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

it’s all downhill from here, which is a daft thing to say because it’s not as if people in their thirties are getting younger either, look at it that way and it’s all downhill from birth, death approaching minute by passing minute, kids too, but he knows what he means. It’s different, being past the midpoint. It just is. The young are younger and the older not so old.

He pours the boiling water, watching the steam rise and drift on the darkening air. He glances up again at his wife, who is biting the skin off the sides of her fingernails, grimacing and baring her teeth as if he isn’t even here. Even with the earbuds, she must be able to hear the noise, must know that someone has decided that everyone within about a three-mile radius is just going to have to listen to their racket, that one Romanian gets to decide what every other soul has to hear for hours and hours of the night, that one person’s urge to party trumps everyone else’s need to sleep. He’ll go round there, he thinks, and kill them with his bare hands, he’ll kick the door in, he’ll rip the speakers from the wall and throw them through the bloody windows, that’s what he’ll do. And then there will be peace.

Do you want a cup of tea, he says to Justine, but she’s too busy with her box set and her fingernails to respond. He goes over and taps her shoulder: on screen, there’s a woman sitting on the edge of a shiny kitchen counter in a puffy red dress with her white knees wide open, bracing her arms behind her while a man in a suit appears to be giving her oral sex under the skirt. Justine pauses it again and takes out an earbud. Now what, she says. I said, he says, do you want a cup of tea. No thanks, she says, and she waits, frowning, until he’s back in the kitchen before she restarts the action. What the hell is she watching? It’s typical, isn’t it, when a man watches porn he’s dirty and dangerous and it’s degrading to women but she can just sit there on the sofa for all the world to see, getting all hot and bothered over her laptop. Her work laptop, he might add, property of her employer. She could get sacked for that and then where’d they be, not as if they could manage on what he earns, not these days. The song’s changed again, a surging, rolling beat against an angry male voice. You can’t really hear the words but he’d bet good money they’re not what you’d want your kids to say. Do they have rap in Poland? He pours himself tea, takes the last of the milk which means there won’t be any for breakfast not that there was enough anyway, adds two heaped spoons of sugar and leaves the spoon on the counter, sticky. Is that what she wants, to sit on the counter like that? Is that what he needs to do to get some action these days? How does it even work, how could you get your mouth where it needs to be if she’s parked her backside on a hard surface, wouldn’t your chin get in the way? It doesn’t make sense, fucking American films with their acres of kitchen and fridges the size of cars. They probably have a special counter insert for the purpose, along with their ice-dispensers and garbage-disposal units and what have you. Who wears a big dress like that in real life anyway, especially in the kitchen? Oh fucking hell, they’ve just turned the music up even louder. There ought to be built-in limits on those things, like the speed limiters on goods vehicles, not that people wouldn’t find a way to disable them. Bloody Bulgarians.

He takes his tea over to the French windows, carefully going round the front of Justine and her work laptop. The first day they were here, he watched the sunset at just about this time. It goes down behind the mountains of course, you’d need to be over on the west coast for the whole thing, but the clouds went mad shades of neon pink and the sky was a deeper and deeper blue, almost unnatural colours, and later when he got up to pee he noticed the stars and went out on the deck to look, and it was just him standing there under the night sky with more stars than he’d ever seen in his life and the water reflecting a quarter-moon and he thought, bloody hell, this is me, then, and this is space, kind of wanted to go down to the beach but it was proper cold and him in his pants and T-shirt, plus it felt a bit funny, woods in the dark, so he just stood there and watched the stars until the cold got to him.

There’s no sunset today. Rain runs down the windows and drips from the roof, and in the window there’s the reflection of Justine’s laptop hanging in a wet tree. It’s all going black and white; when Steve was little he thought all the colours left at night, and he still doesn’t really see that that’s not true. How does anyone know there are colours in the dark, it’s not as if you can see them. There are patches of yellow light coming from most of the other cabins, and two doors along he can just see the Romanians, their windows open despite the weather and someone standing in the open door, smoking. Unless they own that cabin, and he very much doubts they do, there’s no smoking allowed here and he’d have thought any idiot could see why smoking in a wooden cabin in a wood ten miles up a single-track road was a bad idea, even if you’re not bothered about lung cancer and heart disease and all that. And