by Alix Kelso
“Me too,” said Big Kev, chuckling.
“Oh, shut up, the pair of you,” Keith shouted. “Neither one of you could tell paprika from parkin.”
The two men chortled. Keith scowled around the pub and spied Bruce sitting at the table with Laura. “Laura, nice to see you,” he said, and pointed at Bruce. “You, get up and get some work done. I’m not paying you to sit around chatting to the punters.”
“You’re not paying me at all, Uncle Keith.”
But Keith just ignored this. “I’m off to the baker’s for a sausage roll for my lunch, since Marek’s decided to try to starve me to death with this new-fangled cooking of his.”
Keith stomped out of the pub.
“Your Uncle Keith thinks chicken paprika’s new-fangled?” Laura asked.
Bruce shook his head. “No, he doesn’t. He loves Marek’s cooking. He’s just being difficult and trying to pick a fight.”
She looked puzzled. “Why?”
“He needs a woman,” he said, his tone quiet, “and can’t seem to find one who doesn’t mess him around.”
She considered this. “Maybe we should set him up with Natalie. She needs a man to show her some fun and distract her from making the worst decision of her life by selling Valentino’s.”
Bruce looked at Laura. She looked straight back. Finally, they broke into laughter.
“Yeah, really bad idea,” Laura said.
“He’s too bad-tempered.”
“And she’s too nice to be expected to put up with him.”
Still, they stared at one another, the thought swirling between them. Laura’s phone began beeping. “That’s my alarm,” she said, silencing the noise. “Break’s over.” She covered her uneaten pasta with the foil and picked up the bowl. “See you later, Bruce. And thanks for listening, I appreciate it.”
“Any time.”
She disappeared out the door, and Bruce watched her dart across the road, her ponytail bouncing over her shoulders. Once she was back inside Valentino’s, he saw her grab a tray of drinks waiting to be delivered to a table and pull out her pad to take down an order.
She was a whirlwind.
“Any chance of some service?” Jimmy Pearson said, turning on his bar stool and gesturing with his empty pint glass.
“Hope you’re not so loved up you’ll leave your punters to die of thirst,” Big Kev said.
Coming around the counter, Bruce’s eyebrows shot up. “What are you talking about?”
“You’ve got your heart set on Wee Blondie over there.” Jimmy chuckled. “We’ve got eyes.”
“Well, you must need them checked at the opticians,” Bruce said, pulling the fresh pint.
“If you say so,” Jimmy said, chuckling again with Big Kev.
But Bruce wasn’t listening. Instead, he was focusing very hard on not peering out the window towards Valentino’s and on not thinking about how pretty Laura’s ponytail had looked as she ran across the road.
Just don’t go there, he thought. The last thing he needed was to start slobbering over some girl. His heart had already been broken once this year. And she had a boyfriend, anyway. It was a non-starter on every conceivable level.
He’d come here to work, get his head sorted, and think about what direction to take next. He’d come here to get over Heather and the detonation of their marriage. He had no bandwidth for anything other than that.
He set down Jimmy’s fresh pint and decided it was time the shelves behind the bar were cleared and scrubbed. Mindless, physical work – that’s what he’d come to The Crooked Thistle for. And so that’s what he’d do.
That evening, Bruce drove to his brother’s house for dinner. The lovely summer’s day had turned into a pretty summer’s evening, and it felt good to get into his car, roll down the window, and just drive.
His brother, Jack, lived on the south-west edge of Glasgow with his wife, Claire, and their children, Chloe and Isla. The two girls barrelled out the front door as soon as he pulled on to the driveway, and Bruce smiled to see them. During the years he’d spent living in London, he’d missed watching the girls grow up. The opportunity to enjoy more time with his nieces had been one of the few upsides of the disintegration of his marriage.
“Uncle Bruce!” Chloe yelled as he got out of the car. “We’ve got a paddling pool in the garden!”
He took in their brightly coloured swimming costumes and the pool toy that little Isla was clutching. “I hope you’re watching out for sharks.”
The girls screamed with laughter. “You don’t get sharks in paddling pools, Uncle Bruce!”
“I’ll remember you said that when I have to dive in and haul you out from between the teeth of a great white.”
More screaming laughter.
“Do you like hamburgers, Uncle Bruce?” Chloe wanted to know.
“Love ’em.”
“That’s what Dad’s cooking on the barbeque for dinner.”
“Uh-oh, has he set fire to the garden yet?”
The girls darted around as they all walked through the house and out to the garden at the rear. There, Bruce found his brother hunched over an enormous gas barbeque, and his sister-in-law, Claire, spooning salad on to plates.
“New toy?” he said, clapping his brother on the back and gesturing to the shiny barbeque.
Jack beamed. “I bought it at the weekend. Still haven’t worked out what all these dials and whatnot are for. But she’s pretty cool, don’t you think?”
“He’s already referring to that thing as a she, which I find disturbing,” Claire said, giving Bruce a kiss on the cheek. “Last night he cooked some chicken, and then spent an hour cleaning it afterwards, pouting at the splashes the marinade sauce had made.”
Bruce grinned. “You’ve truly entered the realms of middle age, Jack. My condolences.”
“It’d be a shame if your burger happened to fall to the ground while I’m bringing these over to the table,” Jack said.
Bruce peered at the burgers. “If one of those hit the ground, it’d likely crack your paving stones. Should they be as charred as that?”
Jack snorted. “They look delicious and you know it.”
They did, and tasted even better. The hamburger recipe was Jack’s own and fiercely guarded, the result of much tinkering and tweaking of ingredients and seasonings. The girls chatted while they ate, regaling Bruce with tales of what they’d been up to that week, and when they grew bored of eating, were allowed to return to the paddling pool.
“How’s Uncle Keith?” Jack asked, popping the last of his burger in his mouth.
“Grumpy, but otherwise fine.”
“The man’s been in a bad mood for as long as I can remember.”
“Why’s he grumpy?” Claire asked. “I don’t know that side of your family. He’s not even a full uncle, is he?”
“He’s our dad’s cousin,” Jack said, and drank from his bottle of beer. “And he’s had three failed marriages. I guess that’d probably leave a person in a bad mood.”
“That’s a shame. Is he with anyone now?”
Bruce shook his head. “He had a few nights out with a woman but it fizzled out. I feel bad for him. I think he’d like to have someone in his life, but he keeps picking the absolutely worst women to hook up with.”
“The women he married were no good?” Claire asked.
“That’s an understatement.” Jack plucked a fresh beer from an ice cooler. “The first wife I don’t remember because we were just kids at the time, but she ran up a lot of debt, then hoofed it and left him to pay it all off. Nearly ruined him, financially. The second wife ditched him to go back to her first husband. The third wife was already having affairs before they even got married. Dad tried to tell him, but Uncle Keith insisted he had her all wrong. Two years later, she ran off with one of the men she’d been sleeping with behind his back. That was, what, three, four years ago, Bruce?”
“Sounds about right.”
“I feel bad for him,” Claire said, spearing so
me leftover salad from the bowl on the table. “He’s had bad luck to end up with three women who treated him that way.”
“And that doesn’t include the women he’s gone out with in between the wives,” Jack said. “A few of them have been hair-raising according to my mother. Considering what a good businessman he is, running that pub of his, it’s odd he’s got such bad judgement when it comes to women.”
Reaching for his glass of lemonade, Bruce caught his brother’s eye. “Being good at making business decisions doesn’t automatically make you good at making life decisions.”
Jack opened his mouth to respond, but apparently realised the blind alley down which he was stumbling. He laid a hand on Bruce’s arm. “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking. And it was a stupid thing to say anyway.”
He waved a hand. “Forget about it.”
Claire laid down her salad fork. “You still haven’t heard from Heather since you moved back?”
“No.”
“She really did a number on you,” she added, anger flushing her cheeks. “It makes me fume any time I think about it.”
“Then don’t think about. That’s the only strategy that’s been working for me so far.”
But she had the bit between her teeth. “She was so sneaky about it. Running around behind your back, cheating on you with whatever-his-name-was, and then dropping that bombshell.”
Bruce loved Claire for the righteous fury he saw in her eyes. It felt good to have people on his side. In London, he’d had no one, not really. He’d been too busy building up his business to make the sort of friends upon whom he could rely in moments of personal crisis.
He’d had big dreams when he’d moved to London and had worked around the clock to make them come true. Risking every penny he had, and every penny he’d convinced the bank to lend him, he’d bought and restored an unloved, tumbledown pub on the edges of west London and turned it into a lucrative, and much-admired, business. All his time had been ploughed into running it, and it had made him proud to accomplish something meaningful, to take a wreck and transform it into a livelihood.
Meeting Heather, and falling for her and marrying her, had been the icing on the cake. What spare moments he managed to carve out from running his pub he’d happily spent with her.
When it turned out she’d been spending her own free time rather more creatively than he could ever have imagined, he’d discovered there was literally no one in London he was close enough to talk to about any of it.
That his beautiful new wife had been cheating, while bad enough, was only half the story. When he’d heard the rest of it, explained to him by a sobbing Heather late one night as he sat dumbstruck at the kitchen table, it’d hit him like a juggernaut.
And so he’d come home, back to where there were people he could be comfortable with, while he put himself back together again. As much as he ever could put himself back together. He suspected he would always remain scarred by what Heather had done. But spending time with Jack and Claire and their girls, with his parents, and with his grumpy Uncle Keith – maybe, bizarrely, especially with his grumpy Uncle Keith – had kept him going. The separation of their lives from the one he’d tried to build in London with Heather had helped him get his arms over the ropes and begin hauling himself up from the canvas.
Still, hearing his sister-in-law grow angry as she spoke of Heather only reminded him of all the punches he’d taken in the ring before he’d gone down for the count.
“Let’s not waste a beautiful summer’s evening talking about her,” Bruce said, and gave Claire a squeeze on the arm.
Her expression softened. “I suppose it doesn’t exactly help you to hear me let off steam. It doesn’t change anything, does it?”
“I’ve discovered that letting off steam makes you feel better for about two seconds, but that it absolutely does not change anything whatsoever.”
She smiled and glanced at her watch. “Okay, I’m off to load the dishwasher, and then I need to get ready for tomorrow. I’ve got surgery scheduled from eight and medical journal reading to do before I have an early night.”
“Surgery? Medical journals? How’d you manage to get such a smart woman to marry you, Jack?”
“I tricked her.”
Claire grinned, kissed Bruce on the cheek, then her husband. “Don’t gossip too long, boys.”
“Men don’t gossip.”
“Of course they don’t.” Claire looked over to her daughters, still splashing in the paddling pool. “Five more minutes girls, then it’s bath time.”
“Why do we need a bath?” Chloe yelled, feigning puzzlement. “We’re already wet.”
“Being wet doesn’t make you clean. Five minutes.”
Claire disappeared into the house, and Bruce soon heard her through the open window humming along to the radio as she dealt with her kitchen chores. Jack stretched out in his chair, beer cradled against his belly. The girls splashed around in the pool, the last of the evening sunshine slanting through the trees at the bottom of the garden.
“This is a nice life you’ve got here, Jack.”
“I know. Beats me what I did to deserve it.”
“Me too.” Bruce grinned at his brother. “How’s the business doing?”
Jack, an enthusiastic car fan ever since they’d been kids, had turned his passion into a living by setting up his own luxury limousine service. His fleet now encompassed more than a dozen high-end vehicles – Mercedes, Jaguars, Range Rovers – and Bruce knew his brother had worked tirelessly to grab a slice of the corporate market and attract business from those with the wallets to pay for such indulgences.
“Things are good,” Jack said. “I won a contract for one of the big golf tournaments. There’s a lot of work there, driving VIPs between the airports and the hotels and the venue.”
“You’ve always had an eye for a lucrative business opportunity.”
“So have you.” Jack slid a glance at his brother. “Still can’t believe you walked away from that gold mine you made for yourself down in London.”
“I didn’t walk away. I sold up.”
“As if Heather didn’t hurt you enough, you let her drive the blade in even deeper by selling off your livelihood.”
Bruce sipped his lemonade. “Tell me, Jack. All that work you put into your limo company. Why do you do it?”
Looking confused, Jack shrugged. “For my wife. My girls. For me too, sure, but it’s for them.”
“At the start, when I first bought that old place and refurbished it, it was for me. It was my baby, and I wanted to see if I could pull it off. But after I met Heather, it was for her too. For my wife and the kids I thought we’d have. When all that was gone, I couldn’t face going back to that place I’d built, knowing the thing I’d built it for didn’t exist any more.”
Jack frowned and sipped his beer. “Still don’t think you should’ve sold it.”
“I made a good profit.”
“Yeah, and what are you doing with it? Nothing. You’re the only thirty-two-year-old self-made millionaire I know who’d end up living in his uncle’s spare room and working for free in his pub.”
Bruce laughed. “The Crooked Thistle’s a nice place and I like it there.”
“You’ve been there four months. When are you planning on getting back into the saddle?”
“Just as soon as I stop feeling sick at the idea that I had this great life and I lost it.”
“You didn’t lose it. Heather destroyed it. Stop blaming yourself.”
“Easier said than done.”
Just then, Claire shouted through the open kitchen window to the girls, telling them their five minutes were up. Chloe and Isla got out the paddling pool and began running towards the house. But Isla, her feet wet and uncoordinated, slipped and tumbled to the grass. Bruce was preparing to leap from his chair to help her, but no sooner had his little niece hit the ground than she was bouncing back up again, brushing grass from her legs and running to catch up with her sister, throwing a huge grin to
her father and Bruce as she sped past.
“That’s what it’s time for you to do, Bruce,” Jack said. “Get up, brush yourself off, and keep going. Simple.”
Sure, Bruce thought. Simple.
Chapter 3
Laura woke with the dawn, just after four thirty. Outside all was quiet, the red sandstone of the tenements just beginning to catch the first colour of the rising sun. The sky above the rooftops was the perfect blue of a midsummer morning.
It was going to be a beautiful day.
Laura pulled on her running gear and bundled her hair into a ponytail. Across the tiny hallway, her flatmate’s bedroom door was open. Yvonne had not come home last night. For days, she’d been talking non-stop about her new guy, Olly, and how she couldn’t wait to spend the night with him. Clearly, last night had been the night. Good for them, Laura thought. No doubt she’d hear all the lurid details soon enough.
Jogging down the tenement stairs, she stepped outside and breathed the sweet summer air. The conditions were perfect for an early morning run.
She set off east, along the blocks of streets lined from one end to the other with four-storey tenements, taking in the colourful flowerpots that dotted the stepped entrances. Passing the Salvation Army centre and the old Fairhill parish church, she crossed Shaw Street jogging past shuttered shops and cafes and scattering pigeons pecking at discarded takeaway food. When she reached the grand gates of Mungo Park and veered inside, she slowed her pace to enjoy the tree-lined walkways and flowerbeds, before pressing on around the small pond where ducks quacked happily and then up the incline around the municipal golf course.
She’d only recently got into running after seeing a poster advertising a ten-kilometre city race in the late summer. She had liked the sound of the challenge. It had begun with a lot of hard work to improve her endurance and strength, pounding the pavements and wondering if she’d ever manage to run without getting an agonising stitch in her side.
Now, though, there were a couple of months of hard work under her belt. While she’d never be mistaken for a skilled athlete, she enjoyed the simple pleasure of feeling her feet propel her over the ground. Early morning runs were best, when the city was still. Sometimes as she ran, she felt like the only person who was awake in the world.
