnut prawns and my nuclear soup without any pink, any red, any roses or any pity.
Ha. What I had forgotten was that – unrelated to the misanthropy of the staff, the temperature of the sauces and the shape of the containers – the food was good. And, even on this insufferable day, there were a few courting couples in Cuento who cared. The Yum had done their best to
make clear the establishment’s contempt for the holiday. The tea lights were slapped straight down on the Formica and they’d made ten roses do thirty tables by chopping them into three pieces, crossways. Twenty tables had sections of stalk in shot glasses, while ten had flower heads with no stalk. Truly, pie shops in Glasgow could learn disdain from these masters.
Still, I should have been able to tough it out. I would have been able to tough it out. If only I hadn’t seen in the usually dead eyes of the Yum’s counter-order taker something that undid me.
‘Hot sour soup and honey walnut shrimp, please,’ I said, translating effortlessly into American.
‘For one?’ she said, and that’s when I saw it. It wasn’t pity, nor empathy, nor kindness, nor concern. But it was, unmistakably, human. And she didn’t shout anything scathing over her shoulder towards the kitchen either.
‘No, for tw—’ I started to say, then I put my hand to my back pocket and prised out my phone. Yes, I was wearing very tight jeans. Yes, I had changed into them twenty minutes ago. Just in case. ‘One minute,’ I told the order taker as I put the phone to my ear. ‘You’re just in time,’ I told it. ‘I was going to get you the same as me. What do you want? OK. OK. Open a tinny for me. I’ll be there soon.’ I put the phone back in my pocket and said, ‘The soup and shrimp for one, plus a general chicken and fried rice. Four crispy wontons. Thank you. And two fortune cookies,’ I added, in case she still hadn’t got the message.
‘You’re a sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad little sack,’ I sang as I traipsed home again, using the tune of ‘When the red, red robin’. I was disgusted with myself for pretending to have an imaginary boyfriend, for pretending my useless imaginary boyfriend sent me out for takeout on Valentine’s Day, for pretending my useless, uncommunicative imaginary boyfriend ignored all my texts asking him what he wanted, and most of all for pretending that my useless, uncommunicative, boring imaginary boyfriend ate general chicken and wontons, when I could either have ordered him something lovely that I would have welcomed tomorrow for lunch, or something properly awful, like congee and frog curry, that I wouldn’t be tempted to cram into my lonely, bitter face tonight with my second bottle of wine and third romcom.
I even found myself looking at a man walking ahead of me, alone, not carrying chocolates or flowers, not dressed up or reeking of aftershave and not – I saw the lack of a reflective glint on his left hand as he passed a lighted hairdresser’s salon – married. Was he also lonel— No! Was he also single, maybe? I knew he was straight, from the clothes – truly pitiful, but I didn’t mind a fixer. And he had a walk that said, I’m fine with who I am; ain’t life grand? If I were to overtake him in my skinny jeans, then he were to catch up again at the pedestrian crossing, and I smiled, and he smiled back, and the lights were broken and we were stranded there …
As it happened, he sailed across the road when the walky man appeared and strode into the phone shop on the other corner, going straight past the sales area and in through the staff door. That was that then. A phone-shop staff member would never look twice at me, with my unused apps and overpriced chump plan. Men didn’t want fixers.
As if all of that wasn’t bad enough, the downtown florist was still open and, as I passed, a woman in a pink overall, with a red ribbon tied round her head then done up in the kind of rosette you can only learn to make from a YouTube video, was putting out a sign saying, Sold Out of Red Rose’s, and I was too depressed at the thought that Phone-shop Guy and me were the only solitary people in Cuento tonight to ask, Red Rose’s what?
And then the tin lid was applied and tamped down all round with the handle of a sturdy screwdriver. I noticed, outside the only residential property on my route – from the Yum, under the railway line to the (literal) wrong side of the tracks, past the police station, drive-through coffee shack and self-storage facility, to the Last Ditch Motel where I make my humble home – a pile of what they call ‘yard waste’.
It’s a great service provided by Cuento City Waste Management and Recycling. When you’re doing your garden, you just scrape all the crap you don’t want – everything from palm branches to grass clippings – down on to the street and leave it there for someone to take away. It’s a hell of a waste of parking spaces and it’s not much fun for the odd cyclist who somersaults into piles of jaggy stuff, but you’ve got to love such a celebration of extreme laziness. It’s right up there with the drive-through bank.
I had never seen anything to trouble me in this pile. Usually it was prunings, punctured lemons, weeds and the odd rotting squash. Tonight, though, right on the top, there was a bunch of slightly wilted, not-quite-decaying roses. I stopped and stared, feeling the tub of soup hit me in the calf with a hot smack. I’d never wondered about the people who lived in this one little house jammed between a fro-yo and the multistorey car park for the cinema. Students, I’d have guessed. Or maybe an original owner from the fifties, hanging on, shredding the offers from developers that had to come through the letterbox thick and fast now that the zoning was commercial on this block. Whoever they were, I now saw, one of them bought roses so regularly that the old bunch could go out for the binmen when a fresh lot turned up on Valentine’s Day.
So I was in the mother of all slumps when I trudged across the Last Ditch car park, heading for the corner where the path led round to the motel’s namesake slough in which my little houseboat sat bugging the life out of the city planners. I purposefully avoided looking upstairs towards Todd and Roger’s room, even though they were bound to be either out somewhere fabulous or already in bed with lobsters. I even more purposefully avoided looking into the office, where the owners, Kathi and Noleen, were bound to be either lovingly sharing a curry on a card table or having a romantic game of darts and a margarita.
Unfortunately, two doors opened while I was right in the middle of the asphalt; not a chance of a getaway. Room 101 was the lair of Devin, a kid who’d moved out of his college accommodation when he couldn’t stand the bullying and moved in here to try and live off the buffet breakfasts for three meals a day. Room 105 was the permanent home of Della and her six-year-old, Diego, as well as two cats, a rabbit, a seahorse and an expanding family of tropical fish.
‘He sleeps!’ Della was calling along to Devin. She hadn’t even noticed me.
‘Cool!’ Devin said, and pulled his door shut behind him with his foot. He loped along the walkway under the overhang, his arms bursting with … looked like some kind of board game … and a six-pack swinging by its plastic from one finger.
‘Oh!’ I said. ‘You two having a game night? You should have told me. I’ve over-ordered Chinese and I’ve got a bottle of … can’t remember, actually, but I’ll get it.’
‘Hi, Lexy,’ Della said. She was staring at me with a weird, penetrating look on her face that I couldn’t begin to decipher.
‘Yeah,’ said Devin. Della swung round and treated him to the look now. ‘I–I mean, “Yeah, hi, Lexy,” not, “Yeah, Chinese food and mystery booze,”’ he said. ‘Hi, Lexy. Yeah.’
He always talked like this. Noleen had burst into his room every day before they legalized it, looking for evidence of a hydroponic grow, but I reckoned he was just made that way.
‘So …?’ I said. I really did. I was that slow.
‘See you tomorrow!’ said Della. ‘Have a lovely evening. Thank you.’
‘Wait,’ I said. I looked at what Della was wearing and noticed at last that there wasn’t much of it. And I looked at Devin’s armload and realized that the board game was Twister. ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Are you …? Are you two …? Is that even …?’ Legal, I was going to say. Thank God I stopped myself in time. But seriously, Devin was a student, a child, and Della was a woman, a mother.
‘Legal?’ Della said. ‘Were you asking, “Is it legal?”’
‘Jeez, Lexy,’ Devin said. ‘I’m twenty-one.’
‘I wasn’t going to say “legal”,’ I lied. ‘I was going to say … “legal”. Sorry. Why not? What’s it got to do with m
e? Joan Collins … I mean, isn’t Madonna …? I mean, Demi Moo—’
‘I’m twenty-five,’ Della said. ‘Have a lovely evening, Lexy.’
‘Hasta pronto!’ I said, even though I knew my accent hurt Della’s teeth, then I went round the back of the motel to eat two dinners and try to feel proud, because this stupid manufactured holiday really needed a Grinch of its very own and I was ideal. Clearly.
TWO
No matter how depressed, carb-stuffed and hammered you go to bed, waking up to find that it’s still California outside always helps. February the fifteenth, I thought to myself, stretching in bed. Well, I say stretching, but it’s more like bracing. I put my hands against the wooden wall at the top of my box bed and my feet against the wooden wall at its base to see what creaked first: me or the boat.
The sun was shining through the bare branches of the hackberry trees and a Cinderella wardrobe department of little birds was chirruping away as they all took their morning dip in the slough. There was good coffee waiting at the Swiss Sisters drive-through, and fresh bagels too if I wasn’t still full of takeaway. In Dundee, in mid-February, the rain would be turning to sleet – horizontal sleet, at that – the pigeons would be pecking at frozen sick and the coffee would be instant. It didn’t go down well when I mouthed off to Alison about instant coffee: ‘What’s wrong with us? We’ve got the cheek to whine about American tea and then suck down that bilge. We might as well eat tinned potatoes and drink powdered OJ.’
‘OJ?’ Alison had said, with scorn seeping out of every pore. ‘OJ!’ She’s my best friend, or at least my oldest one, so she gets to say what she likes to me.
Life, I told myself sternly, wasn’t too bad. I had my health, I had Obamacare while it lasted, I was living in a democracy in a time of local peace. I had good friends and an interesting job where I was my own boss, flexible hours, all that. I just needed to tweak that one last little thing. I just needed to meet the man of my dreams. Even the man of one wild weekend would do.
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