500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(49)
The man laughed. “Naw.”
“Look, I stay in that building just there. Come find me if you need anything.”
Robbie waved him away. “Aye, fine, man.”
CORMAC COULDN’T SHAKE the memory, couldn’t shake thinking about what had gone on out there on the battlefield that had left Robbie on the pavement, left him treading water in his own life.
But Cormac himself wasn’t, he told himself hotly. He was doing something now. He was helping out and being useful, wasn’t he?
But he was, unusually, very disinclined to lend a friendly ear to Lissa, who was surrounded by people who wanted her to talk about what she’d been through, who would bend anything to help her get better.
LISSA HAD TURNED up at the appointment—a post-psych-ward discharge, which normally meant a suicide attempt—to be confronted at a beaten-down gate of a very small farmhouse by a grubby teenage boy and a large barking dog with slaver dripping down off its chops, which Lissa didn’t like the look of at all.
“Hello!” she said. “I’m from the hospital.”
“Shut your pus, you mingebag.”
Lissa blinked. “Is your mum or dad home? I’m really just here to change your dressings.”
“Feck off, bampot.”
Lissa didn’t understand any of this, but it didn’t sound particularly welcoming.
“Just let me in to have a look,” she said. She noticed he was wearing a large, dirty jumper with long sleeves that he had pulled down over his wrists.
“Get to fud,” he said, turning on his heel in front of the gate. The dog, however, remained rooted to the spot, snarling at her.
“Cormac knows I’m here,” she tried desperately.
“That fannybaws can fuckety bye an’ all,” said the boy incomprehensibly, disappearing into the tumbledown old cottage.
Lissa frowned. She was used, from her A&E days, to drunk or resistant patients, but it was normally only in the heat of the moment. Working in the community, most people were delighted to see her. Someone like—she checked her notes—Cameron would normally be a social work case. On the other hand, someone needed to take a look at his slit wrists, and that someone was her.
SHE CAME BACK a couple of days later, but the mother was no help. She refused to open the door, shouting through that they were busy. Lissa could hear a lot of yelling and banging around, and a TV and radio fighting each other at top volume, and the dog barking its head off, and she heaved a sigh and thought, you know, sometimes there was nothing more you could do; if the state tried to help you and you couldn’t take the help, then there was a limit, truly. But the idea of losing another boy scared her rigid, and she was angry that he wouldn’t see a woman, only wanted Cormac.
She knew she’d been lulled into a false sense of security; most of the patients she’d met had been lovely, gentle, and forever pressing her with food: shortbread, homemade bread, cream, and once, memorably, when she’d confirmed Agnieska’s pregnancy, a fresh lobster caught from Loch Ness, which she had given to Joan, who had refused to eat it. The lobster was now happily scrappling its way around the surgery fish tank, terrorizing the other fish, Martina and Billie.
She was gradually getting used to the warmth of the local people, so to be confronted like this was terrifying. And, if she was being honest with herself, was bringing back frightening memories, dialing up her anxiety again. She thought back to what Anita had tried to tell her—to go through the experience again in her head. She hadn’t been doing it, and it was showing; a common or garden issue had turned into a large problem in her head.
She sighed.
To: [email protected]
* * *
Cormac,
Hi there. I’m afraid I’ve had to mark as discharged young Cameron Blaine. He wouldn’t open the door on third time of asking, won’t respond to treatment requests, and is refusing treatment all round. I’m not sure what else to do without breaking and entering the house, so I’m going to discharge him and file with Social Services.
Cormac squinted at it crossly. This was very much not all right. Cameron Blaine had an incredibly difficult family background; he’d been excluded from school, his father was in prison, and his mother was not in prison only to save the council a ton of money on trying to rehome all five of the children. The boy desperately needed help and he had . . . he’d been doing not too badly. Mostly just hanging out with him. He’d gotten Cameron to wash his car once or twice, overpaid him, but tried to make it clear how you did it thoroughly, how you managed not to figure out how to palm the keys in case you wanted to hijack it later. He’d spoken to Gregory Duncan, the amiable local policeman, for whom the Blaine family provided more or less 99 percent of his active work that wasn’t about parking, and they both tried to be casually walking by street corners Cameron was on whenever things looked like they might be getting a bit tasty. Cormac also had an old friend in army recruitment, but he thought that might be a step too far for Cameron, at least at the moment.
It had been a couple of years of good, solid work of trying to build up trust, and Lissa was letting it all collapse in two minutes by behaving like exactly the kind of snotty posh woman Cameron had mistrusted all his life. He was angry and emailed back quickly something exactly on those lines, basically instructing her to get back there and get things sorted out.