Lottie took a lock of my hair and curled the pink bit round her finger. ‘We could look at younger ones.’

‘No. It’s really all right.’ I pointed. ‘Jesus.’ Tall, blue eyes (both of them). Openly admit that im not perfect (what man is?)

‘There’s no one at uni, then?’

‘Hell, no. They’re shitheads. Look at him.’ Im hot as Im close to the sun. But will I melt! Nothing ventured nothing gained …

‘All of them?’

‘All of them.’

I thought about Jim winding that string round and round his hand, a dark cuff of hair on his wrist, and wondered what his profile would say. It was probably up there on bagyourselfawildman.com. Monosyllabic glower-machine, likes gutting fish and not saying very much. Looking for woman – man? dog? – to accompany brooding silences and bird dissection.

‘And how’s Fraser?’

‘Fine.’

I couldn’t work him out. He’d made me hold that disgusting lobster for a laugh, I swear – did he laugh, properly? Was that a thing he could do? – or maybe to test me. Little did he know that I had a penchant for trying out new things. Normally they involved hallucinogens or extremely bad fashion decisions – stonewashed denim-print jeggings, I salute you – but hey. He wasn’t going to scare me off that easily.

‘Everything’s all right with you two? I thought maybe …’

‘It’s all fine.’

He was pretty dark, for sure, and had all the conversational skills of a brick wall, but – that last bit. In the jeep. He’d meant that he hadn’t hated me being there. I think. It made me want to dig away at him. Just a bit. A toe in the mud.

‘I know this isn’t your ideal holiday.’ Lottie looked at the screen again. ‘Oh dear.’

Ordinary Guy looking for an Ordinary Woman who is’nt full of herself or is’nt looking for the earth. Don’t want to waste my time, or your’s, loking for full relationship and all that comes with it.

They really needed punctuation Nazis on these things.

8

Baked beans. The locals obviously existed on a diet of baked beans, mustard, spaghetti hoops and sausages, because the shop didn’t sell much else. It wasn’t exactly the gourmet deli-come-artisan-bakery-come-organic-greengrocer I’d had in my head before we got up here. My favourite shop at uni was the Asian supermarket, where Lena and I would go to pick up sheets of seaweed to make sushi with, or shrunken dried plums to put in hot water with lemon, or knobbly mushrooms I faintly hoped would be magic. Lena – before she found out about chip-van-gate, before she pushed me against a wall and said you fucked him – would buy bamboo leaves and show me how to make killer rice dumplings and we’d stuff our faces with the lot.

Definitely no bubble tea or miso paste or ready-made pho here. I trailed my fingers along each shelf, collected every vegetable that didn’t resemble a dying balloon and tried to think what they’d do on Masterchef if they were armed with a crap oven and really blunt kitchen knives.