by Fiona Gibson
Anyway I also have good news. Exciting news anyway. A dog turned up at the cottage last night! A lost dog with no tag on his collar. So I’ve come into town to try and find somewhere to take him before I catch the ferry.
Frieda: A dog! What’s he like?
Hang on. [I take a picture]. Like this.
Frieda: Oh Mum he’s so cute. I love him!!!!!!
Isaac: Have you bought a dog?
Are you reading my messages, Isaac? He came to the cottage last night. He seemed lost. I just wanted to tell you before I take him to the police station.
Frieda: Don’t do that. Bring him home!
I can’t do that.
Frieda: Why not?
Isaac: Go on, he’d keep you company.
I don’t need company thank you, Ize!
Frieda: If he has no tag he’s probably a stray. You should definitely keep him.
Maybe it fell off. He must belong to someone. His owner’s probably frantic with worry.
Frieda: But what if no one’s reported him missing?
Mum: I’ll leave him with the police.
Isaac: Do they do that out there? Do they have some kind of dog-holding service?
I don’t know! What else d’you suggest?
Frieda: Bring him home.
Isaac: Go on Mum. You know you want to. Just look at that little face.
I know, he’s very handsome, love. I’ll let you know what happens and PLEASE be more careful in the kitchen, okay?
Isaac: Message received Mum :)
Parenthood is a funny thing, I decide, as I grasp Scout’s makeshift lead (we are improvising with a pair of my 30-denier tights). Forget the fact that I appear to be solely responsible for a failing distillery, will probably have to declare bankruptcy and might even lose my home.
Right now I’m thinking, fuck, my son could’ve burnt the house down.
Chapter Eight
Ricky
Friday morning, and I’ve arrived at my first school of the day. It’s one of the bigger primaries in the area and, significantly, it’s Arthur’s school. I know he’d like me to avoid him (or, better still, be something else entirely like an engineer or a car salesman; anything but a teacher). But here I am, and there he is, sauntering along the corridor with his two best friends.
Ah, the joys of youth, I reflect as he joshes and laughs with Kai and Lucas. They seem to be engaged in some kind of game involving trying to pull at each other’s ears, which is causing much hilarity. As Arthur hasn’t seen me, his young life hasn’t yet been destroyed. If I could, I’d vaporise into the slightly musty air in order to preserve his happiness. But as that’s not possible, I carry on walking towards them, carrying a folder of sheet music and a flimsy music stand, which seems to have been twisted into something you might see displayed in the Tate.
‘Hi, Ricky!’ Kai spots me first. Kai, whose generous parents are taking Arthur with them on their week’s holiday at Easter to Alicante. Both he and Lucas are unfazed to see me knocking about on school premises, because I am not their dad.
‘Hi,’ I say with a smile. However, Arthur isn’t smiling. It’s as if a shutter has come down over his face, like a shop closing at the end of the day – or perhaps in preparation for impending nuclear attack. He stares at me, his face drained of blood, as if I’ve strode into his school wearing a mankini.
The message go-away-go-away-go-away beams fiercely from his dark eyes. Sorry, I want to tell him, but I’m just doing my job to earn the money that pays for our food, the roof over our heads and the laptop you might be getting for your birthday, if you’re lucky. The boys and I pass each other. Just as I sense him relaxing, my phone starts ringing. As I pull it from my pocket the music stand slips from my grasp, tumbling to the floor with a metallic clatter.
The boys glance back. ‘Oops,’ Kai says, wincing, as Arthur looks askance. I grab the stand and check who’s calling; Ralph’s name is displayed.
Kai’s dad. The boys are marching away now and my phone has stopped ringing. Ralph owns a popular city centre bar and, although we’re friends, it’s virtually unheard of him to ring me during the working day. There’s no time to call him back right now as the string ensemble’s due for a rehearsal, and the classroom we use is always a tip.
I prepare the room quickly, rearranging chairs, setting up music stands and rifling through my folder for a simpler cello part, as the current version is proving too tricky for Joey to master. The cello has always been my main instrument. While I’d like to say I’ve always loved it, it’s not quite as simple as that; at a certain point in my teens I wished the darned thing had never been invented. But then it opened up my life in ways I hadn’t even dared to imagine.
At eighteen years old I left Sgadansay to study music in Glasgow. I fell in love with the city and made new friends from all over the world. There was a confidence about them, a breezy approach to life that I’d never encountered before. My friends who’d stayed on Sgadansay tended to work at the local shops and businesses, like the distillery, or for the ferry company or on their parents’ farms.
I graduated and started working as a tutor in Glasgow schools with private pupils on the side. It was a bit of a scramble as I was still young and all over the place. But I loved living in the city and seemed to have aptitude for teaching kids.
My twenties flew by in a blur. Then, on my thirtieth birthday, something significant happened.
I’d been dragged to a club by some friends; a divey place with banging music. I felt too old, like I didn’t belong there. I’d never been a clubber really. Maybe it’s because of my island background but I’d always felt happier chatting with a few mates in the pub.
The night dragged on, and just when I’d been thinking of leaving I got chatting to a striking red-headed woman at the bar. Suddenly, I didn’t feel too old anymore. I felt like a teenager. This chatty and animated woman turned out to be a pharmacist called Katy who came from London but had studied and settled in Glasgow.
We started seeing each other and fell madly in love. Seven years later our son was born, the image of his beautiful mum. We were thrilled with Arthur, our smiley baby with his shock of red hair, and I never imagined that anything would ever spoil our happiness.
How wrong I was.
In come the kids now, chatting and giggling, eating crisps, swigging from plastic bottles and banging their instrument cases against the furniture. We’re prepping for a concert, which is way off in June, thank God, because before any actual playing can begin:
‘Mr Vance! I forgot my music.’
‘Don’t worry, I have a new part for you, Joey …’
‘Mr Vance! Look at my bow—’
‘What happened to it, Natalie? Christ, look at the state of it.’ It appears to have been gnawed by an animal.
‘My dog got it. He thought it was a stick.’ There’s a ripple of laughter.
‘If your dog can open a violin case,’ I venture, ‘you should film it and put it on YouTube. Can he play it as well?’
She giggles. ‘He can howl along to “Help!” by the Beatles …’
‘I’d have thought he’d prefer Bach,’ I say, which elicits a collective groan. ‘Okay, okay,’ I add in a more serious tone, ‘I’d love to spend the whole session chatting but we’ve got work to get on with …’
There’s a scraping of chairs and a fluttering of sheet music falling to the floor. Anaya babbles an excuse about having not practised all week – ‘Haven’t had time, Mr Vance!’ – and there’s some raggedy sawing on the cello. And now finally Corrybank Primary’s string ensemble is ready to make beautiful music. Or at least to batter its way through a Hungarian folk song and then, to lighten things up, The Scooby-Doo theme tune, arranged for strings – which is probably more terrifying than anything Scooby and the gang ever found themselves having to deal with.
Session over, I troop out to my car, sitting in the driver’s seat for a few minutes in order to scoff a sausage roll before setting off for my next school. Ralph, I remember now. Better c
all him back.
‘Hi, Ricky,’ he says. Immediately, I detect the strain in his voice.
‘Everything okay?’ I ask.
‘Yeah. Well … kind of. Not really. It’s about Easter, mate. The holiday, I mean.’
I frown. ‘Oh, what’s up?’
He exhales loudly. ‘We can’t take Arthur. I’m sorry. I mean, none of us are going to Spain. We’ve cancelled the holiday. Brenna’s mum’s taken a turn for the worse and we think she’s nearing the end now.’
‘Oh, God, I am sorry.’ I know Ralph’s mother-in-law has Alzheimer’s and has been in decline for some time.
‘Thanks, mate. It’s, well, it’s hard, you know? Bren says she couldn’t forgive herself if she was away when, y’know, it happens …’
‘God, yeah, I totally understand that.’
He clears his throat. ‘We could still go, but I really don’t feel like taking the boys away without Bren.’
‘Of course not,’ I say firmly. ‘You couldn’t do that. You need to be with her. And please don’t worry about Arthur, okay? I’m just sorry you’re all going through this …’
‘Thanks,’ Ralph murmurs. ‘Um, look – we haven’t told the boys we’re not going yet. We only made the decision this morning and I wanted to speak to you first.’ The Fergusons have three boys, Kai being the youngest. ‘I didn’t want Arthur to hear it from Kai, before we’d spoken,’ he adds.
‘Honestly, don’t even think about that. Just look after yourselves. This is awful for you and Arthur’ll be absolutely fine—’
‘Will he go up to your dad’s instead?’ So typical of Ralph to worry about Arthur being disappointed when his mother-in-law is dying.
‘Yeah, of course he will,’ I reply firmly. ‘He’ll come to Sgadansay with me and Meg. He loves his granddad. It’ll be great.’
Chapter Nine
Suzy
Sgadansay’s police station is tucked down a back street and looks like an elderly couple’s house. There’s a pot of yellow pansies at the door and a cluster of pony ornaments on the inside windowsill. The door is locked. A notice on the wall details its opening hours.
Opening hours, as if it’s a museum and not a vital community resource! ‘It’s shut on Fridays,’ I tell Scout. ‘Just as well I’m not lying bleeding in the street.’ As if he even knows what day of the week it is. He sniffs at a chip on the pavement and scarfs it down (I’ve noticed that he seems to be on high alert for pavement food and had to whisk him away from a discarded kebab). The notice also says to call 101 in a non-emergency – but how could a call centre operative on the mainland help us?
We wander back to the main shopping street, Scout trotting obediently at my side. On a positive note, at least no one seems to have recognised me from the distillery. We encounter no hostility as we stop off at the butcher’s, to see if anyone there knows Scout: ‘Sorry, never seen him before,’ says a bald man in a stripy apron. He offers him a scrap of ham as if to make up for being unable to help us. People are similarly sympathetic at the cycle repair shop, and at Mary’s Store, where I bought my refined carbohydrates and cheap plonk.
When he hears of our predicament, the reedy young man at the till fetches a plastic carton of water for Scout, which he laps at eagerly. He won’t accept any money for the box of dry dog food I want to buy. ‘You know, a couple of customers mentioned they’d noticed a dog wandering about,’ he says, tickling Scout under the chin. ‘I think he’d been seen on the beach but he’d run off before they could do anything about it.’
‘Poor thing,’ I murmur. ‘He did seem terribly hungry when he turned up.’
‘Someone must know him,’ the man adds. ‘I’ll ask around for you – and good luck.’
‘Thanks so much,’ I say, touched by his kindness. As I did in the other shops, I leave my number on a scrap of paper, writing ‘lost terrier type dog’, plus ‘Suzanna’, my actual name, which no one has used since about 1987.
We arrive at the bakery-cum-teashop where a smiling silver-haired woman comes to the door. ‘Don’t stand out here,’ she insists. ‘Bring him in.’
‘Oh, if you’re sure?’ Although Scout has had plenty of opportunities to pee, after the pouffe incident I’m still cautious.
‘’Course I am, love. Sweet wee thing, isn’t he?’ Someone on this island is actually calling me love? It must be a dog thing, I decide. He seems to be sending out a signal along the lines of, This lady likes dogs and therefore you can be reassured that she is a good person.
‘He is, yes,’ I reply. ‘I really hope I can find out who he belongs to.’
‘Oh, me too.’ She indicates his makeshift lead. ‘What’s this?’
‘My tights,’ I reply with a smile. ‘I didn’t have a lead for him.’
She chuckles. ‘Let me see if we have anything in the back room. We get all sorts of stuff left behind.’ She disappears briefly and returns with a red leather lead. ‘I thought we had one lying around. Look, it even matches his collar!’
‘Oh, thank you,’ I say. ‘D’you need it back at all?’
‘Of course not,’ she says, unscrewing the lid from a jar of dog biscuits on the counter. ‘Can he have one of these?’
The implication that I am Scout’s guardian, and therefore the one making important decisions regarding his nutrition, gives me a small glow of pride. ‘I’m sure he’d love that.’
He crunches it down and I thank her profusely as we leave. ‘You should try the vet’s,’ she calls after me. ‘He’s probably microchipped, isn’t he? They’ll be able to scan him and find out.’
‘That is a good idea,’ I say. ‘I should have thought of that. Thank you so much.’
She gives us directions, and I check the time on my phone; almost 11 a.m., so an hour until the ferry departs – although car passengers are supposed to be there half an hour early. ‘We’ll be fine,’ I tell Scout, hoping to radiate confidence. He looks up at me as we walk. My God, he looks as if he’s actually smiling again. I try to push away the anxiety that’s growing in me now as the veterinary surgery comes into view.
Scout leads the way into the bustling waiting room where a cheerful receptionist taps away at her keyboard, checking lost animal databases (no joy there), then asks us to take a seat. I perch on a chair and Scout sits pertly with ears pricked, as if keenly taking in his new surroundings.
I glance around, feeling a little furtive in the thick of the Sgadansay community with their assorted pets. There’s an elderly man with a black and white cat mewling in its carrier, and a mother and daughter with what looks like a hamster in a cardboard box. A tough-looking man with bulging forearms has brought in a surprisingly decorative puffball of a pooch sporting a diamanté-studded collar. I’m aware now that we’ll be cutting it fine to catch the ferry if we have to wait our turn.
However, I’m not prepared to ask to be seen immediately, not after the horrors of yesterday. Distillery wrecker and now queue jumper at the vet’s! So we wait and wait as, one by one, the animals are taken into the consulting room.
The phone on reception trills constantly. More people arrive. A woman is talking about her son getting a job with a fire service and a man is reminding his neighbour about Saturday’s pub quiz. I’m trying to stop obsessively checking the time on my phone as the receptionist greets another new arrival.
‘Hello, Barney,’ she says, addressing the woman’s toffee-brown spaniel. ‘Nice to see you again, lovely boy.’ The newcomer’s shiny black hair is cut in a choppy bob, and she’s wearing skinny jeans and a buttercup-yellow waxed jacket. She smiles pleasantly as she sits beside me.
‘He’s a sweet little fellow,’ she remarks, looking down at Scout.
‘Thanks.’ It seems a little dishonest to accept praise for ‘my’ dog, but I’d rather not go into the whole story now.
She pats her own dog, encouraging him to settle at her feet, then turns back to me. ‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’
‘It is,’ I reply.
‘Are you from around here?’
/>
‘Erm, no,’ I reply distractedly. ‘Just here on a visit.’
‘On holiday?’ There’s a trace of Geordie accent.
‘Kind of, yes.’ While I don’t wish to appear rude, I’d rather avoid explaining precisely why I’m here in such a public setting. I’d just like to get this business over and done with and hand Scout over to, well, someone capable who’ll agree to look after him so I can catch that ferry, drive back to Yorkshire and get on with sorting out my life. But now, an expectant hush has fallen over the room. Clearly, as the yellow jacket woman has admired ‘my’ dog, it’s probably the done thing to praise hers.
‘He’s lovely,’ I say. ‘What’s he here for?’ I hope it’s okay, etiquette-wise, to ask that question. Surely it is. It’s a vet’s surgery, not a sexual health clinic.
The woman grimaces. She has high cheekbones, striking grey-blue eyes and a smooth, creamy complexion. She’s probably in her late thirties, and there’s a vibrancy about her that whisks me straight back to toddler group days, when I’d spy a fellow mum across the church hall and think, She looks nice. Maybe I’ll try and make friends with her? When all of us were eager to make new connections, thrown together in what was essentially a platonic speed-dating exercise.
‘He’s been pretty off colour,’ she explains. ‘He’s a grand old age, though. He’s fifteen.’
‘Oh, I hope he’s going to be okay,’ I murmur.
She smiles stoically. ‘We’ll see. So, what about this little chap?’
‘He just turned up where I was staying,’ I reply. ‘He seems to be lost. I’m hoping the vet can scan him and see if there are any details of—’
‘Ah, is this the little lost dog?’ I break off as a woman with curly hair piled up in a tangly topknot appears from the consulting room.
‘Yes, this is him,’ I reply.
She strides towards me clutching a small blue plastic device. ‘So sorry to keep you waiting. I’m the veterinary nurse.’ She crouches down to greet Scout. ‘Hey, little man. I hear you’ve been on a bit of an adventure and this kind lady’s been looking after you. Now, let’s see if we can get you home.’
