Chapter 11
Cary Anderson’s life was all about balance.
He had his one-man carpentry business which brought him a great deal of professional satisfaction. He’d spend his Saturdays sharing his skills at the big fixing shed and now he ran the schoolkids’ carpentry session during the week as well.
Volunteering at the repair shop was his way of giving back to the town that sustained him, even while he maintained a shy, almost silent, mystique amongst its people.
The carpentry meant he had enough money for the things he needed to live as well as a few of the things he simply wanted, which included any number of dapper vintage waistcoats, crisp white or tan work shirts, the brown, sandy or khaki ‘Oxford bags’ trousers that he favoured and wore sometimes with leather belts, sometimes with braces.
His style was unostentatious, a little shabby and understated but certainly distinctive, and now that everyone in town was used to seeing him cutting about in his classic, preppy gear, nobody batted an eyelid.
He didn’t buy vast amounts in the way of vintage clothing, but what he did buy, he looked after, extending its useable life by decades, one of the central principles of repair shop life.
Because his draughtsman dad had worked away in the city till all hours, it had been his grandfather, once a Fellow at the Glasgow College of Art, who’d taught him about style, showed him how to tie a tie and pomade his curls and how to shine his boots to a nut-brown sheen – which he still did to this day.
Like his grandfather, Cary was the sort of methodical man that revelled in a job well done.
That went for his personal care as well as his craftsmanship.
His mother often repeated the story that young Cary hadn’t uttered a word until he was seven years old and that this had been a source of some wonder amongst the Glasgow health workers and nurses of the 1990s.
Then one day he had simply replied, ‘No ta, Glo Glo,’ to the offer of a mug of his grandma Gloria’s favourite milky Mellow Birds and that was that.
He talked. Nobody really knew what had happened, but his mum, a nursery teacher, always maintained that ‘children must be allowed to do, or not do, things in their own sweet time,’ and he’d held on to that as a motto for his adult life too.
However, Cary Anderson remained a man who wouldn’t speak just to hear the sound of his own voice.
If it was vital, he found the words to express it; if it was chatter or small talk, he rarely felt compelled to pitch in.
This was how he practised contentment, never getting too involved in discussions that didn’t require him.
His balance of work and community life and the way he never wasted anything, including time and words, meant he was contented in ways few folks are, and that balance brought him stability and an unstudied calm which was written upon his fine upright body and fixed in his handsome, placid expression.
Unfortunately for Cary Anderson, today his tried and true system for steadiness and simplicity was about to be sent careering loop-the-loop, and he had no idea whatsoever what was about to hit him.
‘This is Dr Alice Hargreave,’ old Dr Millen was saying, making the introductions while the repair shop regulars filed into the messy consulting room cluttered with old books and papers, the corners stacked with dead printers and old disconnected telephones strangled with their cords.
The old doctor presented the woman Cary had met outside the bank, the one whose number he’d deleted from his phone out of respect for her privacy.
The woman who he’d barely been able to string a coherent sentence together for, when she’d been lost and asking him for help.
He’d probably scared her when he blurted out that he’d text her the deli’s details, and he’d mentally kicked himself over it afterwards.
It had been a dick move and not like him at all.
It was just she was so befuddled that day on the street with her hair rain-spotted and clinging to her face. That, and she was almost certainly the most beautiful person Cary Anderson had ever encountered in his thirty-five years.
Cary didn’t want to push himself forward so he hung back now, allowing Murray McIntyre, who headed up the repair shop party, to greet the new doctor first. Then Livvie Cooper, who he introduced as the repair shop admin, shook her hand, welcoming her to Cairn Dhu.
A little girl in school uniform, a small blanket clasped in her hands, revealed her face from behind Livvie’s long Afghan coat, gazing up at the new doctor. Livvie introduced her as her daughter, Shell, saying they went everywhere together when she wasn’t in school.
Alice greeted the little girl warmly but it only made the child withdraw.
There followed a search for coloured markers and Alice tore a few pages from her notebook so the shy girl with deep-set eyes and skewwhiff pigtails could hide herself away behind their backs and draw while the adults talked.
At last, it was Cary’s turn to say hello.
Something within him quavered at the sight of Alice, so slight and tentative, her eyes scrunched into tight smile lines, the tips of her white teeth bared, her lips a little parched. She was smiling, yes, but there was apprehension behind it. She looked fit to drop, or to flee.
‘We’ve already met,’ Cary said.
‘You’re the man with the clock.’
He was glad to know she remembered him. He hoped the detachment in her demeanour wasn’t down to her remembering him as the creep who’d taken liberties asking for her phone number.
She hadn’t offered him her hand, so he didn’t reach out his own. Instead he nodded and took his seat, and something in her face loosened as if with relief. Everyone was claiming chairs now amongst the untidiness of the elderly medical man’s office, the formalities dispensed with.
‘Survived your first day?’ Dr Millen asked Alice. ‘I see you got to grips with the referral system, anyway. You’ve really gone to town on them today, eh?’
Cary knew this was the old doc’s way, paternal, a little ironic perhaps, but generally kindly and well-meaning. Alice, however, looked like she thought she was in trouble.
‘Shouldn’t I have?’ she was saying.
Cary averted his eyes, fussed with his bag, shifted his chair.
‘You know what’s best for your patients,’ Millen said with a crumpled brow, and he sat too, seemingly forgetting the matter.
Cary couldn’t help picking up on the defeated way Alice folded into the low armchair. It couldn’t be easy for her heading into a meeting after a long first day at work in a new place. She was crossing one leg over the other, her notepad and pen poised over her thigh. She was pretending to be fine.
All of this was from the corner of his eye. He didn’t dare stare, but something about her was sounding a strange alarm within his body.
She had chosen the chair by his side, which was oddly lower than his. All the furniture was mismatched so no one in here was meeting eye to eye.
Murray McIntyre sat next to Millen and looked uncomfortable on a wheely office chair he was fiddling with, trying to lower it, and failing.
Livvie perched on a stool like a nervous bird poised to take flight. Shell scribbled away, shielded behind her.
The old doctor lounged on his consulting chair and cleared his throat, his once-sharp eyes over-shelved with bushy brows that moved in a comical way, putting Cary in mind of the bedraggled dog from Fraggle Rock, one of his favourite childhood shows. His heart lifted, noting the similarity.
The new doctor beside him sat dead still, nothing but tiredness and shrinking heaviness pulsing out of her like signals from a dying star.
Gracie the receptionist appeared at the door with a tray of oddly homespun ceramic mugs and a milk jug with a lopsided, pouting lip. She poured tea for everyone except Shell, who was passed a wonky mug of milk which she only stared at before shaking her head in refusal.
‘That’s me away home, then, if that’s everything, Dr Millen?’ the receptionist asked. ‘I’m throwing my first vase tonight!’
‘Best of luck with that, Gracie.’ The old doctor was of an age where he didn’t even try to hide his wry amusement. ‘Cheery-bye now.’
‘Senga’s made us some of her chocolate digestive squares,’ Murray said as the receptionist left, and he pulled the lid from a tub to release a sweet scent of milk chocolate over buttery, bashed biscuits cooked with condensed milk, soft brown sugar and golden syrup.
He made sure Shell was offered the first tasty piece.
When he offered the tub to the new doctor she looked sorely tempted but after hesitating over them, she scrunched her nose. ‘I don’t really like to eat refined sugar.’
This elicited a shared glance between Murray and Livvie as Dr Millen dived his hand into the tub and claimed the biggest piece.
‘As you know,’ he said, biting into the treat, still cool from the repair shop fridge, ‘we’ve been asked to provide a new community service. An initiative to combat the mental-health crisis and loneliness epidemic we know all too much of in this part of the world.’
‘The weather isn’t helping,’ Murray put in. ‘Can’t remember a rainier winter.’ He too bit into his biscuity square, careful to catch the crumbs.
‘Tell me about it,’ interjected Alice, only realising once the words were out that everyone had turned to face her. ‘I… I, uh, thought Manchester was dark and grey in the wintertime, but this is something else.’
Cary caught the shake in her voice that told of her sudden discomfort, and he remembered a time when he was the new arrival in town.
Cairn Dhu certainly took a little getting used to.
It must be harder for the young doctor, landing in the depths of January when she’d been used to the shelter and fun of a big, towering English city.