Page 1 of Basket Case

ONE

Icame to the Highlands hoping to reconnect with my roots. I'd hoped for photo albums, stories, some kind of inner feeling of 'home' as soon as I set foot into the village my mother had grown up in.

Gran gave me a wicker basket.

It sat in the middle of her kitchen table, large enough to hold a week’s shopping and ugly enough to discourage anyone from stealing it. A folded note had been tied to the handle with pink wool.

I recognised Gran’s handwriting immediately.

I leave my best creel for my granddaughter. May it bring you much joy.

P.S. Don’t you dare throw it away.

That sounded like a will, but Gran wasn't dead. She was in a care home half an hour down the road, where she was playing darts and lusting after the male nurses.

I turned the basket around, looking for any clue as to why Gran considered it her best. The wicker had darkened with age, and several rods stuck out at angles that posed a safety hazard. It was too big for shopping and too battered for decoration. Calling it a creel didn’t make it any better. Maybe I could plant some flowers inside, set it in the garden and hope that it would become part of nature again.

I had been in the cottage for all of twelve minutes. My suitcase was still beside the front door, my coat was dripping onto Gran’s flagstones and I had already checked my work emails twice.

The top message was from my headteacher. A parent had complained that I’d embarrassed her son by asking him to stop licking the classroom glue sticks. She wanted a meeting to discuss why I had stopped her child from making his own decisions. I was so done with it all.

I put my phone face down.

One week.

I had promised myself one week without school or small children putting objects in their mouths. By the following Monday, I would know whether I wanted Gran’s cottage or whether I was going back to Glasgow and my tiny yet central little flat with its unreliable boiler.

Gran had moved into the care home because she was tired of chopping firewood. The presence of “several surprisingly fit widowers” had confirmed her decision. She’d offered me the cottage before contacting an estate agent.

“Try it for half term,” she’d said. “You might remember that life exists outside a classroom.”

So far, life outside the classroom appeared to involve rain coming sideways and no mobile signal unless I stood beside the toaster.

The cottage felt larger without Gran in it. Most of her belongings had gone with her, but the china sheep still watched me from the mantelpiece. A framed photograph of me wearing fairy wings and no front teeth stood beside a bottle of whisky that had already been opened.

I carried the basket to the pantry and shoved it onto the lowest shelf. Then I retrieved my phone, stood beside the toaster and called Gran.

She answered on the fourth ring. Music and several loud voices filled the background.

“Did you find the basket?” she asked.

“Hello to you too.”

“Hello, darling. Did you?”

“Yes. Why does your note make it sound as if you’ve died?”

She laughed. “What?”

“You wrote, ‘I leave my best creel for my granddaughter.’”

“Well, I have left it for you. I’m not there, am I?”

There was no arguing with that.

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

She sighed as if she the answer was obvious. “Use it.”