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

by Jenny Colgan

  ‘Well, Yazzie’s been all over it. Him. It! After he had a man in too!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Your Scottish boy!’

  ‘He’s not “my Scottish boy”,’ said Lissa, feeling slightly uncomfortable. ‘I’ve never even met him. I don’t even know what he looks like.’

  ‘You can see half his arse on Yazzie’s Instagram. I think she took the picture while he was asleep,’ said Kim-Ange musingly.

  ‘Well, that doesn’t sound very nice . . . What, they’re going out together?’

  ‘Well, she hasn’t changed her Facebook status . . . and he doesn’t have one so . . .’

  ‘Not even to “It’s complicated”?’

  ‘Nope.’

  Lissa was annoyed at the fact that she felt slightly relieved.

  ‘Maybe it’s just a casual thing.’

  Still, she was disappointed in him. She hadn’t thought of him as a player like that. Mind you, wasn’t that the point about players? They were really sweet and fun – that’s why they reeled you in every time.

  But she’d definitely thought he was different.

  ‘Yazzie is a filthy mare.’ Kim-Ange was still talking. ‘Of course, I approve of that.’

  ‘And gorgeous,’ said Lissa.

  ‘What do you care?’ said Kim-Ange. ‘Haven’t you got a date?’

  Lissa thought of cute Jake.

  ‘I do,’ she said, smiling wryly.

  ‘Well then.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Yes!’ said Kim-Ange. ‘See, this is a lot of news. I like catching up like this.’

  ‘It’s almost as good as having you here,’ said Lissa. ‘Not quite though.’

  ‘Well, spray a shitload of Jo Malone perfume around and it will almost be the same.’

  ‘Almost too much.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not at all too much! Who is your date with?’

  ‘Piotr.’

  Lissa had to think for a minute. It wasn’t just nurses in the accommodation; it was more a general housing back-up facility for anyone who had to work at the hospital and couldn’t quite manage on the wages the hospital was prepared to pay.

  ‘Piotr Porter? Amazing!’

  It was indeed the diminutive porter Kim-Ange had spent the evening dancing with at the ceilidh, who was completely overwhelmed by her.

  ‘Is he nice?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Kim-Ange. ‘There are no men in this town and I haven’t had a date in eight months. As long as he doesn’t eat weasels, I’m probably going to let him get to second base.’

  ‘What if he licks weasels?’

  ‘First base.’

  Lissa smiled.

  ‘I just can’t believe we’ve all got dates!’

  ‘I know,’ said Kim-Ange. ‘Skype me later and I’ll tell you why you’re dressed all wrong.’

  Cormac sent over the last of the week’s notes to Lissa and couldn’t stop himself from adding at the bottom, seemingly innocently, ‘Going to Fordell Fair?’

  Lissa saw the line in the email and smiled, then frowned. Word got around. She took another bite of her russet apple.

  Maybe. What about you? Busy, I believe?

  Cormac squinted at the message. Oh, obviously she’d heard. Kim-Ange would have been all over it. It felt very odd; were they . . . were they friends now?

  Throwing the core of the russet he was eating into the bin, he typed: Oi!

  There you go, all EastEnders again. Where are you going?

  Some hot new restaurant.

  You’ll be queueing for four hours and it’ll be full of snotty types and all anyone does is take photographs of the food and the plates will be too small and you won’t get enough to eat and it will be filthy expensive.

  Well, you might throw up on the big dipper.

  Shan’t! And Kim-Ange has a date! It must be summer.

  So we all have dates.

  Cormac grabbed another apple from the bag.

  Good!

  Good!

  Lissa decided on another apple, and bit into it, trying not to betray how cross she was, and then she went out to feed Ned.

  Chapter Eleven

  The fog rose on the little town of Kirrinfief that Saturday and they had by noon one of those days in the Highlands known as ‘you should have been here last week’. It is a fact, sad but true – though please don’t ever let it put you off visiting our beautiful country; we will be so happy to see you, I promise – and a fairly hard-wired one at that, that if you want to plan a visit to Scotland, or go to a wedding or a barbecue there, the mere planning is seen as an act of hubris that upsets the weather gods. Lugh, he of the one eye and the ability to summon storms, will be displeased and at the very least there will be light drizzle and ominous grey skies, and if you are in a place that has a beautiful view you will have to put up with people telling you there is a beautiful view, because you will not be able to see it.

  But take Scotland by surprise and you might just get a day when the sun warms every nook and cranny, but the breeze gently pootling over a loch as calm as glass will keep you from getting too hot, and the stillness of the air means the cries of the many birds can be heard more loudly than ever, as well as the lightly crashing hooves of the deer in the forest.

  The sky is a freshly washed blue; the green of the meadows far greener than anything you would expect to find without a heavy filter on it; fat bees buzz merrily among the meadowsweet and long grass; the evenings last for ever. And Lissa Westcott is going to the fair.

  In London, Yazzie had persuaded Cormac to come out with him to a new restaurant and he has said yes because he didn’t know what else to do and Kim-Ange was mysteriously unavailable. Kim-Ange was going to the Polish club with Piotr who was both excited and slightly concerned about it.

  And five hundred miles away, Lissa was in a blue dress which for once she was wearing without a coat or a cardigan. It was a plain dress but it suited her, and she had left off the make-up apart from a little bit of pink lipstick, and her hair was bouncing down her back and she felt not . . . not fine exactly. But, as Kim-Ange gave her the thumbs up from the laptop in the corner of the room and she reminded herself again and again, It’s only Jake, it’s only Jake, she could be feeling worse.

  They were all of them out in the warm of a British evening as beautiful as they come, hundreds of miles apart, but each with the same combination of butterflies and cheerfulness and a slight aura of dread and a consideration of just cancelling the entire thing and never mentioning it again, running away to sea to be a sailor which characterises the process of dating. But they were all young(ish) and it was a lovely evening, and there was potential magic in the air, so you couldn’t be too worried for them, not really. Tonight, even for Lissa, the bad things felt a little further away, protected in the magical sweetness of the air, a summer’s caress, a new pair of boots, the scent of candy-floss on the air and of expectation, possibilities, aftershave and checking wristwatches and best earrings and chewing gum.

  Chapter Twelve

  The fair was easy to smell along the old farm track. The normal scents of pine and bracken in the air, with an undertone of cow that at first Lissa had noticed but now rather liked, had been overtaken by smells that were familiar and strange all at once; the fairground mix of candy-floss, popcorn, diesel and dirty old engines.

  Lissa remembered her mother hurrying her past a fair in London, refusing to let her go, completely uninterested in the entire affair. Lissa hadn’t wanted to catch the eye of the rougher girls in case they teased her later (which they did anyway, calling her stuck up which it was hard to disagree with because her mother was so very insistent about these things that that’s exactly how she appeared).

  And then, another time, when she was a little older, she did exactly what her mother was so scared she would: pretended she was going round to someone’s house to study whereupon the two of them both slipped out to ‘the library’ and rushed down to the com
mon, pooling their money which left them with just enough to share candy-floss and have one ride. The scrawny boy on the waltzers had a tooth missing, but to them that made him look even more exotic, like a pirate. He came and hung off the back of their car as they screamed their heads off. The evening was dark and the music was incredibly loud and as Lissa spun round and round, her neck hurting from the pressure, she couldn’t remember feeling more alive, more naughty.

  Of course, one of the girls from school saw them and, even though she was friendly enough, word got around and someone’s mum ran into her mum at Sainsbury’s and the worst came to the worst and she was grounded for a solid month.

  It had been so worth it though.

  Jake was standing there, wearing an open-necked blue shirt that suited his hair. He’d had it trimmed, Lissa noticed, for the occasion. It looked ridiculously sharp and contoured and gelled and she wasn’t crazy about it (fearing retributive ear-cutting, Jake had gone into the nearest town, forty miles away, and had got it done by somebody who hadn’t known him his entire life).

  He grinned at her nervously. She looked lovely, her curls bouncing behind her. And the smile he never normally saw in the daytime appeared, shy, tentative.

  They awkwardly attempted a social kiss, which went a little wrong. Jake would normally have taken her hand but, suddenly shy, didn’t. Instead, he gallantly offered her his arm, and she took it, also rather shyly.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘So what do you want to do first? What’s your favourite thing?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lissa. ‘I’ve never been to a fair properly before. Except the waltzers. I like the waltzers.’

  ‘You’ve never been?’ He was incredulous. ‘Were you brought up in a cupboard under the stairs?’

  ‘No,’ said Lissa.

  He stopped himself suddenly.

  ‘Sorry, is it . . . like a culture thing?’

  Lissa gave him a sideways glance.

  ‘How would that work then?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ said Jake, lifting his hands in horror in case he’d said the wrong thing.

  ‘No,’ said Lissa slowly. ‘We have funfairs in London. My mum just didn’t really approve.’

  ‘Because . . .?’

  Lissa thought about it.

  ‘Oh . . . I suppose she was a bit of a snob.’

  This was such an out of character thing to say that Lissa lifted her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe I just said that about my mum. She’s amazing, really inspirational character, very . . . all of that.’

  Jake smiled.

  ‘She sounds . . . terrifying. And amazing, obviously,’ he added hastily, horrified at how he was doing.

  Lissa smiled again.

  ‘Oh God.’ She swallowed. ‘Okay. She is both of those things.’

  She wondered suddenly. Why hadn’t she confided more in her mum? Would she even have needed to come here? Would her mum have been disappointed?

  She thought of Cormac too, and his mother, fussing him about. It was odd, sometimes, just a little. The strange things they had in common.

  ‘Well then,’ said Jake after a long pause, trying to get her attention. ‘Where shall we start? I really need to win you a large soft toy.’

  ‘I don’t need one of those.’

  ‘You don’t need one,’ said Jake who had, truth be told, been practising, ‘but I think you should have one. To make up for all the ones you missed when you were a child.’

  And he bought her a large candy-floss, which immediately stuck in her hair, and they both laughed, as it was just as sticky and ridiculous a concept as a foodstuff as Lissa remembered from nearly half a lifetime ago, and was also potentially going to make a terrible mess of her hair but she found she didn’t care. She wondered briefly if she didn’t care because she was so relaxed, or because she genuinely wasn’t that fussed about the guy she was with, but soon told herself to stop bothering and just enjoy herself. And she did.

  They passed Ramsay and Zoe with their clutch of children, the two little boys wearing identical Spider-Man costumes, holding hands and looking terrified.

  ‘What about the ghost train?’ Zoe was saying and the taller of the small children replied, ‘We absolutely do not want to meet any more ghosts, Nanny Seven,’ the littler was shaking his head in terror, and Zoe said, ‘What do you mean “more” ghosts?’ rather nervously and Patrick and Hari just looked at one another.

  ‘Hello, you two,’ said Zoe. Lissa felt odd to hear them referred to as a couple.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘LOLLIPOPS!’ hollered Patrick. ‘You’re the lady with all the lollipops. And jags. And lollipops.’

  He narrowed his eyes as if trying to work out whether seeing her was a good or bad thing.

  ‘I don’t have any lollipops. Or jags,’ said Lissa reassuringly. ‘Are you having a good time at the fair?’

  Patrick and Hari shook their heads firmly.

  ‘They won’t go on anything,’ said Zoe in despair. ‘They think this entire fair is a plot to kill them.’

  ‘Mary said so!’ said Patrick.

  ‘Oh, Mary,’ said Ramsay, holding the girl.

  ‘Well, at least it’s cheap,’ Zoe agreed vigorously.

  ‘Ah disnae want to die,’ said the tiniest of the children.

  ‘You’re not going to die!’

  A large ride that tipped people upside down about forty metres in the air suddenly did just that and a huge amount of screaming rent the air. Both the lads looked absolutely petrified.

  ‘Perhaps the spinning teacups,’ grimaced Zoe, marching them off.

  ‘HOT TEA ABSOLUTELY NO THANK YOU’ was the last thing Lissa heard of Patrick as the oddly shaped family vanished into the crowd.

  ‘They probably will die now,’ predicted Jake. ‘Just to be ironic.’

  ‘Did you bring your med case?’

  ‘I am technically off duty,’ said Jake. ‘So don’t let me go too near the St John Ambulance tent. They are all madly in love with me.’

  ‘That’s very cocky,’ said Lissa, but she had to eat her words when they passed the tent, Jake notably skulking, only for a large older lady to come fluttering out. She had very small feet in very high-heeled shoes given the ground was still pretty muddy.

  ‘THERE’S MY FAVOURITE AMBULANCE MAN!’ she trilled. Other women in the more familiar green outfits poked their heads out of the tent. One appeared to be busy attempting to cut candy-floss out of a small child’s hair; another was comforting a child sobbing its heart out.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Lissa instantly.

  ‘Och,’ said the woman thoughtfully. ‘I’m no’ sure if the ghost train is getting scarier or bairns are getting more scared.’

  ‘The world is getting scarier,’ surmised Lissa. ‘We probably don’t need ghost trains too.’

  ‘AYE,’ said the wee lad whose shoulders were shaking.

  Meanwhile, Jake had been bustled away and fed.

  ‘You know this lad. Always ready to help out,’ said the first women, handing him a plate piled high with sandwiches and chocolate biscuits.

  ‘Well, it’s his job,’ said Lissa, watching him, amused.

  ‘Here you go, Jakie, tea just how you like it,’ said another one, piling sugar into a large enamel mug. He looked at Lissa, rather shamefaced.

  ‘Would you like a sandwich?’ said one of the women, not in a particularly friendly way. ‘Only they’re really just for the volunteers.’

  ‘I’m fine without a sandwich, thank you,’ smiled Lissa. ‘That’s okay, Jake, you eat your fill.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Cormac popped next door in response to a loud banging on the thin wall. It was definitely a summonsing banging.

  Kim-Ange was standing with her hand behind her shoulder, waving uselessly.

  ‘Can you zip me up?’ she said. She was wearing a bright purple chiffon dress with a chain belt around her waist. Cormac stood behind her as she looked at hers
elf in the mirror. Her purple eyeshadow matched exactly, as did her high velvet boots.

  ‘Well?’ she said, turning round nervously.

  ‘You look beautiful,’ said Cormac, and he meant it. ‘Knock him dead.’

  ‘Not literally, like, by accident or anything?’ Kim-Ange sounded uncharacteristically worried.

  ‘No,’ said Cormac. ‘By being your gorgeous self.’

  And she was about to say something sarcastic, but instead grabbed her purple clutch bag, kissed him on the cheek and left.

  ‘You didn’t wish me luck with my date!’ shouted Cormac behind her.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ said Kim-Ange, whose opinion of Yazzie was unsisterly, but it was too late, as Yazzie was already standing there, her large eyes looking at Kim-Ange tremulously. Kim-Ange decided, again uncharacteristically, to suddenly take the stairs.

  There is something about standing in a very long queue that is not conducive to a good date, however beautiful Yazzie looked – which she did, in a long orange dress that perfectly set off her dark braids and huge dark eyes.

  London was still ridiculously climate-change hot and people were walking about in shorts, red-faced, with a vaguely suppressed aura of threat in the air. They walked past the skateboarders under the Royal Festival Hall, shouting while entrancing children, cheek by jowl with expensively dressed older people on their way to concerts and the theatre. There were frozen-still mimes standing in the middle of the street, balancing on poles and getting in the way; art for sale, hawkers, jugglers, people yelling and handing out leaflets, book sales and the whole noisy cacophony of life, the smog hanging above the water and the great towers of the east taking on a pink tinge in the early evening.

  The air smelled of food vans and garbage and fuel and Cormac felt stuffy and hot in his best checked shirt which had made Kim-Ange pretend to vomit but then decide was good enough after all. No designer borrowing tonight, he noticed.