500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(69)
His newfound fondness for the big city was muted tonight; he was thinking about how the fair was always such a fun time. He’d normally go a couple of times. Jake would get in with the St. John’s Ambulance ladies, who got free passes to everything but never wanted to use them—it was obviously a scam, they should have gone to a much more deserving cause, but Jake had the gift of the gab and that was that.
He hoped he was nice to Lissa. It would be cool there tonight. Bright as well, you wouldn’t get a whiff of sunset till ten P.M. There’d be a breeze probably; the right kind of evening for just a shirt and a jumper and being totally comfortable wherever you were, with fresh air and the sweet smell of the last of the bluebells on the air, as well as the gorse, warmed by the sun through the day . . . he could almost feel it. And smell the candy floss on the air, and feel you couldn’t be happier . . .
“So, anyway, we drained about a liter of bile from his abdomen,” Yazzie was saying.
Cormac blinked. “Is that right?” he said.
She looked worried. “Sorry, is that gross? Before dinner?”
“Naw, naw, not at all,” said Cormac.
In fact, it wasn’t before dinner at all. Lissa had been right, they’d had to queue; what she hadn’t been correct about was it certainly wasn’t an hour. It was at least ninety minutes.
Something happened in the queue. Looking around, Cormac could see most people on their phones; some had been left to hold places while their presumably more popular mates whooped it up in a local bar somewhere. Some couples were tight in conversation, as if they were as happy to be in a queue together as they would be anywhere else, and some groups of friends were doing that slightly nervous loud thing groups do at the beginning of a night out, before they’ve all managed to have a drink and settle down. They were whooping at each other and shouting performatively and welcoming more and more members to their group, until Cormac started to doubt whether they were ever going to make it to the front of the queue.
“What do they sell here?” he said, realizing that both of them were actually finding the conversation a little slow and stilted; that even before they knew each other, they kind of looked like one of those couples with absolutely nothing to say to each other, once she’d told him about old Mr. Haber’s drained cyst.
“Buns,” said Yazzie, pointing to the menu in the window.
“Buns?” Cormac screwed up his face. He didn’t want a bun; he was starving.
“Bao,” said Yazzie. “They’re like Chinese street food. They’re filled with meat and stuff.”
“Meat buns,” said Cormac. They had already been there for forty-five minutes. His shirt was sticking to his back and his neck felt grimy, simply from standing on a narrow sidewalk with cabs and trucks squeezing past him every second.
“Apparently they’re amazing,” said Yazzie sullenly, because she had bought a new orange dress for this and told all her mates about how she’d managed to pull that hot Scottish NPL they all liked, and now she was standing on a sidewalk with a guy who looked like he’d rather be on the moon than here.
If it was warm in Kirrinfief, there was a little hidden bay down by the loch where you couldn’t drive, only walk, and as long as you took all your rubbish away, the police (Gregory Duncan from Hart’s farm; they’d all been to school together) would turn a blind eye to it, and they’d light a bonfire and drink cider and watch as the sky barely darkened as the hour neared midnight, and they could play their music as loud as they wanted, nobody was anywhere near to hear them, not for miles, and they watched the stars pop out, one by one, never too bright, for the night wasn’t long enough for them to shine; the north of the planet had tilted too far on its axis.
Stars were for a different season; this was their season of light. Someone would sometimes bring a guitar, and everyone else would groan and throw stones and call them a James Blunt fud, but even so, if the gentle chords of “Caledonia” or “Sunshine on Leith” started up, well, it wouldn’t really be possible not to sing along to that, would it, as the moon reflected on the calm waters of the loch and its endless rippling glory. And as soon as the sun was sunk on one side of the dark shapes of the mountains, it felt the lightest rays of the dawn were just appearing once more.
They had been such happy nights. Cormac found himself wondering if that’s where Jake would take Lissa and whether she’d like it. Just a bonfire, some cider, a bit of music, some hamburgers and marshmallows. Nothing fancy. Occasionally a soft toy someone had won at the fair, which would get to sit on a proper throne made of sticks, after the year Gordon Lowrie had thrown one in the fire, and the nylon had sparked and melted horribly and the plastic eyes had dropped down the edges of the pink bear, and all the girls had screamed and gotten upset with him. After that, stuffed animals had pride of place.
He smiled to himself. Yazzie cleared her throat crossly.
“Ach. Where were we?” he said, looking up. The queue hadn’t moved at all.
“Meat buns,” she said.
Chapter 53
Meanwhile, three miles across town, two people had, amazingly, found a very quiet space.
Piotr had arrived in London with absolutely no money whatsoever, nothing more than the bus fare to Victoria station. He had spent the first six months, when he couldn’t afford even to eke out a beer, at the Polish Centre and walking around and around the huge, terrifying, expensive city, walking for miles along unfamiliar sidewalks with foreign signs and extraordinary monuments and strange things. So he was taking Kim-Ange to somewhere he really liked, because you could be a tourist for only so long before you started getting deeper and deeper into what was around you, and one of his endless drizzly Sunday walks had taken him to this enchanted spot.