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

she says, well, there’s plenty of time. She kisses his shoulder and lies there a moment, feeling things buzz and contract. Do you fancy a bacon bap then, she says. In a minute, he says, but she’s pulling tissues from the box, getting up. He watches her, hands behind his head. You’re gorgeous, he says, as she pulls her belly in.

Rain pelts the patterned glass of the bathroom window and it’s chilly in here. She pees, washes her hands and face, pulls her pyjamas back on. She’ll shower once she’s eaten. Her feet are getting cold. The main room’s not much warmer, and she can see rain dripping from the roof onto the wooden deck, needling the puddles in the gravel, bouncing the leaves of the big oak. Beyond the trees, the water lies flat and dull. They’ll need to do something soon, get out somewhere, go see something. Even if it’s just driving back to the town for the supermarket, she wants to get away from the huddle of chalets, from the eyes at every window and this view of the loch curtained by wet leaves, where she’s begun to find herself watching out for the tourist steamer to pass three times a day. She fills the kettle and puts it on, Josh’s mum’s white plastic kettle. She’s going to put a nice chrome one on the wedding list, and a toaster that will take bagels without her having to squash them flat. If they’re moving to the island it’s worth making sure they have things that will last, you can’t nip out and replace a dud kettle there the way you can at home. It’s better for the environment that way, people learn to mend things and make do but honestly that might take her a while and you’d want to start off with stuff that won’t break. A really good vacuum cleaner, she thinks, and we’ll save up for a proper German washing machine, you probably can’t put that on a wedding list. There are four white baps left, couple of days out of date but it won’t matter with the bacon and sauce and it’s a reason to go back to the Co-op. Goodness but it’s icy in here, look at the kettle’s steam, she needs to get Josh to put the heating on. Don’t if you can help it, his mum said, evenings only, we try to do, the cabin’s not well insulated, costs a mint if you’re not careful. It can’t be more than fifteen degrees in here. She pulls her big wool scarf from the sleeve of her coat hanging by the door, still damp from yesterday, wraps and tucks it so the ends don’t get in the bacon, sets the flaking non-stick frying pan to heat on the electric ring, turns on the grill with a vague idea about toasting the baps but really for the heat.

There’s nothing happening out front. Rain, the loch, the trees, more rain. Ostentatious rain. Pissing it down. You’d think it couldn’t keep up like this, that the water would run out. She holds her hand over the pan but it’s barely warm, those old electric rings take for ever. Voices out there, car doors; she leans over the sink to see the family from the lodge behind going out, or at least trying to; the dad’s sitting in the car watching the rain while the mum’s trying to get one of the little boys to put his coat on and the other one’s peering round the door. Justine, that’s her name. Northern accent, somewhere near Manchester, said this is the first time they’ve been here and honestly probably the last, no way it’s worth the money, and Milly didn’t say Josh’s parents were letting them stay for free. The child in the coat is now jumping up the steps to the front door one at a time and Justine’s gone back inside, presumably to find the other one, while her husband hasn’t moved. They must be going somewhere the little boys don’t much fancy, though there’s one of those indoor adventure places over towards Stirling, she’s seen the leaflets, probably full of hectic kids and parents wishing they’d saved their money and stayed at home but still, better for the boys than being stuck in the cabin. Here’s Justine, pulling the big one by the arm, and the jumping child sees his chance and dashes back inside.

Milly shakes her head, puts a couple of teabags from the tartan caddy into the teapot, pours the water, watches steam roll and plume. The pan’s beginning to warm up, another minute or two. The old couple next door have found somewhere to go too, their car’s gone. Unless someone came in the night and nicked their shiny boomer-mobile. She chatted to him the day they arrived, when he came to put the rubbish out while she and Josh were unpacking the car, of course he knew Josh’s parents and the people they bought the cabin from when Josh was a kid. Doctor, final-salary pension scheme, the whole works, probably bought some fabulous Victorian pile in Bearsden for tuppence ha’penny in the Seventies, probably they’ve got a gîte in Provence or Tuscany or whatever as well though really in that case she supposes they wouldn’t be here. Barra’s not, it turns out, going to be entirely a refuge from all that, plenty of second homes and upper-middle-class English people of a certain age at play in their weirdly Puritan ways, weaving their own kaftans and foraging seaweed that they sling in the backs of their enormous SUVs, but they don’t, Josh says, stick around much past September. Weather a couple of winters and we’ll start to fit in. Good practice, then, anyway, this holiday, though on the island there’ll be things to do, work, community events. Joining in, that’s what they’re after, a collective, a way of life that recognises people’s dependence on each other and the land. She just