by Jenny Colgan
Lissa made it to the park bench. The sun was out, but the wind felt incredibly cold. You never really noticed the wind in London, except when you crossed the Thames. The Millennium Bridge, a short walk from the nurses’ quarters, was always breezy.
Here on Kirrinfief’s pretty open cobbled square, she could feel the full force of its chill, and pulled her new puffa jacket closer round her. The houses were higgledy-piggledy, in grey stone, with doors right out onto the pavement; there wasn’t a straight roof to be found. Smoke puffed out of several chimneys. There was a cosy old pub on the corner, with hanging baskets outside, and a bright red painted grocer’s with mops and brushes propped up against the window. A pale blue van was parked in the corner, selling books. Lissa tried to imagine sitting and reading a book again. It seemed incredibly unlikely: managing to slow her brain down; managing to concentrate for long enough without breaking the spell. And she couldn’t read anything triggering or upsetting . . . Something else lost.
She looked at her watch. The local GP was supposed to be meeting her, talking her through the job. Bit of a jack of all trades, by the sounds of things, provision was so patchy and far apart. In London, it sometimes felt like there was a hospital every hundred yards. It didn’t seem like that was the case here.
She looked around again, up the hill, where long streets of narrow terraced houses weaved their way upwards, backed against the deep green of the mountains. To her left, she could catch the sun glinting off Loch Ness. That was a bit mad. She wondered if it was rude to ask about the monster. She could see it was a pretty spot. But what did people do here? What on earth . . .? How did you pass your days without restaurants and theatres and nightclubs and shopping and exhibitions and cocktail bars?
Suddenly, the oldest, dirtiest car Lissa had ever seen charged round the square at top speed. It was a vast old Volvo estate in a very unappetising shade of brown, and the back of it appeared to be full of straw and dogs. It screeched to a halt before her and a tall, imposing-looking woman stepped out, wearing a tweed skirt and a dark green polo neck. She had fine features but no make-up and her skin was weather-beaten; her hair grey and cut into a bob, more or less. Lissa had the oddest sense when looking at her that she hadn’t changed her style since her first day at primary school. As premonitions go, she was spot on. The dogs, meanwhile, were going berserk.
‘HELLO!’ barked Dr Joan Davenport. Lissa frowned slightly, and felt her heart rate jump up and her nerves pile in.
‘Um . . .’ said Lissa.
‘Are you Alyssa Westcott?’
‘Um, Lissa?’
Joan looked like she couldn’t care less about that.
‘Well. You’re my charge, it appears. I did ask for a boy.’
Lissa was confused.
‘Just my little joke! Never mind! Nobody reads, I get it, I get it.’
‘Are you the GP?’ said Lissa as Joan started striding towards her.
‘Huh? Well, of course. Did Cormac not explain?’
Lissa didn’t know how to tell Joan that she’d been too anxious and full of worry to contact Cormac to ask the questions she needed to know; she’d barely replied to his email at all, as if ignoring what was coming would somehow make it go away.
She shook her head, and Joan looked at her keenly. Her bluff manner wasn’t put on – that was just who she was – but it didn’t mean she wasn’t perceptive.
‘You’ve had a tough time,’ she observed. Lissa fiddled with her bag and stared at the ground.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’m perfectly fit to work.’
Joan glanced at her again.
‘Well, we’ll try and keep your workload light. I’m sure they’ll keep Cormac busy!’
Joan opened the back door of her ancient car and three scruffy terriers jumped out.
‘Yesss!’ she said, her tone instantly changing from brusque welcome to motherly concern.
‘There we are, Montgomery, my angel! Jasper! Jasper! Come here, my lovely boy! Pepper! Pepper! Come here!’
But it was too late. All three dogs were immediately leaping up, covering Lissa with their mucky paws. She was frozen in fear. She had learned on her rounds to be very wary of dogs; many in London were bred to be guard dogs and righteously defended their property whenever she walked up the path. And these hairy beasts seemed completely uncontrollable. As she tried to make them go down, she saw Joan looking at her, the stern face completely gone.
‘Aren’t they wonderful?’ she said. ‘You’re lucky. They like you.’
Lissa did not feel in the least bit lucky as she attempted to gingerly pat one on its fuzzy head.
‘You’d better get used to dogs if you’re going to work a country beat,’ observed Joan.
And, almost completely surrounded by panting dogs – a state Joan appeared to consider entirely desirable – Lissa followed Joan up behind the square to a whitewashed stone house, separate from the others, with a brass plate on the wall announcing the GP surgery.
‘Is it just you?’ said Lissa, worried. ‘Do you take the dogs in?’
‘No,’ said Joan. ‘Bloody health and safety.’
She whistled, surprisingly loudly, and the dogs left Lissa alone and slunk around the back of the house. Lissa peered after them and saw a medium-sized, rather pretty garden and three dog kennels. The idea of a GP surgery having a garden rather tickled her. ‘And it’s just you?’
Joan nodded.
‘Yes. Small population in the village, plus hamlets and homesteads. I spend a lot of time in the car, and so will you.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Lissa. ‘They said there’d be a car . . .’
She pondered Joan’s terrible brown estate for a second. How bad was her car going to be? In fact, as Joan showed her behind the surgery, it was a perfectly nice little Ford.
‘Of course, you’ll want to cycle most places,’ said Joan. ‘Lot easier than getting the cars up the road.’
‘Cycle?’ said Lissa. ‘What about the drug box?’
‘Try not to leave it by the post box,’ said Joan drily, ‘and I’m pretty sure you’ll be fine.’
She started rifling through her daily files, then looked up as she remembered something.
‘Are you going to need time off for therapy? How are they even doing that?’
Lissa winced even to hear the word. She wanted to shout, wanted to tell everyone: this wasn’t the real her! She existed in the world! She was fun and carefree! The real her was cool, not some traumatised wreck! Not, she realised, a patient. She looked after patients. The idea that she needed looking after . . . she couldn’t bear it.
‘I’m to see someone over Skype,’ she admitted grudgingly.
Joan sniffed loudly. ‘Of course, London would be full of therapists. Lots of crazy English. You know what you really need?’
Lots of people had told Lissa what they thought she needed, and she hadn’t enjoyed any of that either. A love affair, to get drunk, to go on holiday, to fall in love, to travel the world. She weighed up what she thought Joan’s response would be.
‘Is it “a dog”?’ she said.
Joan smiled.
‘Well, that and a bit of fresh air, I would say. Lots of walks, lots of being out in the countryside. That’s a cure for just about anything.’
Lissa looked out of the window where it had clouded over ominously.
‘Doesn’t it rain all the time here?’ she said.
‘So what?’ said Joan, stumped at the question. She went back to her files and pulled some out. ‘Cormac will send you his case notes. These are just the current ones dished out.’
‘So what kind of thing do you see round here then?’ said Lissa.
‘Oh, the usual. Some diabetes care. Bit of stoma work. Vaccinations. The elderly. Farming accidents.’
‘What?’ said Lissa.
‘People lose bits to tractors. More often than you’d think. That kind of thing.’
‘What kind of bits?’
‘Sticky out bits,’ said Joan ominou
sly, walking from the waiting room into the unlocked clinic. Lissa twirled around.
‘You leave your door open?’
‘Well, they’re very welcome to the House & Garden back issues and a broken toy garage.’
Lissa stepped through in wonder. The old front room of the house was the waiting room, and it was thankfully rather cleaner than Joan’s car, although she faintly suspected that the dogs still did indeed get in here from time to time. There were toys, posters warning against smoking and drinking; nothing notably different, except that every other inch of the walls was covered in pictures of dogs and horses, and there was a stag’s head on one wall and a stuffed greyhound in a glass case in the corner.
Lissa started when she saw it.
‘Ah yes. Cosmo,’ sighed Joan. ‘Wonderful, wonderful animal. Could never let him go.’
‘Doesn’t it scare the children?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous! They love him!’
Lissa stared at the glassy eyes.
‘Are you sure?’
Joan snorted. ‘Here,’ she said, indicating a whitewashed room, thankfully free of taxidermised pets. ‘This is Cormac’s office.’
‘He gets an office to himself?’
‘Aye. He’s got one up at the hospital too.’
‘You’re kidding!’
Lissa normally did all her notes back in her room and if she was lucky she got to squeeze into a staff room at one of the bigger practices every now and again.
Joan blinked.
‘There’s six rooms upstairs we don’t use at all.’
‘Cor,’ said Lissa. ‘In London this would be worth, like, millions.’
‘Yes,’ sniffed Joan in a tone of utter disdain. ‘But it would be in London.’
Chapter Five
Cormac looked round at the tiny room. There was not a piece of green to be seen anywhere out of the window, just concrete and cars and more concrete and the occasional spindly, sickly-looking bare tree, roped off from the pavement. His room was more of a cell than a room really: long, narrow and cheerless. How did people live like this? Where did they go when they needed to stretch their legs? He watched the people below him streaming across the roundabout when the lights went green, taking big steps and little ones, as the endless circling traffic and lines of buses and cabs stopped and started and belched fuel and stopped again. It was dizzying. How did people stop? How did they calm down and take a deep breath? He opened the window. The air was harsh with exhaust fumes and the noise was incredible. He quickly shut the window again and poured himself a glass of water from the sink. Then he poured it away. It was lukewarm and chalky and hard and absolutely revolting. Perhaps it was just the pipes, he thought. Maybe it was just old pipes.
He looked at his watch. It was only ten in the morning and he didn’t report for work until the following day. There were seven million people in the city, and he didn’t know a single one of them. He’d never been surrounded by so many people in his entire life, and he’d never felt so lonely.
There was a loud knock on the door.
Joan gave Lissa the list of appointments for the next day and the keys to the cottage.
‘I have surgery,’ she said. ‘You’ll be all right getting on, won’t you?’
Lissa wasn’t sure about this, but nodded her head.
‘Are you always this quiet?’ said Joan. ‘You’re like that other English girl.’
‘There’s another English girl?’
‘Oh, we’re infested with them.’
‘You’re English! Well, you sound English.’
Joan fixed her with a horrified glance.
‘I’m from Edinburgh! This is how we talk.’
Lissa couldn’t see why it could possibly matter whether you had an English accent or not and whether saying something like that wasn’t rather . . . racist . . . but she tried to smile politely and listen to Joan’s directions, even as they vanished from her brain as soon as she found herself outside the white surgery.
Cormac wouldn’t have been entirely surprised if his mum and her friends from the church community Zumba group had appeared there with nine boxes of Tunnock’s Teacakes, but in fact the apparition that greeted him was even less expected.
The most extraordinary person Cormac had ever seen was standing in the door frame. Was larger than the door frame, Cormac realised. At least six foot, with big burly shoulders, a huge swathe of beautiful shiny long black hair braided round their head, a fully made-up face including pink and yellow eyeshadow and vast amounts of pink sticky lipgloss, all balanced over an extremely roomy pair of blue scrubs, down to a pair of pink glittery trainers.
‘HELLO!’ said the voice with a broad Estuary accent. ‘OOH! She didn’t say you were a fittie!’
Cormac considered himself a fairly easy-going character on the whole but he wasn’t the least bit sure where to look.
‘I’m Kim-Ange,’ continued the creature, entering the room. ‘She didn’t tell you about me? I thought you guys were emailing each other?’
‘I’ve . . . sent her one email,’ said Cormac.
‘I’m not surprised she wanted to keep you to herself!’ said Kim-Ange. ‘We tried to look you up. You know your Facebook profile is absolute crap.’
‘Aye . . . I don’t really do Facebook.’
‘You don’t do Instagram either! And why not?’
Kim-Ange sat down on the bed in a familiar fashion; as it creaked beneath her weight.
‘Um . . . well, I see most of the people I want to see. And I don’t really see the point of it otherwise unless you want to show off and that.’
‘That,’ said Kim-Ange, ‘is annoyingly sensible. And misses out the joy of showing off.’
Cormac shook his head.
‘But you’ve heard of the internet? They have the internet in Scotland?’
‘As long as we’ve positioned the ram’s horns in the right direction. So . . . you’re a nurse?’
‘No, I just love the fabulous outfit,’ said Kim-Ange, looking down at her dull scrubs in distaste.
‘Which specialty?’
‘Cardiology.’
‘Oh, I bet you’re useful. Lot of . . .’
Cormac had been about to say that there was a lot of heaving heavy people about, which there was, but he realised just in time that this would not be the right thing to say as Kim-Ange gave him a look.
‘Because of my warm and empathetic manner?’
‘Um, yes,’ said Cormac, blushing bright red to the roots of his sandy hair.
It was just a glance. But Kim-Ange caught it. She was absolutely attuned to being able to figure out whether people were allies or not. Abuse from strangers she could handle – had to, every single day of her life – but sometimes it was nice just to make a friend. She had come in to invite him to a nurse’s’ drinks party. Now she changed her mind.
Cormac had never met anyone like her before. He’d never given anything much thought beyond what he knew. His stuttered hesitation then hastily constructed excuse about being tired were simply confusion on his part, but taken for something rather worse by Kim-Ange. She turned on her surprisingly dainty feet with a quick tight smile and left the room, leaving Cormac with the horrible certainty that he’d been there five minutes and he’d already done something very, very wrong.
Chapter Six
If Kirrinfief had been a tiny bit bigger, Lissa would have immediately got lost, but not understanding Joan’s directions had given her a chance to wander a little.
There was a small stream at the village’s edge that fed into the loch, and down there she found a low building that formed the nursery (well, she assumed it was the nursery: a clutch of children were screaming their heads off in the garden and chasing each other with sticks, so either it was the nursery or something she really didn’t want to get involved in at this stage) as well as a tiny redbrick school that looked incredibly cute and, a little further along the road, out of the village altogether on a grassy verge, stood the cottage.
Okay. She knew what her job paid. Cormac got paid less than her because she got central London weighting. But even with that, and even living in subsidised accommodation, even with all those things, she could never, ever afford a place of her own, certainly not one as beautiful as this.
It wasn’t flashy, or incredible, or like something you’d see in an interiors magazine – nothing like that.
It was a cottage, roughly whitewashed again in the same style as the bigger house containing the GP’s surgery. It had a roof that had obviously once been thatch, but was now slate, with two dormer windows in it, and there was a red wooden front door leading to a protruding porch that had a shoe rack, presumably for wellingtons, and an umbrella box with two walking sticks leaning out of it in a friendly way. There were two windows on either side of the door, giving it the friendly visage of a house a child might draw, and a stone step straight onto the pavement.
Behind the house was a small, tidy little garden with a vegetable patch planted neatly. Imagine, thought Lissa. Imagine having time to tend a vegetable patch. She had never met anyone in her life – not her family, always busy, nor her fellow nurses, some of whom worked two jobs to get through nursing college and the university courses that were required these days, nor her school friends – who had a garden, not to mention a vegetable patch. She had assumed this nurse guy was . . . well, she hadn’t really thought about him at all after they’d failed to find him on Facebook. This was something that was happening to her, after all; he was inconsequential. However, she really, really hoped he didn’t expect her to keep his vegetable patch alive. Because she really didn’t have a scooby doo.
She added it to her worry stack, and went back round the front and turned the rusty key in the old lock, both nervous and rather excited.
The door creaked open straight onto a cosy sitting room – no hallway or corridor at all.
A wood-burning stove sat in the middle of the side wall, with an old fireplace surround; a leather sofa and a floral sofa bunched companionably around it. On the other side was a dinner table that looked under-utilised, and through the back was a small, functional kitchen in a wobbly-built extension with several glass windows overlooking the back garden. Behind the house was the stream, cutting through the bottom of the garden, and then – nothing.