Page 14 of Fixing a Broken Heart at the Highland Repair Shop

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Ally’s mouth was dry as she sat in front of her laptop now, her hair scraped back and in a knot. She wore one of her mum’s suit jackets from the late nineties, olive green, with some red, glossy lip oil she hadn’t worn since, well, you know what.

She worried it was all possibly a bit too much paired with her favourite green charity-shop dress with the little white flower sprigs.

It was too late now, though. She couldn’t shuck the jacket off or dive for a blotting tissue in case they joined the call right that second and caught her flustering and regretful.

There simply hadn’t been enough time to prepare. Didn’t they know she was more of a novelty cuckoo clock type of person than a precision timepiece?

She flicked through the pages of notes she’d made about the charity, finding she couldn’t make much sense of them now the time had come.

It had been a bewildering, and depressing, twenty-four hour crash course (minus her work shift yesterday) in the entire environmental crisis.

All her carefully researched stats about fossil fuels and the rate of deforestation merged into facts about carbon neutral communities, fines for greenhouse gas emissions, the names of nature conservancy projects – too many to count – the hazards of forever chemicals, and the cost to local authorities of anaerobic digestion waste treatment.

Her heart raced and her vision blurred.

She rubbed her thumbs over the lids of gritty eyes. She should have got some more sleep, instead of cramming like she was about to address the UN Climate Change Conference. Who did she think they were expecting? Greta Thunberg?

They’d take one look at her and see she was an imposter. Why had she told her brother she was up for this?

The screen changed from blue to a red countdown on a white background. Three, two, one. Ally fought the impulse to slam the laptop shut and run flat out until she summited Ben Macdui itself. Too late. Three figures appeared on-screen.

‘Good morning,’ said a model-esque Black woman in a clipped and efficient German accent. She wore heavy beige linen over something cream and simple that made Ally instantly regret her thrifted and borrowed choices even more. ‘I’m Barbara Huber, Future Proof Planet Co-CEO for Strategy Development.’

‘Nice to meet you,’ said Ally automatically, not sure what Barbara’s job title meant, other than she was Very Important.

‘And this is Andreas Favre,’ Barbara said, indicating the extremely well put together man beside her, also in beige linen and an open-neck white shirt.

Was this some kind of uniform policy? To work there, did you have to dress as though you were fresh from a fashion shoot for some achingly chic, utilitarian eco-brand?

The barely-in-shot, slumped person to Andreas’s other side told her it wasn’t policy for everyone, at least. This person looked about fifteen and was shrouded in a huge black and white graffiti-print hoodie with extremely large clear plastic glasses and a set of chunky headphones round their neck.

‘And that’s V,’ said Barbara.

‘V?’ Ally confirmed.

‘Summer intern.’

‘I mostly fix the printer,’ V drawled in a Canadian accent, chewing gum, and looking weirdly spaced out and achingly cool in ways Ally had never been for one second of her life.

‘Thank you all for seeing me.’ Ally couldn’t help but worry that if they had V fixing the printers, why would she even be needed? She tried to concentrate on wowing them. But just how easy was that going to be?

‘You have ten minutes. Let us begin,’ said Barbara.

Ally shifted in her seat at the kitchen table. Thankfully, her mum and dad had gone for a walk so she could have the place to herself and wouldn’t witness any of this. They weren’t around to fret over the way sweat was beading at the curly red baby hairs at her temples.

Barbara was talking fast and clear. ‘Our donors range from governments, major corporations and wealthy philanthropists to private individuals fundraising in their communities, all the way down to school children giving their pocket money. Your application stated you have experience working with cross-sector clients in your repair shop and community café, yes?’

‘I uh, I did say that, yes.’ Why? Why had she said that?

‘How do you handle these very different relationships?’ asked the beautiful Andreas in a lovely French accent.

‘Umm…’ Ally tried to think. Nothing but blankness presented itself.

‘Can you describe a time where one of your service-users presented some unique difficulties for you, and you resolved the problem?’ he pressed.

‘Well… there was the time Pigeon Angus drove his Massey Ferguson tractor down to the repair shop and it broke down right in front of the open doors, pretty much trapping us inside,’ Ally blurted, hating herself more with every stupid word flying from her mouth.

‘ Pigeon Angus ?’ Barbara’s eyes widened.

V shook their head, openly cringing.

‘That’s right.’ Ally gulped. ‘He’s a… smallholder.’

That was stretching the truth. Angus was an elderly hillfooter who spent all day splattered with droppings in a hut with his beloved homing pigeons.

He lived off his homegrown veggies and stinky roll-ups and was often in the local paper for threatening hillwalkers who strayed onto his land with various antique shotguns which the police seized one at a time, only for him to somehow acquire another.

She was regretting mentioning him now, but it was too late. The interview panel peered impassively at her as she scrabbled for words.

‘He’s… known to be a wee bit… curmudgeonly. But he needed our help with his jammed axle so we disassembled the thing…’

‘The tractor?’ clarified Andreas.

‘Yup.’ Ally hid another gulp behind a thin smile. ‘We, the repair team, took it apart, bit by bit, until it could be rolled away from the shed doors and we could operate the café and shed as normal, and then my dad custom moulded a replacement part…’

She paused as Barbara and Andreas exchanged scrunch-browed looks and scratched sparse notes on paper. Bored, V scrolled on their phone, chewing gum in the most judgemental way Ally had ever witnessed.

Still, she wouldn’t be stopped. ‘And while Dad was making it, we all took it in turns to drive Angus to and from his hut, bringing him back every day so he could tell us what needing doing on his tractor, and so we could teach him some repair techniques to stop the metalwork corroding further. Mum even made a cushion for the seat, because you know they’re just bare metal? ’ Why couldn’t she stop talking?

Barbara moved her lips like she could taste something strange.

The man narrowed his eyes. Was he smiling or was he embarrassed for her?

The intern smirked down at their phone like they were at home watching a sitcom and not witnessing an underprepared Scottish woman having a sweaty breakdown in an interview for a job she’d known she wasn’t qualified for before she even applied.

‘So,’ Ally swallowed, since no one was talking. ‘Angus taught us some things about vintage tractors, and we showed him some new things about metalworking, and we used Dad’s specialist skills…’

‘To collaboratively repair a man’s broken down vehicle, which he needs for his livelihood, presumably?’ Andreas said, glancing at Barbara.

‘It’s still working today,’ Ally offered hopefully.

In fact, just last week she’d seen his shiny red tractor parked on the double yellows outside the animal feed shop. The traffic warden had been in the middle of writing him another parking ticket (which he’d no doubt crumple up and chuck into the gutter like all the other ones he’d ignored).

‘OK, so that’s community co-working covered, sort of,’ said Andreas, making what looked like a tick in his notes.

‘Tell us about your approaches to global strategisation.’ Barbara had said the words like they actually meant something.

‘Uh…’

This was enough to draw V’s attention. ‘She means how does the stuff you do have a wider impact.’ V was shaking their head again, rolling their eyes at the ridiculous Scottish Millennial who really shouldn’t be given the time of day by Future Proof Planet.

‘Ah, right, well, thank you, V,’ said Ally through a gritted teeth smile. ‘I, uh, I suppose everything we do has a global impact.’

She was about to say that if they hadn’t fixed Pigeon Angus’s tractor he’d have had to buy a new one and that would use up vital resources, and probably energy and emissions importing it, since tractors aren’t really made in Scotland now, but then Ally thought how, more realistically, if they hadn’t repaired the thing, Angus would simply have let it rot in a field since there was no way he could afford a new anything, let alone a tractor.

‘Um…’ She felt the cold trickle of sweat down her spine and tried not to squirm. She forced herself to think. ‘We, uh, we fix things here in Cairn Dhu and that makes a difference to the whole world because… um…’

Words failed her. How could anything she did here in her small town on the edge of a mountain range in the Highlands of Scotland make even the tiniest bit of difference to the planet?

Did repairing, repurposing and recycling bits and bobs in communities like theirs shift the dial on planetary extinction even one teensy, tiny bit?

Now that next to nobody was coming to the repair shed (and their youngest volunteers had started to abandon the project) there was surely zero chance of making any difference long term, even in her own town?

‘Let us move on, já ?’ said Barbara, cutting through the sound of Ally’s heartbeat in her ears.

‘If we connected you to a project in, say, New Zealand, where communities were trying to save the endangered kakapo, how could you use your technology skills to enable them to more fully meet their goal?’