21
B y the time they’ve made it out of the shop Essie has signed them up for a builder’s account, for which Dwight gets ten per cent off immediately, and he has therefore immediately decided she is some kind of financial wizard.
‘I have seen multi-million-dollar companies go down,’ she says, conscious she is showing off a bit. ‘And tiny ones. Because they couldn’t control their costs. It doesn’t matter how big or small you are.’
‘You sound like Alan Sugar.’
‘So you do watch some TV.’
He shrugs, starts to speed up as they pass the schoolhouse at the edge of town.
‘What about manpower costs?’ she says
‘Well, Wee Jim Eckles will do it for a hundred quid.’
‘Do what?’ says Essie.
‘Whatever needs doing,’ Dwight says, looking over at her spreadsheet.
‘Keep your eyes on the road!’
They are zooming along at nearly seventy miles an hour on the curving country lane.
Dwight handles the ridiculous car with an insouciance born of one who started driving old bangers in the fields at age thirteen.
Essie would have been embarrassed to admit she rather likes it.
Connor would bark at every pedestrian cyclist and other motorist and tram and complain, entirely without irony, that Edinburgh was becoming impossible to drive in, which Essie could only agree with, as they were doing it on purpose.
Cars were nothing but a hindrance in the middle of the city.
Out here, though, the sky is huge, a bright clear blue with wispy white clouds, and they are cresting the moor road; they can see for miles in every direction.
The huge gullies and cliffs of the very last of the Highlands; kestrels circling in the drafts; newly planted fields full of yellow rape, long lines waiting to be sown with summer crops; and everywhere, sparks of green in more shades than you could imagine; everywhere new life: baby ducks in duck ponds; lambs waking up, hopping joyously on the sides of the mountains, cast into shadow or sun as they flit past. The air smells heavy with a combination of gorse and thick petrol fumes from the car which normally Essie would disapprove of but the feeling of extraordinary speed, the wind whooshing through the open windows .
. . There is of course no air-conditioning, no GPS.
It doesn’t feel quite as dumb a car as she’d thought it might.
Obviously, she disapproves of great big gas guzzlers on principle. It’s a disgrace.
On the other hand . . . it’s fun.
There is a tape player in the car, of all things, and Dwight is playing something that sounds like fifty-five banjos having a fight, and someone hollering ‘yee haw’ over the top of it.
Essie lets her gaze drift from her laptop for a moment, out of the window into the empty spring air.
Suddenly she feels like shouting; feels, bizarrely, free.
With nobody else around, nobody asking how she is, or, just as bad, ignoring her; nobody to talk to about the pathetic hurts and disappointments in herself that her mother doesn’t understand; that as a white, educated girl from a good home, more or less, in a nice part of the world, with a nice boyfriend, she has absolutely nothing, at the end of the day, to complain about. Not really. Not at all.
‘Aaaah,’ she tries nonetheless, experimentally, out of the window into the vast landscape all around them, making them tiny, the sea a turquoise stripe on their left between the clifftops.
Dwight glances at her. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Singing along to your music.’
‘Okay,’ he says, cheered. ‘Go ahead.’
‘Can I just have a holler?’ she asks.
He grins. ‘Be my guest,’ he says, and guns the car even harder as she leans out of the open window and screams into the wind.
A field of auburn Highland coos, their beautiful russet locks blowing in the breeze, glance up at her as she passes, idly wondering, Essie thinks, what this huge black howling raven is .
. . and then they are gone, over the crest of the next hill, doing an incredibly dangerous blind takeover of a wide farm truck carrying silage as Essie closes her eyes and yelps in quite real terror, seeing as Dwight is on the wrong side of the road to see properly around the bend.
‘Playing the odds,’ says Dwight, his cowboy voice back, and Essie rolls her eyes and laughs in nervous horror as they hit the straight again, the car bouncing over the middle line, but she feels alive.
She hasn’t worked much more on the spreadsheet yet, but she had come back to it.
From the price he’d paid and the money he’d made .
. . well, he would do well on the cottages, it’s a sure thing.
And, she tells herself, they were lying empty before.
They haven’t been looked after for a long time.
So maybe a young family is going to come and use one of them for their holidays and make happy memories .
. . once or twice a year. Maybe Christmas and Hogmanay too.
That would be alright, wouldn’t it? Maybe they’d spend money .
. . when they came. The pandemic had stopped so many people travelling, of course; that had been tough.
When all the holiday homes had sat empty year on year and people had got out of the habit, and they’d started to deteriorate and there wasn’t anyone around left to fix them up . . .
Anyway. There is definitely a way to do well on this project, and to make it look lovely. Dwight just needs to be careful.
But she doesn’t think he is a very careful person.
She is dreaming of reclaimed fireplaces, and how well the flooring might scrub up (once you’d got the puppies off it) when they pull into the car park.
As she gets out, the phone rings. It’s Connor.
She feels oddly guilty, for no reason, as if she’s been doing something other than just having a ride in a car.
‘Hey, you,’ she says.
‘Thought we might come up for the weekend soon?’
‘We?’
‘Yeah, you know, me and the lads? Bit of a stalk.’
‘A what?’
‘A deer stalk! Tris got it all sorted out. And I get to see you!’
‘Um, great,’ she says. ‘Want to stay? The house is . . . it’s quite small.’
‘No, Tris has booked us somewhere posh.’
I bet he has, thinks Essie. ‘Can I come?’
‘Stalking?’
‘No! I want to hang out in the nice hotel and have a big deep bath. My mum’s house is stifling me.’
‘Well, I would like it if you did that,’ he says, and they both smile down the phone.
*
‘I just wish it wasn’t deer-killing,’ says Essie to Al on the phone later, taking a walk so her mum doesn’t overhear every word then give her that pained expression and head-tilt when asking for further details of her bolloxed life. Temporarily bolloxed life, she tries to tell herself.
‘Painlessly destroying an old or malformed animal that needs to be culled,’ says Alasdair.
‘Essie, I’ve explained this a million times.
They will eat every leaf in the forest. They will eat every crop in every field.
They will eat every sapling – that’s a baby tree, Ess.
They’ll eat every baby tree. Do you know what happens next?
They starve to death. Want to watch Bambi starve to death, Essie?
Because it takes a long time, so you can go and watch it crying. ’
‘No!’ says Essie, crossly.
‘Well, then,’ says Al. ‘Stop being a bloody hypocrite. Deer have no natural predators.’
‘Except us.’
‘That’s right, except us. To make the ecosystem workable.’
‘Deer are like us,’ says Essie. ‘Just growing and overrunning and ruining everything. But occasionally cute.’
‘That’s exactly right,’ says Al.
‘We have no natural predators either.’
‘Yes, that’s why we’ve invented AI. Can I get off the phone now?’
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘What?’ he says.
‘Will you go stalking with Connor?’
There’s a groaning noise.
‘What? Don’t you like him?’
‘I don’t know him. I just . . . gangs of posh young guys are, it will amaze you to hear, not my favourite clients.’
‘He’s very sweet.’
‘What’s he doing with you, then?’
‘Ha ha ha.’
‘How’s Mum?’
‘Blah blah blah laundry blah blah blah money doesn’t grow on trees blah blah blah I’m a million years old it’s terrible.’
‘Essie! That’s cruel. Go and stay with Dad if it’s that bad.’
‘Oh, God, Lori is always on a diet and Logan’s a thug and Dad works all the time and looks haunted and sad every time she gives him more kale salad. At least at Mum’s I know how to use the coffee machine.’
‘Lucky old Mum.’
‘It’s alright for you! She thinks the sun shines out of your behind!’
‘It does,’ says Al seriously.
‘Whereas I’m just . . . a problem.’
‘I was going to say pain in the arse.’
‘ Al !’
‘Come on, sis. It’s temporary. Soon you’ll be able to piss off back to Harvey Nicks or whatever it is . . . ’
‘I’m not like that.’
‘Okay,’ says Al. ‘But you hate it here.’
‘I did,’ says Essie, looking back at the cottages, and down to the harbour.
In the pinkening sky the tiny propellor plane that serves the archipelago circles down, almost fluttering down to a halt on the little airstrip, right on time as ever.
Morag must be back from her rounds. Essie wonders if she’s managed to talk Gregor into getting a pup yet.
‘But it was such a bad time. I had to get away.’
Al’s voice turns serious. ‘I know. I was there too, remember.’
There’s a silence as she looks out to sea, both remembering the horrible nights of hearing her mum cry.
‘I just wish . . . ’
‘It wasn’t Mum’s fault.’
‘I know, I know,’ says Essie, and she kind of does on one level.
But on another, she still feels: how did she let it happen?
Why wasn’t she nicer to Dad? More fun? Why did he have to look elsewhere?
She had always been so frustrated, niggly with him.
Just as she was with Essie now. She sticks out her bottom lip.
‘Okay,’ says Al finally. ‘I’ll only take him to where the really mean right-wing deer are.’