Had Bastian been here, he’d have been loudly proclaiming about the wonders of repair initiatives, how the ethos fitted his owngreen agenda, how it wassimply marvellousplaces like this existed and doesn’t it just go to show,someonemust use them.
A small memory of getting ready for a night out together with her old friends early in their dating history, hoping he wouldn’t embarrass her, made its way back to Alice now. Maybe her tolerance for being shown up had increased over time and in the end, she hadn’t felt it quite so much?
A pang of guilt struck coldly inside her. She had to be misremembering him? Exaggerating his less endearing traits? And yet why had she had so many similar moments since coming to Scotland when she seemed to be able to see her old life in a new light? It made her feel like a traitor to herself.
‘Eat up,’ Cary was saying, banishing the memories of Bastian’s brashness.
Alice tasted the cake again.
‘You know,’ she told him, feeling a deep need to reconnect herself to the here and now, to Cary. At her words, his face switched in intensity, gently captivated. ‘Back on the wards everyone would bring in their baking and biscuits and big tubs of chocolates. We’d literally live off them on nightshifts. After a while I dreaded going into the staff room, or the nurses’ station, even the reception, because there was always something somebody had baked or it was someone’s birthday, and you couldn’t very well sayno thanksto whatever they’d brought in. We shared everything we had, if that makes sense? Trying to keep each other going. When I finished with my foundation rotations, I realised the sight of sweets and cakes and biscuits made me feel nauseated. I couldn’t eat another one. Is that silly?’
‘Course it isn’t.’ Cary’s bright expression told her he wasn’t here to judge. He licked his fork and put it down on his empty plate and Alice was surprised to find her own cake gone as well.
‘Butthatwas amazing, actually,’ she said, settling back in the chair with her mug, wanting to close her eyes.
‘I think you had a tough time, at work?’ Cary said, so softly she might have missed it.
She looked at him, seeing the way he crumpled his mouth in sympathy. No one else had ever seemed to understand the toll her training had taken on her.
Cary topped up their teas, right to the brim this time.
She could have slept there, even with the background noise and movement, if someone would just put a blanket over her, but a realisation jolted her upright. ‘My printout!’ she said, looking all around her on the floor and feeling her coat pockets before realising Cary was trying to show her that he had the sheet of paper she’d been carrying when she arrived as well as her stethoscope box. He must have brought them over here with him when she’d turned dizzy.
She sagged with relief. ‘Thank you! Carenza would kill me if she knew I hadn’t practised this yet.’
‘What is it?’ Cary asked.
She showed him the printed text. ‘This. It makes zero sense, and she wants me to read it at the Burns supper tomorrow night, becauseapparentlythat’s the job of the town doctor.’
‘The “Address to the Haggis”?’ Cary said. ‘We had to learn all about Burns at school, for the Burns competitions? We’d memorise and perform his poems and songs, for prizes.’
‘You’re all obsessed!’ She shook her head in astonishment. ‘That would be like us memorising Shakespeare or Jane Austen and having a little talent show.’ Actually, she thought, that might have been quite nice.
‘He’s a big deal all over Scotland, even if some of his,ahem,’ he mock-cleared his throat, ‘attitudes and behaviour might irk us now.’
‘Well, he irks me, all right. How am I meant to read this out loud in front of a room full of people? I don’t understand most of these words. I don’t have the right accent, even. I’ll balls it up for sure, and everybody’s going to think I’m dishonouring their favourite poet on purpose.’
Cary was smiling. ‘I’ll help you, if you like? Here…’ He straightened out the page, running a fingertip along line one.
Alice falteringly read it. ‘Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face, Great Chieftain o’ the Puddin-race!I mean, what does that even mean? Somebody’s pleased about a pudding?’
Cary laughed. ‘Aye. Your job is to praise the massive haggis they’re going to pipe in to the supper table. You’ll stand over the thing and tell everyone it’s the chief of the pudding world, best thing you’ve ever seen. Then you get to cut it open, spilling out its guts.’
‘Oh, God,’ she gulped, pulling a queasy face, only partly to make him laugh again, and partly because the idea of haggis made her tummy churn. ‘But what does this bit mean?’
‘Fair fa’? I think that’s just a greeting, a welcome?’
‘Oh, all right then, makes sense.Hello there, haggis!And what about this bit?’
‘Sonsie face?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Sonsie? It’s, uh, bonny. Pretty.’ His eyes met hers for a fraction of a second before he whipped them back to the page.
Cary cleared his throat for real this time. They both sipped their tea until whatever that was had passed.
‘I’ll try to find an annotated version online,’ she told him, folding the paper. ‘Thanks for trying to help.’
