500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(15)
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.