Page 2 of Fixing a Broken Heart at the Highland Repair Shop

THIS YEAR, MAY

Ally took one last glance around the repair shop and café to check everything was ready for opening.

Retired GP’s receptionist, Senga Gifford, was switching on the tea urn in her little dominion, the café corner, where she held court, helped by her beleaguered younger sister, Rhona, who Senga never allowed to do much of anything other than put the money in the till.

A good aroma of freshly baked bran scones wafted from the Perspex display case on the café counter.

Cary Anderson, a local carpenter, barely five and thirty but with an old-fashioned handsomeness about his clothes that marked him as a man curiously out of time, sat at his tool-sharpening station, his foot poised over the pedal of his grinding wheel.

He rarely spoke, other than to ask for a fresh cup of tea, but was always smilingly affable and turned up like clockwork every Saturday. Behind him, a poster on the wall read:

NEVER TAKE brOKEN FOR AN ANSWER

Sachin Roy was back too, sitting at his spot in the repairs ‘triage’ area by the door where he directed clients to the right person and dealt with the paperwork and donations (like all repair cafés nobody pays for fixes here; folks drop a discretionary amount of cash in the jar, and even then it’s optional).

McIntyre had insisted, since this was Sachin’s bright spark idea in the first place, that he surely didn’t mind helping out, and his old friend had found he had no choice but to come here, much to Mrs Roy’s annoyance, every Saturday since the shop launched, a good two and a half years ago.

Ally McIntyre’s mum, Roz, sat with her pin cushion on the back of her wrist beneath her seamsters’ banner with its motto ‘make do and mend’ in embroidered purple velvet like something the suffragettes would have marched under.

She was with Willie and Peaches, her young crafting protégés recruited for work experience from the fashion degree programme at their Highland university, both of whom were scrolling on their phones one last time before opening, and both were dressed in their own hand-sewn garments with the look of two fabulous, colourful, patchwork rag dolls – if rag dolls ever interned at London Fashion Week.

Today, Peaches’s hair was a wonderful apricot shade with flame-red lengths (the repairers would pass quieter moments taking guesses on what colour it might be the next weekend).

These two ‘young ones’ were adored and coddled by all the elder repairers, especially Rhona Gifford, who’d cannily sneak them cakes to take home with them.

At every station the volunteers waited with their repair equipment (or their cake tongs) ready for action.

Granted, it was a ramshackle sort of a repair shop, furnished almost entirely with the machinery accumulated by McIntyre at the height of his hoarding (an abundance of overlockers, welders, lathes, sanders, hoists, bandsaws, clamps, doodads and thingumabobs only he knew the names for).

Aside from a few specialist machines they’d sourced from salvage yards or begged as donations, they’d found Charlie already owned much of the hardware and tools they’d needed to launch their fixing venture.

Today there were nine volunteers in total, if you included Ally, though nobody did because nobody was expecting her to stick around.

In fact, her day off was the only thing they could talk about this morning, even with the local news crew arriving shortly to record a segment on the global rise of community repair groups since lockdown.

‘I’m turning the sign on,’ called Ally, hoping to stop the speculation, propping the door open and flicking the switch so the barn flooded with the pink neon light of their Repair Shop and Café logo: a steaming coffee cup with a threaded needle passing through its handle.

‘Do you know where he’s taking you?’ Senga called across the room.

‘Somewhere romantic, I bet,’ Rhona plucked up the courage to say. ‘The Cairn Dhu Hotel restaurant is nice for an engagement.’

Senga batted her down with a tut. ‘With all the tourists gawking? Hardly the spot for a proposal,’ she asserted, folding her arms across her apron.

‘Now, now,’ Cary Anderson said softly, but nobody seemed to hear.

‘Can you all stop, please. Mum, tell them!’ Ally complained.

Roz McIntyre only shrugged helplessly across the room at her daughter.

This is what happens when you open up the family home (well, its big barn, anyway) and all its goings-on to the whole community. Everyone sticks their noses in.

‘There’s absolutely no reason to think Gray’s going to propose. I don’t know where you get your ideas from,’ Ally went on, but the flutter in her chest told another story.

Senga took the opportunity to remind everyone that, ‘Moira Blain has it on good authority from Jean Wilson who heard it from her cousin, Tony, who’s on the hop-on, hop-off tour buses, that Gray came out of the wee jewellers in Aviemore carrying a tiny bag .’

Hardy incontrovertible evidence there was about to be a celebration.

‘It is your anniversary,’ McIntyre said under his breath as he passed his daughter, casting an eye into the courtyard, scanning for the news crew.

There’d be clients arriving soon too. They usually started rolling in at the turning on of the sign. Ally sighed heavily but couldn’t help following her dad’s gaze outside.

Gray was coming at ten, he’d said, so any minute now, and he’d said there was ‘something important’ he wanted to talk about. That’s how all this theorising had begun in the first place.

‘We’ll probably just go for a walk,’ Ally said, refusing to show she too was swept up in hoping, but secretly she was hoping, very much.

It had been twelve happy months since she’d met Gray, right here in the shed when he’d brought in his granny’s vacuum cleaner to have its jammed rollers freed up.

They’d fallen for each other in moments while Ally’s dad took the thing apart and Gray approached her with a sly smile and small talk, the dust motes sparkling like glitter in the shafts from the barn’s skylight window.

‘When a man runs errands for his dear old granny like that, you just know he’s a good one,’ the repair café sages had agreed at the time, and sure enough, he’d been nothing but charming and fun all year long.

The only problem had been her dad’s cooler attitude towards Gray. Sachin – not that it was any of his concern – had agreed there was, ‘something we cannae quite put our finger on with that lad. Something sleekit,’ which is Scots for something both skulking and smooth.

It didn’t really matter what the repairers thought.

Ally was having fun and if that fun was enhanced by a little more romance (or even a great big commitment), then that would be very nice indeed.

She’d attempted a home manicure last night specially, in case there were surprise engagement announcement photos.

Nothing flashy, just a glossy ballet-slipper pink.

Subtle, like the butterfly flutter in her chest.

A proposal would mean she was doing something with her life as she approached twenty-eight, other than checking her emails for job alerts and sending out speculative CVs in the hope of getting out of her IT customer support day job and repair-shed-Saturdays rut.

Even her twin brother was helping her from afar.

If he was taking time out of his schedule to help, it had to be obvious to everyone her career was seriously on the skids.

Only last night Murray had sent her a heads-up about a job that was about to be advertised at the charity where he worked in Switzerland.

Hey you. Just had word from HR one of our Blue Sky Thinking Techs is leaving.

We need a twelve month replacement with a knowledge of the sustainability sector ASAP.

There’s a huge IT skills gap in Switzerland, just look at their visa page.

Anyway… I already floated your name to see if it’d be a problem, you applying, being my sis and all.

Boss says to send her your resume direct.

This had not been well received. At first she’d laughed, then she’d fallen into exasperated incredulity. A blue sky thinking tech? What even is that? Murray had his answer prepped.

It’s just someone who knows how to work the office printer and they can dream up creative communication solutions to assist in the delivery of the charity’s projects all over the world.

When he put it like that, it didn’t sound so daft.

It sounded quite nice, actually. Nevertheless, Ally protested.

How could she go to Switzerland? She was always needed at the shed on Saturdays, for a start.

And how could she up and leave, moving to a whole new life in a place she didn’t know?

Leaving Gray for a year, just when things were, hopefully, taking a serious turn.

She’d scoffed and blown at the notion. What a load of nonsense. She’d told Murray all of this, more or less, and he’d rang her immediately.

‘Zurich’s almost exactly like the Cairngorms, only there’s less fly-tipping and a few more billionaires, and everybody’s carrying those wee Inspector Gadget penknives with the corkscrew and that thing for getting stones out of horses’ shoes.

I think they’re distributed with babies’ birth certificates actually… ’

She’d cut short his rambling, telling him to be serious for a minute. He couldn’t go playing games with her life like this. What had he been thinking, talking to his boss about her? Besides, how could she possibly be properly qualified?

‘Hey,’ he stopped her. ‘You’ve got the exact same degree as me!’

It was true, both of them had passed the same Environmental Science, Technology and Communications degree, both gaining distinctions. Only Murray had actually put his to good use.