Chapter 12 #2
‘The sidecar’s going to hold, right?’ she shouted over the engine as Euan twisted the throttle.
‘We’ll soon find out!’ he shouted, and she could do nothing more than grip on tightly and count down the minutes until she would officially be too late to take part in the showcase her whole life had been building up to.
Leaving Cairn Dhu behind them hadn’t been all that bad. The road was littered with small branches which Euan rode around, and some bins had blown over, spreading litter everywhere, but they met no major obstacles until they were on the high road out of the valley.
Jamie Beaton had been as good as his word and a police outrider accompanied them, making sure they stuck to the speed limit all the way. The first fallen tree they passed was small and already cleared into a roadside ditch.
But approaching the second and largest tree, lying down fully across the road, even Euan gasped. A vast gnarled thing, easily a metre tall on its side, bark splintered everywhere and with broken fragments of smaller branches spilled for many yards across the tarmac.
The officer waved a hand to slow them down, and when it became clear Euan could indeed scramble offroad and down the grassy bank to get past the great crown of the tree, he didn’t waste a second.
‘Lean with me!’ he shouted, and as they left the level surface and bumped over the grass, dodging the river rocks straying above the bank, they both leaned far over to the right, compensating for the weight of the sidecar, the drag of gravity and the slipperiness of the gradient that wanted to pull them down into the water.
The sidecar’s wheel splashed through the dark water’s margin and Peaches didn’t know whether to close her eyes or watch in terror as her collection came so close to a soaking, but in an instant they were powering back up the bank.
Euan revved the bike hard to get over the cobbled kerb and they both released their held breaths when the bike hit level tarmac again.
They didn’t pass a single vehicle after that, apart from the heavy road-clearing machinery going the other way. The tractor driver flashed his lights at them, probably thinking them crazy. When Euan leant forward over the handlebars, she leaned with him, resting her head on his shoulder.
Perhaps for a moment or two during their cross-country race her thoughts strayed from the showcase and everybody awaiting her arrival, and perhaps she briefly considered shouting, ‘Euan Sparks, I could kiss you!’ over the sound of the air whipping past them and the engine roaring, before she decided against saying any such thing, and instead held on and hoped this wasn’t her big night blown before she’d even set foot on campus.
The Highland University of Art and Design was, as you might expect, cleverly designed to blend in amongst the hills and trees.
Euan didn’t know they’d reached their destination until Peaches pointed him down a long road to its car park, hidden beneath an undulating green roof thick with squat sedum and moss.
‘I’ll pull up right by the entrance,’ Euan called from behind his visor, and he felt Peaches’ squeeze of agreement.
The whole ride here she’d gripped him with her thighs and, slowly, she’d unclasped her hands and held on around his waist instead.
He’d cooled down considerably without his leather jacket but where she touched him, his flesh was alive with warmth.
He’d been sure to avoid the potholes and puddles as best he could, wanting her to enjoy the ride, if that were possible. He tried not to imagine himself cutting up the road like Steve McQueen, the epitome of cool, but it wasn’t easy; his grandad had filled his head with visions of suave heroism.
At one point on the journey, as the highway opened up and he could tell Peaches was looking out at the view, the mountains spread so far in every direction, a person could be forgiven for thinking the earth was composed of nothing but granite peaks, grand skies and scattered ribbons of cloud cut through with blazing pink sunset in the west.
If he wasn’t immersed in a dream before that moment, he certainly was now Peaches was gripping his waist, and he’d have stayed in the dream if it wasn’t for the sight that greeted them at the entrance to the university auditorium.
He had to prematurely brake to stop Peaches jumping from the bike while it was still rolling up next to an ambulance.
‘Willie!’ she was shouting, as Euan gave the trusty bike a thankful pat on its tank for getting them here.
Willie was her model and her friend, he knew that much, and the guy had been ill lately, but ambulance ill?
He followed close behind Peaches as she ran alongside the stretcher-trolley containing a worryingly sallow guy.
The cool bloodlessness of his face contrasted sharply with the damp sweatiness around his hairline.
‘What happened?’ Peaches was shouting at another guy, also about her age, who was holding the patient’s hand.
‘I told him he wasn’t up to this, but he insisted!’ the stranger cried back, frantic. ‘He turned suddenly feverish, and then the next thing you know, whomp, he was flat on the floor.’
‘Oh my God! Willie! You should have said you were still ill.’
‘Who’s he?’ Willie said weakly from behind a steamed-up oxygen mask.
All eyes turned upon Euan, and that feeling of being sussed out, so familiar since he moved back here, returned to him.
‘This is Euan Sparks,’ Peaches said, absently. ‘Are they really taking you to hospital?’
The ambulanceman slotted the stretcher into the mechanism in the back of the vehicle and slid the strapped-down man inside.
‘We’ll take him to the out-of-hours clinic to get checked over. Can’t be too careful with glandular fever,’ the second paramedic said. ‘We’ll run an ECG for a start, and try to get on top of the fever.’
‘I’m sorry, Peach.’ Willie looked even smaller and weaker now. ‘Your runway…’
Peaches swept this aside with her hand. ‘I’m not doing the fashion show! I’m coming in this ambulance with you!’ she said, one foot on the step into the vehicle.
Willie pulled the mask away. ‘No, you are not! You haven’t come this far to only come this far. Get in there and show your collection before Quinn-Watson has an aneurism and I end up sharing this ambulance with her!’
‘He’s right,’ said Thom, Willie’s partner.
‘I’ll stand in for Willie,’ Euan said, and even the ambulance staff stopped to look him up and down. ‘What? I did it before! The garments are so well made,’ he said, scrabbling for the words. ‘They’d look good on anybody, even me. I can do it!’
‘He’s got a lot of opinions about fashion for a man in a grey JEEP hoodie,’ gasped Willie, before the paramedic placed the mask back over his mouth and told him not to talk any more.
‘We’re going,’ said the paramedic, and Thom jumped inside, just before the doors were pulled shut.
Euan thought Peaches might run after the ambulance as it rolled out of the car park, flashing its blue lights but foregoing the siren. ‘Peaches?’ he said, trying to awaken her from her panic. ‘Let’s get inside and get set up.’
Peaches looked at the time on her phone with drowsy, disbelieving eyes, like this really was her worst nightmare. ‘We’ve got ten minutes,’ she said, draining as pale as poor Willie had been a moment ago.