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‘And be nice to your brother, it’s not his fault I asked him to wake you.’

Rory laughs to himself as our mum heads back downstairs.

The smell of roast potatoes and gravy drifts up from the kitchen, making my stomach turn and rumble at the same time.

‘Do you have to start this shit so early in the morning?’ I ask him.

My darling brother repeats every word I just said in a voice that I imagine is supposed to be my own. For some reason, he sounds like a cockney geezer though, and I do not.

‘Where has your Yorkshire accent gone?’ he jokes accusingly.

‘It’s right here, telling you to piss off,’ I reply. ‘Seriously, Rory, I’m not feeling well, can you leave me alone?’

‘Sorry,’ he says, sounding sincere enough, but then he grabs a pen and starts drawing a dick on one of my posters.

I lie back down, my head hitting the pillow a little harder than I had planned, because there’s absolutely no point trying to stop him.

‘What do you want, Rory?’ I ask, assuming he’s here for a reason, not just to annoy me.

‘Mum asked me to wake you when lunch is ready.’

‘Then why don’t you do that,’ I reply.

‘Erm, I am,’ he says with a laugh.

I grab my phone from next to my bed to check the time.

‘Oh my God, it’s half two! Why didn’t anyone wake me?’

‘Hey, I tried. Nine, by the way.’

‘What?’ I reply.

‘Nine. That’s how many of those stones I had to throw at you before you woke up.’

I roll my eyes.

‘Technically I was already awake when you threw the last one.’

‘Yeah, so I didn’t count that one. Come on, you know me better than that.’

I can’t help but laugh.

‘You are a ridiculous person,’ I tell him.

‘And you’re clearly having some kind of quarter-life crisis,’ he replies. ‘Because look at that hair!’

I touch my brown money pieces defensively – the more I look at them, the more I actually quite like them.

I’m a little tetchy today, sure, although Rory does annoy me at the best of times. The reason I’m a little irritable is because I’m kicking myself. Last night, after I was freed from the toilets, and Mel and Angie took me into the function room, all I could think about was the mysterious Mr L, but by the time I went back into the main room of the pub to find him, he was nowhere to be seen. Mel obviously didn’t recognise him, because she never said anything when she saw him – I don’t even think she looked at him – and believe me when I say that I walked multiple laps of the pub, looking for him, including returning to the toilets, but there was no sign of him. Maybe he only came in because of the colder weather and cosy pub atmosphere. Maybe he lives somewhere else and was only visiting Marram Bay for the weekend. Hopefully it’s his local, and I’ll see him the next time I go in, but even so, I’m annoyed at myself. I mean, come on, I thought to kiss him before it occurred to me to ask him what his name was.

‘Get out of my room, I need to put clothes on,’ I tell Rory.

‘Okay, but if I were you, I’d dress nice,’ he warns me.

‘Why, do we have company?’

‘No,’ Rory replies, totally straight-faced. ‘You just look like shit.’