Summerwater by Sarah Moss (top 10 motivational books .txt) 📕

onto a white beach with palm trees and bright water and he’s tied my wrists to the bed. Oh god but it’s colonial though, isn’t it, that one, she shouldn’t be objectifying the places that were red on the map. Gender-based domination is one thing, at least for women, in the privacy of your own head, but the whole Orientalism business is not on. Not that Zanzibar’s in the Orient, obviously, but she knows what she means. Objectification, though how you can have a fantasy without – still, it doesn’t have to have geopolitical implications, does it? Transpose it to the Mediterranean, then. Greece. She went to Greece, once, years ago, same colour scheme as imaginary Zanzibar. Olive trees, sun-bleached marble ruins, a whitewashed house with blue balcony doors open onto sea and sky, scarlet geraniums in terracotta pots. If it’s OK to have a sexual fantasy about a country whose economy collapsed. Not to mention the refugees on the beaches, who will end up in the terrible camps. Like the ones on the American border, she did give money for that, but it’s not money that’s needed, is it, it’s voting, a whole lot of voting and there’s bugger all she can do there. How can anyone— Let’s try a different position, Josh says, come to the edge of the bed, it’s higher than at home.

She wriggles obediently. No point in thinking about those children, not just now, it doesn’t do any good, thinking, but she can’t help imagining if it was her class, the little P1s last year, could barely cope without their mums for a school day. How can anyone – well, people do, don’t they, given the chance, just think about the Holocaust. Well, not now don’t think about the Holocaust, obviously this is not the moment for thinking about the Holocaust. Or any other atrocity, European genocide isn’t more important than anyone else’s. The Middle Passage. The Cultural Revolution. The Khmer Rouge. Oh dear. Is that good, he says, and she says, mm, which is probably true, or would be if she wasn’t thinking about – Don Draper. No, Josh. Why don’t we try thinking about Josh for once, with him actually being here and all. If we’re into islands, how about trying Barra where they’re planning to live after the wedding? Let’s have, hmm, a Scandi-style new-build or old stone, the ones with flagged floors and whitewash? There are a fair few abandoned croft houses, roofs fallen in and grass growing through rusting iron bedframes, crying out for rescue, though Josh says they all belong to someone and people can be funny about selling and anyway you have to do actual crofting which wouldn’t be her scene. A wood-burning stove only there aren’t many trees on Barra and anyway those stoves are terrible for the environment, though you’d think with the wind there the particulates are going to be halfway to Greenland before they get anywhere near your lungs. Not that Greenland needs any more pollution either, the polar bears – anyway, the here and now. A little being in the moment, hmm, you can’t expect a man to give you an orgasm if you keep thinking about particulates and genocides. Josh likes this position because he has a good view, which makes her want to perform a little, though with her legs in the air like this she doesn’t have much purchase.

No, she promised herself when they got engaged that she would never fake again. What kind of basis is that for a lifetime together, lying about the one thing she’ll never do with anyone else? (Never again, not in her whole life, not if she lives to be a hundred? Well, things happen, don’t they, not things you plan, who’s to say?) This does feel good, it wouldn’t be entirely fake, just a little emphasised. Surely you can’t expect to get through what could easily be sixty years – sixty years! – without the odd bit of emphasis, a little storytelling. Mm, she says, ah, but she’s getting cold again and she feels a bit silly laid out like this. No, hold me, she says, let’s try like this, and they move around again. She touches his face, his eyebrow’s arch and the plane of his cheek. His lips kiss her fingers as they pass.

Right, then. OK. So there’s a tall, slim man in a well-cut black suit. Linen, since it’s a summer’s day in – in Italy. Bit fascist, Italy. Oh shut up. White cuffs with cufflinks and tanned wrists and she’s watching his hands on the steering wheel as he drives his posh car up the loops of the mountain road towards his house, and he’s driving fast and he’s locked the doors so she couldn’t get out even if she wanted to and he’s telling her exactly what he’s going to do to her when they arrive, how she’s going to go into the villa and up the curving staircase to his bedroom which has a balcony looking over the terraced hillside and down towards the terracotta roofs of the village and she’s going to take off everything except her underwear and – almost, now, try not to be trying – he expects to find her on the silk sheets, white silk— oh, she hears herself saying, yes. More. Yes. Oh, oh, there. And Josh, ah, he says, ah yes, yes.

Ha, he says, so we did it, yes? Mmhm, she says, still enjoying the aftershocks. She rearranges herself a little. It probably doesn’t really count as thinking about another man if he doesn’t have a face and you haven’t got as far as the décor of his bedroom, let alone taken his clothes off. It’s just a suit, really, a car and maybe a little architecture, and even the car is mostly a steering wheel and gear lever, she couldn’t name the make or anything like that. I knew we could, says Josh, we’ll have to keep practising. Mm,