500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(23)

“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 scissors. “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.

And Cormac left to the man tearfully shaking his head over and over and cheering, as if Cormac had performed a miracle, and he felt both acutely ridiculous, given the tiny job he’d done, and rather pleased with himself. He heard the music start up again as he let himself back into the stinky lift, with an exhausted-looking young woman pushing a filthy double buggy and coping with a whining toddler at her side too, covered in snot, in a T-shirt too thin for the brisk spring day.