He heaved in a huge sigh.
‘At least give it a try. Show me you care enough about this relationship to try.’
‘Of course I do. Yes. I’ll do anything you want. Anything, Lu. Literally anything.’
Her heart was bumping, her mouth dry, and her words came out in a sort of croak: ‘Would you go back there?’ She swallowed, cleared her throat, made herself hold his gaze steadily. ‘Back to Sunnyside? To properly revisit what happened, I think we need to take a trip back there. If it’s a holiday let now, presumably you can cancel a booking or two so we can stay there?’
‘You mean, actually in the house? In Sunnyside?’
‘I was thinking of taking a break from work anyway, after . . . after Paul.’ She put a hand to his face. ‘I really think we need to do this, if we’re going to have a future together. We need to go back to the place where your family vanished, because, really, I don’t think you’ve ever left.’
8
Maggie - September 1997
‘Okay, Nick, it’s seven-ten,’ went Maggie. ‘Leaving in five minutes.’
She was dropping Nick at his school in Langholm for a rehearsal of a Shakespeare play, and then she was going on to the coffee shop to have a proper catch-up with Pam and Liam. Her pal Pam from catering college was ‘between jobs’ and had jumped at the chance to fill in for Maggie while she was off on maternity.
Nick turned to her from the sink. ‘Okay, I’ll just finish up these last few things. Could you dry that and put it away?’ He nodded at the knife on the draining board.
The knife had belonged to Duncan and Yvonne’s ma and was something of a family heirloom. Duncan always insisted it be dried immediately to stop it rusting. Maggie picked it up, dried it and put it away in the rack.
‘Thanks,’ said Nick.
If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought a miracle had happened – that Nick had turned over a new leaf. But she did know better. His nicey-nicey act had got to be fake. In the week since her latest meltdown, she’d been waiting for his next move, but nada. He’d smiled and smiled and brought her cups of tea. She hadn’t drunk them, mind. You never knew what the wee bastard might have put in them.
It was doing her head in. Just like when she was wee, waiting for Ma to turn on her. The waiting had almost been the worst bit.
She expected him to maybe start on her when they were alone in the car, but he just sat there in silence. Maggie looked at the scenery and tried to relax. The humpy hillsides, Billy McLetchie and pals, became more threatening towards night-time, like Billy himself when he’d had a few. But the cute cottages and the trees just starting to get their autumn colour, and the fields with the bales in them throwing long shadows across the stubble, the harvests gathered in – all that was magic.
As she stopped outside the school to let Nick out, she even found it in her to say she hoped he had a good rehearsal.
‘Thanks, Mags, I will. Enjoy your catch-up.’
Maggie drove through the old square and over the bridge across the River Esk. This was where the bonniest houses were, big old stone ones like Sunnyside. She turned right along the High Street, passing the wee lane she knew so well because up there was the house where her bedsit used to be. Most of the yobs attending The Phoenix Centre were bused in from the local area, but some were from further afield, like Maggie and Liam, and were put up in that house, which was owned by the same charity.
Maggie had thought she’d died and gone to heaven, living in this barry wee town nestled in the hills. The locals weren’t mad about the whole arrangement, but Duncan maintained it was carrying on a long tradition of accommodating hoodlums. Langholm was just eight miles from the Scotland/England border, and back in the day this whole area had been Scotland’s equivalent of the Wild West. Outlaws, reivers and all-purpose mad bastards had called it home. Those days were long gone, of course, much to the disappointment of most of the yobs on the programme.
She got to the coffee shop at twenty to eight, just as the sun was setting. It was in a prime location near the town hall, in a narrow stone building squashed between a bank and an estate agent. Maggie had painted the door and window a fashionable pale grey and done her best with red and white gingham to make it look bonnie.
The place closed at four, but they did the stocktake and paperwork every second Thursday evening, and it was all lit up. Pam and Liam were at the table in the window with sheets of paper spread between them. Liam seemed to have even more gel in his spiky blond hair than usual, like a character out The Broons.