Also, he had to bend over so hard to hear anyone it gave him a sore back, and the only person he liked to dance with was Zoe, because she was so little he could pick her up and stick her legs around his waist, then carry her straight home, something that he assumed would be rather frowned upon by other people.

Chapter 44

“Where is your happy face?!” demanded Kim-Ange loudly as she ran into Cormac that evening in the old battered lift.

“Ach,” said Cormac. “It’s the village dance coming up. Was just thinking about it.”

“Ha, God, I can’t imagine Lissa going to something like that.”

“She is going!” said Cormac. “I made her!”

“Seriously? LISSA?”

“Yes.”

“At a village dance?!” Kim-Ange burst out into a peal of loud laughter.

“It’s not that weird,” said Cormac.

Kim-Ange shook her head. “I know. It’s just . . . until she’s had a few, Lissa’s not much of a dancer. She’s far too shy.”

Cormac blinked at this. It hadn’t occurred to him that Lissa might be shy. She didn’t seem shy to him. Of course, they’d never been face-to-face.

They made their way through the dingy common room. Kim-Ange looked around it.

“Well,” she said, “why don’t we have a village dance?”

Cormac gave her some side-eye.

“We could have it here! They let people use it if you book it. Get some music, you can teach people to dance. Sell tickets. They can set up a bar.”

“Who’d come to a ceilidh in a nurses’ home?”

“Every drunk Scotsman in London! And there are a lot of them.”

Cormac thought about it. “I suppose I could design a poster.”

“Give me some,” said Kim-Ange. “I’ll take them up to the hospital.”

THE RESPONSE WAS absolutely extraordinary and immediate, partly because on the whole when Kim-Ange suggested you do something, it was normally easier just to do it. They sold out all their tickets, and Cormac had enough money to hire a small ceilidh band with a caller to tell people what to do and to stock the small bar with additional Tunnock’s tea cakes and caramel wafers.

Kim-Ange took over the decor and, amazingly, with a few meters of tartan cloth and ribbon and a vast amount of Ikea twinkle lights, transformed the scuffed hall and battered old tables into something rather magical. From seven P.M., hordes began pouring in. Cormac had absolutely no idea there were so many Scots in London. Although most of them were from Glasgow and Edinburgh, he still found it comforting to be surrounded by familiar voices, red hair, freckles, loud laughter, and the sound of people calling each other “tubes” and “bawbags.”

But there were also all the nurses who lived there, who came from everywhere—all over the world. One after another they came up to him, giggling and pleased, often telling him what their local dances were like.