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

was sorry and tried to hug her even though she was the one who’d made her cry in the first place. Fine, she says, and manages to get a good slam out of the bedroom door despite the thick carpet.

Becky drops face-down on her bed, though in a minute, she thinks, when she’s finished, she is going to go find Gavin’s tent. Hot night out or what? The mattress is harder than at home and it hurts her breasts, which are tender today. She presses her face into the pillow and wonders how people die of having pillows over their faces – a pillow’s not airtight, is it, she’s breathing depressingly well through it so why can’t everyone else? Like everything here, the pillow smells of plastic and mildew, the whole building, the whole shell of all their so-called holidays, tacky and temporary. Gimcrack, she thinks, and wonders how you pronounce it, jim-crack or the way it looks? Dad’s said more than once, the whole thing would go up like paper in a fire, wouldn’t pass regs these days, and it’s not that she hasn’t thought about it, thought that with one match, one of the ones in the box in the kitchen, she could end the whole thing. Light the curtains, which came from Gran’s house when she moved and are so old they actually have holes in them which Mum says don’t show but they do and they definitely pre-date fire-retardant, and it would all be over in a few minutes. Flames creeping and munching up the blue flowers, smoke smearing the damp-stained ceiling. The boiler’s just along the wall and there’s one gas cylinder attached outside and the spare in the outdoor cupboard against her and Alex’s bedroom wall. Light that and your problems would soon be over.

Her face is getting hot. She rolls over. There’s damp on the ceiling in here too, spilling in from the outside wall, and from her bed she can see rain on the window, a bit of next door’s kitchen window and a corner of dark grey sky. She’s been looking at this view all her life, every single summer. She remembers when they used to make her go to bed and it was still broad daylight and she could hear other kids playing on the shore. You need your sleep, Mum used to say, I’m not responsible for other people’s children, but she kind of knew then and certainly knows now that they just wanted to get rid of her so they could – what, drink herbal tea, probably. Do crossword puzzles. The family renting next door have turned on the lights, which Mum would say is wasteful. All these long summer days, she says, even when it’s cloudy the light lasts for ever, why would you want to blind yourself with the electric, don’t we have enough artificial light all winter? Only so you can see, Becky thinks, only maybe if you find it fucking depressing fumbling round in the dark in a tiny wet cabin miles from anywhere when you could just as well be at home with normal-sized rooms and a downstairs loo as well as the bathroom so you don’t have to be always smelling your brother’s poo and normal internet access or at least data so you don’t feel as if you’ve died. She wants to pick up her phone, even just to look at the photos, but there’s no point.

I want to be dead.

They would be sorry, probably, though maybe Dad would just say she was stupid and crazy because he certainly wasn’t sorry when she banged her head on the wall. She’s tried cutting her wrists before, all the girls do, and it makes you feel better for a bit but you don’t bleed anything like enough to die. Jamila took an overdose last year but then she had stomach pains and got scared and told her mum and they took her to hospital where everyone was angry with her and they pumped her stomach without giving her any sedatives or anaesthetic or whatever and made her drink this awful black gritty stuff and Jamila didn’t even know if it was just a punishment or meant to make her better somehow. All I’m saying, she said, when Becky and Bridget were eventually allowed to see her afterwards, all I’m saying is next time I’ll know not to tell anyone, either don’t do it or follow through. And one of these days, Becky thinks, there’s bleach under the sink, isn’t there, knives in the drawer, though honestly based on past experience it would be pretty difficult to sever your own artery unless you were on drugs or something, high enough not to feel all the pain but not so high you couldn’t actually do it. She’s even got enough paracetamol in her handbag, for period pain she told Mum and she does sometimes take one for that but mostly it’s just nice to know they’re there, that if she feels like it she wouldn’t even have to go to the shops where they won’t sell you two packets at once in case you’re suicidally organised enough to buy tablets but not so much it occurs to you to go to another shop for a second pack. Maybe if you were in some tiny village somewhere with only one shop and not even a petrol station it might work, but you’d probably have left or killed yourself years ago anyway.

Right. Fuck this. Becky wipes her nose on the back of her hand and sits up. Lipstick. No point in anything else, it’d be all over her face by the time she even gets to the tent, but she rubs some serum through her hair and brushes it smooth, likes the smell. Her coat’s by the front door so she takes Alex’s hoody he’s left lying on his bed, puts on her trainers, climbs over his bed – shoe print on the sheet, his own fault