Summerwater Sarah Moss (microsoft ebook reader txt) 📖

know about. Lola likes lighters, the way you just flick with your thumb and there’s a real live flame right there in your hand and you think it will burn you but it doesn’t. There’s a bit of a wheeze when she breathes out but often when she runs the breathing gets easier so she sets off fast down the path to the shore, hurdles over the boulders in the grass and leaps off the edge of the field to catch the small rope swing. It’s always been there, ever since they started coming here when Jack was a baby, and every year Dad comes and tests it before they’re allowed down here on their own. At the furthest point, she whoops as if it were a much bigger swing and a much bigger drop than it is, and lands in a heap on the stones. Jack’s watching from the grass. Lola gets up as if it doesn’t hurt. I can do that, he says. Go on then, she says, but instead he uses the rope as a handhold while his feet slither down the bank.

Lola goes to stand in the water in her wellies. She likes the way your feet can feel the whole loch around them but they’re not wet. She looks at the waves patting her ankles and raises her gaze slowly, making a line over the ripples – like chocolate on a biscuit – right out between the islands to the other side, where there’s the road and people going places, and then the bottoms of the hills before the cloud cuts them off. Lola and Jack haven’t been anywhere for days, not since the beginning of the week. We’ll make some trips later, Mum says, we don’t want to be driving all the way back down the road before we need to and we’ve plenty of food. Mum doesn’t like the single-track roads, can’t see how Dad can know there’s nothing coming the other way when you can’t see round the bends. Lola balances on one foot and kicks the water with the other, watching the shapes of droplets in the air. Jack’s found a stick and is aiming it at the trees and staggering at the recoil.

Wet feet. Oh well, not very wet. She watches the drips bead on her thick socks before they begin to sink in and darken the blue, and then she bends down to dabble her hands. She likes the way it looks as if your fingers bend at a funny angle at the water’s surface. In summer – well, it is summer, on sunny days, she means – sometimes there are little brown fish, and if you stand still for long enough they’ll come and nibble at your feet and fingers, their mouths so small you’re not even sure if you can feel it or not. You have to close your eyes to work out if you’d know they were there if you couldn’t see them and it’s still hard to tell. Lola likes experimenting with the five senses and what people think is there and what they can be persuaded might be there. It’s easy to imagine touch, people are always feeling a little push from what’s not there and you only have to mention insects, fleas or midges, to raise bites. Seeing is pretty reliable, though in the dark sometimes you can make people see movements of things that don’t exist. Or in the woods, especially near that place where Dad says people were buried. What was that, she says, over there, something moved, did you not see. She can make Jack hear things that aren’t there if she talks about them after Dad’s said goodnight and shut the door. There’s a scratchy noise, she says, like claws, and at first he says he can’t hear anything but after a while she can call werewolves and zombies to the window, or even under the bed. His bed. She stands up. Her coat’s dipped in the water at the front and she can feel it through her leggings. Smell is pretty easy. Farts, or even gas; she made Mum call the gas board one day, insisting there was a smell until everyone else smelt it too and Mum was going round unplugging everything because she thought the toaster or something might just turn itself on and start a fire. That was pretty funny.

Jack is still busy with woodland warfare, not even looking at the loch. She splashes back to the shore. Dad can make stones skim way across the water, twenty times sometimes, and he’s taught her too but she’s not that good. She picks one up and throws it as far out as she can, but after a promising swoop it tumbles and lands over where she was standing before. She’d like to watch a stone falling through water. Does it wobble and glide, like paper in air? One day she will go diving, will take the seals’ eye view of wavering plants and sleeping fish. She’s seen people diving from boats and coming up encased like astronauts in helmets and bodysuits. Rain wouldn’t matter, for diving. She throws another stone, a more pointed one that goes a bit further. She’s not going to go back yet, Mum’s probably worrying but then she shouldn’t have sent them out, should she, and if she wants them back she’ll just have to come out and find them like a normal person. Though the water on Lola’s coat is now soaking her legs. She shivers, runs unevenly over the stones in her wellies to the big rope swing, the one Mum doesn’t like. Jack’s scared of it too. You have to lean right over the water to pull it back and then jump from a rock. You fly out over the loch and if you don’t keep it moving after two or three swings you find yourself dangling over the loch with no foothold to get airborne again, but Lola