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

towards the jetty. A gust of wind throws rain in his face. His phone is back at the house, always switched on in case some coincidence of weather and wishing brings a flash of reception, so in his head he composes a post to his group chat and sends it out on the wind. SOS. Mayday.

The wind slaps water around his ears and tugs on the kayak so he stumbles, bangs his shin on one of those stupid rocks people use to stake their claim on the open grass. Fuck, he says. Bloody fucking rock. Assholes. Cunts. Sometimes, alone, he goes on like this for a while, takes out and airs his bad words, but the weather extinguishes his swearing. The Scottish sky is better at obscenity than any human voice. He shifts the kayak, bows his head, remembers the board games in the damp lodge, the smell of soup and the pitch of his sister’s voice, and keeps going. He won’t die, after all, out here, and he might kill someone if he stays in there. His dad, for example, he might kill his bearded, soup-dribbling dad. Shut up about the soup, he thinks, but its viscous tomato smell seems to hang in his hair. Not blood, he wouldn’t want to spill his father’s blood, but the satisfaction of approaching from behind with the pan in which his mother fries stinky eggs so the whites are all snotty and slimy and form strings as his father shovels them into his mouth, with that pan or one of these very rocks—

The pebbles on the beach are dark and shiny with rain. He likes their sound under his feet, the proclamation that he is here, real, that he has mass and force and velocity. A child has dropped a shoe on the beach, the wrong kind of shoe, patent black with a pink flower, and if he wasn’t carrying this fucking kayak he’d put the shoe somewhere more deliberate, upright at least and further from the waterline, the way people do with found objects, teddies and bobble hats on walls, as if making impromptu shrines. On the way back, maybe.

Right, he can go out along the jetty and launch from there or he can just bloody man up and walk into the loch. Dad might be watching. He walks. It’s not a drysuit, you have to let the water in and then let your body heat it around you. It’s so cold his feet and ankles read pain rather than temperature. Calves. Knees. Bloody hell. He stops to lower the kayak.

When he was younger he used to pee in his wetsuit, to warm it up.

There are three white birds sitting on the water halfway between the shore and the island. Gulls. Hooked yellow beaks, the black flashes on the heads, bigger than you think, not much bothered by rain.

He’s up to his thighs and the kayak is pulling on its rope like an impatient dog. Right then. It would have been easier to get in from the jetty.

Much easier.

Oh fuck.

But it was a slip, not a fall, and now at least the wetsuit is properly full of water and will soon be insulating him the way it’s supposed to do. He tries again, and this time ends up more or less in the kayak and more or less the right way up. Go, then, to the island. To the far side. To the end, even, to the town where there’s the station and he could, if he had any money, take a train back to the city, if he had his keys go home, though home, he thinks, beginning to paddle, is not where he would go, or at least only briefly for a shower and a change of clothes and to stuff some things into a rucksack. Once you’re floating on it, the loch is rougher than it looks from the shore. He finds the rhythm of his paddle, likes as always the percussion of water and body and boat, the audacity of small craft carrying a living soul across a body of water. He’d have no phone, and more to the point no money, but there’s not always a guard on the train and if there is you can hide in the loo. He can see a gust of wind coming down the loch, the water ruffling like stroked fur, and shoves the kayak round to face it. He’d go home, and he’d take a hot shower – you’d need one after travelling in a wetsuit – and he’d raid the kitchen, no, he’d put a frozen pizza in the oven before getting in the shower and then, there’s no way round this, he’d borrow the credit card Mum keeps in her desk because although she doesn’t like credit cards, doesn’t like debt, having one gives you a credit history and what if her purse gets nicked while she’s out, and he’d go on the internet and find out how you get out of this country because people still do, it can be done – not America, though it’s the obvious choice, where people have always gone, but racists and guns and complete fucking nutters, it’s not even funny any more, and anyway from what he’s heard it’s about the hardest place to get through immigration. Australia, red earth and big skies. He’s OK at surfing. Windsurfing on calm water, anyway. They have farm jobs, don’t they, for young travellers, for Europeans, and they’d stretch a point, wouldn’t they, he is Scottish. He could pick fruit, whatever grows there. Mangoes, warm and heavy as breasts. Does it rain enough in Australia for mangoes? Hm, breasts. Or Canada, aren’t they nicer than the Americans, couldn’t he take kayaks up rivers or something, though that might have been long ago. It wouldn’t be worse than here. He knows where the passports are, stupidly in the top of Mum’s chest of drawers, along with her jewellery, to make things really easy for