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

we were just like that, although she’s not sure she can remember a single occasion when David had time to play outside with the baby and the toddler. He must have done. Maybe it happened so often it wasn’t memorable. And later, certainly, once he was settled in General Practice, there were sometimes days off, he used to take himself out hill-walking, all weathers. She did see his point, he was working all week, on call half the weekends and why shouldn’t he have a day to himself, it wasn’t every week, but once the children were at school she could have gone with him if he’d been willing to come back mid-afternoon. She’d have liked it, a few hours up the Campsies between washing up the breakfast and going back to the school gates. The father is taking the child’s hand, showing her how to reach back and then skite the stone over the waves.

Why did she come over here, anyway? What time is it? The light never changes, these dull summer days, hour after hour of grey pallor seeping through the trees, the sky at breakfast no different from bedtime. Still raining. Coming up five. If she makes something complicated for tea, it could be time to start cooking, or at least arranging things ready to cook. She made a plan when they went to the shops, wrote out a list of meals and ingredients. There was fish, wasn’t there, in the freezer? And potatoes, new potatoes in the summer, and you’re allowed to eat butter again now after all those years when it would kill you just to look at the wrapper. There’s mint in a pot on the veranda, and she remembers buying courgettes. She could scrub the potatoes now, and pick the mint, and maybe say hello to that nice family if they happen to come back while she’s out there, find out the names and all.

Mary unlocks the French window, but the key doesn’t work. David looks at her over the top of his book. It’s already open, he says, what are you going out there for?

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know why she’s opening the door, and the weather the way it is. Where is she going? Everything turns.

Deep breath.

To pick leaves, she says, for the potatoes. She tries to pull the door and it doesn’t work, but when she turns the other way and pushes, it slides and the afternoon comes in, damp and chill.

David’s put his book in his lap. Leaves, he says.

She makes a laugh. Oh, you know, she says, for the potatoes, you’ve always liked them like that. Butter and a bit of what’s-it.

Mint, he says. Butter and mint. We haven’t had herbs out there for years, Mary. Don’t you remember, even when we had the pots right up by the window the rabbits got them all?

Now that he mentions it, she does, yes. She made unseasonal garlands of holly and hawthorn which had no apparent effect at all. Squirrels, more likely, she says, I doubt the rabbits could have climbed up on the table. Oh well then, no mint.

No, he says, no mint today.

He is still looking at her.

She does not look back.

where the bodies lie

In the shelter of the big pine tree there’s an anthill, and within the anthill is a city. Within the city are many chambers: nurseries, granaries, the throne room and a crypt where the bodies lie, and within the chambers are worker ants, two hundred thousand of them, and the winged queen.

The city is south-facing for warmth, its roof angled like a solar panel to intercept the sun’s rays at right angles. The temperature is falling and a team is moving the new brood into a warmer room. Their city is well built and they’re safe enough from the weather, the settlement thatched like the roof of a Japanese palace to guide the rain from one panel to the next, to direct it downhill and away through the soil to the loch.

They close the entrances and wait.

what it’s like being

DON’T USE THAT, says Mum, you’ll scratch the tray, it’s non-stick, that. Becky drops the wire scrubber into the washing-up bowl, which is full of brown water with squashed peas and bits of potato bobbling against her hands. Well how do you want me to clean it, then, she says. Elbow grease, says Mum, which is what she always says, and mind out, I want to get the kettle on.

Becky rubs at the tray, whose non-stick has been coming unstuck for years, with the brush. There are bits of yesterday’s onion tangled in the bristles and she’s not going to pick them out. I want to be dead, she hears in her head, I want to be dead. She’s already washed the ‘sharp knife’ which isn’t sharp at all, skids off tomatoes and inflicts blunt-force trauma on cheese, and anyway it’s as hard to kill yourself with a knife as it is, apparently, easy to kill someone else. They had a prevention session at school, led by this seriously hot guy with dreadlocks who’d been in prison and didn’t want any of them to have his life and Preti and that lot sat at the back and giggled.

I want to be dead.

In America, she knows, you can get the police to shoot you just by acting a bit weird with your hands in your pockets, which is a bummer if you’re a weirdo with cold hands but must save suicidal people a lot of time and trouble. There’s no way she’s going to get the burnt-on fish off this tray with the brush, it’s completely pointless, what Mum’s making her do. Do get on with it, says Mum, it’ll take you all night at this rate, doesn’t have to be such a performance, you know. The kettle boils and Mum reaches round Becky – too close, unwashed hair and that awful hippy deodorant – for her box of