500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)
Jenny Colgan
Dedication
This book is dedicated with love and gratitude to organ donors everywhere. You are the true heroes of so many stories.
Epigraph
There are two teachers in the school, One has a gentle voice and low, And smiles upon her scholars, as She softly passes to and fro.
Her name is Love; ’tis very plain She shuns the sharper teacher, Pain.
Or so I sometimes think; and then, At other times, they meet and kiss, And look so strangely like, that I Am puzzled to tell how it is,
Or whence the change which makes it vain To guess if it be—Love, or Pain.
—SUSAN COOLIDGE, WHAT KATY DID
Part I
Chapter 1
It should have started with ominous dark crows, great murmurations and flutterings, bad omens taking to the sky; with thick storm clouds rolling in, clocks striking thirteen.
In fact, it started with an extremely undignified argument with an old lady over a bar of chocolate.
“But you have a bar of Dairy Milk right there in your hand!”
Mrs. Marks looked up at her, heavy and glowering, from the cracked brown leather sofa. “I do not!”
“Behind your back!”
Like a tiny child, Mrs. Marks refused to remove her hand, just shook her head mutinously.
Lissa Westcott put down the medical equipment she’d been packing away and strode back into the center of the room, exasperated. “You thought I’d gone! You thought I was leaving the room and you were making a grab for a hidden Dairy Milk!”
Mrs. Marks fixed her with beady eyes. “What the bleedin’ hell are you then, the chocolate police?”
“No. Yes!” said Lissa, rather desperately.
She held out her hand. Mrs. Marks finally handed it over. It was, in fact, a Bournville.
“Ha!” said Mrs. Marks.
Lissa looked at her.
Old Mrs. Marks lived on the fourteenth floor of a South London tower block where the lifts were often broken. Her foot was gradually giving in to diabetes, and Lissa was trying her absolute hardest to save it. She glanced out from the dingy, fussy room with dusty fake flowers everywhere, over at the grand views of the river to the north, at the great towers of the City, glinting in the light, bright and beautiful, clean and full of money, like a vast array of glittering palaces, completely out of reach, though less than two miles away.
“We’ve just been talking about your diet for twenty minutes!” she said to the poor woman who was practically a shut-in, with only her daughter to visit her. Watching EastEnders with family-sized bars of chocolate was one of the few pleasures she had left, but it wasn’t doing her any good. “I don’t want to be coming up here one day and finding you in a coma,” Lissa went on, as severely as she dared.
Mrs. Marks just laughed at her. “Oh, don’t you worry about me, duck. Whatever will be will be.”
“That’s not how health care works!” said Lissa, glancing at her watch. She was due in Peckham in twenty minutes. Driving in London was an absolute fool’s errand, but she didn’t have any choice; she couldn’t carry drugs on the tube.
Lissa was an NPL: a nurse practitioner liaison. She followed up on hospital discharges who had trouble attending outpatient departments in the hopes that they didn’t become readmissions. Or, she said in her more cynical moments, did half of what community nurses did when they still had the budget and half of what GPs used to do when they could still be asked to leave the office. Originally trained as an accident and emergency nurse, she loved her current job, which involved rather fewer drunks spewing up on her than A&E did—particularly the bits of it when she got chocolate.
Her hopes, though, in Mrs. Marks’s case, were not at their highest.
“You’re not exactly a sylph yourself,” said Mrs. Marks.
“You sound like my mum,” complained Lissa, who had her mother’s curvy frame, to her mother’s occasionally vocal and occasionally silent disappointment.
“You take it then,” said Mrs. Marks grudgingly.
Lissa made a face. “I hate dark chocolate,” she said. But she took it anyway. “Please,” she said again. “Please. I’d hate them to admit you again. Next time you might lose your foot. Seriously.”
In response, Mrs. Marks sighed and indicated the entire old brown three-piece suite. Lissa put her hands down the backs of the cushions and found chocolate bars behind every one.
“I’m donating them to the food bank,” she said. “Do you want me to buy them off you?”
Mrs. Marks waved her away. “No,” she said. “But if I do end up back in that place again, I’ll blame you.”
“Deal,” said Lissa.
IT WAS CHILLY for mid-March as she left the tall building, but the sun was shining behind a faint cloud of smog in the air, and Lissa could sense spring coming, somewhere on the horizon. She prayed, as she always did, that nobody had seen the medical personnel sticker on her car and attempted to break into it in case she’d left any drugs in there, and contemplated the new Korean barbecue place she was due to meet some friends in later. It looked good on Instagram, but this wasn’t necessarily a good thing and sometimes quite the opposite if it was just full of people photographing cold food.