500 Miles from You

by Jenny Colgan

  “Yes,” said Lissa. “It was a hit-and-run. Possibly deliberate. Fifteen years old.”

  “It barely made the news,” said Kim-Ange.

  Lissa sighed. “Give me the purple elixir of joy and/or misery then,” she said, holding out her mug, and Kim-Ange filled it up. “Oh my God, that’s revolting,” Lissa choked out, collapsing onto her bed. Then she took another sip. “Still bad.”

  There was a pause and she tried again.

  “Okay, now it’s not so bad.”

  “There we are,” said Kim-Ange, pleased. “A three-sipper. One of my best yet!” She started absent-mindedly folding Lissa’s clothes.

  “They’re going to call me in too,” said Lissa after a while. “Disciplinary, I think. I didn’t get out of the way of the doctors. I messed up with the transplant protocol.”

  “You stopped a transplant?!”

  “No, I made one happen.”

  “Oh, that is terrible.” Kim-Ange snorted. “And don’t tell me, did you have a baby doctor who didn’t know his arse from his elbow and couldn’t tap a vein in either of them?”

  “No, I crossed the line,” said Lissa.

  “Thank God there’s such a plethora of highly trained paramedical staff they could fill your job from,” said Kim-Ange, looking mischievous.

  Lissa half smiled. “How short are they at the moment?”

  “Four grade eights,” said Kim-Ange. “Haha, they’ll never get rid of you. I mean, seriously. What else did you do? Did you have full sex in the ambulance?”

  “Kim-Ange!”

  “I’ll take that as a maybe.”

  “No!”

  “Did you steal the car afterward?”

  Lissa bit her lip. “Stop it.”

  “No, seriously, I am trying to work out ways they’d actually let you go. Did you make the ambulance stop at the KFC drive-through on the way to the hospital?”

  “No.”

  “There you go then. It’ll be a telling-off.”

  “I hate those too.”

  Kim-Ange rolled her eyes. “That’s right, terrifying NHS management sitting on their fat arses ticking boxes all day. They are pretty tough and scary, right enough. I heard they don’t even cry when they get a paper cut.”

  “Tell me about your day,” said Lissa, changing the subject. “Hang on, didn’t you have a date tonight?”

  Kim-Ange approached Tinder with more or less as much tenacity as her job in cardiology. “Hmm,” she said.

  “Oh no!” Lissa scrolled down her phone. “But look at you on Insta! You look amazing!”

  “I do,” said Kim-Ange.

  Lissa looked at her, then back at the picture, then up at Kim-Ange again. “Stop doing that!”

  “What?” said Kim-Ange innocently.

  “Giving yourself a waist. It looks really weird.”

  “Beautiful weird?”

  “I’m taking FaceTune off your phone. You have gone too far. You look like a shark has bitten a chunk out of you.”

  “Piss off!”

  “You’re beautiful as you are,” said Lissa. “So, don’t tell me. He was a shark-bite fetishist and then you turned up without a chunk out of you?”

  “No.” Kim-Ange sighed. “He just kept going on and on about kimchi.”

  “Oh, you’re kidding,” said Lissa. “Did you tell him you’re from Margate?”

  “Yup. That’s when he started telling me I really ought to get to know my own culture.”

  Lissa laughed and rolled over on the bed, stuffing her face into her pillow. “No! Know-your-culture bro strikes again! Nooo!!”

  Kim-Ange checked her waist in the mirror and breathed in, quite hard.

  “What else did he say?” said Lissa from behind the pillow.

  “Oh! He went to Cambodia on his gap year.”

  “So?”

  “So! Obviously I would want to hear all about that!”

  Lissa screwed up her face, then pulled out her phone. “Oh well. Let’s see what everyone else is up to.”

  “You mean, let’s see where everyone else is FaceTuning themselves.”

  “And lip-filler watch.”

  “On it,” said Kim-Ange, and she refilled their glasses with the filthy purple alcohol and they sat down and scrolled through the absurdly overfiltered pictures of everyone they’d ever known, and then for good measure they made their own ridiculously overfiltered FaceTuned pic that turned them both into busty size 6s with giant fish lips, stuck their figures onto a background of a golden beach, and posted it. Immediately the likes started pouring in.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Lissa, rolling her eyes.

  “Now everyone’s going to ask me how Hawaii was,” said Kim-Ange, getting up to go to bed.

  “Tell them you got sponsored by a luxury holiday site to go for free for the ’Gram,” suggested Lissa.

  “I will, I will.” And Kim-Ange kissed her on the cheek and Lissa went to bed, feeling slightly better, or, at least, a little drunk.

  Chapter 9

  Cormac wasn’t entirely disappointed to notice that Emer had gone by the time he got home. There was a text on his phone he didn’t read the whole of, but it definitely included the phrase “you’re like a really shit Batman.” He was pondering this when, for the third time that evening, Jake rang.

  Cormac hurried out into the street.

  “That was quick,” said Jake suspiciously. “I take it she left.”

  “Don’t you start,” said Cormac.

  “Ah,” said Jake. “The thing about lady problems is . . .”

  “Don’t start,” said Cormac. “And for the third time, I’m not even on call.”

  “I know,” Jake said, and tried, and failed, to suppress a smile.

  Cormac gave him a sideways look. It wasn’t like any call to be great fun. Unless, in Jake’s case, a supermodel had gotten herself stuck in the bath or something ridiculous like that. “What?”

  “I thought you might like this one.”

  “What?”

  “It’s your young Islay.”

  Cormac’s heart started beating extremely quickly. “What about her?”

  “It’s only come up. Ten minutes ago.”

  “You are kidding,” said Cormac.

  Jake shook his head. “Nope. Some poor kid down south.”

  “The right age?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Oh God,” said Cormac. Then: “Oh God.”

  “I know.” Jake whistled through his teeth. “I never thought we’d get there.”

  Heart and lung transplants were so rare, and the chances of success so slim, that the heart was transplanted only into patients who desperately needed it.

  “It’s the right size: he was tiny. Couple more years growing, and they can do it together.”

  Cormac had watched the clock run down on patients before, had been fully expecting it to happen again.

  “Chuffing hell,” he said. “That is absolutely brilliant news.”

  “Want to come with me to get her?” said Jake.

  Cormac did. And he clasped his hand on Jake’s shoulder as they climbed into the van, Tim the silent driver pulling away.

  LISSA COULDN’T SLEEP.

  Outside the nurses’ block, with its single-glazed windows, was the ongoing sound of London, rumbling away. Normally Lissa didn’t mind it, quite liked it, in fact: the steady, reassuring noise of lorry deliveries; bottles being recycled from pubs; bin pickups; sirens; shouting. It was the city she’d been born in, the city she’d always known. It was her lullaby.

  But tonight, it was getting right on her nerves, as she lay there, eyes dry and wide, wondering how many other Kais were out there, how many other boys wouldn’t make it home to their mothers.

  Normally in her job she followed people into their homes. Alive people who got better, hopefully, or at least reached a stage of acceptance and learned to deal with whatever hand of cards they’d been dealt.

  This had happened the wrong way around, and all she could se
e was a dripping pool of blood and wide staring eyes and someone who could have been her brother, could have been anyone she’d been at school with . . .

  Every lorry stopping on the road sounded like danger; a car’s screeching brakes made her stiffen. She could feel the adrenaline shoot through her, without warning, feel it spurting through her system even as one bit of her was chanting, Must rest, must rest, and her phone glowed on the table, counting down the minutes until she had to get up; even as she could see the sky lightening through her cheap, thin standard-issue curtains. She groaned, turned over in bed, stuffed her head under the pillow, feeling simultaneously grimly alert and as if all her limbs were pinned down by stones, and the night ground on.

  Chapter 10

  Joan had arrived by the time the boys got back there to Islay’s house. All the lights were blazing in the quiet village street. Mrs. Murray, who ran the village shop, lived next door and had gotten up to see what all the fuss was about, just in case she missed any vitally important gossip.

  She didn’t consider what she did to be gossip, but instead an intensely important life force to the surrounding area and, in fact, a moral source for good, practically heroic—hence her standing in her eiderdown dressing gown outside her (spotless) front step at one o’clock in the morning. Plus, everyone had known wee Islay from a bairn, knew it wisnae fair, the poor lass. When all the other kids were running themselves ragged down at Zahira’s nursery, she’d had to be kept home like a china doll sat on a shelf, never moving, jumping, running—everything children wanted to do. She was made of porcelain and couldn’t be let out. It was a real hardship, to live somewhere as beautiful as Kirrinfief, which had the loch close by, the mountains, and as much freedom and space to play in as a child could dream of, and be stuck indoors all the time watching TV or playing with her iPad.

  And here were all the medical folk of the town—Joan and Cormac and Jake—as well, my goodness, a full house. But they were smiling and chatting and everyone was excited, and the next minute out came Islay herself, being wheeled on a stretcher, sitting up, a tube in her nose to keep her blood supplied with oxygen.

  “I can’t believe it,” Islay’s mother was saying, clutching her hands to her chest. Gregor, her dad, was blinking hard, trying to shush her, that it was very early days, that these things weren’t always a definite, that there were false alarms.

  “Wheels up!” shouted Jake into his walkie-talkie, face beaming.

  “Och, listen to you,” said Cormac, helping him wheel the bed. “With your fancy language! What are you, on Air Force One?”

  “They’re sending a plane with the heart in it.”

  “Who is?”

  “British Airways! They volunteered!”

  “They volunteered to fly here?”

  “I think they had to move a plane,” said Jake. “Anyway, they’re rushing it.”

  Cormac shook his head. “That’s amazing. That’s just amazing.”

  He patted Islay on the shoulder.

  “Can you believe this? They’re rolling the red carpet right out for you.”

  They hopped in the ambulance, Jake in the front, Cormac and Islay’s parents in the back. Even though Islay was thirteen, she was still clinging to an old, raggedy toy seal she must have had since she was a baby.

  Jake had every new gadget on his phone and pulled up an app that identified planes that flew overhead. They ignored him at first, then gathered around, in amazement, watching as the only flight in the air at that hour—BA 978, noted as “special cargo”—blipped its way up the country from London. They fell into silence. Jake gave the phone to Islay to hold and started up the ambulance.

  THE TRIP THROUGH the pitch-black countryside seemed to take forever. Jake had the headlights on high beam, given the unlikeliness of bumping into anyone—at least until 4:30, when the farmers started getting up—and every hedgerow, it seemed, contained a pair of suddenly glowing eyes. Creatures stirred by the road: hooting owls, a shiver of starlings taking off from a tree, a quick rustling in the gorse or the high grass as small creatures rumbled through, past almost before you knew it. Cormac imagined the ambulance, the only little pool of light in the whole world, as it shot past distant darkened farmhouses and vast fields of sleeping cows, one occasionally stirring itself sleepily to watch as the precious cargo sped by; the animals of the Highlands, it felt to Cormac—ridiculously, of course—standing aside respectfully to let them through, nothing standing in their way, as a girl sat on a bed, tracing a plane through the night skies.

  Chapter 11

  The sun rose at six A.M., approaching the March equinox, and Cormac was there to see it, partly because he’d gotten caught up in making sure the operation went all right and partly because he had to wait for Jake, who had to sleep an acceptable amount of time before he was allowed to drive the ambulance back again.

  He didn’t mind. He’d sat with the parents for a while, then, as Joan was still back in Kirrinfief, he took the calls from the hospital office in London, after explaining who he was. He was a little intimidated, talking to the world-class teaching hospital—it felt a little like taking an exam—but he explained as much of Islay’s backstory and state of mind as he could and felt he was more or less doing all right.

  The plane had landed at a little after one o’clock, and another ambulance was dispatched and sent screaming through the streets, with absolutely no cares whom it woke in the process.

  Cormac had watched as they’d jumped out the back, running. The icebox was so small, so inconsequential looking. It looked like nothing, even as it contained the whole world.

  How amazing. And also the sheer luck: the tissue matching, the exactness of the match. He watched as they dashed in, said a wee prayer. Wondered, briefly, about the person who had sacrificed his life to give it, and to think how very, very lucky they were. Or should be.

  LISSA GAVE UP at six. It was light. She closed her heavy, crusty eyes, opened them again, and thought at least she could get in first in the shower, wash it all away. That was one good thing about the nurses’ accommodations: it was triumphantly overheated, which meant almost limitless amounts of hot water, as long as you didn’t mind the low water pressure that made it dribble.

  She stood under the shower, hair tied up, for as long as she could. She probably should have turned it to cold to wake herself up, but she couldn’t bear it. Her whole body hung down. She was weary and bedraggled and grimy to her bones, even as she stood in the shower, and was absolutely dreading the case meeting, whatever Kim-Ange said.

  Chapter 12

  The next week was awful for Lissa. She received a written warning, but more than that, she could see people pointing and talking about her. The young doctor had apparently been furious.

  She tried to bury herself in her work and going out with friends. But she couldn’t sleep. Not at all. Every time she lay down, she saw that young boy’s beautiful face bleeding out. She heard herself screaming at him, saw the ambulance lights flash against the wet pavement. She called Ezra, but he wasn’t answering anyone. She couldn’t blame him.

  During her years in A&E, she’d become hardened to practically anything. But when it was someone you knew: that was different. She got crankier and more careless, was so exhausted she was in tears half the time; not even Kim-Ange could cheer her up, even when she dated a man who liked to go to conventions dressed as a rhinoceros and wanted to know whether Kim-Ange had ever considered doing the same and whether she would like to.

  Lissa felt sick, but that was nothing new these days. Beyond not sleeping well at all, she felt her heart race at the smallest thing. She wasn’t doing well at work either; she could tell. Her regulars had all noticed and remarked upon it, missing her normal cheery demeanor.

  But the spark had gone out of her. She was terrified of everything now: loud noises, even the ambulance sirens she heard every five minutes going in and out of hospitals; sudden movements. It felt like her heart was bursting out of her chest; every time she tried to get
some rest, she was bolt upright again, in agony. She tried sleeping pills, but they made her feel worse, foggy and disconnected, and she was scared she’d be asked to drive the car while taking them.

  Kai’s funeral was exactly what Lissa had feared: a massive community outburst of misery and sadness and rage. His entire school, his church, and the whole of his housing development, it seemed, turned up to pay their respects, singing and crying, spilling out of the large church and onto the street. It was a paroxysm of agony and grief, even as his mother tried to stay dignified and the pastor tried to calm the anger obvious in the crowd at the terrible waste. Ezra didn’t even look at her.

  At the church she linked arms with Kim-Ange, whose large presence was always a comfort. Today Kim-Ange’s hair was bright burgundy, but thankfully she was wearing black rather than the orange and purple she favored. Okay, it was a fuzzy-wuzzy coat that made her look like an enormous black bear, but Lissa found it comforting nevertheless and leaned in as they approached the incredibly busy church. You could hear the hubbub a mile away. Traffic had stopped. People were standing crying in the street.

  They found a tiny spot on a pew. Nobody ever liked to budge up to Kim-Ange. This bothered Kim-Ange not a bit, and she scooched her sizable bottom along the pew as far as she could and patted the seat beside her.

  “Come on, darling.”

  Lissa sat down. She was trembling and checked her pocket with the tissues, just to make sure it was all right. She was going through a lot of tissues these days.

  There was a lot of noise and hustle and bustle; it seemed half the world was there. But suddenly there was a hush, as the doors at the back of the church opened. It was like a wedding, Lissa thought, her heart racing. Only of course so, so wrong.

  The choir stood to the side, their numbers absolutely packed too. On a note, very softly and sweetly they began to gently sing, “Swing low, sweet chariot,” and the pallbearers began a slow, long march down the aisle, carrying a pure white coffin.