by Jenny Colgan
‘It can protect other people who can’t be vaccinated,’ he said gently. The woman stared at him.
‘You’ve been totally brainwashed,’ she said quietly. The child moaned on the bed. Cormac held up his hands.
‘I think Titania needs rest. She’s going to be fine.’
‘Of course she is!’ said the woman. ‘She’s being treated. Naturally. By me!’
And the great city had looked a little meaner to Cormac as he’d headed back home.
For no stupid reason! For some stupid woman who thinks she knows better than hundreds of years of medical science! Stupid spoiled spoiled spoiled cow.
Then, ten seconds later, he realised.
Shit! This is our official NHS account!
I know!
Shit! Can you delete that? Please? Quickly?!
It’s NHS IT. They can’t tell the arse codes from their elbow codes!
I know. But!
I know.
And that was how they swapped telephone numbers and moved on to text messaging.
Chapter Four
Jake finally plucked up the courage, much to the disappointment – and rather unkind remarks, if we’re being honest, by Ginty McGhie at the hairdresser’s, who also might have mentioned in passing that if that new nurse thought that she, Ginty McGhie, was going to do her hair for the big night she had another think coming – to ask Lissa to the farmer’s dance that took place before the fair arrived.
It was a big affair round their neck of the woods, and with the typical Highlands imbalance of men and women, it wasn’t like Ginty McGhie hadn’t already been asked four or five times already by shy, sturdy, red-cheeked young men, but that didn’t matter – she wasn’t the least interested in them, and very interested in flashing dark-eyed Jake Inglis and the excellent time they’d had last summer, and he seemed to have time for no one these days but that exotic-looking incomer, which was men for you.
In general, Ginty’s clientele agreed with her (it is wise, incidentally, if you live in a very small village, not to get on the wrong side of its only hairdresser). Lissa to them still seemed a little strange and stand-offish, always looking as if she was in a hurry to get places, dashing here and there. That was English folk for you. And now (once Jake had, while slightly drunk in the pub, revealed his intentions to ask her to the dance) here she was, waltzing off with the most eligible man in the village, now that Cormac MacPherson was down south too. Talk about having your cake and eating it.
Then Jake had asked Cormac for Lissa’s number and Cormac had found himself feeling slightly awkward about passing it on.
Jake asked me for your number.
I know.
I was going to ask you if it was okay to give it to him.
Of course.
Of course? thought Cormac.
But Mrs Murray and some very angry hairdresser told me he was going to ask me out anyway. The hairdresser is quite scary.
She is. Are you going to go?
Cormac loved the farmer’s dance. He thought back ruefully to the previous year where he’d drunk a load of cider and let Emer do what she’d been pretty clear she’d wanted to do for some months, given how often she happened to be walking past the cottage in full make-up. He wasn’t God’s gift, Cormac would be the first to admit, but when girls liked him, they really liked him.
I don’t know. Should I?
You should. It’s at Lennox’s farm, they always put a good spread on. And what else are you doing for fun?
Is this the bit where you show off about going to that private members’ club again?
In fact, Larissa had texted him but Cormac had pretended he hadn’t seen it. It wasn’t really his scene. He didn’t tell Lissa that though.
Well, maybe you should up your game then.
What game?
The ‘who’s having the best secondment?’ game.
That’s not a game!
That’s exactly what someone losing a game would say.
Lissa looked at the screen, slightly annoyed and amused. A tiny bit of her was, she thought, possibly – just a tiny bit, not really – hoping he might be jealous.
All right. I will go to your stupid dance. What should I wear?
Piss off! And that looks nothing like me!
I’m relieved to hear that.
And what’s the music going to be like? All fiddle-dee-dee twiddly-dee ‘I would walk five hundred miles’ stuff?
Cormac didn’t answer and Lissa wondered if she’d offended him. She absolutely had.
After Cormac didn’t reply, Lissa glanced around the room and noticed something she hadn’t noticed before: a small stereo system, exactly the kind of thing that a well-meaning but otherwise utterly clueless auntie would buy you for your fourteenth birthday. She had the exact same make and model, but it was in the attic at her mum’s house. Next to Cormac’s, however, was a line of CDs. Nothing as cool as vinyl; she thought of her London hipster mates with their vintage record players and independent record shop habit. Who still bought CDs? She leafed through them. Runrig, Orange Juice, Deacon Blue, Biffy Clyro, Del Amitri, Belle & Sebastian. Then she pulled out one with a picture of two identical men wearing glasses and playing the guitar on the cover. Ah, she thought to herself.
Can I play some of your music?
It’s a bit ‘twiddly-dee’ for you, isn’t it?
She had offended him! Oh no! Boys and their music. She would hardly be offended if he didn’t like, for example, her mum’s calypso music (this was a total lie; she would have been completely offended).
Maybe I’ll give it a shot.
Don’t put yourself out.
Lissa smiled to herself. For a moment, she found herself thinking that maybe she could tease him later when she saw him . . . And then she remembered that he was in London and she was here and this was a professional work placement, and she rolled her eyes to herself and went to look at her very limited wardrobe.
Jake was incredibly pleased that Lissa was coming out with him, even if it did mean bad haircuts for the rest of his life. And Cormac was good enough, listening to Jake’s boasting, not to mention that he had had a little something to do with it. And he didn’t mention to Jake, or even to himself, how much in fact he maybe would have liked to have been there too.
Tentatively, Lissa texted Zoe. It was really awkward, trying to make a new friend. She felt like she was asking out a boy aged fourteen, and more or less expected not to hear from her. Instead, Zoe immediately texted her back and said why didn’t she come and get dressed up at the house. Ramsay could drive them there, seeing as he wasn’t going, as the male to female ratio was already hopelessly skewed, which meant he wouldn’t get five minutes with his girlfriend without her being asked to dance all the time, plus he had a deep and abiding horror of having to stand around in front of everyone from the village who would undoubtedly have much to gossip either to or about him. Also, he had to bend over so far to hear anyone it gave him a sore back and the only person he liked to dance with was Zoe because she was so little he could pick her up and stick her legs around his waist, then carry her straight home, something which he assumed would be rather frowned upon by other people. He smiled, though, looking at his happy busy girlfriend, always keen to welcome new people into her life; his opposite, in fact, which was probably why he loved her so much.
Chapter Five
‘Where is your happy face?’ demanded Kim-Ange loudly as she ran into Cormac that evening in the old battered lift.
‘Ach,’ said Cormac. ‘It’s the village dance coming up. Was just thinking about it.’
‘Ha! God, I can’t imagine Lissa going to something like that.’
‘She is going!’ said Cormac. ‘I made her!’
‘Seriously? Lissa?’
‘Yes.’
‘At a village dance?’
Kim-Ange burst out into a peal of loud laughter.
‘It’s no’ that weird,’’ said Cormac.
Kim-Ange shook her head. ‘I know. It’s just . . .
until she’s had a few, Lissa’s not much of a dancer. She’s far too shy.’
Cormac blinked at this. It hadn’t occurred to him that Lissa might be shy. She didn’t seem so to him. Of course, they’d never been face to face though.
They made their way through the dingy common room. Kim-Ange looked around it.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we have a village dance?’
Cormac gave her some side-eye.
‘We could have it here! They let people use it if you book it. Get some music and you can teach people to dance. Sell tickets. They can set up a bar.’
‘Who’d come to a ceilidh in a nurses’ halls?’
‘Every drunk Scotsman in London! And there are a lot of them.’
Cormac thought about it.
‘I suppose I could design a poster.’
‘Give me some,’ said Kim-Ange. ‘I’ll take them up to the hospital.’
The response was absolutely extraordinary and immediate, partly because on the whole, when Kim-Ange suggested you do something, it was normally easier just to do it. They sold out all their tickets immediately and Cormac had enough money to hire a small ceilidh band with a caller to tell people what to do, and to stock the small bar with additional Tunnock’s Teacakes and Caramel Wafers.
Kim-Ange took over the décor and, amazingly, with a few metres of tartan cloth and ribbon and a vast amount of Ikea tealights, she transformed the scuffed hall and battered old tables into something rather magical. From seven p.m., hordes began pouring in. Cormac had absolutely no idea there were so many Scots in London. Although most of them were from Glasgow and Edinburgh, he still found it comforting to be surrounded by familiar voices again as well as red hair, freckles, loud laughter and the sound of people calling each other tubes and bawbags.
But there were also all the nurses who lived there, who came from everywhere – all over the world. One after another they came up to him, giggling and pleased, often telling him what their local dances were like.
The band set up in the corner, and the caller was excellent, marshalling her forces extremely effectively, which meant that the Scots – who had been taught the dances at school and knew them back to fronts – and the girls from the halls could partner up extremely well. The lights flashed as Nadeeka, from Sri Lanka, bounded round the eightsome reel, her small hands in the great meaty paws of Tam Lickwood, one of the hospital porters, a proud Govan man. There were consultant surgeons from the hospital, thin, austere men who’d learned their trade in the chill sea winds of Aberdeen and St Andrews; a young radiographer from Elgin who’d brought his entire team; a clique of Glaswegian nurses who’d trained and moved to London together, who gathered and fussed round Cormac like he was a new puppy – something, he felt very strongly, must be of enormous comfort to their patients; and a girl called Yasmin, or Yazzie, whom he’d noticed in the halls who now seemed clamped to his side whenever he needed a partner.
Kim-Ange wore a yellow dress in Buchanan tartan, a pattern so loud that many was the Buchanan descendant who had arrived in Scotland to track down their ancestors and, after shown their family stripe, turned away in defeat. She had also tied large bows of the same material into her hair, which meant wherever Cormac was in the room, he could usually spot her, enthusiastically twirling in the arms of a faintly concerned-looking porter called Piotr; she was clearly having an absolute whale of a time. He smiled to himself and agreed to make up the third member of a Dashing White Sergeant team with Chi-Li, who lived down the corridor, and to whom he had never so much as nodded to before but now, wearing a bright red dress with a tartan trim, he thought she looked glorious and danced beautifully on tiny feet. He did, in fact, survey the entire scene with some satisfaction, and quickly sketched it in his head to send to . . . Ha, that was odd. Why was he thinking of Lissa right then? He wondered how she was getting on at her dance.
Chapter Six
Lissa was sitting absolutely flat on her arse, her skirt splayed around her hips, howling with laughter. She hadn’t realised, to be fair, quite how formidably strong the elderflower wine was – it tasted like cordial – despite Zoe giving her a few worried glances.
It had been so very long since she’d been able to cut loose. And it was, the tiny insects in the air notwithstanding, the most utterly beautiful evening. Lissa couldn’t believe how light it was, was convinced it couldn’t be past six p.m., even as the clock ticked on deep into the night.
The whole village was there in a flood of different colours and kilts, everyone cheerful and laughing. Many was the night they had had to hold the ceilidh in Lennox’s barn, and dash about in the mud when there was absolutely nothing to be done about that except to deal with the fact that you were going to get very muddy indeed.
But on a night like tonight, the heavy sun hung in the sky like syrup, slowly and patiently lowering itself, the midges buzzed and hummed imperceptibly, the fiddles played wilder and the grass came to your ankles while the elderflower wine tasted like nectar and could persuade even a nervous, slightly uptight Londoner – as Lissa was explaining to all and sundry – to dance.
On the straw in front of the barn, she could see Joan hoofing merrily up and down with Sebastian the vet (who in real life was her everyday nemesis, as she was constantly second-guessing his diagnoses and sending his clients crazy), galloping the pair of them to the same reel that was taking place in slightly more cramped conditions five hundred miles to the south.
The contrast was stark. Down there, different people from different backgrounds were taking a shot and throwing themselves into things and having a laugh. Up here, it was a deadly serious business, like people playing sport. The fiddles played fast and clean; there was no caller, just a brief announcement – ‘Flying Scotsman!’ ‘Cumberland Square Eight!’ – and then people would immediately dissolve partnerships or join up with others, pulling the awkward-looking teenagers off the walls they were leaning against. And Lissa had danced every one.
Lennox had stridden up, little John on his shoulders, and was watching cheerfully, leaning on a barn gate – he wasn’t much of a dancer – and Zoe had introduced Lissa to her friends Agnieska and Murdo. But Lissa, emboldened by the music, wanted to dance everything. It was just fun in of and for itself – not showing off, not spending a lot of money (it was five pounds entrance and a pound a glass), not wearing clothes they couldn’t afford that would get returned in the morning, not queuing for hip restaurants in the rain to be jostled into a tiny space in return for handing over vast amounts of money for bao. Yes, people were taking photos, but only snaps in which they were laughing, not repeated instances of themselves making puffy-lipped pouts for Instagram, or insisting on taking the same picture one hundred times. They didn’t have time for that; they were too busy having fun, in the hazy, dripping golden light, with a drum, a fiddle and a big double bass.
And then Jake approached. He was wearing an open-necked white shirt made of heavy cotton, and a pale green and grey kilt, his shadow passing over the grass. Lissa wished more than anything else that Kim-Ange was there; she would have fainted clean away. Obviously, it was just totally normal around here but it was pretty hot stuff regardless.
‘Stop there,’ said Lissa, smiling and taking out her phone. ‘I want a pic. You look like you’re in Outlander.’
Jake smiled bashfully but in fact was pleased and secretly felt like cheering. He spotted the empty glass of elderflower wine by her side. He should probably warn her a bit about that.
‘Okay,’ said Lissa. ‘I’ll send it.’
‘Don’t you want to be in it?’ said Jake. ‘Hey, hi, Ginty, can you take a picture of us?’
Ginty scowled, but stepped forward nonetheless. She wanted to take an unflattering picture of Lissa, but Lissa was so happy and, for once, carefree and utterly amazed at just how free she felt, she couldn’t stop grinning, and the sun shone through her light floral dress and Jake leaned in and just ever so gently put his arm round her to touch her opposite elbow, and he was grinning
too, and Ginty could have hurled the phone back at the pair of them.
‘Ooh!’ said Lissa, and she sent it immediately to Kim-Ange.
‘Aw, look at this,’ said Kim-Ange, who was hot and sweaty from all the dancing. She passed her phone over to Cormac. She had absolutely no idea he’d never seen a picture of Lissa before. Taking pictures of everyone and everything was one of the cornerstones of Kim-Ange’s life.
He saw the shot and winced. He’d been right about the curly hair.
Well. Good for Jake. They looked incredibly happy.
‘That’s the first time I’ve ever seen her,’ he said.
Kim-Ange looked at him crossly.
‘You don’t follow her on Insta? Although her Insta is very boring,’ said Kim-Ange, whose Insta was not in the slightest bit boring.
‘Ach, I don’t really go in for that stuff,’ said Cormac shyly.
‘You’re sleeping in her bed!’
‘I know,’ said Cormac, still staring. Her smile beamed, the sun shining straight in her face, her eyes shut. The photo faded from Kim-Ange’s phone and he handed it back, somewhat reluctantly.
He had kind of known what she looked like from what Jake said. But from her missives – her slightly short, occasionally sarcastic emails – he’d been expecting someone a little . . . more uptight.
The girl in the picture. She was radiant.
‘She looks happy,’ said Kim-Ange. ‘Good. It’s been a while.’
‘Yeah,’ said Cormac. ‘Good.’
And they tried to take one together to send back but Kim-Ange wasn’t happy with the angle, and insisted on nine more, and then Cormac got called away to pay the bar staff, and it never happened after all.
Chapter Seven