Page 50 of One Summer

Worse, my brain whirs with pent-up anger. Towards Max, obviously, because if he hadn’t dumped me, I wouldn’t be here. Greta, for being so hideously perfect. My parents, for finding their soulmates as seventeen-year-olds. Bandanna Man, for existing and sneezing all over me. But mostly my fury is directed at the highly irresponsible Frank, because I’ve checked my emails and, although the date was my mistake – I was supposed to arrive on Thursday, not Tuesday – the other mistake was theirs. They engineered this whole situation by forgetting to include the words ‘types of’ through either sheer incompetence or a thirst for shits and giggles.

I don’t draw the blinds across the circle window. Instead, I lie on the window seat looking out at the sea as the sky turns silver and gold. There is so much beauty here, the sort that reaches down from the heavens and touches your soul.

I think of what Max would say if he knew I was here on Loor, a place he’s always planned to visit. He’d probably think I was having a quarter-life crisis.

1) Get dumped, 2) Resign and 3) Run away to an island to live among the snakes.

But Max would love Loor, which has always attracted treasure hunters. Rumour was that the ancient Celts buried their gold here, stashed on the heath in pewter cauldrons. Criminals came later, hiding loot in tin cans buried in the dunes. Max would take out his metal detector and spend every minute he could looking for gold.

Except he doesn’t have a metal detector, because I broke down the one I bought for his birthday into its portable sections and brought it with me in my luggage. Not because I have any plans to go detecting here, but because I don’t want him to own something that I’m still paying off. Still, I’m sure Greta has a spare one he can borrow: the best of the best, gifted to her by one of her many generous sponsors.

Max would give anything to find a priceless treasure – not to sell it to a museum and retire off the proceeds. Treasure hunting is not about the money for him; he already has the money. What he wants, desperately, is the respect of the community. He wants to appear on the cover of Metal Detecting Monthly and be the envy of ten thousand men with their neat coin collections and lightboxes in their man caves. He wants them so jealous that they could vomit bile. But more than this, he wants to go down in the reference books as the man who pulled something out of the ground that was so monumentally important, it changed everything historians thought they knew about a people who lived in the far distant past. Why this is Max’s dream, and not say, a Lamborghini, I’ve never been able to work out.

Max would come to Loor with Greta, not to stay in a blowfly-ridden fleapit of a beach house, ceiling-deep in snakes, but to the island’s single luxury hotel. A £700-a-night spa hotel with three bromine-filtered swimming pools and its own outdoor reed pool set on the cliff, for people who want to swim in carefully controlled nature. They’ll stay there and make love on their balcony as the sun comes up, and Max will think how lucky he is to have got rid of me and ended up with her.

A hot tear slides down my face and I wipe it away, angrily. I can’t fall to pieces. I chose this new life for myself, this ‘adventure’, and I have to stay strong and stand my ground. It’s hard to stay strong, though, when I can’t even stay still. I’m itching so badly I could scream: my hair, my chest, even the soles of my feet feel like they’re being bitten by fleas. Psychosomatic or factually accurate – either way, it’s unbearable. I’m also sweating into the nylon sleeping bag I found folded at the top of the wardrobe – which I thought was the least likely item for the fleas to have made their home in – but I’d do anything for a cotton sheet right now.

Maybe I’m getting whatever virus Bandanna Man is infected with. My immune system is so run down these days that I can get taken out by a toddler’s sniffle at a hundred paces, and he coughed and sneezed for hours into the air that I’m now breathing. I probably have one or two days maximum before I’m walking around with my own twin tissue plugs in my nostrils.

Forty-Four

Drapes

I think of my room back in London, the curtains of my bedroom. White, crisp, faux silk. Like something from Interiors Magazine, beautiful but totally useless for blocking out sunlight when I wanted to nap on a summer’s afternoon instead of going outside and making memories with the carpe diem people.

I’d brought my childhood curtains to the flat when I moved in. Thick damask in darkest burgundy. They’d hung in my father’s study, a window with the exact same dimensions as my bedroom window in London. When I looked at their dark swirls, I saw home and felt safe enough to sleep. Max couldn’t stand them. ‘Grannyish’, he’d called them. ‘Ugly’. He’d argued with me to change them, bin them, give them to charity if I thought anyone would actually want to buy them. I refused.

They didn’t fit the aesthetic of the flat, he’d said. Everything else was inoffensive and neutral. Sort of like our relationship, I’d thought at the time, and immediately berated myself.

But I wasn’t wrong; it was a beige relationship – not even vanilla. Vanilla has a bit of pep, at least: seed specks and some texture. Our relationship was the blah-est of blah.

I kept on refusing to change my burgundy curtains, every time Max brought up the subject – which was often – until one day I came home from work, and they just weren’t hanging in the window anymore.

‘Doesn’t that look better?’ he’d said.

‘What the hell, Max? You had no right. Where are they?’ I said, looking around, as if he might have left them casually draped over my bedside cabinet.

‘You’re not going to like this, but I handed them to the bin men, because I knew if I put them in the cupboard, you’d just get them out again.’

I felt my jaw drop and he smiled at me sheepishly.

‘This is tough love,’ he said, engulfing me in a sweaty hug. ‘You had an unhealthy attachment to those curtains. You needed to go cold turkey.’

Who was he to decide that? Was Max my keeper? Had I employed him to give my bedroom a makeover? No, he was just my boyfriend.

That night, I’d lain awake for hours, an inch away from resolving to break up with him the next day, but how over-the-top would that be? What sort of woman would break up with a pleasant man, who worked hard every day and didn’t drink too much or scare her, over some old curtains that had been hanging since the nineties? It was ridiculous, it was Generation Z gone mad. Max wasn’t one of those gaslighting, controlling men. He just had a strong aesthetic and couldn’t bear to look at anything he considered unsightly.

He wanted things his way, because he was confident his way was better, and maybe he was right about that.

Forty-Five

Clip

Another hour passes, and I’m still awake. I know YouTube won’t load on my phone with this crappy internet, but I check it anyway.

Max has posted another new video. A one-minute clip.

God, he looks good today. He hasn’t shaved and it’s given him even more of the rugged lumberjack look that his admirers in the comment section have so much to say about. The preview picture shows him talking directly to camera, and he’s framed the shot beautifully. There is an old church in the background to his left, and on the right of him, there is soft light and swans. According to the episode notes, he’s introducing a new spade that he’s using, because his ‘old one didn’t suit his digging style’.

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