500 Miles from You

by Jenny Colgan

  “Alyssa Westcott?” she said briskly, and rather indistinctly.

  “Uh-huh,” said Lissa, finding she was sitting with her arms around her knees on the floor in front of the laptop.

  The woman put her spoon down and squinted. “Sorry,” she said. “All I can see is knee. Do you mind?”

  Lissa changed position but suddenly wasn’t sure what to do. She moved the laptop onto the coffee table, then found herself awkwardly kneeling in front of it like she was in church, which she didn’t like. She tried sitting up and looking down into the screen, but in the little self-image all she could see was her face looming over from above, which wasn’t a great concept. She was also increasingly aware of the fact that the more time it took her to make a decision about how she ought to be and sit, the more that would probably mean to the psychiatrist on the other end of the line sitting waiting patiently, which made her start to blush and feel uncomfortable.

  “Sorry!” she said, her voice sounding high and completely unlike herself, rather like some posh English woman asking if she was on the right train. “I’m not quite sure where to sit!”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said the woman calmly, which of course convinced Lissa that it did, very much, matter a lot, and she twisted around in a panic. She ended up back on the floor again, her legs tucked under her like a little girl. Then she remembered her tea and had to retrieve it.

  Anita the psychiatrist was still smiling patiently at her, even with a quick glance at the upper right-hand quadrant of the screen, which Lissa interpreted, correctly, as a glance at the clock on her computer.

  “Um, ha! Hello! Sorry about that!”

  “Don’t spill your tea,” said Anita.

  “No! Ha, it’s not tea, it’s vodka!”

  Lissa had absolutely no idea why she just said that. Anita smiled politely, as if it didn’t matter to her if it was tea or vodka.

  “I’m only kidding! Look!”

  Lissa tilted the cup toward the camera, which led to a predictable outcome and resulted in more precious seconds lost in finding a tea towel. She was just about to apologize and suggest they start over when a voice suddenly screamed, “Mummmyyy!”

  Anita’s face winced, just a little.

  “Mummy’s busy, darling,” she hissed out of the side of her mouth.

  “Samosa done fall in the toilet.”

  Lissa and Anita both froze.

  “Um, do you want to go sort that out?” said Lissa.

  “No, no, I’m sure it’s fine,” said Anita, doing her best to look unflustered. “Now, where were we? What we’re going to do is carefully go through everything that happened that day, look carefully at the details . . .”

  “I just eating it.”

  There was another long pause.

  “Just go,” said Lissa, even as Anita jumped up, knocking over a tall pile of notes and case files onto the desktop as she went. Lissa glanced at them as she heard a lot of yelling and negotiation taking place off-screen. “PTSD” was written on hers; she could make it out, bold as brass. She stared at it. Was that her? Was that who she was? Some crazy person? With a label and a padded cell and . . .

  Anita came back, her dark hair ruffled, noisy crying still happening off-screen.

  “So,” she said. She started clearing up the papers, spilling her coffee cup in the process. She screwed up her face. “Sorry,” she said. “Some days . . .”

  “I know,” said Lissa. “You work for the NHS. I know what it’s like.”

  But inside she was burning up with her diagnosis.

  “So, I have PTSD?” she found herself saying abruptly.

  “What?” Anita’s phone was ringing. She glanced at it, hung it up. It started ringing again.

  “That’s . . . that’s what you think I have?”

  “I think it’s a— Sorry, I just have to get this.”

  She grabbed the phone.

  “Where are you?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Well, where’s your bus pass? . . . But if you don’t take your bus pass how can you expect . . . I’m working here! . . . Well, you’ll just have to wait. Where are you? Well, what can you see?”

  She made an apologetic face at Lissa, who was beginning to wonder whether this was, in fact, the therapy, designed to make her feel better about being all by herself in the middle of nowhere.

  By the time Anita had untangled herself from the complexities of the phone call and was nervously eyeing something Lissa couldn’t see but could only assume was almost certainly her car keys, their time was almost up.

  “Whether it is or whether it isn’t,” said Anita eventually, “we’ve found the standard treatment protocol helpful.”

  “I know the standard treatment protocol,” said Lissa a little snappily. “You want me to go over it all again.”

  Anita nodded sympathetically. “It’s certainly something we’d want you to try.” Her eyes meandered sideways again.

  Lissa saw red suddenly. “But I do. I go . . . I go through it in my head. Every day. All day. Every time I close my eyes. Every time I see a teenage boy, or hear a yell or a shout.”

  “I realize that,” said Anita as patiently as she could. “That’s why you have to start from the beginning and go through every inch of it. So it loses its power.

  “So. Tell me about that day.”

  “That actual day?” The knot in Lissa’s stomach tightened. She took a very deep breath.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Right now?”

  Anita blinked.

  IT WAS PAINSTAKING, painful. Every detail. The sun on the window frame. The saying goodbye to old Mrs. Marks. The noise of the car revving up . . . its speed, faster and faster. The gleam of the phone in the air.

  “I was looking at the boys shouting at each other . . .”

  Lissa dissolved into sobs. “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t.”

  “You can,” said Anita softly. “You can, Lissa. You were looking at the boys shouting at each other,” she repeated. “You were watching them. What did you notice?”

  Lissa shook, her face creased with tears. Then she took another breath, opened her mouth . . .

  “Mummy!”

  A tiny, sweet face appeared, marched up to the screen, seemed to stare directly at Lissa, and then, to the surprise of everyone, slammed the computer shut.

  LISSA FELT COMPLETELY stranded. The tears still falling down her face, she stared at her computer screen, but the connection was gone and she couldn’t call Anita back; that was how these consultations worked.

  She went, dejectedly, upstairs and turned on the taps to the bath. The pounding of the hot water, the fizzing over of the bubbles; gradually the sounds overtook her sobs. But the fear remained. There was something wrong with her. That’s why she’d been sent away.

  She grabbed her book, retrieved her tea, and sank slowly into the bubble bath. Every time her mind spun back to Kai she forced her attention back to her book and took another slug of tea. As her mind quieted, she listened outside, to the wind whistling through the trees and the calls of distant owls, and instead of finding them threatening, she found them calming.

  She knew, even in the brief time they’d managed to discuss the incident, that on one level, Anita was absolutely right. She would have to think about it, would have to be able to work it through in her head, to stop the panic attacks and the anxiety.

  But right here, with a warm bath and a book, and almond-scented bubbles and a cup of tea, and the sound of the wind through the trees instead of traffic and sirens and helicopters—well, she wasn’t going to think about it. Not right now.

  Chapter 31

  And Lissa did feel better when she woke up, after another surprising night’s sleep. It had to be the fresh air; every breath felt like she’d never properly opened up her lungs before. But then she’d woken up very early, light creeping through, and the fear had returned. She looked out the window at the greenery in the garden, trying to calm herself, then gave up and scro
lled through Instagram until it was a decent time to get up.

  Her first appointment wasn’t until later, so she popped into the little grocers and picked up some amazingly cheap eggs (she didn’t know they were cheap, she never bought eggs) direct from Lennox’s farm, some local butter and milk, and some sliced bread from the baker, and she had time to make herself some scrambled eggs on toast. The sun was rising earlier; there was a chill wind, but she discovered, out the back of the cottage, the small patio next to the wall was an almost perfect sun trap, warm enough to sit out on regardless of the wind.

  She tried to block out what had happened with the psychiatrist the night before, just change the mental subject, and checked in with Kim-Ange, whose Instagram was full of her dressing up and wearing different hats in what looked suspiciously like the millinery department at Peter Jones, where they tended to take a rather dim view of that sort of thing. She missed her, suddenly, missed her old life completely. It was almost the weekend. They’d be up to all sorts. Then she looked at her case file for the day, and her heart skipped a beat.

  She knew she wasn’t supposed to know. But seriously, you couldn’t avoid it. “Young (f), heart and lung transplant,” and the dates matched. They hadn’t pulled this place out of thin air. Not at all.

  Cormac’s notes were very straightforward: “Brilliant!” he’d headed them up with. Lissa blinked. It wasn’t remotely brilliant, and this was hardly tactful.

  She stood up and washed her dishes, then found herself making up a packed lunch—a packed lunch! Who was she? But then it wasn’t her fault there wasn’t a Pret a Manger for two hundred miles. She took a picture of it and sent it to Kim-Ange to make her smile: a cheese sandwich, augmented with something she found in Cormac’s cupboards that she very much hoped was homemade pickle. No tofu. No bean sprouts. No cronuts and no bento boxes. She added a couple of russet apples and contemplated buying a thermos and smiled, just a little, wondering who she was.

  IT WAS TRULY a lovely morning, and Lissa decided to walk in—she was going to the center of the village, she could put her medical bag in a rucksack on her shoulders, and it wasn’t likely that she was going to be mugged or leave it on a tube train.

  And it really was a glorious day; she stopped for a full five minutes across the road, watching a full field of brand-new lambs hop and skip. They were hilarious: tumbling, jumping over puddles, then every so often making bleating noises and skittering back to the comfort and safety of their mothers, who placidly ignored them as they ran rings around them and reached their little pink mouths up to suckle. They were entirely enchanting in the sunshine and hard to watch without your spirits rising at least a little.

  She focused on her breathing as she approached the little terraced house. Annoyance leaped in her once again as she wished her psychiatrist hadn’t been so brusque or, if she was being truly honest, hadn’t allowed her child to hang up the call. Stupid NHS cutbacks, she told herself, throwing her in the deep end like that. And now this.

  The door was flung open almost before she had finished ringing it. The woman there, though, looked confused to see her.

  “Och no!” she said. “Where’s Cormac?”

  “Um, he’s on secondment,” said Lissa. “It’s me instead. Sorry.”

  “Aye!” said the woman, beaming. “Oh, I heard all about you!”

  “Yes, I’m beginning to realize that,” said Lissa, trying to sound as friendly as the locals, rather than slightly sarcastic.

  “Is he liking it?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Lissa.

  The woman looked at her. “But he’s doing your job?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’ve no chatted about it?”

  Lissa shrugged. “Not really,” she said. “How’s . . .”

  She had trouble pronouncing the name, but the woman’s face lit up.

  “Oh well. You didn’t see her before. You had to see her before. That’s why I wish Cormac were here.”

  “Well, he isn’t . . .”

  “I know. But I wanted him to see this.”

  Lissa followed, feeling very second best, into the little tidy sitting room.

  Sitting in front of Pitch Perfect was a very thin, pale little girl with black circles beneath her eyes. The fact that she was sitting up was somewhat lost on Lissa.

  “Hello,” the girl said softly. Her face screwed up. “Where’s Cormac?”

  Lissa smiled thinly. “Oh, well, he’s in London. I’m standing in for him for a bit. Think of me as Other Cormac.”

  There was a pause while Lissa wondered if she was going to meet a hostile reception. Then the girl’s face brightened.

  “Will you tell him? Will you tell him you saw me? Will you tell him everything?”

  “Um, of course.”

  “Will you take a photo?”

  “No, that’s not allowed.”

  Islay frowned, but her mother relaxed and went to put the kettle on.

  “Take a picture!” the girl insisted bossily, and put on a huge grin and a ta-da with her hands. “Do it!”

  Lissa tried to smile patiently. “I’d lose my job,” she said.

  The girl looked suspicious.

  “And so would Cormac.”

  But already the mother was bustling back in, smiling expectantly. “Och, he’ll be wanting a picture,” she said. Islay smiled triumphantly and posed again, and Lissa, reluctantly, snapped her.

  The girl’s blood pressure, heart rate, healing scar—all were fine, totally normal. The parents both lingered at the doorway, fearfully watching Lissa’s every move in a way that made the back of her neck prickle. She didn’t understand why they were so smug and triumphalist about it all. Didn’t they realize? Didn’t they know that an innocent boy’s blood had trickled out on the pavement for this?

  It wasn’t until later that night when she got the email back from Cormac that she realized what she had missed.

  To: cormac.macpherson@npl.nhs.uk

  * * *

  Um, hi. The Coudrie family asked me to write to you directly and send you a picture.

  Oh, and thanks for the house and everything. I took the spare room, by the way. Oh, and I picked some daffodils, I hope that was okay. Hope everything is okay with you.

  Anyway, she seems fine, all vitals normal. I’m not sure I even needed to be there. Scar fine and healing fast, patient well in herself, talkative, seems perfectly normal situation. Don’t know if follow-up visits will be required as long as immunosuppression initiation continues as normal, but they were very adamant I let you know and send you a picture. PLEASE don’t share it. I know I shouldn’t send it but she was quite persuasive.

  Yours sincerely,

  Alyssa Westcott

  CORMAC HAD HAD a trying day. He had mixed up the dogs and was slightly perturbed that in discussing the dogs, Alyssa had completely failed to mention that James had a boa constrictor in the house. He hadn’t been terrified exactly; it would just have been nice to have had a bit of forewarning.

  On the plus side, he’d gotten lost only three times and been shouted at by only two cyclists, once for reasons that almost weren’t his fault. And he’d gone for a pint after work and been charged £7, and while he didn’t think of himself as a stingy man, and certainly didn’t want to live up to any kind of Scottish cliché, internally he couldn’t help wincing. And it wasn’t like Eck’s pub, where anyone—hill walkers, tourists, locals, long-lost American cousins searching for their roots—would strike up a conversation with you and where the pub was a convivial meeting place full of dogs and farmers and talk of weather and general hospitableness after a long day. Here there was nowhere to sit and large groups of aggressive young men, and everyone was ignoring everyone else, and there was a slight atmosphere of menace, and the beer tasted like fizz and nothing else, and Cormac had always thought of himself as a man of fairly simple tastes, but he wasn’t sure he fitted in here at all.

  And the streets were completely astonishing to him. There was a tramp i
n Kirrinfief, Dorcan. He’d been there longer than anyone could remember; nobody even knew if that was his real name. He came and went, slept in the churchyard, accepted soup and meals left out for him, spoke to no one, but sat on his bench then went on his way again to who knew where. Nobody knew anything about him, and he discouraged chat, even from Judith the friendly vicar, whose garden he was effectively sleeping in. She left the vestry open for him, but he never used it, even on the wettest of nights.

  But here—there were people just lying about everywhere, in underpasses and shop doorways, over vents and under bridges. And nobody batted an eyelid. It seemed completely fine. Cormac was entirely baffled by the whole thing but followed what other people did: bought the Big Issue when he saw it, blinked in puzzlement. Wasn’t everyone here rich? Walking about the city, he’d seen a gold car parked in Covent Garden; restaurants where everything cost £30; shops that smelled of money, with fantastical window displays, Wonder Rooms; and jewelers with watches that cost more than he made in a year.

  He knew he didn’t understand politics—he’d spent enough time sitting in a desert for reasons he didn’t quite grasp to pretend to know anything about anything. But this was so very odd, that everyone had just learned to live with loads of people lying on the ground.

  Lissa’s email changed his mood in an instant. He pulled out his laptop in the pub and typed back,

  To: alyssa.westcott@npl.nhs.uk

  * * *

  I bet she was!!!! That’s brilliant! That’s just so fantastic! I can’t believe she’s sitting up! And talking of her own accord! Christ, they must be over the moon—thank you, THANK YOU for doing the house call and reporting back, I’ve been worried sick.

  Amazing. Sometimes this job is really fricking amazing, don’t you think? Also, thank you for the dog warning, but if you feel like adding snake warnings at any point, that would also be appreciated.