Chapter 5
Chapter 5
M orag, not long back in Carso, hardly shopped for herself at all and if she did she went to the fancy Post Nalitha didn’t live in town. So neither of them ever came into the ScotNorth, but today they were making an exception.
It was so strange, thought Gertie, that she still felt it. It had been so long ago. Why did the stings of adolescence stay so fresh when she couldn’t remember what she’d had for lunch yesterday? She could immediately smell the weird ham smell of the school canteen, mixed with Lynx Africa and hairspray and trainers and dust and textbooks. She could see them, Morag with her black curly hair straightened to within an inch of its life; Nalitha wearing big gold hoops in defiance of the dress code, all tall and confident and laughing with the boys. Well. One boy in particular. And all these years later she still couldn’t bear to think of it.
Now the two of them were waltzing by, looking better than ever, and obviously, Gertie realized with some bitterness, still great friends. Nalitha was clearly pregnant, with huge wedding and engagement rings on.
“I don’t want to eat here,” Morag was saying. “It’s all Scotch eggs and Ringos.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Can’t we find a nice bistro or something? Sit down?”
“But I have to eat NOW. I mean, NOW. This is one of the weird things about being pregnant.”
Gertie found she was furiously eavesdropping, even as she stared at her bucket and prayed for them to go straight past without noticing her.
“Hey,” said Nalitha to Morag, “oh my God, look at that.”
She was indicating the little handwritten for sale/wanted board.
“Oh, someone’s selling kittens,” said Morag, frowning as she studied it. “Gosh, that would be nice, though, wouldn’t it? Mind you, Gregor and cats is a whole big other issue I don’t really like getting into. Ornithologists and cats are, like, massive enemies.”
“Do cats know that though?”
“Well, no,” replied Morag. “The best way to have a sworn enemy is to not even care whether they’re your enemy or not.” She reflected. “Plus, it might be a bit, ‘WE HAVE A PET NOW!’”
“Huh,” said Nalitha. “Anyway, not that, no. Look.”
“What?”
“I thought you had 20/20 vision!”
“Better than actually,” said Morag, proudly.
Nalitha leaned over her own bump and rapped her knuckles against the newest ad, in scrawled blue ballpoint pen.
TWO-BED FLAT TO RENT OFF HIGH STREET
With a telephone number.
Morag stared at it.
“You could take it short-term!” pointed out Nalitha. “While you and Gregor sort out what to do.”
“I doubt it takes goats, though.”
Gregor was perfect, but also had a pet goat. So. Almost perfect.
Nalitha rolled her eyes. “Come on. Look. It says it’s not on Airbnb!”
“Yet,” replied Morag.
Nalitha took a picture of the ad on her phone. “This could be just right for you. Now hurry up—I have to eat.”
And they rushed past Gertie without noticing her. Which was slightly a relief and slightly reminded Gertie of school all over again.
A two-bedroomed flat, thought Gertie, dreamily, finishing off the windows. All to herself. Imagine. You probably didn’t even have to bend down to get through the door. It might even have a bath. The little Shore Road house didn’t have enough room for a bath. There was a tin one they’d kept in the shed that Elspeth used to get washed in as a baby in front of the fire and was now... well, it was full of wool, thought Gertie, somewhat crossly.
Imagine...
And she took her phone out and quickly snapped a photo of the ad too.
Back inside, Gertie had rather hoped they would be getting their whatever and going. She didn’t like reliving it. That first time her dreamworld had ever come up hard against reality. Very hard.
E LEVEN-YEAR-OLD Gertie—all black cloudy hair and snub nose, legs so long she constantly looked like her knees were knocking; freckles over every part of her that no amount of “oh, look at your lovely freckles” from Jean could stop her longing for creamy skin—had walked slowly toward the large metal gates of Carso Secondary. It looked huge to her, then. She stood outside it, staring up. Her best friend at primary, Amna, had just moved to the bright lights of Stornoway and she felt very alone amongst the hordes of new kids.
As she did so, a lanky teenage boy in baseball boots bounded up behind her. A guitar bounced off his back and he nearly tripped as she came to a sudden halt.
“Hey yah!” he yelled, backing up. Gertie immediately started apologizing, but he grinned broadly.
“It’s not so bad,” he said, immediately twigging her for a first year, the sleeves of her blazer hanging halfway down her too-long skirt. “Don’t worry about it.”
And he grinned, blue eyes sparkling, and just like that, Gertie forgot instantly all the terrifying advice from the KCs about men, as the first crush of her life walked through the open gates. And his name was Struan McGhie.
There would be others, of course, many, many others. Zac Efron. Mr. Brewster, the young, bequiffed rock-star-looking and patently-unsuitable-for-teaching-geography teacher (who lasted eight months before going off to make cheese and leading a much easier, quieter existence without everyone—teachers, pupils and parents alike—falling in love with him every ten minutes); a variety of Jonas brothers; and Usher, whom she could never quite successfully maneuver in her imagination into a situation where his private plane would have to perform a forced emergency landing at the town’s tiny airstrip, and he would somehow have to stay at the smallest cottage in town with her, her mum, and her gran. But she knitted him a couple of lovely tight beanies, just in case. She never mentioned it at home. All men were anathema to the KCs (except Rod Stewart, obviously).
Struan, though, was a different matter to pop stars. Because he was right there. He was a third year, and played in a ceilidh band already and hung out with girls and boys; Gertie, still in the full gender apartheid of being twelve, found this astonishingly cool. She learned his timetable by heart and somehow contrived to be at every entrance and exit more or less at the same time. Struan, being fifteen, and chock-full of hormones that rather distracted his gaze in the direction of girls who had actually been through puberty, was completely incapable of noticing.
Gertie, very bravely and unusually, came up with a bold plan. So bold it kept her awake at night. She couldn’t share it with the KCs, who would pooh-pooh it immediately and then one of the twins would tell her to change her hair and let her long fringe grow out and stop hiding her face behind it (something, she discovered, years later, the twins were actually correct about).
But Struan was a musician, people even said he might be famous one day—he was so popular—and he’d played the Christmas concert, even though it was normally just the big scary fifth and sixth years.
So carefully, painstakingly, with many mistakes and unpickings, in her favorite pale soft colors—a variety of grays with a dusty rose edge and a thin stripe of yellow in the fingers—she made a set of fingerless gloves, which is very difficult to do; ideal, she thought, for someone who practiced the guitar all the time. He would be so surprised and delighted that surely he would notice her, and smile and...
She told the KCs they were for her, so they would help with the tricky bits, which of course they did, whilst making many helpful suggestions about adding brighter colors or perhaps some adorable buttons, as they could not help themselves; until finally they were ready (sans buttons) and they were the first thing Gertie had ever finished that she was completely and utterly proud of. She wrapped them carefully in a leftover box from Christmas, and a bit of stray ribbon, and tied it as neatly as she could. Then on Valentine’s Day she’d written a card, chosen after much agonizing and at great length, and left it near the bottom of his locker.
She spent the rest of the day in absolute agony, unable to focus on a single lesson, desperately waiting for lunchtime where, if she was lucky, she would catch a glimpse as he hung out with his wide circle of acquaintances, grabbing a sandwich before heading off to the music department.
She wasn’t hungry and let her friends go ahead. Struan was with his friends Morag and Nalitha. Nalitha was incredibly beautiful and exotic-looking in an area without much diversity, and if she was annoyed by standing out, well, she didn’t let it show. Always beautifully dressed and made up, her shiny long black hair swinging to her waist. She was utterly breathtaking. And Morag; well, everyone knew the MacIntyres. They lived in a huge rambling house by the sea—much bigger than the cottages—and not only that, her grandfather ran an airline! He had his own plane, which took people from Carso to the islands of the archipelago. Not only that , but Morag was learning to fly too, which meant all the boys found her totally fascinating, even as she ignored most of them to concentrate on coming top in maths, physics, design, and technology and geography.
The pair of them were inseparable; not party girls, just friends, with their own private jokes and jaunts to the islands on the weekends. Gertie would have loved to have been their friend, but doubted she’d be able to, even without the chasm of two years separating them—they were clever and popular already, and she was the dreamy girl whose entire wardrobe was homemade.
They were nice without being swots, and weren’t intimidatingly cool, and, of course, they got to be friends with Struan. A bolt of jealousy went through her as he bounded up to them, in a jolly mood.
Suddenly turning hot and cold all at once, Gertie realized what he was jolly about. He took out the card, and showed them: the gloves. Nalitha burst out laughing. Morag was obviously telling her off and actually admiring them, whilst Struan screwed up his face, laughed again, and shook his head in disbelief. Then Morag hushed him and looked around the room, obviously in case the culprit was lurking. Cheeks burning, grateful beyond belief she hadn’t told anyone what she was doing, Gertie had turned away from her friends, muttered something about “girls’ problems,” and bolted for the door, resolving once and for all that the KCs were right: men were awful, not to be trusted, and she was better off without them. Because he had laughed. And the girls had too.
G ERTIE HID BEHIND the till now. The girls were still chatting in front of the biscuit display.
“I really need to find someone,” Morag was saying. “You are having this baby. It’s happening.”
Nalitha nodded.
Gertie couldn’t help overhearing. Anyway, it was the supermarket. Conversations were generally held to be communal there, she told herself. She rang up Perry Albert’s nine bananas and huge bag of chicken breasts. He was on a new bodybuilding program that was doomed to fail, as it did every time he hooked up with all his mates at the pub and then they ended up at the chippie having battered haggis suppers. But she admired him for trying.
“I’m looking,” said Nalitha. “The CVs are...” She made a face.
“They don’t need to be you ! They don’t need to be brilliant. Just get me someone nice, and polite, who can check in passengers and doesn’t mind occasionally lifting stuff.”
“By ‘stuff’ you mean farm animals, though,” pointed out Nalitha.
“Well, don’t put that in the ad.”
“I didn’t,” Nalitha replied.
“So what’s wrong with the CVs?”
“There aren’t any.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nobody’s applied. Come on, Morag. Antisocial hours. Standing about in the cold. Grumpy passengers. Miles away from anywhere.”
Morag rolled her eyes.
“I mean it. And the pay is terrible. Why would anyone want to go miles away from home and work really early mornings and late nights when they can, say, sit nice and comfortably here in this supermarket from nine to five, then walk home?”
“I just... we just need someone nice.”
“Well, you don’t actually,” said Nalitha tartly. “You need someone who can handle quite a lot. Drunks and people who are terrified of flying and safety issues and angry people and people who’ve missed flights and have the wrong tickets and are weird about their baggage and all sorts of things. Not just anyone can do this job.”
“Well, I know that,” said Morag, affectionately. She loved working with her best friend.
“Yes, but you pay buttons.”
“We make buttons! We profit-share in anything that comes in!”
“I know,” said Nalitha. “And I care about the company. I love my job. I’m just saying. For the money. I’m not sure we’re going to get anyone.”
“We have to get someone ,” said Morag in exasperation. “Summer’s coming!”
Summer was the big busy season in the Highlands and islands of Scotland, right through to the beautiful orange and brown soft smoky autumn. The nights were short; it was light until midnight, and although the weather was invariably changeable, you sometimes did get lucky. There would always be a handful of the beautiful days when you could travel through turquoise seas—never warm, but stunningly clear and fresh—and golden beaches; huge wide fresh skies, with the mountains reflecting perfectly in the lochs below; the forests teeming with birds and wildlife; salmon leaping from the streams. It was a glorious time of year when the air was sweet with abundant gorse and heather that chased the bluebells, that chased the daffodils, that chased the snowdrops; and the deer (far too many deer, muttered locals, eating suspiciously sourced venison for supper again) scampering with their tails bobbing; rabbits ducking in every hedgerow; lambs hopping fences; squirrels bounding joyfully through the trees.
Few people enjoyed the summer as much as the Scots themselves and people came from all over the world to walk and hike and rest at cozy stone pubs and drink Irn-Bru and take ferries and little planes to islands with sand so white it looked photoshopped; to sit up at night and watch the sky barely darken, the stars only just visible. Children got muddy in streams and burns or built dams on beaches; lit bonfires and ran wild and carefree. Adults visited beautiful remote castles set deep in forests or on the tops of rocky crags staring out to sea; sipped peaty whisky in front of fires lit even in July as the evenings were still chilly; read books and listened to fiddle bands and forgot all the stresses of their lives, beyond having to go slowly behind the stupid big RVs on the North 500 road.
The Highlands and islands of Scotland were, Morag was convinced—and, as a commercial pilot she had traveled far and wide, so had done her research—amongst the most beautiful places on Earth.
Unfortunately, one of the reasons for that was they didn’t have a lot of people in them—Scottish people lived along a line in the south of the country, just as Egyptians lived down the Nile—which was mostly lovely, having the landscape to yourself, but now, when she was trying to hire staff, a bit tricky. The youngsters would rather go down and make money in Glasgow and Edin burgh, where you didn’t need a car, and you could find a place to live that wasn’t an Airbnb, rather than stay up in Carso with its two pubs and no nightclubs.
Nalitha grabbed the first slice of plastic-wrapped Dundee cake she came across.
“Don’t eat that,” moaned Morag. “I’ll get Gregor to make you one.”
Gregor had many qualities but one of her favorites was what a good cook he was.
“He’s forty miles away and at work. On a mostly uninhabited island,” said Nalitha. “I don’t think you realize this baby needs to eat now.”
“And the baby wants Dundee cake that doesn’t expire for another two years?” said Morag, examining the packet.
“Yes!”
“Well, it’s got whisky in it, so the baby can’t have it.”
“Nnnn!” said Nalitha. She looked over for something else, and suddenly saw Gertie, and her smooth forehead wrinkled slightly as if in vague recognition, but then her eyes slid off her again.
Nalitha had a think about the girl she’d just seen. Pregnancy brain was not very useful.
“Mor, who’s that quiet girl we went to school with who lived with loads of women?” she whispered.
Morag racked her brains. That was the problem about living in an isolated area; you ended up really far away from people you went to school with because you were all so scattered.
“Skinny legs. Black hair. Never looked where she was going, always trailing knitting needles and stuff.”
“Gertrude Mooney?” came to her eventually.
“Gertie, of course! I think she’s over there,” said Nalitha.
“Okay,” said Morag. “She was nice. I think. Didn’t say much.”
“Well, at least she wasn’t one of the racists,” said Nalitha grimly, who had those names carved on her heart.
Gertie stiffened. She had felt their eyes on her. This wasn’t school, she told herself. Anyway, they hadn’t been bullies. Gertie had been lucky with dodging outright bullies, or so she’d thought. She figured it was because she was so often daydreaming that she was the despair of the teachers and the really mean kids couldn’t be bothered. But this was not at all true. None of the kids wanted to come up against Jean, Marian, Majabeen, and the twins in a bad mood. It wasn’t nicknamed “the coven” for no reason.
But even so, they reminded her of her real humiliation, particularly for the months afterward when the KCs had loudly asked her why she didn’t wear those lovely gloves and then she’d had to knit a pair in bright yellow and pretend it was the wrong color so they got all the satisfaction of being right, and she had to wear a pair of stupid yellow mittens for the next two years.
“Yellow mittens, remember?”
“Oh yeah. Goodness. I’m so used to everyone moving away.”
“Except for us losers,” said Nalitha.
Morag was just preparing her hello smile, when suddenly the door slid open and a loud voice could be heard.
“Aye hiyas!”
Someone was shouting at someone outside.
“GETIFA YA BASSAS AYE YIZ ALL O YIZ.”
And a huge, filthy man lurched into the shop.