Page 80 of One Summer

‘What do you mean?’ I say, feeling my cheeks flush. ‘Was I snoring?’

Please not sex noises.

‘You sounded angry. Something about smashing up a printer.’

In a flash, my dream comes back to me. Scotty had written ten new chapters of his sci-fi novel, and I hit print so that I could take them home to read. But instead of paper, a long stream of colourful knitting came out. On the printer display screen, a message was blinking.

The world doesn’t need more books; it needs more scarves.

‘Oh,’ I say, with an inexplicable pang of nostalgia for Scotty. ‘My boss used to get angry with me for messing up the photocopying.’

Caleb’s wearing a fleecy, blue bathrobe, tied tightly at the waist, and as he walks past me to his washing line, I notice that there’s something moving on the neckline of his robe, walking from the back collar, towards the nape of his neck.

‘Don’t panic,’ I say, already feeling my own adrenaline kicking in. ‘But there’s something on your dressing gown.’

‘Huh?’ he says, not processing what I’m saying.

‘Take off your robe,’ I say, not able to keep the urgency out of my voice.

‘But you’ll see my Simpsons pyjamas.’

‘I can handle it. You really need to take off the robe.’

He looks over at me, his gaze revealing dawning realisation.

‘Is it a spider?’ he says, squeezing his eyes shut in horror.

‘Take. Off. The. Robe.’

He unbelts the robe and throws it on the lawn, where it lands in a heap… from which a large centipede emerges.

‘I can’t tell you,’ he says, trying not to smile, ‘how much I truly dislike your cat.’

Sixty-Six

Snot

A few days later, on my morning walk with Ted, I bump into Joshua on the way back from a surf, who says, gallantly, ‘You look beautiful today,’ glancing very obviously at my legs.

I want to ask him about the tortoise comment, but it’s hard to know how to work it into the conversation. I wait to see if he’ll mention going for a drink, but he just tells me about the waves he caught this morning and the quality and length of his rides, in great detail. I’m happy he had such a great time, but being a non-surfer, I don’t really know how to respond.

As he’s talking, he wipes a drip of salt-snot off his face, and something about the gesture makes me feel a bit queasy. Do I fancy him, or do I just think I should?

Sixty-Seven

Wi-Fi

A new dawn, a new day but the thing that’s made me most excited is, tragically, that I’m on the island’s Wi-Fi at long last, which means I can watch any video I want, whenever I want, although, apparently, all I want to do is watch Max’s videos while on the loo.

He’s just posted a new one, in which he meets up with yet another glamorous mudlark. The video is not live streamed this time, but edited to perfection. Max sounds so happy as he talks to her, eager and flirtatious, with a twinkle in his eye.

She has silky, blonde hair and a sexy voice, and they ooh and aah as she shows off some of her best finds and he shows her his ‘amazingly wonderful’ sword pommel, which he’s brought along especially. This woman is tagged in the description section, and I see that her Instagram page is called Jewel of the Mile, a play on the film Jewel of the Nile, because her claim to fame is that she found an uncut emerald and she only ever mudlarks a specific one-mile-long stretch of the Thames.

Is Max going to date every sexy mudlarking woman in London? Is he going to be the Leonardo DiCaprio of the foreshore?

I almost jump out of my skin as somebody taps on the bathroom window.

‘Lindy, are you in there?’ a booming voice says, and I immediately recognise the dulcet tones of Betty.

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