500 Miles from You Read online

  Lissa rolled her eyes. “Oh God,” she said. “I’ve never lived in the countryside. What’s it going to be like?”

  “Think of it this way,” said Kim-Ange. “When anyone phones you don’t want to, you can just tell them your reception is cutting out.”

  Lissa nodded. “I suppose.”

  Kim-Ange hugged her. “Honestly. It’ll be great. Peace and quiet. Get some sleep. Read some books. Build a massive Instagram brand of you looking at misty moors. Think of it as a holiday. And come back and be fabulous with me please. And think of me. I’m the one that’s going to get some wittering country idiot being Scotch next to me!”

  Lissa managed a wan smile. “I’m sure he’ll be perfectly nice.”

  “Oh, you’re sure. You’re sure, are you? I don’t even want a boy on this floor.” She sniffed noisily, and Lissa gave her a hug.

  “Thanks, Kim-Ange,” she said.

  “The sacrifices I make! You’ll miss me every day!”

  “I will miss you every day,” promised Lissa, and meant it.

  Chapter 18

  Lissa looked at the paperwork again, carefully, anxiously, so terrified she’d get something wrong. She was taking on the caseload of one Cormac MacPherson, who was also lending her his home.

  They each had a secure NHS log-in that they could exchange patient data on, only with each other, so they could achieve continuity of care, and would be expected to debrief every day for three months. They also had to write a weekly report for HR—apparently, she discovered, they were guinea pigs for the entire scheme. At the bottom of the first page, Juan had added, “Good luck, Lissa—I think this will be a wonderful experience.”

  Lissa was not thinking this. Not at all. She felt banished, pied off, reduced to being put out of sight out of mind, as if she’d gone crazy and needed to be hidden out of the way. She loved London; it was the air she breathed. The idea of being stuck out in the country was ridiculous.

  She’d googled Cormac MacPherson, but his Facebook page was private and gave absolutely nothing away. He didn’t seem to be on the internet much, which was strange enough in this day and age. She’d spent more time looking at Kirrinfief on Google Earth. It was tiny!

  She’d never spent much time in the country; London was all she’d ever known. She’d never been to Scotland at all.

  But Lissa needed—absolutely, desperately needed—the insomnia to stop, as well as the nightmares from when she finally drifted off into a shallow, tainted half-sleep. During the day she felt grit under her eyelids, and she could not control her breath when she saw a bunch of lads on the street or heard a shout or, worst of all, a car backfiring or accelerating. If going to this godforsaken place would help her get over that, then it was worth a shot. She would have vastly preferred to be at her granny’s in Antigua, but that wasn’t an option the NHS was notably keen on offering her. So the wild north it was.

  Chapter 19

  Cormac was, he rapidly realized, somehow just too big for London. He’d played rugby for the army, and it had never really left him. It wasn’t just that he was tall, although he was—there were plenty of big-looking people; aye, there were plenty of people, full stop. More people, surely, he thought, than were strictly necessary or even viable. More people than you could figure out had gotten crammed into these hot, sticky streets that smelled of food and smoke and choking exhaust fumes. Didn’t they notice how revolting the air was? Maybe not. London clung to you, put greasy fingerprints all over you.

  The nurses’ home was a tall, peeling eight-story building situated outside of a tube by a roundabout in what Cormac would learn to call South London.

  There didn’t appear to be any automatically obvious way to get through the roundabout, which was, on closer examination, actually two roundabouts, each with four lanes of traffic. The air was a haze. Cormac thought back to what he had imagined he’d find the first time he came to London. It had definitely involved lots of parks with swans in them. And also, Buckingham Palace.

  He sighed and tried several times to reach the block through subway passages lined with people asleep on flattened cardboard boxes, in filthy sleeping bags, and finally made it to Nightingale House. The glass was security protected. He rang the bell, and a large man saw him from inside and buzzed him in.

  “Hi,” said Cormac nervously. “I’m the secondment for . . .” For a split second he forgot her name. “Alyssa Westcott? I’m taking over her room?”

  The man stared at him, unperturbed, then ran his finger down a grubby list of printed names.

  “Neh,” he said.

  Cormac looked to the side, then tried again. “I’m not Alyssa,” he said. “I’m Cormac MacPherson.”

  There was another very long pause.

  “Yeh,” said the man, lifting a heavy finger from the page and sighing deeply.

  “So, youse having a good day?” said Cormac cheerily.

  The man looked at him, humphing as he got out of his chair—which creaked alarmingly—and stretched up to a long line of keys.

  “I just got down on the sleeper. Didn’t think I’d sleep much, but actually it was great . . .” Cormac left space at the end of his sentence, but the man wasn’t responding. This was very odd.

  In Kirrinfief, if you went up to Inverness for the afternoon that would provoke a fairly long conversation in the grocers about what you’d seen and whom you’d met and whether you’d been to the big cinema, which had something called a Nando’s. Going on the sleeper was a next-level adventure; it would have involved the input and discussion of anyone in the shop. The train had narrowly avoided a crash about three years ago and people still talked about it.

  By contrast, this man didn’t respond at all, as if Cormac weren’t there or hadn’t said anything.

  “So, anyway. It’s . . . Well, this place looks interesting . . .” Cormac was stuttering on, but in an increasingly confused fashion. He felt like a dog wagging his tail and getting roundly ignored. He was just making conversation, that was all, what people did. What was this guy’s problem?

  The man grunted and put down a set of keys and gave him a bunch of forms to fill in, all the while avoiding eye contact. Perhaps, Cormac thought, there was something wrong with him. Yes. That had to be it.

  He handed over his passport for photocopying and paid the deposit, worrying again whether he’d left the cottage clean and tidy enough for the girl who was moving in there.

  Lined with old random chairs, the lobby was the kind of place that smelled of smoke even though nobody had been allowed to smoke in there for years. Cormac leafed through an old copy of Nursing Times while the man, still ignoring him rather than making conversation like a human being, shifted his bulk around photocopying and laboriously noting down all of Cormac’s details. It couldn’t be pleasant, Cormac decided, being trapped inside that booth all day.

  Meanwhile, the bell buzzed and nurses came and went, loud and confident. He was used to being surrounded by women doing this job, but this was a lot by even his standards. Cormac felt slightly intimidated. Where he’d done his training, everyone had been local, more or less, and he’d known a couple of people from school and everyone was friendly. This looked like a glamorous menagerie of bold, colorful women calling, laughing, with a mix of great barking accents, saying, “Yeah, awight,” and sounding like they were on EastEnders or from across the world. He tried not to stare. It was more different types of people than he’d ever seen.

  A few people gave him a glance as they passed, but most of them assumed he was someone’s boyfriend, a visitor waiting for someone. He wondered whom he’d be living next to.

  Finally the man inside the glass box grunted and pushed his paperwork back toward him.

  “Which room?” asked Cormac, figuring that surely this was the one question that would need an actual spoken answer, but the man only put a burly finger on a cheap plastic tag attached to one of the keys: 238.

  “Brilliant,” said Cormac, who was not normally a sarcastic person. “Thanks
so much! For everything!”

  But the man hadn’t heard, or wouldn’t hear, because this was London, and Cormac picked up his rucksack again and headed for the old creaking lift.

  THERE WERE TWELVE rooms on either side of the central lift, with a large kitchen at each end—rather grotty—and two sets of bathrooms. The facility was obviously old, but the windows were big, looking out across the roundabout and onto North London and the river itself. Cormac fiddled with the lock and entered the little student room.

  He didn’t know what he’d expected—he supposed something left over—but the room was almost completely bare. There was a north-facing window, a single bed, a sink with a mirror above it, harsh-brown carpet, and a cheap wardrobe with a few hangers inside it. He worried then if he should have cleared everything out of the cottage—he’d left the books, the dishes, and the rugs. Was that not right? But it was only for three months; he wasn’t clearing out his entire life.

  This person had, though. There was nothing here at all.

  Chapter 20

  After such a long journey, Lissa was absolutely sure she’d gone too far, or at least was going around in circles. She could distantly appreciate the hills dotted with lambs, the deep blue of the loch, the shadows cast by the crags on the fields, the farmers out plowing new seed—she understood in the abstract that these things were nice—but looking through the dirty bus window was a bit like watching it on television, as if she were seeing it from a distance.

  And now she was worried she’d missed her stop, and she would put any money on Uber not working out here, and everyone was looking at her funny (she was convinced) and the bus driver was trying to chat her up, and this was just awful and doing her anxiety no good at all.

  Finally, after about half an hour, during which she simply sat on her hands, trying to breathe, trying not to let everything get on top of her, the bus driver, who’d been trying to engage her in conversation for the last forty minutes and didn’t understand why she didn’t know making conversation with the bus driver was very much the least you could do on a bus, stopped in Kirrinfief Square, where he normally liked to take a short break and buy a book, and smiled at his last passenger, the pretty girl with the curly hair who looked terrified.

  “Come on noo, lass, you’ve made it!” he said encouragingly.

  Lissa stared at him; she didn’t understand a word. The driver nodded toward the door, and Lissa jumped up and sidled past him. Was this it? She lugged her heavy bag and jumped down the steps, ignoring the driver offering to take her case and not remembering to thank him either, which didn’t change Iain’s idea of English people one iota, frankly.

  But Lissa was too nervous to care. She tried to shake herself. She never used to be like this! She’d traveled in South America one summer when she’d been a nursing student, traveled through strange countries, drunk tequila and danced in strange bars in strange neighborhoods. What had happened to that girl? In one terrible moment she had gone. In the scheme of things, of course, she was the lucky one. She felt guilty that she even felt bad, when she had lost nothing and others had lost everything.

  But still. She missed that girl. Here she was in a little village in a perfectly safe environment, and the hand gripping her rolling suitcase was shaking.

  LISSA MADE IT to the park bench. The sun was out, but the wind felt incredibly cold. You never really noticed the wind in London, except when you crossed the Thames. The Millennium Bridge, a short walk from the nurses’ quarters, was always breezy.

  Here on Kirrinfief’s pretty, open cobbled square, she could feel the full force of its chill and pulled her new puffer jacket closer around her. The houses were higgledy-piggledy, in gray stone, with doors that led right out onto the pavement; there wasn’t a straight roof to be found. Smoke puffed out of several chimneys. There was a cozy old pub on the corner, with hanging baskets outside, and a bright red-painted grocers with mops and brooms propped up against the window. A pale blue bus was parked in the corner, selling books. Lissa tried to imagine sitting and reading a book again. It seemed incredibly unlikely, managing to slow her brain down, managing to concentrate for long enough without breaking the spell. And she couldn’t read anything triggering or upsetting . . .

  Something else lost.

  She looked at her watch. The local GP was supposed to be meeting her, talking her through the job. Bit of a jack-of-all-trades, by the sound of things, provisions being so patchy and far apart. In London it sometimes felt like there was a hospital every hundred yards. It didn’t seem like that was the case here.

  She looked around again, up the hill, where long streets of narrow terraced houses weaved their way upward, backed against the deep green of the mountains. To her left she could catch the sun glinting off Loch Ness. That was a bit mad. She wondered if it was rude to ask about the monster. She could see it was a pretty spot. But what did people do here? What on earth . . . How did you pass your days without restaurants and theaters and nightclubs and shopping and exhibitions and cocktail bars?

  Suddenly, the oldest, dirtiest car Lissa had ever seen charged around the square at top speed. It was a big old Volvo in a very unappetizing shade of brown, and the back of it appeared to be full of straw and dogs. It screeched to a halt before her and a tall, imposing woman stepped out, wearing a tweed skirt and a dark green polo. She had fine features and her skin was weather-beaten, but she wore no makeup, her hair gray and cut into a bob, more or less. Lissa had the oddest sense looking at her that she hadn’t changed her style since her first day at primary school. As premonitions go, she was spot-on. The dogs, meanwhile, were going berserk.

  “Hello!” barked Dr. Joan Davenport.

  Lissa frowned slightly and felt her heart rate jump up and her nerves pile in. “Um,” said Lissa.

  “Are you Alyssa Westcott?”

  “Um, Lissa?”

  Joan looked like she couldn’t care less about that. “Well, you’re my charge, it appears. I did ask for a boy.”

  Lissa was confused.

  “Just my little joke! Never mind! Nobody reads, I get it, I get it.”

  “Are you the GP?” said Lissa, as Joan started around the vehicle.

  “Huh? Well, of course. Did Cormac not explain?”

  Lissa didn’t know how to tell Joan that she’d been too anxious and full of worry to contact Cormac to ask the questions she needed to; she’d barely replied to his email at all, as if ignoring what was coming would somehow make it go away.

  She shook her head, and Joan looked at her keenly. Her bluff manner wasn’t put on—that was just who she was—but it didn’t mean she wasn’t perceptive.

  “You’ve had a tough time,” she observed.

  Lissa dragged the bag behind her and stared at the ground. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m perfectly fit to work.”

  Joan glanced at her again. “Well, we’ll try and keep your workload light. I’m sure they’ll keep Cormac busy!”

  Joan opened the back door of her ancient car and three scruffy terriers jumped out.

  “Yesss!” she said, her tone instantly changing from brusque welcome to motherly concern.

  “There we are, Montgomery, my angel! Jasper! Jasper! Come here, my lovely boy! Pepper! Pepper! Come here!”

  But it was too late. All three dogs were immediately leaping up, covering Lissa with their mucky paws. She was frozen in fear. She had learned on her rounds to be very wary of dogs; many dogs in London were bred to be guard dogs and righteously defended their property whenever she walked up the path. And these hairy beasts seemed completely uncontrollable. As she tried to make them go down, she saw Joan looking at her, the stern face completely gone.

  “Aren’t they wonderful?” she said. “You’re lucky. They like you.”

  Lissa did not feel in the least bit lucky as she attempted to gingerly pat one on its fuzzy head.

  “You’d better get used to dogs if you’re going to work a country beat,” observed Joan.

  And almost completely surrounde
d by panting dogs—a state Joan appeared to consider entirely desirable—Lissa followed Joan up behind the square to a whitewashed stone house, separate from the others, with a brass plate on the wall announcing the GP surgery.

  “Is it just you?” said Lissa, worried. “Do you take the dogs in?”

  “No,” said Joan. “Bloody Health and Safety.”

  She whistled, surprisingly loudly, and the dogs left Lissa alone and slunk around the back of the house. Lissa peered after them and saw a rather pretty medium-sized garden and three dog kennels. The idea of a GP surgery having a garden tickled her.

  “And it’s just you?”

  Joan nodded. “Yes. Small population in the village, plus hamlets and homesteads. I spend a lot of time in the car, and so will you.”

  “Oh yes,” said Lissa. “They said there’d be a car . . .”

  She pondered Joan’s terrible brown vehicle for a second. How bad was her car going to be? In fact, as Joan showed her behind the surgery, it was a perfectly nice little Ford.

  “Of course you’ll want to cycle most places,” said Joan. “Lot easier than getting the cars up the road.”

  “Cycle?” said Lissa. “What about the drug box?”

  “Try not to leave it by the postbox,” said Joan dryly, “and I’m pretty sure you’ll be fine.”

  They entered through the back into Joan’s office, and she started riffling through her daily files, then looked up as she remembered something. “Are you going to need time off for therapy? How are they even doing that?”

  Lissa winced even to hear the word. She wanted to shout, wanted to tell everyone: This wasn’t the real her! She existed in the world! She was fun and carefree! The real her was cool! Not some traumatized wreck! Not, she realized, a patient. She looked after patients. The idea that she needed looking after . . . she couldn’t bear it.

  “I’m to see someone over Skype,” she admitted grudgingly.

  Joan sniffed loudly. “Of course, London would be full of therapists. Lots of crazy English. You know what you really need?”