500 Miles from You Read online

  Chapter 45

  Lissa was sitting absolutely flat on her arse, her skirt splayed around her hips, howling with laughter.

  She hadn’t realized, to be fair, quite how formidably strong the elderflower wine was—it tasted like cordial—even as Zoe had given her a few worried glances.

  And it had been so very long since she’d been able to cut loose. And it was, the tiny insects in the air notwithstanding, the most utterly beautiful evening. Lissa couldn’t believe how light it was, was convinced it couldn’t be past six P.M., even as the clock ticked on deep into the night.

  The whole village was there in a flood of different colors and kilts, everyone cheerful and laughing—many was the night when they had had to hold the ceilidh in Lennox’s barn and dash about in the mud, when there was absolutely nothing to be done about that except to deal with the fact that you were going to get very muddy indeed. But on a night like tonight, the heavy sun hung in the sky like syrup, slowly and patiently lowering itself; the midges buzzed and hummed imperceptibly; the fiddlers played wilder; the grass came to your ankles; and the elderflower wine tasted like nectar and could persuade even a nervous, slightly uptight Londoner, Lissa was explaining to all and sundry, to dance.

  On the straw in front of the barn, she could see Joan hoofing merrily up and down with Sebastian the vet (in real life they were everyday nemeses, as she was constantly second-guessing his diagnoses and making his clients crazy), galloping the pair of them to the same reel that was taking place in slightly more cramped conditions five hundred miles to the south.

  The contrast was stark: there, different people from different backgrounds were taking a shot and throwing themselves into things and having a laugh. Up here, it was a deadly serious business, like people playing a sport. The fiddlers played fast and clean. There was no caller, just a brief announcement—“Flying Scotsman!” “Cumberland Square Eight!”—and then people would immediately dissolve partnerships or join up with others, pull the awkward-looking teenagers off the walls they were leaning against. And Lissa had danced every one.

  Lennox had strode up, little John on his shoulders, and was watching cheerfully, leaning on a barn gate—he wasn’t much of a dancer. But Lissa, emboldened by the music and the alcohol, was watching everyone else and suddenly was determined to join in the fun. It was just fun, in, of, and for itself—not showing off, not spending a lot of money (it was five pounds for entrance and a pound a glass), not wearing clothes they couldn’t afford that would get returned in the morning, not queuing for hip restaurants in the rain only to be jostled into a tiny space in return for handing over vast amounts of money for bao. Yes, people were taking photos—but only snaps in which they were laughing, not making puffy-lipped pouts for Instagram, nor were they insisting on taking the same pic one hundred times. They didn’t have time for that; they were too busy having fun in the hazy, dripping golden light, with a drum, two fiddles, and a big double bass.

  And then Jake approached, his shadow passing over the grass. He was wearing an open-necked white shirt made of heavy cotton and a pale green-and-gray kilt. Lissa wished more than anything else Kim-Ange were there; she would have fainted, she would have fainted clean away. Obviously it was just totally normal around here, but it was pretty hot stuff regardless.

  “Stop there,” said Lissa, smiling and taking out her phone camera. “I want a pic. You look like you’re in Outlander.”

  Jake smiled bashfully but, in fact, was pleased and secretly felt like cheering. He spotted the empty glass of elderflower wine by her side. He should probably warn her a bit about that.

  “Okay,” said Lissa. “I’ll send it.”

  “Don’t you want to be in it?” said Jake. “Hey, hi, Ginty, can you take a picture of us?”

  Ginty scowled but stepped forward nonetheless. She wanted to take an unflattering picture of Lissa, but Lissa was so happy and, for once, carefree and utterly amazed at just how great she felt, she couldn’t stop grinning, and the sun shone through her light floral dress, and Jake leaned in and just ever so gently put his arm around her to touch her opposite elbow, ever so lightly, and he was grinning too, and Ginty could have hurled the camera back at the pair of them.

  “Ooh!” said Lissa, and she sent it immediately to Kim-Ange.

  “AW, LOOK AT this,” said Kim-Ange, who was hot and sweaty from all the dancing, and she passed her phone over to Cormac. She had absolutely no idea he’d never seen a picture of Lissa before. Taking pictures of everyone and everything was one of the cornerstones of Kim-Ange’s life.

  He saw the shot and winced. He’d been right about the curly hair.

  Well. Good for Jake. They looked incredibly happy.

  “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen her,” he said.

  Kim-Ange looked at him crossly. “You don’t follow her Insta? Although her Insta is very boring,” said Kim-Ange, whose Insta was not in the slightest bit boring.

  “Ach, I don’t really go in for that stuff,” said Cormac shyly.

  “You’re sleeping in her bed!”

  “I know,” said Cormac, still staring. Her smile beamed. The screen faded to black on Kim-Ange’s phone and he handed it back, somewhat reluctantly.

  He had kind of known what she looked like, from what Jake said. But from her missives, her slightly short, occasionally sarcastic emails, he’d been expecting someone a little . . . more uptight. The girl in the picture, she was radiant.

  “She looks happy,” said Kim-Ange. “Good. It’s been a while.”

  “Yeah,” said Cormac. “Good.”

  And they tried to take one together to send back, but Kim-Ange wasn’t happy with the angle and insisted on nine more, and then Cormac got called away to pay the bar staff, and it never happened after all.

  Chapter 46

  Lissa fell, got up, danced, and still constantly felt she was absolutely fine because it was still light outside, even as everybody else started to drift off. She wanted to dance on and on. The relief of it all was quite something.

  Finally, there was a massive circular “Auld Lang Syne,” and when the music stopped, you could feel, at last, the chill of the spring night come on them, and she found herself shivering. Jake immediately took one of the blankets off the hay bales and put it around her shoulders. She smiled at him gratefully.

  “Thanks,” she said. She looked around. The previously shy teenagers were now snogging their heads off by the side of the barn. Cars had vanished from the fields, and the lowing of cows, disturbed by the recent noise, reached them across the distant fields.

  “Walk you home?” said Jake, handing her a large glass of water that she downed in one.

  “Oh, thanks,” she said. “I needed that.”

  “Fierce stuff, the elderflower,” said Jake.

  “Uh-huh,” said Lissa.

  They headed out, and she put her foot into a massive muddy rut on the road and nearly stumbled over. Jake put out his arm to steady her and, once he had done so, left it there.

  “So,” he said. “You had fun.”

  Lissa’s tongue felt thick in her mouth, the way it did when you’re trying to explain something but can’t quite remember how, but somehow feel that regardless, it’s still very important to get out what you mean. In other words, she was a little drunk. Pinpricks of stars were appearing overhead.

  “I did,” she said. “I did, you know. And for the first time . . . for the first time . . .”

  She heaved a breath.

  “I wasn’t . . . It was like I was just feeling lighter. Just living in the moment. Not anxious, not scared every second of the day. Not terrified for whether I was safe.”

  “Is that because you were pished up, though?” said Jake with a smile.

  “Yes . . . No!” said Lissa emphatically. “It’s because when you’re dancing you can’t really do anything else. Not when you’re trying to remember the steps and how they go.”

  Jake kindly did not mention that not one single time had Lissa managed to reme
mber the steps and how they went.

  “You just have to get on with it. And then you manage it, and it’s fun, and it’s just different from everything, and everything else falls away, and all you’re doing is dancing.”

  She attempted a pirouette in the middle of the road. Jake steadied her again.

  “Oh! Sorry!” she said, realizing she was blundering. “But,” she went on, “it’s been so hard . . .”

  “Cormac said,” said Jake, and Lissa blinked suddenly, realizing she wanted to tell Cormac, wanted to tell him she wasn’t feeling so cranky anymore, wasn’t so annoyed with everything. She picked up her phone, but she had to shut one eye to read anything off it so decided against it.

  “So,” she said as they reached the door of the little cottage, the roses starting to bud in the beds alongside it. “Thank you. That’s what I wanted to say. Thank you.”

  She looked up at him, but Jake could see her mind was elsewhere. And she was definitely rather on the squiffy side. It absolutely wasn’t, he thought, the moment to try to kiss her, even though her eyes were sparkling, her smile wide. She’d regret it tomorrow, he thought. And he wanted to see her tomorrow, and after that if he could.

  “Drink some water,” he told her, taking back the blanket. He could drop it off in the morning. “Lots of water. Take some aspirin.”

  It was true; just in that moment there had been, Lissa had felt, a tiny bit of magic in the air, a definite sense that she might say, Screw it. Give me a little bit. Give me a little bit back of being young.

  Give me back my fearless side that violence has stolen away. Give me some carelessness, where I am not worried, and scared, and trying to please people.

  Give me tonight, with a handsome man in a kilt by my side, and a heavy warmth, and a short night, and a pair of fiddles, and a glass of sweet elderflower wine, and let me dance.

  Jake saw it in her eyes. But he knew—or suspected at least—what anyone would: that her wild mood was dangerous.

  And, he had to admit to himself, he liked her. He really liked her. He didn’t want her to wake up, head pounding, full of regret, too embarrassed to see him again after a night’s wild fancy.

  “Go to bed,” he said. “Let’s have coffee in the week.”

  She smiled flirtatiously at him, and he turned away quickly before he changed his mind and followed her into the house—Cormac’s house, he reminded himself.

  Ah well, thought Lissa later, trying to brush her teeth and making a bit of a mess of it. If she’d lost her ability to seduce a guy, that was one thing. But still. She drank a pint of water; the freezing freshness of Scottish water never failed to make her gasp and splutter. Still. It had been good. It was a small country dance in a tiny village clinging to the edge of a loch. To Lissa it had been everything.

  FIVE HUNDRED MILES south, Cormac finished tidying up the common room, its plain walls looking duller than ever as the ribbons and fabric came down. Countless people besieged him to tell him what a great night they’d had; a few invited him for a drink or to go on up to their rooms, in the case of a particularly jovial bunch of Spanish nurses, all of them raving beauties out of their scrubs, and Yazzie, who’d been constantly trying to catch his eye.

  He smiled blankly at them all, then went upstairs and fell asleep with the sound of the drums beating in his ears and the faint outline of the photograph—he tried drawing it but couldn’t make a fist of it—in his head.

  There was a shy knock on the door. He opened it to Yazzie, the girl from downstairs who’d wanted to dance, and he felt suddenly lost, and empty, and sad, and homesick, and confused, and he let her in.

  Chapter 47

  Cormac couldn’t believe how hot it was. It was ridiculous, worse than Spain. Practically as bad as . . . well, he wasn’t going to think about his old job. But he disliked the heat, didn’t trust it. And London felt oddly feral when it got hot. The bins stank. The people were out in the streets more; you felt how crowded the city was, how constantly everyone managed to bubble along, but sometimes, it felt precariously close to boiling over. Cars with windows open blasted out incredibly loud music with rumbling bass lines you could hear coming a mile away. Groups of young people sat and drank pints on the sidewalks of the bars, looking for a place outside even when there wasn’t anywhere to sit, getting, sometimes, aggressive and yelling at the passing cars, who circled, shouting at the girls.

  It was oppressive; Cormac had never known anything like it. There was no air-conditioning in the nurses’ home, so he managed to pry his window open, which meant all night he could hear police sirens screaming and helicopters going and voices and music and smell drifting barbecues. How, he wondered, could people live like this all the time, piled on top of one another, without going mad? He was naturally calm, but this was making him anxious, wound up. His patients were fretful, full of complaints about the hospital and their injuries and illnesses; for the housebound it was unpleasant—stuffy rooms in stuffy houses, dreaming of fresh air that was nowhere to be found. He tried to be particularly kind, to not get upset when the tar was practically melting on the roads, when drivers were screaming at each other, confronting each other in jams and accidents; the frustration was never far away, the shouts and howls.

  Once again Cormac felt homesick, less interested in shaking up all the new experiences London had to offer him—he felt completely nonchalant now, strolling down the south bank, crossing Tower Bridge.

  He didn’t see Robbie, although he looked for him every day, for another week, and then he recognized his old trainers, sitting in one of the underpasses.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey yersel,” said Robbie.

  “How’s it going?”

  Cormac couldn’t help thinking of Robbie leaving his wallet, of how difficult it must be for someone with nothing not to have taken it. But to imply he would have would have been so awful.

  Robbie shrugged.

  “Listen,” said Cormac, wondering. He’d need to ask Lennox, but it might be worth a shot. It wasn’t like Lennox wasn’t used to all sorts coming along to help with the harvest. “If I knew of a job, would you be interested?”

  Robbie shrugged again. “I’ve got a record,” he said. Then he glanced up at Cormac, his eyes wild and haunted. “Not for anything bad! Just a bit o’ street drinking and that . . .”

  He trailed off.

  “Nothing bad, you can check.”

  Cormac believed him. “It’s hard work. Just harvest. But there’s a bed and three meals a day.”

  “I’d like to work hard again,” mumbled Robbie.

  “Let me have a word,” said Cormac.

  Back at the nurses’ home, it didn’t help that Yazzie, while absolutely delightful, was proving slightly difficult to avoid, seeing as they lived in the same building, and much as he was generally pleased to see her, it did seem to be mounting into something he didn’t quite have the full inclination for and he was relieved when she went on nights.

  Jake, uncharacteristically, was furious when he heard about this.

  “What?” said Cormac. “I thought you’d be thrilled I’d kind of started seeing someone.”

  “No,” said Jake. “You do this all the time! You’re out do-gooding.” (Cormac had told him about Robbie.) “And you use that as an excuse so you don’t make any effort, and some girl moves on you and you just go for it because you are lazy as shit and they get upset. You should see Emer moping about the village.”

  “Um,” said Cormac, surprised he was getting a telling-off from Jake of all people.

  “Well, I’m not,” said Jake. “There are lovely women out there in the world . . . lots of them nurses . . .”

  His voice took on a slightly dreamy turn.

  “. . . and all they want to do is do good in the world and help others, but it doesn’t mean they block out other people . . . and they deserve someone who is absolutely crazy about them.”

  Cormac paused. “Who are we talking about here exactly?” he asked. It wasn’t l
ike Jake to be quite so romantic.

  “No one,” said Jake sullenly. “I’m just saying. If you want her you should treat her right, and if you don’t you should let her go politely, it’s not fair.”

  “Yeah,” said Cormac. “Also, can you tell me how much ransom money you want for holding Jake?”

  “I’m just saying!” said Jake.

  “Jake, if I want disapproval I can call my mother.”

  “And you need to call your mother. I saw her the other day.”

  “I do call her! All the time! She says she’s too busy and then makes sarcastic remarks!”

  “She’s an old lady with her hand in a sling,” said Jake.

  Cormac sighed. Outside, the sun was beating through the window and his little room was uncomfortably hot.

  “Do you think I should come back? It’s the Fordell Fair this weekend.”

  “No!” said Jake quickly. “No, it’s fine.”

  “Jake,” said Cormac, unable to keep the smile out of his voice, “is there someone doing my job and living in my house who is, in fact, herself a nurse that you might be rather fond of in a very un-Jake-like fashion and you really don’t want me around?”

  “You could not,” said Jake stiffly, “be further from the truth.”

  And Cormac was still chuckling by the time they rang off and rather cheered. Though Jake, irritatingly, was right about Yazzie, and Cormac vowed to do better. Once he got Robbie on the coach. Lennox had a certain amount of tolerance for wounded birds, and though he was worried about the drinking, he’d agreed to give him a trial. Cormac walked him to Victoria bus station, bought him new clothes from Primark, a toothbrush, and a washcloth, then could do nothing but wish him his best.

  “Nemo me impune lacessit,” he said as Robbie turned to go.