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

and takes the bottle, kisses her cheek and lets them both in. He can hear laughing and shouting as well as the music. He’s never been to a party for grown-ups. What can Dad be doing there, he doesn’t really laugh and you can’t imagine him dancing. Dad wouldn’t like it if Jack turned up, not that you can leave Mum on her own. He raises his arms again, dances back across the room to his own ghostly reflection in the French windows, nods and wiggles at himself. He bends back and shimmies his hips, comes back up, jumps and spins, pumps his arms.

And the dancing around the room, he’ll think later, later and often, was why he didn’t see the flames sooner. The dancing was why he didn’t notice when the laughing stopped and the shouting sounded different.

The dancing was why by the time he’d smelt the smoke and gone to look and rushed back to pull the fire extinguisher from its holder on the wall – surprisingly difficult, that – and run barefoot over the wet grass and checked the diagram by the flickering light already coming from the Shit-chenkos’ window and pulled the part you pull and pushed the part you push, it was too late.

And the dancing was why by the time he shouted and ran and banged on the doors of the people who weren’t at the party, on the door where the skinny brave woman was in the house with her kids and the door of the posh old guy with the doddery wife and the door of the older boy with the red boat and his grumpy sister who never puts a coat on even in this weather, and they all came out and then went back for their fire extinguishers and came back again, running, even the old man, already the flames were shining on the branches and the daytime birds thought it was morning.

The dancing was why the fire had time to take hold so that Dad and Lola and the other dad had to climb out of the bathroom window of the burning cabin and the neighbours fired their fire extinguishers and brought wet towels and buckets of water, and the boy with the red boat went in, right into the flaming building because the fire brigade had been called by then, by the skinny running woman who ran to the pub, but the wooden building was going fast, faster than you’d expect really given the weather, and everyone knew how far the fire engine had to come, how long you’d be able to see the blue flashes signalling off the water and through the trees before help arrived.

The men from the car came out from the back of the burning cabin, one of them half-carrying the other whose feet didn’t seem to be working, and the old man and the boat boy’s dad ran over to them and laid the foot-dragging man on the ground, on the wet grass and the leaves, and turned him on his side and the other man bent over and threw up, right there in front of everyone, stuff dripping out of his mouth and pooling by his feet in the firelight, and no one paid any attention.

A tall bearded man in an Army jacket came out from the trees carrying an axe, a real axe glinting in the flames, and Jack thought for a moment that he was part of the fire somehow, that now the killers and creepers Lola talked about at night were coming out of the wood, but when the man raised the axe he started hacking at the burning window frame where the boat boy had gone in, and Mum was there, outside, not stopping in the doorway but running and shouting for Lola who stayed where she was, watching. Mum brought the running woman’s kids and the mum and baby and toddler from over the way into the kitchen, talking to them, to people she’d never even met before, saying, you come in here, it’s not for kids to be watching, this, you stay here in the warm, and the baby was crying but no one was doing anything about it and Jack stood there, quiet in the corner. Come on, Jack, Mum said, help me, and he went to help but she was moving really fast, she pulled the duvets from the beds, hauled them off herself and carried them bundled in her arms out into the rain to put over the people lying on the ground and Jack followed her but only as far as the steps. The curtain couple were out again and they looked weird by now, their faces dark and their eyes too white. He stood there breathing smoke and feeling the heat on his face and arms and watched Mum use his duvet, his duvet from home, to put over one of the women from the big shiny car when the red boat boy brought her over and she was crawling on the ground and sicking up white froth, the fire louder now, growling, and Mum tried to get the young couple to stop, to come in and have a drink, but they wouldn’t because where was the little girl, where was the little girl with the shiny shoes and the bicycle, and where was her mum? The curtain couple and the boat boy tried to go back, right into the flames, although the boat boy’s dad was telling him not to, because there was still the little girl in there, wasn’t there, the little girl and her mum, weren’t they still inside? The other little girl, not Lola. Lola was still standing there, watching, her hand in her pocket, her smudged face and her hair pale in the firelight.

Violetta, Jack said, though no one was listening to him, her name’s Violetta, the other little girl.

The axe man chopped at the wall again and the boat boy and the curtain couple held