Summerwater Sarah Moss (microsoft ebook reader txt) 📖

can jump and she’s not scared of landing on the rock, nor really of the water: if she falls in she’ll just have to go back to the lodge and change her clothes, which has happened before and will happen again, and Mum gets upset about what she thinks could have happened and Dad thinks it’s funny. She’s got guts, Lola, Dad says, no one’s going to bully her, see, Jack?

Lola climbs the rock, hooks the swing with a stick, grabs the rope as it begins to escape, and takes to the air, landing neatly with her bum on the branch from which years of bottoms have worn the bark. She crosses her ankles and leans back, lets her hair swoop low over the waves. She’s flying over the dark water in the rain, spread on the air, her feet and her belly and her head passing through different spaces at the same time. She could keep going, could follow her trajectory far across the water before she would tumble and, as she entered the water, ears and hair slick back, elbows fold, legs fuse, glide and turn, become a seal, and she would swoop the loch, would rise and eye the cars and lorries storming north, dip and drift to the island. The seals in the zoo have a pool with glass walls and she’s watched them swim, like underwater flying, gliding on currents the way a seagull wheels and coasts on the wind. Sometimes she doesn’t much want to be a girl, stuck on land. Back over solid ground, Lola takes her weight on her hands, parts her legs to release the branch and drops at just the right moment, lands on her feet like a gymnast after backflips.

There’s a girl on the bank, watching.

She’s about Lola’s age. She doesn’t have the right clothes. No such thing as bad weather, Dad says, only bad kit, though Auntie Sue said once that Dad’s preferred kit seemed to be a pub and a pint. The girl’s wearing shiny shoes with straps and buckles and pink flowers on them, white tights and a denim skirt – denim’s terrible in the rain, holds water like nobody’s business, you can tell who shouldn’t be on the hills because they’re wearing jeans, and her coat is the sort that darkens in water. Can I have a go, says the girl, and Lola shrugs. It’s a free country, Dad would say. Take turns, Lola says, I haven’t finished. And my brother might want a go. I saw him, says the girl, in the trees. She comes down to the rock and realises she can’t reach the swing. He pretended to shoot me, she says. Lola shrugs again.

The girl casts around and then picks up the stick and pulls in the swing. She jumps onto it well enough, better than Jack, but she clings to the rope and holds herself upright as she flies. Witch on a broomstick, Lola thinks. The girl has black hair and dark eyes. She tucks her feet up under her, makes herself as small as possible. She doesn’t like to fly. If you ever got Mum on a swing, she’d probably hold on just like that. The girl swings in over the beach and back out over the water, scrunched up. In again, and Lola feels her face beginning to smile because she knows exactly what’s going to happen. This time the swing crosses the water’s edge, but only just. Out, back, still a pendulum but now swinging only over the loch. Lola steps up onto a flat rock, for a better view, and folds her arms.

You can see the girl realising what has happened. Her shoulders clench. She becomes even smaller. She wouldn’t, in Lola’s view, have had to be especially bright to see that a swing hanging over the water before you get on it is going to be hanging over the water when it stops. I can’t get down, she calls. Lola nods, although the girl, twisting on her rope, can’t see her. I can’t get down, she shouts again.

Lola glances round. Jack is standing in front of the trees, watching, his weapon held now across his body, as they’ve seen the police sometimes in city centres and at train stations nurse their machine-guns.

Can you help me, shouts the girl.

Lola can, of course. Easily.

She thinks she probably won’t, this time.

What’s your name, Lola asks. The girl twists herself, trying to face Lola, but she has no purchase on the air. Violetta, she says. I’m Violetta.

Violetta, says Lola. Violetta who? The girl says some syllables. Shit-chenko, says Lola, Violetta Shit-chenko? Shevchenko, says the girl, Shevchenko.

She spins the other way, drooping now, her feet hanging down over the water. Her hood has slipped off her head and the black hair is beginning to smear her face, to drip from its points. The front of the denim skirt, hitched up around Violetta’s thighs, is dark with rain.

Please would you pull the swing in, she says. Maybe, Lola says, in a bit. Where are you from? Glasgow, says the girl, aren’t you?

Lola looks at Jack, tips her head, and for once he gets the message and raises his gun, takes aim. It’s none of your business where I’m from, Lola says, I’m asking the questions here. So, where you really from, Violetta Shit-chenko? Somewhere people scream and yell like baboons all night and keep everyone awake with their so-called music? Somewhere people don’t know how to behave? I bet you’ve never been on a holiday before, have you. We heard you, you know. My dad heard you. He was talking about it. He was thinking – Lola sighs – he was thinking of calling the police, actually. Because it’s not fair, is it, one lot of horrible baboons keeping all the babies and old folk awake all night, ruining everyone’s holidays.

Lola jumps off the rock and takes a little turn along the beach, ending at the edge of the water near Violetta.