500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(33)
Islay frowned, but her mother relaxed and went to put the kettle on.
“Take a picture!” the girl insisted bossily, and put on a huge grin and a ta-da with her hands. “Do it!”
Lissa tried to smile patiently. “I’d lose my job,” she said.
The girl looked suspicious.
“And so would Cormac.”
But already the mother was bustling back in, smiling expectantly. “Och, he’ll be wanting a picture,” she said. Islay smiled triumphantly and posed again, and Lissa, reluctantly, snapped her.
The girl’s blood pressure, heart rate, healing scar—all were fine, totally normal. The parents both lingered at the doorway, fearfully watching Lissa’s every move in a way that made the back of her neck prickle. She didn’t understand why they were so smug and triumphalist about it all. Didn’t they realize? Didn’t they know that an innocent boy’s blood had trickled out on the pavement for this?
It wasn’t until later that night when she got the email back from Cormac that she realized what she had missed.
To: [email protected]
* * *
Um, hi. The Coudrie family asked me to write to you directly and send you a picture.
Oh, and thanks for the house and everything. I took the spare room, by the way. Oh, and I picked some daffodils, I hope that was okay. Hope everything is okay with you.
Anyway, she seems fine, all vitals normal. I’m not sure I even needed to be there. Scar fine and healing fast, patient well in herself, talkative, seems perfectly normal situation. Don’t know if follow-up visits will be required as long as immunosuppression initiation continues as normal, but they were very adamant I let you know and send you a picture. PLEASE don’t share it. I know I shouldn’t send it but she was quite persuasive.
Yours sincerely,
Alyssa Westcott
CORMAC HAD HAD a trying day. He had mixed up the dogs and was slightly perturbed that in discussing the dogs, Alyssa had completely failed to mention that James had a boa constrictor in the house. He hadn’t been terrified exactly; it would just have been nice to have had a bit of forewarning.
On the plus side, he’d gotten lost only three times and been shouted at by only two cyclists, once for reasons that almost weren’t his fault. And he’d gone for a pint after work and been charged ￡7, and while he didn’t think of himself as a stingy man, and certainly didn’t want to live up to any kind of Scottish cliché, internally he couldn’t help wincing. And it wasn’t like Eck’s pub, where anyone—hill walkers, tourists, locals, long-lost American cousins searching for their roots—would strike up a conversation with you and where the pub was a convivial meeting place full of dogs and farmers and talk of weather and general hospitableness after a long day. Here there was nowhere to sit and large groups of aggressive young men, and everyone was ignoring everyone else, and there was a slight atmosphere of menace, and the beer tasted like fizz and nothing else, and Cormac had always thought of himself as a man of fairly simple tastes, but he wasn’t sure he fitted in here at all.
And the streets were completely astonishing to him. There was a tramp in Kirrinfief, Dorcan. He’d been there longer than anyone could remember; nobody even knew if that was his real name. He came and went, slept in the churchyard, accepted soup and meals left out for him, spoke to no one, but sat on his bench then went on his way again to who knew where. Nobody knew anything about him, and he discouraged chat, even from Judith the friendly vicar, whose garden he was effectively sleeping in. She left the vestry open for him, but he never used it, even on the wettest of nights.
But here—there were people just lying about everywhere, in underpasses and shop doorways, over vents and under bridges. And nobody batted an eyelid. It seemed completely fine. Cormac was entirely baffled by the whole thing but followed what other people did: bought the Big Issue when he saw it, blinked in puzzlement. Wasn’t everyone here rich? Walking about the city, he’d seen a gold car parked in Covent Garden; restaurants where everything cost ￡30; shops that smelled of money, with fantastical window displays, Wonder Rooms; and jewelers with watches that cost more than he made in a year.
He knew he didn’t understand politics—he’d spent enough time sitting in a desert for reasons he didn’t quite grasp to pretend to know anything about anything. But this was so very odd, that everyone had just learned to live with loads of people lying on the ground.
Lissa’s email changed his mood in an instant. He pulled out his laptop in the pub and typed back,
To: [email protected]
* * *
I bet she was!!!! That’s brilliant! That’s just so fantastic! I can’t believe she’s sitting up! And talking of her own accord! Christ, they must be over the moon—thank you, THANK YOU for doing the house call and reporting back, I’ve been worried sick.
Amazing. Sometimes this job is really fricking amazing, don’t you think? Also, thank you for the dog warning, but if you feel like adding snake warnings at any point, that would also be appreciated.
And he attached a picture of Islay he had taken for her mother, when they thought it might be the very last time they saw her alive: a blue bag of skeletal bones, connected to every tube in the ICU department; a wraith; a frail whisper of an angel Death had already clapped its scaly wings around.