Chapter 11 #2
‘You get used to the long dark nights,’ he wanted to tell her, ‘and the people.’ Cary wished he could ask the new doctor if she’d had a chance to observe the stars over the mountaintops since her arrival; the brightest in the British Isles, the air was so clean here.
The sight of them could cheer anyone and help get them through the winter.
But he said none of this because Dr Millen evidently had his dinner waiting for him at home and was intent on pressing on with this meeting.
‘Social prescribing is all about supplementing health care with social solutions,’ droned Millen.
‘The idea is to tackle the things that often accompany health issues; loneliness, barriers to social mobility, panic and anxiety, for instance, before they compound into larger health concerns. Thanks to Murray’s funding bid talents we’ve been gifted a few hundred pounds to begin a community garden to be created and run by volunteers for the benefit of patients in the community, where they can grow their own food, learn about plants… ’
Out of the corner of Cary’s eye he noticed Alice wasn’t note-taking at all, but circling her Biro in black loops the way children draw curly hair on the head of a stick figure. Her pen travelled in tight rings along the margin.
‘Come to think of it…’ Dr Millen was saying. Alice’s pen froze. ‘Where’s the laddie they were sending from the mountain rangers’ station? Jemmy promised us a man, did he no’?’
Murray McIntyre knew the answer. ‘Oh, yeah, uh… the guy called in at the shed earlier, said there’d been a mix-up? Finlay, his name was. Finlay Morlich. He wasn’t much interested in helping out.’ Murray shrugged. ‘Sorry ’bout that.’
‘Maybe they’ll send someone else?’ Livvie offered. ‘We might be better off without Morlich, anyway, bringing everyone down with his grumpy patter.’
‘Oh, I dunno,’ Murray tried, generously, ‘he seemed all right, just a bit… harassed.’
Cary had seen the ranger around the town, recognising within him another reticent soul, but Finlay was surely someone with no time at all for others.
A shame really, as a few days in town with his hands in the earth would probably do him good.
Some people, he’d come to learn, didn’t take much of an interest in the world, or in themselves for that matter, and without knowing it, they cut themselves off from everything good.
Until they had the awareness or the courage to ask for help, they often couldn’t be helped.
Livvie had more to say about him, clearly not a fan. ‘I doubt Morlich will lumber into town again anytime soon, not until he wants more of his precious snacks, anyway.’ This elicited a tiny giggle from behind her where Shell concealed herself.
‘No matter,’ Murray said. ‘We’re all here, and fully committed to helping. Cary had some thoughts on where to start, didn’t you, Cary?’
This pulled him from his position as quiet observer. ‘Ah, right enough.’
Drawing the plans from his dad’s leather satchel that was probably as old as he was and, also like him, soft as butter, he shared the blueprints he’d inked up on his drawing board at home.
The papers brought with them an apple from his bag that he caught in a quick hand before it could tumble to the floor.
‘Shell?’ Cary said, softly, knowing the little girl was prone to getting startled. ‘Apple?’
The child’s face appeared around her mother’s side, looking to her for approval before she spread her hands to catch the fruit.
Cary passed it to Livvie first, instead of chucking it.
With the red fruit delivered into her hands, Shell went back to drawing, trying to silence her bites.
Cary’s heart ached a little to see her still so shy, in spite of all the time she spent at the repair shed on Saturdays and after school, sticking so close to her mother there was rarely a gap between them.
Although nobody really knew for sure, Cary had a rough gist of what Livvie and Shell Cooper had been through in recent months. The local police had uncovered a crime gang operating across the region. They’d been using Livvie’s house as a kind of ad hoc HQ, and using Livvie as… he dared not think.
Ally McIntyre, who’d left town for Switzerland in the summer, had a policeman boyfriend, Jamie Beaton, and he’d had something to do with the raid that saw the gang’s ringleaders jailed and, as far as Cary had gathered from the scant facts published in the papers and what Ally had been allowed to tell the repair shop volunteers, Jamie had put his life at risk in the process.
Livvie and Shell were never mentioned in the papers, of course, and for four months they’d been rehoused somewhere out of sight for their safety.
Now they were free of the tyrant man who’d controlled them.
The gang had been put away for years, and little Shell was re-enrolled in the primary school down the road.
Livvie had been unable to resist the welcoming gravity of the repair shop (something Cary Anderson knew a little about too), and she’d quickly found herself drawn into its schemes.
Murray’s clever funding bidding had made sure she was salaried, their official events manager and overseer of the various community groups who met at the shed, including Cary’s children’s woodworking group.
Cary couldn’t count her as a friend exactly, she was too self-contained for that, but he admired her organisational skills and competence.
‘Get on with it then,’ Livvie snapped, rather testing his sympathy for her.
Cary spread the papers across his legs and softly cleared his throat. ‘This is the land to the south of the repair shed,’ he began. ‘Generously surrendered to public use by the McIntyre family.’
‘Thanks, Mum and Dad,’ threw in Murray.
‘It’s laid to lawn at the moment,’ Cary went on. ‘There’s room for four large raised planting beds at each point of the compass, like this. One for fruits, one for veg, one for herbs and medicinal plants, and one for cut flowers. I’ll help to build the raised beds.’
‘And I’ll oversee the rotas and liaise with the surgery about patient access and safeguarding,’ Livvie said.
‘And the surgery will refer patients to the scheme,’ said the doc. ‘Although anyone can join in with the planting and upkeep. This garden’s for the whole community, yes? And, in fact, that’s where young Dr Hargreave comes in.’
Cary felt the tension sharply rising from the woman to his right.
‘Me?’ she said, her pen hovering.
‘Patient engagement officer,’ said Millen, with what passed as a smile for him.
‘It’s only social prescribing if the surgery sends a medical presence to the site to talk with the locals, do a bit of mental-health first-aiding where needed and generally facilitate engagement with the garden, so patients can fully access its benefits. ’
‘But I don’t know anything about gardening,’ she said. ‘I’ve never looked after so much as a window box!’
‘You know about patients.’ Millen’s smile grew weaker still.
‘I’ll be there to help you,’ Cary told her softly.
‘We all will,’ Murray added in his easy way. ‘My role is general dogsbody, so if there’s anything you don’t know, or anything you need, you can tell me.’
None of this seemed to reassure the woman, if the waves of panicked energy coming from her were anything to go by. Cary was surprised to realise they’d set off an unusual response within him too.
Not a man who had to scrabble around to label his feelings correctly, he knew exactly what it was. It was a careful kind of tender attentiveness.
Without having to think too deeply about it, he’d already subconsciously committed to making Dr Hargreave happy in her work at the garden, and if that couldn’t be achieved, he’d strive to make her, at least, feel comfortable.
He didn’t enjoy witnessing anyone out of sorts, but this woman was something else.
To Cary she appeared as out of her element as a planet in retrograde, a lost soul.
Her whole demeanour was an unhappy one, her pallor sickly, as though she’d spent the last decade under fluorescent lighting.
Maybe she had? A young doctor at the end of her training, at last released into the real world, and a Manchester girl too?
Cairn Dhu had to be a far cry from home.
He’d experienced the culture shock himself, a few years back, and he’d only moved from Glasgow.
‘We’ll need a naturalist’s expertise when choosing and sourcing the plants and trees,’ Murray was saying.
‘The trees?’ Millen asked.
‘Yes. Here, here, here and here.’ Cary pointed to equidistant points between each of the raised beds on his drawing. ‘I’d hoped we’d plant alder trees, if no one minds? They’re an indigenous species to Scotland, not to mention wonderful for woodworking.’
The others agreed they had zero objection to the idea, and Murray said it sounded ‘braw’. Alice Hargreave, however, was staring into space, her gravity turning heavier, like a black hole, emitting exhausted dark energy.
Cary heard her sighing softly more than once, and her posture slumped inch by inch. She was fighting the weight of existence, that much was obvious. It made his heart soften all the more for her.
The meeting went on for some time, and because Cary had said his piece, he had nothing more to add, other than nods of agreement.
Murray and Livvie went over the flow of funding and the release of monies for the initial materials.
There was some discussion of safeguarding and protecting vulnerable groups and criminal disclosure checks for all volunteers, as well as some words on patient confidentiality.
Dr Millen made sure that Alice, who had accepted her gardening fate, understood her role, telling her she’d only be required on site on some Sundays, or the occasional errand early on a Saturday.
He’d see to it this was taken into account in her surgery workloading, remarking pointedly how some time outdoors would do her good.
She was smiling in weak agreement when the consulting room door banged open and little Shell screamed and ran to her mother’s arms.
‘Uh, I’m sorry, I didnae mean to…’ said the gruff, hulk-like figure in the doorframe, his fists tightly curled by his sides.
‘Good grief, man!’ Dr Millen shouted, jumping to his feet. ‘What’s all this in aid of?’
Cary, always observant, noticed multiple things happening at once.
First, he saw the quailing shame in Finlay Morlich’s expression as he apologised and stomped inside, asking pointlessly if he was too late.
He also registered the bright flash of something victorious in Murray McIntyre’s looks as he directed the unfortunate, clumsy ranger to the only spare chair, piled with books and next to Alice, and Cary couldn’t miss Murray’s gaze following the mountain man as he knocked every chair and table leg and stumbled over his own boots on his way to his seat.
‘Sorry, lassie. I didnae mean to frighten you,’ Finlay was saying to Shell, who didn’t look inclined to forgive him during her lifetime.
‘You’ve missed the lot,’ Millen scowled, hoiking up his trousers at the knees to sit again.
Finlay shiftily eyed the biscuit tub and did nothing to hide his dismay at finding it empty other than crumbs.
Murray seemingly couldn’t help smiling in sympathy at Finlay, but the ranger put his head down, clasping his two hands tightly together like a man steeling himself to suffer through a public meeting with no refreshments of any kind.
The meeting soon concluded with plans to start the landscaping and bed-building while the patients were referred by Alice to the project. She was to pick suitable participants, said the old doctor with a sly cheerfulness, since she’d proven herself ‘so good at firing off referrals’.
There would be an official tree planting to launch the scheme on the morning of Sunday the twenty-fifth, the very first time the participants would be invited onto the site, and the local paper would be invited to take everyone’s picture, so the organising committee would have to crack on if they were going to break ground, prepare the beds and make the place safe and ready for them to start gardening in.
Finlay was asked if he’d mind accompanying Murray to the plant nurseries on the tenth before the repair shed opened for the day.
‘On Saturday?’ confirmed Finlay. ‘I didnae ken we’d be startin’ so soon!’
Not one to indulge moaning, Livvie ignored this and asked, ‘We need to get the plants and trees ordered. Can you borrow the ranger truck, do you think? Pick Murray up at eight?’
As soon as he was released, Finlay stormed out with barely a word of farewell, even more out of sorts than when he’d arrived. Murray, who the ranger hadn’t even said goodbye to, didn’t appear quite as smirking and self-assured as he had earlier.
Then, suddenly, Alice was pulling herself from the chair, hauling on her coat, and lifting her bag of textbooks onto her shoulder.
At the door, Cary managed to stop her.
‘To tide you over till tea,’ he said in the hubbub of everybody taking their leave, handing the new doctor a second apple he’d had in his bag.
He stored them for winter in his attics, having picked them from his own apple trees in his little woodworking yard behind his cottage where the wood shavings blew around his ankles and accumulated in cobwebby corners.
She looked with apprehension at the red fruit cradled on his fingertips, but she accepted it with a nod, as though she had not a word left in her head.
‘Mind how you go,’ he said, though she didn’t seem to hear.
Cary purposely didn’t watch after her from the surgery ramp as she left, as, unknown to her, she took away a piece of him he’d never get back, a soft portion of his heart that wanted her to be glad she’d travelled all the way here from England. He’d do everything he could to see to that.