Five Hundred Miles From You: the brand new, life-affirming, escapist novel of 2020 from the Sunday Times bestselling author

by Jenny Colgan

  Would she, Lissa was thinking, would she ever have something so pleasant and so simple? She sighed. Everything like that, all the trappings of a grown-up life – and they had to be nearly the same age – felt so very far away from where she was.

  ‘You seem pretty settled,’ she said shyly to Nina, who looked surprised for an instant, then smiled.

  ‘Well . . . it’s a pretty nice place to be,’ she said and at that moment Lissa could only agree with her.

  The next second, there was a terrible screeching of brakes and a yowling sound. Both the woman jumped up, and Lissa dashed out of the van.

  There in the square was an old battered car and, knocked clean to the side of it, a fat, scruffy-looking orange and brown tabby cat.

  Carrie, who had still been nearby, gasped aloud when she saw.

  ‘Marmalade!’ she screamed.

  ‘Stay here,’ said Nina fiercely, holding the old woman back. ‘Can you go?’ she said to Lissa. Lissa had absolutely no idea what she could conceivably do with a dead cat but she tentatively wandered over.

  An incredibly old woman, who couldn’t possibly have seen over the steering wheel, got out of the ancient white car.

  ‘Noooo,’ she said. ‘Ochh, oh nooooo, is that Carrie’s cat?’

  ‘Margaret McLafferty, is that you?’ came a loud cracked voice. Nina obviously wasn’t having a great deal of luck holding Carrie back.

  ‘Did you just kill my cat?’

  ‘Occchhh noooooo,’ said the woman, leaning faintly on the car door. Lissa went up to her.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she said. ‘Do you need to sit down?’

  ‘Dinnae worry about her!’ came the strident voice. ‘Save my cat!’

  ‘I’m not . . .’

  Lissa went closer. Her heart dropped. The poor creature was in a bad way: one of its ears was ripped half off and its back leg looked as if it was smashed.

  The creature eyed her up piteously as Lennox came and stood next to her.

  ‘Aye, that’ll be her,’ said Lennox shortly. Lissa gave him a look.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Tried to fish her out of a tree. She took fright and bolted.’

  ‘Can you get the vet?’ she said.

  ‘No need,’ said Lennox. ‘There’s a shovel in the van.’

  ‘You’re kidding!’ said Lissa. ‘There must be hope.’

  She crouched down. The cat yowled and tried, claws out frantically, to back away, but couldn’t move because of its shattered leg. The eyes were absolutely panicked. It was heartbreaking to see.

  Nina approached.

  ‘Vet’s over Kinross way,’ she said, and Lennox swore. ‘Bloody Sebastian. And those bloody horse shows.’

  Sebastian was a good vet, but horses were his true love.

  ‘FIX MA CAT!’ came the voice again. She still wasn’t, Lissa noticed, getting any nearer. Lissa couldn’t blame her for not wanting to see it.

  ‘I feel very faint,’ said the woman who’d been driving.

  ‘Good!’ came the voice. ‘Hope you die!’

  Lennox glanced at the surgery.

  ‘Where’s Joan?’

  Lissa winced.

  ‘She said she was going to . . .’

  ‘The horse show,’ said Nina. ‘Might have known. She’ll probably be assisting Sebastian.’

  ‘Christ, if we ever needed her.’

  The cat was yowling but it sounded deeper now, and groaning more.

  ‘I could get the spade,’ said Lennox helplessly.

  ‘LENNOX, IF YOU KILL MY CAT, I’LL HAVE YOU UP IN A COURT OF LAW,’ said Carrie, finally storming over, face alight. ‘NO CAT MURDERING ON MY WATCH.’

  Lennox’s face was a mask of despair.

  ‘You cannae let the wee thing suffer, Carrie. You just cannae do that. It’s no’ right.’

  The baby started crying too, as if to chime in with the miserable atmosphere all around. Nina looked at Lissa enquiringly, who stared back, helpless. She didn’t have a clue what to do. Carrie had now burst into noisy sobs.

  ‘SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING! NOT YOU, LENNOX!’

  Lissa fumbled in her pocket for the key to the surgery. She couldn’t, could she?

  It was absurd: there was a world of difference between a boy lying on the ground and an injured cat. They were completely different. But still, somehow she felt something surge within her. She put her sleeves over her hands and attempted to lift the screaming cat up.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Lennox, still outraged that there was an animal in such pain. Lennox was an extremely conscientious and humane farmer, but he was not remotely squeamish. To his mind, to leave an animal in this state was utmost cruelty.

  ‘We can . . . get her into Joan’s,’ stammered Lissa. ‘There are supplies there. I could . . . I could take a look.’

  Lennox looked at her.

  ‘You don’t know how to treat a cat,’ he said roughly.

  ‘No, but . . . I can stop her pain,’ said Lissa, and Lennox calmed down a bit.

  ‘How?’ he said, taking off his jacket and bundling the poor creature inside it, Carrie hurrying behind them, and Nina rushing in with them too to try and take little John off his dad before the cat scratched out one of his eyes.

  ‘It must be the same weight as a baby,’ said Lissa, opening the big manse door, and then the one to the surgery. She pulled out a huge roll of medical paper and moved Joan’s files onto the floor, then put the paper over the top of it. Lennox kept the animal covered with his coat, but it had quietened now and was only making the occasional soft whimper, which they both recognised as being distinctly worse. Lissa scrubbed her hands quickly and put a tiny amount of morphine in a syringe, frantically doing arithmetic in her head. It slid in very quickly as she found a tiny vein in the creature’s groin, grateful for the amount of times she’d spent taking blood on her various placements.

  Then, once the large cat had fallen asleep, she took a look at what they were dealing with.

  She palpated the cat’s stomach – she knew absolutely nothing about animal biology, but it wasn’t firm or feeling like it was filling with blood. Neither was the heartbeat thready, although it was fast – ‘Google “cat heartbeat”,’ she shouted to Nina, who immediately complied.

  There was a leg that was patently broken – there was no plaster of Paris on-site, but she could certainly improvise a splint until they could get the cat to a vet.

  The most important thing, though, was the shape of Marmalade’s face. The skin had been ripped away; you could see sinew and bone underneath, and her ear was hanging off. It was a mess. Lissa looked at it carefully. It reminded her of working A&E, in fact. Underneath the fur, it was just skin and sinew and muscle, after all. Nothing she hadn’t seen a million times. She looked at it for a long time.

  ‘What?’ said Lennox.

  ‘I reckon . . .’

  She retrieved the stitching kit.

  ‘Whoa,’ said Nina, who had retrieved John, who was now watching the proceedings excitedly. ‘Are you really going to stitch up that cat?’

  Lennox also looked dubious.

  ‘She’s not in pain right now,’ said Lissa. ‘I mean . . . I could have a go . . .’

  ‘FIX MY DAMN CAT,’ came a voice from outside. ‘I’m holding Margaret until the police come! I’ve just made a citizen’s arrest.’

  ‘I’ll go calm her down,’ said Nina. ‘Also, I don’t want to watch this; I’ll faint and it’ll be disgusting. And I’ll take the baby outside.’

  So Lennox held down the other end of the cat in silence, while Lissa bent to do her work, quickly trying to unravel the ragged ends of severed flesh. It was rather like doing a grisly jigsaw, and Lissa found a certain satisfaction in working away with quick neat stitches, checking the cat’s breathing from time to time, and covering each layer in disinfectant powder. Finally, she carefully tried to align the ear correctly. It was always going to be a bit wonky, she figured, but hopefully it would still work.

  Once s
he’d closed the wound, trying to make sure it wasn’t pulling in a way that would cause pain, she took a ruler from the stationery drawer and tightly bound the cat’s leg to it.

  ‘It’s not going to like that,’ she observed. ‘But it’ll last until it gets to the vet hospital. Which is where, by the way?’

  ‘Two hours north,’ said Lennox.

  ‘Cor,’ said Lissa.

  She stroked the cat’s head. It was still snoring deeply, out for the count.

  ‘You might just be okay,’ she said softly, thinking again of the time when she couldn’t make it okay, when she couldn’t control it. ‘I think you’ll be okay.’

  Lennox looked at her.

  ‘Well done,’ he said. She shrugged, pleased.

  ‘Oh, it’s just like being back at A&E,’ she said. ‘Except furrier . . .’

  Suddenly, there was a huge commotion at the door and they both turned around. Nina was walking in with Margaret, who had a black eye.

  ‘What happened?’ said Lissa.

  ‘She tried to kill my cat!’ shouted the voice from outside.

  ‘I thought you were making a citizen’s arrest,’ said Lissa crossly, sitting the woman down.

  ‘I was. Police brutality,’ came an unapologetic voice, and then Carrie strode in.

  ‘Right,’ said Lissa. ‘You have to get her to the vet hospital, get her leg set properly.’

  Carrie gave the trembling cowering figure of Margaret a contemptuous glance.

  ‘I’ll be borrowing your car.’

  ‘You shan’t,’ said Nina hastily. ‘I’ve got to visit the warehouse anyway. I’ll take you in the van.’

  Lennox looked surprised at this but didn’t say anything as Nina bundled Carrie out and Lissa carefully tended and cleaned Margaret’s eye.

  ‘That’s quite nasty,’ she said. ‘Do you want to press charges?’

  ‘Against Carrie? She’d bewitch me and throw me down a well!’ said the woman. ‘I’m just glad her cat’s okay otherwise she might have burnt down my house.’

  Lissa stopped.

  ‘There’s one more thing,’ she said, looking severely at the old woman. Joan had an old-fashioned optician’s chart on her far wall. ‘Can you read me the bottom line of that chart?’

  ‘Not without my glasses,’ said the woman. ‘I’m blind as a bat without them.’

  ‘And were you wearing them when you were driving?’

  The woman went very quiet.

  ‘If you don’t get your eyesight sorted out,’ said Lissa gently, because what she was about to say was a complete lie, but she’d used it confidently many, many times before, ‘I’ll have to report you to the police and the DVLA, otherwise I’ll lose my licence to practise.’

  ‘Is that true?’ said the woman, looking even more shocked. It had definitely not been her morning.

  ‘It is,’ said Lissa. ‘And I’ll be watching out for you.’

  She stood up.

  ‘The swelling should go down – keep this ice pack on it. And I highly recommend going to the bakery and having a cup of sweet tea and a long sit down. Is there anyone who could drive the car home for you?’

  ‘My son,’ Margaret said quietly.

  ‘Call him,’ said Lissa. ‘Seriously. Nobody wants to get the police involved.’

  Margaret nodded and left timidly. Lennox looked around the surgery, which looked as if a bomb had hit it, although not necessarily hugely worse than how Joan normally left it.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’d better get back. Good work.’

  Chapter Twenty-one

  After that, although it wasn’t of course Lennox who’d told everyone about it, the story got out somehow – and actually it became rather inflated till by the end Lissa had singlehandedly brought a dead cat back to life while fighting off Carrie from performing manslaughter, a fact about Carrie nobody seemed to have the slightest problem believing to be absolutely true. And just like that, it seemed, everyone said hello to Lissa in the morning; people were pleased to see her when she turned up and weren’t so quick to take offence if she looked sad or distracted, and she was amazed, truly, that she wasn’t anything like as lonely as she’d expected to be.

  Plus, Cormac’s email made her smile:

  I just want you and everyone else to get this straight: I saved a person and you saved a cat.

  That’s a cat? Anyway, one: it’s entirely debatable that humans are better than cats, and two: whoever saves one life saves the world entire.

  Lissa added a tongue-sticking-out emoji.

  All anyone in Kirrinfief is talking about is you and that stupid cat and everyone is ignoring my glamorous London heroics.

  Sucking face with an overdosing scumbag, you mean?

  Well, you brought Carrie’s cat back to life. You know that’s her familiar? You’ll bewitch half the town. You’re allowing her to continue her reign of terror. When the crops fail and the cow’s milk dries up, you’ll change your tune then.

  I’ll be back in London long before then.

  Aye, so you will. I’d forgotten. And I’ll be back there, see what’s left of my flowers.

  There’s a lot of those yellow round ones.

  Dandelions?

  Yes!

  You mean weeds?

  I like them.

  Weeds!

  Also, I picked some bluebells I hope that’s okay.

  It was true. She’d changed her mind; surely nobody would notice a few gone.

  Cormac looked out of the window. He loved bluebell season. That heavenly cloud. He didn’t want to mention that though for fear of sounding . . . well, whatever.

  Sure, just write down how many you’ve picked and we’ll tally it up when I’m back.

  There was no answer, and Cormac wondered whether he needed to clarify that that was a joke. On the other hand, if she couldn’t see it, being told it was a joke probably wouldn’t help matters anyway. He waited, refreshing his inbox.

  I think what I’ll do is just let you count them when you get back and deduct them from the stocktake you already have?

  Cormac smiled as he closed the laptop.

  Lissa bit her lip and, for the first time, she realised she wasn’t at that precise moment missing London. It wasn’t just the daffodils that were coming into season; all sorts of plants and bushes were starting to flower, none of which Lissa knew the names of, and the wildflowers were beginning to tumble and crawl up the sides of the road. It was so fast that there was something new to see every day. And bees! She’d never really seen a bee in the wild before, and there were great fat ones everywhere, butterflies too, orange and black, with eyes on their wings. It was very slightly amazing.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Both Cormac and Lissa were rather surprised when they fell out, particularly over someone Lissa had barely met. But Cormac was distracted anyway; he had what Jake would have called his saviour face on.

  He’d been wandering home late. He would have found it hard to deny that he rather liked the shiny London streets at night; the neon and lights everywhere, the sense of a lot of people with a lot to do. There was always a palpable prickle of excitement in the air; it was never dull. Cormac saw a chap he’d seen before sitting near the entrance to the nurses’ accommodation, over the vent of warm air from a posh office building which, judging by the smell, had a swimming pool in the basement. The man, lolling there, looked about the age of Cormac himself. He felt in his pocket for his wallet. This wasn’t right. It was a warm, slightly sticky evening, but even so. Everyone needed a place to lay their head.

  He put the money down quietly, trying not to disturb the figure, who was very still, but had their eyes half open.

  ‘Aye, thanks, man,’ came a low voice, almost a growl, unmistakably Scottish, and it stretched out a hand. To Cormac’s great surprise, there was a badly drawn, pinpricked but nonetheless recognisable tattoo on the bottom of the pale, grubby arm: the clear insignia of his own unit.

  ‘Are you Black Watch?’ he asked in amazement.r />
  The dull, lifeless eyes lifted up to him and Cormac caught a strong waft of unwashed body.

  ‘No any more,’ said the figure.

  ‘Where did you serve?’ said Cormac worriedly, looking at him carefully in case he knew him.

  ‘Fucking . . . fucking Fadge,’ said the man, and Cormac smiled painfully.

  ‘Aye,’ said Cormac. ‘I was there too. 2014.’

  ‘Fucking . . . fucking shithole,’ said the man.

  Checking which way was upwind, Cormac sat down carefully beside the man.

  ‘What happened?’

  The man shrugged. He had to be Cormac’s age, but he looked far, far older.

  ‘Aye, got stuck in a bit of trouble with the bevvy, aye?’

  He looked at Cormac.

  ‘Were you really there, man? Or are you after something?’

  Cormac didn’t even want to think about what something might mean.

  ‘No, I was there,’ he said grimly. ‘Did you know that regiment colonel, Spears?’

  ‘Fuck yeah,’ said the man, almost breaking into a grin. His mouth was covered in sores. ‘That bawbag.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Fuck it all,’ said the man. ‘I lost three mates out there.’

  Cormac nodded. He had probably worked on at least one of them.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Robbie.’

  ‘Cormac.’

  Robbie offered him a bottle, but Cormac declined, instead offering him the last of the money in his wallet.

  ‘I cannae take your cash,’ said the man.

  ‘Always going to help a comrade,’ said Cormac. ‘Have you got a phone?’

  The man laughed.

  ‘Naw.’

  ‘Look. I stay in that building just there. Come find me if you need anything.’

  Robbie waved him away.

  ‘Aye, fine, man.’

  Cormac couldn’t shake the memory, couldn’t shake thinking about what had gone on out there, whatever had left Robbie on a pavement, left him treading water in his own life.