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

could keep a fire going in this weather, not unless you built it in a cave or whatever and then where does the smoke go – picking berries for the whole three weeks there are berries to pick. He had a book like that when he was little, about a kid in America who ran away and lived in a hollow tree in the Catskills, and though he read it about fifteen times there were bits he could never really imagine, a tree wide enough that you could make a bed and a place to sit and storage inside the trunk, a country big enough that a person, even a child, could live indefinitely without ever seeing another person. He hears the wind, this time, before it hits, but there’s not much he can do, the kayak skids under him, tips as it comes side-on to the waves and though he doesn’t go in there’s fresh cold water in the wetsuit and he starts to shake, a kind of deep shaking that seems to be coming from the depth of him, from his guts or his lungs. Nothing to be done but get home, fast now, and it’s true the wind is helping though it doesn’t feel like it, this is much quicker than it was going out.

He really can’t feel his fingers.

And here’s the island, the rowan trees crouching at the water’s edge. This is going to be the tricky bit, this turn, no way to avoid crossing the wind, he’ll just keep an eye out for another of those gusts. The rain hits his face as he turns, spatters his left eye so he can’t keep it open which makes it hard to watch over that shoulder for the wind on the water. Blinking rapidly so he sees the world as if under flashing lights, so his brain can’t quite accept the constancy of boat and waves and land, he pushes now fast across the last stretch, sees the old blue rope swing reach in the wind and fall, as if there’s an invisible child driving it. Ghost child, why not, you could die there, easy, that was why it used to be exciting, water and rock waiting below instead of that weird rubber stuff they have in playgrounds. Even Mum used to tell them not to play on that swing and normally she was always on about how kids ought to be free-range and better to get bumps and bruises in the fresh air than be inside staring at screens all the time. Quiet fills Alex’s ears and he realises that he’s had the wind growling in his head, playing in the whorls and drums of his ears, all afternoon. Or whatever it’s been, two hours at least, must be, all the way up there. And the waves, of course, have almost gone here in the shelter of the island and the peninsula where even today there are cars glinting wet through the trees, people desperate enough to walk in the rain or some of them just seem to drive to the end of the road and park and sit there, newspapers and tea from a flask and it makes him itch everywhere at once just thinking of it, people sitting in parked cars, the windows steaming up, waiting for minutes to pass, for their lives to drip away. You can’t wait for the fucking weather, not here, you’ll be dead before it stops raining.

Inside the island, ruffle on the water, the slap of wavelets on the stony beach. He’s going for the jetty, this time, climb up the ladder and lead the boat in on a string the easy way, though as he tries to put down the paddle to grab the ladder he finds his fingers have locked on it, the simple matter of letting go of one thing and picking up another no longer works, and he does actually need to get hold of the ladder, or of something. He jams the paddle through the ladder’s step, which stops the boat, and then bends forward, bites his index finger and lifts it off the paddle with his teeth, and there’s no feeling in the finger but a horrible twang in his forearm, as if a taut string has been plucked when it shouldn’t be. Still. He does it again with the middle finger, a lesser twang and now he can hook his arm round the ladder and rest the hand with the paddle in his lap. He blows on it, mouth wide, har, har, until he’s a bit dizzy, but then he can use one numb hand to lever the other and they’ll probably work well enough for the ladder even if he can’t feel them, you probably don’t exactly need feeling to operate the body and maybe he’ll tie up the boat and come back for it later but he knows what Dad would say. He makes an approximate knot to hold the kayak while he climbs out and fucking hell this is hard, is this what it’s like being really old, like his nan, always hobbling and gripping as if the ground’s not to be depended on, is this how it feels ’cos if so he doesn’t want it, thank you very much, he’ll just jump off a cliff when he’s seventy or whatever. Drive his car into a wall.

Alex finds himself lying on his belly over the edge of the jetty. He squirms forward, bangs a knee so hard his eyes water but at least the knee still has feeling. He sits up and the shaking starts again. Pushes himself onto all fours and then upright and it fucking hurts, it really does, just standing up really fucking hurts and he shuffles down the jetty thinking they’ll be watching him, all those people sitting in their cabins with their loch views, staring into the rain waiting all day for something like this, for a boy making an idiot of himself in