Chapter 7
Scottie
The sleet finds every gap in my jacket. I stamp my feet on the pavement outside The Wallace, breath fogging in the amber light of the canopy. December in Scotland is when the grey sky occasionally spits ice.
I’m waiting for Ava. There’s no pretending this is coincidence anymore.
Tuesdays have become our thing for the past month.
The whole point used to be about sitting in the dark and not having to speak to a soul.
But last week she was ten minutes late, and staring at my own jacket taking up her spot genuinely pissed me off.
Peace and quiet don’t actually kick in until she turns up, unspools her scarf, claims the middle armrest, and steals the sweets. The easiest part of my week.
My phone goes off in my coat pocket, so I fish it out. It’s Mum:
Boiler’s making that clanking sound again, love. Have a look?
I swipe it away. Not now. Another buzz. Finn texts:
Where did you put the remote? Also, we’re out of milk.
Worst flatmate ever. I type a quick reply:
I’m not your maid. We share the mental load, remember?
I stow the phone, stare at the wet tarmac gleaming under the streetlights, and wait.
Finally, her battered Volvo turns into the car park, wipers slapping at the rain. The knot in my back muscles loosens, and the noise in my head goes quiet.
Ava parks crookedly, front wheel kissing the kerb. The door swings open. Her cheeks are pinched pink, and her hair is scraped back into the usual bun.
I wonder what it looks like when she lets it loose.
She spots me and her face changes. Without scanning the car park or checking over her shoulder, she walks straight toward me.
‘Hi.’ She stops a foot away. ‘Sorry to break it to you, but you look like a freshly defrosted Viking.’
‘And you look like a frozen sparrow.’
‘Don’t you know anything about nature? Sparrows never freeze. They fluff up.’ She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a small tube. ‘Here.’
‘What’s this? Lube?’
‘Don’t be silly. It’s arnica gel. Take it.’ She holds it out towards me. ‘I saw you wince when you stood up, and this helps,’ she explains when she registers my confused expression. ‘Come on. You’re always sorting the snacks. I wanted to do something nice for you for a change.’
I weigh the tube in my palm. Nobody ever notices any crack in my armour, never mind tries to mend it. Her gesture is so small yet so vast that I don’t know where to put it.
‘You didn’t have to.’
‘Yeah, I know.’ She shrugs. ‘But I wanted to.’
Something catches in my chest. A snag I can’t explain. I close my fingers around the tube and tuck it into my jeans. ‘Ta. I mean it.’
She smiles. ‘You’re very welcome. Now, can we go inside before my face falls off?’
‘Is that so? Why don’t you fluff up, then? Heard that’s how sparrows do it.’
She snickers, slaps my arm, and hooks hers in my elbow.
We buy tickets and climb to the back row. Our row. Ava puts her coat under her seat and snuggles in right beside me. No gap or buffer.
I keep stealing looks at her while the trailers blast. Hair shoved into a messy bun with strands escaping around her neck after God knows how many hours of physio.
The projector light catches the exhausted shadows under her eyes, the physical toll of her week showing right on her face.
Even looking like she desperately needs ten hours of sleep and in the blue wash from the screen, she’s so damn pretty. The prettiest girl I’ve ever seen.
She catches me staring. ‘What’s it, Mister?’
‘Nothing. You’ve…erm…got popcorn on your chin.’
She doesn’t. But she wipes at it anyway.
The Mistletoe Mistake starts. A high-powered CEO in a red cashmere coat gets bonked on the head by a falling branch in a Christmas tree farm and forgets who she is. The locals adopt her. Hijinks ensue.
‘Unlikely,’ Ava mumbles in my direction. ‘I don’t think you forget your entire personality and life from minor blunt force trauma.’
‘It’s festive force trauma. Different rules.’
A short laugh breaks out of her. ‘Is that covered by the NHS?’
‘Naw, you need to go private,’ I say. ‘There’s a specialist in London. Very exclusive.’
She giggles and leans into my arm. Not sure she knows she’s doing it, it’s that subtle. Her warmth settles into me, and the light shines on the line of her cheekbone.
‘Maybe I should get his number.’ She shifts in her seat, stretches her right leg out in front of her. ‘Add him to my collection.’
I glance at her foot. The compression sleeve is visible beneath the hem of her jeans.
‘How many specialists does one ballet dancer need?’
‘Depends on what joint loses an argument with the floor.’ She rotates her foot. ‘You tackle men, I tackle gravity.’
‘That’s one way to put it.’
Three rows of empty seats sit between us and the handful of folk scattered down the slope, so our voices just get lost in the gloom.
‘Ballet is easier on the head than rugby. But at least as hard on everything else.’ She stretches her legs out and crosses her ankles. ‘Your body is a tool. You use it until it breaks, and then you keep using it. It’s not great, but that’s the job. Could be stacking shelves at Tesco.’
I look down at my own hands. It’s a brutal, unsentimental way to view yourself, but she’s right. It makes perfect sense. She knows what she signed up for and deals with the damage. I respect the hell out of that.
‘Last weekend, I took a knock to the ribs and finished the match. Physio strapped me up tight and told me to crack on. Turnover in the seventy-second minute went right through my torso. Couldn’t breathe properly for two days.’ I crack my knuckles. ‘We won, though.’
She turns her head briefly. ‘Exactly.’
Understanding clicks into place. We’re the same species that keeps going because stopping isn’t an option. We learned early that pain is part of the game.
Her shoulder presses against mine. The natural physics of two people sharing an armrest in the dark. But it registers anyway, a patch of heat bleeding through my jumper. I don’t move. Neither does she.
The film plays on, and I’m not watching a single frame of it. I’m too busy memorising the weight of her against my arm.
On screen, the CEO with amnesia is learning to make gingerbread with a ruggedly handsome tree farmer who has no personality beyond his flannel shirt.
‘Do you think he actually knows how to fell a tree?’ I say. ‘Nobody makes a living selling trees for three weeks a year. What does he do the other forty-nine?’
‘Probably OnlyFans.’
I laugh so loud that a woman five rows ahead turns backwards to glare at me.
Ava presses her knuckles against her mouth. ‘You’re going to get us thrown out,’ she hisses.
‘I’d like to see them try.’
She grins. I grin back. The noise of the cinema fades, and for a minute it’s only us, two people who’ve found a frequency nobody else can hear.
Then Ava reaches for the popcorn, and her sleeve rides up.
Her arm stretches across my line of sight, wrist exposed in the cold blue light.
Bruises. Faint now, fading to green, but the shape is unmistakable. Even in this dim light. Four oval marks on the inside of her wrist. Fucking grip marks. I’ve seen them on my mum’s arms, twelve years ago, when she’d wear long sleeves in July.
A cold stone settles in my gut.
Ava’s already pulled her sleeve down. She trembles as she scoops popcorn, a fine vibration she’s trying to hide.
Four fingers. The spacing of a man’s hand holding tight enough to leave evidence. The urge to leave the cinema and find that fucking piece of shite and break every single one of his bones is so visceral I taste copper on my tongue.
But I need to tread carefully here, so keep my voice neutral. ‘That wrist looks a bit sore.’
She locks into a wire-tight brace beside me. ‘What? Oh, this.’ She tucks her hand under her thigh. ‘Just physio. Deep tissue work. I bruise like a peach, honestly. It’s embarrassing.’
Physio on a foot doesn’t leave marks on a wrist.
I know she’s lying. She knows that I know.
The air between us thickens with everything neither of us says.
I could ask who did this to you – even though I’ve a bloody good idea – and watch her walls slam into place.
I could demand answers and watch her bolt for the exit.
If I push now, I lose her. She won’t come next Tuesday.
And she might need someone next Tuesday.
I want to be there when she needs me.
I swallow my questions and bank them. Instead, I force the air in and out of my lungs and a sentence out of my mouth that doesn’t include the words kill or Nevin.
‘It’s been four days. You’d think someone at her massive corporation would have noticed she’s currently shovelling snow for a bloke named Brock in the mountains.’
The steel in her frame doesn’t disappear, but it softens. Her hand comes out from under her thigh, and she reaches for more popcorn. ‘They probably assumed she went on a very aggressive wellness retreat.’
‘Is manual labour a recognised cure for corporate burnout?’
‘The London specialist would know.’
We’re back to normal, but I don’t forget what I saw. The shape of those marks. How she tried to hide them. Something is not okay with Ava MacKinney. Far worse than a tendon injury. Something that fits a shape I recognise and hoped I’d never see again.
The film ends with a kiss in front of snowy trees and a montage of the CEO swapping her corner office for true small-town love.
Minutes later, we walk out through the foyer. The temperature’s dropped since we went in, and the car park’s glazed white. A thin crust of hardened slush is everywhere. I clock the treacherous ice instantly.
Ava takes one step, and her right foot slides. She catches my sleeve. ‘Jesus. It’s a skating rink out here.’
‘Aye.’ I don’t move. Her fingers are still clamped around my arm. ‘You awright?’
She doesn’t answer straight away. Her gaze drops to her foot, then to the icy tarmac stretching toward her Volvo tucked away at the very bottom of the row. The distance might as well be a mile.