Chapter Seventy-Three
Seventy-Three
Posy
I have to look. Fighting it is just making me depressed. Plus, I want to see Max, hear his voice. I know I’m just twisting the knife in my own back; this internet surveillance won’t hurt him, it’ll only hurt me. But I have to do it anyway.
I click on his channel and see that he’s posted a video from Detectorville – an Oxfordshire jamboree for metal-detecting enthusiasts – hundreds of them – who pay to detect new fields during the day, and get drunk in the beer marquee in the evening, before stumbling back to their two-man tents.
In the preview, he’s hinted at some extraordinary find and actually used the word ‘treasure’.
I flick my eyes down to the comments and see numerous repetitions of another word: Congratulations.
He must’ve found gold. Nothing gets detectorists excited like gold. Most of them even have a special dance up their sleeve for the occasion. Max does a ‘mudlark moonwalk’ whenever he finds anything good. Which is hard, on a foreshore full of bricks and divots. But he tries.
I watch the episode, scrolling forward every time he finds something that isn’t the treasure. And then he gets to it.
He pulls something out of a clod of earth. It’s a finger ring, yellow as egg yolk. It’s old, the purest gold, with a dark-purple stone worked into a rudimentary, slightly wonky setting.
Even more importantly that this, it is inscribed. Personalised finds are always the most special, the most coveted by detectorists, and this ring is inscribed with the words, Alas for fayte.
This is treasure, the very best kind – a posy ring – and Max is moonwalking harder than he’s moonwalked in his whole life. Then he’s lying on the ground and filming the sky, breathlessly taking the viewer through the specifics of the rarity and potential historical value of this coin.
When he’s finally calm enough to speak normally, he sits up and films a woman running towards him. He dislodges his camera from his chest harness and passes it to another friend behind him with the instruction to, ‘Please film this.’
The woman is Greta. Of course it is. I watch, transfixed, as he lifts her up and spins her round.
Then, he kisses her passionately and drops to one knee.
‘Will you marry me?’ he says, holding up the priceless, mud-encrusted artefact.
‘Oh my god, yes!’ she squeals, sliding the ring onto her finger.
A perfect fit. Just like them.
Alas for fate indeed.
The filmer pans around and a dozen other detectorists are whooping and hollering congratulations. This is, without doubt, the best moment of Max’s life.
I click off the video and rub my eyes.
I could have gone my whole life without watching my ex-boyfriend get engaged to Greta Honeycake, but no, I had to keep watching, I had to put myself through it, even when I knew which way it was going, and that I would never be able to erase this memory from my mind.
I can feel tears sliding down my cheeks and I don’t want them to. Max and I were never right for each other, and I think deep down I always knew that, but this still hurts. Four words come burning into my brain.
Max is gone forever.