Chapter 36
It was probably for the best that Finlay didn’t know a thing about what had happened next: the whole team arriving with helmet torches flashing, the stretcher rescue – since the helicopter still couldn’t fly – and the jolting march back to the cruive where Doctors Hargreave and Millen stripped and warmed him, re-setting his shoulder under the single bare light bulb, the sedation making no difference to him, he was so lost in the In Between.
There’d been a mask over his face and gas and air, a bleeping monitor on his finger, a drip in his arm, a cold stethoscope pressed repeatedly to his chest in front of his fire which had never been so stoked with logs as it was that night.
It had gone eight in the morning when he’d finally opened his eyes, and although he was dimly aware of a vast assembly of figures crowded in his little cottage, the first sight that greeted him was the face of Murray McIntyre leaning over him in amazement, and by his side loomed the long, pink, disgusting tongue of a big, black, ridiculous dog with a smiling, drooling mouth.
‘He’s awake!’ Murray said, visibly drooping with relief.
With a sense of floating lightness that Finlay had never experienced in all the years before he nearly died on his mountain, he let his eyes close and he drifted off into peaceful sleep once more while Murray tightly held his hand over the covers.
* * *
‘Don’t worry, I’ll look after him, and as you said yourself, it’s just for a few days, until he’s fully on his feet,’ Murray was saying at the cruive door as Dr Hargreave took her leave.
‘You can call me at the surgery or on my mobile, any time,’ she said, before taking one last look at her patient, reclined under blankets on the sofa in front of the crackling hearth.
‘I’ve got this,’ Murray reassured her, and Finlay wondered how the decision had been made that it was to be Murray, of all people, who hung around to nurse him.
There was a lot of stuff his memory was hazy on.
Finlay’s rational brain knew that there had passed one whole week since he’d awakened – Murray had confirmed it – a week of his lying prone by his fireside, submitting to being monitored and jabbed, weighed and washed, alongside all the fuss of people bringing up supplies and dropping in to ‘check on the patient’, but it had all merged together into a strange, drowsy blur.
Now all of that was over and he was to be left alone again. He’d continue to allow Murray to stay, if he really must. That dog, though? That was another matter.
Nell snored on the hearthrug as Alice stepped out into the bright early-February noon light.
‘Stick to the community path!’ Finlay shouted after her from his sick-sofa, and she waved away his concern as the door closed. She’d made the trek up and down from the surgery so many times in the last week, she knew the route all too well.
Murray stood on the doormat, his fists bunched at his hips. He was giving Finlay a funny look.
‘What?’ Finlay wanted to know.
‘Nothing. It’s just strange, everyone leaving at last.’
‘Hmph,’ Finlay grunted. ‘Thought they’d never leave me in peace.’
‘They saved your life.’
The fire crackled in the silence as Murray let that sink in for him, but Finlay had heard enough about what happened to know it had, in fact, been Murray who’d saved his life.
Though Murray had deflected that it was ‘all Nell’.
According to him, it had taken hours to reunite man and dog on the mountainside, but once Nell was safely back on her lead, she’d been the one who had scented Finlay and dragged Murray the hundred yards to where he’d fallen.
‘Clever girl,’ Murray had repeatedly called the dog over the intervening days, while feeding her bits of the cold chicken and pork pies that the town folks had sent up.
It turned out Finlay had fallen only a couple of metres off a stony outcrop, but it had been enough to knock him out, dislocate his shoulder, crack some ribs, and send all his belongings flying.
‘Hungry?’ Murray said now, still standing awkwardly by the door.
Finlay took pity on him. ‘You don’t have to stay, you know. Don’t you have a job to go to?’
Murray seemed to consider this. ‘Not immediately, no.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You should eat something,’ Murray said, ignoring the question, and picking up a chart the doctor had left for him. ‘Every four hours.’
‘Like a baby.’ Finlay harrumphed.
‘I draw the line at night feeds.’
Murray, it turned out, made a pretty decent nurse. He’d helped change the bandages on Finlay’s fingers and over his scraped ribcage the day before, bathing the scratches in antiseptic before applying clean gauze and the big sticking plasters, all with Alice showing him how.
Now Murray was making his way down through hatch doors in the floor in the corner of the cruive and rummaging around in the sunken coldstore that passed for Finlay’s refrigerator, accessed by a few steps. Finlay called it his ‘scullery’.
Murray’s head popped out from the room, the glow from the scullery lamp lighting his face from beneath like a ghost in a play coming through a trapdoor. Finlay determined not to laugh at the sight of him.
‘There’s bacon, sausages, and a tonne of new potatoes,’ Murray relayed. ‘Dropped off from Laura at the deli. No charge, she said, not for her favourite customer.’ Murray’s eyes gleamed with delight. So the man still enjoyed taunting him, even now?
‘Pass,’ Finlay grumped, unable to prevent his own smile forming.
‘Let’s see. What else? Chutneys, cheddar and some nice crackers from the library staff.’
Now that was a surprise. Finlay really hadn’t expected them to care in the slightest.
‘Didn’t know you had so many fans,’ Murray said, as though in agreement, his head disappearing once more.
‘Makes two of us,’ Finlay said, unsure if Murray could hear him.
In fact, he’d been astonished at the response to the news of his rescue.
There’d been a flower delivery from the garden project people.
Not project-grown stuff, of course (there’d still be nothing to show for the season’s growth down there), but a big blousy bunch of early daffodils and tulips, probably sent in an aeroplane all the way from Holland, but he’d forgive them the emissions just this once, since they looked so bright in the sink and they scented the place with springtime.
There’d been a hundredweight of sugared almonds, gummy bears, chocolate bars and lollipops. Kids’ stuff, brought by Jemmy and his team. Murray had been trying to ration them out to him, but he was easy to get around, if Finlay complained hard enough.
Murray had already let him have all the tablet Senga had made the postman drop off no sooner than the fog had cleared.
‘Oh, and there was this from Gracie at the doctor’s surgery,’ said Murray, still peeping out from the scullery hatch, giving the misshapen ceramic vase he was holding a dubious look.
‘Looks handmade,’ said Finlay, not knowing what else to say about it.
‘Looks rubbish,’ said Murray.
Nevertheless, he quickly escaped the hatch, filled it up from the tap and, confident it wasn’t leaky, plonked the spring flowers in it and set it on the mantel.
‘That’s no’ half bad,’ Finlay had to admit, prepared to forgive Gracie perhaps a small amount for all her prying and gossiping.
Back down the steps he went once more. ‘The police station sent this,’ Murray was saying, emerging after a moment holding a big colourful box.
‘What is it?’ Finlay asked, craning his neck to get a look.
‘Chocolate cake.’
‘That’s dinner sorted, then,’ concluded Finlay, another wave of lightness passing through him, an increasingly regular occurrence since the rescue.
Murray dropped the scullery hatch closed behind him and Finlay’s heart sank when he saw he was bringing with him not the double chocolate gateau he’d hankered after, but a big cellophane-wrapped fruit basket with a Brazilian pineapple peeping out of the top.
‘Before you start grumbling about air miles,’ Murray stopped him, ‘you need some vitamins before you can stuff yourself with any more cakes. Let’s start with a tropical fruit salad.’
Finlay conceded with a big sigh. ‘Who sent the fruit basket?’ he asked, letting Murray drop it in his lap so he could pull at the red ribbon ties with his free arm – his other arm was still wrapped in its sling.
‘I did, as it happens. My get well soon present,’ Murray told him as he rummaged in the kitchen drawer for a knife, before bringing over two bowls, two spoons and, Finlay was pleased to note, a big pot of cream.
With some effort, Finlay shifted his still stiff legs to make room for him, and Murray perched on the end of his sofa.
‘I didn’t know so many people cared,’ Finlay said gruffly as Murray chopped a papaya, sticking its ‘Mexico’ label on Finlay’s knee, just to annoy him.
‘They don’t,’ Murray said with a sly grin, eyes fixed on his task. ‘They’re taking pity on me stuck up here with you. That chocolate cake’s meant for me.’
‘Commiseration cake?’
‘Exactly. I’ll let you have a wee slice. Maybe. But only after you eat your…’ Murray pulled a fiery pink and green fruit from the cellophane. ‘Uh?’
‘Go on,’ taunted Finlay, sure Murray had no idea that was a dragon fruit.
‘Spikey devil pear?’ Murray smirked, before cutting the thing open and gasping at the seedy white flesh inside.
‘Aye, spikey devil pear,’ Finlay said in a voice that couldn’t disguise its fondness. ‘That’s exactly what that is.’
As Murray filled the bowls with glossy, sweet-smelling fruits, he would glance now and again at the fire and the shelves, and the kitchen corner.
‘What is it?’ Finlay asked.
‘I’m just thinking it’s quite nice up here.’
Finlay tried to sit himself up a little more so he could look around too, trying to see the place through Murray’s eyes. ‘It was little more than a stall for animals at one time. My late mother,’ Finlay felt the need to clarify, ‘she’s gone now, called it a hovel.’
Murray kept cutting, meeting his eyes only to say, ‘I’m sorry to hear about your mother. But she was wrong, this is no hovel. This is off-grid living.’
‘Oh, here we go.’ Finlay made a show of rolling his eyes but he couldn’t help the warm feeling inside him.
‘How do you charge your phone?’ Murray wanted to know.
‘Down at the rangers’ station, and I have a couple of rechargeable power banks to top it up with. I’m no’ quite the Luddite you think I am.’
‘I honestly didn’t think that at all,’ Murray said, standing to dump all the fruit peelings into the compost crock by Finlay’s sink, near enough filling the thing. Noticing the power bank on the little windowsill, he quickly slipped his phone, perilously low on battery, into it.
‘I think,’ Murray went on, turning to him like a detective in a movie about to reveal whodunit. ‘It might be you that has all these critical words in your head. I’ve never heard anyone call you anything other than Finlay the ranger.’
‘Doubtful,’ scowled Finlay.
‘Actually…’ Murray was on his way back, settling down properly onto the sofa this time, handing Finlay his bowl. ‘Senga and Rhona Gifford might have even called you sweet every now and again.’
Finlay narrowed his eyes.
‘Well.’ Murray crumbled. ‘Maybe what they said was, you could occasionally be a bit of a nippy sweetie.’
‘No’ quite the same thing, is it?’ Finlay took his spoon in his hand, wondering where that tub of cream had got to.
‘Just look at all those cards,’ Murray reminded him, indicating the colourful row along the mantel. ‘Plenty folk like you fine.’
For the first time in his life, Finlay felt his cheeks warming in a blush. ‘Where are you hiding that cream?’ he complained.
Murray smirked in a knowing way that told him he could see straight through all his mumping and moaning, and he pulled the top from the carton, drowning their fruit salads in the stuff.
They talked and they ate while Finlay explained how everything worked up at the cruive, from rainwater harvesting to the multi-fuel stove and the solar panel that powered the lights, and how in the summer his shower was just water scooped from the barrel round the back.
‘What? In the nuddy outside?’ Murray laughed.
‘It’s just the squirrels watchin’, and the occasional sparrow.’
‘And the postman!’ Murray howled with laughter in their cosy corner of the room as the afternoon wore gently on and the chimney smoked.
All through the evening, as Murray attempted to master brewing tea with the big black kettle that swung over the fire on its hook and as they made short work of the chocolate cake and the last of the cream, Finlay caught himself just before he accidentally remarked aloud how he could get used to this, because that was precisely the one thing he dared not do.