Where Have All the Boys Gone?

by Jenny Colgan

  ‘…so, but, actually, apart from that, it’s lovely, great and we’re very happy,’ she finished in a gush.

  Harry was quiet.

  ‘She’s your mum, isn’t she?’

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘Gran?’

  ‘Aunt, actually. Brought me up after my mum died.’

  Uncharitably, Katie’s first thought was, ‘well, that explains a lot’. Her second was, ‘how annoying, having that to throw in every time you wanted to win a conversation’. Fortunately it was her third that actually came out of her mouth. ‘I’m really, really sorry.’

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ said Harry. ‘And she couldn’t cook then either, to the best of my recollection.’

  Katie stared at the floor, her face burning.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ said Harry finally. ‘I find it’s probably best to…buy your own sheets, stuff like that. There’s a woman in town gives you a discount if you tell her where you’re staying.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Katie, thinking it best not to mention that the plans she and Louise had discussed that morning included moving out as soon as humanly possible, burning the place to the ground, then salting the land.

  ‘So, what’s my first assignment?’

  Derek returned, bearing three cracked mugs bearing pictures of trees on the side. They said ‘Don’t commit TREEson, come see us this SEASON’.

  These people need help, thought Katie.

  ‘The prickwobbling dicko,’ prompted Derek.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Harry. ‘Iain Kinross. Iain Kinross of the West Highland Times. Yes, yes. Iain Kinross.’

  ‘Our evil arch-nemesis,’ added Derek helpfully.

  Harry brandished the paper and threw it down on the desk. ‘You have to sort him out.’

  Katie picked up the paper.

  ‘He’s pursuing a vendetta against us,’ said Harry gravely. The headline read ‘Further Deciduous Cuts’. It meant nothing to Katie.

  ‘He writes that we’re killing all the trees.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘We start by weeding out the gay and disabled trees.’

  ‘Don’t listen to him,’ said Derek.

  ‘No,’ said Katie, who’d come to this conclusion on her own.

  ‘Yes!’ said Harry indignantly. ‘Wages paid by me, both of you. Now, you –’ he pointed at Katie ‘– go into town. Introduce yourself to Kinross. Simper a bit, you know, do that girlie thing. Toss your hair a little.’

  ‘I will not,’ said Katie. ‘I’m not a horse.’

  Harry rolled his eyes. ‘Just tell him you’re new here and that you were kind of hoping he’d go easy on you until you’ve settled in.’

  ‘That’s not the kind of thing I’ve usually found works on journalists,’ said Katie. ‘Especially not evil ones.’

  ‘Well, what’s your great plan then, Miss Whoever-you-are?’

  Katie didn’t know, but given the atmosphere of outright hostility, she was on Iain Kinross’s side pretty much already. ‘Let me go and talk to him,’ she said, trying to sound professional.

  ‘Exactly. Bit of the old eyelash-fluttering. See, Derek, I told you a lassie would help things around here.’

  ‘Of course, boss.’

  ‘They’re like Mr Burns and Smithers.’

  Katie had run into Louise with comparative ease, given that there were only three streets in Fairlish, and only one person on any of them.

  ‘Great,’ said Louise. ‘I’m starving. Let’s cut our losses and run. We could be in Glasgow in five hours, and it rocks.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s going to be that easy,’ said Katie, looking around her. ‘Do you know, Starbucks would clean up around here.’

  ‘Who from? Mrs Miggin’s pie shop?’ Louise pointed to a little bakers-cum-teashop. It still had the original round glass panes in its tiny windows, and was painted pink. It looked cosy and welcoming, with condensation fogging up the glass. ‘Why isn’t it that easy? They can take the high road, and we’ll take the low road, and we’ll be shopping at LK Bennett’s before them.’

  The heavy bakery doors clanged as they walked in. The shop was hot, steamy and full of old men chattering away in a musical brogue. Everyone fell silent immediately. Katie and Louise were about the same height as most of them.

  ‘Do you sell coffee?’ Louise asked the friendly-looking red-haired chap behind the counter, which would have been fine if she hadn’t felt the need to over-enunciate in a very posh-sounding way while making the international signal for coffee by shaking imaginary beans in her hand, and looking a bit of a Gareth Hunt in the process.

  Alongside the chap there was a tallish, angular young girl, with a sulky expression and a face that was quite possibly rather beautiful, if it were not crowned by a ridiculous pie-crust, olde-world elasticated bonnet and a murderous expression.

  ‘Aw, caawww-feee?’ she said, shaking her hand in the same stupid gesture Louise had used. ‘Ah dunno. Mr MacKenzie, dweez sell CAAWWW-FEEE?’

  Mr MacKenzie looked at the two girls with some sympathy. ‘Don’t be stupid, Kelpie,’ he said. ‘Serve theys.’

  Kelpie gave the all-purpose teenage tut and walked over to a silver pot in the corner, slopping out two measures of instant into polystyrene cups before adding half a pint of milk and two sugars to each without asking them.

  ‘Anything else for you girls?’ said Mr MacKenzie pleasantly. ‘Macaroni pie?’

  ‘Let me just check my Atkins list,’ said Louise. Katie kicked her.

  ‘Umm.’

  Nothing in the case laid out in front of them looked in the least bit familiar. There were pale brown slabs of what might have been fudge, only harder, lots of circular pies with holes poked in the middle of them which seemed, on closer examination, to hold anything from rhubarb to mince. There were gigantic, mutant sausage rolls and what may or may not have been very flat Cornish pasties. But both girls were starving. Suddenly Katie’s eyes alighted on the scones.

  ‘Two…um, of those please.’ She couldn’t remember how to pronounce the word. Was it scawn or scoone?

  ‘The macaroons?’

  ‘No, um, the…’

  ‘French cake?’

  What on earth was a French cake?

  ‘The scoones,’ said Louise. Katie winced. There was a pause, then everyone in the shop started laughing.

  ‘Of course,’ said the man serving, who had a kind face. ‘Would that be a roosin scoone or a choose scoone?’

  Maybe not that kind.

  Louise and Katie found a bench in a tiny sliver of public park overlooking the harbour. The boats were coming back in, even though it was only ten in the morning. They looked beautiful and timeless, their jaunty red and green painted hulls outlined against the dark blue water. Katie was throwing most of her (delicious) scone to the cawing seagulls.

  ‘Now I’ve got to find some complete stranger and try and intimidate them.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Louise. ‘A great change from your usual job. Of finding complete strangers and licking their arses until they buy something.’

  ‘That is not what PR is about,’ said Katie. ‘Except in, you know, the specifics.’

  Louise kicked her heels. ‘What do you think people do around here for fun?’

  ‘Torture the foreigners,’ said Katie. She nodded her head towards the baker’s. Kelpie was heading over their way with two cronies. She had shaken off her ridiculous pie-crust hat to reveal a thick head of wavy hair with four or five rainbow-hued colours streaked through it, and taken out a packet of cigarettes. Even from fifty feet away, it was clear that she was doing an impression of Katie and Louise.

  ‘We’re big news around these here parts,’ said Katie. ‘I think we’d better make ourselves scarce, before we get bullied by a pile of twelve-year-olds. I’m going to find this Iain Kinross character. Sounds like some anal old baldie geezer who sits in his bedsit writing angry letters to the Daily Mail. He’ll be putty in my hands.’

  The three girls had
seen them now; Kelpie was pointing them out. They were screaming with laughter in an over-exaggerated way.

  ‘Oh no you don’t,’ said Louise. ‘Not without me. They’ll flay me alive.’

  ‘They’re harmless,’ said Katie as they both got up from the bench and started to back away.

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Louise. ‘Take me with you, please.’

  ‘I can’t!’

  ‘Of course you can! Just say I’m your…PA.’

  ‘I’m not paying you.’

  ‘Oh my God, you’re a true Scottish person already,’ said Louise.

  ‘I’d like a SSSCCCCOOOOOOOONNNNE,’ came from the other side of the park, carried on the wind.

  ‘OK,’ said Katie. ‘But you’d better keep your mouth shut.’

  ‘A SSSCCCCOOOOOOOONNNNE!’

  It took them a while to find the offices of the West Highland Times, situated up a tiny alleyway off the main street of old grey stone buildings, which hosted a post office, a fishmongers, a kind of broom handle/vacuum cleaner bits and bobs type of place, a Woolworths and sixteen shops selling pet rocks and commemorative teaspoons. They looked very quiet at this time of year.

  The small oak door was set into a peculiar turret on the edge of a house made of a particularly windworn granite. It was studded with large dark bolts, and only a tiny brass plaque set low on the left-hand side identified it. There didn’t appear to be a bell, so, taking the initiative, Katie bowed her head and crept up the spiral staircase. Louise, whispering crossly under her breath at the exercise involved, followed her.

  A little old man with grey hair sat at the top in a small room with an open door leading into the main body of the building. Katie could glimpse computers, typewriters and masses of paper beyond, and hear the regular dins and telephone calls of a newsroom.

  They were not greeted with a welcoming smile.

  ‘Did ye’s no knock?’

  Louise screwed up her face. Was no one going to be friendly to them around here?

  ‘Sorry?’ said Katie politely. ‘Hello there. I’m from the Forestry Commission. I’d like to see Iain Kinross please.’

  ‘He’s busy.’

  ‘How do you know?’ said Louise.

  ‘Shut up Louise,’ said Katie, and motioned to her friend to sit in a chair, awkwardly positioned around the curve of the wall.

  ‘I’m sure he won’t be too busy to see me,’ said Katie. She’d dealt with tougher hacks than this. ‘Could you tell him I’ve come from Harry Barr’s office?’

  ‘In that case, he’s busy for ever,’ said the man.

  Katie heard a snort come from Louise. ‘I’ve got for ever,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll just stand here and wait until he comes out. Or in.’

  ‘You cannae do that,’ said the man. ‘I’ll…I’ll call security.’

  ‘Unless your security’s name is Kelpie, you’re not going to scare me with that,’ said Katie. ‘My name is Katie Watson and I’ve come from the Forestry Commission. Please just tell him I’m here.’

  The man looked at her, then turned back to his computer. ‘He’s busy,’ he muttered in the tone of somebody feeling they definitely weren’t being paid enough to take this kind of abuse.

  ‘Yes, busy slagging off my employer,’ said Katie. ‘Let me see him!’

  ‘No!’

  The door to the newsroom finally banged open.

  ‘Archie, Archie, can ah no get a wee bit of peace and quiet in here?’ said an amused-sounding voice. ‘I’m never going to win my Pulitzer with this racket, am I?’

  Katie looked up. The owner of the voice, with its gentle Highland burr, was tall with green eyes, untidy curly brown hair and a mouth that looked as though it was permanently teetering on the edge of a grin. He turned to face them.

  ‘What can I do for you? Let me tell you, if it’s for prize cattle, you’re swing out o’ luck.’

  The man on the desk gave Katie a look which clearly read ‘I am now going to hate you for ever.’

  ‘I heifer feeling you’re not going to like it,’ said Katie, pushing past the now incandescently annoyed assistant.

  The green-eyed man opened his arms in a gesture of surrender. ‘What about your friend?’ he said, looking over at Louise. Louise flashed him a beaming smile.

  ‘She’ll be fine,’ said Katie, storming into the room beyond. Then she stopped suddenly. What she’d imagined to be a full and busy newsroom was really quite small, about fifteen feet long. There were three desks, one empty, one containing another very old man talking quietly down the phone, and one clearly belonging to the man beside her. In the corner was an old-fashioned record player, playing, at full volume, a sound effects track of typing, telephoning, shouting…

  ‘You’re really not meant to be in here,’ said the young man with a sigh.

  Katie stared at the record player and back to him.

  ‘It’s for advertising,’ he said apologetically. ‘That goes through Mr Beaumont there, but not everyone has a telephone and some people like to pop in on market day and

  ‘You want them to think there’s a million people working here.’

  ‘Working for the good of the town.’ The man’s green eyes danced mischievously. ‘Well, you’ve scooped us. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the local paper will run it.’

  Katie smiled and put out her hand. ‘Well, I’d like to say your secret’s safe with me…’

  He took it and bowed low. ‘Yes, bonny English maid?’

  ‘But I’m afraid I’ve been sent here by Harry Barr.’

  He dropped her hand as if it were a live snake. ‘Och, you have not now.’ He looked around as if for assistance.

  ‘You have to be Iain Kinross.’

  He rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Um, no. That was him out on the front desk. Bit of a dour type.’

  He paced across the room and sat down on the comfortable green leather swivel chair in front of his desk. He had an antiquated computer in front of him, and a rather more used-looking typewriter; small Stanley knives and tubes of paper glue littered the tabletop and floor, and piles of paper filled the shelves around his desk. He squinted at her, and pushed back a rogue lock of hair. ‘You don’t look like a rottweiler.’

  ‘I’m the new forestry PR,’ said Katie.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Iain, and, suddenly, he disappeared below his desk.

  ‘Are you being sick?’ ventured Katie, when he didn’t reappear.

  ‘No, uh no.’ He emerged. ‘There’s a mouse in here somewhere. Thought I saw it in one of the coffee cups.’

  ‘One of the coffee cups?’ said Katie. ‘How many do you have under there?’

  ‘One,’ he said quickly. ‘You don’t want a coffee do you?’

  ‘I sooo don’t.’

  ‘Good. That’s good. So, I suppose Harry has told you lots of horrible things about me?’

  ‘No.’

  His open face brightened. ‘Really? That’s good.’

  ‘Just that you were a “prickwobbling dicko”.’

  It fell again. ‘Oh.’

  ‘And that he’s not killing all the trees.’

  At this, Iain leaned forward. ‘Look. Are you a country girl?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Katie quickly. Well, she’d nearly gone camping on the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme once. It wasn’t her fault that it had started raining and her mother had given in to her noisy and tremulous tantrum and let her stay at home and watch Dr Who and drink hot chocolate instead. Katie had picked up a thing or two from her canny younger sister.

  ‘OK well, you should understand then. If they’re going to cross-fertilise from the GM firs just because they’re gaining on their EU dispensation, it’s going to be no surprise to anyone when they start to lose the red and have yet another heron panic’ He snorted at the ludicrousness of Harry’s position.

  ‘Heroin? Really? Up here? Well, I suppose it is Scotland,’ said Katie.

  Iain stared at her suspiciously. ‘OK, well, let’s pretend I was explaining to you as if, for o
ne minute, you weren’t a country girl. Just for fun.’

  Katie got her notebook out.

  ‘I mean, if you keep planting one type of tree instead of lots of different types, you’re going to have to understand why animals who like lots of mixed habitats might move on. Which then affects the environment and turns back on the plantations themselves.’

  ‘That sounds terrible,’ said Katie. It did sound terrible. Though she didn’t know why.

  ‘It is,’ said Iain, pounding his fist on the desk, which made lots of suspicious-sounding clinking china noises. ‘That’s why you…’

  ‘Katie,’ said Katie.

  ‘That’s why you, Katie, have to help me. That man is killing trees.’

  ‘Yes!’ said Katie, fired up with zeal. ‘Oh, hang on. No! I can’t! I work for him.’

  ‘This isnae about “me” or “him”,’ said Iain, gazing into her eyes. ‘This is for the trees, Katie.’

  She looked at him for a second, then the moment was broken by the low trill of a mobile phone. A nice masculine ring, she couldn’t help thinking.

  ‘Kinross. Yeah? Oh, cock. Right, right, OK.’ He snapped it shut. ‘I’m so sorry. I have to go. Some stupid sheep’s just had octuplets and it’ll probably make the front page. Drink tonight?’

  The invitation was so direct, Katie didn’t even see it coming and wasn’t sure what it meant. Was it a date or a continuation of their business conversation? She shouldn’t really be fraternising with the enemy, should she – even if he was hot? On the other hand, the alternative was huddling under two sheets in a hayloft with Louise, so she wasn’t in a position to be picky.

  ‘Um, OK. Where?’

  Iain, who was now shrugging his way into a parka, laughed. ‘Well, take your pick. There’s the Rum and Thump or the Mermaid or…nope, that’s it.’

  ‘The Mermaid, please,’ said Katie fervently. The name sounded a bit more appealing.

  ‘Got a taste for the wild side have we? OK, see you at seven. Remember –’ he indicated the audio-challenged room sternly ‘– tell no one. Or Mr Beaumont will be on you like a cougar.’

  The aged Mr Beaumont declined to look up from his whispered conversation on the telephone. Or maybe he couldn’t.

  ‘A cougar,’ warned Iain again. Then he was gone.