by Jenny Colgan
Beyond were fields leading across the water to woods straight ahead, and the mountains loomed behind them. If there hadn’t been an electricity pylon in the distance, Lissa could have been in any time from the past three centuries. It was really rather extraordinary.
She turned back and went upstairs. She was slightly worried about entering a strange man’s bedroom as she mounted the small staircase. She needn’t have worried. There were two tiny rooms underneath the eaves, with a tongue and groove bathroom in between them, and she was obviously expected to sleep in the spare, which suited her fine. The whole place was spotlessly clean. She wondered about him again. Gay? Some male nurses were but that didn’t mean anything. Jack the Lad? She couldn’t imagine many Jack the Lads would choose to live in a cottage in the middle of nowhere though.
Lissa hauled her bag up the narrow stairs and considered unpacking. The house was freezing and she couldn’t find out where the central heating was. It then occurred to her that it might not have heating. Hang on. How was that going to work?
Back downstairs, she found a folder full of instructions for anything and everything, such as the hot water heater and the fact that she had to light the log burner and that would heat everything else. There were no instructions on how to light the log burner. This was obviously something they assumed everybody knew how to do. She opened the back door and glanced outside and sure enough, just next to the kitchen extension was a huge pile of chopped up logs that gave off a warm aromatic smell. In the kitchen was a small packet of firelighters and a box of matches. She stared at them for a long time, feeling as if civilisation had ended, and she was going to have to get on with life as the last person on earth. She felt the now familiar feelings of panic creep up on her.
Then there was a knock at the door.
Chapter Seven
Cormac figured he should probably go out and look at a bit of London. He took the tube up to Leicester Square, walked into M&M’s World while wondering what on earth the point of that was, considered going to see a film until he saw the cost of a ticket, and ended up having a very poor meal in the window of a steak house, exactly as he had the last time. He didn’t feel it was going very well.
‘How’s it going?’ Jake texted him. ‘Met any supermodels yet?’
Cormac rolled his eyes.
‘I think I managed to insult someone already,’ he replied. ‘I’m not sure how I’m going to get on here.’
‘Aye well, everyone in London’s a weirdo,’ typed Jake, man of the world. ‘Was it a woman?’
‘Think so,’ typed Cormac tentatively.
‘Did you apologise?’
‘No.’
‘Well, do that then!’
‘I’m not sure what I’m apologising for.’
‘That NEVER MATTERS with women.’
So Cormac set out to find the local supermarket next to his digs, quite pleased to have an errand.
He found it extremely confusing – there was no square sausage, the crisps were different, they didn’t stock Irn Bru and in general it was not entirely unlike the time he’d been to Spain and wasn’t sure what to ask for whenever he was hungry and once he’d asked for some toast with butter and everyone had laughed at him because he’d asked for toast with a donkey on it.
Anyway. He had made a mistake on his very first day and thought he’d take Kim-Ange a small minding. The shop didn’t sell tablet or Tunnock’s Teacakes or Edinburgh rock or Soor Plooms or Oddfellows so he was slightly puzzled as to what she might like but eventually he went for a box of Dairy Milk Celebrations, and knocked on her door.
Kim-Ange opened it up, looking magnificent in her Japanese robe.
‘Och.’
Cormac pushed his hair out of his face, trying to look sorry.
‘I thought . . . I thought we maybe got off on the wrong foot,’ he added.
Kim-Ange sniffed, folded her arms and raised a black eyebrow all at the same time.
‘I’m . . . from a very small village.’
‘That had never heard of the internet or the outside world. We established that.’
Cormac looked down at the chocolates.
‘Well, I’ll just leave these here,’ he said. English people were, he had concluded, very, very confusing.
‘I’m lactose-intolerant,’ said Kim-Ange.
‘I’ll throw them in the bin then,’ said Cormac, picking them up and retreating.
Kim-Ange stuck her arm out of the doorway and snatched the box.
‘Well,’ she said quickly. ‘It comes and goes.’
And she shut the door, making sure she didn’t betray even a hint of a smile.
Chapter Eight
As soon as he’d knocked on the door of Cormac’s cottage, Jake realised that turning up unannounced to greet a strange woman who’d just arrived in town might be seen as a bit . . . well . . . odd.
But on the other hand, he told himself, he was going to have to work with her after all. Might as well be friendly. Yeah. Friendly. Just checking in.
The sun was going down behind the meadow as Jake looked round. Ach, come on, surely she was going to like it here all right. It was gorgeous. And with someone like him to show her the sights . . .
Of course, that wouldn’t be appropriate. At all. But Jake liked playing the odds. Sure enough, Ginty McGhie still had her eye on him. But no harm in checking to see if there was any competition . . .
‘Yeah?’
A loud English voice shouted at him from the other side of the door instead of just yelling ‘come in’. This was unheard of. Jake considered opening the door and just walking in as he’d have done if Cormac was home, but (thankfully) discarded that idea (Lissa would have hit him with a lamp she’d already eyed up).
‘Hi . . . uh, it’s Jake Inglis? I’m the paramedic? Did Cormac no’ mention me?’
Lissa cursed. This was the second time she was in trouble for not following the most basic of Cormac’s instructions and actually reading the stuff he’d so thoughtfully typed up for her. She hadn’t left him anything, just assumed that her entire world was pretty obvious. Was that what anxiety did to you? she thought. Made you so focused on the tumult inside you couldn’t focus on anyone else, not properly?
Tentatively, she opened the door a crack. It wasn’t locked, she realised. Presumably if he was going to murder her, he’d just have walked in.
Jake, perceiving what she was thinking, stepped back.
‘Just me,’ he said. ‘Except of course, you don’t know me, so saying “just me” isn’t much use. Ha. Aye. And also I’m not in my uniform, so . . .’
Get it together, he thought to himself. This wasn’t like him at all. But he hadn’t expected . . . he hadn’t thought of what to expect, truly. Not this pretty, curvy girl with ringlets coming out from her head at all angles, beautiful big freckles dotting her cheeks and tired dark eyes.
She was wearing old jeans and looked a bit cross. He wondered immediately what she’d look like with a bit of effort, and maybe a smile.
He tried one himself.
‘Hello again,’ he said. ‘Jake Inglis.’
‘Yeah, you said that,’ said the girl, frowning. ‘Sorry. I thought I didn’t start till tomorrow.’
‘Oh, you don’t,’ said Jake. ‘I thought it would be polite to come and introduce myself . . .’ Suddenly it didn’t feel particularly polite to either of them, with twilight falling and the occasional owl hooting in the woods. ‘. . .but I suppose I’ll see you about.’
‘Okay, thanks,’ said Lissa. Inside, she was thinking how weird, how rude and stand-offish she was being. But she just couldn’t . . . What was she supposed to do, make jolly conversation with a stranger? Nobody in London would do this in a million years.
‘Well, let me know if you need anything – I promised Cormac I’d look out for the house if you need anything.’
‘Okay, thanks – that’s kind,’ said Lissa, feeling her heart beat completely impractically. He was just being kind! she tried to tell herself.
Nothing bad was going to happen! This was normal.
She found herself, anyway, closing the door on his face.
Oh well, thought Jake. You win some, you lose some.
Just as he was pulling out in his silver SUV, he heard her voice behind him.
‘Sorry,’ she said, and she did sound genuinely sorry; anguished almost. She was, Jake concluded, extremely odd.
‘Aye, nae bother,’ he said, stopping the car.
‘No, I mean . . . could you possibly . . . ?’
She pulled at her curly hair. It really was quite something.
‘Could you . . .? Do you know how to light a fire?’
Jake slapped at his forehead.
‘Did he no’ leave you instructions? For God’s sake, what a bampot.’
He jumped out of the car again.
‘I mean, there’s lots of wood . . . but . . .’
‘But that’s the only way to heat the house,’ said Jake.
Lissa sighed.
‘I was afraid of that.’
‘And the water.’ He looked at her. ‘Were you just going to sit in the cold all night?’
Lissa tried to smile and looked rather rueful.
‘Um. I don’t . . . I hadn’t really thought about it.’
‘Because it’s going to be below zero tonight.’ He grinned cheerfully. ‘Just as well I turned up then.’
Lissa bit her lip, nerves returning.
‘Suppose.’
Jake disappeared and came back with an armful of the neatly chopped logs.
‘He’s left you well-prepared. Good stuff too.’
He handed her one and she stared at him blankly.
‘Smell it!’ he said, and she took a tentative sniff. It had a deep, oaky aroma she couldn’t quite place.
‘Whisky barrel,’ he said. ‘When they don’t use them any more. They burn like stink, and smell delicious. Right, watch this.’
And he showed her how to open the wood-burner and pile the logs up like Jenga to create a chimney inside the fireplace itself. Then he lit a firelighter, popped it down the middle of the logs, pushed open the flues and clunked shut the door. The entire thing was blazing merrily in ninety seconds flat.
‘You may have to write that down for me,’ said Lissa.
‘Yeah, best thing is not to let it go out,’ he said, showing her the basket of peat to the side with which she could damp the fire down through the night like a blanket, and let it smoulder. ‘Then you’ll be cosy all the time. Works all right this place. Once it’s up and running.’
And he gave her a quick, charming smile and, before she even had the chance to get nervous – or offer him a cup of tea (if she had had any tea, which she didn’t) – he’d bid her good night.
It turned that he was right: the cottage did heat up surprisingly quickly. There weren’t any lamps, just a bright overhead light which reminded Lissa of the hospital, so she just sat as the evening grew pitch-dark, staring alternately listlessly at her phone and into the flickering flames. Then she opened her phone and looked for Deliveroo choices.
Blinking in amazement, she took in the terrible, terrible news. There were none.
Chapter Nine
Cormac gave himself an hour to get to the hospital the next morning, not understanding the layout of London at all, and was surprised to find himself there thirty-five minutes later. It was the oddest thing; he’d found, just by habit, when he got on to the packed tube train, that he looked around for a face he recognised like he would anywhere at home. Did you get over this? Not knowing a soul any place you walked? Everyone, regardless of colour or how they were dressed, had the same expression on their faces: a sort of studied disconnectedness; a completely inability to meet everyone else’s eyes. Even the schoolchildren had it. It must be an animal’s self-protection mechanism, he reckoned. Like dogs. Don’t make eye contact, because you don’t know anyone; you don’t know how they’ll react to you. What a strange way to live. Cormac couldn’t really remember an existence where he didn’t know most people nor they him. How did people cope? Wasn’t everyone incredibly lonely all the time?
He liked Juan from HR at once, the diminutive form in a suit, phone going off constantly. Juan had smiled apologetically, said that it was great he was here, could he fill in a weekly questionnaire that someone would almost definitely not read, and by the way if there were another seventy or eighty full-time non-agency NPL staff available just like him up in the Highlands, would he mind terribly bringing them with him next time as they were a bit short-staffed? Oh, and one hundred and forty-seven midwives.
Cormac had smiled, realising what Juan was really saying: please, please get on with things and don’t bother me. Which suited him just fine if Alyssa Westcott would just get in touch with him. He knew Jake was going round to see she was all right and, even if he hadn’t known that, he’d have guessed it because that was precisely the kind of thing Jake would do but, rather to his surprise, he hadn’t contacted him. That wasn’t like Jake at all. Normally he had a score out of ten for anyone between the ages of eighteen and about sixty-five, more if you included Helen Mirren. Maybe this Alyssa was just awful.
He opened up the case notes the hospital had sent him – the kind Alyssa was meant to be annotating for him – and thanked goodness for the GPS system.
Driving in London, however, he was not remotely prepared for. Cormac had been driving on his mates’ farms since he was fifteen years old, like most Kirrinfief boys, and he could drive a tractor and had had a go on a baler.
But once he’d hit the open road, particularly for work, it was long hills of empty roads; single-track lanes when visiting farms; vistas of dappled mountain shadows so stunning that sometimes he would simply stop in a layby, push open the door of the little car, breathe in the sweet and bracing air and eat his cheese and pickle sandwiches staring out at the unpeopled view, feeling very pleased with his lot.
None of this was the least preparation for the crazed London traffic, with furious cabbies and delivery vans on insane schedules and huge Chelsea tractors doing the school run and red buses swaying everywhere; tourists stepping straight out into the middle of the road while keeping their eyes fast on the opposite way, expecting the traffic to come from the left; cyclists, darting through every gap in the road like birds. The exhaust fumes, the confusing lane systems, the vast roundabouts, the endless honking, the stop-starting – it was terrifying. And there was nowhere to stop, no quiet laybys, but red markings on the roadside which meant you couldn’t stop at all, just try and rotate your head 360 degrees at all times to try and clock who was coming at you and from where.
Eventually, Cormac pulled into a large supermarket car park and took a deep breath. This was going to have to be got used to. These roads were insane. He took another deep breath and checked his satnav. Okay. There was an estate, not far from here, called Rosebud, and all the names of the buildings were flowers. He needed to be in Flat 19, Daffodil House.
Daffodil House was the least likely thing to remind Cormac of daffodils he could imagine. It was a vastly high tower block, one of seven on the estate, cutting great bruised scars across the sky. As a child, he’d wondered what it would be like to live up high rather than their little terraced house. It sounded very exciting and glamorous.
Daffodil House was not like that at all.
There was deprivation in the Highlands, of course. Cormac had known houses without indoor plumbing. There were places that relied entirely on foraged wood to keep warm, and the usual ravages of all economies: drink; horse-racing; family breakdown.
But there were always the hills, the mountains, lochs and trees. There was work, even if it wasn’t always the best paid. The schools still had plenty of outdoor space to play. You could still cycle your bike into the village and feel most people knew who you were, or walk into your local bakery and get a hello and a French cake for seventy-five pence and, rich or poor, that was one of the best things Cormac knew.
Whereas here . . . There was an unp
leasantly dark and dirty little convenience store with heavy bars on the windows and the grilles halfway down. A vast dog was chained up outside and it barked at him, setting off another few dogs around the place. Everything was grimy; nothing seemed friendly. Cormac was good at dogs – they didn’t put that on the job description, though should have – but even he didn’t feel like extending his hand to be sniffed by this fearsome-looking beast, who was baring his teeth at him.
‘Good dog,’ he muttered, heading on.
The lobby smelled absolutely dreadful, a concentrated mixture of hash and urine that made Cormac’s eyes sting. He’d been buzzed in, but the trundling old lift took a very long time to come. There was graffiti everywhere. As he waited, an old lady came in pulling a shopping trolley on wheels.
‘Morning!’ said Cormac, standing back to let her go ahead.
‘Fuck off,’ she said instantly, and they had to stand for what to Cormac felt like another five years before the lift finally arrived, smelling, if anything, worse than the lobby. Two men got out, obviously in the middle of a fight about something, or so it sounded to Cormac.
‘Yeah, roight, fing is, you cahnnnnt . . .’ trailed behind them as they swaggered past, all aftershave and wide knees. They glanced at Cormac as he went into the lift, though he kept staring straight ahead.
On the sixteenth floor, the scent of dope was still pretty strong, but was now mingled with food and cooking smells, some of which were good, some less so. Cormac paced up the hallway, which was covered in dirty linoleum. Most of the lights were broken and there was no natural light at all. Cormac didn’t want to admit it but he was nervous. His admiration for his counterpart was rising in leaps and bounds.
He could hear music playing behind the door of number sixteen and knocked gingerly, then louder when it became obvious nobody could hear him. Eventually he rapped loud enough that the noise was turned down inside and a tumble of voices answered the door. He glanced down at his notes as a burly man pulled the door open, surrounded by children.