The next round of presents is distributed by Georgia and Brianna, who take it in turns to pass each gift to the intended recipient, whilst gathering up the accumulating rubbish in a large black bin liner.
‘What’s this?’ Heather asks as she opens an envelope with her name on it.
‘Just open it!’ Georgia rolls her eyes.
It takes a few moments to read and process the card inside.
‘It’s a voucher for open water swimming lessons,’ she croaks eventually. ‘How did you know I wanted to learn?’ She glances across at him. Scott’s smile is a weird mixture of bashful and smug and his blue eyes twinkle.
‘Don’t you remember telling me?’ he asks. Heather shakes her head. ‘On Georgia’s birthday?’
Her brain shoots back to the vague memories of the evening and the ensuing horror afterwards. Her cheeks begin to burn.
‘I don’t remember a huge amount about that night,’ she says sheepishly.
‘You were so wasted, Mum,’ Georgia laughs.
In fact, they all laugh and reminisce about how terrible Heather had been at that memory game and how many shots of Georgia’s birthday vodka were drunk by her mum that evening.
‘We saw some open water swimmers when we were walking to the bus stop,’ Scott says.
He’s smirking! She’s right. He’s definitely smirking. He’s remembering it, too. How she’d lifted his t-shirt and caressed his chest.It's a perfect fit,she’d said.
‘The lessons are on Portobello beach with an approved instructor. It might give you the confidence to join the swimming group and even go out on your own a few times in the summer.’
There’s no denying it’s a thoughtful gift. She blinks the sudden tears away before anyone sees them.
Her gift to Scott is next. He guffaws when he pulls the wrapping paper to the side to reveal the book she’d carefully chosen for him: “A universe of data: how numbers rule the world”.
‘I thought it might help you come up with more of your useful statistics,’ she says teasingly. ‘You know: you’ve got a such-and-such chance of this and a such-and-such chance of that.’
‘Oh my. You’ve never forgiven me, have you?’ he laughs.
The girls, desperate to be brought up to speed, squeal in horror when Heather tells them about Scott’s first communication with her. ‘I honestly spent the first few weeks paranoid I was going to end up on anti-depressants, and you were going to drop out, Georgia,’ she says.
‘Ah,’ Scott says with his finger in the air, ‘there’s still time for that yet.’
Heather’s not quite sure how it happens, but somehow, she, Georgia and Brianna end up rugby tackling Scott to the floor and punishing him for his remark through a mixture of tickles (Georgia), kisses (Brianna) and playful poking (her).
‘Take it back. Take it back,’ Brianna shouts.
‘No. No. No,’ he screams through the pile up of bodies. ‘Data is key. The data never lies.’
Afterwards, when they come up for air as a tangled mass of bodies and limbs, Scott is forced to withdraw his statement. ‘Well, maybe now I know you both, it seems like the data might need to flex a little.’
‘Loser!’ Georgia shouts.
‘Yay!’ yells Brianna.
‘What? What? What?’ Scott holds his hands as though at gun point. ‘This is allowed. You get anomalies to any rule.’
Heather sees the wink that’s directed towards her. The girls don’t.
Fraser’s presents to Heather and Georgia mark a change in the dynamic: Cashmere scarves in the Campbell family tartan.
‘Campbell?’ says Scott. ‘Not McVey?’
Heather shakes her head, worried about where this conversation is going.
