There were no actual castles in sight, where an evil queen might reside, but there were brooding, craggy snow-covered mountains lining the valley, and smoking chimneys poking out of hobbledehoy slate roofs, and everything everywhere was strangely old-timey and quaint, if she ignored the tourist tat shops and the traffic lights.
She’d have stopped the passing policeman on his beat to ask him the bank opening hours if he hadn’t been intent on cautioning a tractor driver for parking on the pavement. Yes, on the pavement! A little ancient-looking red tractor with a scruffy, indifferent little driver who was waving away the policeman’s concerns like they were no big deal.
This certainly wasn’t the Manchester Oxford Road Corridor, that’s for sure, with its signs everywhere and congested bus lanes, and hordes of students heading this way and that, takeaway coffee cups in every hand.
Thinking of coffee shops, she’d have killed for a matcha latte and avo smash on toast right about now, but there was only the stuffy hotel on the corner advertising its famous Scottish fried breakfast with haggis and black pudding, not her sort of thing at all. She’d seen with her own eyes what that stuff did to arteries.
Her apartment fridge was still empty, however. Grocery shopping was high on her ‘to do’ list today, but so far all she’d spotted was the corner shop that doubled as a Post Office with their pricey canned food and refrigerated, pre-packed processed hams and cheddars.
Where was the fresh food? Weren’t towns like this supposed to have picturesque farmers’ markets and allotments and orchards on every corner? She’d ask someone, if she could be sure they weren’t a tourist and unlikely to know.
That’s when she saw something even more out of place than herself.
A great grandfather clock was sailing down the street, bobbing and weaving through the crowds, right past the steps of the bank and away. The man pushing it along (it was partially swaddled in blankets and strapped onto a wheelbarrow) seemed to have stepped right out of the pages of a vintage catalogue or knitting pattern book. Tall and handsome, tan-waistcoated and in shiny nut-brown shoes, he scurried along, his coat and baggy brown trousers all coordinating with a dapper herringbone baker boy sort of cap on his head.
She followed him. In the moment it felt quite natural to stop him and ask about the bank, even though he was clearly busy; there was something curious and trustworthy in his busy, jaunty manner that told her he’d help.
‘Excuse me?’ she called at his back and he stopped, turning dark brown eyes upon her under the brim of his cap. He was younger than she’d expected from his outfit, still older than her though, and handsome with brown skin and overlapping constellations of lovely freckles.
He wasn’t saying anything, only waiting expectantly, holding the handles of the barrow, ready to hurry off again.
‘Sorry,’ she began, not sure why she was apologising. ‘I only arrived yesterday and I was wondering…’ The man cast a glance in the direction he’d been travelling. ‘Sorry, that looks heavy, you should probably keep…’
‘No, no,’ the man said, lowering the wheelbarrow and straightening up in front of her. ‘I’ve got time.’
‘I can see that.’ She tipped her head towards the clock, peeping out of its blanket wrapping.
He only smiled placidly, making her regret herself.
‘Sorry, uh, I was wondering when the bank opened?’
He caught sight of the cheques in her gloved hands. ‘Ah, OK. That’d be Thursday.’
‘Hmm?’ She couldn’t be hearing him right.
‘Yeah, I know, it’s a pain. It’s only open on Thursdays now. There’s a branch near Garten if it’s urgent.’
She had no idea where that might be and no intention of finding out. The cheques went back in her wallet. ‘Never mind,’ she said, feeling herself even more deflated than she’d been when she finally got on that minibus from the train station last night after fifty minutes’ rainy waiting and it had carried her all of three stops and fifteen minutes down the road and into the high street, and in all that while her map had refused to load on her phone.
When she’d stepped off at the town’s only bus stop she’d asked the driver if he happened to know where number eighteen, Cairn Dhu High Street might be and he’d turned a bony finger towards a gap between two buildings and he’d said, ‘doon the vennel’ and shut the bus door upon her before puttering away again.
It turned out a ‘vennel’ was a scary, unlit, un-signposted passage that led to a block of low-rise seventies flats, nothing like the auspicious, gothic buildings along the main street.
There’d been no elevator to take her up to flat 3A, no automatic lighting, and no switch to be found, so she’d dragged her belongings up the stairs in the dark using the torch setting on her phone, draining the last of the battery, and after two trips up and down, she at last let herself inside, clammy and panting, only to find herself under a glaring bare light bulb in a sparsely furnished white box of a flat that smelled of cheap disinfectant and the effects of being left unheated for weeks in winter, and which looked exactly like every student accommodation she’d ever rented back in England.
It had not been a good start. Now that she was here and actually meeting a real local, things showed no signs of improving, and on her birthday too.
‘What about shops?’ she said, stopping the man lifting his barrow handles again, not even thinking to ask him why he was wheeling a grandfather clock through the town. Of course that was the sort of thing people would get up to in a lost-in-time place like this.
He pointed back towards the Post Office like she knew he would.
‘No, I mean, a supermarket? Or health-food shop?’
The man scratched the cropped black waves behind his ear, his cap lifting a little. ‘There’s always Laura’s deli,’ he offered, hopefully.
‘Great, where’s that?’
‘It’s not a place, as such. It’s a delivery business. You just ring her and say what you want.’
