Page 11 of One Summer

It started when he’d finally consented to come and visit me at my flat share, which was always damp. We hung out in my bedroom, and I noticed he’d got into the habit of taking his T-shirt off and resting his head on a cushion on my lap. He’d ask if I’d scratch his back, and I couldn’t say no, because he was always happy to tickle mine. Some days he wanted it harder and some softer, but he always wanted it. We didn’t do Netflix and Chill. We did Podcast and Scratch. When the skin of his back started to change colour, developing lighter patches here and there, he was alarmed enough to book a private GP appointment using his work health insurance. He had a video call with a lovely Scottish dermatologist, who prescribed a red shampoo to treat the fungal infection he’d developed. But after one treatment, the itch stopped, and it wasn’t as pleasant for him to be scratched for hours as he listened to his favourite podcasts. So, he stopped using the shampoo and let the fungus grow on his skin unhindered, assuring me it wasn’t contagious because everyone had these particular yeasts on them; his were just jacked-up over-achievers whose little colonies bleached his skin in weird little blotches.

I thought back to the one year I’d studied philosophy as a minor at university. How we’d discussed the definition of pleasure, and someone had suggested it as a ‘need that is met’. And the professor had quoted Plato’s Gorgias and cited the case of a man condemned to a life of itching and scratching. I’d memorised what Socrates had said: ‘tell me whether a man who has an itch and wants to scratch, and may scratch in all freedom, can pass his life happily in continual scratching?’

Would that be happiness? Pleasure? Apparently for Max the answer was yes. The scratch made the itch worth having.

I looked down at his heavy head in my lap and tried not to think of the fungal colonies accumulating under my fingernails. It was his skin. His choice.

Maybe I forgot I had a choice too.

Because, if I was indeed a jellyfish, I was drifting in his ocean.

*

I look at a living statue who’s performing in green paint and raking in the small change from passing tourists. She’s not supposed to catch my gaze, but she does, and I see pity in her eyes.

I’m being pitied by the Statue of Liberty.

This is a new low but who can blame her? I’m boyfriendless, on my final warning at work, and on my way home to a flat full of people I barely know and who only ever talk to me about toilet-roll rotation.

Living the dream, Lindy. Living the goddamn dream.

I click back onto YouTube. It autoloads a news story about fungus that has coated homes, trees and everything else with a dark crust in a county of Tennessee. The fungus is fed by alcohol vapours from barrels of ageing whiskey in sprawling barrelhouses. Whiskey fungus. A known thing. I feel an affinity with that fungus. Just doing its best trying to get on with things and everyone dislikes it.

Oh god, I was the fungus growing on Max’s skin and now he’s finally made the decision to get rid of me.

Could this day get any worse?

My phone rings. For a second, I think that maybe it’s Max again, ringing to explain it all away, to say he’s changed his mind and decided to stay with me after all. How would I even feel about that? Could I forgive him? Would I give him another chance?

But it’s not Max. It’s my mother.

Eleven

Mother

‘How are you, Lindy-Lou-Lou?’

‘Terrific,’ I say, breezily. So breezily that I possibly sound a bit unhinged.

‘You sound stressed,’ she observes, and I can tell how hard she’s trying to keep the note of judgement out of her voice. She worries about me, I know that, and she has good reason, but I also wish she was better at hiding it.

She and my dad have often asked if I’ve any plans to marry Max, which has always been depressing, but I really don’t think I could take it now.

Don’t ask, I think, closing my eyes in silent prayer.

‘I just had a bad day at work.’

‘Scotty still being a dickhead?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t suppose he can help it. It’s probably deeply encoded in his DNA.’

‘It’s my fault. I’m a terrible assistant.’

‘Resign. It’s a bad fit. Go somewhere else. New job, fresh start. What’s this thing Henny texted me about – you’re designing jewellery?’

‘Why are you texting Henny? You met her once.’

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