500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(10)

Lissa felt sick, but that was nothing new these days. Beyond not sleeping well at all, she felt her heart race at the smallest thing. She wasn’t doing well at work either; she could tell. Her regulars had all noticed and remarked upon it, missing her normal cheery demeanor.

But the spark had gone out of her. She was terrified of everything now: loud noises, even the ambulance sirens she heard every five minutes going in and out of hospitals; sudden movements. It felt like her heart was bursting out of her chest; every time she tried to get some rest, she was bolt upright again, in agony. She tried sleeping pills, but they made her feel worse, foggy and disconnected, and she was scared she’d be asked to drive the car while taking them.

Kai’s funeral was exactly what Lissa had feared: a massive community outburst of misery and sadness and rage. His entire school, his church, and the whole of his housing development, it seemed, turned up to pay their respects, singing and crying, spilling out of the large church and onto the street. It was a paroxysm of agony and grief, even as his mother tried to stay dignified and the pastor tried to calm the anger obvious in the crowd at the terrible waste. Ezra didn’t even look at her.

At the church she linked arms with Kim-Ange, whose large presence was always a comfort. Today Kim-Ange’s hair was bright burgundy, but thankfully she was wearing black rather than the orange and purple she favored. Okay, it was a fuzzy-wuzzy coat that made her look like an enormous black bear, but Lissa found it comforting nevertheless and leaned in as they approached the incredibly busy church. You could hear the hubbub a mile away. Traffic had stopped. People were standing crying in the street.

They found a tiny spot on a pew. Nobody ever liked to budge up to Kim-Ange. This bothered Kim-Ange not a bit, and she scooched her sizable bottom along the pew as far as she could and patted the seat beside her.

“Come on, darling.”

Lissa sat down. She was trembling and checked her pocket with the tissues, just to make sure it was all right. She was going through a lot of tissues these days.

There was a lot of noise and hustle and bustle; it seemed half the world was there. But suddenly there was a hush, as the doors at the back of the church opened. It was like a wedding, Lissa thought, her heart racing. Only of course so, so wrong.

The choir stood to the side, their numbers absolutely packed too. On a note, very softly and sweetly they began to gently sing, “Swing low, sweet chariot,” and the pallbearers began a slow, long march down the aisle, carrying a pure white coffin.

Lissa collapsed. She was sobbing so hard she couldn’t breathe. This wasn’t her boy, wasn’t her tragedy. She was drawing attention to herself. This was awful, completely inappropriate. People were looking at her crossly, and she didn’t know what to do, even as she sounded louder than the choir. Someone tutted. Righteous and noisy grief was expected from contemporaries, and family, and young people. Not from a thirty-year-old young professional who didn’t even know the family.

Kim-Ange looked at her, made a decision, and half dragged, half hauled her outside and set her down, quite roughly, on a park bench. There were still mourners trying to get in who watched them with interest.

“Breathe,” said Kim-Ange, and when Lissa didn’t respond, she pushed her head between her knees. “Breathe!”

The brusque tone, oddly, was just what Lissa needed. Being told what to do without having to think about it. The panic attack was intense, but gradually, her heart rate slowed, the blood came to her head, and she started to feel ever so slightly better.

“Sister,” said Kim-Ange, rubbing Lissa’s back as she finally came back to herself, “this cannot go on. This absolutely cannot go on. Also the walls in our rooms are really thin and I can hear you getting up and pacing about half the night and it’s extremely annoying. But I am mostly thinking about you. Although also, when you have a shower at five A.M., you make a lot of noise. But also, for you, this cannot go on.”





Chapter 13


Lissa liked the HR director, Valerie Mnotse, always had; she considered her a friend and mentor, supportive of her career choices when working in the community was often seen as second best.

Valerie got it. She understood the importance of connecting the hospital with the people who used it, and how the better the care they got at home, the less likely they were to boomerang straight back to the hospital and clog up A&E, whether because they were so endlessly confused with the labyrinthine system or because they felt bad but couldn’t get a GP appointment. But this morning, Valerie looked grave.

“Health care in London is always difficult,” she started carefully.

Lissa was about to fire back that she wasn’t burned out, she was fine, she was a good nurse, she knew she was . . . but she found, suddenly, that she couldn’t get the words out—couldn’t get any words out—because she was going to cry again.

No. She couldn’t. She couldn’t cry in front of Valerie, the most immaculate, punctilious woman she knew. She had to be strong. She’d defied her family to go to nursing school, get her university qualifications. She’d done it by herself and worked in some of the toughest, most deprived wards in the entire country, in the whole of Europe. She could do it. She could . . .

“It’s all right to cry,” said Valerie, pushing over a box of tissues.

Lissa felt the tears leak down her face and was furious with herself. If she showed weakness, they were going to move her, she knew it. Lissa nodded slowly as Valerie picked up her phone.