by Jenny Colgan
It was truly a lovely morning, and Lissa decided to walk in – she was going to the centre of the village so she could put her medical bag in a rucksack on her shoulders, and it wasn’t likely that she was going to be mugged or leave it on a tube.
And it really was a glorious day. She stopped for a full five minutes once she’d crossed the road, watching a field of brand-new lambs hop and skip. They were hilarious, tumbling, jumping over puddles, then every so often making bleating noises and skeetering back to the comfort and safety of their mothers, who placidly ignored them as they rang rings around them, and reached their little pink mouths up to suckle. They were entirely enchanting in the sunshine, and hard to watch without your spirits rising, at least a little.
Lissa focused on her breathing as she approached the little terraced house. Annoyance leapt in her once again as she wished her psychiatrist hadn’t been so brusque or, if she was being truly honest, had tried to call her back. Stupid NHS cutbacks, she told herself. Throwing her in at the deep end like that. And now this.
The door was flung open almost before she had finished ringing it. The woman there though looked confused to see her.
‘Och no!’ she said. ‘Where’s Cormac?’
‘Um, he’s on secondment,’ said Lissa. ‘It’s me instead. Sorry.’
‘Aye!’ said the woman beaming. ‘Oh, I heard all about you!’
‘Yes, I’m beginning to realise that,’ said Lissa, trying to sound as friendly as the locals rather than slightly sarcastic.
‘Och, I miss young Cormac,’ said the woman, shaking her head. ‘How’s he getting on? Is he eating all right? Is he enjoying it?’
‘How would I know?’ said Lissa, genuinely confused.
The woman looked at her. ‘But he’s doing your job?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you’ve no’ chatted about it?’
Lissa shrugged.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘How’s . . .?’
She had trouble pronouncing the name, but the woman’s face lit up.
‘Oh well. You didn’t see her before. You had to see her before. That’s why I wish Cormac was here.’
‘Well, he’s isn’t . . .’
‘I know. But I wanted him to see this.’
Lissa followed, feeling very second best, into the tidy little sitting room.
Sitting in front of Pitch Perfect was a very thin pale little girl with black circles beneath her eyes. The fact that she was sitting up was somewhat lost on Lissa.
‘Hello,’ Lissa said softly.
The girl’s face screwed up.
‘Where’s Cormac?’
Lissa smiled thinly. ‘Oh well, he’s in London. I’m standing in for him for a bit. Think of me as Other Cormac.’
There was a pause while Lissa wondered if she was going to meet a hostile reception. Then the girl’s face brightened.
‘Will you tell him? Will you tell him you saw me? Will you tell him everything?’
‘Um, of course.’
‘Will you take a photo?’
‘No, that’s not allowed.’
Islay frowned, but her mother relaxed and went through to put the kettle on.
‘Take a picture!’ insisted the girl bossily, and put on a vast grin and a ta-da with her hands.
‘Do it!’
Lissa tried to smile patiently.
‘I’d lose my job,’ she said. The girl looked suspicious.
‘And so would Cormac.’
But already the mother was bustling back in, smiling expectantly.
‘Och, he’ll be wanting a picture,’ she said. Islay smiled triumphantly and posed again, and Lissa reluctantly snapped her.
The girl’s blood pressure, heart rate, healing scar were all fine, totally normal. The parents both lingered at the doorway, fearfully watching her every move in a way that made the back of Lissa’s neck prickle. She didn’t understand why they were so smug and triumphant about it all. Didn’t they realise? Didn’t they know that an innocent boy’s blood had trickled out on the pavement for this?
Um, hi. The Coudrie family asked me to write to you directly and send you a picture.
Oh, and thanks for the house and everything. I took the spare room by the way. Oh, and I picked some daffodils; I hope that was okay. Hope everything is okay with you.
Anyway, Islay seems fine, all vitals normal, I’m not sure I even needed to be there. Scar fine and healing fast, patient well in herself, talkative, seems perfectly normal situation. Don’t know if follow-up visits will be required as long as immunosuppression initiation continues as normal, but they were very adamant I let you know and send you a picture. Please don’t share it. I know I shouldn’t send it but she was quite persuasive.
Yours sincerely,
Alyssa Westcott
It wasn’t until later that night when she got the email back from Cormac that she realised what she had missed.
Cormac had had a trying day. He had mixed up the dogs, and was slightly perturbed that when discussing the dogs, Lissa had completely failed to mention that James had a boa-constrictor in the house. He hadn’t been terrified exactly; it would just have been nice to have had a bit of forewarning.
On the plus side, he’d only got lost three times and been shouted at by two cyclists, once for reasons that almost weren’t his fault. He’d gone for a pint after work and been charged seven pounds and, while he didn’t think of himself as a stingy man and certainly didn’t want to live up to any kind of Scottish cliché, internally he couldn’t help wincing. And it wasn’t like Wullie’s pub, where anyone – hill walkers, tourists, locals, long-lost American cousins searching for their roots – would strike up a conversation with you; where the pub was a convivial meeting place full of dogs and farmers and weather and general hospitableness after a long day. Here there was nowhere to sit and there were large groups of aggressive young men and everyone was ignoring everyone else and there was a slight atmosphere of menace and the beer tasted like fizz and nothing else. Cormac had always thought of himself as a man of fairly simple tastes but he wasn’t sure he fitted in here at all.
The streets were completely astonishing to him. There was a tramp, Dorcan, in Kirrinfief. He’d been there longer than anyone could remember, and nobody even knew if that was his real name. He came and went, slept in the churchyard, accepted soup and meals left out for him, spoke to no one and sat on his bench, then went on his way again to who knew where. Judith the friendly vicar, whose garden he was effectively sleeping in, left the vestry open for him, but he never used it, even on the wettest of nights.
But here, there were just people lying about everywhere. In underpasses and shop doorways and over vents and under bridges. And nobody batted an eyelid. It seemed completely fine. Cormac was completely baffled by the whole thing, but followed what other people did, buying the Big Issue when he saw it, blinking in puzzlement. Wasn’t everyone here rich? Walking about the city he’d seen a gold car parked in Covent Garden; he’d seen restaurants where everything cost thirty pounds; shops that smelled of money, with fantastical window displays; jeweller’s with watches that cost more than he made in a year.
He knew he didn’t understand politics – he’d spent enough time sitting in a desert for reasons he didn’t quite understand to pretend to know anything about anything. But it was so very odd that everyone had just learned to live with loads of people lying on the ground.
Lissa’s email changed his mood in an instant. He pulled out his laptop in the pub and typed back:
Hello, thank you for the dog warning, but if you feel like adding snake warnings at any point, that would also be appreciated!
I bet Islay was persuasive! That’s brilliant! That’s just so fantastic! I can’t believe she’s sitting up! And talking of her own accord! Christ, they must be over the moon – thank you, thank you for doing the house call and reporting back. I’ve been worried sick. Amazing. Sometimes this job is really fricking amazing, don’t you think? You should have seen her befo
re.
And he attached a picture of Islay he had taken for her mother, when they thought it might be the very last time they saw her alive: a blue bag of skeletal bones, connected to every lead in the ICU department; a wraith; a frail whisper of an angel death had already clapped its scaly wings around.
Comparing the two pictures side by side and reading again Cormac’s heartfelt joy, happiness and relief, Lissa considered the sickly girl she’d just met, back from the very foot of the grave, watching Pitch Perfect, eating ginger crunch biscuits, sitting up in her living room and being cheeky. And she understood, as she stared at the picture for a long time, and felt a little spark inside her.
She meant to put the file away. Then she found herself, on impulse, emailing back:
What’s wrong with a lovely boa-constrictor?
To her total surprise, after a few moments she got back not an email but a text showing a photograph of a drawing, and she smiled.
Is that you?
Did you mean: oh, look at you, you poor thing being strangled by a boa-constrictor?
That’s a terrible picture!
I’ll have you know that’s exactly what I look like.
You’re definitely more scary than the snake.
Thanks very much.
And, shaking her head at the odd message, and hoping he hadn’t scared James’s pride and joy too much, she went to bed.
Chapter Sixteen
The week continued, even as they both started to get into the swing of things. Cormac peeled a layer of clothes off every day to stop being so hot, and Lissa added a layer every day to stop being so freezing.
Lissa didn’t realise how much people were gossiping furiously about her and thought she was stand-offish because she generally considered not making eye contact the most polite way of dealing with strangers. Oblivious, she managed to cover the vast majority of her calls – there was diabetes management, as everywhere, and some quite complex psychiatric treatment she called the hospital to talk her through step by step, as well as other commonplace call-outs. Joan seemed, if not exactly over the moon with her, particularly when it turned out she had absolutely no opinion on the horse racing, not entirely displeased.
At 6.30 p.m. four days later though, Lissa was back staring at the laptop.
‘Before we start, I meant to tell you, turn off your social,’ said Anita, who was speaking fast and eating with chopsticks. Lissa watched her hands, fascinated.
‘What?’ said Lissa. ‘What’s that got to do with PTSD?’
‘What have anxiety-creating engines designed to distract, enervate and worry you got to do with your mental health?’
Lissa frowned. There was a cough on the other side of the computer screen.
‘I know,’ said Anita, but not to Lissa. The forlorn cough came again.
‘Sorry,’ said Anita quickly. ‘I had to keep her home from school.’
‘I’m sorry about that,’ said Lissa.
‘IZ FINE,’ came a small voice, followed by another racking cough.
‘She’s not fine. She just wants to watch Frozen again.’
‘Maybe you’ll start telling your clients to build a snowman,’ said Lissa, and the two women smiled briefly at one another.
‘Have you had a trial date yet?’ asked Anita.
‘No. It’ll be ages away.’
‘It probably won’t,’ said Anita. ‘They fast-track these things, particularly with young lads.’
Lissa sighed.
‘So you’re going to have to be ready,’ said Anita unnecessarily. ‘If you can’t stand up and tell your story, there might be a mistrial. They might be freed. There might be no justice.’
Lissa’s heart sank again.
‘Why does that mean I have to give up my social media?’
‘Are you on it a lot?’
Lissa glanced at her phone. Kim-Ange appeared to be wearing a bowl of fruit on her head.
‘That depends how you define a lot.’
‘It’s going to really impact your recovery,’ said Anita, slurping. The coughing began again.
‘How?’
‘It’s making you ill. It’s making everyone ill with jealousy and self-doubt and you are particularly vulnerable and in danger from it.’
Lissa looked at Anita. She had a large splodge of curry sauce on her cheek, but her expression was serious.
‘But I’m out here all alone, and then I’ll be even more alone.’
‘Good,’ said Anita. ‘Use your inner resources. Stop trying to distract yourself with tiny pictures and other people’s lives. You’re distracting yourself from things you ought to be owning up to.’
Lissa was biting her lip.
‘Feel,’ said Anita. ‘You have to feel what you need to feel. Not to distract yourself every five seconds. Not to be constantly waiting for pinging and swipes and likes and making yourself anxious. Trust me, Lissa. You are already anxious. You need to get ready to tell this story and you only have four more sessions. Embrace the way you— Oh!’
‘What?’ said Lissa, but there was no need. Loud and painful sounds of vomiting were coming from off-screen.
‘Not . . . not on the files!’ Anita yelled as she jumped up.
Lissa waited for quite a while, but Anita did not return. Lissa knew she had six sessions of therapy and six only. That was two down already and they didn’t quite seem to have got started yet. And the news that the trial would be soon, when she had assumed it would be months and months, was very worrying. She checked Google, and sure enough the mayor’s office was trying to clamp down on youth crime in London by fast-tracking everything through the courts.
She sighed. That was very bad news indeed.
But Lissa did that one thing. She muted her Facebook and Instagram accounts, leaving cheery messages to stop anyone worrying about her, and removed herself from the conversation. She thought she would be lonely and miserable. In fact, instead – and with the occasional WhatsApp check-in from her good friends – she found it oddly freeing.
Without really noticing it, she started talking more to the locals, simply because she had no choice, including Deirdre in the bakery and Mrs Murray in the general store. She also met another English girl called Nina who ran the book van, and who made her up a care package, to her delight, of books she might enjoy to cheer herself up, which worked beautifully – Cold Comfort Farm made her laugh out loud; she had never read Jeeves and Wooster before and found it incredibly daft and funny; and, oddly, The Worst Journey in the World, which Nina pressed on her – a story of Scott’s journey to the South Pole – ended up being extremely cheering too. Things are, Lissa thought, never that bad if you’re not stuck at the South Pole in minus forty degrees with no food, your tent blown away and a storm closing in.
It was odd advice. But good advice.
And every day she’d swap patient notes with Cormac, mostly brisk, but sometimes funny, or offbeat. Irritatingly, he’d normally heard about anything that happened to her: getting the car stuck up the dyke road, because apparently everybody knew you didn’t drive up the dyke road after a heavy rainstorm, but nobody had thought to mention it to her, and it had taken half of Lennox’s lads to pull her out again. He’d also caught her up with how Mrs Marks had switched to Turkish Delight, believing it to be okay.
Seriously? Did you confiscate it like I told you?
Lissa had not hidden how appalled she was when she wrote back.
Yes!
What did you do with it?
Nothing!
And then in the next email:
Lissa responded:
I am amazed that you had to become an NPL instead of a professional artist.
Me too. An endless and disappointing loss to the art world.
What do people do on the weekend round here? Have you got anything to do?
In fact, he did. There were people from Kirrinfief in London – not many, and it was his mother’s idea to make contact with them, which rarely boded well as she didn’t speak to him tha
t much. But it was either that or literally nothing at all, sitting in one small room breathing bad air, so he’d said yes.
That’s very unfair. You have a ready-made social life in the greatest city in the world.
So do you. Just go down the pub.
And make friends with Alasdair?
Well, that sounds like you already have.
Lissa signed off, and Cormac made a mental note that as put off as Jake had been before when he had visited her, it might be worth suggesting another shot. Meanwhile, he had the ordeal of a big London night to prepare for. He popped another piece of Turkish Delight into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully.
Chapter Seventeen
The night out wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for Cormac’s mum who did the Rotary Club with Larissa’s aunt, although Cormac’s mum just helped out and the very posh Larissa’s aunt Tabitha was the local grandee in charge, who handed out the prizes at the local pet show and chaired the ball committee. Bridie hadn’t forgiven her youngest son for ducking out of the Army and taking a local job, but she wasn’t going to tell Tabitha this. In fact, she made quite the point of him going to London and hobnobbing with the hoi polloi, and wasn’t Tabitha’s niece there, and perhaps she could show him around, and Tabitha, who was a decent sort underneath it all and terrified of appearing a snob just because her brother was the Duke of Argyll, agreed and passed on the details.
And, in fact, she caught her niece at just the right moment. Larissa was still in an absolutely furious mood after being rejected the previous year by the local laird, Ramsay Urquart, who had, in fact, headed off with some guttersnipe nanny who’d inveigled her way sneakily into his pathetic affections – ‘Such a cliché,’ she’d moaned to her friends, who’d all agreed with her completely and said he couldn’t handle a strong woman with her own mind and poured more fizz and complained yet again about how shit all the men were those days and they’d all very much agreed with her, which was comforting.