Chapter 11
‘What’s she like, then?’ Big Kenneth hadn’t liked the sound of Florrie from the reports he’d heard around town. ‘You ken she turn’t up at the Hotel check-in desk without a reservation and caused a fuss, demanding a room! Got her herself chucked oot is what I heard.’
Friday club night was just filling up. Some Christmas party groups had been in since seven enjoying fondue and floodlit slope views with ice-cold beers, but now food was off the menu and it was Christmas cocktails and shots from here until midnight.
Hamish sent away a mixed tray of Naughty or Nice shooters to a standing table of college students who’d clearly already gone hard on the pre-drinks before leaving home.
‘Keep an eye on that lot,’ Hamish told Kenneth over the sounds of the DJ warming up his decks with a classic track: Slade wishing it could be Christmas every day.
Hamish couldn’t think of anything worse, being stuck in the limbo of this decision-making December forever.
Still, he tried not to blame Florrie for his feeling so displaced.
He certainly wouldn’t be drawn into badmouthing her.
Cairn Dhu’s gossips were evidently beginning to do a good job of that already.
‘Has she no’ finished looking over your books yet?
’ Kenneth prodded, casting his eyes over the crowd as one half of the mountain rescue team came in on their night off while the other half remained firmly on call across the region, not that anyone was attempting the hills during the rainy December deluge.
‘Naw. She’s sat in my kitchen from nine till gone five o’clock since she turned up on Wednesday. I swear when I’ve been in to get ma lunch she hadn’t moved. She was sitting staring, scribbling in her wee book. Wouldn’t even accept a sandwich. She’d only reluctantly take a coffee off me!’
‘Scribblin’? Does she ken what she’s doing?’
‘We should be grateful she’s taking her time. It means her mind’s not made up just yet. She’s weighing up all the evidence, looking for ways of saving us.’
Kenneth gave his old friend a look that said Hamish was too soft by half.
‘I told her she should come tonight, see what the club’s like when it’s heaving. Show her our best side.’
Kenneth looked about. ‘And yet she isnae here.’
‘It’s early yet.’
Some new arrivals shoved between them, putting in their order for two jugs of lager and eight glasses, and Kenneth called over their heads that he’d better take up his post by the doors if there was nothing else that needed doing in the bar.
As he was making to leave, the club doors opened with a tentative push and a woman peeped her head inside.
‘He’s tendin’ bar,’ Kenneth told her as he walked out. ‘Try and have a good time, eh? You’re in Scotland and it’s coming on Christmas. There’s more to life than facts and figures.’
Florrie gave Kenneth, still a stranger to her, a tolerant smile.
The DJ’s coloured rig began to spin while the Ptarmigan’s ambient lighting dimmed, prompting cheers and whoops from the clubbers just getting warmed up to party.
Hamish spotted Florrie walking towards him through the dancing spotlights and lasers, thinking that his mouth turning dry at the sight of her couldn’t be a good sign, no matter what it might signify.
Florrie sensed Hamish was still rightly cautious of her.
She’d done nothing to dispel his fears. He’d made her more welcome than could reasonably be expected from someone in his precarious position, to the strange extent that, when he’d brewed her afternoon coffee at his kitchen island these last three days, she’d thought he might be arriving at a place of acceptance that he was probably going to lose his job.
Why did he have to be so darned pleasant to her?
She was supposed to be the reaper signalling his time here was up, and he was the one asking her to please come to the Ptarmigan tonight.
She’d love it, he’d said. Which was presumptuous.
He needn’t be this involving. She’d rather he was cold and angry.
That would make her task a lot easier. But there he was now, black shirt sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms, waving to her with a bar cloth in his hand, his hair knotted back with strands of it escaping to frame his lightly stubbled jaw and dark brows.
She examined this vision of the plucky Hamish alongside a memory from last week where she’d sat outside her father’s office listening in while he made a conference call, and she’d heard the grown man Maxim was talking to actually sobbing.
Her father had been calm and precise, explaining in the simplest terms how the takeover was not his wish, only it was what the shareholders had voted for, and so the man was cut off from his own snow sports sponsorship relations company.
Her father had hung up that call and come out to greet her with an indulgent smile and a hug like he hadn’t been affected by the man’s tears in any way.
It hadn’t sat right with Florrie, and she’d been relieved when he’d informed her that he couldn’t make their lunch reservation after all, saying, ‘Sorry, Angel. A lot of people want a piece of your old man today.’
Now she was here in front of Hamish, beaming proudly behind his bar, she found her lips tugging into a genuine smile at the greeting and she even accepted his offer of a proper drink. The contrast between the two men, Hamish and her father, could not have been sharper.
‘I’ll take one of your cocktails, please. But I have to pay. Can’t accept freebies.’
He’d sniffed a laugh and shaken his head at her fussy ways, then punched numbers into the till system and told her when to scan her phone. While he shook her drink, she watched the first clubbers bobbing their way to the dance floor to be rewarded by a white plume of dry ice.
The new tune coming over the speakers caught Hamish’s attention as he placed a margarita glass on the bar for her.
A ruby concoction with three frosted redcurrants on the frothy top.
‘Try my red cola, cava and fruit cider special.’ Distracted, he bobbed his head in the direction of the DJ, who was waving his hands in the laser light like this was an Ibiza superclub.
‘Bit early for “Rhythm is a Dancer”. He obviously knows you’re here. Trying to impress you, I think.’
She smiled at this too and stirred the short candy-striped straw through her drink. ‘What’s this drink called?’ she shouted over the noise.
‘A Florrie Flurry?’
She tipped her head.
‘I’ve no idea what it’s called. I just came up with it there and then.
Tell me what you think.’ He leaned on the bar, unknowingly flexing sculpted forearms. His sports watch caught the light, a sight which – on any other European job posting – might have served to increase her thirst. She cursed herself for feeling shy under his gaze while she took the smallest sip, telling him quickly that it was really good.
He seemed pleased with this and moved off along the bar to check IDs and pour more sour-looking green and red shots.
The sofas by the slope view windows were all occupied and every standing table was crowded.
More revellers spilled through the doors at intervals.
The bodies on the dance floor swelled in number, and there formed a steady queue waiting to be served by the efficient, friendly Hamish, who seemed to know most people by name.
She’d stay until she finished her drink, then she’d leave.
She’d thought she might learn something about the business if she came along to observe, or at least that’s the lie she’d told herself.
Her decision to come had been nothing to do with the repair shed hosting a public lecture by Roz’s son Murray on the topic of non-recyclable Christmas wrapping papers and sticking tapes and their eco alternatives.
She’d weighed up hiding in the mezzanine until everyone left but the prospect of that was somehow worse than hiding out at a nightclub bar alone.
Being here wasn’t teaching her anything she hadn’t already learned from looking at the accounts. It had taken her the first two days to make sense of the whole picture they presented and most of today to run cost-saving scenarios, only to find Hamish already had this place pared back to its bones.
She now knew that seven quid cocktails weren’t going to keep the ski complex afloat.
Even if every person in town bought five every Friday night of the year, she couldn’t hide the fact this place had already hit the iceberg.
What Hamish didn’t yet understand was that the damage was done. He was going under.
She watched him now, in his element, chatting with locals and visitors alike, asking how their day had been, shouting over the music. By friendly instinct his blue eyes, rendered all the more striking by the cool light emanating from the blue ‘ice-block’ bar, sought her out and he smiled.
She dropped her head, concentrating on her drink.
‘Can you hop on shotskis for me?’ Hamish shouted over a club mix of a Sabrina Carpenter Christmas song.
Florrie screwed up her face, her hand to her ear. ‘What?’
She’d refused a second drink and had been sipping water, talking to no one and looking like a fish on land in her jeans and blazer and those same high boots she’d worn since Wednesday. A rolled square of silk in Christmassy colours was knotted at her throat.
‘That lot want a mixed shotski of Naughty and Nices. They already paid.’
She seemed to consider this for a second, and then uncrossed her legs, her body unconsciously deciding before her brain agreed. ‘Am I allowed? Like, does your insurance let me come behind the bar?’
He laughed and lifted the hatch for her to join him. ‘It’s not like we’ll be shut down or anything,’ he said, trying out a streak of gallows humour and finding it helped him, even if it did make Florrie wince like there could be human feelings beneath her stony exterior.