The front door thuds closed as Heather leaves and Scott is leftalone, his head spinning with the afternoon’s impossible turn around.What on earth was that?His frustration has made him clumsy. He walks away from the bags he’s trying to re-pack and swears under his breath as they topple over and spew their contents onto the tablecloth.
He’d brought a fucking tablecloth!That’s how hard he was trying.
He paces the floor.He was preparing to put himself out there – a place he’d avoided for over seven years. And what does she do? Walks away! Does she have any idea what this leap of faith was costing him? How vulnerable it made him feel? He brings his fist down on the tabletop. The impact sends shock waves through his hand and up his arm. He clutches his throbbing knuckle to his chest. Punching inanimate objects is clearly a young man’s game. And it’s never been his. He needs to get a grip. Scott tilts his head back and forces his jaw to unclench. He takes five calming breaths the way the counsellor taught him after Lucy.
In … hold … release …
In … hold … release …
In …
His heart rate calms in a few minutes, and he returns to packing the paper bags from the bakery and delicatessen. Neither has the structural integrity to face being packed to the brim twice. No doubt most wooing romantics actually get to feed their beloved before declaring their unending love. He throws a plastic tub of olives into the least filled bag and swears as the lid pops open, and the entire bag and its contents are soaked in briny oil.
‘For f—’
Frustrated with the situation and vexed with Heather, he angrily steps on the opener of Heather’s swing top bin and chucks it all: bread, meats, olives, pates, sun-dried tomatoes, thewhole bloody lot of it. Ten minutes later, he’s leaving her house, slamming the door of his car and finding Luca’s number on speed dial. He turned down a training weekend for this.
‘Hey, mate,’ he says when Luca’s answer machine picks up, ‘weekend’s gone a bit tits-up here in Edinburgh. Gutted I’m not with you guys right now. Anyway. Hope the ride’s a good one. You’ve got a cracking day for it if Edinburgh’s anything to go by. Catch you later.’
He’s frustrated and riled as he drives home. He’s not just shaken by how badly their date ended; he’s also knocked to the core by how much it’s affected him. He’s had disappointing dates in the past; why should this one upset him so much? He works out the reason somewhere near the motorway exit for Glasgow. He’d thought this one was going somewhere.
He’d taken a risk, broken his sacred rule, let someone close.
Too close, it now seems.
And all it’s done is confirm everything he’s believed since Lucy died: that letting someone close will lead to devastation. He’s fallen for Heather. He knows that now. And the only thing he can now reasonably do is pull back and self-protect before he goes deeper still. At least it never went so far that the girls became embroiled in it all.
Lorraine calls when he’s pulling into the parking space beside his own apartment. Like muscle memory, the sound of her voice pulls him back to that night when he held Lucy in his arms for the last time. Any man who causes his own wife’s death isn’t allowed a second chance at this, he’d known at the time. “There’s never going to be anyone else,” he said to her as she lay there in his arms. He was a fool to think anything else would be appropriate for him.
Lorraine’s call is as predictable as the setting of the sun.
‘Have you made a decision?’ she asks.
It takes every iota of Scott’s control not to sigh and say, “What this again? Will you never, ever, ever give up on this?” but instead he tells her, unequivocally, one last time, that his decision is unchanged and that will never change.
As if she hadn’t heard him, she changes the subject. ‘How did your date go today?’ she asks. ‘Did you tell her?’
Had it been such a good idea to tell Lorraine about Heather and his feelings for her?
‘I didn’t get a chance to tell her, so, no, it didn’t go too well.’ Scott pauses as he turns the key in the ignition to silence the engine and unclips his seat belt. He leans forward and wraps his arms around the steering wheel, bringing his mouth closer to the in-car microphone. ‘I don’t know why I’m so disappointed. You know as well as I do it can never go anywhere.’ He listens quietly to Lorraine’s protestations whilst playing distractedly with the dials on the dashboard. Afterwards, he hangs up and lets himself into the apartment.
HEATHER
Heather parks haphazardly across two spaces in the John Logie car park, tells Maisie to wait in her crate for five minutes, cranks the window open to allow air inside and rushes from the car. It’s more typical for her to spend a few minutes orientating herselfjust soin the parking slot so as not to impinge on neighbouring spaces. But normality doesn’t apply right now. Her focus is on emergency intervention with her daughter. Georgia’s taken a page from Heather’s own rule book, her location services have been disabled. With the entirety of St Andrews to cover, Heather begins her search in the most obvious place: her accommodation.
Heather bangs on the door like a demented Deliveroo driver. But nothing. There are no sounds or glimmers of life inside the property. She tries the nearest neighbours. Flat 25 draws a blank. Flat 27 the same. The door to Flat 28 is opened by a pale faced dude with dishevelled hair and wearing pyjamas. He seems extremely disappointed to find Heather is not disturbing him to drop off a Chicken Ramen or a Legendary Sausage Roll.
‘Sorry to bother you,’ she says (she’s not sorry at all). ‘I’m looking for my daughter, Georgia. From Flat 26. I think she might be in trouble.’
Pyjama boy weaves his fingers through his overgrown fringe.
‘You mean Gee?’
He rolls his vowels as though consonants are an affront.
‘Yes. Yes. Gee. That’s right. Do you know where she might be?’
‘Err … No … She’s probably on the pub crawl.’
