‘I’m just lifting the breakfast,’ Maisie informed Barra as he walked towards her. ‘D’you want some? Or would you prefer to stay up there with yir thoughts?’
‘I’ve had mine,’ Barra answered. ‘And they’re no’ just thoughts.’
‘C’mon in anyway,’ Maisie said, leading him into the kitchen. ‘I’d enjoy the company.’
She pulled a plate down from the rack above the range and began shovelling the eggs from the griddle on to it, pushing them to the side to make room for the several rashers of bacon and two slices of fried bread which followed. Barra leaned against the door, knowing better than to interrupt Maisie when she was assembling her food. A couple of fried tomatoes and a hillock of mushrooms were daintily balanced on the side of the plate, and Maisie reached across the counter to set a steaming mug of coffee on the tray beside her meal.
‘Follow! Follow!’ she instructed, pushing through the swing door and on into the café. Maisie set the tray down on the nearest of the six tables, and took a moment to settle herself in her chair. Barra climbed into the one opposite, as he always did. You couldn’t sit in the chair next to Maisie and be comfortable. It was better to give her some space – especially when she was eating.
Maisie reached across the waxed tablecloth for the brown sauce. Several dollops were thumped from the bottle, and a liberal sprinkling of salt and pepper dressed the whole thing to perfection.
She sat back in the enveloping folds of her ivory quilted dressing-gown and sighed with pleasure. Her hair was tied back in a cream-coloured hat that was supposed to look like a scarf. Mam had a blue one just like it. Mam looked nice when she wore hers. Maisie looked like the Michelin man.
Several mouthfuls later, Maisie looked up. ‘You weren’t really bothered with me taking out the rubbish, were you?’
‘It wasn’t you. I wasn’t speaking to you.’
‘Ah. Something in the woods, was it?’
‘Kind of.’
Minutes passed. A final wipe round with the fried bread, and Maisie’s plate was as clean as a whistle. ‘I’ll need another cup to wash it down,’ she said, heading back towards the kitchen. ‘Coke?’
Barra shook his head.
Maisie rested against the door for a moment, surveying Barra with a careful expression. ‘We need to talk,’ she said at last. ‘Don’t move. I’ll no’ be a minute.’
She wasn’t.
‘Now,’ she said, leaning into Barra, her hands wrapped around a fresh mug of coffee. ‘Did you leave that glorious smile back up in the woods? And if you did, why?’
Barra wet his finger and pressed it into the salt crystals ringing the space where Maisie’s plate had sat.
‘I’ve met someone … in the woods. I told Olive.’
‘Then you might as well have put a notice in the window,’ Maisie replied. ‘Are you sorry?’
‘No,’ Barra said. ‘She was amazingly …’
‘Aye,’ Maisie interrupted. ‘That’s Olive. Amazingly Olive!’
‘He’s an angel, Maisie. His name’s Jamie.’
Maisie blew on her coffee, the force of her breath causing it to ripple almost to spilling. Then she put the mug down, and ran a purple-tipped finger around its rim.
‘You told Olive … that?’
‘Aye.’
Maisie sucked in her breath. Barra was sure she was going to burst out laughing any minute, but when she looked up her eyes were soft, and very pretty.
‘How do you know he’s an angel? This Jamie, how d’you know?’
‘Well, I was sure, at first. Then I wasn’t sure, not after Mam started explaining things.’ Barra shook his head in frustration. ‘No. I was sure. I was!’
‘Then we can move on,’ Maisie prompted.
‘Well, then I met him again today, and he told me straight I’d be the only one who could see him.’
Maisie sniffed. ‘Ah. So I won’t be getting an introduction?’
Barra shook his head. ‘Sorry, Maisie. ’Fraid not. It makes it harder, though, when no-one else can see him.’
‘Aye. And would I be wrong in believing that you had trouble seeing him yourself? When you were out there calling him?’
‘Oh no. He’d disappeared by then,’ Barra assured her. ‘He can come and go when he likes. Y’canna’ take yir eyes off him for a minute.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘It gets a bit annoying. That’s what made me swear.’
‘An annoying angel,’ Maisie mused. ‘Now there’s something different for Drumdarg.’
‘He can be quite sarcastic too.’
Maisie, who’d been resting her chins on her hand, covered her mouth with her fingers. ‘Sarcastic?’ she mumbled.
‘He can be,’ Barra confided. ‘When I said he didn’t look much like an angel, well, I meant … he looked real, well, anyway, he said “Who were you expecting? I’m afraid Gabriel’s otherwise engaged.”’
Maisie nodded, pressing her fingers even harder against her mouth.
‘… And when I asked him to mend Olive’s feet, he said he was an angel – not a chiropodist.’
Maisie thrust out her other arm towards Barra’s chest, clearly intending to silence him. ‘Give me a moment,’ she said at last. After several deep breaths, she lowered her arm.
‘What do your folks say?’
‘Da doesn’t know yet, and Mam … She’s worried. She thinks there’s someone after me, in the woods. You know what she’s like.’
‘She’s a mother, Barra. Mothers are like that.’
‘She kept me out of the woods all day yesterday. She made me go to the town. On a Saturday afternoon.’
Maisie let out a low whistle. ‘That’s out of order.’
‘Then she pushed me down the stairs at Boots.’
Maisie gasped then, finally, and with great relief, roared with laughter. Barra joined in, even though it wasn’t funny. At last Maisie wiped her eyes on her sleeve. ‘Rose … pushing you down the stairs? What did you do, my bonny lad, to take that on yirself?’
‘I don’t know.’ Barra shrugged, still wondering at it. ‘I met Jamie on Friday, on my way home from school, and he said we had things to take care of, and Sandra was talking about Mr Pascoe, and Mam said not to mention angels, and I just said I knew someone who could make Mr Pascoe better. That’s all that happened.’
He paused for breath. ‘Then she pushed me down the stairs.’
Maisie’s eyes cleared. ‘This Jamie, did he say he’d make Jim better?’
‘No. He hasn’t mentioned anyone yet. He said we’d find out more as we went along. So today I told him about Olive’s feet, but he got a bit…’
‘I think Jim Pascoe would be higher up the list when it comes to needing an angel than Olive Tolmie’s feet, don’t you?’
‘Aye,’ Barra agreed. ‘But I had to start somewhere.’
Maisie swallowed, her voice soft again. ‘Barra, you do know that Jim’s dying, don’t you?’ she said gently.
Barra licked the salt from his fingers. It had almost disappeared, but he could taste it just the same.
‘That’s what they say.’
‘And you think this angel can save him?’
‘I do.’
‘Wouldn’t that be great?’ Maisie picked up her mug, apparently prepared to give it some thought.
‘So what do you think?’ Barra asked, impatient for Maisie’s opinion.
‘I don’t know, Barra,’ Maisie mused. ‘But if you say an angel came to you – and I’m not saying he didn’t, mind – it wouldn’t surprise me a bit. Not a bit.’
‘What wouldn’t?’ Doug shuffled through from the kitchen.
Maisie glanced towards Barra, silently asking his permission to share their conversation. Barra smiled back at her, his earlier dejection gone. Doug was a great listener altogether.
‘Sit down, Doug. I’ll get you some breakfast, and Barra can tell you all about it.’
‘No breakfast, Maisie,’ Doug said, pulling out a chair and coughing with the effort. As he lit a cigarette, Maisie made her way over to the ancient wooden server. Reaching inside the lower shelf, she pulled a bottle of Glenmorangie free from its hiding-place and poured a large measure into one of the glasses ranged along the top shelf. She set it down in front of Doug and, placing a loving hand on his arm, bent to whisper, loudly, in his ear.
‘There’s breakfast for you.’
Doug smiled painfully up at her, and coughed some more.
‘So?’ he sputtered, turning his attention to Barra.
Barra opened his mouth, and closed it again.
‘I think I’d better get going.’
‘Where now, Barra?’ Maisie asked in surprise. As so often before, the boy’s mercurial ways had caught her off-guard.
‘I’m going to the Pascoes’. I’ll be back later,’ he called, already in the kitchen and racing for the back door.
Doug raised a questioning glance to Maisie.
‘He says he met an angel,’ she said, reaching for his hand and rubbing it against her cheek. ‘He doesn’t know I beat him to it.’
Doug Findlay had walked through her door ten years before, almost to the day. He’d heard she was looking for a handyman.
No, Maisie had replied, Murdo Macrae was good enough to offer his services when needed.
She didn’t have enough business to pay for full-time help.
He didn’t need a full-time job. Perhaps he could do an hour or so’s work, just till the end of the week. Did she need someone in the bar?
Maisie looked at him. ‘That would be a bit like putting a bairn in a sweetie shop, wouldn’t it?’ she asked gently. Doug nodded, and retired to an empty table. She sent a large whisky over to him ‘on the house’, and he’d drunk it quickly, sitting with the empty glass before him for the rest of the evening.
He spoke to no-one, and nobody spoke to him. Eventually he nodded off, huddled in despair and cloaked in a loneliness with which Maisie was all too familiar. Long after the last recalcitrant customer had been chased from the bar Doug had stayed, face down on the table, sound asleep.
He had, as it turned out, nowhere else to go.
Some months earlier, a day before his thirtieth birthday, Doug had returned from his milk round to find the house he had shared with his wife of nine years quite silent. Quite empty.
A cursory note of explanation was propped on the mantelpiece.
Barbara Findlay had packed herself, her belongings and their two boys into a newly purchased second-hand caravan, and set off for parts unknown. The owner of the caravan, and now apparently of Doug’s family, was Freddie Johnstone.
Freddie was Doug’s first cousin, his childhood companion, his drinking partner and more-or-less constant visitor to his home. He was also single, full of life and laughter, and Doug’s young sons adored him. Doug had trusted him implicitly. Never, not once, had he imagined that Freddie was preparing to steal his family from him.
Doug’s marriage had foundered early on. Barbara had been just seventeen, and three months pregnant, when they’d sworn to love each other ‘till death us do part’. A second son, born a scant year after the first, robbed her of the youth she felt she deserved. She had wanted to travel, she told him – often, and with bitterness. She’d wanted to see the world, not peer out at it over pails of nappies and lines of washing. She had wanted much, much more than a milkman’s wage could provide. Freddie loved her, and was prepared to do whatever it might take to make her happy.
In the few seconds it took to read the letter, Doug’s world fell painfully, irrevocably apart.
He had no idea where they had gone, had waited day after day to hear news of them. It came in the form of a postcard from Scarborough, and it robbed him of the last ounce of hope he had left.
Barbara would not be returning. He would be contacted by a solicitor in due time. He would not be contacted by Barbara, nor by his children. They belonged to Freddie now – all of them, and were apparently delighted with the arrangement.
Doug hit the bottle.
It didn’t take long for his employers to determine that the people of Craigourie deserved their daily pinta on a more-or-less regular basis, and within weeks he found himself unemployed. Barbara had thoughtfully emptied their tiny savings account and, as the drinking took over what was left of his life, he became not only unemployed – but unemployable.
There was no income to pay the rent. The council stepped in with an ultimatum. Three months to pay the rent arrears. Not a day longer.
It couldn’t be done, of course.
On the day of the eviction, an hour before the bailiffs were due to arrive, Doug Findlay stumbled out into the daylight and locked the door behind him. He threw the keys down the nearest drain, and headed for the park. The bailiffs had had to break the door down, and the few sticks of furniture they found inside were auctioned off on the pavement. The proceeds came nowhere close to paying the rent arrears.
The bailiffs were unperturbed. They’d done their job.
Doug joined the ranks of the town’s down-and-outs, depending on the auspices of the Salvation Army for food, shelter and the occasional bath. If the weather was kind enough, he sought out an empty park bench. There, he had nobody to answer to but himself; nobody to question his right to oblivion; nobody to intrude; and nobody to save him – however briefly – from his spiralling descent.
As days turned into weeks he began putting in an appearance at the broo, realising that he would need some form of remuneration to keep up with his worsening habit. The wifie behind the counter had been kind enough, and not without standards of her own.
He agreed to sweep floors, wash windows, cut grass – anything which would give him the means to buy another bottle and, incidentally, further entitlement to the state’s allowance.
That morning he had been tipped off that there might be some work in Drumdarg. The information had been wrong, but Doug was too heartsore, weak and weary to trudge back into town. He’d fallen asleep, hoping, as always, that he might never wake up.
Maisie had gently nudged him back to semiconsciousness, offering him the use of the spare room for the night. Perhaps, she would have to see, there might be something he could do the next day – enough to pay for a day’s keep, nothing too heavy. He’d have his bed, his food, and a drink at the end of the day.
Doug had responded to her kindness, putting in a full day’s work on nonsensical chores which Maisie dreamed up. He stayed a second night, and a third. And, as he sat in the bar each evening, gradually growing accustomed to the regulars, Maisie became aware that his gentleness, his understanding, was becoming more and more sought after. God knows, wasn’t there an answering desperation in every heart?
She allowed him to pull a pint or two, noticing how much more comfortable the men were with a male host behind the bar. As though she were nurturing a child Maisie brought Doug slowly into the light, allowing him a dignity he could barely remember.
In the process, she fell hopelessly in love. Eventually, Doug moved out of the spare room – and into hers.
Maisie was much, much kinder to others than she was to herself. She truly believed that their roles had become reversed over the years, that she had come to depend on Doug far more than he depended upon her. She was also unarguably convinced that Doug’s fondness for her would last only as long as he had a roof over his head, and that he found their ‘arrangement’ a mite too comfortable to risk upsetting.
Yet Maisie dreamed of so much more than fondness. She wanted to be loved, with the same deep and abiding love that she felt for Doug.
If Barra Maclean wasn’t the fanciful boy that he was, Maisie would be on her knees right now, praying for a little celestial intervention of her own.
But then that was Barra.
And Doug was Doug.
And she was just Maisie.