Page 21 of One Summer

‘Wow, it’s like some mythical place in a story book.’

‘Not really,’ he says.

Still, the rain should be plastering my hair to my face, the wind should be blowing through to my bones and making me shudder, but it’s not like that at all. The harbour beach shimmers with heat haze and sweat runs down my neck all the way to the small of my back.

Billy docks the boat, helps me disembark and tells me to have a look around while he arranges transport to my accommodation.

‘Just leave your stuff here,’ he says. ‘Nobody will touch it.’

‘Are you sure it’s safe?’

‘Yeah, Loor Islanders only bother stealing Gucci suitcases.’

We both look at my Argos cheapies, inherited from my parents, who probably got them from a car boot sale.

‘The cat will be fine too,’ he says, striding off, but I don’t feel right leaving Nemo alone. What if he sees me walking away and thinks I’m abandoning him? Two abandonments in one month would be rough on anyone’s mental health.

Lugging his cat basket, I walk down the slipway from the harbour wall and onto the beach. It’s supposed to be windy here all year round, but there’s not the merest breath of breeze.

I take some deep inhalations and try to calm myself. I’m on an exclusive island, swept by Atlantic breakers and visiting wildlife. I’ll probably meet all sorts of interesting people this summer. Loor attracts people from all over the world. I might meet my true love here. That would be something. And it would really annoy Max.

But that’s just stupid. Wanting to meet my true love just to annoy my ex is immature, and I wouldn’t even have the first clue how to handle a true love.

God, Nemo’s basket is heavy. Too heavy. Why did I think I could drag it up the beach in the first place? Who does that? Who takes a caged cat for a beach stroll?

It would be a bad look to die of heat exhaustion on my first day. It wouldn’t reflect well on my tenure here. There would be headlines in newspapers around the world.

Twenty-six-year-old city failure overcome by sunny day succumbs to general weakness, and dies in front of watching sea gulls, who peck the biscuit crumbs out of her handbag.

I look up and see that there’s someone watching me. It’s a middle-aged woman with vivid red hair and a white sundress. There’s a second when I almost raise my hand to wave to her, as if my brain thinks I know her. But I don’t know her, and she would quite rightly find it weird to be waved at by a stranger. But why is she staring at me so intently?

Deeply uncomfortable, I angle my body away from her and see something glinting in the sand, still wet from the retreating tide. I stoop to retrieve it and look down at a perfect teardrop of aquamarine sea glass. I hold it up to the light, like I’ve seen Max do in his mudlarking videos, and take my phone out to capture a picture. The colour is extraordinary. It looks like a jewel. I could absolutely set this in a necklace, and it would be a showstopper. All my friends would admire it. Well, Henny might.

I snap a few photos of the piece and then scan the parabola of sand in front of me, swooping down to grab a huge chunk of emerald glass. It’s heavy in my hand and darkens to almost black as it dries in the sun. It’s nothing like the thin green glass of modern beer bottles: this is much thicker and sturdier. Perhaps it’s from an old wine bottle? Max would probably know what type. He was always going on about ‘mallet’ bottles and ‘onion’ bottles: hand-blown in the seventeenth century. He dreamed of finding one intact, with a gorgeous, iridescent patina from long centuries buried in the Thames mud, and putting it up on his YouTube channel to the envy of all his mudlark friends and rivals. But he never found one. The last time he spoke about it, he’d been drinking his own fair share of wine and mentioned buying an onion bottle from an antiques dealer – he’d seen a beautiful one for a ‘smidge over six thousand pounds’.

‘Why?’ I’d asked.

Maybe he could plant it somewhere… Pretend to find it.

When I’d asked if he was serious, he’d backtracked straight away. The glory of mudlarking was in the searching, not the finding, and certainly not the ‘owning’, he told me, as if I was the one who’d come up with the scheme in the first place.

I’m about to swoop down on a frosted piece of vibrant amber glass, to join the assortment of sweaty pieces in my other hand, when a gruff voice close at hand startles me.

‘Please don’t.’

Twenty-One

Bandanna

I look up and see a man standing not more than six feet away. I get the feeling he has a beard, but I can’t be sure because he’s wearing one of those outlaw bandannas that became so popular during the pandemic. Neck gaiters. I can’t see anything below the eyes… and he’s wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, which makes it hard to put an age on him. Somewhere between twenty-five and fifty, for sure.

Is this a put-em-up? Am I about to be robbed?

‘You shouldn’t be doing that,’ he says in his deep voice. Deep is an understatement. It’s practically a growl.

‘Um – what shouldn’t I be doing?’ I say.

‘That,’ he says, pointing at me.

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