‘Because,’ came Mhairi’s quiet voice, ‘it’s all so… isolating.’ She smiled sadly towards her sleeping boy before smoothing his lovely golden hair off his sweet pudgy face.
The three friends watched Mhairi, waiting for more.
‘What?’ Mhairi said, once she noticed, looking between them.
‘You’re the worst of all of us!’ Brodie said, injecting some jokey lightness into her voice, though her brow was crumpled.
Mhairi’s expression cycled through indignation, before falling to shame, then utter defeat. ‘You guys… how am I meant to tell you how hard it’s been when you’re not supposed to complain about it all?’
‘Says who?’ Ally asked.
The three mums pulled the exact same world-weary expression and said in wry unison, ‘EVERYBODY’.
‘And there was you fighting for baby Gillie,’ Mhairi continued. ‘Going through all the tests and injections and the worry of assisted insemination. And, Jo, you make it all look so easy, juggling kids and working in the city and you and Gus looking busy like some Instagram power couple. And, Ally, I couldn’t burden you with my stuff when you’re young, free and single. You’re going on dates and working hard.’
All three were huffing dismissively, telling her this was ‘rubbish’, laughing at the very notion they had their lives together or they were too self-absorbed to relate. And yet all three were throwing guilty glances too, acknowledging that maybe there were grains of truth in all of this. Mhairi, however, was finally getting this off her chest and she couldn’t stop herself now if she tried.
‘And my life is so boring and child-admin heavy, I can’t even bring myself to repeat it to anyone! I’ve done nothing but try to get Jolyon an appointment with the Speech and Language Therapies people for the last three months and will they answer my messages? No, they won’t. Or I’m at home worrying that he’s still in nappies when he’s supposed to be starting primary school in August, and asking myself why does he only eat yogurt and breadsticks? How can he be getting what he needs to grow? And where the hell’s my mother when I need her? In a timeshare in chuffing Alcúdia with her new man! And exactly how many smug parents and nursery assistants have to casually let me know that my baby’s missing key milestones, unlike their four-year-old who’s already signed up for NASA space camp or something, but not one of them actually offers to bloody well do something and help me!’ Mhairi covered her face in her hands and fell into stifled sobs.
Ally, Brodie and Jo had their mouths open and eyes searching in a what just happened? way, only for a moment, before they were on the move and draping themselves over their crying friend in a group hug that drew the attention of the whole café.
‘OK,’ said Jo, releasing herself from the weepy bundle after a moment. ‘Just a sec.’
She got her phone from her fancy handbag, rang through to a number in her contacts list and explained she couldn’t get in to her keep in touch afternoon, she was going to have to reschedule, and they weren’t compulsory anyway so what were they going to do about it? Then she hung up, a look of utter relief on her face, and she lifted a fork, handing it to an astonished Mhairi, before taking another for herself and cutting a great wedge of cake, not caring about the crumbs.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Start from the very beginning, Mhairi, and then we’ll do the same. No one leaves until we’re right up in each other’s business!’
And that was how it all came out; four friends, two rounds of tea and cake, and the great unpacking of the last few years of absolute chaos, anxiety, surprises, celebrations, and disappointments.
It was an unburdening. Everyone listened, nobody judged, and four friends found out more about one another in that one afternoon than they’d discovered in twenty years, and Ally McIntyre had to lay down the chip on her shoulder that had told her she was the only one feeling under-supported, misunderstood and overwhelmed with everything, learning that even her most ‘together’ friends struggled with many difficult things they had for the most part kept to themselves. And all before their childcare duties resumed at teatime.
Afterwards, Ally chugged her way home in her mum’s old car, thinking hard all the way, because – just like her dad – she knew a good idea when it presented itself to her. It was meeting the girls again that had really focused her vague plans to do something even bigger than her and Jamie’s big emergency meeting when they’d both swung into action and brought the community together to recover the repair shop’s reputation.
All she had to do now was bring everyone together again, an easier prospect now that she knew how to do it, and she would put on a Cairn Dhu event to go down in the history of the repair movement as the biggest ever seen in the Highlands.
She’d need help. From everyone, Murray included, wherever he was, and yes, the police station, and Jamie too – if he was still allowed to be in the same room as her without turning morally corrupt in the Force’s eyes.
It occurred to her as she drove that maybe the whole ‘I want to see you again, but I’m not allowed’ thing that he’d spun her might be nothing more than an excuse, a way of letting her down gently after coming to regret how they’d got so close so quickly that night at the Ptarmigan. She rubbed a hand over the twinge in her chest where her seatbelt pressed against her. Hadn’t he missed her at all? She hadn’t even spotted him patrolling the high street recently. It was like he’d disappeared.
No, she’d set to work on her big repair plans and do her best to rope him in. There could be nothing in the rule books about them working on the same community cohesion plan together, surely? As colleagues? That way, maybe she wouldn’t have to live with the ache of missing him quite so much.
He’d been serious when he’d said he had to keep his distance. Still, a message would have been nice. How could he stay away from her, even if he felt just a tiny bit of how she felt about him?
She’d shaken those thoughts away as she got out of the car. Friendship (and temporary friendship, at that; Jamie was leaving soon) was all she could ask of him, and she’d have to make peace with that sooner rather than later for the sake of her great big idea.
If she was quick, she could finish plotting it all out on her laptop and capture the plans circulating in her head, making use of it all in her Future Proof Planet second interview preparation. The interview was in a couple of days and this time she’d wow them.
She wasn’t going to leave her friends out of her plans either, not after they’d reconnected today. Heck, she was going to rope in every parent in a thirty-mile radius if she could, and their parents too! But first she had to convince the repair shop regulars that she could pull it off. With a bright ember of conviction burning within her, she pulled on the handbrake outside the mill house.
She had work to do.
18
The next day, before the shed opened to the public, Ally was ready, clicker in hand. The slide deck was loaded and displayed on the screen she’d rigged up. The chairs were set out in a semi-circle in front of her workbench.
After Sachin, the volunteers had arrived in twos; the Gifford sisters, her parents, then Peaches and Willie, leaving only Cary Anderson who came in last and by himself as always.
Ally had deflected their intrigued comments until everyone was sitting, happily taste-testing Senga’s new sweet, crumbly tablet squares with walnut chunks that were being passed around in a greaseproof wrapping and everyone had agreed this had to be her best tablet yet.
