by Jenny Colgan
Jake was staring at Cormac, aghast.
‘Run this past me again,’ he said. ‘They’re offering you cheap accommodation in the middle of London, for three months, and a London bonus on your pay packet, to hang out in London, work a bit and do whatever the hell you want, without every old lady you meet in the street asking if you wouldn’t mind looking up her bum?’
Cormac frowned.
‘They don’t do that.’
‘Mrs MacGonnagall does that!’
‘She does, aye.’
Cormac drained his pint.
‘Seriously, you’re so lucky. They should do that scheme with ambulance drivers!’
‘Ha, that’d be a lot of use.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘“Hello, welcome to London, off you go to Oxford Street . . .” “Och aye, sorry, where would that be now?”’
Jake sighed.
‘Oh. Aye. Even more reason why you’d be absolutely mad not to go. The women in London, oh my God.’
‘How do you know?’
Jake shrugged. ‘In the papers, aye?’
Cormac looked at him suspiciously, but Jake was refusing to look his way.
‘Have you been reading Grazia again?’
Jake sniffed.
‘This is the chance of a lifetime, man. Kirrinfief, it’s all right.’
In the corner, Alasdair’s dog let out a massive fart right next to the fire, then looked around with an innocent expression as if it couldn’t possibly have been him.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘But London! On cheap rent! Hot summers and amazing women and everything going on and famous people and stuff off the telly and that!’
‘Well, I’ll be working.’
‘Yeah. Looking after hot models with toe injuries from wearing really, really high heels,’ said Jake sadly, who had clearly given this quite an astonishing amount of thought. ‘Seriously, mate. You’re insane. You’ll be back in three months. What’s going to change for you in three months?’
Cormac stared out of the window. The clouds were hanging low today. Rain was threatened. Being somewhere sunny with models in it suddenly seemed rather exciting.
‘Plus, you know, since you got back . . .’
Cormac gave him a sharp look.
‘What are you saying?’
‘Nothing,’ said Jake hastily. You didn’t talk about Cormac leaving the Army. You just didn’t. ‘I just mean, it’s quiet.’
Cormac looked at Lennox, who as usual wasn’t saying much.
‘What do you think?’
That was a pretty stupid question. Lennox had been to agricultural college, then come straight back to the farm he’d been born on. The most surprising thing Lennox had ever done was get together with the clever, nerdy English girl who ran the local bookshop, and even then she’d been renting one of his farm buildings. Literally all he’d had to do was fall across the road.
Lennox shrugged.
‘No’ for me,’ he said to absolutely nobody’s surprise. Above the cracking fire, the old clock ticked mournfully on. ‘But you’re just a bairn. You’ve no ties, nothing holding you back. Why wouldn’t you?’
He stood up. ‘And send me back some lads, will you? Brexit’s put a bloody big hole in my harvesting teams, I’ll tell you that for nothing.’
And with that he put down his glass, smiled and went home to his lovely Nina and their perfect darling baby boy, deeply happy in his soul that as far as he was concerned he never need decide to go anywhere other than home ever again.
PART TWO
Chapter One
There are few places lonelier than a crowded station platform five hundred miles away from home, where you know nobody but a lot of people are trying to get past you, or get you out of the way.
Cormac had taken the sleeper train down. He had thought that he wouldn’t sleep, given he had so much to think about, but the comfortable bed and the rocking motion of the carriage as well as the nip of whisky he’d bought from the onboard bar had all combined to send him off into a surprisingly deep sleep, punctuated by dreams that had him swimming or riding a horse or anything involving motion.
Euston at 7.30 in the morning was absolutely heaving; grimy with dirt and full of smartly dressed people moving – why did they all have to walk so fast?
He looked around, standing under a huge four-faced clock, feeling ridiculously out of place. He must have stood out a mile to anyone, with his freckled complexion, messy sandy brown hair and cords. Perhaps he would have to rethink the cords. His mum had bought them for him, telling him that’s what everyone wore in Edinburgh. Why she thought Edinburgh was the height of fashion sophistication he wasn’t entirely sure. Nobody here was wearing cords. She was happy he had gone though. It wasn’t easy, bearing the weight of his mother’s disappointment. Another good reason to take some time away.
Anyway, everyone here was wearing expensive suits and skinny jeans and baggy pants and all sorts of weird and wonderful colours you didn’t see much of in Kirrinfief. And Jake hadn’t, it turned out, been lying about the women; some of them did, indeed look like models, all made up, with bright blonde or pink or blue hair, strange eyebrows (Cormac was not the expert on eyebrows) and incredibly outlandish clothes. The whole thing was bewildering. How did all these people know where they were going? Why didn’t they all bang into each other? Why were they all holding canisters with green drinks in them?
Slowly, lumbering rather with his heavy rucksack, Cormac scratched his chin and went over in search of a London Underground map, narrowly missing clouting a tiny girl clip-clopping her way round him, who let out a sigh louder and more pointed than he would have expected from such a small woman.
Kim-Ange had given her a big kiss as Lissa set off, looking sadly round the little room she was leaving behind.
‘Into exile,’ she’d moaned.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Kim-Ange, bundling cake into Lissa’s bag. ‘It’s not for long! It’ll be an adventure.’
‘I’m being suspended,’ said Lissa. ‘They never want me back.’
‘Of course they do,’ said Kim-Ange. ‘You’re definitely the second-best nurse on this floor.’
Lissa rolled her eyes.
‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘I’ve never lived in the countryside. What’s it going to be like?’
‘Think of it this way,’ said Kim-Ange. ‘When anyone you don’t want to phones you, you can just tell them your reception is cutting out.’
Lissa nodded.
‘I suppose.’
Kim-Ange hugged her. ‘Honestly. It’ll be great. Peace and quiet. Get some sleep. Read some books. Build a massive Instagram brand of you looking at misty moors. Think of it as a holiday. And come back and be fabulous with me please. And think of me. I’m the one that’s going to get some wittering country idiot being Scotch next to me!’
Lissa managed a wan smile.
‘I’m sure he’ll be perfectly nice.’
‘Oh, you’re sure. You’re sure, are you? I don’t even want a boy on this floor.’
She sniffed noisily, and Lissa gave her a hug.
‘Thanks, Kim-Ange,’ she said.
‘The sacrifices I make! You’ll miss me every day!’
‘I will miss you every day,’ promised Lissa, and meant it.
Chapter Two
Lissa looked at the paperwork again, carefully, anxiously, so terrified she’d get something wrong. She was taking on the caseload of one Cormac MacPherson, who was also lending her his apartment.
They each had a secure NHS.org log-in that they could exchange patient data on, only with one another, so they could achieve continuity of care, and they would be expected to debrief every day, for three months. They also had to write a weekly report for HR – effectively, Lissa discovered, they were guinea pigs for the entire scheme. At the bottom, Juan had added:
Good luck, Lissa – I think this will be a wonderful experience.
Lissa was not thinking this. Not at all. She felt b
anished; pied off; reduced to being put out of sight out of mind as if she’d gone crazy and needed to be out of the way. She loved London; it was the air she breathed. The idea of being stuck out in the country was ridiculous.
She’d googled Cormac MacPherson, but his Facebook page was locked and gave absolutely nothing away. He didn’t seem to be on the internet much which was strange enough in this day and age. She’d spent more time looking at Kirrinfief on Google Earth. It was tiny!
She’d never really been in the country; London was all she’d ever known. She’d never been to Scotland at all.
But Lissa needed – absolutely desperately needed – the insomnia to stop, along with the nightmares when she finally drifted off into a shallow tainted half-life, and the grit she felt under her eyelids, plus the way she could not control her breath when she saw a bunch of lads on the street, or heard a shout or, worst of all, a car backfiring or accelerating. If going to this godforsaken place would help her get over that, then it was worth a shot. She would have vastly preferred to be at her Granny’s in Antigua, but that wasn’t an option the NHS was notably keen on offering her. So the wild north it was.
Chapter Three
Cormac was, he rapidly realised, somehow just too big for London. He’d played rugby for the Army, and it had never really left him. It wasn’t just that he was tall, but he was also broad – and he really was – as there were plenty of other big-looking people; aye, there were plenty of people full stop. More people, he thought, than were surely strictly necessary or even viable. More people than you could figure out had crammed into these hot sticky streets that smelled of food and smoke and choking exhaust fumes. Didn’t they notice how revolting the air was? Maybe not. London clung to you, put sticky fingerprints all over you.
The nurses’ home was a tall, peeling eight-storey building situated outside a tube station by a roundabout in what Cormac would learn to call South London.
There didn’t appear to be any automatically obvious way to get through the roundabout which was, on closer examination, actually two roundabouts, each with four lanes of traffic. The air was a haze. Cormac thought back to what he had slightly imagined when he pictured staying in central London for a month. It had definitely involved lots of parks with swans in them. And also Buckingham Palace.
He sighed and tried several times to reach the block through subway passages lined with people asleep on flattened cardboard boxes in filthy sleeping bags, and made it to Florence Nightingale House finally. The glass was security protected. He rang the bell and a large man saw him from inside and buzzed him in.
‘Hi,’ said Cormac nervously. ‘I’m the secondment for . . .’
For a split-second he forgot her name.
‘Alyssa Westcott? I’m taking over her room?’
The man stared at him, unperturbed, then ran his finger down a grubby list of printed names.
‘Neh,’ he said.
Cormac looked to the side, then tried again.
‘I’m not Alyssa,’ he said. ‘I’m Cormac MacPherson?’
There was another very long pause.
‘Yeh,’ said the man, lifting a heavy finger from the page and sighing deeply.
‘So, youse having a good day?’ said Cormac cheerily.
The man looked at him, harrumphing with a loud noise as he had to get out of his chair – which creaked alarmingly – and stretched up to a long line of keys.
‘I just got down on the sleeper. Didn’t think I’d sleep much, but actually it was great . . .’
Cormac left space at the end of his sentence but the man wasn’t responding. This was very odd.
In Kirrinfief, if you went up to Inverness for the afternoon, that would provoke a fairly long conversation in the grocer’s about what you’d seen and who you’d met and whether you’d been to the big cinema which had something called a Nando’s. Going on the sleeper was a next level adventure; it would have involved the input and discussion of anyone in the shop. The train had narrowly avoided a crash about three years ago and people still talked about it.
By contrast, this man didn’t respond at all. As if Cormac wasn’t there, or hadn’t said anything.
‘So, anyway. It’s . . . well, this place looks interesting . . .’
Cormac was stuttering on, but in an increasingly confused fashion. He felt like a dog wagging his tail and getting roundly ignored. He was just making conversation, that was all; it was what people did. What was this guy’s problem?
The man grunted and put down a set of keys and gave him a bunch of forms to fill in, all the while avoiding eye contact. Perhaps, Cormac thought, perhaps there was something wrong with him. Yes. That had to be it.
He handed over his passport for photocopying and paid the deposit over, worrying again whether he’d left the cottage clean and tidy enough for the girl who was moving in there.
Lined with old random chairs, the lobby was the kind of place that smelled of smoke even though nobody had been allowed to smoke in there for years. Cormac leafed through an old copy of Nursing Times while the man, still ignoring him rather than making conversation like a human being, shifted his bulk around photocopying and laboriously noting down all of Cormac’s details. It couldn’t be pleasant, Cormac decided, being trapped inside that booth all day.
Meanwhile, the bell buzzed and nurses came and went. Cormac was used to being surrounded by women doing this job but this was a lot by even his standards. They were loud, confident, laughing and shouting; he felt slightly intimidated. Where he’d done his training, everyone had been local, more or less, and he’d known a couple of people from school and everyone was friendly . . . This looked like a glamorous menagerie of colourful women, bold with great barking accents, saying ‘yeah awight’ and sounding like they were on EastEnders, along with a mix of accents and voices from across the world. He tried not to stare. It was more different types of people than he’d ever seen.
A few people gave him a glance as they passed but most of them assumed he was someone’s boyfriend, a visitor waiting for someone. He wondered who he’d be living next to.
Finally, the man behind the glass box grunted and pushed his paperwork back towards him.
‘Which room?’ asked Cormac, figuring that surely this was the one question that would need an actual, spoken answer, but the man only put a burly finger on the cheap plastic tag next to the Yale key – 238.
‘Brilliant,’ said Cormac, who was not normally a sarcastic person. ‘Thanks so much! For everything!’
But the man hadn’t heard, or wouldn’t hear, because this was London, and Cormac picked up his rucksack again and headed for the old creaking lift.
There were twelve rooms either side of the central lift, with a large, rather grotty kitchen at each end and two sets of bathrooms. The facility was obviously old, but the windows were big, looking out across the roundabout and into North London over the river itself. Cormac fiddled with the lock and entered the little student room.
He didn’t know what he’d expected, but the room was almost completely bare. There was a north-facing window, a single bed, a sink with a mirror above it, harsh brown carpet and a cheap wardrobe with a few hangers inside it. He worried then, if he should have cleared everything out of the cottage – he’d left the books, and the pictures and the rugs. Was that not right? But it was only for three months, so he wasn’t clearing out his entire life.
This person had though. There was nothing here at all.
Chapter Four
Lissa stood where the bus had dropped her off. After such a long journey, she was pretty sure she’d gone too far and round in circles. She could distantly appreciate the hills, dotted with lambs, and the deep blue of the loch, and the shadows cast by the crags on the fields, plus the farmers out ploughing new seed – she understood in the abstract that these things were nice, but looking through the dirty bus window was a bit like watching it on television, as if she was seeing it from a distance.
And then she was worried she’d mi
ss her stop and she would have put any money on Uber not working out here, and everyone had been looking at her funny (she was convinced) and this bus driver was trying to chat her up, and this was all just awful and doing her anxiety no good at all.
Finally, after about half an hour during which she was simply sitting on her hands, trying to breathe, trying not to let everything get on top of her, the bus driver, who’d been trying to engage her in conversation for the last forty minutes and didn’t understand why she didn’t understand why making conversation with the bus driver was very much the least you could do on a bus, stopped in Kirrinfief square, where he normally liked to take a short break and buy a book, and smiled at his last passenger, the pretty girl with the curly hair, who was looking terrified.
‘Come on the noo, lass, you’ve made it!’ he said encouragingly. Lissa stared at him; she didn’t understand a word. The driver nodded towards the door and Lissa jumped up and sidled past him. Was this it? She lugged her heavy bag and climbed down the steps, ignoring the driver offering to take her case, and not remembering to thank him either, which didn’t change his idea of English people one iota, frankly.
But Lissa was too nervous to care. She tried to shake herself up. She never used to be like this! She’d travelled in South America one summer when she’d been a nursing student; travelled through strange countries, danced in strange bars, drunk tequila in beach bars in strange neighbourhoods. What had happened to that girl? In one terrible moment it had gone. In the scheme of things, of course, she was the lucky one. She felt guilty that she even felt bad when she had lost nothing and others had lost everything.
But still. She missed that girl. Here she was in a little village in a perfectly safe environment and the hand gripping her pull-along suitcase was shaking.