After she’d ‘graduated’ from the programme six years ago, she and Duncan had kept in touch. He’d helped get her onto the course at catering college, and then he’d sponsored her for the grant that had allowed her to open Maggie’s, her wee coffee shop. He and Kathleen used to pop in maybe once a month. Latte for Duncan, double-shot cappuccino for Kathleen, lemon drizzle cake for both. Kathleen had been mad for Maggie’s lemon drizzle.
When Kathleen had died, Maggie had cried for an hour straight – for Duncan, if she was being honest, rather than for Kathleen herself – but then the evil thought had popped into her head that now Duncan was fair game. Fair game and grieving and in need of support from an old friend. He’d started coming into the coffee shop for his lunch every Tuesday. Usually soup and a toastie or a baked potato, but Maggie had started adding pies to the lunch menu on a Tuesday because she knew Duncan loved them. Chicken and leek. Steak and kidney. Good old Scotch pies. He’d joked that he’d put on half a stone in a month. They joked around a lot, Maggie and Duncan, and she liked to think it was a bright spot in his week, that Tuesday lunch. Then he’d seen the advert she’d put in the window for an assistant, and suggested she might want to give this young lad who’d just left the programme a try. His name was Liam and he’d been sucked into the gang culture in Glasgow in his early teens and done a long stretch in a young offender institution for GBH and armed robbery, but now he was turning his life around. If she could take a chance on him, with her example in front of him and ‘our support’, Duncan was hopeful the lad could make it.
Our support.
Maggie didn’t give a stuff about this Liam. The least sympathetic folk in the world when it came to wee yobs were reformed wee yobs. She didn’t want some mad GBH bastard in her coffee shop, putting the frighteners on her regulars.
But our support.
Liam Clarke had started at the coffee shop the next day. And aye, at first he’d been the nightmare she’d expected, giving her lip and smoking in the kitchen, dropping fag ash in the tuna mayo. Smashing glasses accidentally on purpose. Getting all his dodgy pals in to sit around with cans of lager up their jumpers, boasting about their court appearances and clearing the place. But Maggie had read him the riot act, and Duncan had read him the riot act, and he’d pulled his socks up pronto. Two weeks later, he was asking her if maybe the punters might like an avocado-based baked potato filling, maybe with sour cream and spring onion and a wee touch of chilli for a kick.
Liam turned out to be a natural.
Duncan started coming in every day for his lunch to check on his progress.
And then, one red-letter day, Duncan asked Maggie out to a fancy hotel for dinner to thank her for all her help with Liam. They had a lovely meal, and she soon forgot that she was showing him up with her common ways. They laughed and laughed. They drank a fair bit, of course, which helped. And then, walking her back to her flat, Duncan started crying and muttering about Kathleen.
She hugged him.
He kissed her.
And then he started crying again.
‘How can I be feeling the way I do about you, when Kathleen . . . when Kathleen . . .’ And it all came pouring out. That he’d been attracted to Maggie from the start, from when she’d been in the programme. ‘Little Miss Prickles.’ He admitted that he’d enjoyed her company so much that he used to dread the time she’d leave the programme. ‘We just clicked, didn’t we? We had so much fun. I felt I’d known you all my life.’
Maggie couldn’t believe it. It was like she’d just stepped out of her real life and into her wildest dream.
But she knew she should go slow. She told him it was too soon. He was still grieving for Kathleen. Aye, she had feelings for him too, and aye, she agreed that they’d ‘clicked’ all those years ago – in fact, she’d had a massive crush on him – but they should just stay friends, for now at least.
The sexual tension this embargo had produced had been incredible.
A month, he’d held out. A long, frustrating, electric month of ‘accidental’ touching, as she handed him his coffee or his change. She’d reeled him in good and proper.
And now look!
She knew it was going to be fine. She knew Duncan Clyde loved her, maybe even more than he’d loved Kathleen.
She kicked off her shoes and pulled up the duvet and sighed as she sank onto the comfy mattress, lying on her side as she had to now. There was a window right opposite with a view across the lawn and the fields to the hill that she had to stop thinking of as Billy McLetchie. It was pure dead gorgeous. Everything here was gorgeous. Even the window was a posh old wooden one with four panes in it, framing this view of the bonnie Scottish Borders countryside.
Maggie shut her eyes, sinking into sleep, breathing in the cool, clean, fresh country air.
For the first time in her life, she had a real home and a real family.
For the first time in her life, she felt safe.
3
Lulu - May 2019
The blood was like threads, threads that thickened into string, into rope, coiling through the bath water, coiling over the doughy, pale grey skin of the person who lay there, on his side, his back turned towards her so she couldn’t see his face.
Lulu was clutching the door handle.
She couldn’t let go the door handle.
It was a strange room, gloomy and dingy with peeling paint and a grubby floor, but the bath in the centre was the bath from Braemar Station, the big cream enamel bath with the chip in the side where her brothers had hit it once with a cricket ball.
She needed to get to him, but she was caught in a thick, heavy inertia, as if the air around her wasn’t gas but solid, and there was nothing she could do, she couldn’t get to him and she couldn’t stop what was happening.
He flopped over, and she saw his face.
It was Dad.
And then light was searing through her eyelids and she was awake, all of a sudden, awake and weeping, staring at the bright wall of glass opposite the bed.
The blinds were rolling up and music was blaring from the integrated sound system.
‘Close to You’ by the Carpenters.
Thank God, thank God, thank God, it was a dream!
She closed her eyes.