Chapter 23 #2
He passed around the contents of the folder; press clippings and photographs documenting the early days of the ski centre.
‘Ah, that’s auld Mr Farquhar there, on the day the centre opened,’ said McIntyre, examining one picture.
‘And this is a story about the kids’ ski school! Our girls went to that every Saturday for years,’ remarked Sachin.
‘Happy memories,’ said Roz, a little misty, as she unfolded a clipping advertising the new concessions stand and the arrival of the slope slushie machine. ‘Fifty pence a cup. I remember my mum and dad taking me to the ski centre gardens for slushies and watching the ski chairs going up and down.’
‘I remember you taking me to the ski chairs one night,’ said McIntyre to his wife across all the bowed heads examining the little archive. ‘Although,’ he cleared his throat at Roz’s warning glance. ‘Perhaps that no’ a story for others’ ears, right enough.’
‘What is it you wanted to ask?’ said Senga, moving through the room so she was at Hamish’s side.
‘Well, I thought, since the town obviously does have happy memories of the place, and these are just a handful of the pictures and cuttings and advertising materials that survive of its history, I thought maybe I could cobble together a wee exhibition in the hire shop, until we close, like.’
‘Aye, I like your thinking, son,’ remarked McIntyre. ‘And you can encourage other townfolk to rummage in their attics and photo albums and bring their own snaps and keepsakes in? Make it a community exhibition of our combined recollections.’
‘That’s the plan,’ Hamish replied.
‘You could have an electronic visitors book to capture these memories in words, a sort of living history record,’ Ally McIntyre added, before saying, more sadly, ‘to stop them being lost forever.’
‘Right, right!’ Ally’s twin, Murray, threw in. ‘And we could ask the papers to come down and report on it. Maybe even get whatshername from the TV news to come back?’
‘Morag Füssli,’ said Finlay in a heavy way, at the exact same time as McIntyre also tolled the woman’s name. Neither man had what could be described as happy experiences of her news reporting over the years.
‘But she’s good at putting word out!’ Rhona tried, and she saw her sister’s lip curl, taking exception to this statement, because surely no one was better suited to that task than herself.
‘Rhona’s right,’ Roz said, ‘and anything that grows visitor numbers to the ski centre in its last days, to say goodbye, and to share memories, has to be a good thing.’
The wobble in Roz’s voice stilled the others’ chatter as the whole lot of them processed what it meant for the town to lose its ski centre and its only nightclub all at once.
‘It’s a shame though,’ Sachin said, shaking his head.
‘But… we havnae been skiing for years,’ Murray added guiltily.
‘Even though it’s right on our doorstep,’ Cary said, and because he spoke so rarely, everyone looked to him and solemnly agreed.
‘Aye, it’s a right shame,’ Senga said primly and with the look of a woman who’d never played in the snow in her entire life. ‘But what is it you came to us for, Hamish? What do you need?’
‘Ah, right!’ This jolted Hamish out of the pained stance he’d adopted while receiving their commiserations. ‘I’ll need frames, or boards, and display cases, I’ve no idea what, really. Only I know I need exhibition stuff.’
‘Well, then,’ McIntyre clapped him around the shoulders. ‘You’ve come to the right place.’
For a while there was a lot of talk of display items that could be salvaged, thrifted and quickly knocked up here at the shed, and Ally and Murray volunteered some of their old presentation boards from their various jobs, and even Finlay had an idea where he could locate some old Perspex cases that belonged to the mountain ranger service, and it was all getting very exciting, when Roz remembered she’d been in the middle of hosting a meeting before Hamish arrived, and announced over the rabble, ‘So we all know what we’re doing for the volunteers’ Christmas party and Secret Santa, then?
In that case, is there any other business? ’
‘Aye,’ came a voice, arch with mischief and accusation, enough to send Rhona’s heart rate spiking. ‘I’ve a question.’
The room fell quiet. Senga was on the move towards the door, where there was a sheet concealing a large shape underneath the Christmas tree.
‘I thought to myself, Santa’s come early this year, when I happened to look in the coal bunker this morning.’
Rhona swallowed hard. ‘No, sister!’
But Senga never listened. Rhona knew that appealing to her better nature was futile.
‘I found this.’ She whipped away the cloth to reveal, just as Rhona knew it would, Eric’s handcrafted toboggan.
It looked in a sorrier state here in the twinkling rainbow lights of the tree than it had when Rhona stowed it away under cover of darkness last night, her mind too troubled with the puzzle of how the thing had found its way back to find her to think about the risk of its discovery by her eagle-eyed sister.
Rhona watched on as her repair shop colleagues crowded around her secret, all exclaiming things at once: ‘Wherever did this come from?’ and ‘Ah, that’s a fine auld thing,’ and ‘It’s in bad nick, though.’
Rhona’s boots stayed fixed to the spot, feeling herself under examination even though not one pair of eyes were upon her. None except her sister’s.
Then Roz exclaimed how she hadn’t seen one of these old things in years, and McIntyre agreed, saying, ‘You and me’d race doon the ski slope on one of these, remember?’
‘Must have been one of a fleet o’ about fifty, at one time, I reckon,’ said Sachin.
At this, Rhona felt she ought to protest. A fleet of fifty? What were they on about? This was her Eric’s one and only. His creation. Made just for her. For them. That day.
But everyone seemed to be in agreement.
‘This is one of the ski centre’s old toboggans, back when they had the run, remember, in the eighties?’ McIntyre said. ‘All exactly like this! Havnae seen one in years.’
This was all wrong. This was her toboggan.
Unique. And it had somehow come back to her.
That’s why she’d taken it. She should have hidden it under her bed last night when she had the chance.
It was no one else’s business but hers. And yet, she had found it at the lockup in the ski centre gardens, which did seem an odd place for it to have been.
Could what they were saying be right enough?
Had she blundered again? Senga’s narrowed eyes fixed upon her seemed to say so.
‘Question is,’ said her sister, closing in, her prey-bird stare making everyone else in the room turn to look at Rhona too. ‘What was it doing in our coal bunker?’
Not for the first time in her life, Rhona felt herself exposed as though awakened in the middle of heart surgery, all of her hidden tenderness on display.
Reaching behind her, blindly searching for a seat to catch her as she stumbled, everyone gawping at her like her father had that lunchtime when she’d tripped guiltily homeward after the party, and Eric had turned his hat in his hands on the doorstep and explained to her father how it was all his fault, and the snow’s too, but mostly his, for keeping his youngest daughter out all night, and Mr Gifford had shouted for the first time ever within Rhona’s hearing.
This man? Rhona? Of all the men you could bring to my door, and you chose this man!
A bloody rabble-rouser? The reason the family business was shut down for weeks?
All those men’s jobs put at risk? Their families going hungry?
She’d known then that her secret love affair wasn’t just out in the open, it was over.
Everything in the repair shop was turning black.
‘Someone fetch her a glass of water!’ Alice was shouting.
‘Put her on the sofa,’ a hazier voice cried.
‘Senga, what were you hoping to achieve with that stunt?’ someone else said, but Rhona had already fainted away.