Nothing from Bastian, of course. She wondered if he’d text her tomorrow to wish her many happy returns. She hadn’t heard from him since the day, a few weeks ago, she told him she was taking this GP training post and he’d sulked, saying she’d ‘blindsided’ him, before lecturing her about how she simply wasn’t cut out for being so far away from him. How would she cope?
‘You know how you’ve been lately,’ he’d said. ‘Do you have it in you? What if… you know,ithappens again? Another episode? In a place where nobody knows you like I do?’
She couldn’t tell him that was precisely the reason she’d accepted a job three hundred miles away, where nobody would know her secret. Besides, with a change of scenery and a change of pace, maybe she could get out of the habit?
That’s what Bastian had described her vivid daydreaming as, a bad habit, and he only knew about the stuff she’d let him in on. Once she realised he thought it was a failing of hers, she kept the worst details secret, worried one day she might come close to losing her grip on reality entirely.
The textbooks hadn’t helped reassure her either, or that one phone call with the consultant psychiatrist, a friend of her dad’s, who’d told her it was possible she was ‘exhibiting some of the traits of maladaptive daydreaming’, her brief clinical experience of the condition frightening her so much she’d cancelled her second appointment and not dared to investigate his theory further.
After the big argument, back when she thought Bastian was simply taking some time alone to regulate his emotions, she’d texted him her train departure time, but he hadn’t replied. That’s when she realised they probably weren’t going to recover from this.
Nevertheless, that hadn’t stopped her from looking for him in the crowds at the station this morning, or imagining spotting him frantically searching for her at all the carriage windows, and when he found her, his face a picture of torment and relief, he’d run to her, his white clinician’s coat flapping, telling her he was sorry, he’d overreacted,of coursehe’d wait for her. Then he’d lifted her in his arms, spinning her, laughing up into her face, kissing her like in the movies.
That daydream had been powerfully real too. So much so, as the vision evaporated she’d dropped into her seat, shaking and breathless. After a while, as the train pulled away, she’d waved goodbye to no one but the gammy Manchester pigeons.
‘A dreamy child,’ her teachers had called her. ‘In her own little world.’ It hadn’t mattered so much when she was tiny and it was still cute.
Sometimes, when she was getting lost in her visions when they were supposed to be watching a movie together or when he was regaling her with gory tales from his wound care clinic that day, Bastian would snap his fingers near her ear and call her name like she was a patient on a resus trolley. ‘Stay with me, Alice,’ he’d say.
‘Aviemore station in ten minutes,’ the tannoy voice announced, bringing her round. Alice had been tracing a fingernail over the gilt figure-of-eight on her mother’s birthday card like a race car on a track.
She stuffed the cards and cheques away in their envelopes before pulling free from her handbag the leaflet Dr Millen had sent her. She’d read it many times already.
Cairn Dhu General Practice looked recently built, if absolutely tiny, with only two consulting rooms, currently staffed by the ageing Millen and one part-time nurse practitioner.
Fiona, the Health and Social Care Partnership’s HR exec for Cairn Dhu and its surrounding villages, had travelled to Dr Millen’s surgery especially to conduct the interview, and Alice had joined them online. They’d been seeking to fill the post for some time, according to Fiona. Dr Millen’s retirement was looming and they needed someone to take over from him, once they’d learned the ropes and ‘got used to certain…’ Dr Millen had cleared his throat, ‘…eccentricitiesof the area.’
Alice hadn’t given much thought to what that might mean, only remarking that after half a decade of studying and two hair-raising stretches split across Geriatrics and Accident and Emergency, with some palliative care and hospice rounds too, there was absolutely nothing that could surprise her about medicine. Fiona had cast a sideways look at Dr Millen, who’d feigned composure, but Alice still caught the stifled, amused snorts.
They’d taken a long time to get back to her after that and she’d assumed it was a non-starter, but then suddenly it was all happening. Dr Millen himself had offered her the job over the phone. How quickly could she get to the Highlands? It would be an immediate start. ‘In at the deep end, eh?’ he’d said, something wry but grandfatherly in his voice.
She had bought a one-way ticket there and then, found a flat from a letting agency online, and broken the news to Bastian that night that she was leaving Manchester for eighteen to twenty-four months of on-job training, she couldn’t be sure how long exactly. She’d be back as soon as her stint was over. She had zero plans to stay on in Cairn Dhu at the end of her placement and there was literally no way she wanted to take over from a country GP at the top end of nowhere, although at her interview she’d made sure to give the impression she’d love nothing more.
All she needed was a chance to forget the toll her training had taken, to get unstuck. Then she could return to England and show everyone the stern stuff she was made of.
Maybe then she’d be back in her own good books after all the times she’d let herself come untethered from the here and now, not to mention that one mistake she’d made, when it all came to a head at the hospital; the one Bastian had covered up for her, knowing it could have been enough to end her career. Even though she hated to admit it, and Bastian never let her forget it, she owed him big time. In her mind’s eye she saw herself now with the blue bloods tray, filling in the transfusion form, preparing that IV, all while she’d been in one of her dreamy stupors… She shook the image away, thanking her lucky stars Bastian had been there.
‘Aviemore station! This is Aviemore,’ the voice announced. ‘All change. All change, please. Minibuses to Cairn Dhu, Stranruthie and onwards to the Garten valley estate leave from the stand opposite the station exit… if you’re lucky.’
Alice jumped up even as the train rocked and rumbled, pulling on woolly gloves and gathered her belongings.
If you’re lucky?Was this the beginning of the regional ‘eccentricities’ she’d been promised? Whatever it was, she’d take it all in her stride, like she handled everything else in life, head down and business as usual, and she’d mostly been fine. Right?
Besides, how bad could it be, doctoring in a small practice, compared to the gritty relentlessness of the city hospitals? And in a Highland town in the middle of winter where probably nothing much ever happened?
‘I feel better already,’ she reassured herself, breathing through her nerves as she hauled her suitcase onto its wheels and the train pulled in alongside the rainy platform.
2
‘I don’t mind taking the teas through to the builders, cheers, Senga,’ said Murray McIntyre, hurrying to relieve her of the tray and ignoring the pointed look the woman threw her sister, Rhona.
He knew what that look meant. It meant the Gifford women who ran his family’s repair shop’s café corner thought himveryhospitable to the workmen who’d descended upon the big fixing barn shortly before Hogmanay. It meant they’d noticed him trying not to get flustered over that youngest one, the one sleeved in colourful tattoos, the one who’d clocked Murray the day they arrived with their scaffolding and who’d been trying to make him blush ever since.
‘Chuck on a few of your iced biscuits an’ all,’ said Murray.
‘Coming out of your pocket, are they?’
Senga, the retired GP’s receptionist, talented baker and general busybody, positively vibrated with the urge to jump to conclusions. She’d have the pair wed by lunchtime if she could.
