Page 4 of One Summer

‘You will be the death of me, Lindy Hougassian.’

He insists on pronouncing my surname as ‘Huge Assian’ despite my correcting him numerous times, and explaining it’s an Armenian name with a ‘hard G’. I’ve given up arguing the point, since he obviously gets a kick out of this pathetic micro-aggression.

‘Right, I’ll take a hazelnut latte from the coffee stand, please. When you’re ready.’

‘You want me to do another coffee run?’ I ask, not able to keep the note of judgement out of my voice.

Why do I have to question everything? Why can’t I just do whatever he tells me with a silent smile of assent? Why am I so ridiculously demand-avoidant? I’m perfectly happy to do almost anything, unless somebody tells me I have to do it. I am a nightmare employee. I am naturally resistant to authority. No wonder Scotty hates me.

‘Are you above coffee runs now?’

‘No, no, of course not!’

It’s just that this would be the third coffee run so far today. I like getting my step count up as much as the next person, and getting some river air and hitting up the bakery for yum-yums, but this seems excessive, especially as it’s only 11.15 a.m.

‘It’s been a long morning, Lindy. I’ll take some cannoli as well. Make it three.’

He hands me a ten-pound note.

‘You want me to go right this minute?’ I say, my voice a little incredulous. Because what happened to ‘when I was ready’?

‘Yes, please, Lindy. Unless that’s a problem for you?’

He raises his eyebrows, just daring me to provoke him again.

‘No, no, it’s absolutely fine,’ I say, rictus-grinning and feeling so much intense heat in my cheeks that I wonder if it’s possible I’ve given myself a subdermal scald. I cannot stop saying the wrong thing. It’s as if my subconscious knows exactly what is most likely to wind Scotty up and then that very thing pings directly out of my mouth.

‘Great,’ he says, spinning in his chair to face the window, so that his back is firmly to me, which I take as my cue to leave.

Henny flashes me her ‘mock shock’ face as I go to my desk to grab my jacket and bag.

‘Want anything from the coffee stand?’ I ask in a hushed tone.

She must have heard Scotty shouting at me and is probably desperate to know why, but knows better than to try a water cooler chat until he’s got his coffee and cannoli in hand.

‘Nah,’ she says. ‘I’ll stick with my slime water.’

I head outside into the bustle of the London street and inhale the tang of the Thames. It’s low tide and Max is out there now, filming for his mudlarking channel on YouTube. Somewhere on the foreshore, he’s there in wellies, bootcut jeans and his channel-branded polo shirt. If he’s chilly, he’ll be wearing his lumberjack jacket, which just about keeps off the biting spring breeze that rushes up the river. It’s a good look for him. Sexy, serious and just the right amount of dirty…

A shirtless man on one of those newfangled ‘hoverboards’ rides past me and I find myself looking at his muscled shoulders for a little too long. I have to do something to get Max and me out of this impasse. I have to make a change.

Three

Dirt

My mind wanders as I look over the wall down to the foreshore. It’s been so long since Max and I were intimate that I think it’s actually made me depressed. I don’t think I’ve had this long a dry spell since I swore off men in my first year of university and that was only because I caught scabies. Max doesn’t seem bothered, though. All that animates him these days is his foreshore finds.

Some of the stuff he’s brought home has been quite cool. Roman hair pins, ancient glass beads and ornate clay pipes with miniature figures reclining between stem and bowl. He even has a collection of late-seventeenth century tin farthings with tiny square copper plugs in the centre to stop counterfeiting, issued by the British government as a boost to the Cornish tin mining industry, which was struggling to survive. This stuff even I can get excited about. The history, the design, the impressive longevity of the workmanship. But I suppose mostly, I like how happy it makes Max: the way it lights him up like nothing else.

Who cares if most of what he finds is uninspiring, or, well, unsanitary? There are rotting medieval leather shoe soles stacked on the top of his wardrobe, drying out slowly in whiffy plastic bags. The smell is always there, no matter how much Febreze he sprays around. But if they dry out too quickly, they could fall apart. Every change of state needs to be slow and steady, or it could end in disaster.

I can’t even bear to think about the pottery shards that he wants to make into art for my living room. I dread to think what he’s going to produce because he doesn’t seem to have a creative bone in his body. Thankfully, he hasn’t presented me with any homemade gifts yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

On Christmas Eve, he surprised me – which is putting it mildly – with a hand-carved Tudor comb, made from boxwood. I was able to feign mild excitement until he explained that this was a lice comb, and he pointed to a handful of ancient dead headlice trapped between the wooden teeth and perfectly preserved by the anaerobic Thames mud. He was looking at me, waiting for a reaction, waiting for me to express the same sort of marvelling wonder that he felt, but all I felt was a strong desire to throw the comb out of the window and scrub my hands with bleach.

I just don’t get it, I suppose. I don’t have his passion for the nitty-gritty of history – emphasis on the nitty. I don’t want to see old scraps of leather that were once hobnail boots or poulaines. I can’t get excited by holes that hint of a long-dead toe rubbing through. Max delights in all of this; he believes that in touching those grey scraps of hide, he’s reaching back into the past, meeting its people, bridging the centuries between them and us. It’s a spiritual practice to him. He’s a man with a new religion. A new reason for being.

I feel a pang for thinking about him so critically. I love him. I should be glad he’s found such a fulfilling hobby, not jealous. A good girlfriend would be supportive of her partner’s new passion.

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