Page 86 of One Summer

‘I’m serious,’ he assures me. ‘Why the surprise?’

‘I’d have thought it’s quite rare for boys to love Anne, especially given you’re clearly a Gilbert Blythe type.’

‘I’m an Anne,’ he says, with absolute certainty.

‘No, you’re not,’ I scoff. ‘You’re good-looking, rich and not the least bit ginger. You’re Gilbert.’

‘Hello?’ he says, pointing to his hair. ‘Not ginger, no, but definitely an outsider because of my hair colour. What teenage boy wants silver highlights?’

‘Fair point,’ I say, thinking of all the teasing he’d have experienced at my rough school. ‘Well, I won’t hold up one of your braids and whisper “mackerel” in your ear.’

‘Mackerel?’ he asks, frowning.

‘It was the only food I could think of that was grey.’

‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Because Gilbert held Anne’s plait and whispered “carrots”?’

‘Exactly. But I don’t think there are any grey vegetables.’

A quick Google search reveals that there is just one grey vegetable in the world. The Hubbard squash, which looks like a brain crossed with a deer tick.

‘I think if anyone had whispered mackerel in my ear, I’d have thought I had an entirely different problem…’ he says.

‘Yeah, you’d probably have wanted to up your personal hygiene.’

I think this may be the first time I’ve seen him genuinely laugh, which gives me a small prickle of pleasure, or maybe it’s just the beer kicking in.

Seventy

Colorado

Caleb and I are both pegging out our wet washing on our adjacent rotary clothes lines at 11 a.m. It’s now become our thing. We don’t do water cooler chat; we do laundry drying chat. He tells me he’s finally run out of clean clothes, which I can believe because today he’s wearing a sweatshirt that doesn’t have a slogan. He explains to me that all of his most comfortable ones, the ones that don’t worsen his skin sensitivity, are divided among no less than five washing baskets dotted around the villa.

He turns to go inside, and I see small letters on the back of his T-shirt. I was wrong. It does have a slogan. BRECKENRIDGE, COLORADO. Before I can stop myself, I hear myself begin to ask him if he’s ever been to Colorado, and then I shut my jaw, hearing the audible click of my back teeth coming together. He hasn’t been to Breckenridge, Colorado. He’s a homebird. He is basically one of those monks.

‘Did your ex ever buy you a T-shirt on her travels that you wouldn’t wear?’

He thinks about this for a long while.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Three times.’

‘What did they say?’

‘Some really weird stuff that honestly freaked me out.’

‘You’re going to have to give me examples.’

He sighs. ‘Okay, one of them said “Side by Side or Miles Apart, Sisters Will Always Be Connected by the Heart”. It was really soft, and I wore it around the house for a few weeks but then I answered the door to the postman, and he looked really disturbed. And I started thinking about conjoined twins sharing a heart and the whole thing just got too emotionally loaded.’

‘And the second time?’

‘I didn’t get it exactly, but it felt like something rude.’

‘Tell me.’

‘It was a grey T-shirt in organic cotton, which I liked a lot, but it said, “Putting the Gland in England.”’

‘What does that mean?’ I say, laughing.

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