Chapter 7
Rhona was in her element. Up early to wave Senga off on her visit to Jean Wilson’s in the Garten valley, she had the whole day to herself.
There’d be no jump scares as her sister sneaked up behind her to ask if she’d remembered to add those milled oats to the café’s shopping list or what had she been thinking, wanting to make pineapple upside-down cake in the middle of winter when folks wanted hot treacle sponge and custard.
‘Yes, Senga, right away, Senga,’ she said to herself with a chuckle and a facetious little curtsey as she busied herself with tying her apron at the repair shop café counter as the whole town slept.
‘Wednesdays are cheese and pickle toastie days, Rhona,’ she mugged in a nagging voice, before blowing a big raspberry at the fading ghost of her sister’s presence. ‘Not today, sister!’
She tuned in the radio for the classic love songs hour, an English channel, and not her sister’s preference at all.
Senga always insisted on the rolling Cairn Dhu news and weather updates.
Rhona knew what the weather was, freezing and dark and threatening drizzle, because she’d just walked through it on her way here, and she knew what the news headlines were too.
Everyone was talking about the ongoing Christmas lights display repairs and the delay to the big switch-on.
Other than that, there was nothing doing.
As a song ended and the radio presenter started speaking, Rhona turned up the volume a notch.
The voice was saying, ‘And on today’s ‘love hour’ we’ve had a request from one of our loyal listeners, Miss R, who always asks to remain anonymous.
This is for you, mystery caller, it’s a hit from the vaults, 1978’s “I’m Waiting on Love” by the late great Johnny Bristol. ’
As the Motown intro kicked in, Rhona smiled and hummed along to one of her old favourites, and she tipped potatoes from a paper sack into the sink and set about peeling while shifting her feet to the beat.
After half an hour, the potatoes had been softened with butter and onions, the café corner was steamy and Rhona, tired from dancing, was taking her first sip of hot milky tea before she went about scrubbing ‘cheese and pickle toasties’ off the café menu and chalking up her favourite lunchtime dish, corned beef and buttery potato stovies, instead.
It had been a favourite of her father’s, back in the day, filling and comforting, the sort of thing menfolk needed to power them through a hard day’s labouring.
Although, she acknowledged wistfully, she’d never got the chance to make it for a special man of her own.
Still, she enjoyed making it for the repair customers on the odd occasions she was left to her own devices in the café.
These were her favourite days of the year and no one ever grassed her up to her sister for not following orders.
That rare, sneaking sense of satisfaction was setting in deep for the day when a noise up above her sent her reaching for her dish mop in self-defence.
‘Who’s there?’ she yelped, switching the radio off so she could listen again for the sound, hoping it was just another pigeon that had got locked inside and not a burglar who’d been watching her from the shadows all this time. ‘Show yourself!’ she demanded.
‘Who’s that?’ came a voice in reply, drowsy and frightened, like they’d been jolted from sleep.
A bizarre white featureless face peeped over the mezzanine gate, sending Rhona’s nerves bristling.
Their startling white mask peeled away and plopped to the floor at Rhona’s feet.
It was just a girl in one of those papery face masks from the chemists, and she was pulling sleep plugs from her ears.
‘How did you get in here?’ the girl yelped, her hair spilling over the mezzanine like Rapunzel’s.
There followed an exchange about not being a rough sleeper or indeed a burglar but a guest of Roz’s, and Rhona had explained her place in the repair shop ecosystem, followed by some far less brusque introductions and the placating offer of a cup of tea.
By the time Florrie had come down the ladder in her bare feet to accept the mug, the fright had dissipated entirely.
‘You’re no’ here for a hikin’ holiday, that much is plain, and you’re no’ visitin’ family either,’ Rhona said, watching the young woman through the steam from their drinks.
‘How do you know that?’ Florrie’s eyes widened into startled spheres.
‘Only because you’d no’ likely be hidin’ away in our mezzanine if you had family nearby, you’d be with them, and all the hikers have called off their walking due to the weather forecast. They never mind hiking in frost, but not in torrential rain.’
Florrie’s shoulders slumped in a defeated way that reminded Rhona of herself at her age. She seemed to weigh Rhona up before saying in a confessional tone, ‘I’m here to audit the ski centre.’
Rhona knew what this meant. She’d heard Carenza McDowell, the property flipper, who knew about these things because she had a finger in every pie at local government and civic level, spreading rumours about it being time to call it quits on the whole venture and the Regional Authority wanting to turn the building over to flats, which there was a desperate need for in the town.
‘But I’d rather keep the reason I’m here on a need-to-know basis.’
‘Well,’ Rhona said, flattered to be included in her secret and hoping to console the part of the girl that didn’t seem to relish her task.
‘I’m sure you’ll do the best thing.’ She’d been about to say the ‘right thing’ but not knowing what that might be, she plumped for this alternative.
The girl’s eyes flitted to the mug in her hands and stayed fixed there.
‘He’s a nice lad, Hamish,’ Rhona went on.
‘Who? Oh, the live-in duty manager, Mr Skelton?’
‘He won’t like you calling him Mr Skelton, I imagine. He’s just Hamish to us. A quiet lad, always workin’, as far as I can see. Mild with it, though.’
‘Right,’ Florrie said, a flex at her jaw telling Rhona that the town’s good opinion of him wasn’t doing anything to quell her unease about this job.
‘Were you wishing he was a scoundrel businessman, running the place into the ground and no’ caring?
’ Rhona tried to prompt a smile, but the girl didn’t react.
She didn’t want to pursue it and make her even more uncomfortable than she obviously already was.
‘Anyway, if you’re hoping to avoid an audience seeing you in your jammies, you’d better shake a leg.
The apprentices from the Parks department will be here soon.
’ The girl looked just as bemused as she had on discovering Rhona in her rental’s kitchen.
‘They’re being loaned to McIntyre to help him restore the Christmas lights. ’
They both glanced at the plastic figures.
‘I wondered what they were. I didn’t like to ask in case it was a bizarre Scottish Advent custom!
’ Now Florrie was smiling, if a little half-heartedly.
‘Not that I can judge people’s Christmas traditions, what with my omma making us all watch Tre N?tter til Askepott every single year while we ate julekaker.
Dad really hated that movie,’ Florrie continued as if to herself, and seemed to get lost in a memory before locking it away in case it escaped again.
She has a secret interior world, this girl, thought Rhona. Something they had in common. Maybe Florrie could see it in her too and that’s why she’d told Rhona her secret about the audit.
Rhona slipped one of yesterday’s scones into a bag for the girl.
‘Here, some breakfast for you. And if I were you,’ she glanced at the clock, ‘I’d run along, before the lads get here.’
When Rhona saw Florrie again ten minutes later, she was like a different girl entirely, dressed in a trouser suit and blazer, with an elegant black roll-neck underneath.
She’d plaited and wound her long hair away, which seemed a shame.
If Rhona had ever had long flowing hair she’d have worn it with pride.
Senga had always been of the opinion that long, loose hair was ‘tarty’ and so the sisters had favoured a shorter style all their lives.
Rhona’s was grey and bobbed now, hanging in sleek silvery sheets at her soft jaw.
‘For the road,’ Rhona said, giving her a coffee in a reusable cup branded with the repair café logo. Florrie offered to pay but Rhona wouldn’t hear of it, not when she was a guest in the Mezzanine Bunk.
Something caught Rhona’s eye as the girl was pulling on black, heeled boots. She stopped her from leaving and snipped the price tag from the blazer collar. ‘Now you’re ready,’ Rhona told her, unable to stop herself glancing at the label with its price in US dollars.
She watched Florrie pulling on a good winter sports jacket and picking her way through the Christmas sculptures to the exit where she took up a black umbrella from the mat.
‘Thank you for my breakfast, Rhona,’ Florrie called behind her.
‘I’ll save you some of my speciality stovies for your dinner. They’ll be in the fridge in a tub marked just for you, OK?’
The girl’s expression shifted to somewhere in between gratitude and sadness, before Rhona saw her rolling her shoulders and flexing her neck, filling her lungs, building herself up into a wall of impassive professionalism for her public outing.
She didn’t bear any resemblance to the soft, fearful girl who’d climbed down the ladder in her PJs this morning.
When she was gone, Rhona was left wondering if the poor young woman, so obviously out of her element, might like to try some of her upside-down cake for pudding, and so she turned up the radio and reached for the canned pineapple rings with new determination.