Page 12 of Fixing a Broken Heart at the Highland Repair Shop

He swung his head to look blinkingly at her. He wanted to tell her he hadn’t come all this way to play silly beggars. For a brief moment he considered announcing that he could make his own way back to town from here, she didn’t have to stay.

‘Faerie dog?’ he said dryly.

‘While I was changing into my boots, I grabbed the crusts from the kitchen. You have to bring something for the faerie dog when you come to the Nithy Brig. An offering.’

He looked once more at the picture, something triggering within him. Ally passed him the crust and as soon as it hit the palm of his hand and his fingers closed reflexively around it, he knew.

‘It was a crust,’ he said, around the lump forming in his throat.

Ally talked softly, helping him unfold the message that was coming through to him. ‘No tourist coming here in the last two hundred years would pass the brig without throwing their crust under it. Everyone round here knows the myth.’

He nodded, the world around him shifting, time slipping. He was moving towards the stone arch.

‘It was a big green dog, wasn’t it?’ he said, surprising himself. How did he know that?

‘That’s right,’ Ally said. ‘He needs distracting with a crust or you daren’t pass his bridge and walk into the foothills for fear he’ll bark three times at your back and, on the third bark, you’ll perish where you’re standing.’ She wasn’t holding back on the drama.

‘This faerie dog’s dangerous, then?’ he was saying, his own voice somehow miles away and Ally now just an airy presence, like a voice on the radio.

‘Not always. They’re protectors, especially of children out there in the mountains.

They used to say the Nithy Brig faerie dog will guide a lost child home to their parents.

In fact, we were all told at the school about how, once, in the fifties, a lost child who’d been gone for days come home safe all by herself, saying she was brought there by a great big green dog.

So it must be true.’ Laughter rippled through her distant voice.

‘The other tales, I’m no’ sure of. But still, you’d better throw your crust for him. ’

He turned the hard bread in his hand, fixing his eyes on the dark space under the bridge and the black water glittering over slimy rock.

A billowing blue moved at the edge of his vision.

‘Throw it, Jamie, darlin’. Go on, right under the bridge.’

His mum’s voice came to him from a locked place, and he threw the crust. He turned, dazed, at the sound of a camera shutter, a cool hand slipping into his – he dared not look down at his empty palm and risk breaking the illusion.

‘Well done, my clever boy.’

The voice dissolved away, and he found himself smiling at the picture taken more than two decades ago on this exact spot, and away slipped the daylight and his mum at his side, and into focus came Ally where the feeling of his dad, young and smiling behind his camera, had been a second ago.

‘Are you all right?’ Ally was asking.

He stared down at the photograph of him and his mother on a summer’s day offering crusts to the faerie dog under the brig, the moment newly opened up to his understanding.

‘Yeah,’ he said, having cleared his throat. ‘I’m good.’ He swiped tears from his lashes.

Ally lifted her phone and snapped a picture of him by the bridge, alone under the aurora sky.

The flash firing woke him further. ‘I’m ready to go,’ he said.

Ally didn’t ask any questions as she and Jamie made their way home, side by side and alone with their thoughts, the faerie dog of ancient, ever-evolving myth having once again re-united a lost child with their family, even if it was temporary, even if it was illusory.

Like the northern lights, it was still beautiful.

The aurora dimmed away into sapphire blue and a tiny part of four-year-old Jamie’s shattered heart healed.

* * *

When Ally got home that night, after a quiet ‘thank you’ from a very preoccupied Jamie, who’d nevertheless insisted on walking her to her door, she found her mum still up and sitting at the kitchen table, her sewing glasses low down her nose, her needle poised.

On the table before her lay her fabric shears, a bundle of crispy cottonwool and thin slivers of orangey-brown plush fabric.

‘There you are. Saw you home, did he?’ said Roz McIntyre.

‘Yep.’

Her mum knew better than to make any smirking assumptions about why she’d been out walking at nearly midnight with a lad, not after The Thing With Gray.

‘He’s nicer than I thought. Friendly,’ she added, as a sop to her conscience about not sharing things with her mum. Not that there was anything to share.

‘Your dad’s gone to bed,’ Roz said, her eyes still on the little highland cow she was working on.

‘Is Murray still here?’

‘He’s leaving early in the morning.’ Roz sighed. ‘It was nice while it lasted.’

Ally drew her lips into a sorry smile. Her mum took Murray’s absences harder than anyone.

‘What do you think?’ Roz said, clearly trying to rescue her mood, turning the little hairy coo so Ally could admire the repair work she’d evidently been concentrating on all evening.

It wasn’t unusual for her parents to finish jobs outside repair shop opening hours; there was far more work to finish than they could fit inside the ten to five of a repair shop Saturday.

Or, at least, there had been until this week.

Soon her parents would have their evenings back, if things continued like this.

‘I can’t sew this little guy up until someone takes a look at this thing,’ her mum was saying, holding out a small black object.

Ally advanced, taking it in her hand.

‘At first I thought it was a growler,’ said Roz.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Like you get in old teddies? So when it’s tipped over it makes a growl sound? But it looks electronic.’

Ally inspected it.

‘It’s definitely some kind of noise-maker,’ Roz went on. ‘But it doesn’t work any more.’

‘It’s a little speaker, I think,’ Ally told her.

She searched the contents of the old marmalade tin on the dining table for a crosshead screwdriver. Other families might have cutlery or utensils in a jar on their dining table; not the McIntyres, they needed to have tools handy.

As Ally worked the screwdriver, she asked, nonchalant, ‘Isn’t this Jamie Beaton’s toy?’

Roz nodded and watched on. ‘It’s been cuddled to death, poor thing. Must be a childhood treasure. I can’t put new stuffing in before trying to fix and reposition whatever that thing is.’

Ally opened the little round cover of brittle plastic, carefully placing the tiny screw on the dish on the table reserved for keeping small parts so they didn’t roll away and get lost.

‘There’s a cell battery in here, contact’s corroded,’ said Ally, slipping into tech surgeon mode. ‘A simple chip, and a button to depress to make a sound come out. Wires look OK, but the button’s been stuck down for some time, I reckon.’

‘Can you fix it?’

‘I’ll try. It’s probably a “moo” sound on this wee chip that activates when it’s squeezed. If the chip isn’t water-damaged or fried, I might be able to get it mooing again.’

Ally didn’t mention how, having watched Jamie sink into some secret dream tonight at the brig, she felt more than usually inclined to re-unite a repair shop client with their beloved item.

She’d seen the difference in him from having experienced whatever it was that had happened to him this evening.

There’d been a new smoothness in his brow as they said goodnight, as though he was truly relaxed for the first time since she’d met him.

The sadness in his eyes was still there, but there was a glint of boyish brightness too.

All of this danced in her mind with the memory of the aurora lights and the grasshopper song from the meadow.

She said goodnight to her mum and placed the whole device in the dish along with the little screw and carried it away to her bedroom, wondering if Jamie Beaton had come to Cairn Dhu this summer seeking more than a bonny part of the world to notch up voluntary hours.

Was he seeking recovery? Repair? She’d been so set upon finding fault with him, as though he was just another broken-down thing opened up on her workbench for diagnostic testing, she’d failed to recognise the same soft, slightly shattered thing within him that she carried inside herself too. They were both a little worse for wear.

She went to bed more kindly disposed to the man with penetrating brown eyes, having caught a glimpse of the sweet little boy within him, but trying not to think about how seeing it had opened up a closed-off part of the person Ally had been before The Thing With Gray, and before the rat race went on without her, leaving her behind, underachieving and a tiny bit resentful.

It had instead put her in touch with the part of her that was just a girl; a girl with what was beginning to feel like a very small and slightly inconvenient fondness for her local Special Constable who’d told her he was leaving before the end of the summer.

Not that that was relevant. Not that she looked at her calendar before bed that night, regretfully telling herself there’d be no more night-time excursions or conversations with him. She’d fix his hairy coo and get it back in his possession, then she’d steer well clear.

Ally had no idea that the long white nights of the Cairngorms summer had plans of their own for her; try as she might to navigate her own road safely to autumn.