Page 35 of One Summer

The title of which is: ‘Gold-Panning with THE Gorgeous Gothic Girl Greta’.

He and Greta are camping in the mountains of Scotland. They’re both dressed in waders and standing in a stream. For extra pizzazz, he’s added an overlay of a rainbow with them positioned at the bottom of it. The video won’t load because my phone signal is terrible here and I haven’t yet managed to connect to the island internet, so all I can see is the cover image and the episode notes.

They’ve gone ‘YouTube Official’ and, wow, do they look happy.

They’re panning for literal gold, and they’ll find it. Of course they’ll find it. A big pot of it at the end of their pretty little rainbow.

The sight of them hits me right in the gizzard, because as angry as I am with Max, as hurt as I feel… I still miss him. Even after everything, I still want to see him, run this situation past him and ask for his advice. Just hearing his voice would be nice.

I scroll the cursor across to the middle of the video’s progress bar and try to see if I can load a few frames. For a miraculous few seconds, it actually plays, using my shoddy phone data.

Footage of Max’s gold-panning apparatus cuts to warm yellow light and him saying that the sun is setting and they’re going to build a campfire.

Then the video stalls.

I can just imagine them picking out sticks and taking turns to place them in the perfect configuration.

They will no doubt zip their sleeping bags together, have energetic sex all night in their tent and wake up without a single bite from a midge.

Somehow, even this hideous visual doesn’t make me stop wanting to talk to him.

Which is madness, because if I send any sort of message to him, even in a crisis, he’ll be irritated. He doesn’t want to hear from me. I couldn’t even dress it up as a welfare update about Nemo. He doesn’t want to hear about him either. We’re his past, and his future is Gothic Girl Greta.

I scroll further forwards without success until, right at the end, I manage to play another few seconds of video.

Close-ups of flowering bushes and meadow grasses waving in the breeze. There’s classical music playing over the scenic shots of perfect wilderness.

It’s so beautiful. Max has clearly been working on his production values, trying to up his game to impress his new YouTube girlfriend.

I put down my phone and press my palms into my eye sockets.

Max has moved on, I say to myself, almost as a mantra.

I have to face the truth: there’s nobody who can help me or make me feel better. I have to sort this out on my own.

The dog’s gone to sleep on me, and Nemo seems comfortable up on high, so for the time being all I can do is hold tight and wait.

I can still hear heavy breathing, occasional coughs and snorts, and then, after what must be two hours, the room goes silent, and I hear a scrabbling sound.

He’s awake.

Thirty-Three

Walkies

I go hesitantly back into the bedroom, and find the man sitting up holding the water I gave him earlier and digging frantically at the blister pack of pills.

He swallows two and collapses onto the bed.

‘Do you need anything else?’ I ask, embarrassed by how enthusiastic I sound, as if I’m only too pleased to be offering my non-existent nursing services to a man I don’t know.

He goes quiet as he thinks.

‘Yes, please.’

I wasn’t expecting him to actually say he needed something else. He’s already had the pills and the water. What more does he want? Lymphatic drainage massage? A freshly whipped-up batch of herbal tonic? The pagan incantation for health?

‘Could you get some food for Ted?’

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