Page 5 of Fixing a Broken Heart at the Highland Repair Shop

Exactly a month after Ally’s broken heart, the June sunshine was beating down on the repair shop’s corrugated iron roof.

It was getting on for the end of a long Saturday’s fixing, but the locals just kept coming in.

The repairers had been markedly busier since their segment was finally aired on the news programme, Highland Spotlight , the night before.

Everyone had been amazed. They were only expecting a brief plug in the last news story of the day; the light-hearted ‘and finally’ story, the cheery antidote to all the awful stuff that had come before it. What they got was a long ‘special report’.

McIntyre had been onscreen for all of five minutes.

First, he’d been shown working away at his station, goggles on and head down while Füssli’s voiceover explained the ‘repair revolution’ sweeping the planet since Martine Postma launched the very first Repair Café in Amsterdam sixteen years ago and her idea swept the planet.

The volunteers had watched it together on the big telly at the Cairn Dhu Hotel bar and there’d been a hearty cheer when the shot cut to McIntyre standing stiffly in front of the camera outside his workshop explaining why he’d opened up the barn for repairs.

‘The throwaway culture we’ve come to rely on has to end, and it ends with us, grassroots organisations for locals.

Our waterways are choked with plastics and chemicals, there are landfill mountains as big as Ben Macdui itself.

Even the air we breathe isn’t clean. Single-use living is over.

We are the skill-sharing, fix-it generation.

Our grandbairns’ll thank us for it. And we’re only a wee part of a worldwide effort to make a change. ’

McIntyre’s cheeks had turned ruddy as he spoke and his eyes shone. Nobody watching could doubt his dedication to the cause.

Then there’d been some interviews at other repair projects across the Highlands, including a free bicycle repair and toy swap shop in Inverness that was doing a roaring (charitable) trade.

In what seemed like an ill-judged moment, the programme editors allowed the café sisters to have the final word of the show and Senga had appeared on-screen speaking over Rhona while pouring a cup of tea for Cary Anderson who was posing as a customer at the counter.

‘A wee cuppa while you wait,’ Senga simpered, her eyes boring down the lens while tea sloshed over the rim and into the dangerously wobbly saucer. ‘And one of my famous nutty barms?’

She’d grinned exaggeratedly at the viewers, giving an affected tip of her head for good measure. Cary had been opening his mouth to thank her when the segment cut away to Füssli out in the courtyard, signing off.

‘The Cairn Dhu community repair shop and café is just one example of concerned residents taking sustainability into their own hands. Will the make-do-and-mend trend continue to grow, or are we addicted to our shopping carts and credit cards? Only time will tell, but for now, community projects like this one are flourishing and it’s a case of can do in Cairn Dhu! ’

In the background, just on the edge of the shot, but plain to see for the eagle-eyed, was Roz McIntyre – or the bottom half of her – hanging out of the kitchen window, trying to break into her own home to comfort her daughter who, around about that time on that fateful May day, had been crying herself to exhaustion on the kitchen floor.

Everyone crowded around the bar room telly had pretended not to notice. Ally had been so withdrawn and pale ever since that day, they didn’t like to mention it.

It smarted all the more that her humiliation was now immortalised on local TV footage, even if only a handful of people knew the true story of the Gray-Laura-Ally Triangle of Shame.

Laura hadn’t been back to the repair shed since that awful day, choosing instead to send her business partner with the café’s provisions.

Ally had adopted a strict silence on the topic following the break-up and it had made for a tense atmosphere on repair Saturdays ever since.

So long as she kept busy, she could just about contain her bad mood. Which was just as well since the news programme had jogged the Cairngorm region’s collective memory that the repair shop and café existed, and so they were now coming to the end of their busiest day’s fixing and serving yet.

‘Better start telling folk we cannae accept any more items this weekend, Sachin,’ McIntyre announced from his workbench where he was showing a young couple how to replace a plug on their toaster. ‘Bet you thought this machine was toast, eh? Eh?’ he said, waiting for their politely feigned laughter.

Roz and Peaches were hemming a pair of heavy velour curtains that they’d shortened by two feet, while Willie turned the offcuts into cushion covers, just as the owner had requested, though she hadn’t been able to stay to see them make the alterations.

She was down the river right now with her toddlers, feeding the mallards.

McIntyre usually liked it when people stayed to watch, learning how to do their own repairs for the future, but he couldn’t win them all, and perhaps it was for the best, not having tots tumbling around the floor while Cary was sharpening garden secateurs and saws in a steady stream all day long.

There’d even been an old scythe brought in at eleven which Cary had made a braw job of, sharpening it to a steely shine.

The elderly man who brought it in had told Sachin at the triage desk that the scythe had once belonged to his grandfather and the shaft was so worn from use that his granddad’s grip had been permanently impressed into the wood.

He treasured it, he’d said, and wanted it restored and hanging above his fireplace.

‘Each to their own,’ Senga had muttered in response as she served the sultana scones and poured the teas with Rhona, both of them in their summer sundresses and pinnies.

The radio had blared out all Saturday long, and everyone remarked on how steamy it was under the baking corrugated iron of the shed’s roof.

For the first time so far this year they’d wished they had spare money for an air conditioning unit – all except McIntyre who didn’t believe in running electric units when you could simply change into your cut-offs and vest. Ally had taken one glimpse at his white knees that morning and tried to talk him out of wearing these clothes in public, but it made no difference, of course.

Neither had Peaches’s mortified cringing or Willie’s remark that seeing ‘a ginger Boomer in jorts’ hadn’t been on his ‘bingo card for today’.

McIntyre was as stubborn as his daughter and had gone about his day not minding the teasing.

Now Ally was hunching over her workbench where she was replacing the little joystick button on a Nintendo Switch while a very invested pre-teen watched on in concern from behind her long fringe as her mum chattered about the cost of buying new tech.

They’d bought the spare button off the internet but hadn’t the tools (or the confidence) to do the fix themselves. That’s where Ally came in. She was responsible for refurbing computers, laptops, consoles and mobile phones.

It hadn’t exactly been part of her life plan to spend her Saturdays in a sweltering barn (excepting in autumn and winter when it was bitterly cold) with her family and a bunch of busybodies, but from day one the shop had needed a ‘tech guru’ (her dad’s words) and surrendering half her weekend meant her parents hadn’t asked her for any rent in recent years and she got to remain at home while she ‘found her feet’.

That agreement had been reached two and a half years ago just as the fledgling repair shop was first opening its doors and when her IT support centre job had switched to home-working and never moved back.

Ally hadn’t minded not getting the bus out to the industrial estate every morning and, in the beginning, she’d actually quite liked working half days, answering tech support calls in the comfort of her pyjamas.

But working close to home (where everyone had opinions about her love life) was losing even more of its appeal since The Thing With Gray happened.

That’s what they called it around the house.

‘I know you’ve struggled since the thing with Gray , but there’s plenty nice lads out there,’ her mum would say. ‘Don’t you want to get out there again? Start meeting folk?’

Or Murray, her twin, who was so rarely in Scotland he got away with never having had to help out in the shed, would tease her when he video-called, saying, ‘He can’t be worth the torn face after all this time?’

Ally would huffily shrug it off, or simply ignore them. She was doing fine. Couldn’t they see? Doing her customer support job in her dressing gown on weekday mornings then minding her own business in the workshop on Saturdays had become her life, and it was all FINE!

‘There,’ Ally said, handing back the console so the kid could try it out. ‘Good as new.’ Granted, she’d had to watch a YouTube demo of how to take the Switch apart but that’s how Ally learned lots of things she was attempting for the first time.

Whilst she’d been absorbed in the repair job, the toaster couple had left, taking two of Senga’s chocolate tiffin slices to go, and the café’s till rattled with coins whenever Rhona slid the drawer shut.

Now that Sachin was turning people away, telling them they’d re-open next Saturday at ten, the shed was quickly growing quieter.

The kid made chirpy electronic music play aloud from their Switch. Willie and Peaches cheered and offered Ally their congratulations. The young girl almost smiled, and Ally spotted a tiny hint of silver braces over her teeth.

‘Thank you so much,’ the mum effused, having drained her mug and pulled her bag over her shoulder ready to leave. ‘What do we owe you?’

‘It’s voluntary donations,’ Ally said, nodding to the big jar behind them on the triage desk.

Sachin caught the words and tapped the glass with his biro.