500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(67)

Lissa remembered her mother hurrying her past it, refusing to let her go, completely uninterested in the entire affair. She recalled not wanting to catch the eye of the rougher girls in case they teased her later (which they did anyway, calling her stuck up, which was hard to disagree with because her mother was so very insistent that that’s exactly what she was).

And then another time, when she was a little older, she did exactly what her mother was so scared she would: pretended she was going around to Majabeen’s house to study, whereupon the two of them slipped out to “the library” and rushed down to the common, pooling their money, which was just enough to share candy floss and have one ride. The scrawny boy on the waltzers had a tooth missing, but to them he just looked even more exotic, like a pirate. He came and hung off the back of their car as they screamed their heads off. The evening was dark and the music was incredibly loud, and as she spun around and around, her neck hurting from the pressure, she couldn’t remember feeling more alive, more naughty.

Of course one of the girls from school saw them, and even though she was friendly enough, word got around and someone’s mum ran into her mum at Sainsbury’s and the worst came to the worst and she was grounded for a solid month.

It had been so worth it.

JAKE WAS STANDING there, wearing an open-necked blue shirt that suited his hair. He’d had it trimmed, Lissa noticed, for the occasion. It looked ridiculously sharp and contoured and gelled and she wasn’t crazy about it (fearing retributive ear cutting, Jake had gone into the nearest town, forty miles away, and gotten it done by somebody who hadn’t known him his entire life).

He grinned at her nervously. She looked lovely, her curls bouncing behind her and the smile he never normally saw in the daytime.

They awkwardly attempted a social kiss, which went a little wrong, and Jake would normally have taken her hand but, suddenly shy, he didn’t. Instead, he gallantly offered her his arm, and she took it rather tentatively.

“Okay,” he said. “So what do you want to do first? What’s your favorite thing?”

“I don’t know,” said Lissa. “I’ve never been to a fair before. Except the waltzers. I like the waltzers.”

“You’ve never been?!” He was incredulous. “Were you brought up in a cupboard under the stairs?”

“No,” said Lissa.

He stopped himself suddenly. “Sorry, is it . . . like, a culture thing?”

Lissa gave him a sideways glance. “How would that work, then?”

“I don’t know!” said Jake, lifting his hands in horror in case he’d said the wrong thing.

“No,” said Lissa slowly. “We have fairs in London. My mum just didn’t really approve.”

“Because . . . ?”

Lissa thought about it. “Oh . . . I suppose she was a bit of a snob.”

This was such an out-of-character thing to say that Lissa lifted her hand to her mouth.

“Oh my God,” she said. “I can’t believe I just said that about my mum. She’s amazing, a really inspirational character, very . . . all of that.”

Jake smiled. “She sounds . . . terrifying. And amazing, obviously,” he added hastily, horrified at how he was doing.

Lissa smiled again. “Oh God,” she said, and swallowed. “Okay. She is both of those things.”

She wondered, suddenly, why she hadn’t confided more in her mum. Would she even have needed to come here? Would her mum have been disappointed?

She thought of Cormac too, and his mother, fussing about him. It was odd, sometimes, just a little, the strange things they had in common.

“Well then,” said Jake after a long pause, trying to get her attention. “Where shall we start? I really need to win you a large soft toy.”

“I don’t need one of those.”

“You don’t need one,” said Jake, who had, truth be told, been practicing, “but I think you should have one. To make up for all the ones you missed when you were a child.”

And he bought her a large candy floss, which immediately got stuck in her hair and was just as sticky and ridiculous a concept of foodstuff as Lissa remembered from nearly half a lifetime ago and was messing up her lipstick, but she found she didn’t care and they both laughed. She wondered briefly if she didn’t care because she was so relaxed or because she genuinely wasn’t that into the guy she was with, but soon she told herself to stop bothering and just enjoy herself. And she did.

They passed Ramsay and Zoe with their clutch of children, the two little boys wearing identical Spider-Man costumes, holding hands, and looking absolutely terrified.

“What about the ghost train?” Zoe was saying, and the taller of the small children said, “We absolutely do not want to meet any more ghosts, Nanny Seven,” and the littler was shaking his head in terror, and Zoe said, “What do you mean ‘more ghosts’?” rather nervously, and Patrick and Hari just looked at each other.

“Hello, you two,” said Zoe, and Lissa felt odd to hear them referred to as a couple.

“Hello,” said Lissa, smiling.

“Lollipops!” hollered Patrick. “You’re the lady with all the lollipops. And jabs. And lollipops.”

He narrowed his eyes as if trying to work out whether seeing her was a good or bad thing.