500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(17)

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?”

Lots of people had told Lissa what they thought she needed—a love affair, to get drunk, to go on holiday, to fall in love, to travel the world—and she hadn’t enjoyed any of that either. She weighed up what she thought Joan’s response would be.

“Is it a dog?” she said.

Joan smiled. “Well, that and a bit of fresh air, I would say. Lots of walks, lots of being out in the countryside. That’s a cure for just about anything.”

Lissa looked out the window, where it had clouded over ominously. “Doesn’t it rain all the time here?” she said.

“So what?” said Joan, stumped at the question.

She went back to her files and pulled some out.

“Cormac will send you his case notes,” said Joan. “These are just the current ones dished out.”

“So what kind of thing do you see around here, then?” said Lissa.

“Oh, the usual. Some diabetes care. Bit of stoma work. Vaccinations. Old. Farming accidents.”

“What?” said Lissa.

“People lose bits to tractors. More often than you’d think. That kind of thing.”

“What kind of bits?”

“Sticky-out bits,” said Joan matter-of-factly, walking into the waiting room and throwing open the unlocked door.

Lissa twirled around. “You leave your door open?!”

“Well, they’re very welcome to the Homes and Gardens back issues and the broken toy garage.”

Lissa stepped through in wonder. The old front room of the house was the waiting room, and it was thankfully rather cleaner than Joan’s car, although she suspected faintly that the dogs still did indeed get in here from time to time. There were toys, posters warning against smoking and drinking—nothing notably different from London, except that every other inch of the walls was covered in pictures of dogs and horses; there was a stag’s head on one wall and a stuffed greyhound in a glass case in the corner.

Lissa started when she saw it.

“Ah, yes. Cosmo.” Joan sighed. “Wonderful, wonderful animal. Could never let him go.”

“Doesn’t it scare the children?”

“Don’t be ridiculous! They love him!”

Lissa stared at the glassy eyes. “Are you sure?”

Joan snorted. “Here,” she said, indicating a whitewashed room, thankfully free of taxidermied pets. “This is Cormac’s office.”

“He gets an office to himself?”

“Aye. He’s got one up at the hospital too.”

“You’re kidding!”

Lissa normally did all her notes back in her room, and if she was lucky she got to squeeze into a staff room at one of the bigger practices every now and again.

Joan blinked. “There’s six rooms upstairs we don’t use at all.”

“Cor,” said Lissa. “In London this would be worth, like, millions.”

“Yes,” sniffed Joan with a tone of utter disdain. “But it would be in London.”





Chapter 21


Cormac looked around. His room was tiny—more of a cell than a room, really—long, narrow, cheerless. How did people live like this? Where did they go when they needed to stretch their legs? There was not a piece of green to be seen anywhere out the window, just concrete and cars and more concrete and the occasional spindly, sickly-looking bare tree, roped off from the pavement. He watched the people below him streaming across the roundabout when the lights went green, taking big steps and little ones, as the endless circling traffic and lines of buses and cabs stopped and started and belched smog and stopped again. It was dizzying. How did people stop? How did they calm down and take a deep breath? He opened the window. The air was harsh with exhaust fumes and the noise was incredible. He quickly shut the window again and poured himself a glass of water from the sink. Then he poured it away. It was lukewarm and chalky and hard and absolutely revolting. Perhaps it was just the pipes, he thought. Maybe it was just old pipes.

He looked at his watch. It was only ten in the morning and he didn’t report for work until the following day. There were millions of people in the city, and he didn’t know a single one of them. He’d never been surrounded by so many people in his entire life, and he’d never felt so lonely.