500 Miles from You Page 14

  “Hari!” yelled Zoe, as Lissa reached into her bag and presented Patrick with a sugar-free lollipop.

  “Ooh,” said Patrick, and Hari’s eyes grew wide.

  “Oh,” said Shackleton quietly. “Only you see I didn’t get a lollipop.”

  “You’re thirteen!” said Lissa. The child was enormous; he looked old enough to drive a car.

  “I didn’t realize there was a legal limit for lollipops,” said Shackleton.

  Lissa smiled and brought out another one.

  “I don’t want one,” said Mary loftily.

  “Can I have two?” said Shackleton.

  “No!” said all the adults in the room simultaneously.

  Hari might well have cried, even though he needed only his booster, had not Patrick stood in front of him, letting him lick on his lollipop as the needle went in. Mary withstood it with barely a flinch, which made Zoe sad at how used the child was to pain, and she hugged her strongly afterward. And then they were done.

  “Okay,” said Lissa, straightening up. “Possibly a few cold and flu-like symptoms, but don’t worry about them unless they last for more than forty-eight hours.”

  Patrick immediately started to cough loudly.

  “Or are completely made up.”

  “No, no, it’s fine,” said Zoe. “Come on, Patrick, straight to bed with you.”

  “Actually I think I am absolutely fine,” said Patrick, eyes wide.

  “It was nice to meet you,” said Lissa, a tad wistfully. Obviously they lived in a big mansion and were terribly busy and everything, but Zoe seemed like the kind of person Lissa would have liked to have had as a friend.

  “Thanks!” said Zoe, and Lissa was halfway to the car before she turned around to find Zoe there.

  “Sorry,” said Zoe. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Sometimes I still have my London head on, where you never talk to strangers. It’s an old habit. Also, young people like you I’m sure wouldn’t be remotely interested in hanging out with someone else’s billion kids. But, listen, would you like coffee sometime? Or we’re all going to the fair when it comes . . .”

  Normally Lissa would have shut down—smiled politely, backed away—desperate not to reveal that she was dreadfully lonely. But she made a decision, as she went to open the car door, to try something new.

  “Yes, please,” she said. “Yeah. I’d really like that.”

  And they swapped numbers, and as Lissa drove away she found she was smiling and decided, being on a roll, to head into the village square and treat herself to a book.

  There were a few people gathered around the book bus in the village square, and she went up to have a little look. A pretty woman smiled hello as Lissa poked her head around the door. The bus was like a little TARDIS, far bigger than it looked from the outside, and crammed with every type of book imaginable. It even had, Lissa was amazed to note, a tiny chandelier swinging from the ceiling.

  “Hello!” she said. “Oh, you’re the English girl! Hello again!”

  “The locals think we’re invading, one person at a time.”

  “I know, I met Zoe.”

  “I’m Nina, by the way. You know, three is definitely enough for a coven,” she said. “It’s really going to scare the wits out of Mrs. Murray.”

  “Why the influx?”

  “Well,” said Nina, smiling quietly to herself, “the men round here are . . . well, some of them.”

  Across the square, Wullie, who haunted the pub, and Eck were sitting outside on an absolutely ancient bench, enjoying the sunshine, even though they were still wearing their flat caps and overcoats and high tied scarves. They waved to Nina, who waved back cheerfully.

  “My investors,” she said, completely bamboozling Lissa. “So, how are you settling in? Are you going to the fair?”

  “That’s all anyone talks about,” said Lissa.

  “We don’t have so much going on,” Nina said, looking mildly wistful for a moment. Then her face changed and softened, and Lissa followed her gaze to a tall, sandy-haired man crossing the cobbles with a long stride. In a carrier on his back was a round-eyed baby about six months old, already stretching its arms up in gleeful anticipation of being held by its mother.

  “And,” she said, “the babies up here are very ginger.”

  She kissed the man and picked up the wriggling infant as his dad unbuckled the sling.

  “Hello, John,” she said, rubbing the baby’s tummy. “How’s my best little man?”

  “He tried to eat some straw,” the man reported.

  “Good sign,” said Nina. “Moving on from dung. Lennox, this is . . .”

  “Lissa,” said Lissa, putting out her hand.

  “Och!” said Lennox. “You’re Cormac!”

  “Apparently,” said Lissa. “Does everyone know each other here?”

  Nina and Lennox looked at each other.

  “Well, yes,” said Nina. “That’s more or less how it works.” She kissed the baby, who giggled.

  “He’s beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” said Nina, pleased. “We like him.”

  She blew a raspberry on the happy baby’s stomach, and he chortled uncontrollably. “My mum still can’t believe I came back with a ginger baby,” she added.

  “God, I can imagine,” said Lissa, then: “Oh God, I didn’t mean it like that!”

  The other two just laughed. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “How’s Cormac getting on down south?” said Lennox. “He’ll hate it.”

  “Actually,” said Lissa, who’d woken up to a patently drunken and misspelled email and a picture that was just a scribble, “he spent last night at Stockton House and had a totally amazing time.”

  She had found herself envious. She didn’t get invited to many private members clubs.

  “Cormac?” said Nina. “Ha! Gosh, he’s changed. Maybe he’ll turn into a socialite and he’ll never come back and you’ll be stuck here!”

  Lissa looked out at the sun dappling the cobbles and Nina with her happy baby and suddenly felt rather wistful. “What’s Cormac like?” she asked.

  “Haven’t you met him? Oh, no, I suppose you wouldn’t have,” said Nina. “He’s kind. The old ladies love him.”

  “What about the young ladies?”

  Nina smiled. “Oh, he’s not an alley cat. Not like that Jake.”

  Lissa raised her eyebrows. “Oh, is he?” said Lissa, disappointed.

  “Oh no! Did he have a crack at you?”

  Lissa shrugged. “He wanted to take me to the fair.”

  Nina grinned. “That’s adorable. Well, he’s . . . very nice.”

  “But a bit of a player.”

  “He . . . has girlfriends,” said Nina.

  “That’s okay,” said Lissa. “I’m not after anything serious. I’m supposed to be chilling out anyway.”

  “Well, you’ve come to the right place,” said Nina. “But he’s perfectly safe to go to the fair with. He’s a good bloke. Just not marriage material.”

  Just then a woman darted across the square, looking perturbed. “Lennox!” she yelled. “Lennox, can you come?”

  Lennox looked confused. “Aye, Carrie, whit is it?”

  “It’s Marmalade,” she said. “I can’t find him.”

  “Carrie!” said Nina reprovingly. “You can’t just ask Lennox every time—”

  “Aye, I’ll have a look,” said Lennox.

  Nina gave him a look that turned into a kiss. “You’re not the errand boy of the village.”

  Lennox rolled his eyes and packed little John back into his sling. “Aye, the bairn will like seeing a cat,” he said, as the baby waved his fists in the air.

  Nina watched him go affectionately, and Lissa had the strange sense, as she had had recently, of watching other people’s happy lives as if from behind glass, as if she were watching them on television, taking part in a life that wasn’t hers, wasn’t a place she could legitimately be in. Why did everyone else seem so sorted and organized? (It would ha
ve surprised Nina very much to know that anyone thought this about her; as far as she was concerned they lived on a shoestring, couldn’t ever go away because of the farm, and dealt with a myriad of daily ups and downs, just like everyone else in the world. Plus, she was miles from her family. Although when she got home in the evenings to the farmhouse and the log burner was blazing and John was kicking his little feet in delight on the lamb’s-wool rug, smelling of baby oil after his bath, grinning and gurgling up at his besotted father—well, nothing else seemed to matter quite so much.)

  Would she? Lissa was thinking. Would she ever have something so pleasant and so simple? She sighed. Everything like that, all the trappings of a grown-up life—and they had to be nearly the same age—felt so very far away from where she was.

  “You seem pretty settled,” she said shyly to Nina, who looked surprised for an instant, then smiled.

  “Well . . . it’s a pretty nice place to be,” she said, and at that moment Lissa could only agree with her.

  The next second, there was a terrible screeching of brakes and a yowling sound. Both the women jumped up, and Lissa dashed out of the bus.

  There on the square was an old battered car and, knocked clean to the side of it, a fat, scruffy-looking orange-and-brown tabby cat.

  Carrie, following, gasped aloud. “Marmalade!” she screamed.

  “Stay here,” said Nina fiercely, holding the old woman back. “Can you go?” she said to Lissa. Lissa had absolutely no idea what she could conceivably do with a dead cat, but she tentatively wandered over.

  An incredibly old woman, who couldn’t possibly have seen over the steering wheel, got out of the ancient white car.

  “Noooo,” she said. “Och, oh nooooo, is that Carrie’s cat?”

  “Margaret McLafferty, is that you?” came a loud cracked voice from the bus. Nina obviously wasn’t having a great deal of luck holding back Carrie. “Did you just kill my cat?”

  “Och, noooooo,” said the woman, leaning faintly on the car door. Lissa went up to her.

  “Are you all right?” she said. “Do you need to sit down?”

  “Dinnae worry about her!” came Carrie’s strident voice. “Save my cat!”

  “I’m not . . .”

  Lissa moved closer. Her heart dropped. The poor creature was in a bad way: one of her ears was ripped off and her back leg looked as if it were half torn off. The cat eyed her piteously, even as Lennox came and stood next to her.

  “Aye, that’ll be her,” said Lennox shortly. “Tried to fish her out of a tree. She took fright and bolted.”

  “Can you get the vet?” she said.

  “No need,” said Lennox. “There’s a shovel in the van.”

  “You’re kidding!” said Lissa. “There must be hope.”

  She crouched down. The cat yowled and tried frantically, claws out, to back away, but couldn’t move because of her shattered leg. Her eyes were absolutely wild. It was heartbreaking to see.

  Nina came out. “Vet’s over Kinross way,” she said, and Lennox swore.

  “Bloody Sebastian. And those bloody horse shows.”

  Sebastian was a good vet, but horses were his true love.

  “Fix my cat!” came Carrie’s voice. She still wasn’t, Lissa noticed, getting out of the bus. Lissa couldn’t blame her for not wanting to see it.

  “I feel very faint,” said the woman who’d been driving.

  “Good!” came Carrie again. “Hope you die!”

  Lennox glanced at the surgery. “Where’s Joan?”

  Lissa winced. “She said she was going to . . .”

  “The horse show,” said Nina. “Might have known. She’ll probably be assisting Sebastian.”

  “Christ, if we ever needed her.”

  The cat was yowling, but the sound was deeper and more groaning now.

  “I could get the spade,” said Lennox helplessly.

  “John Lennox, if you kill my cat I’ll have you up in a court of law,” said Carrie, storming out of the bus, face alight. “No cat murdering on my watch.”

  Lennox’s face was a mask of despair. “You cannae let the wee thing suffer, Mrs. Brodie. You just cannae do that. It’s no right.”

  The baby started crying, as if to chime in with the miserable atmosphere all around. Nina looked at Lissa inquiringly, who stared back, helpless. She didn’t have a clue what to do. Carrie had now burst into noisy sobs.

  “Somebody do something! Not you, John Lennox!!”

  Lissa fumbled in her pocket for the key to the surgery but then remembered that Joan kept the door unlocked. She couldn’t, could she? It was absurd—there was a world of difference between a boy lying on the ground and a cat. They were completely different. But still, somehow, she felt something surge within her. She put her sleeves over her hands and attempted to lift the screaming cat up.

  “What are you doing?” said Lennox, still outraged that there was an animal in such pain. Lennox was an extremely conscientious and humane farmer, but he was not remotely squeamish. To his mind, to leave an animal in this state was utmost cruelty.

  “We can . . . get her into Joan’s,” stammered Lissa. “There are supplies there. I could . . . I could take a look.”

  Lennox looked at her. “You don’t know how to treat a cat,” he said roughly.

  “No, but . . . I can stop her pain,” said Lissa, and Lennox calmed down a bit.

  “How?” he said, as Nina rushed in to take little John off his dad, with Carrie hurrying behind her, and Lennox took off his jacket and bundled the poor creature inside it.

  “It must be the same weight as a baby,” said Lissa, opening the big manse door and then the surgery. She pulled out a huge swath of medical paper and placed Joan’s files onto the floor, then put the paper over the top of them. Lennox kept the animal covered with his jacket, but it had quieted now and was making the occasional soft whimper, which they both recognized as being distinctly worse. Lissa scrubbed her hands quickly and put a tiny amount of morphine in a syringe, frantically doing the arithmetic in her head. It slid in easily as she found a tiny vein in the creature’s groin, grateful for the amount of times she’d spent taking blood on her various placements.

  Then, once the large cat had fallen asleep, she took a look at what they were dealing with. She palpated the cat’s stomach—she knew absolutely nothing about animal biology, but it wasn’t firm or feeling like it was filling with blood. Neither was the heartbeat thready, although it was fast—“Google cat heartbeat,” she told Nina, who immediately complied. There was a leg that was patently broken—there was no plaster of paris on-site, but she could certainly improvise a splint until they could get her to a vet.

  The most important thing, though, was the shape of the cat’s face. The skin had been ripped away; you could see sinew and bone underneath, and her ear was hanging off. It was a mess. Lissa looked at it carefully. It reminded her of working A&E, in fact. Underneath the fur, it was just skin and sinew and muscle, after all. Nothing she hadn’t seen a million times. She looked at it for a long time.

  “What?” said Lennox.

  “I reckon . . .” She retrieved the stitching kit.

  “Whoa,” said Nina. “Are you really going to stitch up that cat?”

  Lennox still looked dubious.

  “She’s not in pain right now,” said Lissa. “I mean . . . I could have a go . . .”

  “Fix my damn cat,” came a voice from outside. “I’m holding Margaret until the police come! I’ve just made a citizen’s arrest.”

  “I’ll go calm her down,” said Nina. “Also I don’t want to watch this part; I’ll faint and it’ll be disgusting.”

  So Lennox held down the other end of the cat in silence, while Lissa bent to her work, quickly trying to unravel the ragged ends of severed flesh. It was rather like doing a grisly jigsaw, and Lissa found a certain satisfaction in working away with quick, neat stitches, checking the cat’s breathing from time to time, and covering each layer in disinfectant powder. Finally, and ca
refully, she tried to align the ear correctly. It was always going to be a bit wonky, she figured, but hopefully it would still work.

  Once she’d closed the wound, trying to make sure it wasn’t pulling in a way that would cause pain, she took a ruler from the stationery drawer and carefully and tightly bound the cat’s leg to it.

  “It’s not going to like that,” she observed. “But it’ll last until it gets to the vet hospital. Which is where, by the way?”

  “Two hours north,” said Lennox.

  “Cor,” said Lissa.

  She stroked the cat’s head. It was still snoring deeply, out for the count.

  “You might just be okay,” she said softly, thinking, again, of the time when she couldn’t make it okay, when she couldn’t control it. “I think you’ll be okay.”

  Lennox looked at her. “Well done,” he said.

  She shrugged, pleased. “Oh, it’s just like being back at A&E,” she said. “Except furrier . . .”

  There was a huge commotion suddenly at the door, and they both turned around. Nina was walking in with Margaret, who had a black eye.

  “What happened?!” said Lissa.

  “She tried to kill my cat!” shouted Carrie from outside.

  “I thought you were making a citizen’s arrest,” yelled Lissa crossly, sitting Margaret down.

  “I was. Police brutality,” came an unapologetic voice as Carrie strode in.

  “Right,” said Lissa. “You have to get her to the vet hospital, get her leg set properly.”

  Carrie gave the trembling, cowering figure of Margaret a contemptuous glance. “I’ll be borrowing your car.”

  “You shan’t,” said Nina hastily. “I’ve got to visit the warehouse anyway. I’ll take you in the bus.”

  Lennox looked surprised at this but didn’t say anything as Nina bundled her out and Lissa carefully tended and cleaned Margaret’s eye.

  “That’s quite nasty,” she said. “Do you want to press charges?”

  “Against Carrie? She’d bewitch me and throw me down a well!” said the woman. “I’m just glad her cat’s okay, otherwise she might have burnt down my house.”

  Lissa stopped. “There’s one more thing,” she said, looking severely at the old woman. Joan had an old-fashioned optician’s chart on her far wall. “Can you read me the bottom line of that chart?”