Summerwater Sarah Moss (microsoft ebook reader txt) 📖

left some in that cupboard and it is the sort of thing people do leave in the cupboards of holiday cottages, but no, there isn’t any and that handle really is sticky, how has she not noticed that before? She cleans the handle, and then while she’s about it, while she has the spray and the cloth in her hand, the other handles, and the oven door, and the kettle boiled a while ago and she’s not supposed to be cleaning.

Claire makes two cups of tea, in the biggest mugs she can find which are still annoyingly small and also tartan, not really what she’d call a proper cup of tea. She leaves them on the counter while she puts on her flowery waterproof mac-in-a-bag and the clashing flowery wellies that Izzie chose for her last birthday and then she goes out, sets the tea on the step where rain falls in it while she closes the front door, and carries the cups carefully over the gravel and grass and rocks down towards the shore. There’s no one else out and you can see why, only with small children is it more fun to be out in this weather than inside with a book and a cup of tea, but if all the neighbours are indoors there are watchers at every window. There’s that other English family, they’re saying, did I tell you now he’s a teacher in Edinburgh? Aye, it’s full of English these days, can’t stand their own country any more. You’d tell a mile off, wouldn’t you, him in that green jacket and all. Her feet slide around in her purple tulip wellies, need an extra pair of socks really, and she can feel the stones through the soles and the rain on her face, coming through her hair already. Three more days to go, she thinks, and they won’t come back here. The loch, maybe. Well, probably, it’s hard to avoid if you’re driving north of Glasgow and they’ve all Scotland to explore these coming years, but not here. They’ve seen it now, no need to come again, and bubbles of relief rise in her head. Home soon, back to the flat with its wooden floors and the lovely old plasterwork even if it does need repainting, and the high ceilings. She’s got used to living with all that airspace now, when they first moved in she felt exposed, dizzy, as if something might swoop down on her while she played on the floor with Izzie or lay in her own bed but now she’s hemmed in when there’s no headroom. The stones hurt her feet through the rubber soles. Rain mists her glasses. No, they won’t come back here.

Patrick sees her first, and his excitement makes Jon turn and Izzie wave so hard she almost loses her balance in the water. Mummy, she says, Mummy, look, and Jon, Patrick in one arm and takes the tea in the other hand, gives her a kiss on the cheek. Pat lurches, casts himself onto the air between his parents, spills his father’s tea. They won’t always love her this much, she thinks, holding her son, no one else, not even her children’s future selves, will ever be so pleased to see her coming as they are today.

the weight of water

The light is as it was this morning. These midsummer days move too slowly to see, especially with the curtains of rain and cloud closed upon the woods and shore. Huddled in a hazel bush, a short-eared owl waits, unseen. If it does not hunt soon it will die but if it flies now the weight of water will drag it to the ground where dusk will bring harm: foxes, humans and still nothing to eat. A vole now, even a pipit or sparrow, would buy the owl more hours of life, more time for the rain to stop.

once there stood

SHE CAN’T FIND it.

There’s always one in her drawing bag, kicking around with the paper pad and the pencil case, and usually another in the box, but today there isn’t. She must have had one in the café, mustn’t she, she can’t have made that whole sketch without. Probably. Try to use it less, Annie says in the weekly group, just draw what you see the way you see it, don’t be always correcting and second-guessing yourself. It’s funny how you can’t avoid taking art lessons personally.

You’d think that maybe people, the over-fifty-fives, would paint with their unconsciousnesses, their repressed selves or what have you. You’d think, or maybe hope, that the quiet wives in pastel jumpers and beige make-up would splash scarlet and crimson and slash black lines, that the ones in long skirts and flat shoes would betray a passion for order in neat little pencil sketches, and perhaps that the two men – chinos under eight-month bellies – would show a turn for raging dancers and stormy skies. People do, sometimes, betray the wildness they carry in their heads. The older she is, the more she thinks everyone’s at it, because it turns out that being a little old lady doesn’t stop you wanting to bash the panels of cars parked on the pavement with your umbrella and snatch and stamp on the phones of people having loud conversations on the bus. Quite recently at the supermarket Mary was in the queue behind a lass who was expecting, she’d asked when the bairn was due, just touched the bump, so round and taut, and the lass told her where to go in terms she’s not going to repeat and then started crying, right there by the cereal bars, and though she was shocked and upset Mary also felt a wee surge of admiration. It’s cheering, somehow, when it’s the unlikely people quietly amok, Sheila Hepton up the road, mother of three boys and kept the house so neat you didn’t want to sit down for fear of squashing a