He returned to his grandad’s side with a fixed smile, the biscuit tin in one hand and Clyde’s pill box in the other.
‘Here. Have your medicine first, then your KitKat, eh?’
‘You’re a good lad,’ said Clyde. ‘Any jobs booked in for today?’
Euan didn’t have to say anything.
‘Well, never mind.Coogan’s Bluffis showing on catch-up. Eastwood at his best! Pop it on, eh?’
The two settled in for the rest of the day, and Euan, shuddering occasionally as he remembered the misplaced confidence with which he’d snapped shut the cover on that fuse box on Friday afternoon, tried not to think of the Cairn Dhu chatterers going door to door with the latest tasty morsel of fresh gossip with which he’d provided the town.
2
The early April afternoon light shone in through the glass wall at the far end of the big repair barn where Peaches McDowell held her threaded needle poised between her fingertips to make the final stitch of her fashion collection.
Willie, Peaches’ fellow fashion student, was filming the moment on his phone. Surrounding her were gathered the Cairn Dhu Community Repair Shop restoration experts, as well as the Gifford sisters who ran the café, and Sachin Roy, who manned the repair triage desk.
Roz McIntyre sat by Peaches’ side, pride glowing in her eyes, as her husband, Charlie McIntyre, teased the cork from a prosecco bottle. Cary Anderson, the shed’s always-nattily-dressed carpenter, held two glasses ready to catch the fizz.
‘Aaand…’
Peaches’ audience craned their necks to watch the neon-yellow thread pass through slubby cotton. With a practised hand she buried the last stitch and snipped away the remainder. ‘…it’s done!’
Her supporters erupted into applause, accompanied by the sound of the cork popping.
‘Well done, darling!’ Peaches’ mother had to raise her voice over the excitement as she stooped to kiss her daughter on the cheek just below the dyed pink bangs which she didn’t really approve of, but she had realised long ago that her daughter’s devotion to an ever-changing spectrum of dyed hair colours was, like her design talents, a safe way of practising her self-expression.
McIntyre pressed a bubbling glass into Peaches’ hand as Roz whisked away the garment that, at last, completed the student’s end-of-degree showcase collection, taking it out of reach of any spilled bubbly.
‘Thirteen custom outfits,’ Willie narrated as he recorded the scene.
An ominous voice tolled, ‘Unlucky for some!’
All eyes snapped to Senga Gifford, boss of the repair shed’s café nook, and not usually a superstitious woman, but a woman gleefully dedicated to living up to her reputation as the shed’s resident aggravating busybody. Everyone always forgave her because she made the best shortbread and scones this side of the Pennines and she had a heart as big as her famed chocolate-dipped rock buns.
‘How does it feel?’ asked Willie, pointedly refusing to entertain Senga.
‘Surreal!’ Peaches looked down his phone’s camera lens. ‘I can’t believe we got the whole collection finished.’
‘You did it all by yourself,’ Roz corrected, accepting her own glass of bubbly from her husband.
‘With help from all of you.’
‘The repair shop’s tools and sewing machines helped,’ Willie threw in.
It was true. Peaches had made herself thoroughly at home here in the shed this last couple of months, her presence extending way beyond her regular Saturday sewing repair stints; she’d practically set up a night-time fashion workshop. The repair shop community had got used to finding her sewing and snipping, cutting and hot glue-gunning at all hours.
‘Credit where it’s due,’ Carenza McDowell threw in, fizzing with maternal pride. ‘You’ve pulled it off. Designing and delivering an entire sustainable fashion collection single-handedly in less than eight months.’
Carenza wasn’t keen on anything that detracted from her daughter’s achievements. She wasn’t simply proud; she was fiercely protective of her child, and the McDowell reputation, and she knew better than anyone how Peaches’ upcoming assessed Master’s degree showcase would represent the culmination of years of hard graft by her talented child.
‘All those late nights. All that sacrifice. And now it’s coming to fruition!’ Carenza’s usually stern and steady voice wobbled.
Not one person assembled in the repair shop on that fresh and sunny Saturday afternoon could be in doubt that many of the ‘sacrifices’ Carenza referred to were her own. She’d channelled everything she had into supporting her daughter through her studies, expanding her property rental empire so it now covered vast swathes of the Cairngorms, and all so that Peaches could have the best of everything. She’d offered it all up to her precious child with an unmatched motherly zeal: fine fabrics imported from anywhere in the world that her daughter might desire, research trips and plane tickets (with Carenza in tow, of course), any number of expensive coffee table books about the great designers and their fashion houses, vintage ‘look books’ from collectors’ archives, even the very best sewing machinery imported from Japan.
Not that Peaches had accepted any of it, turning down every opportunity flung in her path in favour of what Carenza referred to as ‘slumming it with borrowed machinery’ here at the repair shed, where in recent days she’d put in many more hours than in the aesthetic white studio conversion her mum had made for her at great expense in the high attics of their Cairn Dhu townhouse.
‘I still can’t say I understand the need for all of this…’ Carenza paused, searching for a more neutral word than the one currently on the tip of her tongue (‘trash’). Instead, she plumped for, ‘Thrifted stuff as the basis for your collection.’
