McIntyre talked on. ‘There’s businesses out there making electronics designed so they cannae be repaired, devices and gadgets intended to turn obsolete within a few years, warranties worth nothing, clothes you wear once and they fall apart. It’s all bin that and buy again!’
He’d lifted a hand to a cardboard box marked ‘clock mechanisms and spares’. A solemn note was sneaking into his voice. ‘Nobody cares about any of this good old stuff. It’s consigned to the scrap heap before its time’s up, when there’s years of usefulness still left in it.’
Sachin was on his feet now too, astute enough to suspect McIntyre wasn’t only talking about throwaway objects, but people too. He gripped his now working shredder, shuffling awkwardly for the door. ‘I hope I havenae upset you, pal. Thanks anyway for this, and the coffee and biccies.’
McIntyre wasn’t upset, though. On the contrary, he was so wrapped up in thoughts of a non-disposable world he barely heard his friend leaving. His mind ticked and his eyes sharpened as he pictured his future.
‘A fixing factory?’ he was saying under his breath, scratching the back of his head. ‘Here, at the mill? No, a community repair hub! It’s madness. Is it no’?’
And that was how the idea for the Cairn Dhu Community Repair Shop and Café, famous all across the Cairngorms for its motley band of expert fixers and delicious home baking (not to mention the tiniest wee bit of scandal that threatened to spoil everything), first came into being.
Now that the story of the broken shredder is told, it’s time we got to the part about the broken heart; Ally McIntyre’s heart to be precise.
2
THIS YEAR, MAY
Ally took one last glance around the repair shop and café to check everything was ready for opening.
Retired GP’s receptionist, Senga Gifford, was switching on the tea urn in her little dominion, the café corner, where she held court, helped by her beleaguered younger sister, Rhona, who Senga never allowed to do much of anything other than put the money in the till. A good aroma of freshly baked bran scones wafted from the Perspex display case on the café counter.
Cary Anderson, a local carpenter, barely five and thirty but with an old-fashioned handsomeness about his clothes that marked him as a man curiously out of time, sat at his tool-sharpening station, his foot poised over the pedal of his grinding wheel. He rarely spoke, other than to ask for a fresh cup of tea, but was always smilingly affable and turned up like clockwork every Saturday. Behind him, a poster on the wall read:
NEVER TAKE BROKEN FOR AN ANSWER
Sachin Roy was back too, sitting at his spot in the repairs ‘triage’ area by the door where he directed clients to the right person and dealt with the paperwork and donations (like all repair cafés nobody pays for fixes here; folks drop a discretionary amount of cash in the jar, and even then it’s optional). McIntyre had insisted, since this was Sachin’s bright spark idea in the first place, that he surely didn’t mind helping out, and his old friend had found he had no choice but to come here, much to Mrs Roy’s annoyance, every Saturday since the shop launched, a good two and a half years ago.
Ally McIntyre’s mum, Roz, sat with her pin cushion on the back of her wrist beneath her seamsters’ banner with its motto ‘make do and mend’ in embroidered purple velvet like something the suffragettes would have marched under. She was with Willie and Peaches, her young crafting protégés recruited for work experience from the fashion degree programme at their Highland university, both of whom were scrolling on their phones one last time before opening, and both were dressed in their own hand-sewn garments with the look of two fabulous, colourful, patchwork rag dolls – if rag dolls ever interned at London Fashion Week.
Today, Peaches’s hair was a wonderful apricot shade with flame-red lengths (the repairers would pass quieter moments taking guesses on what colour it might be the next weekend). These two ‘young ones’ were adored and coddled by all the elder repairers, especially Rhona Gifford, who’d cannily sneak them cakes to take home with them.
At every station the volunteers waited with their repair equipment (or their cake tongs) ready for action.
Granted, it was a ramshackle sort of a repair shop, furnished almost entirely with the machinery accumulated by McIntyre at the height of his hoarding (an abundance of overlockers, welders, lathes, sanders, hoists, bandsaws, clamps, doodads and thingumabobs only he knew the names for). Aside from a few specialist machines they’d sourced from salvage yards or begged as donations, they’d found Charlie already owned much of the hardware and tools they’d needed to launch their fixing venture.
Today there were nine volunteers in total, if you included Ally, though nobody did because nobody was expecting her to stick around. In fact, her day off was the only thing they could talk about this morning, even with the local news crew arriving shortly to record a segment on the global rise of community repair groups since lockdown.
‘I’m turning the sign on,’ called Ally, hoping to stop the speculation, propping the door open and flicking the switch so the barn flooded with the pink neon light of their Repair Shop and Café logo: a steaming coffee cup with a threaded needle passing through its handle.
‘Do you know where he’s taking you?’ Senga called across the room.
‘Somewhere romantic, I bet,’ Rhona plucked up the courage to say. ‘The Cairn Dhu Hotel restaurant is nice for an engagement.’
Senga batted her down with a tut. ‘With all the tourists gawking? Hardly the spot for a proposal,’ she asserted, folding her arms across her apron.
‘Now, now,’ Cary Anderson said softly, but nobody seemed to hear.
‘Can you all stop, please. Mum, tell them!’ Ally complained.
Roz McIntyre only shrugged helplessly across the room at her daughter.
This is what happens when you open up the family home (well, its big barn, anyway) and all its goings-on to the whole community. Everyone sticks their noses in.
‘There’s absolutely no reason to think Gray’s going to propose. I don’t know where you get your ideas from,’ Ally went on, but the flutter in her chest told another story.
Senga took the opportunity to remind everyone that, ‘Moira Blain has it on good authority from Jean Wilson who heard it from her cousin, Tony, who’s on the hop-on, hop-off tour buses, that Gray came out of the wee jewellers in Aviemore carrying a tiny bag.’
Hardy incontrovertible evidence there was about to be a celebration.
