Page 3 of Highland Games
The man-bear stopped laughing, and straightened up. ‘Okay. First, it’s not the dead of night, it gets darker quicker up here than in the home counties. Second, I work on this land and saw a piddly little sports car abandoned on the track. I came to see what was going on and got attacked by a lunatic armed with a loaf of bread. And third, you can’t live here; it’s not fit for human habitation. I’ll show you the way to the village. There’s a pub with rooms you can stay in, and tomorrow you can go home.’
Zoe clenched her jaw and spat out her words like bullets. ‘Listen here, Mr Know-it-all, let me get one thing straight. This ismyland andmyhome and I intend to live here. I don’t need an enormous, overgrown yeti trespassing on my property and frightening the crap out of me. Now bugger off.’ She held up the loaf of bread. ‘I’m going to make myself some beans on toa—’ she remembered there was no electricity, ‘bread, and have a quiet night in.’
‘Maybe watch some telly?’ he replied. ‘Surf the web? Have a nice hot bubble bath? Good luck with that.’
He stepped off the porch and strode away, whistling for the dog to follow him. Zoe stalked into the cabin and slammed the door as hard as she could. It rewarded her by falling off its hinges and landing with an almighty crash on the front deck.
The man didn’t look back.
She gulped in a breath, catching it in her throat. Tension spiralled inside her, pushing up tears she wasn’t ready to shed.What have I done?It was all going wrong before it had even started. She’d arrived too late, there was no phone signal, and her new home had no door, let alone the bed she remembered from her childhood. She shook her head. She would not cry here. She wouldn’t give the man-bear, or anyone else, the satisfaction of being right. She was going to have something to eat, get a good night’s sleep, and know that, as her mum always promised, everything would be better in the morning.
She counted to sixty, then went to find the jar of jam she’d pitched at the yeti. It was stuck in a patch of mud. She tugged it out and took it to the stream that ran down the hill, cleaning off as much as she could in the glacial water. Back at the cabin, she sat on the front deck, dipping slices of bread into the jam. Swigging Prosecco from the bottle, she watched the dark hills in the distance and the faint shimmer of starlight on the loch.
It was like another world or stepping back in time. Early yesterday morning she’d set off from the small suburban flat in London that was no longer her home. The people, traffic, lights, pollution, and background hum of the city had never been that noticeable, but now their absence was deafening.
It was so dark. So quiet. Soempty.
She felt a thrill of nervous excitement and a giggle hiccupped out. God, no wonder her parents and friends thought she’d lost her mind. Giving up a good career to go and live in a cabin left to her by her dead great-uncle. In another country. At least she spoke the language. Sort of.
Her stomach was filling and the alcohol was helping lift her spirits, but there was no easy solution for bed. Could she drive into the village now and look up Morag? No. It was late and she couldn’t give up an hour into her new life. She sighed. Nothing was going according to plan and the oaf-bear was right: she couldn’t stay here. Despite the Prosecco, she was shivering and desperately needed the loo.
The outhouse wasn’t an option. Had she arrived earlier she could have cleaned out the cobwebs. But now there was no way she was going to step into that box of spiders, sit over a black hole and pee. She crouched next to the side of the cabin instead, then cleaned her teeth, swilling her mouth out from a bottle of water. The basics done, she scooped up her bag and walked back to her abandoned car.
Siena was a beautiful little MG; perfect for city life. However, she wasn’t entirely at home in the Highlands. Mud was spattered across her sky-blue body, and she was far too delicate to have handled the rough track down to the cabin. Zoe was relieved she’d left her near the main road, so she could easily reverse out in the morning. She threw her bag in the back, reclined the front seat, and attempted to manoeuvre herself into a sleeping bag like a clumsy caterpillar. Caught in her old London patterns, she inserted earplugs and pulled on an eye mask, not that it made any difference to her comfort.
She’d never slept in a car before and now she knew why. All five foot ten of her was never going to be able to stretch out in comfort. Her feet kept hitting the pedals, the headrest was hard, and her arms were too cold outside the sleeping bag and too constricted inside.
She considered going to Morag’s again but dismissed it. She wouldn’t admit defeat and wanted to face her in the softer light of day, not showing up in the middle of the night, a ghost from the past.
It was going to be a long and miserable night.
2
Zoe’s eye mask had dislodged in the night and she woke with the sunrise hitting her face like a golden mallet. She’d been lost in a looping dream of racing great-uncle Willie from the cabin to the loch. Twin flames; one tall, one small. Wild red hair, overflowing with life, whooping and screaming as they tumbled into the cold water. It was Zoe’s stuck record of happiness. The dream that had brought her back to Scotland after so many years.
She tentatively moved her limbs. She felt as if her body had been taken apart, then put back together again by someone who had thrown the instruction manual out with the box. Her feet were backwards, her knees sideways, her left shoulder swapped with the right, her bottom so numb it had disappeared. Her mouth had been stuffed with cotton wool dipped in sour milk and her head had been used as a pincushion. Everything just hurt.
Slowly, she pulled out her earplugs and unzipped the sleeping bag, extricating herself and pushing open the car door. She gingerly swivelled her legs around and, like a newborn foal, stood up, swaying slightly. She stretched her arms as if to touch the morning sky, then lowered them and looked around.
In the half light of yesterday and after the exhaustion of the drive up, she hadn’t had a chance to take in her surroundings. The track was only wide enough for one car and was dwarfed by the tall trees either side of it. The air was still and the branches were almost completely bare. It was November now and autumn was at its end. A solitary beech leaf floated down and she instinctively caught it, rubbing its softness between her fingers and thumb. She reached into her pocket and brought out her phone to photograph the leaf. Close up, with the sun turning the browns into gold, held up to the sky with the sunlight behind it, in her palm, and with the dark backdrop of the trees beyond. Her professional-style SLR camera nestled in the boot, but her phone was more than adequate this morning. Two weeks ago she’d opened an Instagram account, ostensibly for the friends she was leaving behind to share her journey, but also as a place to explore a different side of her. A side not associated with spreadsheets, cities and work. A side locked in this landscape and her memories.
She walked around the car, holding her phone in the air to find a signal. Nothing. She grabbed her bag and walked back down the track to see the cabin in the daytime.
Rounding the corner and seeing it in the amber morning light brought memories flooding back. For a few precious months of her childhood, this house and this land had been her home, almost her entire world. A new wave of emotion coursed through her. She swallowed it back down. This wasn’t the time. She needed to make an objective assessment of the cabin and work out how to make it habitable once more.
It was situated at the top of a couple of acres of open grassy ground, which gently sloped to the edge of the loch. The cabin was one room, rectangular, made from thick pine logs. No kitchen, no bathroom, no bedroom, but four single-paned windows, dirty and cracked, and a porch running along the front. The roof was tiled in wooden shingles and had grown a head of mossy hair. Zoe shuddered. It was most likely a breeding ground for all sorts of creepy crawlies, and she’d need a ladder and a lot of courage before she could take a proper look.
Walking up the steps onto the front porch, she heaved the solid door to one side so it was no longer blocking the entrance, and walked in. Last night, lit only by her phone, the interior had been a place of shadows and unknowns. But now, with the sunrise sending streaks of gold across the wooden floor, she could see everything. And it was worse than she could have possibly imagined.
Willie had lived a simple life but she remembered a bed, a chest of drawers, cupboards, and a large dresser. Where had they gone? The only things left were a solid oak table that had seen everything from Coco Pops to animal butchery, and a couple of chairs, probably only good for firewood now. Against the right-hand wall was a wood-fired Rayburn stove that looked like it was out of the Ark. Her parents had come for Willie three years ago, when he became unable to take care of himself. Had they cleared everything else out?
The cabin didn’t have running water or a sink. Whenever her great-uncle chose to wash, which was pretty infrequently, he used the loch or the small stream that ran down the hillside next to the cabin. When Zoe had come to stay as a child, he’d rigged up a gutter and drainpipe which he used to fill an old cattle drinking trough outside for her to wash in. He also constructed the outhouse for her; no more than a tiny hut with a wooden box and toilet seat inside set over a big pit. To make it more appealing to a ten year old, he’d painted it gold and daubed ‘Princess Zoe’s Throne’ in purple over the door. She hadn’t wanted to ask where he’d gone to the toilet before…
As a girl, the cabin had seemed like a mansion, but now it felt shrunk in the wash. She was used to living in small spaces, her London flat had been tiny, but at least it had separate rooms and a bathroom. She sat on a wobbly chair at the oak table, and dropped her head into her hands. What had she done?
Willie had left her the lease for the cabin in his will less than a month ago and now she was here; using her holiday allowance to leave her job early, not even staying in her flat until the lease ran out. She hadn’t told anyone her plans, not even her parents until the day she left. She didn’t want them, or anyone else, to talk her out of it. Her best friend, Sam, told her she was having a midlife crisis because she was nearly thirty, and Zoe could see how it looked. She should have done a recce before moving up; made plans based on what the cabin was like in reality, not in her childhood memories from decades ago. At least waited until spring before she changed her life. She sighed, and brought out the remains of the loaf of bread to eat with the last of the jam. She knew she’d made a rash decision, but she’d wanted an out for a long time, and the cabin was it. Willie told her to follow her heart and she had. Now the decision had been made, nothing was going to sway her from it. She just needed a plan.
The Rayburn stove was her first priority. She needed to get it going for warmth and cooking. Water she could drink from bottles or take from the stream. She’d paid a removal company to take her furniture and belongings to a storage unit an hour and a half’s drive away. She’d keep everything there until she was sure the cabin was watertight. The cabin walls may have been sturdy but it was missing a front door, the windows needed replacing and the roof was alive. There was also the sad but inevitable task of trading in Siena for a more appropriate vehicle.
