Page 15 of Meet me at the Seaside Cottages

‘They can’t afford them now,’ observes Lish, to a few hearty nods.

‘Well, surely there are lots of paper-pushing jobs?’ says Amsan. ‘There seem to be a million people who do it here.’

‘I know that,’ says Janey. ‘But somehow you get paid ten times more for looking at computer screens in Edinburgh.’

‘Inside in the warm,’ grumbles Milton, who has to circumnavigate the hospital buildings all day in all sorts of weather and does not always like it.

‘We definitely got something wrong,’ says Janey, smiling, but then she glances at her phone. She has an afternoon of community rounds, which means driving up into beautiful farmland to check up on how people are doing with their hearing, seeing so many whose quality of life it has massively improved or helped them work for longer, on a gorgeous chilly spring day, with the farms all grinding into life with the new buds on the trees and the daffs flourishing in every single part of sunshine they can find. She can see if old Fraser Ardmillan will be able to hear the tractor coming, and the birds singing in the trees, and which of his cows are lowing tohim, and she can visit wee Abdul in Caithness, whose parents live in the loveliest house and always press on her food and treats to take away and she can’t really say no, and he is so cute and has learned her name and is very proud of himself, in the way a four-year-old can be, at how brilliant he is at passing the audiology tests. She has absolutely learned to take along extra stickers for his twin sisters, who are six, and have truly earned them from long, long years of waiting on Abdul’s appointments, his hospital stays; tolerating the fuss that was always made of their little brother while they just had to grow up and get on with things. Janey sees this a lot. She makes a special effort with the siblings. Then she has to pop into a GP clinic to schedule a late-night surgery of tests. It suits the poor overworked GPs, who work long days twice a week: it is knackering, but it’s convenient for other people not having to take a full day off work, so she does it with a will.

No, she wouldn’t swap it for moving paper about. Her poor girl.

*

Four long hours later, though, Janey’s tolerance for her ‘poor girl’ is dropping significantly. She’s exhausted from a hectic afternoon, despite Abdul’s charms. She also had to manage an upset young man who constantly wears extremely loud headphones, leading to hearing loss. He’s very distressed about having to wear hearing aids before turning thirty, and Janey tries to balance being firm and being empathetic. However, he keeps making things worse by turning the volume up, which becomes more evident through the damage to his ear follicles. The young man ends up in tears, which is unusual in Janey’s job, where she generally helps people feel better. Janey feels stressed and upset.

It’s dark when she gets home, starving, hoping Essie has prepared dinner, considering they discussed having lamb chops, which are in the fridge.

When Janey enters the house, she’s hit by the heat – it’s on full blast. Janey usually keeps it low to save on heating bills, but now all the doors are wide open, and one window is slightly ajar. The kitchen is a mess, with teabags on the counter, and, in the sink, dirty plates piled up, a ketchup bottle lying on its side; laundry is dumped on the sideboard. The lamb chops are gone. Janey takes a deep breath, clenches then releases her fists, and wishes she hadn’t been quite so dismissive of yoga.

*

Essie had a rough day too. She slept in, which is both good and bad, putting her out of sync with the rest of the world. Her phone showed no new messages, and it’s as if she’s vanished from Edinburgh. Her group WhatsApp chats continue without her, organising brunches and gallery events. Essie had typedJust taking a little MH break, guys, back soon, and left three groups, but now she regrets it, feeling isolated. It seems like the world is moving on without her.

Essie had scoured her mum’s cupboards for food – nothing. There was no Uber Eats or Deliveroo either, and it was freezing. She managed to get the heating on and took a long bath to warm up. But then, back wrapped in her duvet, she checked Connor’s Instagram. And there he was, at a party in a kilt, surrounded by others in kilts, trews or black tie, along with girls in ballgowns. He’d told her he was going, but she’d been too busy complaining. It should have been her at the event, but she’d forgotten about it. They would’ve had a fun weekend together.

Then she spiralled down a rabbit hole of what happened if you weren’t in a committed relationship by the time youwere thirty and what to do when the head-hunter hasn’t called you and looking for big bank jobs that didn’t require German – there weren’t any, although there were plenty of pension administrator jobs – and tortured herself reading articles about how impossible it was to get on the housing ladder and how it wasn’t going to get any better, ever, because the boomers would die and hand their city houses to their kids, who could then get all the good jobs, and otherwise all jobs were open to every human being in the entire universe, and AI would filter your CV before anyone even bothered reading it.

She didn’t even get dressed, just mooned around, eating everything she could find, throwing her phone down in disgust, then picking it up again. She was absolutely in the depths of misery, barely noticed the day slipping away. She had a Zoom call with her recruiter at three p.m. and did her best to at least dress her top half.

‘So. A lot of the jobs we’re looking at,’ said the recruiter, ‘they need an MBA?’

‘Seriously?’ said Essie, who had spent a lot of time at Sinclair feeding figures into algorithms and looking for differences in results. It didn’t feel quite like MBA behaviour. ‘I’m not sure I can get one of those in time.’

‘Then the normal procedure is four or five interviews and a presentation.’

‘Four or five interviews in Edinburgh?’

Essie had got her last job by doing work experience, turning up hours early, staying hours late, and being so cheeky to Hari that he had taken her on as an assistant. Once again it really stung that he wasn’t taking her to Berne. And she couldn’t afford to intern again. Last time she’d only managed by working two jobs through the summer and being a student guidancecounsellor so she could live cheaply in halls. This seems . . . impossible.

So she is not in the best of moods when she hears Janey come in and slam the door behind her. Oh, God. She isn’t in the mood to face her mum right now, she really isn’t. Things are already bad enough. She feels terrible.

‘Essie?’

Her mum’s voice sounds pissed off. Oh, for God’s sake. She’s in a rotten situation, she’s been home for five minutes; can she not have someone else be annoyed with her too?

‘Essie!’

‘Yeah?’ Her voice is full of truculence.

‘Could you come down a sec?’

Huffily, Essie gets up and brushes down the crumbs from her pyjamas. Okay, it was a bit mad that she hasn’t got dressed all day but . . . come on, she’s clearly depressed. She needs a duvet day, not a row. And she doesn’t want to tell her mum, and she doesn’t want to ask, but she hasn’t heard from her dad at all, apart from aYou’ll be fine!message, which was frankly the reverse of encouraging.

‘Hi,’ Essie says in a gloomy Ross-from-Friendsvoice, descending the stairs.

Janey can’t help her face getting pained when she sees her gorgeous, messy daughter. ‘Oh, sweetie,’ she says.

‘What?’ says Essie, irritably.

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