Page 11 of Fixing a Broken Heart at the Highland Repair Shop

‘I’ve got a torch, if that’s any help?’ he offered weakly.

She glanced up at the sleepless night sky, now tinged with the tiniest green haze of the summer aurora, seen now and then in these parts. ‘We won’t be needing a torch.’

* * *

‘It’s along the main road for a wee bit, then across Hutchinson’s farm field, over the meadow and onto Nithy burn side,’ she’d said, all businesslike.

It was no surprise to pass dog walkers and club-goers as they walked, but after a while yomping along field margins in the wide valley that Cairn Dhu nestles inside, they found themselves alone.

The summer twilight sky, not satisfied with its cloudless display of infinite galaxies, turned greener as the northern lights awakened and fell in barely-there, rippling curtains of emerald.

‘Woah!’ Jamie stopped dead, eyes lifted to the heavens. ‘We don’t often get this in Edinburgh.’

Even Ally with all her stubbornness couldn’t bring herself to dismiss it as a regular occurrence up here. She stopped too. ‘I know. I never get tired of it. Some summers the lights are more active than others; some, we get none at all.’

‘Looks like I picked the best summer to come here then.’

He looked for his phone to take a picture, then thought better of it. ‘Doubt I’d get a good photo.’

‘You’re better off just storing it in your memory. Photos can’t do it justice,’ said Ally, catching Jamie glancing at her briefly before fixing his eyes on the sky once more.

‘So, you’re only here for the summer?’ she said, and this was enough to break the sky spell and get Jamie walking again. She matched his slow pace.

‘Temporary transfer.’

She let this sink in. This was good news, surely? He’d be on his way soon, and she could act like a normal human being again.

They reached a stile in the fence, the last enclosure before they hit gradually rising mountainsides, icy-cold lochans and perilous shifting scree leading on to about two thousand square miles of serious climbing and precipitous peaks dotted with dangerous black corries.

‘You’re a volunteer, you said? How can you afford to live out here?’ she asked absently, only wondering if that was a rude question once she heard it on the air.

‘Oh, uh…’ He stepped up onto the stile and swung a leg over.

‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.’

He climbed down the other side then waited for her to cross.

For a second she thought he was going to hold out his hand to help her but he was balling up his fingers into fists by his sides instead.

‘I came into a wee bit of money on my twenty-fifth birthday,’ he said, reluctantly. ‘Mum’s life insurance.’

Ally was over the stile with a jump, her boots hitting the dry ground just as Jamie delivered this bombshell.

She searched his face to make sure she’d understood. The sadness was back. Just for a flash.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘It was years ago when it happened. I was tiny.’

It sounded like something he’d said many times, as though it might make other people feel better for him, as if it made it less awful. For Ally, the fact it was long ago made it much, much worse.

‘Still sucks, though,’ he confessed, and that sounded more honest to Ally’s ears.

She didn’t know what to say, not wanting to push for details, especially when she’d been a royal pain in Jamie’s arse since they met. Why should he trust her with the most painful details of his private life?

Fortunately, Jamie was talking now. ‘I’m getting my voluntary hours up so I can apply for a regular police officer’s job at the next intake, and then it’s just the application process and the physical exam to go through.’

‘Well, the physical shouldn’t be a problem.’ The words had jumped right out of her mouth. ‘Oh God! I wasn’t saying… well, you know what I meant, you’re…’ She was pointing feebly at his bicep, making things so much worse. ‘Are you grinning?’

He barely hid his amusement. ‘Not at all.’

They walked on in smiling silence accompanied only by the growing sound of gently trickling water.

‘So you’re not sticking around at Cairn Dhu station?’ Why was she searching for confirmation?

‘By the end of summer, I’ll be back in Edinburgh. A regular police constable, hopefully.’

‘We’re nearly at the bridge,’ said Ally, quieter now.

Only their boot treads and the grasshoppers chirping on the soft summer breeze broke the silence for many minutes.

‘Did your folks get any customers at the repair shed, then? Apart from me, obviously?’ hazarded Jamie.

‘Three, they said.’

‘How many do you usually have on a Saturday?’

‘More than we can handle.’

‘Ah! Right. Not good, then?’

‘Not good,’ she repeated solemnly.

‘Ally, listen, I’m sorry if anything we did spoiled things…’

Hearing him apologising brought out all of Ally’s shame at her behaviour. ‘Don’t apologise. You couldn’t have done anything different. I was being overprotective, and a bit of a dick.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ he said, throwing a smile her way.

‘You looked ready to cuff me, that first day we met.’

‘Hah!’ He was laughing again, as they made their way over a path of rolled stones where once upon a time a glacier, never witnessed by human eyes, had cut its way through granite. A few feet away, only a crystal clear trickling burn on a diminished riverbed was left of its waters.

‘You were frightened. It’s OK,’ he said.

She mused on this. ‘Being scared is only a reason; it’s not an excuse. I’m still embarrassed.’

They approached the ribbons of shallow river. ‘It’s good to be protective of the people you love. Don’t worry about it. And for the record, I’m hardly ever allowed to cuff anyone.’

This made her smile. Then it made her think things she really shouldn’t be thinking on an innocent night walk with an upstanding member of the police force.

‘Edwyn would have, though,’ he slipped in. ‘You were this close.’ He pinched his fingers to show her.

Their laughter ebbed away as the view opened out before them. Below the Reaper’s sickle of a moon, glowing gently green in the welkin lights, arched what remained of an ancient stone bridge, low and long in the landscape.

Ally hung back and let Jamie approach it alone, sensing this was a pilgrimage of sorts and not wanting to spoil his arrival, especially since she’d gone out of her way to antagonise him up until tonight.

She watched him tread slowly into the scene.

* * *

His breath shaky, he paced around the bridge, easily crossing the shallow rivulets that ran under it. Stones scuffed and kicked out from under his boots.

He held the photo before him as he walked, looking for the exact spot where it had been taken from, nothing else driving him but the need to match up the edges of the image – a tiny window on a lost time – to his own perspective.

There! The curved apex of the narrow, crumbling bridge met with that of the picture.

A step or two closer brought the two worlds into perfect alignment and he stood as still as he could on the spot where his dad had raised his old automatic camera to his eye, shutter-button pressing, light flooding through the opening aperture before it snapped shut again, a perfect exposure captured on delicate thirty-five millimetre film.

A child and their mother. The sense of an older sibling paddling nearby but out of shot.

Sunlight in flaring white rays hitting the lens.

Something that might possibly be a picnic sandwich clasped in the child’s chubby hand.

The other hand obscured in the mother’s as she bends her head, pointing towards the bridge, her mouth open.

Had she been telling the child to ‘say cheese to Daddy’? He had no idea.

The mother’s arms and fingers are thin, her dress billowing and blue.

Within months she’d be gone and that child would search for her for the rest of his life, even when he wasn’t aware that’s what he was doing.

Jamie lowered the picture just an inch or two, his eyes fixed on the real world beyond it; the deepest, most innocent part of him willing with all his might for his mum to be revealed behind the fragile paper, still standing there at the foot of the bridge.

But behind the photograph there was nothing but stones and shallow water and the summer night.

‘What was she like?’ Ally’s voice at his shoulder made him flinch like a man waking from a dream.

‘Uh, I don’t remember.’

‘There has to be something,’ Ally pressed.

He could hear the sympathy in her voice. He didn’t usually tell people things like that because he couldn’t cope with the sympathy. Sympathy didn’t help.

He looked again at the picture. ‘She was nice,’ he managed. ‘Restless, I think. Dad says she was funny and always running around doing stuff. And she was young. She was only twenty-seven here. My age.’

He tried to silence the sound as he swallowed. Hadn’t he cried enough? He didn’t want to do it here too.

‘She looks lovely,’ Ally said, a tiny bit closer.

A silent moment passed where Jamie made up his mind to share the few scraps of understanding he had of his mum, partially afraid that if he said them out loud they too might disappear.

‘My sister, Karolyn, can remember her better than me. She was six when it happened. She still wears Mum’s perfume, says it helps her remember.’

A little more silence.

‘What do you think that is, in your hand?’ Ally was getting a bit too close now. He didn’t want to bristle at the intrusion but it was his first impulse.

‘A sandwich, I think.’

Ally looked even closer, her head right by his. ‘I don’t think it is, you know?’

‘Well, what is it?’ This was the closest he’d come in recent years to being cross. He didn’t like it, swallowing it down.

‘I think it’s one of these.’ She pulled something from her pocket, wrapped in a bit of paper towel, letting it unfold in her palm.

‘Toast crust?’ Why on earth was she walking around with that in her pocket?

‘Aye. It’s for the faerie dog.’