Chapter 4
A highland repair shop on a Saturday afternoon when its resident repair experts are drooping with tiredness after fixing things all day long is neither the time nor the place for a love story to begin.
Not when there’s been a spill of oil behind McIntyre’s workbench, and the Gifford sisters are arguing over next Saturday’s showstopper bake, and Cary Anderson is hoovering up iron filings from under his tool-sharpening wheel, and the horologist, Doctor Bonnet’s newly repaired clocks are all chiming and bonging for five o’clock and the racket is making everyone but her flinch.
Nobody could be expected to fall head-over-heels on sight in these conditions. Not when Sachin was showing the last of the customers out into the car park and there was rain spitting and Wayward was trying to sneak out to freedom every time the barn doors slid apart.
‘She’d go home with anyone, that mutt, so long as they had a takeaway bag of Senga’s rock cakes in their hands,’ said Sachin, gripping the thwarted escapee’s collar for the third time.
No, there was just too much going on to allow for romantic inclinations of any kind.
You only had to ask McIntyre, who, having dumped a load of fresh sawdust over his spilled oil, had been trying to coax a smile from Roz at her sewing machine by offering her a cup of tea and the last of Senga’s toasted, buttered Bannocks.
‘No thanks,’ Roz replied, while her husband eyed her with a touch of wariness, thinking how something was different about her. She was, however, smiling placidly as she helped Peaches with a few last-minute touches before her catwalk rehearsal, a picture of quiet contentment.
No, this was no time for romance. Everyone was far too preoccupied.
Euan had no sooner raised his hand to knock at the door of the big barn than he regretted his decision. His grandad had made him come, and since he’d do anything for him, he’d agreed.
‘Mind out for those old fogey gossips at the café counter,’ Clyde had warned, which was a bit rich coming from him as Senga Gifford was only two years his senior.
It was McIntyre who slid the shed doors open and his expression told Euan he had no idea who he was.
‘Sorry, are you closed?’ Euan asked, checking the time on his phone. ‘Is five o’clock your closing time?’
‘Just aboot,’ McIntyre said, reluctant to move aside.
‘Euan? Is that you?’ came a woman’s voice, and he peered around McIntyre to find out who it belonged to.
For all that this place was supposed to be shutting for the night, there were still people in the shed, some of them busy shifting furniture and rigging lights, God knows why. One thing Euan did know was that he shouldn’t have come.
The woman who’d known his name was making her way over in a long dress with some kind of crocheted spider’s web jumper over the top of it.
‘Sorry, I didnae mean to butt in to a private party,’ Euan told her quickly, making to leave, but the woman made him stay, calling his name once more.
‘You’re Euan Forte, aren’t you?’
Something about her seemed familiar.
‘It’s Euan Sparks now,’ he told her.
His mum had remarried when he was little and it had meant a move out of Cairn Dhu to Glasgow and putting up with a boozy dosser of a stepdad who drove his mum to distraction with his empty promises and sneaky ways until he’d inevitably sloped off into the night and never come back.
The surname had stuck with him though, and proved to be an endless source of jokes at his expense while at college training to be a sparky.
‘That’s right!’ she was saying. ‘I remember. You moved away. I knew your mum. She was the dinner lady when I worked at the primary school. I’m Roz McIntyre.’
‘Ah, right enough,’ Euan answered, but in truth he barely remembered Roz, he’d been so small when they left.
‘How is your mum?’ she pressed.
‘All right, thanks,’ said Euan, with a little pang of guilt. He hadn’t seen her in ages. She was still at home in Glasgow, looking after his wee sister. ‘I’m living with Grandad now.’
‘Euan Forte, is it?’ came another voice from behind Roz. Was he ever going to get to the point of his being here? Cairn Dhu really was kind of infuriating.
‘He’s Sparks now,’ Roz relayed to this second woman, the one with silvery hair and an apron embroidered with the name Senga.
‘Oh aye?’ this Senga was saying with a smirk. ‘You’ve really been making sparks fly, I hear.’
Yep, this had to be the old gossip his grandad had warned him about.
‘Had a spot of bother at the school the other day? Flooded oot the kitchens.’
Senga needn’t look so pleased about it.
Roz McIntyre shooshed the baker into silence and McIntyre hurriedly told him to ‘come away inside’.
Euan stepped into the glow from the pink neon ‘Cairn Dhu Community Repair Shop and Café’ sign on the wall, feeling drenched in regret and with all eyes upon him. Well, almost all eyes.
A pretty woman stood in the middle of the room, about his age, he reckoned, with bright pink hair. Her attention seemed absorbed in sorting clothes on a hanging rail.
Euan Sparks had never seen a more enchanting sight in all of his twenty-five years. Or he thought he hadn’t, until the fellow he recognised as the local carpenter, Cary, flipped a switch on a spotlight and illuminated the girl in a halo of dust-mote-sparkling light.
‘Woah!’ The word escaped his mouth on an airy breath entirely of its own volition.
The glow seemed to give the girl’s pink hair and the make-up on her white skin a luminosity reserved usually for movie stars and models.
Her peachy lip gloss sparkled in a sheeny way that drew his eyes all the more.
She had thin parrot-blue graphic pen lines over her eyelids in a butterfly-wing shape – a kind of arty eyeliner he’d never seen on anyone before, not being much interested in anything to do with trending make-up looks.
She was utterly arresting, and what was she wearing!
Another surreptitious look confirmed it was some sort of white, floaty angel dress with sparkly bits of metallic thread shot through it.
The spotlight lit the layers of fabric, hinting at her soft roundness underneath.
Her black boots, somehow the perfect thing to team with the gossamer clothing, gleamed with polish.
He thought dimly that he must have seen paintings of women like this before, but he didn’t know the names of any of the old masters or their goddesses she seemed to have brought to life.
He gulped hard. It would be easier to tear his eyes away if it wasn’t for that corset thing she was wearing over the dress.
It looked like white leather, all embroidered and covered in straps, and it was tight over her ribcage and cut in curves beneath her breasts in a way that told him he really should look away right this second because the way his body responded to her was straying from reverent admiration into something that made him suddenly self-conscious.
That was the moment when her eyes seemed tugged towards his, as though suddenly sentient of the heat coming from him. She raised a hand to shield her face from the spotlight, and for the briefest of moments their eyes met.
Then two things happened, horribly abruptly, to pull him from his daze and send the girl scarpering.
McIntyre, sidling up to him, asked what it was that he’d come in for, and a split second later there was a loud bang like a thundercrack accompanied by a blinding flash of light. The room fell gloomy again and the spotlight fizzled out.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll change the bulb,’ Cary said, a hand held to his chest after the fright.
The girl reappeared from behind her clothes rail, seemingly having forgotten Euan’s existence. She was asking Cary if he was OK.
McIntyre persisted by his side. ‘You needed something?’ he asked again.
Euan tried to gather himself. ‘Well, um…’
But there was someone else nearby and intent on butting in. ‘I hope he’s no volunteerin’ his electrician skills for repair Saturdays!’ Senga was saying with a hearty chuckle as she buttoned her coat.
Euan hid a heavy sigh. He might as well have worn a sandwich board that said I’m that Euan Sparks, newbie electrician and threat to school freezers everywhere. Do not hire me.
He peered round McIntyre, hoping Senga’s sniping hadn’t reached the girl’s ears. She was talking on her phone, thankfully.
The old gossip was leaving the shed now anyway, accompanied by a woman Euan guessed had to be her sister, they were so alike.
‘Nothing wrong with your grandad, is there?’ asked this other woman as she passed by.
‘Naw, he’s fine, ta.’
Clyde had been involved in the community gardening project in the grounds of the repair shop since January, and he’d been a pretty regular visitor to the shed’s café too. It was nice they were worried about him.
‘Let the poor lad say what he’s come for,’ said Sachin from where he switched off the neon sign by the door.
‘Right, uh, thanks.’ He addressed McIntyre. ‘It’s just, I have this motorbike, you see?’ He hiked a thumb backwards to the shed doors where the café women were departing. ‘A vintage bike. It’s Grandad’s actually.’
This news had McIntyre hooked. In fact, he was already motioning for Euan to lead the way outside to take a look at the thing.
‘Grandad’s looked after it for forty years now,’ Euan said as they crunched over the gravel drive.
‘He’s done a braw job,’ McIntyre exclaimed, inspecting the gleaming machine. ‘An auld Triumph, eh?’
‘It is. He’s repaired it over the years with whatever parts he could scavenge. But now he’s a bit less mobile, since the stroke, and he’s letting me use the bike for work. I’ve needed transport since I moved back to town…’
‘You’re an electrician on a motorbike?’
Euan confirmed this was correct, trying to hide his embarrassment with a straight face.