Chapter 3 #2
He nods, doffs his cap in farewell, and trudges away down the cobbled street.
The street itself is almost as pretty as the view – a long row of pastel-painted houses, blends of pinks and blues and pale greens, stretching off past the harbour.
If you squint your eyes, it’s like an abstract painting, blasts of colour blending into one.
Robbie, in his twenties now but still looking like the teenager he was when I first moved here from Dublin, wipes sweat from his eyes. ‘Can I go now, Granny M? Or do you have some salt you need mining? Maybe a chimney needs sweeping?’
‘Get away with you,’ she says, playfully punching his shoulder. ‘Cheeky devil! Off ye go, son. I believe Joanne was making apple cake as I left this afternoon.’
His eyes light up at the thought of his great-auntie’s apple cake, but he pauses and asks: ‘What about you though? How will you get home?’
The three of them share a house up at the top of the hill that overlooks Bonnie Bay, and it’s a steep climb. Moira has made a lot of progress, but I know he worries about her being out on her own. She did once fall off the side of a cliff, after all.
‘I’ll drive her,’ I say. ‘Assuming I’m not too drunk. Your granny seems to think I’m a bit of an eejit, Robbie.’
‘My granny thinks everyone is a bit of an eejit.’
‘Aye, and your granny’s usually right!’ she says. She gives Robbie a hug and says goodbye, then turns back to me. She reaches up and tucks my hair behind my ears. It’s longer than it should be, as she keeps reminding me.
‘All that welding equipment you have at your place,’ she comments.
‘All those hacksaws. All that stuff! And not a pair of scissors to be found? I’m not sure we should be opening a gallery here, Rory Callaghan.
I think we should be opening a barber shop for all you long-haired louts…
now, will you be coming in for a drink or what? ’
‘I’ve just promised you a lift home.’
‘I don’t want a lift home – I’m enjoying the use of my legs after all that time without. Maybe you could just walk me home instead, like a proper gentleman?’
I nod. It’s a good night for a walk, and I might get some free apple cake for my troubles. Outside the memory of my nanny’s home-made soda bread as a kid, it’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted.
We close up the windows and doors to the budding gallery, and I follow Moira up the steps that lead inside the bookshop.
I smile as the little bell tinkles when we open the door, and feel a familiar sense of comfort once we’re inside.
She disappears off into the kitchen, and I stand and look around.
When I first arrived here in Bonnie Bay, this place was a haven.
I knew nobody, and I’d just abandoned my career as a barrister.
I ran away from a life that looked successful on the surface, but was killing me slowly.
Everyone I knew, including my family, told me I’d lost my mind, that I was having some kind of breakdown, that it wasn’t normal.
Maybe they were right, but it was the best thing I ever did.
And I came to exactly the right place – Bonnie Bay, I soon discovered, is full of people who are only on nodding terms with the concept of ‘normal’.
Finding a bookshop in this tiny speck of a dot was the first surprise.
Finding Moira was the second. She created such a warm, irreverent space here that I felt immediately at home.
It was slightly shabby, crammed with books, every available surface stacked with them.
There was no organisation, no logic to the way the shelves were filled – nothing as dull as the alphabet allowed.
There was no need for it. Moira knew where every single book was, and she had an uncanny knack for knowing exactly what book would suit you best.
That first day, I asked if she had a copy of The Silver Darlings by Neil M.
Gunn. I’d googled ‘books set in Scotland’ and found it recommended as a gritty look at rural Scottish life in the nineteenth century.
With hindsight not the most cheery of options, but I was trying to find a way to connect with my new home on a deeper level than just buying a house.
Moira had taken one look at me and shaken her head.
‘Och no,’ she’d said, sadly. ‘That’s not for you, son. It’s a grand book, an important book even, but it’s not for you. Not today. What you need is this…’
She’d disappeared off around a corner, and returned brandishing a battered paperback copy of Whisky Galore by Compton Mackenzie.
‘This is what you want! It’s not as daft as the wee film was, mind, but it’ll give you a giggle or two.
You look like you need a giggle. Fancy a cuppa?
I was just about to make a brew. And it’d be rude not to add a Glenfiddich to it, in honour of the book now, wouldn’t it? ’
And just like that, I knew I’d found one of my favourite places in the whole world.
The bookshop was my way into the community that I now call home, to the people I call friends, to the life I have built here.
Since that first visit, a lot has changed.
Moira lost her husband Angus; Robbie moved away to Australia and came back again; Moira had her accident and almost lost the shop as well.
I gaze around now, seeing the layers of its various lives, its history and now thankfully its future.
It’s still cosy, still snug, still a place where locals and visitors alike come to settle in for a read, a chat, a respite from whatever ails them.
But since it was rescued from a damp-filled death by Kate and Brody, there are new touches too – nothing that’s altered the character of the place, more of an evolution than a revolution, and all of it good.
There are plush chairs to sink into, little tables with their own reading lamps.
Fairy lights dangle from the shelves, flickers of colour against the dark wood.
There’s a room at the back that’s just for children, colourful and fun, and a doggy station for the many four-legged visitors.
A door has been knocked through into the gallery space, and a courtyard has been created at the back – plus the upstairs rooms are now fully kitted out for events, workshops, poetry readings and the like.
It really is amazing what’s been achieved.
Some things, though, never change – Moira emerges from the kitchen bearing a tray to prove it. Two mugs of tea, and the familiar green bottle of the Glenfiddich. She places them down on the big table by the fireplace, and I join her there. She pours us both a generous glug, and we raise our mugs.
‘Sláinte!’ I say.
‘Cheers!’ she responds, adding: ‘Lang may yer lum reek!’ I learned on my first Hogmanay here that means ‘long may your chimney smoke’, and I’ve always loved it. I sip my drink, which seems to be mainly whisky, and savour the slow spread of its warmth on my throat.
‘Did you see the pictures Kate sent to the village group chat?’ Moira asks. ‘Of her and Brody and the baby with all his brothers?’
I nod, and grin. They’re all monsters, his entire family, a group of massive men all crowded around Kate, who was laughing as she cradled little Alice in her arms. Brody looked proud as punch, and only had eyes for his lady and his daughter.
The way he is with them… well, woe betide anybody who so much as looks at either of them funny at any stage in their lives. It’s sweet, in a brutal way.
‘I did. They’re lucky they found each other. And it was all your fault, really, Moira – you invited them. Alice wouldn’t exist without you.’
She turns it over in her mind, and nods slowly. ‘Aye. At least partly to blame, aren’t I? And I couldn’t be happier about it. Angus would be beaming. It was all his idea you know, the cards? He said he wanted to pay it forward.’
Angus was a force of nature, just like Moira. Calmer, gentler, but just as strong. It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that it was his plan all along.
‘He would. But it was you who made it happen, Moira. You always were a grand team.’
‘We were that. I was lucky too – over fifty years, we were married. What about you, though, Rory? Don’t you ever yearn for marriage? For what Kate and Brody have? For someone to share it all with?’
Her words are eerily close to my own thoughts as I sat by the bay, and I try not to react.
‘Not really, Moira. I think that ship has sailed for me. I’m happy enough with my work, with my life here.’
‘Your work is a wonderful thing, Rory – creating things of beauty as you do from rusty old chunks of scrap. It’s like magic it is. But you can’t sculpt yourself a partner in life, now, can you, someone to keep you warm at night?’
‘I probably could, but it’d be weird, and possibly illegal. Moira… it’s not for everyone, you know? The dream of everlasting love? Not everybody is cut out for it. Not everybody is that lucky.’
She acknowledges this with a slight nod of her head. ‘Aye. Maybe so. You do have… friends with benefits, I think they call it, though, don’t you? I know that Catrina one from Edinburgh visits sometimes, and last year there was a rumour you flew all the way to Spain for a booty call…’