Chapter 13
Chapter 13
G ertie was a bit worried she might not have the right flatmate etiquette, so she dealt with moving in the only way she knew how—she knitted Morag a beautiful pair of super-warm socks in the colors of the company uniform. It worked brilliantly. Morag’s feet were always cold in the cockpit, just a skein of metal between her boots and the freezing sky. She was genuinely delighted, and then felt terrible about not getting Gertie anything so nipped to the ScotNorth and got her some moving-in prosecco and of course Gertie politely opened it at once.
She asked Morag lots of questions about MacIntyre Air, which pleased Morag, who felt she was inching toward the job but was actually a way for Gertie to gather more intel on Calum, particularly now she was following his Instagram. Just to see what kind of knitwear he favored. It wasn’t creepy.
“He seems nice,” ventured Gertie.
Morag snorted. “We thought he’d be a lot worse. Gramps—that’s Ranald. He only works part-time now, so he mostly leaves it to me and I try and keep him in line.”
“Well I did think he was nice,” said Gertie.
“He won’t seem so nice if you take one of his other flights and get stranded at 3 a.m. one hundred kilometers from your destination and his airline won’t pick up the phone or give a crap. Unless it’s us,” added Morag.
She looked at Gertie’s busy knitting hands.
“What IS that?” she asked, pointing at the misshapen black knit steadily growing under Gertie’s flying fingers.
“Oh, it’s a penguin,” said Gertie. “Or it will be. I thought it might be... I thought it might be nice for Nalitha’s other kid, when the baby comes.”
“That is a brilliant idea,” said Morag. She wanted to push Gertie again to take the job, but didn’t quite know how. Regardless, Gertie had caught sight of her watch, and sat bolt upright.
“What?”
“Nine p.m.!” said Gertie.
Morag shrugged.
“Nine p.m.! Summer, Love Island ; winter, Married at First Sight ,” said Gertie, shocked Morag didn’t know. Gertie switched on Struan’s big telly, which was tuned to a sports channel.
“Aren’t those rubbish?” said Morag.
Gertie shook her head fiercely. “No,” she said. “Because every single time, against all the odds, amidst all the nonsense—people really do, genuinely, when they least expect it, fall in love.”
Morag watched the screen burst into life. “They do,” she murmured, almost to herself.
Then she looked down and admired her cozy feet and waggled her toes.
“I may have to get Calum to incorporate these into the uniform.”
Gertie suddenly saw herself standing side by side with Calum at a glamorous event.
“This is my personal designer,” he was saying to someone. “She designs my uniforms. As well, of course, as being the love of my life.”
Morag wiggled her warming toes and glanced out of the window. It was still terribly, unseasonably cold for spring; but it was bright blue out there, the sky fresh and washed clear. It was a Tuesday. The summer season, when the Highlands and islands were overrun with gleeful tourists, was a while off yet; they had a very light work day. Morag thought back to what Gregor had said. And how soon Nalitha was going to have to go off. She had an idea.
T HE NEXT MORNING, as Gertie had found it hard to sleep without the familiar downstairs chatter and noise of women living in close proximity in the tiny cottage, she came down a little later. It was a lovely day. Morag was standing next to the kettle, still wearing her new socks.
“Uhm,” she said gently. “Do you want to come for a spin?”
Gertie looked at her.
“I’ve got a spare seat on the plane. You can’t bring your knitting. But you could... you know. Come along for the ride. Actually, do come,” she said, more seriously. “Calum is down today and I want us to look busy and successful.”
Gertie bit her lip. “Calum’s around?”
Morag nodded. “Absolutely. Being a pain in my arse. Come on, isn’t it your day off?”
G ERTIE’S NERVES MOUNTED as they headed to the airfield that morning, until she ended up following Morag out to the plane as if she was being arrested. There had, in fact, been no sign of Calum Frost at the tin shed that masqueraded as an airport, which was disappointing as she had slightly imagined him saying, “Morag showing you the plane? Why don’t I come along too, get to know you better? For I am so tired of women who only want me for my money and status as an aeroplane person (Gertie wasn’t exactly sure about the exact nature of his job) and really want someone who just loves me for myself. Also if she could knit, that would be a real bonus.”
She thought of Elspeth too, and how proud she would be of Gertie, heading off out into the big wide world. Well, the archipelago. Which was more or less the same thing.
As they boarded—there had been no sign of Calum at the airport; she had absolutely definitely checked—Gertie couldn’t believe how tiny the plane was; you couldn’t stand upright on it, but had to crouch your way up and down. Morag indicated the front-row seat next to the window. She wanted Gertie to see everything. Next to her was a farmer who’d been down to a county show and was not just a nervous flyer but also feeling the effects of rather too much merriment at the Young Farmers’ Ball the night before.
“Hey, lass,” he said to Gertie. “Oh good, a friend of the pilot’s. You’ll have done this a million times, yes?”
Gertie bit her lip anxiously.
“So, is it time for putting seatbelts on or...?”
Gertie hesitated. “Sure?”
Morag was close enough to hear—there was no door between the cockpit and the body of the plane and she didn’t have her headphones on yet. She shook her head subtly, as Mackintosh was still fueling the plane.
“I mean, in a minute,” said Gertie. And then, when it was time, she fumbled horribly with hers, not quite understanding how to make it click, and found herself nervously flushing again.
When the propellers started, she got a bit of a shock. Morag had taken second seat to keep an eye on Gertie, so Erno was captaining today.
“Rough night?” sympathized the Young Farmer.
“Something like that,” murmured Gertie, staring at the tarmac disappearing under the tiny wheels of the plane, faster and faster... Suddenly there was a lurch in her stomach, and she shut her eyes, waiting and praying for it to be over.
I T WAS SUCH a beautiful day to fly and Erno had made a perfect take-off into the blue. Smiling, Morag turned to look at Gertie only to see her sitting, clinging tight to the armrests with her eyes closed. The Young Farmer was looking at her in concern, as if there was clearly something to worry about.
Once they hit cruising altitude she unbuckled and popped over.
“Please open your eyes,” said Morag, quite earnestly. It wasn’t terribly helpful. Gertie clutched onto the tough metal and plastic hand rests and took a glance to her left, then gasped.
She had theoretically known what was going to happen, but it still seemed the most incredible thing; they had left a cool day, yet here they were above the clouds—on top of them. They looked like... well, to some people they look like waves, or cotton wool, or candyfloss. To Gertie, they looked like skeins of wool, or the fluff a sheep leaves behind if it has strayed too close to the barbed wire.
The sun felt warm on the window as Gertie peered out. They were flying south in order to turn round and follow the air corridor northward, keeping out of the way of the many Scandinavian airlines on the route and the great transatlantic liners, taking their shortcut across the top end of the globe.
A line of sparkle cut through everything, occasionally painting bright splodges here and there. It was, she was astonished to realize, the river Caras, which emptied into the whirling maelstroms of the sea. Here it looked like a glorious line of fairy lights unfurling ahead of her.
Down below she could make out, through breaks in the cloud, great long tracts of farmland, occasionally punctuated by tiny settlements, also sparkling in the sun. It was so strange; she knew she lived in a sparsely populated area. But compared to the vast empty land spread out far below here, humans... they were nothing. They were tiny.
“Gorgeous, eh?” called back Morag, over the din of the engines.
“There’s so... it’s huge!” said Gertie, suddenly astounded that her own world was so small. If she followed the land all the way over, it... it was curved. Gertie realized suddenly that she was looking at the actual curvature of the earth. The entire planet. And then she was even more gobsmacked than before. They turned northward and flew over the town and the place she had spent her entire life; where she had grown up and known life and all its joys and disappointments—and it was nothing. Just a little clump against patchworks of fields, and behind them, the mountains. Now they were real and solid, huge and looming. They looked gigantic. Everything natural and green looked real. Their little grid looked puny and silly from up here; the villages dotted around even more so; humans balanced precariously on the surface of a world that had a lot more space without them.
“Oh my,” she said quietly. Morag smiled to herself. She so wanted everyone to love being in flight as much as she did; not to take it for granted, or complain about it, but to remain amazed that something so wondrous had become commonplace.
“What’s that?” said Gertie suddenly. Far to port side was a plane going what looked to Gertie extremely fast.
The Young Farmer vowed never to fly again as the woman talking to the pilot was obviously a pure amateur. Plus he now wanted to throw up for about nine different reasons.
“Icelandair,” said Morag, checking her watch. “En route to Glasgow. We see them every day along here.”
“But they’re going so fast!”
“So are we,” Morag replied. “We’re going 300 miles an hour. It’s all relative when you’re up here.”
Gertie bit her lip.
“That’s nothing actually,” Morag added. “The Airbus goes... never mind, too much info. Don’t worry. We see them every day. It’s perfectly safe up here.”
But Gertie wasn’t really listening; they were approaching the mouth of the river, and beyond it the great sea, the islands looming up ahead of the sparkling waters. She put her hand to her mouth. She’d been on a school trip to Inchborn of course, everyone had, but they’d taken the little ferry, which had been an adventure in itself. There the water had been icy cold and there had been swells against the side of the boat.
The tan and forest colors coalesced around rolling tributaries below, and it was difficult to discriminate between roads or rivers. It was exactly like a relief map; Gertie felt she could put her finger out and follow them round with the tip; the conurbations—so few of them, and so insubstantial, it seemed—even if every day you read in the papers that the world was overpopulated. They looked like a few settlements of humans clinging to the very edges; to the edges of the sea and the river, with no thought for the endless spaces, shaped like Narnian maps, the rolling mountains and hanging cliffs. There were tiny rocks poking out of the water, miniature islands that couldn’t even have names.
She had had no idea that Scotland could be so beautiful. That the world could be so beautiful. That the sea was so blue, the beaches so golden. She immediately wanted to knit in those colors; show off the glorious bracken, and the white tops of the mountains.
“We don’t go very high up,” said Morag reassuringly. “That’s what makes it brilliant: you can see absolutely everything. I have flown everywhere, and I can tell you, few things beat the islands of Scotland. Ask anyone.”
There was pride in her voice as she said it, as if she’d built them herself, Gertie thought. But maybe, when you were flying a plane, you felt like you had.
From here though the sea was a glinting paradise, bright turquoise near the shoreline, growing darker as they drew further from the land. She could make out the fishing boats, the towlines behind them in the wake, so they looked like white commas on a huge blue page; the fishermen couldn’t possibly give a thought to their plane, high above. Gertie could see the shadow of the craft flicking across the top of the waves like a moth.
“Want me to buzz them?” said Morag, noting what she was looking at.
“Oh my goodness, no!” said Gertrude.
“Good,” said Morag quickly. “Because I am absolutely not allowed to do that, and wouldn’t have dreamed of it.”
Gertie touched her finger to the heavy plastic of the porthole.
“It’s not like what I thought,” she said. “I didn’t realize you could see so much.”
“You can’t always,” admitted Morag. “It’s a pretty good day for it.”
Scotland looked, from the air, like a fantasy postcard version of itself. She saw a canal with boats up and down it; freshly tilled fields waiting for spring seeding; huge solar farms and, out to the far north, over the water they passed the huge wind farms that were powering half the country. It was like stepping into another world, being in an alien spaceship. The field of arms, in the middle of the sea, extended for miles and miles, gently spinning, out of sync then in sync with each other. Gertie had seen them pass on trucks a hundred times; she knew how massive they were. And there they were, planted like a field of beautiful sunflowers in the deep ocean. It was awe-inspiring. Even though she was in a plane, said to be utterly destroying the planet, she felt more optimistic about the future, suddenly, than she had for a very long time. There was something so benign about people doing something so difficult—planting great fields of windmills to harness the power of the earth—that you couldn’t help loving it, and them.
“Wow,” said Gertie again, gazing at the jaw-dropping scene in front of her.
They passed great sandbanks in the sea that Gertie could never have suspected were there; covered in birds doing goodness knows what. You could walk there, thought Gertie. Walk out, right in the middle of the sea. And nobody would ever do that, or know about you; your ship would suddenly run aground. A piece of earth—so much, it seemed to her suddenly, that nobody had ever stepped on. Not like the winding cobbles of Carso, which had been worn smooth, foot after foot, year after year, century after century. It was so strange that Scotland itself suddenly to her felt like an undiscovered land, full of places no human had ever walked; nooks and crannies of the mountain inaccessible to transport or anything except animals, birds, and to be viewed from the tiny window of a plane. She had not even suspected. Suddenly she wanted to bring her grandmother up, very much.
Gertie nodded, hypnotized. As they came in to land at their first stop, Larbh, she clutched the arms tightly again as the plane bounced and jerked through the clouds. That morning she had been very very frightened, but now, even as the view from her window grew grayer as they descended, Morag was so calm and matter-of-fact about her job, she couldn’t be scared anymore.
“So,” said Nalitha, arms folded over her vast stomach as they arrived back at the tin shed. “Are you taking the job, Gertie?”
Gertie, still giddy, her head literally in the clouds, stared around at the tiny airport, at the plane outside. Suddenly, she saw Calum Frost walk in with two men, high five Erno and Morag, and start chatting to them.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am.”