8
Some winter Mondays at the repair shop just happen to be like this: quiet, focused and cosy.
McIntyre was carefully re-painting the newly repaired wood of a nutcracker doll that had split in a fall from a Cairn Dhu mantelpiece at Christmas, as he hummed along to his wife’s choice of music, her favourite, Enya.
Roz, tranquil in a fluffy mohair handknit, darned the holes in a client’s cashmere jumper with colourful threads, stitching over each one with the decorative shape of a tiny rainbow moth.
Peaches and Willie, her helpers, were away at their Highland fashion college now that the semester had begun again.
Sachin Roy wasn’t here either because his repair triage desk was rarely busy on weekdays and any one of the regular repairers could handle the occasional clients who dropped in with their broken or worn-out treasures through the week.
There were a small number of new mums in, clustered in a half-moon on the café-corner armchairs around the shed’s new real-flame fire (a bioethanol eco-stove, for the curious, another of Murray’s clever installations). They were making the most of the chance to chat and enjoying the Gifford sisters’ iced spiced buns while their babies napped in their prams.
Livvie Cooper had this morning helped Cary set out the children’s woodworking benches for the primary school group who’d be on their way later, and now Cary was silently sorting bundles of goggles, aprons and sandpaper-wrapped blocks in readiness for their lesson, while Livvie settled down to the shed’s accounts with a steaming mug of tea.
Senga and Rhona had put away the ingredients delivery and, having exhausted their supply of Cairn Dhu gossip for the day, were peacefully mixing up chocolate cornflake cakes for the kids.
Even the building site behind the plastic sheeting had fallen quiet, the whole team having taken their truck to the sawmill for supplies.
Glad to escape the feeling of always being on guard for Kurt’s provoking presence, Murray sat at the café counter putting his signature to the risk assessment for the repair shop social prescribing garden project. There were a fair number of faulty laptops and games consoles still to work on, but he was only too happy to have an excuse to put those off for now.
Everyone in the repair shop and café pottered on, while those who could, kept to their houses, taking their ease, avoiding the icy chill of the foggy winter’s day outside where the chimneys smoked, moisture droplets hung suspended in the still white air and there was nary a driver to witness the traffic lights moving through their sequences at the crossroads on the edge of town.
Murray expected the quiet would only be shattered by the arrival of the schoolkids with their teacher later, so he kept his head down and made the most of knowing nobody was going to ask anything of him for a while, and no one was flirting with him.
Last night he’d given the first of his talks at the shed. It had gone well enough. Nine locals had turned up in addition to his mum and dad and the repair café fixers, and they’d all nodded andstroked their chins as he’d explained how the repair shed would soon be a net-zero, fully renewable establishment. Murray had been astonished to find Kurt had given up his evening just to hear him speak.
At the end of his talk, when Murray had asked if there were any questions, there’d been a clamour amongst the locals to understand the difference between the terms ‘net zero’ and ‘carbon neutral’ and it had all got a bit fractious when Peaches’s mother, the local property mogul, had wondered aloud if they weren’t ‘the same thing as carbon positive’ and Murray’s dad had interjected with, ‘I think that’s the same thing as climate neutral, is it no’?’ and at this, the whole audience broke out into grumbling about how they couldn’t keep up with the lingo and Murray had wanted to pack up his laptop and slide deck and go home, all the while he’d been saying a silent prayer that Kurt wasn’t going to raise his hand and probe him with a silly query, full of smirking self-assurance, just to make him blush in front of the crowd.
He hadn’t, thankfully, and when their eyes met at the end over the applause, Kurt smiled at him in such a way that told Murray he’d had no intention of joining in the confused grilling. Kind, as well as keen.
Murray had given him a grateful nod and, making excuses about a Zoom call with his sister (there wasn’t one), left his parents to see the audience out into the floodlight’s glare.
Back in his childhood bedroom afterwards, he’d had a stern word with himself about not being afraid of Kurt liking him, and that if the builder ever did ask him out he was going to say, ‘Aye, why not?’ because that’s what single guys do.
Murray should really be focusing on the risk assessment and not going over the promise he’d made himself, but Kurt’s smile was playing on his mind again, making it hard to concentrate. Well, that and the sudden commotion of the shed door slamming open, followed by heavy footsteps and heavier breaths advancing upon him. Murray snapped his head up to find Finlay Morlich, his rugged features pinched and thorny, holding out a silvery disc.
‘You!’ he cried. ‘You broke my compass!’
9
‘You broke my compass!’
‘How?’ Murray said, on his feet.
Finlay didn’t know how he could make it any clearer.
‘When you bumped into me. You had something magnetic in your hand. Your phone?’
He was drawing the attention of everyone in the repair shop. A startled-awake baby had begun mewling and there was tutting and angry muttering coming from the group of mums around the cosy stove but Finlay didn’t pay much attention to any of this.
He was focused on making Murray take responsibility for his actions. ‘Things get damaged when people charge around carelessly,’ he said.People can get hurt, he thought.
‘I can take a look at it for you,’ McIntyre was saying in an affable way, approaching the pair, having put down his paintbrush.
‘Something magnetic?’ Murray was saying, still way behind.
‘Ah-hah,’ said McIntyre, now peering at the faulty needle under the gently domed glass. ‘You’re right enough. It’s depolarised.’
