Summerwater Sarah Moss (microsoft ebook reader txt) 📖

just not quite falling over? And they have this amazing confidence or drive or something, to keep getting up and trying again? When do we lose that, do you think, where does it go? He tries to remember if he’s ever seen a baby learning to walk. I suppose they have to, he says, evolution wouldn’t favour someone who fell over and just packed in the whole walking idea. Mothers would, though, she says. You wouldn’t just leave your baby lying there for the next woolly mammoth. I don’t think woolly mammoths eat babies, he says, wondering what on earth they’re talking about. She wanders across the room, picks up one of Mum’s china swan ornaments from the sideboard, turns it over. Just put your coat on and go for a walk, he thinks. Borrow a kayak. Do some of your yoga. He likes watching her do yoga, the seriousness of her face, the way she moves. You can tell she used to dance. She puts the swan down and goes back to the window. It’s still not getting dark out there. Do you think everyone else is looking out of their windows too, she says, do you think we’re all watching the rain? He stirs his veg, adds the garlic – took him years to learn not to put it in until the other stuff’s nearly cooked – hopes a tin of the good Italian tomatoes will save the day. Maybe they’re all having sex, he says, maybe they’re all taking excellent drugs. Before the party. Sit down, he says, put your feet up, let me bring you some of those nuts and your magazine. I’ve hardly had my feet down today, she says, tomorrow we’ll go out, yes, whatever the weather? Sure, he says, of course, we need food anyway. Tomorrow, I promise. And they will, he thinks, drive down past the scattered houses to the village but she’ll want to go on to the town where the trains bring the scent of the city, and where there’s a proper supermarket whose strip lighting will shine on the tenderness of these last few days and erase it, whose shoppers will notice the lift of her hair and the shape of her in her jeans and her amazing eyelashes. Which is all fine, of course, they can’t hide here for ever, he knows that. He does.

flights begin

Bats rouse earlier on these grey days. All day they have been hanging from the rafters of the old barn like pears on a tree. The first one flaps into wakefulness and then there’s an outbreak of life, an explosion of fluttering. Utterances too high for human hearing pierce the air, bounce off the old stone walls and the undersides of the slate roof. Flights begin, fast as falling, but as the bats start to trickle out into the dimming sky, their high notes are returned by raindrops. Midges will blossom when the rain stops. Moths will turn to the moon when the clouds clear, but for now, there is nothing to eat.

shadow people

IZZIE CAN’T SLEEP. Daddy came and said good night to her hours and hours ago and then she heard them putting Pat to bed, which isn’t fair because he’s four and a half years younger than her. Mum sang the song she used to sing for Izzie, hó-bhan, hó-bhan, Goiridh òg O, I lost my darling baby-o. I saw the trace of the swan on the lake, but not a sign of baby-o. But Mum didn’t add Izzie’s special verse about finding the darling baby-o which means that in Izzie’s mind and maybe in Pat’s dreams the baby is still lost, lying out there beyond the track of the wee brown otter and the mountain mist. There’s still talking through the wall but it’s starting to get dark outside and soon they’ll go to bed too and Izzie will be the only person awake, the only one to know if a bad thing happens, and it almost is a bad thing, when the grown-ups go to sleep, especially with the doors shut. She didn’t mind at first, when it was still light. I’m just closing it so we don’t disturb you, Daddy said, sleep tight, be bright, night night gorgeous girl.

Izzie pushes back the duvet, which is too hot anyway, kneels up on the bed and unhooks the cord for the blind. You can’t leave cords dangling because babies put their heads through them and die, but Izzie knows how to undo it and wind it back up again so that if Pat comes in here and somehow gets onto her bed he can’t die, or at least not from the cord although he could still fall off and bang his head. Babies have big heads and weak necks so you have to be very careful with a baby’s head. She tries the wrong cord first, makes the blind tilt instead, and then pulls gently and steadily so it slides up, and the strips rattle a little but with the door closed Mummy and Daddy won’t hear. She doesn’t want it too far up, not so that someone outside would think it was open, or see her looking out, because there are people outside. There’s the big girl from the cabin next door who stays up much later than Izzie, a girl who’s allowed to scuffle about on her pink bike with streamers some days until it’s properly dark and sometimes she sees Izzie and waves and smiles, but she probably won’t be out in this rain. But there’s someone else, in the woods, someone who comes most days and stands in the shadows at dusk. He sometimes seems to look this way but Izzie always ducks and she doesn’t think he’s seen her.

She sits back on her heels and rests her chin on her hands on the windowsill, so that her eyes are level with the opening. He’s not there yet. She can’t