The meeting soon concluded with plans to start the landscaping and bed-building while the patients were referred by Alice to the project. She was to pick suitable participants, said the old doctor with a sly cheerfulness, since she’d proven herself ‘so good at firing off referrals’.
There would be an official tree planting to launch the scheme on the morning of Sunday the twenty-fifth, the very first time the participants would be invited onto the site, and the local paper would be invited to take everyone’s picture, so the organising committee would have to crack on if they were going to break ground, prepare the beds and make the place safe and ready for them to start gardening in. Finlay was asked if he’d mind accompanying Murray to the plant nurseries on the tenth before the repair shed opened for the day.
‘On Saturday?’ confirmed Finlay. ‘I didnae ken we’d be startin’ so soon!’
Not one to indulge moaning, Livvie ignored this and asked, ‘We need to get the plants and trees ordered. Can you borrow the ranger truck, do you think? Pick Murray up at eight?’
As soon as he was released, Finlay stormed out with barely a word of farewell, even more out of sorts than when he’d arrived. Murray, who the ranger hadn’t even said goodbye to, didn’t appear quite as smirking and self-assured as he had earlier.
Then, suddenly, Alice was pulling herself from the chair, hauling on her coat, and lifting her bag of textbooks onto her shoulder.
At the door, Cary managed to stop her.
‘To tide you over till tea,’ he said in the hubbub of everybody taking their leave, handing the new doctor a second apple he’d had in his bag. He stored them for winter in his attics, having picked them from his own apple trees in his little woodworking yard behind his cottage where the wood shavings blew around his ankles and accumulated in cobwebby corners.
She looked with apprehension at the red fruit cradled on his fingertips, but she accepted it with a nod, as though she had not a word left in her head.
‘Mind how you go,’ he said, though she didn’t seem to hear.
Cary purposely didn’t watch after her from the surgery ramp as she left, as, unknown to her, she took away a piece of him he’d never get back, a soft portion of his heart that wanted her to be glad she’d travelled all the way here from England. He’d do everything he could to see to that.
12
Alice rushed onto the high street, head down against the wind. The streetlamps and strings of lights garlanded between them glowed overhead. There was a queue of cars trying to pull in at the chippy. The shops were closing. The bank was still resolutely shut.
All she had to do was get indoors, take her bath, chop some carrots and crack open the red pepper and chilli hummus she’d had delivered from Laura’s deli.
A few stars peeped out between dark cloud up above, the first glimpse she’d had of unobscured sky since she got here. Maybe the clouds were lifting?Something, she felt, was changing. And now she had fourteen hours all to herself. She pondered watching a K-Drama on her laptop while she ate. That’s the kind of thing restful people did.
She’d completed her first day at work and it hadn’t been all bad. She’d held it together. Sure, she was in a whole new place with new systems and new people, some more alarming than others, but the stakes were lower. There was no one screaming on trolleys out in the corridor. No nightshifts where she’d be left in charge of three hundred patients with half the agency staff busy elsewhere, and… No! She wasn’t going to get drawn in to remembering, not now she was turning over a new leaf.
She slowed her pace, noticing for the first time the red ‘SALE’ signs in the kilt shop window and all those gorgeous tartans. She stopped to look at them.
She’d made it through her first day unscathed, even if the image of Mhairi Sears, compliant but on the verge of tears, haunted her now. There had to be more she could do for her and her little boy. She’d have to do some more research on local services. She wondered if Mhairi would enjoy getting involved at the social prescribing garden. She’d ask the surgery to send an invitation first thing, letting the mum decide for herself whether or not she accepted.
‘There’ll always be outliers,’ she heard Bastian’s voice saying. ‘The ones that the systems can’t really help.’ That was how he’d comfort her when she got home after a hard day, feeling inadequate and overwhelmed, worried she’d not done enough to help a patient with a complex presentation, someone requiring multi-agency collaborative support, and knowing that, for all kinds of reasons, they were unlikely to receive it, at least not right away and in a joined-up, streamlined manner. She herself knew nobody should be considered beyond support.
Jolyon and Mhairi aren’t outliers; he’s a sweet little boy and she’s an under-supported mother,she answered back in her head, surprising the spectral Bastian who wastut-tuttingin her imagination. This too made her feel lighter. The feeling of being able to separate herself from the way he was so confident in his opinions. The longer she spent away from him, the more sympathetically she seemed to see the world.
She turned once more for home, having not really taken in much of the shop window display. There were crowds around the bus stop ahead of her, shop workers leaving town for the night. She could see the minibus was on its way down the high street towards them and people were hauling huge hiking packs onto their backs in readiness.
It was a squeeze, getting past them on the narrow pavement, and there was a big red phone box in the way, and, as she pressed against a stone window frame to allow other pedestrians to pass, her eyes flew to the sight of a head bobbing, only partially glimpsed through the milling people. It was a person in side profile, their shoulders working, kneeling over someone in the street, a serious set to their face. They were doing chest compressions!One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four… and in an instant she was spirited into an instinctive battle between fight, flight or freeze. She’d be the only medic on the street, surely, the only person trained to help.
‘I’m a doctor!’ she called over the throng, trying to get through the bus stop crowd and bulky luggage. All eyes turned on her, questioning.
The person hunching over the prone figure on the ground looked up too.
How long had the patient been without oxygen? What were the chances of bringing them round? She knew from experience the chances were slim. Cold sweat ran down her spine.
‘Don’t stop with the compressions!’ she yelled. ‘Can you let me through, please!’
Why were these stupid locals gawping at her? Why were the tourists not shifting?
‘Excuse me!’ she shouted, pushing someone’s snowboard out of the way and revealing…oh, shit! Not a member of the public performing lifesaving CPR and in desperate need of help, but a hiker trying to force a puffy winter jacket into an overstuffed backpack.
‘Oh!’
Over her own panting breaths she heard a mocking laugh behind her, and there was a child asking, ‘What’s wrong with that lady, Mummy?’ followed by a sharp, ‘Shoosh, she’ll hear.’
