‘You have ten minutes. Let us begin,’ said Barbara.
Ally shifted in her seat at the kitchen table. Thankfully, her mum and dad had gone for a walk so she could have the place to herself and wouldn’t witness any of this. They weren’t around to fret over the way sweat was beading at the curly red baby hairs at her temples.
Barbara was talking fast and clear. ‘Our donors range from governments, major corporations and wealthy philanthropists to private individuals fundraising in their communities, all the way down to school children giving their pocket money. Your application stated you have experience working with cross-sector clients in your repair shop and community café, yes?’
‘I uh, I did say that, yes.’ Why? Why had she said that?
‘How do you handle these very different relationships?’ asked the beautiful Andreas in a lovely French accent.
‘Umm…’ Ally tried to think. Nothing but blankness presented itself.
‘Can you describe a time where one of your service-users presented some unique difficulties for you, and you resolved the problem?’ he pressed.
‘Well… there was the time Pigeon Angus drove his Massey Ferguson tractor down to the repair shop and it broke down right in front of the open doors, pretty much trapping us inside,’ Ally blurted, hating herself more with every stupid word flying from her mouth.
‘Pigeon Angus?’ Barbara’s eyes widened.
V shook their head, openly cringing.
‘That’s right.’ Ally gulped. ‘He’s a… smallholder.’
That was stretching the truth. Angus was an elderly hillfooter who spent all day splattered with droppings in a hut with his beloved homing pigeons. He lived off his homegrown veggies and stinky roll-ups and was often in the local paper for threatening hillwalkers who strayed onto his land with various antique shotguns which the police seized one at a time, only for him to somehow acquire another.
She was regretting mentioning him now, but it was too late. The interview panel peered impassively at her as she scrabbled for words.
‘He’s… known to be a wee bit… curmudgeonly. But he needed our help with his jammed axle so we disassembled the thing…’
‘The tractor?’ clarified Andreas.
‘Yup.’ Ally hid another gulp behind a thin smile. ‘We, the repair team, took it apart, bit by bit, until it could be rolled away from the shed doors and we could operate the café and shed as normal, and then my dad custom moulded a replacement part…’
She paused as Barbara and Andreas exchanged scrunch-browed looks and scratched sparse notes on paper. Bored, V scrolled on their phone, chewing gum in the most judgemental way Ally had ever witnessed.
Still, she wouldn’t be stopped. ‘And while Dad was making it, we all took it in turns to drive Angus to and from his hut, bringing him back every day so he could tell us what needing doing on his tractor, and so we could teach him some repair techniques to stop the metalwork corroding further. Mum even made a cushion for the seat, because you know they’re just bare metal?’ Why couldn’t she stop talking?
Barbara moved her lips like she could taste something strange. The man narrowed his eyes. Was he smiling or was he embarrassed for her? The intern smirked down at their phone like they were at home watching a sitcom and not witnessing an underprepared Scottish woman having a sweaty breakdown in an interview for a job she’d known she wasn’t qualified for before she even applied.
‘So,’ Ally swallowed, since no one was talking. ‘Angus taught us some things about vintage tractors, and we showed him some new things about metalworking, and we used Dad’s specialist skills…’
‘To collaboratively repair a man’s broken down vehicle, which he needs for his livelihood, presumably?’ Andreas said, glancing at Barbara.
‘It’s still working today,’ Ally offered hopefully.
In fact, just last week she’d seen his shiny red tractor parked on the double yellows outside the animal feed shop. The traffic warden had been in the middle of writing him another parking ticket (which he’d no doubt crumple up and chuck into the gutter like all the other ones he’d ignored).
‘OK, so that’s community co-working covered, sort of,’ said Andreas, making what looked like a tick in his notes.
‘Tell us about your approaches to global strategisation.’ Barbara had said the words like they actually meant something.
‘Uh…’
This was enough to draw V’s attention. ‘She means how does the stuff you do have a wider impact.’ V was shaking their head again, rolling their eyes at the ridiculous Scottish Millennial who really shouldn’t be given the time of day by Future Proof Planet.
‘Ah, right, well, thank you, V,’ said Ally through a gritted teeth smile. ‘I, uh, I suppose everything we do has a global impact.’
She was about to say that if they hadn’t fixed Pigeon Angus’s tractor he’d have had to buy a new one and that would use up vital resources, and probably energy and emissions importing it, since tractors aren’t really made in Scotland now, but then Ally thought how, more realistically, if they hadn’t repaired the thing, Angus would simply have let it rot in a field since there was no way he could afford a new anything, let alone a tractor.
‘Um…’ She felt the cold trickle of sweat down her spine and tried not to squirm. She forced herself to think. ‘We, uh, we fix things here in Cairn Dhu and that makes a difference to the whole world because… um…’
