Gertie smiled. ‘Do you think that would help?’
‘I think that helps most things. But get outside. See the world. See how you are. And if you are still … no sparkle. Well. Then we have a problem. Please come back then.’
Gertie nodded. ‘I’ll try it,’ she said. ‘But I’ll blame you if it goes wrong.’
Saif allowed himself a smile. ‘But of course.’
He stood up politely as she left.
He wasn’t feeling any better though, and he tried to figure out why, as he considered wandering along to the Seaside Kitchen for lunch. Flora had tried her hand at falafel for him. They were terrible, absolutely awful, but she had tried so hard and so sweetly that he had told her they were great. Now she made them all the time and he felt slightly duty-bound to eat them as everyone looked at him expectantly. Old Mrs Laird, who ‘did’ for him, would nudge him and say, ‘Ooh look, there’s Flora’s flannels,’ which was, to be strictly accurate, more or less what they tasted like. He’d much rather have one of her cheese scones, which were heavenly.
He wasn’t in the mood for it today. He would stay here and finish off his paperwork … He swung round to the computer. And that was when he saw it.
He didn’t know why. It must have been to do with how the dates looked so different on his computer – or in his mind, maybe? Because they were in English and not Arabic? Because – and this made him swallow – perhaps because he thought all the time now in English? He even dreamed in English; he dreamed sometimes that his family could not understand him, that he was shouting at them, shouting at them to come, and the only reason they did not was because he could no longer change his voice to the only language they understood. That had been a nightmare from which he had awoken sobbing, on damp sheets – sobbing even harder when he remembered, once again, that the nightmare was true. There was no respite from the nightmare that went on every day: he did not know. He did not know what had happened to his family.
But now, as he glanced down at the phone, he realised. That he had missed it. That he had known on some level that it was today.
The venetian blind on his window, with which Saif was not particularly familiar and usually got tangled horribly, was thankfully already down. He got up and locked the door, even though he knew he was never meant to lock the door from the inside. He glanced around one last time. The morning surgery was finished and the afternoon house calls were not due for an hour.
Then he pulled down a roll of hospital paper, crouched down behind the examination bed, made himself as small and quiet as possible and wept, quiet racking sobs that felt more painful the more he tried to stifle them, conscious that he must be making the oddest of noises. Ash, his youngest, was six years old. Today. Or would have been six. He didn’t even know that. Didn’t even know.
And he had forgotten the day. And suddenly, once again, everything was too much to bear.
Chapter Nine
‘Mwah. Just one more kiss.’
‘Fintan!’
Flora was trying to do the Seaside Kitchen accounts at the table, and listening to Fintan on the phone was too much.
‘Homophobe,’ said Fintan, not looking remotely sorry.
‘I’m a show-off-o-phobe,’ said Flora. ‘And you are showing off.’
‘She’s on her period,’ said Fintan down the phone. ‘No, I don’t know either. Some girl thing.’
‘FINTAN! Hamish, eat the phone.’
Hamish glanced up from the corner, looking quite happy at the prospect, but Fintan flicked them all two-finger Vs.
‘That’s it, I’m telling Dad,’ said Flora. She looked around. ‘Where is he?’
He wasn’t dozing in the armchair as usual. Bramble was gone too. Flora got nervous when her dad wandered off. She stood up from the accounts – she tried to tell herself she needed a break, but really it was because they were just such bad news – and went off to stretch her legs.
‘Colton says bye!’ shouted Fintan jovially as she left. She would have slammed the door if it hadn’t been warped.
She found her father round the front of the farmyard. He was leaning on the stone wall at the front of the property, over the wide mouth of the road that led down. It was quite the view: low-slung clouds across a wide sky, all the way down to the cobbled streets of Mure below; the beach beyond. He wasn’t doing anything. Flora thought he was from the last generation that were content just doing nothing – not fiddling with their phones, but simply standing, waiting, watching. When she was little, he used to smoke roll-ups, but that had stopped a long time ago. His ruddy face was perfectly still, contemplating the only world, really, that he’d ever known.
Bramble’s tail thumped on the cobbles.
‘Hello dair, dhu,’ he said. His voice retained the ancient speech patterns of his homeland.
‘Daddy.’
He smiled.
‘Fintan getting a bit much for you?’ Flora asked.
Eck sighed. ‘Ach, Flora. You know.’
Flora looked at him.
‘Don’t think of me as an ancient dinosaur.’
‘I don’t,’ said Flora. She didn’t. She thought of him as a rock, deep set in the soil, immovable; reliable and strong.
‘It’s just … it’s very new to me, all this.’
‘I know,’ nodded Flora.
‘I mean … do you think they’d get themselves married, do you?’
This hadn’t occurred to Flora. She felt something of a little stab when she realised that Fintan would probably get married before she did. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘We haven’t really discussed it.’
‘I mean, it would have been all right for your maither.’ His pale-blue eyes scanned the horizon. ‘But, you know. I mean. What would the Thurso boys make of it?’
Flora shrugged. ‘I think you might find these days there are more Thurso men with gay people in their families than you’d expect.’
‘You think that, so you do, do you?’
‘You might be surprised.’
‘I might at that.’ He shook his head. ‘It was simpler when me and your ma were young.’
‘For you it was,’ said Flora. ‘For other people it was impossible.’
‘Aye yes, that, right enough.’ He sighed again. ‘I just want you all to be happy.’
‘Well,’ pointed out Flora, ‘Fintan’s the happiest of all of us.’
Eck’s eyebrows rose. ‘I suppose he is at that.’
They both watched as Innes and Agot came marching up the hill from the ferry port. Agot was jumping up and down noisily at something. With her white hair she looked exactly like the new lambs bouncing in the fields.
‘Ach, that girl wants a maither and a faither,’ said Eck. We all do, thought Flora, but she kept it to herself, kissed her dad on the cheek and went down to try and get Innes to help her with the accounts, which he did with the highly disappointing outcome that she’d been right all along about how badly she was doing.
Chapter Ten
Colton was coming home for the evening – one evening! – and not bringing Joel. That was what really did it.
He jetted in on Thursday, looking slim and a little drawn from working too hard, but nonetheless he threw a huge dinner at the Rock for everyone and they all went and had a rip-roaring time. Hamish tried to chat up Catriona Meakin, who was fifty-six if she was a day, a part-time barmaid, full-time sweetheart, comfortably upholstered and very kind and welcoming on the whole; he looked unbelievably delighted when he succeeded.