Page 27 of One Summer

He stares at me.

‘I, not u.’

‘Aye,’ he says. ‘I know my name.’

It takes me a second to work out the nature of this miscommunication.

‘Lindy,’ I say. ‘Not Lundy.’

‘Oh. Halloon,’ he replies.

Halloon? Is that how people greet each other here on Loor? I probably should have read up more on the local customs. I’m going to get everything wrong and cause offence – even more than I have already.

‘Halloon,’ I say back, tentatively and he doesn’t react in any strange way, so I obviously haven’t committed a Loor faux pas.

He nods politely, leaving me to carry Nemo, but taking my over-stuffed backpack and suitcase as if they weigh nothing.

There’s nobody around except fishermen, sorting their catch, and the red-haired woman I noticed earlier, who’s leaning on a lamppost by some turquoise electric bikes and looking intently at her phone. Perhaps she has a part-time job somewhere around the harbour. I can’t imagine she’s been looking at her phone while leaning on a lamppost for the past five hours. I must have coincidentally caught her on her breaks each time I passed.

The man motions his head to a cart. It’s not a golf cart as I was expecting – the ones you see in the Isles of Scilly – no, this is a vintage, old-timey cart that clearly belongs in a Dickens novel, a cold family huddled down together in the back, wrapped in threadbare blankets as the rain pours down, the stoic father at the reins.

It’s drawn by a huffing horse; a huge grey and white creature, which a quick glimpse tells me is a male horse.

‘Billy mentioned this is your first time on Loor – is that right?’

‘I think my parents brought me over when I was a toddler, but I can’t really remember it.’

‘Lucky for you, I’ve got an hour I need to kill, so you’re getting the full tour.’

‘The full tour is an hour?’ I say, feeling the first twinges of my bladder. I should have used the loo before leaving the pub, but I didn’t think I needed to go very badly. I do now. I am basically still that toddler.

My eyes go again to the red-haired woman, who has stopped texting and appears to be taking photos on her phone. Perhaps she’s a tourist. Except she seems to be taking a lot of photos in my direction. Surely she can’t be taking stealth shots of me? Perhaps she thinks I’m a famous person, although I can’t imagine which one. Max used to say the thing he liked most about my face was that I didn’t look like anybody he’d ever seen – which I tried to take as a compliment.

‘It only covers the main beauty spots: the places the tourists get their pictures taken and whack up on the internet. I could do you a more in-depth version if I had the whole afternoon, but I don’t.’

‘No worries,’ I say. ‘But it’s very kind of you to offer.’

The man insists on taking a photo of me holding Nemo’s basket at every one of these spots, which include a cliff overlooking the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, a cove with a Victorian seawater pool cut into the rocks and a stream tinkling over the cliff. The music of water is a permanent accompaniment to the stunning views at each of these places and before long, my eyes are watering with the strain.

‘Um, is it okay if we go to my house now, please?’ I say, the protests of my bladder now so insistent that I feel I might actually faint, which would definitely be one solution to my problem, as in that scenario, I would most certainly pee my pants.

‘To your new home, then!’ my tour guide declares, cheerfully.

‘Thanks,’ I say. He still hasn’t told me his name and it feels rude to ask now, the moment for introductions having passed three beauty spots ago. ‘It’s called Rose Cottage.’

‘You know it’s not a real cottage, I suppose?’ he says, cryptically.

What does he mean by this? How is it not a real cottage? What is it then? A Lego cottage? A mirage? A cottage cheese cottage?

‘No, it’s nothing like a real cottage,’ he continues. ‘There’s nothing cottage-like about it at all.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘It’s a beach house covered in that plastic weather-shielding muck they think looks like wood. It’s got loads of bedrooms, all stuffed to the rafters. A bit run down but all right.’

A beach house sounds fabulous – weather-shielding notwithstanding – but I’m not keen on the ‘run down’ and ‘stuffed to the rafters’ part. Is the owner a hoarder? Am I going to have to pick my way around piles of old magazines and island circulars? They haven’t volunteered any photos of their house, and I didn’t like to ask – a decision I might very well regret.

‘Yah,’ he says. And it’s definitely a yah, not a yeah. ‘They all have misleading names on the old site. It used to be white circus tents and beach huts, back when it first started… Did you know that?’

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