Chapter Forty-Three
Forty-Three
Itch
The nap was a mistake, just as I knew it would be, because now I can’t sleep. Ted insists on lying with his spine against mine and snoring loudly in my ear. Any attempt to make him sleep in another room has resulted in manic barking, so I’ve given in. Apart from the unwelcome addition of Ted to my sleeping quarters, my whole body itches – either from actual fleas or psychosomatic ones – and my back aches from the mattress, which appears to be made from some ancient memory foam that remembers nothing of its original shape and leaves me rolling into a pit every time I turn over.
Worse, my brain whirs with pent-up anger. Towards Max, obviously, because if he hadn’t dumped me, I wouldn’t be here. Greta, for being so hideously perfect. My parents, for finding their soulmates as seventeen-year-olds. Bandanna Man, for existing and sneezing all over me. But mostly my fury is directed at the highly irresponsible Frank, because I’ve checked my emails and, although the date was my mistake – I was supposed to arrive on Thursday, not Tuesday – the other mistake was theirs. They engineered this whole situation by forgetting to include the words ‘types of’ through either sheer incompetence or a thirst for shits and giggles.
I don’t draw the blinds across the circle window. Instead, I lie on the window seat looking out at the sea as the sky turns silver and gold. There is so much beauty here, the sort that reaches down from the heavens and touches your soul.
I think of what Max would say if he knew I was here on Loor, a place he’s always planned to visit. He’d probably think I was having a quarter-life crisis.
1) Get dumped, 2) Resign and 3) Run away to an island to live among the snakes.
But Max would love Loor, which has always attracted treasure hunters. Rumour was that the ancient Celts buried their gold here, stashed on the heath in pewter cauldrons. Criminals came later, hiding loot in tin cans buried in the dunes. Max would take out his metal detector and spend every minute he could looking for gold.
Except he doesn’t have a metal detector, because I broke down the one I bought for his birthday into its portable sections and brought it with me in my luggage. Not because I have any plans to go detecting here, but because I don’t want him to own something that I’m still paying off. Still, I’m sure Greta has a spare one he can borrow: the best of the best, gifted to her by one of her many generous sponsors.
Max would give anything to find a priceless treasure – not to sell it to a museum and retire off the proceeds. Treasure hunting is not about the money for him; he already has the money. What he wants, desperately, is the respect of the community. He wants to appear on the cover of Metal Detecting Monthly and be the envy of ten thousand men with their neat coin collections and lightboxes in their man caves. He wants them so jealous that they could vomit bile. But more than this, he wants to go down in the reference books as the man who pulled something out of the ground that was so monumentally important, it changed everything historians thought they knew about a people who lived in the far distant past. Why this is Max’s dream, and not say, a Lamborghini, I’ve never been able to work out.
Max would come to Loor with Greta, not to stay in a blowfly-ridden fleapit of a beach house, ceiling-deep in snakes, but to the island’s single luxury hotel. A ￡700-a-night spa hotel with three bromine-filtered swimming pools and its own outdoor reed pool set on the cliff, for people who want to swim in carefully controlled nature. They’ll stay there and make love on their balcony as the sun comes up, and Max will think how lucky he is to have got rid of me and ended up with her.
A hot tear slides down my face and I wipe it away, angrily. I can’t fall to pieces. I chose this new life for myself, this ‘adventure’, and I have to stay strong and stand my ground. It’s hard to stay strong, though, when I can’t even stay still. I’m itching so badly I could scream: my hair, my chest, even the soles of my feet feel like they’re being bitten by fleas. Psychosomatic or factually accurate – either way, it’s unbearable. I’m also sweating into the nylon sleeping bag I found folded at the top of the wardrobe – which I thought was the least likely item for the fleas to have made their home in – but I’d do anything for a cotton sheet right now.
Maybe I’m getting whatever virus Bandanna Man is infected with. My immune system is so run down these days that I can get taken out by a toddler’s sniffle at a hundred paces, and he coughed and sneezed for hours into the air that I’m now breathing. I probably have one or two days maximum before I’m walking around with my own twin tissue plugs in my nostrils.