Chapter Three
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.
I squint down the river in both directions, trying to pick out his figure. It’s low tide and there are lots of mudlarks at work. This stretch of the river is on his usual patch, so Max could be any one of them.
So close and yet so far. I could go down there, keep walking until I found him, surprise him with cannoli and coffee. That’s the sort of thing a good girlfriend would do. But that would make me seriously late back with Scotty’s order. He’d hand me a cardboard box and ask me to clear my desk right there and then. It’s not like I could even plead a long queue. I’d be ankle-deep in squelching Thames mud, and even if I rubbed off the worst of it with paper napkins so that he didn’t see it on my Chelsea boots, he’d smell it. God, how he would smell that mud.
Even so, my heart tethers are twitching for Max. I don’t always tell him what he means to me and maybe I’ve been taking him for granted. After three years together, it’s naturally going to be hard to keep the magic alive. The passion. The interest.
Which is why, two days ago, I finally made the purchase I’ve been agonising over for months. He doesn’t have the right kind of mudlark permit to use a metal detector on the Thames foreshore, but he’s been making noises about wanting to go metal detecting in Norfolk, perhaps getting lucky and finding some Celtic or Roman coins that would set his YouTube channel ablaze. So, I did it. I made the grand gesture. Even though I can’t afford it, I went on eBay and bought a second-hand machine: an XP Deus 2 – used only a handful of times and in perfect working order. A snip at only three-fifths of the retail price, but still many hundreds of pounds that I should not have put on my credit card. I’ve never done any kind of grand gesture for Max before, or for anyone, in fact, and I don’t know why I have now.
Yes, I do: deep down, I’ve sensed I’m failing at my relationship, as well as my job.
My mum’s cheery voice rings in my head…
Lindy, don’t focus on the negative; think about the positive. You have enough. You are enough. Whatever happens, be satisfied.
Be satisfied. That’s all very well and good coming from my mother – who is the most naturally cheerful person on the planet, and the most at peace with herself. It’s easy for her because she found her great love at the age of seventeen and she and my father are still wrapped up in passion for each other twenty-seven years later. They still go on sunshiny picnics. My dad makes his homemade pasties and elderflower cordial, and my mum makes the cakes. They have a special yellow blanket and matching melamine cups. They read long-cherished passages of poetry to each other and take literal snoozes in wildflower meadows. How can anyone’s relationship compare well to that?
When I make it to the coffee stand, there’s a huge queue, at least twenty people deep, and I open my YouTube app, just to take a quick glance at Max’s channel, in case he’s posted any teasers for the next episode. I know I shouldn’t, because I’m technically working, which means I’m on ‘Scotty time’ as he likes to tell me every day, but I can’t resist.
Huh. Max is live streaming right now.