She’d been known to dance the night away at colleagues’ destination weddings, or in big flowery marquees where the women carried their heels and sang along to Ed Sheeran songs and the men grouped around the bar (or someone’s phone, if there was footie on).
Royal Jubilees, a coronation, graduations, big birthdays, baby showers, promotions; these were the things she’d celebrated in her lifetime, and not one of them entailed the memorising of over forty lines of complicated poetry or the horrible drone of bagpipe music.
Yet, here she was, standing in front of the big doors of Cairn Dhu Hotel’s ballroom with a piper and a drummer in their full tartan regalia and with the whole retinue of kitchen staff lined up behind their head chef (the pretty one who’d had her eye on Cary Anderson the other day as he sharpened her knives), who was proudly carrying a wooden trencher with an outrageously large steamy haggis on top, all curled up like a sleeping cat, and just as unappetising.
Carenza McDowell had presented Alice with an antiquated knife, which she called a ‘dirk’ and which Alice was supposed to dramatically plunge into the haggis at the correct moment indicated in the poem. The club president had steeled her with a speech worthy of Burns himself about facing the spotlights and ‘jolly well giving it your all’, and now there was nothing else to be done but wait for her signal.
Carenza counted down like an instructor prepping them for a four thousand metre skydive. ‘Three, two, one!’
The piper blasted an unholy sound in Alice’s eardrums, making all her nerves jump at once.
‘Go, go, go!’ Carenza cried, and the doors were hurled open, revealing a hundred heads turning at once.
‘Oh God!’ Alice gulped, her copy of the poem screwed tight in her hand. Her feet wouldn’t move at first but Carenza gave her a shove and she was over the threshold and trying her best not to grimace.
People were filming the procession on their phones, all of them po-faced like this was a funeral march. She hadn’t expected the supper to be quite so formal. Everyone was dressed to the nines. The tables were set with white linen and silverware.
She shuffled on, following the chef and piper, all the way around the room, trying not to trip on her dress, borrowed in a hurry from the kilt hire place. It was a long white thing, not quite like a bride, more like a fifties party hostess, and it had a tartan sash tied at her hip and a plastic thistle pinned to the collar. When the lady in the shop had asked her which clan tartan she wanted, she hadn’t had a clue what to say, and as the woman reeled them off to see if any ‘rang a bell’ somewhere in her family tree, there’d been only one name she’d felt any connection to at all.
‘MacLeod? Mackenzie? Douglas? Gordon? Anderson? Mac?—’
‘Yes!’ Alice had blurted, startling even herself, and the woman had retrieved an Anderson tartan sash for her. What a fraud she was, but she hadn’t the heart to explain herself, only paying for her rental frock, sash and dancing pumps and getting out of there fast, before she invented any more bogus claims to Scottish lineage.
The piper seemed to have tuned up a bit now and was playing something recognisable as music. Alice carried her knife, feeling like a character in a weird Highland slasher movie.
Out of the corner of her eye she caught the Gifford sisters from the repair shop café. The pipe music was no match for their loud exclamations about how bonny she looked, which was quite nice, really. She gave them a little smile as she passed, knowing one day she’d see them in her surgery and it was probably best to keep on the right side of them.
They’d completed their circuit of the room all too quickly and Alice followed the other dignitaries up the few stairs and onto the raised platform where the top table was set. Her chair was to the left of the middle; the top spot reserved for Carenza as President.
She filed into place only to spot Dr Millen right in the front in black tie and a kilt, enjoying a large glass of whisky with, she presumed, Mrs Millen by his side, and Gracie at the same table.
He toasted Carenza with a wink, and Alice heard her tutting and saying, ‘The cheek of that man!’
There was a moment’s long droning refrain from the bagpipes as the music faded and suddenly the whole room was on their feet, like this was church.
Alice was in position now, a microphone low on the table before her. The haggis had been set down and the chef and her staff moved off stage to a smattering of restrained applause. The piper stood back. The room fell quiet.
Carenza, who didn’t need a microphone – everyone in Cairn Dhu would have heard – said a few words of welcome and a strange prayer about someone not having any meat or something, and then she called upon Alice, ‘Who will now give Robert Burns’s famous “Address to the Haggis”.’
Alice fiddled with the knife, replaying her dad’s words about the importance of going ‘off book’. Her hands shook way too much to unfold the piece of paper without everyone noticing her nerves, anyway. She really was going to have to perform the whole thing from memory.
‘Go on,’ Carenza hissed as quietly as she could, which for her meant the tables in the front definitely heard.
Dr Millen peered at Alice expectantly, brows knitted.
Alice tried to clear her stiffening throat, the hand holding the knife feeling oddly limp all of a sudden. She tried to tighten her grip but her hand was slippery with sweat.
That was all it took to start up the vision.
She pictured the blade slipping from her fingers and guillotining right down into her dancing shoe. She heard the screams it would elicit, the gasps of horror. She could see it as though it were happening in real time. She’d probably faint after that. At least that would mean she didn’t have to recite the poem.
Oh no, thought Alice, the rabbit hole in her brain gaping, wanting her to fall in, as the room turned hazy and wavy in the steamy reek from the giant haggis.
Not here, she pleaded with herself.Not now!
25
Cary Anderson had never been racked with indecision for even one moment in his life, until now.
