Summerwater Sarah Moss (microsoft ebook reader txt) 📖

roughness of their uncombed hair. There’ll be small bare feet on that carpet, small morning erections in dinosaur pyjamas. She’ll just go to that bay ahead, where the loch laps boulders and tree-roots under the fog, a tenderness between water and land that’s almost a beach, and she’ll pause there, a moment’s triumph before she turns back.

And she does pause and she does rest, inhales the morning through the rain, is still, lets water drip from her hair and her top. Here she is, under this mountain, beside this loch. Here, now.

She sets off again before her muscles cool, before the body’s equations change again, back up the hill, under the trees, along the shore. There is a hiker, and another two, mummified in waterproof coats and trousers and gaiters, their rucksacks wrapped in tarpaulin. Just run, she thinks, take it all off and run, and she’s at the top of the hill above the car park when it happens again. Does it feel like a fish in your chest, the doctor said, patients often say it’s like a fish flopping. A bit, she’d said, watching him hold the probe on the bones above her breast the way they’d held it on her belly for the babies, thinking more like a bird, really, a flutter, a brush, nothing to worry about, nothing worth bothering the doctor for if she hadn’t collapsed at the top of the stairs at work. Turned out to be nothing, she said later, to Steve and to HR and to her mum, after the ambulance and the oxygen and the ECG. Nothing at all, I’d run that morning and not got round to breakfast, I’ve always been a fainter, remember when I was carrying Noah? No reason to stop running, one funny turn.

It’s more than a wingbeat this time, as she splashes through the brown puddle that now covers the whole width of the path. More, she thinks, grinning at the menagerie now imagined in her ribcage, at the entire damn food chain gathered in the chambers of her heart, more like a small mammal, something with hurrying feet. Smaller than a hare. A vole, doctor there’s a vole in my upper ventricle. One of these days, she thinks, one of these days, girl, and she pulls off her wet vest, balls it in her hand, picks up the pace, races bare-bellied in the rain past the tent and through the trees and around the barriers at the top of the holiday park, past the bicycles and the blue gas cylinders and the limp laundry and the old man sitting again at his open French windows with a cup of tea. Safety first, the consultant said, there in an overheated pink room with the machines resting between patients, we must think of your kids, they need their mum, don’t they, I’m afraid I must say there’s to be no more running. And if you really won’t take my advice at the very least don’t go far, don’t push yourself, don’t ever run alone.

But what’s another person supposed to do, if her heart stops? How would it help, to have a witness?

the days of the first plants

Here is the Highland Boundary Fault, 420 million years ago the dividing line between mountains and plains, when the rocks that are now Scotland lay south of the equator. The sandstone to the south was made by seasonal rivers carrying sand and pebbles down from the mountains in the days of the first plants.

Was that water brown with the sediment, did it foam?

Have the sounds of rivers changed in all those millennia?

What was the riverbed, before the bedrock?

The land under our feet, far under our feet, beneath our buildings, roads, pipes, subway systems, mines and even our fracking; under the valleys, the deepest lakes and the abysses of the ocean floor, is always shifting, forming, changing state. We write on the surface but the surface moves.

Here: to the north, the Dalradian Supergroup, ancient Precambrian metamorphic rock.

To the south, Devonian sedimentary rock, early and late, imprinted by the bodies of primitive plants.

In the beginning was earth and fire. Was there here, then? Was Scotland?

Should the history of bedrock comfort us, in geological time?

the opposite of dancing

ALL THOSE YEARS of getting up and leaving the house before anyone else was awake, David knows how to leave so no one hears. He’d leave his best self haunting its rightful place beside her while his sneaking self, his doctor self, slithered down the stairs and into the kitchen, eased the door shut and didn’t turn the radio on – though he’d have liked the news – while he made coffee and toast, read the day’s allotted portion of the weekend paper. Earl Grey in the tea-strainer with the dodgy clasp, dash of milk in the china mug with the violets on it he gave her years ago, not too full because the last thing he did before putting on his shoes and jacket, picking up his briefcase and leaving, was to go back upstairs with the tea and say, Mary, Mary love, I’m off, have a good day. It had to do a fair bit of work, that cup of tea: when the kids were small he’d go days without seeing them awake and there weren’t always weekends either. Now he makes the tea when she wakes and not before.

*

It’s harder in the lodge than at home, to leave her in peace, but he’s had enough practice, and if he sometimes suspects she’s faking her sleep, just doesn’t want to deal with him and the day quite yet, is hoping to pick up her book for a few minutes once he’s out of the way, he doesn’t say so. Isn’t that what he’s after too, a stolen hour’s solitude? There are moments in his retirement that seem to be the opposite of dancing, a daily game of hide and seek in which the unspeakable objective is to avoid the