A Very Distant Shore
Praise for Jenny Colgan
‘This funny, sweet story is Jenny Colgan at her absolute best’
Heat
‘She is very, very funny’
Express
‘A delicious comedy’
Red
‘Fast-paced, funny, poignant and well observed’
Daily Mail
‘Sweeter than a bag of jelly beans… had us eating up every page’
Cosmopolitan
‘Will make you feel warm inside – it makes a fab Mother’s Day gift’
Closer
‘Chick-lit with an ethical kick’
Mirror
‘A quirky tale of love, work and the meaning of life’
Company
‘A smart, witty love story’
Observer
‘Full of laugh-out-loud observations… utterly unputdownable’
Woman
‘Cheery and heart-warming’
Sunday Mirror
‘A chick-lit writer with a difference… never scared to try something different, Colgan always pulls it off’
Image
‘A Colgan novel is like listening to your best pal, souped up on vino, spilling the latest gossip – entertaining, dramatic and frequently hilarious’
Daily Record
‘An entertaining read’
Sunday Express
‘Part-chick lit, part-food porn… this is full on fun for foodies’
Bella
Jenny Colgan is the author of numerous bestselling novels, including Christmas at the Cupcake Café and Little Beach Street Bakery, which are also published by Sphere. Meet Me at the Cupcake Café won the 2012 Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance and was a Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller, as was Welcome to Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop of Dreams, which won the RNA Romantic Novel of the Year Award 2013. Jenny is married with three children and lives in Scotland. For more about Jenny, visit her website and her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter: @jennycolgan.
Also by Jenny Colgan
Amanda’s Wedding
Talking to Addison
Looking for Andrew McCarthy
Working Wonders
Do You Remember the First Time?
Where Have All the Boys Gone?
West End Girls
Operation Sunshine
Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend
The Good, the Bad and the Dumped
Meet Me at the Cupcake Café
Christmas at the Cupcake Café
Welcome to Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop of Dreams
Christmas at Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop
The Christmas Surprise
The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris
Little Beach Street Bakery
Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery
The Little Shop of Happy-Ever-After
Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery
COPYRIGHT
Published by Sphere
978-0-7515-6618-5
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © Jenny Colgan 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
SPHERE
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DZ
www.littlebrown.co.uk
www.hachette.co.uk
A Very Distant Shore
Table of Contents
Praise for Jenny Colgan
About the Author
Also by Jenny Colgan
COPYRIGHT
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 1
‘Name?’
‘I told you,’ said the man. ‘I have told you many times.’
There was, Saif knew, no point in getting angry or impatient. If you did, you got sent to the back of the queue, and that meant another night outdoors. Although spring was coming soon, it wasn’t here yet.
The cold seemed to have settled in his bones; he couldn’t remember what it felt like to be warm – properly warm.
‘Saif Hassan. From Damascus.’
‘What school did you go to? What was the mayor’s name? What is the main shopping street called?’
All of these questions were meant to catch him out, to trip him up, to root out the unlucky but hopeful Somalis and Tunisians. He’d even met a man from Haiti, perhaps the least likely refugee from a Middle Eastern war he’d ever seen. There were others, from countries he’d barely heard of – and he knew a bit about the world.
He answered the questions again and again, as the boys behind him in the queue whispered to one another, ‘What did he say? What is he asking? Write it down.’ He stood patiently and waited, clutching his black bag, the only thing he’d been able to save from the boat.
The only thing.
Chapter 2
Lorna was late again. She switched off the car radio with its news of yet more terrible things going on in the world. She knew there were far worse things happening than her being late, but at the moment that didn’t really help.
‘Come on, Dad,’ she said, getting out the car. She held the old man’s arm as he slowly pulled himself out. She looked nervously at her watch. She was definitely going to be late. Her heart sank as she saw there was already a queue in front of the surgery.
The wind clipped in from the west, causing one or two drops of what felt like hail. Please, no. Not a hailstorm. Making a seventy-four-year-old man with a migraine wait in a spring hailstorm really was just not fair. But there was a long queue to see the last remaining doctor on the remote Scottish island of Mure.
‘Just leave me,’ he muttered, as he always did.
‘Don’t be daft,’ said Lorna. Angus didn’t hear half as well as he pretended he did; he’d never hear what the doctor told him. And she couldn’t trust what time they would see him, if they did at all. There were at least ten people in front of them: mothers with wailing children; old biddies who looked as if they were having a bit of a day out; workers looking miserable as they stared at their phones.
‘It might take a while,’ she said. ‘But I’ll get you in and settled.’
That meant missing the infants’ assembly. Mrs Cook would have to do it. But Lorna knew that the very littlest in the school – and their parents – liked it a lot more when the headmistress was there. She could have yelled with frustration. Sh
e pushed her curly auburn hair crossly behind her ears.
‘There was only one doctor here when I was a lad,’ said Angus.
‘Yes, but there were a lot fewer people when you were a lad,’ said Lorna. ‘And they all got killed by farm machinery or just lay down and died at fifty-five. Doctors weren’t quite so in demand.’
‘Yes, well,’ said Angus. ‘It was a Dr MacAllister then too – the young doctor. Although he wasn’t that young. He took over from his father, old Dr MacAllister, who took over from his father —’
‘Who used leeches,’ said Lorna crossly. She glanced at her watch. She was friendly with Jeannie, the receptionist, but that didn’t help. She wouldn’t do her a favour. And no way would Jeannie open up that metal shutter until 8.30 a.m. precisely.
‘You need to be getting on, love,’ said her father as she glanced at her watch again.
‘No, Dad,’ she said, feeling annoyed with herself for being grumpy. ‘It’s fine.’
She thought with some concern about the school roll for next year. It was down again. The problem was that they couldn’t get a new doctor, so people didn’t want to move here. They’d rather go to Orkney, or somewhere else with a lot going on, or just stay in Glasgow. It was bad all round.
Everyone knew that the GP position had been advertised for eight months now without a single applicant. It was the same everywhere. A huge shortage of doctors all over the country, and very few that wanted to bring their much-needed skills to an island this small and out of the way.
She sighed as Jeannie arrived and made a big show of unlocking and rolling up the shutter. It was 8.30 exactly.
The queue, which several people had joined since they’d got there, surged forward. Lorna thought, a little unkindly, that anyone who could push to the front of a queue probably didn’t need to be at the doctor’s at all. She followed the rest, still holding her dad’s arm, into the welcoming warmth of the overheated waiting room.
Chapter 3
Saif knew there were too many refugees in the queue waiting to be seen in the barn by the great barbed-wire fence. The crowd had also realised that there were too many for them all to be seen today, and people were pushing and shoving.
Saif knew better than to go anywhere near that. He was tall and stood out. He was older than many of the men, but his build could attract aggression. All he wanted to do was stay out of trouble. He’d seen enough for a lifetime.
This, though, was getting nasty. The officials behind the fence seemed for the moment to have disappeared, and there was jostling and raised voices from the back of the crowd. He caught the eye of a very young woman with a quiet – scarily quiet – baby in a tattered old buggy, and they both looked away. No more trouble. Please.
It happened very quickly. Just shouts, really. That was all. Then a woman’s scream rang out, and instantly a clutch of heavily armed guards came through the barn door. They came as if from nowhere, one still chewing, batons raised, hands on their guns. The space immediately went dead silent. The men rushed apart, heads bowed, like naughty schoolboys discovered behaving badly when the teacher was out of the classroom.
But the woman’s voice wailed on. Heads that had stiffened, staring at the floor, desperate not to attract attention, began to look around a little.
The man in charge of the guards said something in his own language that was patently a curse. Saif took a quick look.
The woman was cradling a child in her arms, a small boy of not much more than seven or eight. He wasn’t crying out, which worried Saif, but his eyes were wide with fear, his skin pale. Blood was spurting from a wound on his shoulder. Obviously one of the young men had had a knife, and something had gone terribly wrong.
The crowd cleared to give the woman space. The commander spoke into his walkie-talkie, but obviously got a reply he did not like. He looked around, shouting the word in different languages: ‘Doctor? Médecin? Tabib?’
Again, everyone stared at the floor. Saif heaved a sigh. It was not the first time, and it would not be the last. He raised his hand.
‘Yes,’ he said quietly.
Chapter 4
‘Well, when can I have an appointment? He’s had that head for three weeks. He just can’t shift it.’
‘Lorna, you know I’m doing my best,’ said Jeannie, staring at the computer. It was as if, if she clicked on it enough, Dr MacAllister’s time would magically expand and new slots would open up. He should have retired a while ago. They all knew it. But until they got a new doctor he couldn’t bring himself to leave his post. In fact, they needed two new doctors. You couldn’t run the island single-handed; it was ridiculous.
The old doctor staying on was honourable, of course, but not at all practical. He was tired. He was getting more tired. House calls were more difficult all the time, and he couldn’t manage computers. He had never learned, which meant that Jeannie spent long hours of unpaid overtime trying to get the records straight. And as tests were sent by boat to the mainland, they had to wait for the weather, sometimes, to get the results back.
Jeannie and the doctor were clinging on by their fingernails, and they both knew it. Sandy MacAllister had started taking an extra tot of whisky when he got home at night, even though he knew it was making things worse than ever. His wife was in despair. They’d raised three strapping sons on the island, clever, strong boys, their parents’ pride and joy. One was a dentist in Edinburgh, one was at medical school in Cambridge, and one was vaccinating children in Africa for the Red Cross. None of that did the island of Mure much good.
Jeannie glanced up at her friend.
‘Leave him,’ she said. ‘But don’t tell the others. I don’t want any granny-dumping in my surgery.’
‘But you —’
‘I’ll figure something out. Sandy will talk to me. I’ll write it all down for you.’
‘Jeannie, you are one in a million.’
‘DON’T tell the others.’
Jeannie turned to the next in line, poor hopeless Wullie MacIver, whose three talents – washing windows, taxi-driving and drinking cider – served him very badly.
‘What is it this time, Wullie?’
‘Hairline fracture?’ said Wullie hopefully. ‘Might be a bad sprain, yes.’
They both looked down at his very naked, very dirty foot. It was huge, swollen and a rather deep shade of purple.
‘See you later,’ said Jeannie to Lorna, who, full of gratitude, sat her dad down with a Farmers Weekly and told him that everything would be all right. She dashed out of the door.
Chapter 5
All eyes were on Saif as he walked forward, his black bag clasped firmly in his hand.
‘Camp doctor is busy,’ said the commander, eyeing him carefully. ‘Are you a real doctor? We get a lot of not-real doctors. They say doctor to get a passport.’
Once upon a time, this kind of thing would have made Saif angry. No longer. He simply opened up his bag, with its stethoscope, the tattered old blood pressure cuff, and the few bandages he had left. The commander nodded as he crouched down.