500 Miles from You Read online

  “Cormac?”

  “Hullo thair,” he said in his gentle Highlands accent, very different from the posh-boy London voices she was used to. It sounded nice. It sounded like home.

  THE GIRLS WERE sitting around a high table when she got up there, and they all did such an obvious once-over it was annoying. But Cormac didn’t seem to notice, apart from going slightly pink, but that might just have been the environment. It was loud in there and of course—of course—everyone found it very difficult to understand what he was saying, whether by design or on purpose, because they found him quaint.

  “So you’re a nurse?” said Portia emphatically, as if she’d never met someone who did such a pedestrian job in her entire life, which in fact was quite likely.

  “Aye,” said Cormac. “I follow up—try and keep people out of hospital. Lot of post-op stuff, wound care, that kind of stuff.”

  “Oh, so you’re not in a hospital?” said Portia, frowning her perfectly Botoxed brow. “Do you ride around on a little bicycle? How adorable!”

  Kalitha, a slender art dealer Larissa had met during a course at the Courtauld, simply glanced at him up and down, then turned to Ithica sitting next to her and carried on with the conversation as if he weren’t there, which made Larissa feel an anxious tremor of annoyance and shame. She had thought that this would be nice, or different, but instead they were all being rude and snotty, and she was completely annoyed that they were theoretically her friends.

  Portia turned her attention to the cocktail menu.

  “What do you want to drink?” Larissa asked him.

  Cormac was boggling at the prices, utterly astounded. Cocktails were £15! Minimum! £15!! He looked up. If he had to get a round in, that would be £75. Getting a round in at Eck’s was £12. He had the money—he didn’t spend much at home and his cottage didn’t cost much to rent. And he wasn’t tight; he was always the first to put his hand in his pocket. It was just the very idea of it; spending so much on so little seemed to him not so much worrying as totally and utterly immoral, when £75 could buy so much or do so much.

  A worse thought struck him. He was here with four women, which meant as a gentleman he’d normally insist on paying for all of their drinks. If everyone had four cocktails—and, oh my God, he just realized two of them were drinking from a bottle of champagne—he was going to spend as much as the price of a small car.

  It was not Larissa’s fault, but it wouldn’t have occurred to her in a million years what was going through his mind. Money had simply never, ever been remotely an issue to worry about, and the mentality of adding things up like that had never been a part of her. Plus, she’d assumed she’d be getting it anyway; nurses were really super poor, right? He must know it was her club and her card behind the bar.

  “What will you have?”

  “I’ll . . . I’ll just go to the bar,” said Cormac unhappily, wondering if he could ask for tap water when he got there.

  Kalitha flicked her perfectly made-up eyes to him. “Uh, they’ll take your order here?” she said, as if explaining something to a child, just as an incredibly gorgeous, young model-type person in a smart black outfit that patently cost more than anything Cormac himself had ever possessed came up to them, looking at Cormac expectantly.

  “Um, pint of eighty shilling?” said Cormac automatically. He could call his bank and make sure, transfer some money over, probably. Yeah. He’d do that. The crushing thought that these beautiful, groomed creatures might snigger to themselves that he fit the stereotype of Scottish people being miserly was so shaming he wanted to bury himself.

  The beautiful model-waitress smiled widely. “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what that is?” she said, her voice going up at the end. “I can ask maybe at the bar?”

  “It’s a beer . . .”

  “All our beers are imported? We have . . .” And she proceeded to reel off a number of names of beers Cormac had never heard before. Finally Cormac stopped her just to stop things from getting completely out of hand.

  “Aye. That one,” he said randomly.

  The beautiful person smiled. “Wonderful choice?”

  Cormac turned to Larissa, but she was emptying the bottle of champagne into a glass and waving the empty bottle about.

  “Keep them coming!”

  Cormac swallowed carefully.

  “Of course!” said the server, and hurried off with another perfect smile.

  By the time he had turned back, Kalitha was telling a story about a red carpet that he couldn’t really follow but involved lots of squealing, then every so often Larissa or Portia, who seemed slightly kinder than the others, would attempt to bring him in to the conversation by asking him something about Scotland, and he would turn pink and mutter something very unfunny and uninspiring, not feeling like himself at all, and the others would look at him for a second and he could hear Larissa’s audible disappointment in him for not being a jolly lad or whatever it was she’d had in mind when she started all this.

  It was even worse for the fact that Cormac was a perfectly sociable chap, if a little shy. Not the life and soul, maybe, but he was funny and easygoing and the girls usually liked him, and of course Jake would lead the way. Cormac did think how much Jake would be enjoying himself, telling outrageous stories about people who’d gotten things stuck up their bums, giving cheeky backhanded compliments to Kalitha, and generally being at home everywhere, and he felt completely out of his depth and more and more tongue-tied and awkward than ever. His beer, when it came, was a horrible sweet lager that felt sticky on his teeth, but he drank it determinedly and glanced at his watch so he could work out how soon he could politely leave.

  Chapter 34

  Jake caught up with Lissa as she left Joan’s surgery, exchanging one bundle of notes for another.

  “Hi!” he said, and she stared at him as if she couldn’t remember who he was (this was not at all the case; she was just still getting used to people recognizing her in the street, which never, ever happened in London).

  “Oh, hello,” she said, flustered. She held her shopping bag closer to herself in case he wanted to see what kind of groceries she had. She’d never realized how exposing it was, living in a very small village. Mrs. Murray had already remarked more than once on how many Kit Kats she seemed to buy at any one period and she was definitely contemplating getting her Kit Kats online, if she could resist the temptation to buy a box of eighty at a time, which she wasn’t sure she could, and that couldn’t end anywhere good.

  “Jake,” said Jake.

  “Yeah . . . I know. Ambulance, right?”

  He nodded. “Yup.”

  “Busy shift?”

  “In fact, no,” he said. “Young boy fell out of a boat on Loch Ness, but he was fine by the time they picked him up.”

  “Does that happen a lot?”

  “More than you’d think. We nearly lost a couple o’ bairns last year.” He shivered to think about it.

  “Do they get eaten by the monster?”

  “Yes,” he said, totally deadpan. “Monster-related injuries make up about thirty, forty percent of my job most days. It’s okay, we have a venom antidote.”

  She smiled for the first time he’d seen, and he saw her lovely teeth.

  “So, you know it’s the shows?” he said nervously. He wasn’t asking her out, obviously. He wasn’t asking her out at all. He was just letting her know it was on, which wasn’t the same thing at all, nothing like.

  He flashed back to the conversation he’d had the previous night with Cormac.

  “You should go see her,” Cormac had said.

  Jake was still a little sore about being cold-shouldered the last time. “Mebbe,” he’d said.

  “I think she’s a bit lonely,” said Cormac.

  “Oh, do you? And how do you know?”

  “I don’t. We exchange medical notes.”

  “You’re practically having a relationship. I’m surprised your mum hasn’t been over.”

  “I’m not,
” said Cormac.

  “Is she still in a mood with you?”

  “She is.”

  “Highland women,” said Jake, not for the first time.

  “What . . . what does she look like?” asked Cormac tentatively, not even entirely sure why he was asking.

  “Oi oi,” said Jake, and Cormac instantly cursed.

  “Not like that!” he said quickly. “It’s just a bit weird not to know who’s living in your house.”

  “Well, get on Facebook then, like normals.”

  Cormac screwed up his face. “I am on it, remember? It’s just my mum sending me pictures of armadillos and my old army pals sharing really, really dodgy stuff. Ugh.”

  “Well then. You’ll never know if she’s a frog monster or not.”

  “Don’t say frog monster,” said Cormac. “Also, is she a frog monster?”

  Jake’s voice went quiet for a while. Then he started up again, and it had an uncharacteristically dreamy tone to it Cormac hadn’t heard before and certainly not when he was talking about Ginty MacGuire.

  “Well,” Jake said eventually, “you know Meghan Markle.”

  “Mm-hmm?”

  “Nothing at all like her,” clarified Jake. “I mean, not really. I mean, she’s curvier, aye, and, well, no she doesn’t look . . . but she’s got these freckles. And they’re . . . they’re dead cute. And all this hair! She’s just got loads and loads of hair and it’s all ringletty and it’s everywhere and . . . anyway . . . Anyway. No, I havenae seen her.”

  “Jake Inglis! You think she’s cute!”

  “I do not.”

  “Well, there you go! She’s lonely. You can ask her out and thank me later.”

  “No!”

  “That proves it then,” said Cormac. “I know how you work. You ask everyone out and run the laws of statistics. If you’re not doing it it’s because you’re sweet.”

  “I don’t,” said Jake, although he did and had never seen anything wrong with it. Jake liked women in the abstract and found something attractive in practically every woman he’d ever met. Holding back was very uncharacteristic.

  “Well, I’m just glad you’re not harassing her.”

  “I don’t harass anyone!” protested Jake. “I’m charming!”

  “That is very much a matter of opinion,” said Cormac, although several hours later he would be sitting in an overpriced club full of weird squawking beautiful people, wishing he had just a touch of the old Jake charm.

  MEANWHILE, JAKE WAS standing in the middle of the village square, tongue-tied for once in his life.

  “The what?” Lissa asked.

  “The shows?” He shrugged.

  “Like, rides and stuff?” She still looked confused.

  “And, like, a fun house, and you can win teddy bears on shooting ranges and stuff?”

  “Oh, you mean a fair?”

  “Yeah, all right,” said Jake. “There’s a fair. And it’s mostly run by travelers who do that in the summer but help with the harvest and stuff. We know them all, more or less . . . It’s grand.”

  “Well . . . wait, sorry, do I have to work at it?”

  “Oh! No. Nobody’s fallen off the Ferris wheel for at least a year.”

  Lissa wasn’t sure whether he was joking.

  “I’m kidding. The St. John’s Ambulance does it. No, I was just telling you in case you wanted to go.”

  Lissa smiled to herself. She did love fairs: the bad boys spinning the waltzers, the clashing scents of popcorn and hot dogs and candy floss, the sense of danger as night drew in. She used to go with her girlfriends, slipping out of school, turning up their skirts. She hadn’t been in a very long time, as if it had been banned, left behind with becoming a responsible grown-up and a health care professional.

  “Um, I’m still here,” said Jake, coloring. He couldn’t believe this was going quite as badly as it was. Normally a cheeky wink and a story or two about a particularly daring and possibly slightly exaggerated ambulance callout and it was a done deal, more or less, or if it wasn’t, well, thank you, next, plenty more fish in the sea.

  “Thanks for telling me,” said Lissa, slipping out of her reverie. “Okay, well, good to know it’s there.”

  Jake put his hand on the back of his neck. “Actually, I was asking if you wanted to go. With me.”

  Lissa’s eyebrows shot up. It was the oddest thing; another side effect, she supposed. She hadn’t been thinking about boys at all.

  Of course she’d had the same dating-in-London problems as every other girl she knew, competing for decent men with approximately infinity other people. And then there was Ezra. The ghoster. She had sent him one short, consoling letter about Kai, hoping against hope he didn’t think it was another ploy to get his attention. She hadn’t expected to hear back from him, and she hadn’t. But to be ghosted had been so painful. The internet was just such a tough place to meet men.

  So she was extremely surprised and jolted to be “asked out”—London men never asked you out. You hung with them or you met via the internet. They didn’t just walk up to you in broad daylight and . . .

  Jake put his hands up as if he were reading her mind. He’d gone puce.

  “Sorry!” he said. “Didn’t mean to frighten you! It’s all right, don’t panic, just a thought, didn’t want to trouble you.”

  And before she could rearrange her face into something vaguely appropriate, he had gone.

  LISSA WENT BACK home and called Kim-Ange, who was out with her phone switched off, and of course Lissa couldn’t get her on social media anymore. Then she pulled up the laptop and thought she’d like to get Cormac’s advice. But he hadn’t sent anything over . . . he was out, she realized. It was Friday night and everyone was out except her. She wondered where he was. Surrounded by happy people having an absolutely brilliant time, she imagined. While she was just here.

  Perhaps she should say yes to Jake.

  Chapter 35

  Cormac was very much not having a brilliant time. He got up to use the bathroom—nobody really noticed, he thought, although he wondered if they would all start talking about him as soon as he crossed the room, which of course they did.

  He glanced around the large space. Every table was taken up with glamorous people, lipstick shining, hair in bold geometric shapes or tumbling blond or in huge Afros, wearing incredible fashion and big colored glasses. Everyone was laughing and yelling at the top of their voices, or so it seemed. He recognized a few of the faces too; there was someone there who played a doctor on an incredibly popular medical television show that Cormac and Jake watched so they could slag off everything it got wrong about patient care and comment on how they were quite fond of the massive fires and car accidents and extremely not fond of the hard work afterward to get people from simply not being dead to living, functioning humans again.

  Well, this was it, he supposed. He wasn’t, he thought, suited to being a Londoner after all. He wasn’t remotely cool enough: he didn’t have any facial hair, he didn’t have a bun, and his trousers weren’t remotely ridiculous enough.

  He vowed to use the restroom—which was pitch black and covered in tiny spotlights and marble and stupidly fancy and impractical, which more or less summed up everything he was feeling—then make up an excuse and go, and he’d have to leave some money at the bar or something, or just pay cash, which would make him feel stupid and cheap, but what choice did he have, really, and okay, it was humiliating but it wasn’t, he told himself, as if he’d ever have to see any of these people again. He had never wanted to be sharing a quiet pint in Eck’s more.

  He walked into the darkened lavatory, had a pee by touch mostly, then was just washing his hands when he heard a deep groan.

  He stopped. There was nobody else in the bathroom, or at least nobody at the urinals.

  The groan came again.

  “Uh . . . hello?”

  Silence. Then a weak moan.

  Only one of the toilet cubicles had a closed door. A thought struck Cormac: Wha
t if it was people having sex in there? That’s what happened at these trendy, beautiful places, wasn’t it? It was probably two blokes having sex, and he was about to make a bad evening a million times worse by interrupting something and having everyone laugh at him for what a rube he was and how easily shocked.

  It didn’t sound like a sexy groan, though. He took a deep breath, finished drying his hands, and called out one more time. “Hello? Are you okay?”

  There was a long pause. Then: “Heeelllllppp meeee . . .”

  The voice faded away. If this was a prank, it was a very strange one. But also, Cormac recognized the tone of voice. It was exactly what people said when they came into A&E or when he had had to free them from cars or under walls in the field. He’d heard it a million times.

  He ducked into the cubicle next to the closed one and, hoping that expensive places cleaned their bathroom floors more thoroughly than cheap places, put his head down to the floor to look up under the partition.

  He got an almighty shock: instead of the pair of feet he’d been expecting, a man’s head was lying inches from his, a pair of wide eyes, blown pupils, staring straight at him. It was so dark in there, Cormac used his phone flashlight and could see it already: clammy skin, trembling fingers.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he said. “Right. Hold on. Hold on, we’ll get you out of there.”

  There was no room to crawl under the partition; he scrambled out and kicked the door open with one foot, a move he had practiced many times, it being an invaluable part of the paramedics’ arsenal. He also yelled loudly, although he couldn’t imagine anyone being able to hear him over the din of the terrible music and the vulgar self-aggrandizing shouting going on outside.

  It was still pitch dark in the loo, though. He dragged the skinny figure through the door and out into the little hallway that led to the toilets. Several beautiful people stared at them suspiciously and stepped over the prone figure, but Cormac wasn’t paying any attention; he needed space and room to work.

  “Move! Move!” he shouted. The man was foaming at the mouth and moving into a fit, and Cormac snapped his fingers at the bar staff, who immediately brought him the first-aid box.