‘At first I thought it was a growler,’ said Roz.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Like you get in old teddies? So when it’s tipped over it makes a growl sound? But it looks electronic.’
Ally inspected it.
‘It’s definitely some kind of noise-maker,’ Roz went on. ‘But it doesn’t work any more.’
‘It’s a little speaker, I think,’ Ally told her.
She searched the contents of the old marmalade tin on the dining table for a crosshead screwdriver. Other families might have cutlery or utensils in a jar on their dining table; not the McIntyres, they needed to have tools handy.
As Ally worked the screwdriver, she asked, nonchalant, ‘Isn’t this Jamie Beaton’s toy?’
Roz nodded and watched on. ‘It’s been cuddled to death, poor thing. Must be a childhood treasure. I can’t put new stuffing in before trying to fix and reposition whatever that thing is.’
Ally opened the little round cover of brittle plastic, carefully placing the tiny screw on the dish on the table reserved for keeping small parts so they didn’t roll away and get lost.
‘There’s a cell battery in here, contact’s corroded,’ said Ally, slipping into tech surgeon mode. ‘A simple chip, and a button to depress to make a sound come out. Wires look OK, but the button’s been stuck down for some time, I reckon.’
‘Can you fix it?’
‘I’ll try. It’s probably a “moo” sound on this wee chip that activates when it’s squeezed. If the chip isn’t water-damaged or fried, I might be able to get it mooing again.’
Ally didn’t mention how, having watched Jamie sink into some secret dream tonight at the brig, she felt more than usually inclined to re-unite a repair shop client with their beloved item.
She’d seen the difference in him from having experienced whatever it was that had happened to him this evening. There’d been a new smoothness in his brow as they said goodnight, as though he was truly relaxed for the first time since she’d met him. The sadness in his eyes was still there, but there was a glint of boyish brightness too. All of this danced in her mind with the memory of the aurora lights and the grasshopper song from the meadow.
She said goodnight to her mum and placed the whole device in the dish along with the little screw and carried it away to her bedroom, wondering if Jamie Beaton had come to Cairn Dhu this summer seeking more than a bonny part of the world to notch up voluntary hours.
Was he seeking recovery? Repair? She’d been so set upon finding fault with him, as though he was just another broken-down thing opened up on her workbench for diagnostic testing, she’d failed to recognise the same soft, slightly shattered thing within him that she carried inside herself too. They were both a little worse for wear.
She went to bed more kindly disposed to the man with penetrating brown eyes, having caught a glimpse of the sweet little boy within him, but trying not to think about how seeing it had opened up a closed-off part of the person Ally had been before The Thing With Gray, and before the rat race went on without her, leaving her behind, underachieving and a tiny bit resentful.
It had instead put her in touch with the part of her that was just a girl; a girl with what was beginning to feel like a very small and slightly inconvenient fondness for her local Special Constable who’d told her he was leaving before the end of the summer.
Not that that was relevant. Not that she looked at her calendar before bed that night, regretfully telling herself there’d be no more night-time excursions or conversations with him. She’d fix his hairy coo and get it back in his possession, then she’d steer well clear.
Ally had no idea that the long white nights of the Cairngorms summer had plans of their own for her; try as she might to navigate her own road safely to autumn.
8
The following week saw a whole lot of wondering whether the repair shed and café’s fortunes would fare better come Saturday. McIntyre had retreated almost entirely to the silence of the barn all week long, only strolling home for lunch and dinner (and a gentle scolding from his wife) who was missing their son worse than ever, now that he’d jetted off after his visit. She was too much with her own thoughts to be seriously aggravated by the return of her husband’s reclusive habits.
Meanwhile, Ally had tried not to read too much into the change within herself: the little thing that was suddenly insisting she get up early, exercise, shower, do her hair and actually sit at her laptop in a nice outfit for her weekday morning tech support job.
Her shifts online hadn’t gone any faster than they normally did, and the clients she was remotely connecting to weren’t any less confused or inclined to have lost their logins and passwords or to have installed random, unnecessary malware onto their computers without really knowing why they’d done it, but nevertheless Ally McIntyre was irrefutably happier.
On Tuesday, after the particular battery she needed for Jamie’s toy repair had arrived in the mail, she’d spent the evening checking the tiny circuitry, cleaned the corrosion off the battery contact point, and proceeded to make an extraordinary discovery that had made her clasp a hand over her mouth in amazement. She decided to keep her discovery to herself until Jamie was there for the big reveal.
Ally loved repair reveals at the repair shed, when clients were re-united with those extra special projects that might have taken a while to restore, or were items of especial sentimental value. She’d have to wait until a repair café Saturday for that.
They’d had no reason to see each other since their walk to the Nithy Brig, and Jamie hadn’t stumbled her way in search of any other local landmarks.
Still, after her morning’s work, come clocking-out, and not a second after, she’d rip her headset off and – having checked for email responses to her job applications (there were never any) – decide each day that a walk was what she needed.
On Wednesday, Ally found herself wandering through the town and past the police station, for no reason other than her love of dodging the slow-moving tourists on the pavements and finding every shop stuffed to the gunnels with out-of-towners who’d come in by the coachload. She told herself she had no intention of bumping into anyone in particular, whether accidentally or entirely on purpose.
