by Emma Baird
“A haggis factory,” Darcy whispered to me as she hastily gathered up her bag and coat. “Do you know what it’s made from? I guess they’re gonna make us eat samples.”
“Oh, it’s delicious!” I said on behalf of the tourist board in my new land. “It’s just like chicken.”
So, that’s why I was late. Common sense warns me now I’m at my destination that repeating the photos, the Outlander stories and the haggis explanation will not go down well.
“Tourists,” he mutters, and the temptation to not only poke my tongue out but blow a gigantic raspberry returns. Instead, and bearing in mind this is my new home for the next three months, I opt for stating the obvious.
“This is Kirsty’s house then?” I say brightly, the sat nav having delivered me to the location. The sun disappeared again fifteen minutes after leaving Glencoe, but the rain kept away. Lochalshie highlighted its location with a bright sign, Welcome to Lochalshie! We love careful drivers. And then something in an incomprehensible language I took to be Gaelic. The village comprised a long high street in front of a lake, or a loch I should call it now I’m in Scotland. Clouds gathered at the far side of the loch in front of more heather-clad hills, but otherwise, it was picture-book pretty—enchanting little houses with well-cared for gardens lining the street, one small shop that promised it sold everything and two hotels book-ending the place. One had pride of place at the far end, a huge Victorian edifice that towered over the loch as if daring the waters to rise, and the other appearing much more up to date, three floors and a large garden studded with tables and benches, all occupied by people enjoying an early evening pint.
Kirsty’s house astonishes me. It is next to the pleasanter hotel (the Lochside Welcome) and sits forward, so its garden runs onto the loch shore. I spot a barbecue, sun loungers and a swing ball which makes me jump for joy. As a kid, I was Great Yarmouth’s best swing ball player as even Katya would grudgingly admit. Next to the house is a lean-to garage up a neat gravel pathway. The Toyota Yaris seldom gets to sleep inside, and I gave the old girl a little pat as I got out. “Sleep well, tonight sweetheart. Not often you escape the elements at night.”
A good job, I reflected now, that Jamie Fraser aka Jack McAllan didn’t overhear me saying that as I got out of my car. As it was, he appeared minutes after I’d driven up, marching from the pub and making bad-tempered comments on my timing.
“Should I...” I gesture at the loaded-up Yaris, but Jack shakes his head and mutters something about already being way behind schedule. Chastened, I follow him into the house, the front door opening into a well-lit hallway.
Good grief. I don’t know about most people my age, but we don’t tend to live in these kinds of places. Our lot is either to live with our mums and dads, in which case we do live in homes like this depending on our luck at birth. Or we’re more likely to live in grotty rented bottom of the barrel dwellings. Katya shares a flat with four others, the place originally intended to house three. Mould on the walls in the bathroom and kitchen are among its delights, and Katya and her house-mates fight a losing battle with the cockroaches. And I might have left my plush red sofa and hand-sanded furniture behind, but the house Ryan and I shared was nothing like this. There’s an atrium—an atrium for goodness sakes—above me as the house is open plan. The hallway is really a living cum dining area fronted by full-length windows where you can sit on grey, sink into ‘em sofas and chairs and stare at the gently rippling waters of the loch. The kitchen space is to the right, all Shaker units and walls festooned with hanging copper pots and pans, and above me are mezzanine floors. It looks like two bedrooms take up most of the space up there, the master of which is above the seating area so it must share that same full-length window looking out over the water.
Unless house prices are vastly different in Scotland, how on earth did a 26-year-old afford it?
I’m still staring at it all wide-eyed when Jack clears his throat impatiently. He pulls out a sheet of neatly typed paper and thrusts it at me.
“Here’s the extra info you need,” he says, words abrupt and clipped. “Wi-Fi password, where Kirsty stores Mena’s food, the phone number for the vet etcetera. I take it you don’t need anything else?”
He’s not said that much to me, but the Scottish accent is kind of killer. He rolls his r’s—numburrr, etceterrra. I’ve always had a thing for accents, and since Katya and I started watching Outlander, my love for the Scottish one has only increased tenfold. If only the present speaker of it wasn’t so grumpy.
I take the piece of paper and glance at it. My mistake. Not a piece of paper; five of them with instructions typed on both sides. I skim the first—Mena likes lightly boiled chicken chopped into small pieces—and decide it can wait till later. Then it strikes me. I’ve yet to clap eyes on this pampered puss.
“Where’s Mena?” I ask, and Jack... smirks, I decide after a few seconds of trying to work out what the tiny upturn to his mouth means.
“Sleeping, probably. You’ll ken when Miss Mena wants your attention.”
And with that, he’s gone throwing a hasty goodbye over his shoulder as he leaves. “Not even a bloomin’ offer to help me unload my stuffed to bursting car,” I tell Katya in my head and nod along with her when she says she’s outraged.
“Too right, Katya,” I answer back. “He might look like Jamie Fraser, but I promise you looks are the only thing he has in common with our favourite fictional man. He’s awful!”
CHAPTER THREE
A-CHOO!
One’s a wish, two’s a kiss, three’s a disappointment...
And what does twelve mean, or is it twenty by now? When I was a child, my nanna used to tell me what the number of sneezes signified. I can’t remember what she said for twenty, but it can’t mean anything good. Death, perhaps. Sneezing on this scale is not fun.
It started precisely three minutes after Jamie Fraser /Jack McAllan left me to unpack all by myself. I heaved the first lot of bags and rucksacks into the house and felt my nose tingle and my eyes water before the sneeze exploded out of me, and I dropped the box of food I was holding. Food packets, tins and boxes rolled everywhere. “Must be a summer cold,” I said to myself as I sneezed again two seconds later. By the fourth time, I knew it wasn’t a cold. The itchy eyes gave it away, and the guilty culprit herself wandered into the room—Ms Mena, a fat little brown and white creature. It appears I’m severely allergic to cats. I’ve just accepted a three-month job as a cat sitter, having lied about my years of experience of cat sitting and the wretched little beast turns me into a snivelling, snotty mess just by walking into the same room.
Ms Mena watches me coolly as I attempt to blow my nose. She jumps onto the coffee table and licks a paw, her tongue delicate and precise as it flicks back and forth. I suspect she’s doing a ya boo sucks to you human gesture at me. Her furry little body radiates nothing in the way of apology or sympathy. Having completed a thorough cleaning job that covered ears, paws, tail, stomach and... urgh, bottom, she yowls at me. I thought cats miaowed. This one cries like a baby.
Kirsty’s instructions said the food bowl was in the kitchen area. My mum sent me up to Lochalshie with a tray of Asda’s own brand cat food she told me she’d got at a bargain basement price. I open a tin of it, try not to retch (the smell is overwhelming) and shovel out half of it as quickly as possible. Little Ms Mena sniffs it, lifts her head and yowls once more. Disapproval, I guess. I back away; the closer I get to her, the itchier my eyes get, and the more I sneeze. The beginnings of a headache tightens my temples.
As an experiment, I try going upstairs to see if the effects well lessen the farther away I get from her. No such luck. Mena follows me, the yowling still at full pitch. What if one of Kirsty’s neighbours hear her and thinks her new cat sitter is a psycho cat killer in disguise? Distracted as I am, I can’t help noticing the house’s upper interior is as sumptuous as the bottom half. The master bedroom, as I’d guessed, shares that same full-length window, and the view is even better up h
ere, thanks to the extra four metres of height. Light shimmers on the gently rippling waves and a boat makes its way slowly across the loch. Kirsty’s bed looks so comfortable and inviting I’m almost tempted to dive straight on it until I notice the light covering of cream and brown fur on the pillow on the right-hand side. Great. She shared the bed with the cat. I’ll need to sleep in the spare room.
Naturally, the master bedroom has an en suite bathroom, complete with a sunken bath, a marble sink and a toilet so luxurious looking, I know I’ll have trouble sitting on it. Something so beautiful shouldn’t be soiled, right? And still the sneezing goes on, my A-choos punctuated by Mena’s yowls. What am I going to do? Fair enough, I’d not looked after cats before but an allergy to them? Why hadn’t I noticed it before, I should have realised when I went round to visit friends who had cats, the sneezing when one of them came near me would have given it—
Oh, right enough. None of my friends have cats. I haven’t encountered too many of them in my life. I whip out my phone, deciding that when it comes to one to ten emergencies, this comes out at the top end. I need to talk to the fifth emergency service—Katya. I hold the phone to my ear and will my friend to pick up ASAP. When the time between dialling and the phone making the connection stretches out too long, the screen tells me I’m not getting a signal. As Katya warned, Lochalshie doesn’t seem to have the same number of phone masts as we have down south. Again, what am I going to do? Panic mounts, making my breath come in panicky gasps. I bolt outside holding the phone in front of me watching as the bars move from one to two. Poor, but better than nothing and enough to get me through to my friend.
“So, what’s it like?” she answers, her words coming in bits and pieces. Katya always has her phone close to hand so I must have caught her at her spin class. It’s one of my best friend’s most marvellous achievements that she can talk during a spin class. I tried the class with her once and panted so hard you could hear me above the hard-core rave music they played at eardrum-bursting volume. “And the caber tosser. Is-he-as-dreamy-as-the-real-Jamie-Fraser?”
I hold the phone away so she wouldn’t have to listen to me do yet another explosive sneeze, enhanced by my snort at her remark about Jamie aka Jack.
“No,” I said. “He’s the rudest man I’ve ever met. He didn’t even say ‘hello’. Just told me off for being late. Then, he didn’t offer to help me carry my stuff in, and you saw how much was loaded in the Yaris.”
“How-late-were-you?”
“Two and a half hours,” I announce airily, or as airily as you can manage when you’re trying to hold back what might be your millionth sneeze. I’m in danger of stealing that woman from the Guinness Book of Records award for the highest number of sneezes in one day. Katya’s reply is indistinct, partly because the class instructor in the background yells at her that she can’t be working hard enough if she can manage a phone conversation at the same time. She says sorry but doesn’t hang up.
“I’ve got this problem,” I say, and this time don’t bother covering the phone while I let out yet another a-choo.
“OMG! Are you allergic to cats?”
In response, I flick my phone to Face Time mode so she can see me, red-faced and eyed, and a thin line of snot running down my face. It’s a good job we are such close friends. Other people might shriek in fright if they saw me now.
She laughs. (Yet another remarkable achievement—being able to laugh while some Lycra-clad sadist walks around a spin class and tightens the resistance on bikes of participants he doesn’t think are working hard enough.)
“Only you, Gaby. Only you.”
“But what am I going to do?” I cry. “I feel hot and sweaty and horrible. But I’ve promised I’ll do this job for three months and I’ve got nowhere else to live!”
The last few words are more like a wail. Now, I sound like Mena—a tantrum-like two-year-old stamping her feet and screaming.
On the plus side, Katya stops laughing. “Soon as I’m out of this class, I’ll research it,” she says. “Maybe you can take Vitamin C or something, and that’ll help?” A few years ago, Katya wrote the content for a health store’s website and now believes that Vitamin C is the cure for everything. I rack my brains to try to remember if my mum’s food package included orange juice.
“Okay,” I say. “And phone me back as soon as, promise?”
She does, but it’s only when I step back inside the house I remember there’s no signal inside. I’ll need to keep popping out every ten minutes to check if she’s tried to ring me. Great, great, double great.
Little Ms Mena hasn’t let up on the yowling either. When I open the door, she sashays her way towards me, plonks herself in front of me and starts afresh. I gather up some of the food items that spilt from the box earlier and find a tin of tuna—one of the posh ones in olive oil too, and I open it.
“Try this, you thoroughly spoiled moggie,” I say, scooping it out into her newly emptied dish. No, not good enough either. She bends her head, takes one cautionary lick and glares at me. That blasted tuna is three times the price of the bog-standard stuff in brine.
Another thought occurs to me which once again sends me hurtling outdoors. I retrieve my iMac from the back of the car and carry it into the house, attaching it as quickly as I can and firing it up. Kirsty’s left the Wi-Fi password in her instructions, and I type it in as fast as I can. Nada. No connection. I stare at the screen in disbelief, tempted for a few seconds to bang my head on the table in front of me. No Wi-Fi means I can’t work, as I need the connection to keep in touch with people and exchange documents. Did I say that loudly enough? NO Wi-Fi MEANS I CAN’T DO ANY WORK.
My boss, Melissa, took some persuading when I approached her with my idea. “Melissa,” I said, “I’ve thought this all through. You don’t need me in the office. I can be one of those digital nomads, can’t I? Have internet connection, will travel! And what about those new clients you’ve just landed in Glasgow? I can be your on-the-ground girl there.”
That sold the idea to Melissa. Last year, she decided she wanted to make her graphic design company UK-wide instead of just county-wide. Her employees were relieved. Truth to tell, designing fliers for the Norfolk show and websites for farmers had lost its appeal. We wanted exciting jobs—online fashion sites, say, or just anything that didn’t involve agriculture and top of show awards for Friesian bulls. In January, Melissa landed our most exciting client. An American make-up and skin care brand decided it was time to conquer Britain, and they needed a UK-specific website, animated videos, materials for a Facebook page and more to make their presence felt. Trouble was, they’d made Glasgow their base, reasoning it was a lot cheaper to headquarter their staff and warehouse there than anywhere down south. And now here I was, about to move to Scotland albeit on a temporary basis. Their demands had grown steadily since January. If I was close by, I could liaise and ensure our biggest payers to date stayed happy, which meant they would stick with Bespoke Design.
Except... except... And this was another thing. I’d spotted the signs to Glasgow on my way up here. Alarm mounted as the sign disappeared behind the car, zooming away at a terrific rate. When I’d looked at it on Google Maps, the city hadn’t seemed that far. A few centimetres or so, give or take. Now I was here, I realised the truth of Katya’s words. Lochalshie was a gazillion miles away from anything. I’d imagined myself hopping on the local bus, chatting and laughing with the locals as it took us to Glasgow in... oh, twenty minutes. I’d now worked out that journey was closer to three hours or so.
Mena hasn’t given up the plaintive cries, and I resort to searching the cool-bag Mum also pushed on me. In it, she’d included a freshly made kale smoothie, which will go straight down the sink, some eggs and a packet of smoked salmon. “Bit like taking coals to Newcastle,” she said to me when she packed the bag, “seeing as Scotland is the home of smoked salmon. But it might be nice as a treat with some scrambled eggs for your first breakfast.”
Mena leaps up on the kitchen
counter the minute I pull the smoked salmon out of the bag, not even flinching when her proximity triggers off a fresh bout of sneezing. Her tail goes up, and she looks at me expectantly.
“You have got to be joking,” I say, fixing her with my best stern stare. I’m in the presence of a master though. This one fixes me back with her best ‘give me the smoked salmon now’ look, and we lock eyes. Hers are large, liquid gold surrounding big black pupils. Mine are ten times smaller than usual thanks to swelling, green and red-rimmed. We are not an equal match.
I rip open the packet and hastily pull it back as Ms Mena tries to eat the first slice before I’ve got it out. I don’t manage to drop it before she gobbles the slice up. And the one after that, and the next and the next. My scrambled egg and smoked salmon breakfast tomorrow will be missing one crucial ingredient.
I wander back outside, debating whether it’s worth unpacking. My mind runs through all the things I’ll need to do. Phone Kirsty. Apologise profusely and promise to stay as long as it takes her to find another, better qualified cat sitter. Grovel to Melissa and beg her to allow me to work in the office once more, promising I’ll travel up to Glasgow ten times a week (or whatever) so I can be super friendly to our new clients. Write an email to Ryan where I say, ‘okay so I told you I was moving out and I may have been a little too descriptive when I told you how I imagined the rest of your sorry life would work out, but is there any chance I can move back into the flat, perhaps you’re right and we should...’
No. It’s too much. I can’t, can’t, can’t go back. On cue, my phone rings and I dart to the front of the garden next to the Lochside Welcome where the signal is most reliable.
“Katya!” I say, and it all comes out, the terrible allergy, the lack of signal and internet connection and the village being miles and miles from anywhere. “I’ve made a ginormous mistake,” I wail, not caring that by now the happy-go-lucky pint drinkers in the pub garden are staring at me, transfixed. Katya murmurs shushing noises and then pauses.