Chapter Twenty-Five
Twenty-Five
Rat
Calmly, I get up and walk over to the bar.
‘There’s a rat over here,’ I say, pointing towards the corner of the room, where the rat is sitting tranquilly.
She nods, as if entirely unsurprised and unalarmed, and without looking up at me, she asks, ‘Is it wearing a harness?’
‘Yes, actually.’
‘That’s just Maurice. No need to worry about him – he’s had all his vaccinations.’
‘Is he your… pet?’
‘No, he just likes to come and visit the pub sometimes. He’s very sociable.’
‘Should he be roaming around the island alone?’ I ask. It seems like a hostile environment for rats. There are birds of prey here. Big ones. Cats. Humans wielding frying pans.
Nemo already has his nose up to the basket door, fixated by the sight of something so eminently killable.
‘It’s not ideal but he gives his owner the slip sometimes,’ she says, and adds, knowingly, ‘Rats will be rats.’
‘Who is his owner?’ I ask, watching Maurice as he takes a slow walk around Nemo’s basket, sniffing it at opportune intervals.
‘That would be our island’s one celebrity. He spoils that rat something terrible – can’t bear to see him confined, which is probably why Maurice is always giving him the slip.’
‘Celebrity?’
‘Whoops, me and my big mouth. Anyway, it’s in his nature to explore, not just be stuck inside a house all the time.’
‘Who are we talking about,’ I ask. ‘The celebrity or the rat?’
She thinks about this for a moment. ‘Both, if I’m honest. God, he must have seen every country in the world, in his day. He’s something of a legend round here.’
‘Who is it?’
‘Can’t say. We’re all sworn to secrecy. I’m sure you’ll meet him soon enough and he can tell you himself. If he likes you.’
I imagine a gnarled old pirate with a peg-leg and a rat peeking out from beneath his tricorn hat.
‘What shall we do with Maurice in the meantime? Do we need to catch him and take him home?’
‘Oh no, he’ll spend a while here eating up the crumbs and then he’ll find his own way home. We don’t helicopter parent our kids or our pets on Loor.’
I eye Maurice sceptically. He’s climbed up to the windowsill and is washing his face. He’s facing the pane and I have the distinct suspicion that he’s using the old glass as a mirror.
‘While you’re here,’ the barmaid says. ‘How would you feel about folding some napkins?’
‘I’d be delighted,’ I say, turning my back on Maurice. ‘Pass them over.’
Hours drag by, in which I refill the salt cellars, shine the dimpled pint tankards, sweep the floor and a host of other tasks for Cassandra, who turns out to be not a barmaid, but the landlady of the pub. She pays me in cheese sandwiches and ready-salted crisps.
Eventually, after games of chess, Ludo and Triominos with Cassandra, who still won’t reveal anything about the island’s one celebrity, my ride arrives, wearing a double desert camouflage combo: T-shirt and three-quarter-length trousers, which I’ve never seen in a desert print before and can now see why. Billy seems to know this man quite well. They bump fists and laugh riotously about something – probably me, judging by their amused glances in my direction.
As I approach them, I see the man has the striking dark eyes and intense stare of a leading man from a retro Hollywood movie, with that slightly sinister Don Draper vibe. He is what my mum would call, in her classic mum-ish way, ‘distinctly sexy, but too brooding for breeding’.
Cassandra says an abrupt farewell, collects my dirty glass and plate, and disappears into a side room.
I put out my hand in greeting to the new man, and he shakes it.
‘Lindy,’ I say.
‘Lundy? Good island name you have there. Very nice.’
He’s thinking of Lundy Island, ten miles off the coast of Devon.
‘Oh, sorry, it’s actually Lindy.’
He stares at me.
‘I, not u.’
‘Aye,’ he says. ‘I know my name.’
It takes me a second to work out the nature of this miscommunication.
‘Lindy,’ I say. ‘Not Lundy.’
‘Oh. Halloon,’ he replies.
Halloon? Is that how people greet each other here on Loor? I probably should have read up more on the local customs. I’m going to get everything wrong and cause offence – even more than I have already.
‘Halloon,’ I say back, tentatively and he doesn’t react in any strange way, so I obviously haven’t committed a Loor faux pas.
He nods politely, leaving me to carry Nemo, but taking my over-stuffed backpack and suitcase as if they weigh nothing.
There’s nobody around except fishermen, sorting their catch, and the red-haired woman I noticed earlier, who’s leaning on a lamppost by some turquoise electric bikes and looking intently at her phone. Perhaps she has a part-time job somewhere around the harbour. I can’t imagine she’s been looking at her phone while leaning on a lamppost for the past five hours. I must have coincidentally caught her on her breaks each time I passed.
The man motions his head to a cart. It’s not a golf cart as I was expecting – the ones you see in the Isles of Scilly – no, this is a vintage, old-timey cart that clearly belongs in a Dickens novel, a cold family huddled down together in the back, wrapped in threadbare blankets as the rain pours down, the stoic father at the reins.
It’s drawn by a huffing horse; a huge grey and white creature, which a quick glimpse tells me is a male horse.
‘Billy mentioned this is your first time on Loor – is that right?’
‘I think my parents brought me over when I was a toddler, but I can’t really remember it.’
‘Lucky for you, I’ve got an hour I need to kill, so you’re getting the full tour.’
‘The full tour is an hour?’ I say, feeling the first twinges of my bladder. I should have used the loo before leaving the pub, but I didn’t think I needed to go very badly. I do now. I am basically still that toddler.
My eyes go again to the red-haired woman, who has stopped texting and appears to be taking photos on her phone. Perhaps she’s a tourist. Except she seems to be taking a lot of photos in my direction. Surely she can’t be taking stealth shots of me? Perhaps she thinks I’m a famous person, although I can’t imagine which one. Max used to say the thing he liked most about my face was that I didn’t look like anybody he’d ever seen – which I tried to take as a compliment.
‘It only covers the main beauty spots: the places the tourists get their pictures taken and whack up on the internet. I could do you a more in-depth version if I had the whole afternoon, but I don’t.’
‘No worries,’ I say. ‘But it’s very kind of you to offer.’
The man insists on taking a photo of me holding Nemo’s basket at every one of these spots, which include a cliff overlooking the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, a cove with a Victorian seawater pool cut into the rocks and a stream tinkling over the cliff. The music of water is a permanent accompaniment to the stunning views at each of these places and before long, my eyes are watering with the strain.
‘Um, is it okay if we go to my house now, please?’ I say, the protests of my bladder now so insistent that I feel I might actually faint, which would definitely be one solution to my problem, as in that scenario, I would most certainly pee my pants.
‘To your new home, then!’ my tour guide declares, cheerfully.
‘Thanks,’ I say. He still hasn’t told me his name and it feels rude to ask now, the moment for introductions having passed three beauty spots ago. ‘It’s called Rose Cottage.’
‘You know it’s not a real cottage, I suppose?’ he says, cryptically.
What does he mean by this? How is it not a real cottage? What is it then? A Lego cottage? A mirage? A cottage cheese cottage?
‘No, it’s nothing like a real cottage,’ he continues. ‘There’s nothing cottage-like about it at all.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘It’s a beach house covered in that plastic weather-shielding muck they think looks like wood. It’s got loads of bedrooms, all stuffed to the rafters. A bit run down but all right.’
A beach house sounds fabulous – weather-shielding notwithstanding – but I’m not keen on the ‘run down’ and ‘stuffed to the rafters’ part. Is the owner a hoarder? Am I going to have to pick my way around piles of old magazines and island circulars? They haven’t volunteered any photos of their house, and I didn’t like to ask – a decision I might very well regret.
‘Yah,’ he says. And it’s definitely a yah, not a yeah. ‘They all have misleading names on the old site. It used to be white circus tents and beach huts, back when it first started… Did you know that?’
‘No.’
‘Over a hundred years ago that would be. One of them’s called the Castle, one the Summer Palace, one the Abbey. Yours is the smallest but still big enough. It would have to be pretty big, what with the operation they have going in there.’
‘Operation?’ I say, really not liking the sound of this.
Are they secretly growing marijuana in there – taking advantage of the Loor climate, or using hydroponics? Is it a moonshine booze-smuggling operation in the vein of an Enid Blyton gang, determined to get around the demands of Customs with clever use of stills and a speedboat?
He smiles. Somehow, and I’m not sure exactly how, but I feel as if he’s playing a joke on me that I don’t understand.
‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ I say, trying to smooth down my hair, which has expanded in volume quite considerably since I arrived on the island, thanks to the humidity of the air. ‘More than adequate for my needs.’
He raises an eyebrow, pondering this.
‘I don’t mean to pry, but you know they have unusual animals in there, do you?’
‘I do know that, yes. I have a list of very detailed instructions for their care.’
‘You’re not squeamish?’
‘Not particularly, no.’
‘Well, I’m not one to judge. Folks can do what they like, so long as they take the proper precautions, and nothing’s released that shouldn’t be onto the island. Very delicate ecosystem we have here.’
Again with the ecosystem. Am I going to be made to feel bad walking down a path, because of the erosion caused by my shoes?
‘Radigon, Goodithea and the like aren’t too happy,’ he continues, ‘but a lot of that’s prejudice, pure and simple. They like to wind each other up at Yoga Lates.’
This is a confusing speech.
‘Yoga Lates?’ I ask. What is that? Yoga for latecomers? Late bloomers? The recently deceased?
He taps himself on the head. ‘Ah, I said it wrong again. It’s yoga crossed with the other one the ladies do. Pilates.’
‘Oh, right, yogalates,’ I say. ‘That makes sense.’
‘All the women go to that, even if they’re just watching. It’s on just after Knit and Natt, you see. And the women do like to talk, especially about anything a bit, well, controversial. Like a young woman coming to live on her own. We expected it to be a man, you see. Or a married couple, at least.’
What is remotely controversial about any of this? I know this is a small community but surely they’re not shocked by a woman living by herself?
‘Like I said, there’s a lot of prejudice,’ he says, with a sigh. ‘People fear what they don’t understand: always have and always will.’
He smiles inscrutably. The merest hint of amusement around the corners of his mouth.
‘Is it okay if we leave now? I’m bursting for a pee.’
‘You should have said. You could have gone behind a hedge.’
He helps me up into the seat at the back of the cart, stows Nemo’s basket at my feet and then gives me a long, appraising look.
‘Sure you’re ready for this?’ he says, climbing up to the driver’s seat and taking the reins.
‘I’m ready,’ I say, as he clicks to the horse.
But it turns out, I am really, really not.