Highland Fling

by Emma Baird

This is the first time I’ve been in the pub, and the interior is both expected and unexpected. The surroundings are dark wooden panels’ and a stag’s head has pride of place above the bar. There’s even an open fire too, but the musician in the corner isn’t singing in Gaelic, instead mumbling his way through Emo’s greatest hits. The corner bar isn’t horse brasses and old optics either, sleek polished chrome instead, draft craft beers and the biggest selection of gins I’ve ever seen.

  Stewart is at the bar, on a seat that has his name on the back of it. Second home indeed. In front of him sit two empty glasses, and the third one he holds is about to become empty too.

  “Jack, Gaby!” he throws his arms wide and the seat wobbles. The barmaid sticks out her hand and yanks him by his shirt, pulling him straight again. I can tell it is a well-practised move.

  Jack doesn’t bother with a menu, but he hands me one. My mouth waters. It’s a long time since lunch, and this place does brick oven fired pizzas. They don’t bother with all the stuff you often get down south, all rocket this and smashed avocado that. Here, I have three choices—Marguerita, pepperoni or three cheese. When I say ‘three cheese’, Jack nods and says he’ll share it with me.

  “You’re a lucky lass!” Stewart says, pint number three finished. “He doesnae share a 12-inch with just anyone.”

  “Stewart!” I hiss, as heat starts in my chest and spreads to my cheeks, while Jack merely raises an eyebrow. Blame it on having an older brother. As a teenager, Jason found innuendo in just about everything I said. Other people obviously aren’t as dirty-minded.

  “Make that two three cheese pizzas!” Jolene says, appearing behind us and flashing me her big smile. “Stewart and I can share one too.”

  A muffled bark sounds, and Scottie comes out from where he was hiding underneath Stewart’s chair.

  “Scottie gets none of it, Stewart,” Jolene adds. “The vet said he’s obese.” The dog wags his tail delightedly. References to fatness don’t seem to bother dogs in the same way they do we humans.

  Drinks and food ordered we settle on a table as far from the Emo singer as possible, seeing as he is determined to put a downer on everyone’s mood. Jolene sings my praises as she talks about the website. I try not to watch Jack too obviously, wondering how he is responding to someone else’s endorsement of me. When the pizza arrives, I’m not sure of the etiquette. Should I eat it with my a knife and fork, or do we just dig in and rip it apart with our fingers? Ryan was funny about sharing food. He hated me taking chips from his plate, and if I ever asked for a taste of anything he was eating, he would sigh, spear up a tiny bit with his fork and dump it on my plate. The pizza comes with chips wrapped in fake newspaper and a garlic dip, that the waiter places between us.

  “You go first, Gaby,” Jack says, and I pretend lady-likeness. My mum once told me that when she was a teenager, girls weren’t meant to eat very much and especially not in front of men. Jack watches me spear a chip with my fork. He shakes his head and tips half onto my plate, dolloping spoonfuls of garlic dip on top and handing me the slice of pizza that is most generously covered in melted cheese. Oh heck. This is doing nothing for the campaign I wage where I persuade him Kirsty is his one true love. I count up the chips he tipped on my plate and realise it’s not half the portion, more like two thirds.

  He gave me two-thirds of his chips, Katya. My best friend gets it straight away. Jeez, Gaby. He’s a keeper.

  Stewart and Jolene finish their pizza in double-quick time, all to the backdrop of further tales of coding from Stewart. Thankfully, Jolene chips in so it’s not the kind of chat you zone out of after two words. She stands up as soon as they have eaten their pizza and holds out a hand.

  “Stewart, we need to go. Before you lose two more friends by boring them to death.”

  “Now!” she snaps when he looks as if he’s about to object.

  Goodbyes exchanged, I find my blood fizzing once more with excitement. I’m on my own with Jack, if you don’t count twenty or so other folks in little groups around us. The Emo singer is having a break—thank heavens—and cheery chat fills the air instead. There’s one slice of pizza, three chips and a ramekin dish full of garlic dip left. I sneak two fingers forward, destination final pizza slice, and Jack’s hand clamps on top of them.

  “Oh no, you don’t.”

  Funny how a vice-like grip doesn’t bother me. He holds my hand above the plate and grins at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot the barmaid alternating between gawping at us and shifting her focus so she can move her thumb lightning speed over a phone. Looks like I’ve clocked yet another member of the Lochalshie WhatsApp group. When Jack uses his other hand to pull the last bit of pizza towards him, I marvel at myself. Once upon a time, Gaby of Great Yarmouth would have told you no-one kept this girl from her last slice of three-cheese pizza. Or they did so on peril of death. Now, it looks as if I might relinquish without a squeak that perfectly cooked, thinly sliced bit of dough topped with herb-rich tomato sauce, Parmesan, Gorgonzola and Mozzarella that melts together into a puddle of cheesy perfection.

  He takes the pizza slice, opens his mouth wide, and bites off a third. My hand still hovers in the air above us and I feel the vibration of every chew. He waves the remains in front of my mouth.

  “Want some?”

  Oh goodness, gracious yes. I was wise enough not to make the mistake of ordering anything alcoholic when we came in here. I stuck to diet coke. But the pizza waving, hand in the air stuff has gone to my head. Alcohol lowers your inhibitions, my mum always warned. I’m drunk on whatever knows else and just about to do something I might regret in the morning, like bite the blasted pizza slice suggestively and forget everything I’m supposed to do to make Jack weigh up his options and decide Kirsty is his best bet.

  I jerk back my hand. Jack stares at me, as does the barmaid. No doubt this is update number two to the WhatsApp group.

  “You eat it,” I say, and his eyes narrow and widen again. He does that taking you literally thing men love to do—why? why?—and wolfs the slice in three bites. As he reaches for the chips, I stir myself, grabbing the plate and moving it to one side. It’s not my prettiest move, but I grasp the three of them, use them to scoop up a ginormous blob of garlic dip, open my mouth as wide as I can and cram the lot in. I think this counts as a nil-nil draw. Jack shakes his head, but he smirks.

  “Jack!” The man who stands in front of our table slaps him on the back so hard, he flies forward, the plate in front of him shooting straight across to me. Jack straightens and regards the back slapper warily.

  “Donnie. What can I do for you?”

  Donnie fits the width and breadth of the table we’re at. He wears a leather trench coat—and even I’m not that cold in Scotland—along with a waxed hat pulled low over his forehead. He plants fat fingers on the table. My razor-sharp detection skills tell me this is the infamous Big Donnie, he of the money to throw around fame.

  “I want that picture. Five thousand pounds.”

  Unlike me, Jack has been drinking. He lifts the bottle of beer to his mouth and takes a hefty swig before answering the man.

  “It’s no’ for sale.”

  My mind goes haywire, thoughts firing off left, right and centre. I’ve walked my imaginary self back to Jack’s house, and in there, I’ve looked around the living room, taken myself into the hallway and perused the upstairs. What picture do I think he means? And ninety percent of me is sure I know the painting he has in mind. The other ten percent crosses its fingers, toes and offers all kinds of promises to deities etcetera that Mr Serious by the Look of it Doesn’t Want Golden-Haired, Beautiful-Skinned Woman.

  “You’re a hard man, Jack. Five and a half and that’s my final offer. You could do a lot with that money. Plus, I’ll double the prize money for the Highland Games.”

  Silence. I’ve got hand it to Jack. He does mean and moody magnificently. I’d have cracked by now.

  Jack gets to his feet. “Sorry, Donnie. Thanks for the offer, but as I said it
’s no’ for sale. C’mon Gaby. I’ll walk you home.”

  Outside, the streets are silent. All the dog walkers have retired for the night, and the clear skies mean it’s colder than it was earlier today. I’ve only got ten metres or so and I’ll be outside my front door. At certain stages, the evening looked so promising. When he asked me out and when we competed to see who could finish the pizza in the greediest way, and now that air of fun and expectation has slipped away. You’re still meant to be persuading him Kirsty is the love of his life. Even if I’m not one hundred percent convinced that is wise. If I make the voice stern in my head, perhaps my disobedient and unruly imagination will come round.

  “What painting was he after?” I ask, hoping I sound mildly curious and not desperate to know.

  “The one of Kirsty,” he replies, pushing my gate open for me. “Night, Gaby. Sleep well.”

  I treat myself to the luxury of watching him retreat, noting the hands thrust deep into pockets and how his head dips downwards.

  What’s the point of continuing this unrequited crush? If someone is offered five and a half thousands pounds for a painting of their old girlfriend and says no, he’s not over her at all. I don’t need to do any convincing on Kirsty’s behalf. When I tell her this, she’ll be over the moon.

  CHAPTER 14

  Today’s ‘to-do’ list included 1) Stop Fancying Unavailable Men and 2) Throw Yourself into Your New Job.

  If only Jack hadn’t sent me a text the morning after our night out. “Enjoyed sharing my twelve-inch with you. Gotta love a greedy girl. Have a nice weekend.” He’d added emojis after the greedy girl bit in case I took offence, and I decided not to. I wished he hadn’t put the ‘love’ in there. The logical bit of me tells me that taken in context, the word means nothing. The illogical bit, and often I wonder if I’m far less governed by common sense than most, screams he loves me, loves me!

  Kirsty phoned on Sunday and asked if I’d spoken with Jack. She sounded tearful, and the sound of her choking back tears as she reiterated how dreadful the split with Jack had been guilt-tripped me into telling her about Big Donnie’s offer for the painting.

  “And he said no!” she says, the cheerfulness level cranked up one hundred percent on one side of the conversation and plummeted by the same on the other. “Goodness me! He was always telling me that five grand would help him enormously with the marketing of the tours.”

  I concentrate on throwing myself into the new job. On Saturday, Dexter sent me an email asking if he could meet me in Ardlui on Monday morning. He was there doing a two-day mindfulness and yoga retreat, so if I could drive there, we could discuss the design work I’m doing for Blissful Beauty. Not much of a retreat, I thought, if you’re sneaking out to send work emails. But Ardlui is only a fifty-minute drive from Lochalshie, so much easier to get to than Glasgow. And meet-ups with our biggest client were Melissa’s number one reason for letting me work away from the office.

  Relaxed Dexter, I decide when I meet him later, has a hypnotic trance-like state to him I find unnerving. Ardlui sits at the top of Loch Lomond, and it makes Lochalshie look like a metropolis. All I can see as I drive up is a few houses and a lot of wooden lodges that nestle behind lush green trees. I dump my car in the park outside the reception. The woman at the desk directs me to chalet number four, which is the biggest one in the place—three floors, a porch big enough to hold a table for ten and chairs, and a garage. It’s here that Zen-like Dexter greets me.

  “Gaby!” he says, the exuberance dialled down three or four twists. He plants his hands in prayer position and bows. I do the same back and then hate myself. I am an idiot.

  “Come in, come in!” he waves me through the door. “We have so much to discuss.”

  “How was your retreat?” I ask. He looks the part—dressed in baggy linen trousers and a loose white tee shirt, no shoes and his hair tied back in a ponytail at the crown of his head. His bare feet hold no horrors such as dirty toenails, freakishly long toes or hobbit hairiness. When I choose the armchair in the chalet’s living room, he drops to the floor and crosses his legs into the lotus position. Show-off.

  “The retreat was beyond awesome, Gaby. And what I needed. Modern life is stressful. You need to come on these weekends so you can appreciate life at a much slower pace, do you know what I mean?”

  I nod, and he pulls his laptop across the floor towards him, fires it up and glares at it, his expression performing an 180-degree turn from placid to furious in a second. The next few words are not Zen. Quite the opposite in fact and not repeatable. The gist of it is he is sick and tired of the backwardness of Scotland and the inability to get decent Wi-Fi anywhere outside the central belt. I pull out the print-outs of my designs I had the foresight to bring with me; pass them to him, and talk through the changes I’ve made in what I hope are soothing tones.

  The changes, just as has been the case with all the changes I’ve made so far, involve one tiny tweak here, one miniscule tweak there, and make the pages closer than ever to the original designs I presented Dexter with way back when we met in Glasgow. It’s a mark of his distraction that he only glances at them and when he does, says “Fine, fine.” I heave a sigh of relief. If I’d had to change them yet again, I might have added to the blue turn to the air myself, and that wouldn’t have been professional.

  Dexter thumps his keyboard in a move a yoga teacher would disapprove of, and it beeps at him in response.

  “At last. My emails have come through. I don’t think they understand here how crucial it is for me to be contactable at all times.”

  I watch his face change as he reads the screen in front of him. It turns white. People always use that to describe someone as they receive bad news, but I’ve never seen it in real life before. The colour drains from his face, making his eyes stand out as tiny muscles twitch at his jaw. I scan the room, searching for a bottle of brandy convinced I’ll need to pour it down his throat.

  “This can’t be happening, this can’t be happening...” Dexter reaches for his phone, then flings it across the room when he realises he can’t get a signal. He starts to rock back and forth, a lotus position variant no yoga teacher would sanction. “No, no, noooooo.”

  I stand up and get down on the floor myself, scooting across to join him. Working with clients has given me some background in dealing with melt-downs, though none as full-scale as this. I go with back-patting and saying ‘there, there’, ‘everything will be fine’. When he turns to me, his eyes well up. Oh heck. Has he received news of someone’s death? I’m not sure I’m qualified for this.

  “The Blissful Beauty launch, Gaby,” he says, the words croaky. “The venue’s gone bust. We can’t do it there. And my assistant has been ringing everywhere in London. There’s nowhere else, and it has to be that date. Caitlin’s schedule doesn’t allow for anything else. We’re at the beginning of July. We’ll find nowhere in London at such short notice.”

  “When is the launch meant to be?” I ask.

  “August the fifteenth.”

  Now, why does that ring a bell? August the fifteenth... I glance at Dexter, his face still panic-stricken, and then it hits me. A glimmer of an idea starts and gathers pace, growing bigger and more outlandish as I carry on thinking. My heartbeat quickens. Dare I suggest this?

  “Dexter,” I say, “um, why don’t you make the launch of Blissful Beauty so totally different from any other make-up launch there has ever been journalists and influencers talk about it for years to come?”

  He went with it. I leave the chalet half an hour later dazed, astonished at what I’ve just pulled off. Jolene wanted something different and more exciting for this year’s Lochalshie Highland Games. She’s got it. This summer’s Lochalshie Highland Games will feature not only carnival rides, £1,000 for the best tosser of the caber, a re-enactment of the Battle of Stirling Bridge and Psychic Josie to add to the thrills, but the unveiling of a brand new beauty brand and the first ever visit to Scotland by an internationally renowned reality TV sta
r who has more followers on her social media accounts than the population of the country. They will set up a marquee in the village, in-house beauticians and make-up artists will offer free make-overs and samples, and there will be goodie bags a-plenty meaning we are bound to attract people who’d never go near a Highland Game.

  I rabbited on and on to Dexter about how difference was the key here. Journalists and influencers were bored with your bog-standard launch, I said to him, marvelling at how confident and knowledgeable I sounded. They didn’t want to go to yet another glitzy hotel in London where women handed out goodie bags and hashtags, and someone stood up and gave a talk about this amazing skin cream or that revolutionary mascara.

  No, no we Millennials needed our hyper experiences. An event wasn’t special unless it was standout bonkers. And what could be madder than a venue and an event three million miles away from your usual location for such things? That it would be a challenge to get to was part of the deal. Blissful Beauty would provide tickets, flights and overnight stays for the top beauty writers, but everyone else would flock there anyway, desperate not to miss out on this one-off occasion. And everyone wanted to meet Caitlin, right? When I first mooted the idea, Dexter had kept up his ‘can’t be happenings’ and no, nos. But after a while, he’d quietened, and his face did that rapid change thing again. I made suggestions, and he kept adding to them, telling me how he’d run the social media campaign for it. Caitlin, he promised me, loved doing things people didn’t expect. She’d be overjoyed.

  Trying to picture one of the world’s most glamorous women in the middle of Lochalshie proved too much for my imagination, but, hey. Dexter declared the idea super-awesome amazing.

  This would mean a lot of work for the games committee, but I knew Jolene was up to the task. I wandered over to my car and pulled my phone out to text her. Perhaps it would be better to keep the exact nature of the new attraction for this year’s Highland Games quiet until I’d spoken to her in person.