500 Miles from You Read online

  “Not without my glasses,” said the woman. “I’m blind as a bat without them.”

  “And were you wearing them when you were driving?”

  The woman went very quiet.

  “If you don’t get your eyesight sorted out,” said Lissa gently, because what she was about to say was a complete lie, but she’d used it confidently many, many times before, “I’ll have to report you to the police and the DVLA, otherwise I’ll lose my license to practice.”

  “Is that true?” said the woman, looking even more shocked. It had definitely not been her morning.

  “It is,” said Lissa. “And I’ll be watching out for you.”

  She stood up.

  “The swelling should go down—keep this ice pack on it. And I highly recommend going to the bakery and having a cup of sweet tea and a long sit-down. Is there anyone who could drive the car home for you?”

  “My son,” Margaret said quietly.

  “Call him,” said Lissa. “Seriously. Nobody wants to get the police involved.”

  Margaret nodded and left timidly. Lennox looked around the surgery, which appeared as if a bomb had hit it, although not necessarily hugely worse than how Joan normally left it.

  “Right,” he said. “I’d better get back. Good work.”

  Chapter 37

  After that, although it wasn’t, of course, Lennox who’d told everyone about it, the story got out somehow—and, in fact, became rather inflated, till by the end Lissa had single-handedly brought a dead cat back to life while stopping Carrie from performing manslaughter, a fact about Carrie nobody seemed to have the slightest problem believing to be absolutely true. And just like that, it seemed, everyone said hello to her in the morning, and people were pleased to see her when she turned up and weren’t so quick to take offense if she looked sad or distracted, and she was amazed, truly, that she wasn’t anything like as lonely as she’d expected to be.

  Plus, Cormac’s email made her smile.

  I just want you and everyone else to get this straight, he had typed. That I saved a person and you saved a cat.

  That’s a cat? Anyway, one, it’s entirely debatable that humans are better than cats, and two, whoever saves one life saves the world entire, Lissa had typed with a tongue-sticking-out emoji.

  All anyone in Kirrinfief is talking about is you and that stupid cat, and everyone is ignoring my glamorous London heroics.

  Sucking face with an overdosing scumbag.

  Well, you brought Carrie’s cat back to life. You know that’s her familiar? You’ll bewitch half the town. You’re allowing her to continue her reign of terror. When the crops fail and the cows’ milk dries up, you’ll change your tune then.

  I’ll be back in London long before then.

  Aye, so you will. I’d forgotten. And I’ll be back there, seeing what’s left of my flowers.

  There’s a lot of those yellow round ones.

  Dandelions?

  Yes!

  You mean weeds??

  I like them.

  Weeds!!!!!

  Also, I picked some bluebells, I hope that’s okay.

  Cormac looked out the window. He loved bluebell season. That heavenly cloud. He didn’t want to mention that, though, for fear of sounding . . . well, whatever.

  Sure, just write down how many you’ve picked and we’ll tally it up when I’m back.

  There was no answer, and Cormac wondered whether he needed to clarify that that was a joke. On the other hand, if she didn’t get it, being told it was a joke probably wouldn’t help matters anyway. He waited, refreshing his inbox.

  I think what I’ll do is just let you count them when you get back and deduct them from the stocktake you already have?

  Cormac smiled as he closed the laptop.

  Lissa bit her lip and, for the first time, realized she wasn’t, at that precise moment, exactly missing London. It wasn’t just the daffodils that were coming into season; all sorts of plants and bushes were starting to flower, none of which Lissa knew the names of, and the wildflowers were tumbling down and crawling up the sides of the road. It was so fast, there was something new to see every day. And bees! She’d never really seen a bee in the wild before, and here there were great fat ones everywhere; butterflies too, orange and black, with eyes on their wings. It was very slightly amazing.

  Chapter 38

  Both Cormac and Lissa were rather surprised when they fell out, particularly over someone Lissa had barely met. But Cormac was distracted anyway; he had what Jake would have called his savior face on.

  He’d been wandering home late—he would have found it hard to deny that he rather liked the shiny London streets at night: the neon and lights everywhere, the sense of a lot of people with a lot to do. There was always a palpable prickle of excitement in the air; it was never dull. Cormac saw a chap he’d seen before, sitting near the entrance to the nurses’ home, over the vent of a posh office building that, judging by the smell, had a swimming pool in the basement. The vent air coming up was warm, and the man lolling there looked about the age of Cormac himself. He felt in his pocket for his wallet. This wasn’t right. It was a warm, slightly sticky evening, but even so, everyone needed a place to lay his head.

  He put the money down quietly, trying not to disturb the figure, who was very still but had his eyes half open.

  “Aye, thanks, man,” came a low voice, almost a growl, unmistakably Scottish, and he stretched out a hand. To Cormac’s great surprise there was a badly drawn, but nonetheless recognizable, pinpricked tattoo on the bottom of the grubby pale arm: the clear insignia of his own unit.

  “Are you Black Watch?” he asked in amazement.

  The dull, lifeless eyes lifted up to him, and Cormac caught a strong waft of unwashed body.

  “No anymore,” said the figure.

  “Where did you serve?” said Cormac worriedly, looking at him carefully in case he knew him.

  “Fucking . . . fucking Fallujah,” said the man, and Cormac smiled painfully.

  “Aye,” said Cormac. “I was there too. 2014.”

  “Fucking . . . fucking shithole,” said the man.

  Checking which way was upwind, Cormac sat down carefully beside the man. “What happened?”

  The man shrugged. He had to be Cormac’s age, but he looked far, far older.

  “Aye, got stuck in a bit of trouble with the bevvy, aye?”

  He looked at Cormac. “Were you really there, man? Or are you after something?”

  Cormac didn’t even want to think about what something might mean.

  “No, I was there,” he said grimly. “Did you know that regiment colonel, Spears?”

  “Fuck yeah,” said the man, almost breaking into a grin. His mouth was covered in sores. “That bawbag.”

  “I know.”

  “Fuck it all,” said the man. “I lost three mates out there.”

  Cormac nodded. He had probably worked on at least one of them. “What’s your name?”

  “Robbie.”

  “Cormac.”

  Robbie offered him a bottle, but Cormac declined, instead offering him the last of the money in his wallet.

  “I cannae take your cash,” said the man.

  “Always going to help a comrade,” said Cormac. “Have you got a phone?”

  The man laughed. “Naw.”

  “Look, I stay in that building just there. Come find me if you need anything.”

  Robbie waved him away. “Aye, fine, man.”

  CORMAC COULDN’T SHAKE the memory, couldn’t shake thinking about what had gone on out there on the battlefield that had left Robbie on the pavement, left him treading water in his own life.

  But Cormac himself wasn’t, he told himself hotly. He was doing something now. He was helping out and being useful, wasn’t he?

  But he was, unusually, very disinclined to lend a friendly ear to Lissa, who was surrounded by people who wanted her to talk about what she’d been through, who would bend anything to help her get better.
/>   LISSA HAD TURNED up at the appointment—a post-psych-ward discharge, which normally meant a suicide attempt—to be confronted at a beaten-down gate of a very small farmhouse by a grubby teenage boy and a large barking dog with slaver dripping down off its chops, which Lissa didn’t like the look of at all.

  “Hello!” she said. “I’m from the hospital.”

  “Shut your pus, you mingebag.”

  Lissa blinked. “Is your mum or dad home? I’m really just here to change your dressings.”

  “Feck off, bampot.”

  Lissa didn’t understand any of this, but it didn’t sound particularly welcoming.

  “Just let me in to have a look,” she said. She noticed he was wearing a large, dirty jumper with long sleeves that he had pulled down over his wrists.

  “Get to fud,” he said, turning on his heel in front of the gate. The dog, however, remained rooted to the spot, snarling at her.

  “Cormac knows I’m here,” she tried desperately.

  “That fannybaws can fuckety bye an’ all,” said the boy incomprehensibly, disappearing into the tumbledown old cottage.

  Lissa frowned. She was used, from her A&E days, to drunk or resistant patients, but it was normally only in the heat of the moment. Working in the community, most people were delighted to see her. Someone like—she checked her notes—Cameron would normally be a social work case. On the other hand, someone needed to take a look at his slit wrists, and that someone was her.

  SHE CAME BACK a couple of days later, but the mother was no help. She refused to open the door, shouting through that they were busy. Lissa could hear a lot of yelling and banging around, and a TV and radio fighting each other at top volume, and the dog barking its head off, and she heaved a sigh and thought, you know, sometimes there was nothing more you could do; if the state tried to help you and you couldn’t take the help, then there was a limit, truly. But the idea of losing another boy scared her rigid, and she was angry that he wouldn’t see a woman, only wanted Cormac.

  She knew she’d been lulled into a false sense of security; most of the patients she’d met had been lovely, gentle, and forever pressing her with food: shortbread, homemade bread, cream, and once, memorably, when she’d confirmed Agnieska’s pregnancy, a fresh lobster caught from Loch Ness, which she had given to Joan, who had refused to eat it. The lobster was now happily scrappling its way around the surgery fish tank, terrorizing the other fish, Martina and Billie.

  She was gradually getting used to the warmth of the local people, so to be confronted like this was terrifying. And, if she was being honest with herself, was bringing back frightening memories, dialing up her anxiety again. She thought back to what Anita had tried to tell her—to go through the experience again in her head. She hadn’t been doing it, and it was showing; a common or garden issue had turned into a large problem in her head.

  She sighed.

  To: [email protected]

  * * *

  Cormac,

  Hi there. I’m afraid I’ve had to mark as discharged young Cameron Blaine. He wouldn’t open the door on third time of asking, won’t respond to treatment requests, and is refusing treatment all round. I’m not sure what else to do without breaking and entering the house, so I’m going to discharge him and file with Social Services.

  Cormac squinted at it crossly. This was very much not all right. Cameron Blaine had an incredibly difficult family background; he’d been excluded from school, his father was in prison, and his mother was not in prison only to save the council a ton of money on trying to rehome all five of the children. The boy desperately needed help and he had . . . he’d been doing not too badly. Mostly just hanging out with him. He’d gotten Cameron to wash his car once or twice, overpaid him, but tried to make it clear how you did it thoroughly, how you managed not to figure out how to palm the keys in case you wanted to hijack it later. He’d spoken to Gregory Duncan, the amiable local policeman, for whom the Blaine family provided more or less 99 percent of his active work that wasn’t about parking, and they both tried to be casually walking by street corners Cameron was on whenever things looked like they might be getting a bit tasty. Cormac also had an old friend in army recruitment, but he thought that might be a step too far for Cameron, at least at the moment.

  It had been a couple of years of good, solid work of trying to build up trust, and Lissa was letting it all collapse in two minutes by behaving like exactly the kind of snotty posh woman Cameron had mistrusted all his life. He was angry and emailed back quickly something exactly on those lines, basically instructing her to get back there and get things sorted out.

  “He was very grumpy,” she complained to Nina in the bus the next day.

  Nina squinted. “Cormac MacPherson?” she said. He’d done the health visits for John when he was tiny and had bounced the little creature up and down, then dangled him from his fingertips, turned him upside down to glance at his bum, said, “Yup, perfect bairn, A-one,” and gotten him straight up again, while she had watched in horror. Lennox had allowed himself a private grin, given how much Nina fretted about the baby and whether he was all right and if a snuffle meant he was going to die. Lennox knew livestock, and obviously his only son wasn’t livestock. But he wasn’t exactly not livestock, and Lennox knew something bouncing with glorious health when he saw it.

  “I know,” said Lissa crossly. She was more upset than she’d let on; she’d kind of thought they were becoming . . . friends didn’t seem to quite work. Pen pals?

  However, she’d made sure every other note she’d sent that day had been entirely professional in possibly quite a passive-aggressive way, and he had, equally passive-aggressively, not gotten back to her at all and left her in quite the temper.

  Her face softened, though, as she spied the new Kate Atkinson novel and Nina handed it over.

  “Maybe London’s affecting Cormac,” said Nina thoughtfully. “Making him cranky. Is he happy there?”

  Lissa looked pensive. “I don’t know,” she said. “It never occurred to me to ask. I’ve no idea how he’s getting on.”

  “Right,” said Nina. “Well . . . maybe you should?”

  “Hmm,” said Lissa. “And what about Cameron Blaine?”

  Nina looked around. “Well,” she said, “I don’t know. I mean, I believe books can fix most things, but . . .”

  She had a sudden thought.

  “You could try?” And she went to the shelf of classics and pulled out The Catcher in the Rye.

  “Buying him a book?” said Lissa.

  “No need to sound so sarcastic.”

  “I don’t want to buy him a present! I want to clip him round the ear.”

  “Tell me you didn’t say that to Cormac.”

  “No,” said Lissa, looking chastened. “He’s not talking to me now anyway.”

  She picked up the familiar book, the edition she knew with the red horse on the cover.

  Lissa looked at Nina. “Do you think? It’s ancient now.”

  Nina shrugged. “Does as good a job at reaching adolescent alienation as anything I’ve ever known.”

  “I suppose,” said Lissa. “Okay, I’ll take it. Cormac can pay me back for going above and beyond.”

  “Bring it back if he doesn’t want it,” said Nina.

  “What if he can’t read?”

  “That too.”

  “What if the dog eats it?”

  “I think you’re procrastinating.”

  Lissa thought guiltily of everything she should have been doing and felt the anxiety surge again. “Maybe,” she admitted.

  “That’s okay,” said Nina. “Most people, when they come across the Blaines, just turn and run. Procrastination is a step in the right direction.”

  BUT EVEN WHEN she wanted to email Cormac to tell him what she’d done—she’d left a note inside the book, put it on top of the letter box, and, she was ashamed to say, run away—she found she didn’t, because she still hadn’t heard from him. And then she was puzzled why she eve
n cared that she hadn’t heard from him and wanted to stop checking her phone, which was annoying because . . . well, it was annoying. He was being stubborn and irritating and accusing her of not doing her job, and she was furious.

  CORMAC WAS FURIOUS. He would have thought that she of all people would understand the vulnerability of damaged young men; she was literally there to try to look after them and make life a bit better. Okay, so they were a bit nasty, but he’d met plenty worse on her beat. He reckoned she thought everyone in the Highlands was just adorable like on a shortbread tin and everything was gorgeous and perfect. She didn’t want anything to cloud her judgment of how beautiful the place was, to spoil her vision of loveliness. It was all about her. But there was poverty and deprivation there as there was anywhere else—sometimes worse, due to isolation, stretched services, low wages, and bad public transportation. She couldn’t turn her head away just because it wasn’t pretty and she had to realize that. And Robbie was preying on his mind too.

  London annoyed him tonight; it was hot and noisy, and he couldn’t sleep. He wished he were back at home, with the cool breeze coming through the open cottage window, nothing but the rustle of . . . Ned! Shit! He sat bolt upright in bed.

  Chapter 39

  He was still cross with Lissa. He didn’t want to email her. And it was late. But he’d forgotten about Ned! How could he? Damn damn damn damn. London had turned his head.

  He reached for his laptop and opened it up. Maybe she’d be in bed. Or asleep. He didn’t want to type first; it would look like he was apologizing.

  He looked at his last sent message and winced a little. Maybe it had been a little harsh. But even so, this was serious.

  He sat in his T-shirt and boxers on the side of the too-small single bed, rubbing the back of his neck with his large hand, wondering what to do. Finally he began to type: Are you up?

  Lissa couldn’t deny being pleased but was also annoyed that a) she was still up, and b) she’d been waiting to hear from him while pretending she wasn’t.