A Risk Worth Taking

by Robin Pilcher

  He was standing on the platform as the train slowly pulled into the station, the zip of his jacket done up beyond his chin, his hands thrust deep into its pockets, and a woollen hat, with Ski Aonach Mor emblazoned across its rim, pulled down over his ears. He looked down the length of the train at the unsynchronized motion of the doors being opened and slammed shut again, and watched as the drab-clothed mountain folk with their gaitered legs and crampon-festooned rucksacks disembarked from the carriages. And then into this fashionless scene stepped Millie and Nina, wearing such bewildered expressions and out-of-place clothes that it would seem they had just taken the wrong tube line from Notting Hill Gate.

  By the time he reached them, the trailing hems of his eldest daughter’s baggy jeans were already seeping up the dirty brown water that lay an inch deep on the platform, and she shivered as she pulled her miniscule army jacket around her in a vain attempt to give her bare midrift some protection against the elements. Nina, meanwhile, stood with a set of earphone wires hanging limply from her ears, moving her head from side to side like a short-circuited robot as she took in her new surroundings. Her bright yellow bell-bottomed trousers had started the same osmotic process as those of her sister, while the wooly white collar of her purple Afghan waistcoat had begun to take on the appearance, and no doubt the odour, of a miserably wet billy goat.

  “Hi there, you two,” Dan exclaimed enthusiastically as he opened his arms to give Millie a hug. She jumped away as if being set upon by a deranged sex maniac, her sudden movement almost displacing the pair of rain-spattered Oakley sunglasses that held back her short blonde hair.

  “Dad, is that you?” she asked, her nose wrinkling up in disgust as she visually ingested his attire from head to foot.

  “Of course it is. I haven’t been away from London that long, have I?”

  “Why are you dressed like such a prat?”

  Dan snorted out a laugh, realizing now why his initial meeting with Katie at this exact venue must have seemed like the first-time encounter of ET and its young earthling mate. “Don’t worry. You’ll soon find out.” He leaned over and gave Millie an unreciprocated kiss on each of her freezing cheeks before turning his attentions to Nina. He needn’t have bothered. She could have been set upon by that deranged sex maniac without even a look of surprise flashing across her sleet-stung features.

  “Ni, aren’t you going to say hullo?” Dan asked, his head held to the side as he waited for some kind of reaction to their meeting.

  The sideways movement of Nina’s head eventually sped up to a definite shake of negativity. “This has to be the arsehole of the world,” she said in a voice that would seem that she had just found herself eternally condemned to the depths of Satan’s empire.

  “Oh, it’s not that bad,” Dan retorted cheerfully, “although it is a real pity that it’s raining today. We’ve just had a month of nothing but sun.”

  Nina chucked back her head. “Typical,” she tutted as she bent down and heaved up her canvas bag, its sides cascading off rivulets of icy rain.

  Dan swept up Millie’s suitcase and relieved Nina of her load. “Come on, we’ll get you back to the cottage. It’s really cosy there. You’ll be warm again in no time.” He had taken no more than a dozen steps towards the exit of the station before the cases were once more dropped to the ground, and he stood exercising his cramped and aching fingers.

  “What the hell have you brought with you? Bags of cement?”

  “I wish,” Millie replied morosely, tucking her hands under her armpits to keep them warm. “Mum made us bring all our schoolbooks with us. Some half term this is going to turn out to be.”

  They drove back to the cottage alongside the murky waters of Loch Eil, and once again Dan wished that the Indian summer could have held out for just a week longer. The air of despondency inside the fuggy interior of Patrick’s Mercedes was almost tangible, and Dan could tell that the false gaiety in his voice as he pointed out mist-shrouded landmarks was getting very close to manic level. The car, in fact, had been the only thing to date that had brought any kind of verbal comment from Nina.

  “We had a car like this once, but it had leather seats and was much newer.”

  It got worse. As Dan pulled into the lane that led up to the cottage, Nina, who had been sitting alone in the back of the car and had been trying to stave off the slavering attention of the dogs all the way from Fort William, suddenly burst into floods of tears. Dan glanced in the rearview mirror at the collapsed face of his younger daughter. “Ni, what is it?” he asked concernedly.

  “I want to go home,” she choked out in long, stuttering sobs. “This is the worst place I’ve ever been to in my life.”

  “Well, you can’t go home,” Millie retorted with feeling. “We’ve been banished, remember.”

  “That’s enough, Millie,” Dan said quietly out of the side of his mouth.

  “But I had two parties to go to, and Barnie was going to be at one of them.”

  Dan stopped the car at the top of the lane, jumped out and opened up the rear passenger door, and got in beside his daughter. He put his arm around her and gave her a hug. “It’s only going to be for a week, Ni, and anyway, you’ll enjoy yourself. Just wait and see.”

  “But what’s there to do up here?” Nina howled.

  “Well,” Dan said slowly, trying desperately to think of something moderately exciting to lift his younger daughter’s shattered spirits. “Quite a lot, really.”

  Millie, meanwhile, had decided to get into the promised warmth of the cottage as quickly as possible. Having got out of the car, she skipped from side to side up to the gate, doing her best not to get the track’s now slimy mud on any part of her new silver-grey Reebok trainers. She was in the process of working out Josh’s complicated but totally dog-proof latch system, when she suddenly turned and raced back to the car at the speed of an Olympic sprinter, cares for her fancy footwear cast frivolously to the biting wind. She tore the car door open, jumped in, and slammed it shut.

  “My God, that thing is terrifying!” she screamed out melodramatically, her eyes fixed on the far corner of the cottage. “What is it, Dad?”

  Her voice had expressed such fear and alarm that even Dan wondered momentarily whether he had been unconsciously living in the depths of Jurassic Park for the past five weeks. Then, around the edge of the wooden fence at the front of the garden, appeared the fiercely horned head of Dolly, the resident Blackface ewe, a piece of grass sticking out the side of her mouth and an expression on her face that would seem to suggest that she was deeply miffed that her welcome had been so mannerlessly rebuffed.

  “Don’t worry,” said Dan, taking his arm from around the heaving shoulders of his younger daughter and getting out of the car. “That’s just Dolly. She’s as harmless as a . . .” He didn’t bother to finish. He couldn’t think of any happy, pleasing simile that would make any bloody difference to his daughters’ miserable appraisal of their new surroundings. “Come on, you two,” he sighed, “out you get. It’s time to survey the Taj Mahal.”

  They declined the bacon and eggs that Josh had generously left for them on top of the cooking stove and breakfasted in silence on cereal and yoghurt, casting looks around the room and then at each other, lifting an eyebrow in foreboding of what they were to suffer during the course of their mid-term break. Dan whistled a merry tune as he went about his domestic chores, hoping that the false contentment that he displayed over his Spartan abode might in some way be infective enough to rub off on the girls. It was, indeed, a tall order.

  “I have to go to work now,” he said as he returned the dustpan and brush to the cupboard next to the sink, “so I would suggest that you just get yourselves settled in. The telly works well enough and there are a few videos on the shelf over there. All I ask is that you keep the stove going, because that does everything here—the cooking, the heating, and the hot water.” He proceeded to give a demonstration on the art of replenishing the boiler that would have worked well on playschoo
l. “You take the wood from here,” he said, picking up a log from the box and holding it out to show them what a log looked like, “and then you take it to the stove and you open this door, like this, and then you put the log inside, and close the door again. Simple as that.”

  “Ooh, do you think that we can manage that, Nina?” Millie squeaked in a little girl’s voice. “It looks awfully difficult.”

  Dan laughed. “All right. Just don’t forget to do it, okay?”

  “When will you be back?” Nina asked.

  “No later than six o’clock.”

  “Six o’clock? You’re leaving us here all by ourselves until six o’clock?”

  “I’m sorry, but I do have to work, Ni. You’ll be all right. The dogs will be with you.”

  Nina eyed disdainfully the two slumbering forms on the rug in front of the stove. “Thanks a bunch.”

  “I will have the weekend off,” Dan continued, feeling a sudden guilt about his departure. “We’ll all go off and do something together.”

  “When does Josh get back, then?” Millie asked.

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether he’s finishing early or late at the factory and whether he’s seeing Maria José. He usually gets back at—”

  “Maria what?” Millie interjected, her eyes fixed questioningly on her father.

  Dan bit at his tongue, wishing that he hadn’t said anything. “Maria José.”

  He watched the girls’ eyes sparkle as they looked at each other. “Josh doesn’t have a girlfriend, does he?”

  “Well, yes, he does, as a matter of fact.”

  “God, she must be blind or something,” Millie scoffed.

  “Or so ugly that she can’t find anyone else to go out with,” Nina added with a giggle.

  “Or an illegal immigrant who needs to find someone to marry her so that she can stay in this country,” Millie continued.

  “Well, you’re both completely wrong about everything. Maria José is a very beautiful and intelligent girl, and she is obviously extremely fond of Josh, otherwise she wouldn’t be going out with him.”

  “What does she do?”

  “She works in the prawn factory with Josh.”

  Millie let out a derisive laugh. “Come on, Dad, she couldn’t be that intelligent if she works in a prawn factory!”

  “And she must smell horrible as well,” Nina remarked as she feigned a vomit. “Think of those fingers running through Josh’s hair!”

  Dan shook his head. “All right, I’ve had enough of you two for now. I’m going. Have you brought your mobiles with you?”

  “Of course we have,” said Millie. “We want some kind of contact with the outside world.”

  “Well, in that case, give me a call if you want anything. You’ll have to walk up the hill at the back of the house if you want to get a signal, though. There’s a small tree up there where you’ll find that it works.”

  Nina stared fixedly at her father for a moment, then turned to her elder sister and slowly shook her head. “You see,” she said miserably, “this is the arsehole of the world.”

  The weather during the next three days did nothing to disprove Nina’s opinion of the place. They never ventured from the confines of their Highland prison and even suffered the self-imposed torture of being ex-text-communicado with their friends in London. On the first evening, while they had sat watching television, Millie had walked around the room, climbing up onto various bits of furniture, and while tottering precariously on her perch, had gazed fixedly at the screen of her mobile phone in the hope that even one blip of reception signal would appear. Eventually, the precious phone had been unlovingly discarded into her suitcase, its usefulness done, and she had flumped down onto the sofa between Nina and Josh to watch the film Ten Things I Hate About You for the fifth time.

  There were, however, moments of diversion. On the Tuesday evening, Josh bravely took the girls with him into Fort William where they met up with Maria José for a drink in the Nevisview Inn. Neither Millie nor Nina contributed much to the flow of conversation, but instead sat picking their fingernails and staring at the dark-eyed Spanish girl, trying to find something about her that they could criticize. When Dan asked them on their return how they had got on, and whether they had liked Maria José, the girls, having been able to find a blemish neither in her character nor on her face, simply grunted and within five minutes had slipped themselves wordlessly into the comforting depths of their sleeping bags. All that Dan had done, thereafter, was to shoot a knowing wink at his son.

  The following evening, they were asked over to Auchnacerie for supper. Dan had at first thought about suggesting that he should cook the meal, but then remembered that his daughters did not hold his culinary delights in such high esteem as did the Trenchard family. So he left it to Katie to produce exactly what was required—hamburgers, baked beans, and chips—and for the first time since Millie and Nina had been in Scotland, Dan watched with relief how the simple comforts of fast food brought smiles back to their faces. With a good deal of help from Josh, Patrick made it to the supper table, his face drawn and dark rings under his eyes, but his indomitable spirit still burning as fiercely as a bush fire. He teased Millie rotten over her taste in clothes, and then suggested that Nina should hang on for Max, because even though he was five years her junior, he was going to be some looker. What delighted and surprised Dan was the way in which the girls took the ribbing, and Millie even gave back as good as she got when she told Patrick that his hairstyle was at the height of fashion—for scarecrows. Sitting next to Katie at the top end of the table, Dan caught her eye during the meal and the look that passed between read only that things were surely turning for the good. By the end of the evening, a slight flush of colour had returned to Patrick’s pallid features, and there seemed at last to be the beginnings of a mild acceptance by Millie and Nina that their week’s sojourn in the wild, unfashionable wastes of northern Scotland wasn’t going to turn out as badly as they had at first predicted.

  On the Friday morning, the wind dropped and the rain clouds once more moved off eastwards over the tall stack of Ben Nevis, leaving the adjacent waters of Loch Eil and Loch Linnhe bathed by a pale autumnal sun. Before slipping quietly from the house, Dan left a note on the kitchen table for the girls saying that he felt they had done enough homework for the week, and that they should take things easy for the day. He added that they should maybe take advantage of the good weather and walk up to the tree and telephone their mother to tell her how they were getting on. However, he had little doubt in his mind that they would treat the day in similar fashion to those that had gone before, and that when he returned from work, they would still be lying prostrate on the sofas, tucked into their sleeping bags with their eyes glued to the television.

  That evening, therefore, it was with considerable surprise and a certain amount of consternation that he read the note that lay alongside his own on the kitchen table. It was written in Millie’s flourishing scrawl.

  Dad,

  It’s such a beautiful day that we have decided to go up to the tree to phone Mum and then take the dogs for a walk. We’ll probably be back before you get the chance to read this, but thought I should just let you know.

  Love Millie

  Dan dropped the note on the table and glanced out of the window. Darkness was beginning to shroud the hills opposite, and already he could make out a pair of headlights darting through the trees on the road at the other side of the loch. He shrugged his jacket back on again and walked out into the garden, feeling the night drop its invisible veil of chilling dampness over him. He hurried round to the back of the cottage and ran up the hill to the tree. There, on the ground, he found a newly discarded Hollywood chewing gum wrapper. They had definitely been there.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sakes! Where have you got to, you silly girls,” he murmured under his breath as he pressed on up the hill. He felt beads of sweat break out on his forehead at the effort of the cli
mb and the constant lifting of his feet to clear the tall, springy heather, but they turned cold as they trickled between his eyebrows and down the side of his nose. Just as he reached the top of the hill, he fell flat on his face in the heather, his shoe having lost its grip on a lichen-covered stone. He pushed himself back to his feet and stood motionless, looking around him.

  “Oh, my God,” he said slowly.

  He had never ventured that far up the hill before. In the near-darkness, he could see now that nothing lay beyond its summit except total emptiness. He could walk on and never stop, and he prayed to God that that was not what Millie and Nina and the dogs had chosen to do. He yelled out their names, but his voice was lost to the rising wind. He tried to whistle in a vain attempt to attract the dogs’ attention, but his mouth had gone dry, and all that came out was a pathetic exhalation of air. He turned and began to make his way clumsily down the hill, fumbling in the jacket pocket for his mobile phone. He stopped long enough to get Josh’s number up onto the screen, and then continued his descent, bouncing over the heather, with the phone clamped to his ear.

  “Josh?”

  “Hi, Dad. How are things?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Just leaving work. I’m going to come straight home this evening.”

  “Josh, the girls have gone.”

  “Have they? Where?”

  “I don’t bloody know. They left a note for me on the kitchen table, saying that they were going off for a walk. They’re not back, Josh.”

  “Oh, they’ll be fine, Dad. Those girls have never walked farther than the length of Portobello market in their lives.”