been offered the chair of obstetrics at Glasgow University. Lindsay had protested that she didn’t have anything to go back for, but Sophie had managed to convince her she was mistaken. ‘You’ll walk into a teaching job in Scotland,’ she’d said. ‘And if it takes a while, you can always go back to freelance journalism. You know you were one of the best.’
And so she had stifled her doubts for Sophie’s sake. After all, it wasn’t her lover’s fault that Lindsay had reached the age of thirty-nine without a clearly defined career plan. But now she was confronted by the cold reality of unemployment, she wished she’d done more to persuade Sophie to stay in California. She’d looked around for teaching work, but vocational journalism training wasn’t nearly as widespread in Scotland as it was in the US. She’d managed to secure some part-time lecturing at Strathclyde University, filling in for someone on maternity leave, but it was dead-end work with no prospects. And the idea of going back to the overcrowded world of freelance journalism with a contacts book that was years out of date held no appeal.
So her days had shrunk to this. Pounding the walkway by the river. Reading the papers. Shopping for dinner. Arranging to meet old acquaintances for drinks and discovering how much distance there was between them. Waiting for Sophie to come home and bring her despatches from the world of work. Lindsay knew she couldn’t go on like this indefinitely. It was poisoning her soul, and it wasn’t doing her relationship with Sophie much good either.
She reached the point where she had to turn off the walkway and head up the steep hill to the Botanic Gardens, the halfway point on her circuit. Head down, she powered up the slope, too wrapped up in her thoughts to pay heed to her surroundings. As she rounded a blind bend, she realized she was about to cannon into someone walking down the hill. She swerved, but simultaneously the other woman sidestepped in the same direction. They crashed into each other and Lindsay stumbled, smacking into a tree and falling to one knee, her ankle twisting under her. ‘Shit,’ she gasped.
‘Oh God, I’m sorry,’ the other woman said.
‘My own fault,’ Lindsay growled, pushing herself upright, then wincing as she tried to take her weight on the damaged ankle. ‘Jesus,’ she hissed, leaning forward to probe the joint with her fingers.
‘You’ve not broken it or anything?’ The woman frowned solicitously.
‘Sprained, I think.’ She drew in her breath sharply when she touched the tender heart of the injury.
‘Have you far to go? Only, I live just the other side of the river. My car’s there. I could drive you?’
It was a tempting offer. Lindsay didn’t fancy hiking a mile on a damaged ankle. She looked up, taking in her nemesis turned Good Samaritan. She saw a woman in her late twenties with an angular face and short blonde hair cut to fashionable effect. Her eyes were slate blue, her eyebrows a pair of dark circumflex accents above them. She was dressed out of Gap and carried a leather knapsack over one shoulder. She didn’t look like an axe murderer. ‘OK,’ Lindsay said. ‘Thanks.’
The response wasn’t what she expected. Instead of the offer of an arm to help her down the hill and across the bridge, the woman looked taken aback, her eyes widening and her lips parting. ‘You’re Lindsay Gordon,’ she said, bemused.
‘Do I know you?’ Lindsay leaned against the tree, wondering if she’d taken a blow to the head she hadn’t registered at the time.
The blonde grinned. ‘We met about ten years ago. You came to the university GaySoc to talk about gays and the media. A bunch of us went out for a drink afterwards.’
Lindsay strained at the locked gates of memory. ‘Edinburgh University?’ she hazarded.
‘That’s right. You remember?’
‘I remember doing the talk.’
The blonde gave a rueful pout. ‘But you don’t remember me. Well, that’s hardly surprising. I was just a gawky wee fresher who was too overawed to open her mouth. But, hey, this is terrible. Me standing here reminiscing while you’re suffering like this.’ Now she extended her arm. ‘Lean on me. I’m Rory, by the way. Rory McLaren.’
Lindsay took the proffered arm and began to limp gingerly down the slope. ‘I’m amazed you recognized me all these years later,’ she said. The least she could do was make conversation, even though she felt more like swearing with every step.
Rory chuckled. ‘Oh, you were pretty impressive. You’re part of the reason I ended up doing what I do.’
‘Which is?’
‘I’m a journo.’
‘Oh well, never mind,’ Lindsay said, attempting a levity she didn’t feel. The last thing she needed right now was some bright and bouncy kid still jam-packed with idealism making her feel even more old and decrepit than she already did.
‘No, I love it,’ Rory assured her.
‘How do you manage that?’ They had reached the bottom of the hill and were making their way across the bridge. Moving on the flat was easier, but Lindsay was glad she’d taken up Rory’s offer, even if the conversation was depressing her.
‘It’s a long story.’
Lindsay looked up at the climb that would take them back to street level. ‘It’s a big hill.’
‘Right enough,’ Rory said. ‘Well, I started off on the local paper in Paisley, which wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs, but at least they trained me. I got a couple of lucky breaks with big stories that I sold on to the nationals, and I ended up with a staff job on the Standard.’
Lindsay snorted. ‘Working on the Standard makes you happy? God, things must have changed since my day.’
‘No, no, I’m not there any more.’
‘So where are you now?’ Even in her state of discomfort, Lindsay noticed that Rory seemed faintly embarrassed.
‘Well, see, that’s the long-story bit.’
‘Take my mind off the pain and cut to the chase.’
‘I came up on the lottery.’
‘Jammy,’ Lindsay said.
‘Aye. But not totally jammy. I didn’t get the whole six numbers, just the five plus the bonus ball. But that was enough. I figured that if I invested the lot, it would earn enough in interest to keep a roof over my head. So I jacked the job in and now I’m freelance.’
‘And that’s your idea of fun? Out there in the dog-eat-dog world?’ Lindsay tried not to sound as sceptical as she felt. She’d been a freelance herself and knew only too well how tough it was to stay ahead of the pack.
‘I figured what I needed was an angle. And I remembered something you said back at that talk at the GaySoc.’
‘This is surreal,’ Lindsay said. The word felt entirely inadequate to encompass the situation.
‘I know. Wild, isn’t it? I can’t believe this is really you.’
‘Me neither. So what did I say that was so significant it came back to you all those years later?’
‘You were talking about the ghetto mentality. How people think gays are completely different, completely separate from them. But we’re not. We’ve got more in common with the straight universe than we have dividing us. And I thought, gays and lesbians don’t just have gay and lesbian lives. They’ve got jobs. They’ve got families. They’ve got stories to tell. But most folk in our world have no reason to trust journalists. So I thought, what if I set myself up as the journalist that the gay community can trust? What a great way to get stories to come to me.’ Rory’s voice was passionate now, her excitement obvious.
‘And that’s what you did?’
‘Right. I’ve been at it over a year now, and I’ve had some fabulous exclusives. I mostly do investigative stuff, but I’ll turn my hand to