500 Miles from You Read online

  Get it together, he thought. This wasn’t like him at all. But he hadn’t expected . . . he hadn’t thought of what to expect, truly. Not this pretty, curvy girl wearing old jeans, with ringlets coming out from her head at all angles, beautiful big freckles dotting her cheeks, and tired dark eyes. She looked a bit cross. He wondered immediately what she’d look like with a bit of effort and maybe a smile.

  He tried one himself. “Hello again,” he said. “Jake Inglis.”

  “Yeah, you said that,” said the girl, frowning. “Sorry. I thought I didn’t start till tomorrow.”

  “Oh, you don’t,” said Jake. “I thought it would be polite to come and introduce myself . . .”

  Suddenly it didn’t feel particularly polite to either of them, with twilight falling and the occasional owl hooting in the woods.

  “. . . but I suppose I’ll see you about.”

  “Okay, thanks,” said Lissa. She was thinking how weird, rude, and standoffish she was being. But she just couldn’t . . . What was she supposed to do, make jolly conversation with a stranger? Nobody in London would do this in a million years.

  “Well, let me know if you need anything—I promised Cormac I’d look out for the house if anything came up.”

  “Okay, thanks, that’s kind,” said Lissa, feeling her heart beat completely impractically. He’s just being kind! she tried to tell herself. Nothing bad is going to happen! This is normal.

  She found herself closing the door in his face anyway.

  Oh well, thought Jake. You win some you lose some.

  Just as he was pulling out in his silver SUV, he heard her voice behind him.

  “Sorry,” she said, and she did sound genuinely sorry, anguished almost. She was, Jake concluded, extremely odd.

  “Aye, nae bother,” he said, stopping the car.

  “No, I mean . . . could you possibly . . .” She pulled at her curly hair. It really was quite something. “Could you . . . ? Do you know how to light a fire?”

  Jake slapped at his forehead. “Did he not leave you instructions? For God’s sake, what a bampot.”

  He jumped out of the car again.

  “I mean, there’s lots of wood . . . but . . .”

  “But that’s the only way to heat the house,” said Jake.

  Lissa sighed. “I was afraid of that.”

  “And the water.” He looked at her. “Were you just going to sit in the cold all night?”

  Lissa tried to smile and looked rather rueful. “Um, I don’t . . . I hadn’t really thought about it.”

  “Because it’s going to be below zero tonight.” He grinned cheerfully. “Just as well I turned up then.”

  Lissa bit her lip, nerves returning. “Suppose.”

  Jake disappeared and returned with an armful of the neatly chopped logs.

  “He’s left you well prepared. Good stuff too.”

  He handed her one and she stared at him blankly.

  “Smell it!” he said, and she took a tentative sniff. It had a deep, oaky aroma she couldn’t quite place.

  “Whisky barrel,” he said. “When they don’t use them anymore. They burn like hell and smell delicious. Right, watch this.”

  And he showed her how to open the wood burner and pile the logs up like Jenga, to create a chimney inside the fireplace itself. Then he lit a fire starter, popped it down the middle of the logs, pushed open the flues, and clunked shut the door. The entire thing was blazing merrily in ninety seconds flat.

  “You may have to write that down for me,” said Lissa.

  “Yeah, best thing is not to let it go out,” he said, showing her the basket of peat to the side, with which she could damp it down through the night like a blanket and let it smolder. “Then you’ll be cozy all the time. Works all right this place, once it’s up and running.”

  And he gave her a quick, charming smile, and before she even had the chance to get nervous or offer him a cup of tea—if she had any tea, which she didn’t—he’d bid her good night.

  IT TURNED OUT that Jake had been right: the cottage did heat up surprisingly quickly. There weren’t any lamps, just a bright overhead light that reminded Lissa of the hospital, so she just sat as the evening grew pitch dark, staring listlessly into the flickering flames. Then she opened her phone and looked for Deliveroo choices.

  Blinking in amazement, she took in the terrible, terrible news. There were none.

  Chapter 25

  Cormac gave himself an hour to get to the hospital the next morning, not understanding the layout of London at all, and was surprised to find himself there thirty-five minutes later. It was the oddest thing, he’d found, getting onto the packed tube train and, just by habit, looking around for a face he recognized. Did you get over this? Everyone, regardless of color or how they were dressed, had the same expression on their face: a sort of studied disconnectedness, a complete inability to meet anyone else’s eyes. Even the schoolchildren had it. It must be an animalistic self-protection mechanism, he reckoned. Like dogs. Don’t make eye contact, because you don’t know anyone; you don’t know how they’ll react to you. What a strange way to live. Cormac couldn’t really remember an existence where he didn’t know most people and they knew him. How did people cope? Wasn’t everyone incredibly lonely all the time?

  He liked Juan from HR at once, the diminutive form in a suit, phone going off constantly. Juan had smiled apologetically, said that it was great he was here, could he fill in a weekly questionnaire that someone would almost definitely not read, and, by the way, if there were another seventy or eighty full-time nonagency NP staff available just like him up in the Highlands, would he mind terribly bringing them with him next time as they were a bit short-staffed? Oh, and 147 midwives.

  Cormac had smiled, realizing what Juan was really saying: Please, please get on with things and don’t bother me. Which suited him just fine, if Alyssa Westcott would just get in touch with him. He knew Jake was going around to see she was all right, and even if he hadn’t known that, he would have guessed it, because that was precisely the kind of thing Jake would do, but, rather to his surprise, Jake hadn’t contacted him. That wasn’t like him at all. Normally he had a score out of ten for any woman between the ages of eighteen and about sixty-five, more if you included Helen Mirren. Maybe this Alyssa was just awful.

  He opened up the case notes the hospital had sent him—the kind Alyssa was meant to be annotating for him—and thanked goodness for the GPS system.

  DRIVING IN LONDON, however, he was not remotely prepared for. Cormac had been driving on his mates’ farms since he was fifteen years old, like most Kirrinfief boys, and he could drive a tractor and had had a go on a baler. And once he hit the open road, particularly for work, it was hills of empty long roads, single-track lanes up to visit farms, vistas of dappled mountain shadows so stunning that sometimes he would simply stop in a lay-by, push open the door of the little car, breathe in the sweet and bracing air, and eat his cheese and pickle sandwiches staring out at the unpeopled view, feeling very pleased with his lot.

  None of this was the least preparation for crazed London traffic, with furious cabbies and delivery vans on insane schedules and huge SUVs doing the school run and red buses swaying everywhere; with tourists stepping straight out into the middle of the road while keeping their eyes fast on the opposite way, expecting the traffic to come from the right; with cyclists zipping through every gap in the road like darting birds. The exhaust fumes, the confusing lane system, the vast roundabouts, the endless honking, the stop-starting.

  It was terrifying. And there was nowhere to stop, no quiet lay-bys; red markings on the roadside meant you couldn’t stop at all, just try to rotate your head 360 degrees at all times to try to clock who was coming at you and where from.

  Eventually Cormac pulled into a large supermarket car park and took a deep breath. This was going to have to be gotten used to. These roads were insane. He took another deep breath and checked his GPS. Okay. There was a housing development not far from here ca
lled Rosebud, and all the names of the buildings were flowers. He needed to be on floor 19, Daffodil House.

  DAFFODIL HOUSE WAS the least likely thing to be named after daffodils he could imagine. It was a massively high tower block, one of seven in the development cutting great bruised scars across the sky. As a child he’d wondered what it would be like to live up high, rather than in their little terraced house. It sounded very exciting and glamorous.

  Daffodil House was not like that at all.

  There was deprivation in the Highlands, of course. Cormac had known houses without indoor plumbing. There were places that relied entirely on foraged wood to keep warm. And then there were the usual ravages of all economies: drink, of course; horse racing; family breakdown.

  But there were always the hills, the mountains, the lochs, and the trees. There was work, even if it wasn’t always the best paid. The schools still had plenty of outdoor space to play. You could still cycle your bike into the village and feel most people knew who you were, or walk into your local bakery and get a hello and a French cake for 75 pence, and rich or poor, that was one of the best things Cormac knew.

  Whereas here. There was an unpleasantly dark and dirty little convenience store with heavy bars on the windows and the security grilles halfway down. A huge dog was chained up outside and barked at him, setting off another few dogs barking around the place. Everything was grimy; nothing seemed friendly. Cormac was good with dogs—they didn’t put that on the job description but should have—but even he didn’t feel like extending his hand to be sniffed by this fearsome-looking beast who was showing his teeth at him.

  “Good dog,” he muttered, heading on.

  The lobby smelled absolutely dreadful, a concentrated mixture of hash and urine that made Cormac’s eyes sting. He’d been buzzed in, but the trundling old lift took a very long time to come. There was graffiti everywhere. As he waited, an old lady came in pulling a shopping trolley on wheels.

  “Morning!” said Cormac, standing back to let her go ahead.

  “Fuck off,” she said instantly, and they had to stand for what to Cormac felt like another five years before the lift finally arrived, smelling, if anything, actually worse. Two men got out, obviously in the middle of a fight about something, or so it sounded to Cormac.

  “Yeah, roight, fing is you cahnt . . .” trailed behind them as they swaggered past, all aftershave and wide knees. They glanced at him as he got in the lift, and he kept staring straight ahead.

  On the nineteenth floor the scent of dope was still pretty strong, but it was now mingled with food and cooking smells, some of which were good, some less so. He paced up the hallway, which was covered in dirty linoleum. Most of the lights were broken and there was no natural light at all. Cormac didn’t want to admit it, but he was nervous. His admiration for his counterpart was rising in leaps and bounds.

  He could hear music playing behind the door of number 16 and he knocked gingerly, then louder when it became obvious nobody could hear him. Eventually he rapped loud enough that the noise was turned down inside and a tumble of voices answered the door. He glanced down at his notes as a burly man pulled the door open, surrounded by children.

  “Mergim Kavaja?” said Cormac as best he could.

  The man frowned at him.

  “MerGIM KaVAja?” Cormac tried again, with the emphases on different syllables.

  The man continued to frown at him suspiciously as a loud stream of questions in a woman’s voice came from behind him. He shouted back noisily, and Cormac simply showed him the name printed on the file, at which he sniffed and pushed open the door.

  The tiny flat, with its thin walls and cheap doors, was clean but full. Undeniably full. Through open doors, Cormac saw mattresses on the floors of each room, and in the sitting room, bedding was piled beside two ancient worsted sofas. Men and boys sat around the living room, and where there was space they sat with their heads pressed against the wall. There was a smell of cooking as well as a lot of drying clothes, sweat, deodorant. The shower was running, the washing machine.

  “Mergim!” said the man, somehow making it sound totally different from what Cormac had said, and in the corner a man raised his hand. They spoke to each other in an unintelligible string, then the first man turned back to Cormac.

  “Doctor,” he said, pointing at him.

  “Actually I’m a nurse,” said Cormac, but everyone ignored him as he approached Mergim, who was sitting in the only armchair and had his leg up, his cheap tracksuit bottoms turned up to reveal a skinny white leg thick with black hair.

  What Cormac saw was an absolute mess. He looked at it, blinking, for a minute. He had stitches to take out, but the wound itself was a total mystery; it wavered up and around like a whirlpool or a drunk.

  “What did you do to yourself?” he asked, undeniably interested. He’d never seen anything like it.

  Mergim—he was twenty-four, according to Cormac’s file—didn’t say anything, looked inquiringly out into the throng. Eventually a slender man with glasses who had been sitting to the side reading a comic in English got up, sighing. He hissed something at Mergim—probably along the lines of “Speak English!” Cormac guessed—and reluctantly came over.

  “Hello,” he said. “I Zlobdan. I speak English. Everyone else is”—he shot them a look—“very lazy men. Idiots.”

  “Aye,” said Cormac. They didn’t look lazy to him. They looked knackered, dusty from building sites, presumably, on-and-off shift work, sharing beds if the amount of trainers was anything to go by. “So what happened?”

  “He have accident. With drill on-site.”

  “Okay,” said Cormac, taking a closer look at the wound. There were stitches all over the place, gaping holes that had puckered then healed like that. It was fortunate he was young. In an old person, the skin wouldn’t have been strong enough, would have stayed like that. “He get stitched up here by . . . ?”

  Zlobdan indicated one of the men, who blushed red.

  “Is he a doctor?”

  “No! He idiot!”

  “Why didn’t he go to the hospital?”

  “Because they are lazy idiots and didn’t realize health is free here.”

  “You’re European, though, right?”

  “Yes! Albanian!”

  “And you didn’t know that?”

  “I know that! Not lazy idiots know that!”

  Zlobdan gave the pair a look of withering scorn, and the poor man who’d done the stitching stared at the floor, still blushing.

  “I sent him to hospital. After all the screaming.”

  Cormac’s lips almost twitched, contemplating how difficult it must be to share a tiny apartment with at least a dozen other men with whom you had nothing in common.

  “We pay tax!” said Zlobdan fiercely.

  “I know,” said Cormac, holding up his hands. “It’s okay, I’m just here to take the stitches out.”

  He opened his box and took out his disinfectant wipes. Everyone was eyeing him up intensely; it was rather disconcerting. He wondered if there wasn’t much to watch on Albanian TV.

  He snapped on the rubber gloves, then fingered the wound. It was a shame; it was a great creeping mess that almost certainly wouldn’t have been if they’d cleaned it out properly and got a professional in. He looked at Mergim, who had now gone white.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m just going to take them out.”

  “Drugs?” said Zlobdan.

  “There’s no need,” said Cormac, slightly sadly. The nerve endings would have been killed in the botched job, unfortunately. It would all be scar tissue from now on in.

  Zlobdan said something to Mergim, who looked as if he was starting to cry. A bearlike man stepped forward and drew out a plain bottle filled with what smelled to Cormac like paint thinner. He passed it to Mergim, who took a huge swig, wincing as he swallowed. The bearlike man took the bottle back, had a large swig himself, then put it back down.

  “Um,” said Cormac, taking out the s
cissors. “Honestly, you really don’t have to worry.”

  He took out a small pair of forceps and gripped the end of the metal stitch in his right hand and gently started to unlace it.

  There was a huge bang. One of the big bearded lads at the back had fainted out cold. There was a lot of conversation about it, and, sighing wearily, the bearlike man took his bottle of spirits and went over to revive him.

  “Okay!” said Cormac, after he went over and attended to the other man, including giving him a stitch in the back of his head, which the others had watched him do with interest, debating what he was doing in their own language. The men had nudged the big chap who’d done the original stitching on Mergim, obviously admonishing him to watch and learn.

  “Everyone out!” Cormac said as he tried to get back to his first patient. He realized as he ordered everybody out that there was nowhere else to go in the minuscule apartment. The men crammed themselves politely into the hallway and stood tensely, as if they were watching a football match.

  “Tell him to look out the window,” said Cormac, not wanting another fainting on his hands. Zlobdan promptly did so, as Mergim started shaking. Cormac leaned his arm on his patient’s leg to keep it still and deftly pulled the metal stitches cleanly through the nerve-dead flesh. There was a little threading in and out, but the entire process was finished in less than a minute.

  When Zlobdan announced to the room that he was finished, there was a pause—and then a huge round of applause. Mergim burst into tears; the rest flooded in, and Cormac found himself picked up and hugged. The bottle was offered to him, and he found it quite difficult to refuse. He told Zlobdan to explain that he had to drive a car, and Zlobdan thought that worrying about drinking before driving a car was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. One of the men produced a drawing of a huge, angry spider in a web, which Zlobdan explained Mergim was going to get as a tattoo; and Cormac, affixing the bandage, explained that he couldn’t get a tattoo for another three months. When Zlobdan lifted an eyebrow, Cormac said, “Tell him if he does we’ll have to take the leg off,” which was hypothetically, potentially true, even if it was profoundly unlikely. And when Zlobdan had explained to them once more that they didn’t have to pay, Mergim came out of the kitchen and handed Cormac a heavy plum cake.