500 Miles from You

by Jenny Colgan

  Lots of people had told Lissa what they thought she needed—a love affair, to get drunk, to go on holiday, to fall in love, to travel the world—and she hadn’t enjoyed any of that either. She weighed up what she thought Joan’s response would be.

  “Is it a dog?” she said.

  Joan smiled. “Well, that and a bit of fresh air, I would say. Lots of walks, lots of being out in the countryside. That’s a cure for just about anything.”

  Lissa looked out the window, where it had clouded over ominously. “Doesn’t it rain all the time here?” she said.

  “So what?” said Joan, stumped at the question.

  She went back to her files and pulled some out.

  “Cormac will send you his case notes,” said Joan. “These are just the current ones dished out.”

  “So what kind of thing do you see around here, then?” said Lissa.

  “Oh, the usual. Some diabetes care. Bit of stoma work. Vaccinations. Old. Farming accidents.”

  “What?” said Lissa.

  “People lose bits to tractors. More often than you’d think. That kind of thing.”

  “What kind of bits?”

  “Sticky-out bits,” said Joan matter-of-factly, walking into the waiting room and throwing open the unlocked door.

  Lissa twirled around. “You leave your door open?!”

  “Well, they’re very welcome to the Homes and Gardens back issues and the broken toy garage.”

  Lissa stepped through in wonder. The old front room of the house was the waiting room, and it was thankfully rather cleaner than Joan’s car, although she suspected faintly that the dogs still did indeed get in here from time to time. There were toys, posters warning against smoking and drinking—nothing notably different from London, except that every other inch of the walls was covered in pictures of dogs and horses; there was a stag’s head on one wall and a stuffed greyhound in a glass case in the corner.

  Lissa started when she saw it.

  “Ah, yes. Cosmo.” Joan sighed. “Wonderful, wonderful animal. Could never let him go.”

  “Doesn’t it scare the children?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! They love him!”

  Lissa stared at the glassy eyes. “Are you sure?”

  Joan snorted. “Here,” she said, indicating a whitewashed room, thankfully free of taxidermied pets. “This is Cormac’s office.”

  “He gets an office to himself?”

  “Aye. He’s got one up at the hospital too.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  Lissa normally did all her notes back in her room, and if she was lucky she got to squeeze into a staff room at one of the bigger practices every now and again.

  Joan blinked. “There’s six rooms upstairs we don’t use at all.”

  “Cor,” said Lissa. “In London this would be worth, like, millions.”

  “Yes,” sniffed Joan with a tone of utter disdain. “But it would be in London.”

  Chapter 21

  Cormac looked around. His room was tiny—more of a cell than a room, really—long, narrow, cheerless. How did people live like this? Where did they go when they needed to stretch their legs? There was not a piece of green to be seen anywhere out the window, just concrete and cars and more concrete and the occasional spindly, sickly-looking bare tree, roped off from the pavement. He watched the people below him streaming across the roundabout when the lights went green, taking big steps and little ones, as the endless circling traffic and lines of buses and cabs stopped and started and belched smog and stopped again. It was dizzying. How did people stop? How did they calm down and take a deep breath? He opened the window. The air was harsh with exhaust fumes and the noise was incredible. He quickly shut the window again and poured himself a glass of water from the sink. Then he poured it away. It was lukewarm and chalky and hard and absolutely revolting. Perhaps it was just the pipes, he thought. Maybe it was just old pipes.

  He looked at his watch. It was only ten in the morning and he didn’t report for work until the following day. There were millions of people in the city, and he didn’t know a single one of them. He’d never been surrounded by so many people in his entire life, and he’d never felt so lonely.

  There was a loud knock on the door.

  JOAN GAVE HER the list of appointments for the next day and the keys to the cottage.

  “I have surgery,” she said. “You’ll be all right getting on, won’t you?”

  Lissa wasn’t sure about this but nodded her head.

  “Are you always this quiet?” said Joan. “You’re like that other English girl.”

  “There’s another English girl?”

  “Oh, we’re infested with them.”

  “You’re English! Well, you sound English.”

  Joan fixed her with a horrified glance. “I’m from Edinburgh! This is how we talk.”

  Lissa couldn’t see why it could possibly matter whether you had an English accent and wondered whether saying something like that wasn’t rather . . . racist . . . but she tried to smile politely and listen to Joan’s directions, even as they vanished from her brain as soon as she found herself outside the white surgery.

  CORMAC WOULDN’T HAVE been entirely surprised if his mum and her friends from the church community Zumba group had appeared there with nine boxes of Tunnock’s tea cakes; but, in fact, the apparition that greeted him was even less expected.

  The most extraordinary person Cormac had ever seen was standing in the doorframe. Was larger than the doorframe, Cormac realized. At least six feet, with big, burly shoulders; a huge swath of beautiful shiny, long black hair braided around her head; a fully made-up face, including pink and yellow eye shadow and vast amounts of sticky pink lip gloss—all balanced over an extremely roomy pair of blue scrubs and a pair of pink glittery trainers.

  “Hello!” said the voice with a broad Estuary accent. “Ooh! She didn’t say you were a fittie!”

  Cormac considered himself a fairly easygoing character on the whole, but he wasn’t the least bit sure where to look.

  “I’m Kim-Ange,” continued the creature, entering the room. “She didn’t tell you about me? I thought you guys were emailing each other.”

  “I’ve . . . sent her one email,” said Cormac.

  “I’m not surprised she wanted to keep you to herself!” said Kim-Ange. “We tried to look you up. You know your Facebook profile is absolute crap.”

  “Aye . . . I don’t really do Facebook.”

  “You don’t do Instagram either! And why not?”

  Kim-Ange sat down on his bed in a familiar fashion, even as it creaked beneath her weight.

  “Um . . . well, I see most of the people I want to see. And I don’t really see the point of it otherwise, unless you want to show off and all that.”

  “That,” said Kim-Ange, “is annoyingly sensible. And misses out on the joy of showing off.”

  Cormac shook his head.

  “But you’ve heard of the internet? They have the internet in Scotland?”

  “As long as we’ve positioned the ram’s horns in the right direction. So . . . you’re a nurse?”

  “No, I just love the fabulous outfit,” said Kim-Ange, looking down at her dull scrubs in distaste.

  “Which specialty?”

  “Cardiology.”

  “Oh, I bet you’re useful. Lot of . . .” Cormac had been about to say that there was a lot of heaving heavy people about, which there was, but realized just in time that this would not be the right thing to say, as Kim-Ange gave him a look.

  “Because of my warm and empathetic manner?”

  “Um, yes,” said Cormac, blushing bright red to the roots of his sandy hair.

  It was just a glance. But Kim-Ange caught it. She was absolutely attuned to being able to figure out whether people were allies or not. Abuse from strangers she could handle—had to, every single day of her life. But sometimes it was nice just to make a friend. She had come in to invite him to a nurses’ drinks party. She almost changed her
mind.

  Cormac had never met anyone like her before. He’d never given anything much thought beyond what he knew. His stuttered hesitation and hastily constructed excuse about being tired were simply confusion on his part but were taken for something rather worse by Kim-Ange. She turned on her surprisingly dainty feet with a quick, tight smile and left the room, leaving Cormac with the horrible certainty that he’d been there five minutes and he’d already done something very, very wrong.

  Chapter 22

  If Kirrinfief had been a tiny bit bigger, Lissa would have gotten immediately lost, but not understanding Joan’s directions had given her a chance to wander a little.

  There was a small stream at the village’s edge that fed into the loch, and down there she found another large, impressive house that formed the nursery (well, she assumed it was the nursery; children were screaming their heads off in the garden and chasing each other with sticks, so it was either the nursery or something she really didn’t want to get involved in at this stage) and a tiny redbrick school that looked incredibly cute; and along the road a little farther, out of the village altogether on a grassy verge, stood the cottage.

  Okay. She knew what her job paid. Cormac got paid less than her because she got central London weighting. But even with that, and even living in subsidized accommodation—even with both those things—she could never, ever, ever afford a place of her own, certainly not one as beautiful as this.

  It wasn’t flashy, or incredible, or like something you’d see in an interior-decorating magazine, nothing like that. It was a cottage, roughly whitewashed in the same style as the bigger house with the GP surgery. It had a roof that had obviously once been thatch but was now slate, with two dormer windows in it; a red wooden front door with a protruding porch that had a shoe rack, presumably for Wellingtons, and an umbrella box with two walking sticks leaning out of it in a friendly way. There were two windows at the sides of the door, giving it the friendly visage of a house a child might draw, and a stone step straight onto the pavement.

  Behind it was a small, tidy garden with a vegetable patch planted neatly. Imagine, thought Lissa, having time to tend a vegetable patch. She had never met anyone in her life with the time: not her family, always busy; not her fellow nurses, some of whom worked two jobs to get through nursing college and the university courses that were required these days; not her school friends. She barely knew anyone with a garden, not to mention a vegetable patch. She had assumed this nurse guy was . . . well, she hadn’t really thought about him at all after they’d failed to find much on Facebook. This was something that was happening to her, after all. She really, really hoped he didn’t expect her to keep his vegetable patch alive. Because she really didn’t have a clue how.

  She added it to her worry stack, went back around the front, and turned the rusty key in the old lock, both nervous and rather excited.

  The door creaked open straight onto a cozy sitting room—no hallway or corridor at all.

  A wood-burning stove sat in the middle of the side wall, with an old fireplace surround; a leather sofa and a floral sofa bunched companionably around it. On the other side was a dinner table that looked underutilized, and through the back was a small, functional kitchen on a wobbly-built extension with several glass windows overlooking the back garden. Behind the house was the stream, cutting through the bottom of the garden, and then . . . nothing.

  Beyond the wooden fence were fields leading to woods straight ahead, and the mountains loomed behind them. If there hadn’t been an electricity tower in the distance, she could have been in any time from the past three centuries. It was really rather extraordinary.

  She turned back to go upstairs. She was slightly worried about entering a strange man’s bedroom as she mounted the small staircase. She needn’t have worried. There were two tiny rooms underneath the eaves, a tongue-and-groove bathroom in between them, and she was obviously expected to sleep in the spare, which suited her fine. The whole place was spotlessly clean. She wondered about him again. Gay? Some male nurses were, but that didn’t mean anything. A pickup artist? She couldn’t imagine many players would choose to live in a cottage in the middle of nowhere, though.

  Lissa hauled her bag up the narrow stairs and considered unpacking. The house was freezing and she couldn’t figure out where the central heating was. It hadn’t occurred to her that it might not have heating. Hang on. How was that going to work?

  Back downstairs she found a folder full of instructions for anything and everything—the hot water heater, the fact that she had to light the log burner and that would heat everything else. There were no instructions on how to light the log burner. This was obviously something he assumed everybody knew how to do. She opened the back door and glanced outside, and sure enough, just next to the kitchen extension was a huge pile of chopped-up logs that gave off a warm, aromatic smell. In the kitchen were a small packet of fire starters and a box of matches. She stared at them for a long time, feeling as if civilization had ended and she was going to have to get on with life as the last person on earth. She felt the now-familiar feeling of panic creep up on her.

  Then there was a knock at the door.

  Chapter 23

  Cormac figured he should probably go out and look at a bit of London. He took the tube up to Leicester Square, walked into the M&M’s shop while wondering what on earth the point of that was, considered going to see a film until he saw the cost of a ticket, and ended up having a very poor meal in the window of a steak house, exactly as he had the last time. He didn’t feel it was going very well.

  How’s it going? Jake had texted him. Met any supermodels yet?

  Cormac rolled his eyes. I think I managed to insult someone already, he said. I’m not sure how I’m going to get on here.

  Aye, well, everyone in London’s a weirdo, typed Jake, man of the world. Was it a woman?

  Think so, typed Cormac tentatively.

  Did you apologize?

  No.

  Well, do that then!

  I’m not sure what I’m apologizing for.

  That NEVER MATTERS with women.

  So Cormac set out to find the local supermarket next to his digs, quite pleased to have an errand.

  He found it extremely confusing—there was no square sausage or Irn-Bru, the crisps were different—and in general it was not entirely unlike the time he’d been to Spain and wasn’t sure what to ask for whenever he was hungry, and once he’d ordered some toast with butter and everyone had laughed at him because he’d asked for toast with a donkey on it.

  Anyway. He had made a mistake on his very first day and thought he’d take Kim-Ange a small gift. The shop didn’t sell tablet candies or Tunnock’s tea cakes or Edinburgh Rock or soor plooms or Oddfellows, so he was slightly puzzled as to what she might like but eventually went for a box of Dairy Milk and knocked on her door.

  She opened it up, looking magnificent in her Japanese robe.

  “Och.” Cormac pushed his hair out of his face, trying to look sorry. “I thought . . . I thought we maybe got off on the wrong foot,” he added.

  Kim-Ange sniffed and folded her arms and raised a black eyebrow, all at the same time.

  “I’m . . . from a very small village.”

  “That has never heard of the internet or the outside world. We established that.”

  Cormac looked down at the chocolates. “Well, I’ll just leave these here,” he said. English people were, he had concluded, very, very confusing.

  “I’m lactose intolerant,” said Kim-Ange.

  “I’ll throw them in the bin then,” said Cormac, picking them up and retreating.

  Kim-Ange stuck her arm out of the doorway and snatched the box. “Well,” she said quickly, “it comes and goes.”

  And she shut the door, making sure she didn’t betray even a hint of a smile.

  Chapter 24

  As soon as he’d knocked on the door of Cormac’s cottage, Jake realized that turning up unannounced to greet a strange woman w
ho’d just arrived in town might be seen as a bit . . . well . . . odd.

  But on the other hand, he told himself, he was going to have to work with her after all. Might as well be friendly. Yeah. Friendly. Just checking in.

  The sun was going down behind the meadow as Jake looked around. Ach, come on, surely she was going to like it here all right. It was gorgeous. And with someone like him to show her the sights . . .

  Of course that wouldn’t be appropriate. At all. But Jake liked playing the odds, and there were few enough girls in the area—several mostly liked him, which was fine, but they were hardly a challenge when he thought about it—and Ginty MacGuire still had her eye on him, just like she had in fifth year, and she was about the prettiest girl in Kirrinfief, even if she was also a pain in the tonsils, so, you know, they’d probably get around to that one of these days. But no harm in checking to see if there was any competition . . .

  “Yeah?” a loud English voice shouted at him from the other side of the door, instead of just yelling “come in.”

  This was unheard of. Jake considered opening the door and just walking in, as he’d have done if Cormac were home, but (thankfully) discarded that idea (Lissa would have hit him with a lamp she’d already eyed up).

  “Hi . . . uh, it’s Jake Inglis? I’m the paramedic. Did Cormac not mention me?”

  Lissa cursed. This was the second time she was in trouble for not actually reading the stuff Cormac had so thoughtfully typed up for her and therefore following the most basic of his instructions. She hadn’t left him anything, had just assumed that her entire world was pretty obvious. Was that what anxiety did to you? she thought. Made you so focused on the tumult inside you that you couldn’t focus on anyone else, not properly?

  Tentatively, she opened the door a crack. It wasn’t locked, she realized. Presumably if he was going to murder her he’d just have walked in.

  Jake, perceiving what she was thinking, stepped back.

  “Just me,” he said. “Except, of course, you don’t know me, so saying ‘just me’ isn’t much use. Ha. Aye. And also I’m not in my uniform, so . . .”