by Jenny Colgan
“What about the ghost train?” Zoe was saying, and the taller of the small children said, “We absolutely do not want to meet any more ghosts, Nanny Seven,” and 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 each other.
“Hello, you two,” said Zoe, and Lissa felt odd to hear them referred to as a couple.
“Hello,” said Lissa, smiling.
“Lollipops!” hollered Patrick. “You’re the lady with all the lollipops. And jabs. 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 jabs,” 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 meters 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.” Zoe grimaced, 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’s 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 favorite 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 one was comforting a child sobbing his heart out.
“What’s the matter?” said Lissa instantly.
“Och,” said the woman thoughtfully. “I’m not sure if the ghost train is getting scarier or bairns are getting more scared.”
“The world is getting scarier,” guessed Lissa. “We probably don’t need ghost trains too.”
“Aye,” said the wee lad whose shoulders were shaking.
Jake had been bustled away and was being fed sandwiches.
“You know this lad. Always ready to help out,” said the first woman, 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.” Lissa smiled. “That’s okay. Jake, you eat your fill.”
Chapter 52
Cormac popped next door in response to a loud banging on the thin wall. It was definitely a summoning banging, though.
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 herself in the mirror. Her purple eye shadow matched exactly, as did her high velvet boots.
“Well?” she said, turning around 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 she grabbed her purple clutch bag, kissed him on the cheek, and left instead.
“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 WAS SOMETHING about standing in a very long queue that was 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, an aura of vaguely suppressed threat in the air. They walked past the skateboarders under the Royal Festival Hall, who shouted and entranced children cheek by jowl with expensively dressed older people on their way to concerts and the theater; frozen-still mimes standing in the middle of the street, balancing on poles and getting in the way; art and books for sale; hawkers; jugglers; people yelling and handing out leaflets—the whole noisy cacophony of life. The smog hanging above the water and the great towers of the east took on a pink tinge in the early evening.
The air smelled of food vans and garbage and fuel, and he 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.
Yazzie was chatting about someone she’d seen on her ward rounds, and he listened cheerfully enough, as they dodged and weaved around the hundreds of other people on the narrow bridge that cut its way up to Charing Cross station, next to thundering trains on the track beside them, above gray water filled with pleasure boats and dredgers, odd flat structures covered in cement, and a lifeboat station. The clouds seemed to seal the heat to the ground. He accidentally bumped into one group of tourists, fell back, and jostled a large man who looked furious with him and swore under his breath.
His newfound fondness for the big city was muted tonight; he was thinking about how the fair was always such a fun time. He’d normally go a couple of times. Jake would get in with the St. John’s Ambulance ladies, who got free passes to everything but never wanted to use them—it was obviously a scam, they should have gone to a much more deserving cause, but Jake had the gift of the gab and that was that.
He hoped he was nice to Lissa. It would be cool there tonight. Bright as well, you wouldn’t get a whiff of sunset till ten P.M. There’d be a breeze probably; the right kind of evening for just a shirt and a jumper and being totally comfortable wherever you were, with fresh air and the sweet smell of the last of the bluebells on the air, as well as the gorse, warmed by the sun through the day . . . he could almost feel it. And smell the candy floss on the air, and feel you couldn’t be happier . . .
“So, anyway, we drained about a liter of bile from his abdomen,” Yazzie was saying.
Cormac blinked. “Is that right?” he said.
She looked worried. “Sorry, is that gross? Before dinner?”
“Naw, naw, not at all,” said Cormac.
In fact, it wasn’t before dinner at all. Lissa had been right, they’d had to queue; what she hadn’t been correct about was it certainly wasn’t an hour. It was at least ninety minutes.
Something happened in the queue. Looking around, Cormac could see most people on their phones; some had been left to hold places while their presumably more popular mates whooped it up in a local bar somewhere. Some couples were tight in conversation, as if they were as happy to be in a queue together as they would be anywhere else, and s
ome groups of friends were doing that slightly nervous loud thing groups do at the beginning of a night out, before they’ve all managed to have a drink and settle down. They were whooping at each other and shouting performatively and welcoming more and more members to their group, until Cormac started to doubt whether they were ever going to make it to the front of the queue.
“What do they sell here?” he said, realizing that both of them were actually finding the conversation a little slow and stilted; that even before they knew each other, they kind of looked like one of those couples with absolutely nothing to say to each other, once she’d told him about old Mr. Haber’s drained cyst.
“Buns,” said Yazzie, pointing to the menu in the window.
“Buns?” Cormac screwed up his face. He didn’t want a bun; he was starving.
“Bao,” said Yazzie. “They’re like Chinese street food. They’re filled with meat and stuff.”
“Meat buns,” said Cormac. They had already been there for forty-five minutes. His shirt was sticking to his back and his neck felt grimy, simply from standing on a narrow sidewalk with cabs and trucks squeezing past him every second.
“Apparently they’re amazing,” said Yazzie sullenly, because she had bought a new orange dress for this and told all her mates about how she’d managed to pull that hot Scottish NPL they all liked, and now she was standing on a sidewalk with a guy who looked like he’d rather be on the moon than here.
If it was warm in Kirrinfief, there was a little hidden bay down by the loch where you couldn’t drive, only walk, and as long as you took all your rubbish away, the police (Gregory Duncan from Hart’s farm; they’d all been to school together) would turn a blind eye to it, and they’d light a bonfire and drink cider and watch as the sky barely darkened as the hour neared midnight, and they could play their music as loud as they wanted, nobody was anywhere near to hear them, not for miles, and they watched the stars pop out, one by one, never too bright, for the night wasn’t long enough for them to shine; the north of the planet had tilted too far on its axis.
Stars were for a different season; this was their season of light. Someone would sometimes bring a guitar, and everyone else would groan and throw stones and call them a James Blunt fud, but even so, if the gentle chords of “Caledonia” or “Sunshine on Leith” started up, well, it wouldn’t really be possible not to sing along to that, would it, as the moon reflected on the calm waters of the loch and its endless rippling glory. And as soon as the sun was sunk on one side of the dark shapes of the mountains, it felt the lightest rays of the dawn were just appearing once more.
They had been such happy nights. Cormac found himself wondering if that’s where Jake would take Lissa and whether she’d like it. Just a bonfire, some cider, a bit of music, some hamburgers and marshmallows. Nothing fancy. Occasionally a soft toy someone had won at the fair, which would get to sit on a proper throne made of sticks, after the year Gordon Lowrie had thrown one in the fire, and the nylon had sparked and melted horribly and the plastic eyes had dropped down the edges of the pink bear, and all the girls had screamed and gotten upset with him. After that, stuffed animals had pride of place.
He smiled to himself. Yazzie cleared her throat crossly.
“Ach. Where were we?” he said, looking up. The queue hadn’t moved at all.
“Meat buns,” she said.
Chapter 53
Meanwhile, three miles across town, two people had, amazingly, found a very quiet space.
Piotr had arrived in London with absolutely no money whatsoever, nothing more than the bus fare to Victoria station. He had spent the first six months, when he couldn’t afford even to eke out a beer, at the Polish Centre and walking around and around the huge, terrifying, expensive city, walking for miles along unfamiliar sidewalks with foreign signs and extraordinary monuments and strange things. So he was taking Kim-Ange to somewhere he really liked, because you could be a tourist for only so long before you started getting deeper and deeper into what was around you, and one of his endless drizzly Sunday walks had taken him to this enchanted spot.
Piotr wasn’t 100 percent up on the difference between South Korean and Japanese but thought she might like it, and he was right, she did.
Buried deep in Holland Park, well off the main thoroughfares and hard to find unless you already knew it was there, was Kyoto Garden, its colors burnished and bright in the West London evening, full of exotic plants and knotted trees and streams with little bridges. There was nobody there, but a pair of cranes nested at the water’s edge, just below the waterfall. It was breathtakingly lovely.
Piotr opened the rucksack he had been clunking all the way from the tube station, and he pulled out one large bottle of brown beer, one smaller one of vodka, a bag of dumplings one of his substitute aunties at the Polish club had rustled up for him, a box of sushi just in case, and a family-sized bar of Dairy Milk. Kim-Ange grinned widely and grabbed the vodka and the chocolate.
“Normally I hate picnics,” she said, looking around at the tranquil site, the water trickling through the curves of the beautifully made little streams with wooden bridges, smooth rocks, and carp. “But I might make an exception for you.”
And some time later, Piotr was sitting giving bits of dumpling to the fish until Kim-Ange made him stop and they found their two hands together, and their heads even closer, and suddenly, as the fish bubbled in the water and the waterfall tinkled overhead and there was a faint rustling of perfectly manicured fronds, but nobody else at all, they kissed, and even if there was a whole London, a whole eight million people, around them, they were not aware of another soul.
STROLLING BACK TO the tube station, giggly, tripping over their feet, clutching hands, Kim-Ange whispered something into his ear. Piotr shook his head.
“To me, you are only yourself,” he said stoutly, for his diminutive figure, his narrow hips and short height, belied a man with the heart of a lion. “Only yourself.”
Chapter 54
Lissa supposed people liked fairground rides for the same reason they liked scary films: the freedom of knowing that you felt a little frightened but you were actually incredibly safe.
But these rides—these were more than watching a horror film. It was stupid, and she felt she was making up for her childhood, but it was the wind in your hair and, in fact, the view you got, even when the ride paused for only a little bit at the top—it was like a double-edged sword, and everybody else was screaming their heads off with delight or horror.
She, by contrast, liked to try to hold the sight in her head; it was the best view she had had of the absolute vastness of the loch. It seemed to go on forever, and even though the day was still bright, the center of it was pitch dark. No wonder, she thought. No wonder they thought there was a monster in there. It was magical. She almost forgot to scream as they plummeted like a stone, until it looked like they would hit the ground, then just in time brushed past it and were on the rise again, and the view would unfold like a magnificent carpet, and she could see farther and farther as she turned her head: the rolling roofs of the little cobbled village, undulating over the fell; the neat layout of the farmers’ fields stretching ahead; the long line of the railway with a dark red train hurtling down its tracks; and the great body of water. She felt like she could touch the clouds. She wanted to stay up there all day.
Jake thought he’d have to put his arm around her—it was, he was finding, a very intense ride indeed, particularly when you’d just eaten three Scotch eggs and four Penguin biscuits, as pressed upon him by the good ladies of the St. John’s Ambulance. He felt distinctly queasy and wished the damn thing would stop. He shut his eyes to make it pass.
Lissa, meanwhile, couldn’t have enjoyed it more and wished it had lasted longer. She was absolutely blown away by the beauty and drama of the landscape; the ride had made her feel as high as the mountaintops, as close to the birds that circled in the updrafts. She sighed with something perilously close to happiness.
“That was amazing
,” she said, when they finally got unclipped and rejoined the music and flashing lights and commotion of the fair at ground level. “I’d be happy just to be up there all the time!”
Jake couldn’t answer; he was very busy simply trying not to throw up and wiped the sweat off his brow.
“Are you okay?” said Lissa.
Jake nodded, wishing he could sit down.
“Do you need . . .” Lissa smiled. “Do we need to go back to the St. John’s tent?”
The thought of more Scotch eggs was simply too much for Jake. He held up a finger and charged off into the woods.
Lissa, surprised, smiled to herself. Then she glanced at her phone—out of habit, more than thinking anyone would be in touch. She wasn’t missing Instagram and Facebook, not usually. But she would have liked to have posted the view. It was quite something.
There was nothing there, of course, except a little dot on her WhatsApp. She opened it. It was a picture of three white spherical things, hard to make out.
Meat buns, she read, 90-minute wait. Excellent!!!!
She put her phone back, smiling. Well. Someone was having a good date, she supposed.
CORMAC COULDN’T HELP it. He was distracted, and that wasn’t fair. Ironically, of course, it was Jake who had told him all along: don’t be distracted, stop just falling into things. Think about the person you’re with.
He looked up at Yazzie, who smiled back at him nervously, aware this wasn’t going very well. She’d started a long story about the worst wound she’d ever seen, which, on balance, she really wished she hadn’t, especially as she had to shout above the insane noise levels in the bar. They were crammed into a tiny corner space. At least, she thought, the food was amazing—and it truly was, Cormac had never tasted anything like it; every herb and flavor superbly delineated, tasting fresh and light—so that was something.
“This is amazing,” he said. Then found his thoughts, once again, straying north and wondering if the hot dog stall was there and if Lissa was enjoying herself. He resisted the urge to check his phone; this was awful. He was behaving like some kind of bounder.