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

night, somewhere good. There must be something maybe round the other side, on the main road. I looked at the menu in the pub here, we’re better at home with pasta surprise.

He used to eat at the pub here with his mum and dad, for a treat.

She picks up her book again. She’s curled up in his mum’s chair like a cat, her feet tucked under. He remembers her earlier, laid out under him, the whole length of her his, her hair the brightest thing in the room. Later, maybe, again. Take her mind off things. He takes the onions out of the cupboard and decapitates them. He looks at her while she reads, while she won’t see him admiring her and feel weird.

She’s looking up. There’s that girl, she says, the miserable one. Not that I wouldn’t have been miserable, stuck here with my parents at her age.

He’s chopping the pepper, noticing it bleeding into the scratches on his mum’s white plastic chopping board. She’s not really one for peppers, his mum. Meat and potatoes and a green vegetable and nothing wrong with that. Which girl, he says, to keep talking rather than because he thinks it’s interesting when a girl walks across the park. Two cabins up, she says, her brother goes out in the red canoe. He shrugs. There are always kids here, messing around on the beaches. He and Kieran used to spend hours there when they were little, on the swing or just paddling and playing with the stones. He heard some kids playing down there earlier when he was bringing in the laundry Milly had so optimistically hung outside, some kind of war game, lots of shrieking. It’s better for them, isn’t it, than being inside playing war games on a screen? The kids on the island still play outside, all weathers. You know which girl, she says, mum in the hippy patchwork trousers? Don’t know which dad, they all look the same, white bloke going grey, hiking boots, beige trousers with those awful zips. Vaguely, he says, though what he remembers is Milly talking about it. Some women, she said, just never got the memo when the second wave ended, where does she get those clothes, don’t think I’ve ever seen patchwork dungarees in a shop. Feminism, he’s learnt, has waves, though the tides seem very slow and there’s time to write a lot of books Milly thinks he should have read in between each one. Simone de Beauvoir, he’d vaguely heard of her without knowing what it’s all about, which was frankly just fine. Someone else, someone from now, he did read but didn’t really understand, or at least didn’t see how it was what he’d call feminist. He stirs the pepper. She’ll be going to the pub, he says, would she not be too young? Milly’s left her book and she’s opening the door and craning her head round it. Cold air and the smell of rain blows through. She would and she’s not, she says, looks to be going up the road. For phone signal, I suppose, must be missing her mates, she’s going to get soaked with no coat on. Like you, he says, missing your mates, and she closes the door and comes over to him, stands behind him at the electric rings and puts her arms round his waist. Her breasts press soft against his back. She smells different here, the wrong shampoo or something. Nah, she says, I’ve got you, haven’t I, not to mention I’m not fourteen. Poor girl.

At fourteen, they have agreed, they would not have liked each other. She was mostly into dance and he was mostly into weed. It’s a good thing, really, they didn’t meet any earlier. But she is missing her mates, he knows that, or at least missing her phone, missing the chorus of agreement and amusement and outrage that lives in it. He does wonder, sometimes, if the island is such a good idea, if she’d manage without the tribe who share and shore up her indignation with the version of the world they all inhabit. That’s why she wants to go, a new beginning, clean air, learning to bake their own bread and see the stars and hear the birds, but he’s not sure she’s really understood that mostly the people who’ve always lived there aren’t that interested in air pollution and sourdough and she’s always liked thinking about birds and stars more than actually looking at them, here or at home. She buys books, tells her friends how birds have compasses in their minds, seem to be able to steer by the stars even though they fly during the day, how all the stars were named by men. She doesn’t buy binoculars. Maybe she’ll start a book group.

They could go out, there’s a point four miles down the road where you get five bars’ signal. Sometimes you see people sitting in their cars in the layby, refuelling on news and human contact, though Josh is finding that the longer he has no internet access, the less appetite he has for it. And when they drove down the road three days ago and his phone began to tremble and exclaim with his friends’ past moods, it was like reading the weather forecast from last week. Unless there was a tornado or a tidal wave, unless there is a swathe of devastation still producing stories five days later, no one cares. And you can, he thinks, hold off your tornados and tidal waves as long as possible, thank you. No need to go looking, not just now, not while there’s the two of them, here, warm and dry with a bed for sex and sleeping and a table and chairs for sharing food. Maybe that’s all you need, really, a bed and a table. And bookshelves. People used to get by fine, didn’t they, before sofas and all that, generations of his family on the island. Uncle Seumas’s