Everyone was happy here
Frank Rennie drove the 585 between Ardrossan and Ayr for thirty-one years. He still knows when it passes the end of the street. His wife Moira, who taught primary in the town for longer than that, sits at a window in a care home two miles away, holds the hand of a retired joiner called Walter, and calls Frank "son".
Then a leaflet arrives with the care home's letters. For forty-five pounds an hour, a service called Otherwise will put Frank back in his own kitchen on a Tuesday in 2019, with the radio on and Moira at the sink telling him to put the bins out. It is built from what he remembers. It only goes forward, never back. And it is, he discovers, the best hour of his week.
So he goes twice a week, then three times, and lies about the dentist. His daughter Lorna, a nurse with a six-year-old and a folder for everything, starts counting the hours. His son Craig, in Manchester, has a secret of his own. And a man in the pub called Tam has been going somewhere every Friday for a year and will not say where.
Set over ten months in Ayrshire, Everyone Was Happy Here is a novel about a marriage, a town, and a question none of its characters will say out loud: if you could spend an hour with the person you loved, before anything happened, and it cost no more than the heating, why would you ever choose the window instead?
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