Dan shakes his head.
‘I thought you were a vegetarian and didn’t eat processed foods?’ he says, looking adorably confused.
India feels the automatic pull deep inside her. Helistened.
‘I can’t date you,’ she says fiercely.
‘I … I … don’t want you to,’ he says, entirely taken aback.
Dan realises that India has a wild glint in her eyes and he feels a hint of nervousness.
‘Are you feeling OK?’ he asks. ‘Do you want to go back?’
‘No, I want to keep walking. Can we go via a shop? I think a Coke will help.’
India decides that exercising this stupid feeling will – ha! – exorcise it.
She will walk all over this damned island twice if she can stop thinking about how stupid she’s been.
She plans to tell her mother off for all the unicorn claptrap.
But then, India is thirty-four. Old enough to know better.
The unicorn thing must be something India loved, an idea that played into her own hopes and desires.
‘I like the Sanskrit idea that one is given lessons, and that they will be repeated until we have learned them,’ Rose had said the previous evening on the beach.
‘I’m a bit woolly about Sanskrit,’ India had said carefully to Dianne, sitting beside her, perched high on a lumbar-support cushion.
‘It’s a very ancient language in India. It’s Hindu, I think.’
‘The answers lie inside you,’ Rose had gone on.
India now thinks that she’s spent far too long worrying about her outside and clearly not enough time on the inside.That’s all about to change, she thinks grimly.
They set off again in a slightly different direction after Dan has consulted his small map.
‘Do you want to see?’ he asks, holding it out to her.
‘Nope,’ says India, voice firm.
Rule five: always be interested in your man.
‘OK,’ he says.
Yes, definitely something up but he is not asking what.
Asking women what’s wrong with them never, ever works out well.
‘Do you want me to go first,’ Dan asks brightly, ‘or do you want to lead so we’ll go at your pace?’
‘I’ll lead,’ India says, striding off. ‘You tell me left or right.’
She stomps along, feeling crosser all the time as her past unravels in front of her.
She trips on a piece of gorse and only manages to stop falling because Dan reaches out and grabs her elbow.
‘You OK?’ he asks.
