by Sarah Moss
Ha, he says, so we did it, yes? Mmhm, she says, still enjoying the aftershocks. She rearranges herself a little. It probably doesn’t really count as thinking about another man if he doesn’t have a face and you haven’t got as far as the décor of his bedroom, let alone taken his clothes off. It’s just a suit, really, a car and maybe a little architecture, and even the car is mostly a steering wheel and gear lever, she couldn’t name the make or anything like that. I knew we could, says Josh, we’ll have to keep practising. Mm, she says, well, there’s plenty of time. She kisses his shoulder and lies there a moment, feeling things buzz and contract. Do you fancy a bacon bap then, she says. In a minute, he says, but she’s pulling tissues from the box, getting up. He watches her, hands behind his head. You’re gorgeous, he says, as she pulls her belly in.
Rain pelts the patterned glass of the bathroom window and it’s chilly in here. She pees, washes her hands and face, pulls her pyjamas back on. She’ll shower once she’s eaten. Her feet are getting cold. The main room’s not much warmer, and she can see rain dripping from the roof onto the wooden deck, needling the puddles in the gravel, bouncing the leaves of the big oak. Beyond the trees, the water lies flat and dull. They’ll need to do something soon, get out somewhere, go see something. Even if it’s just driving back to the town for the supermarket, she wants to get away from the huddle of chalets, from the eyes at every window and this view of the loch curtained by wet leaves, where she’s begun to find herself watching out for the tourist steamer to pass three times a day. She fills the kettle and puts it on, Josh’s mum’s white plastic kettle. She’s going to put a nice chrome one on the wedding list, and a toaster that will take bagels without her having to squash them flat. If they’re moving to the island it’s worth making sure they have things that will last, you can’t nip out and replace a dud kettle there the way you can at home. It’s better for the environment that way, people learn to mend things and make do but honestly that might take her a while and you’d want to start off with stuff that won’t break. A really good vacuum cleaner, she thinks, and we’ll save up for a proper German washing machine, you probably can’t put that on a wedding list. There are four white baps left, couple of days out of date but it won’t matter with the bacon and sauce and it’s a reason to go back to the Co-op. Goodness but it’s icy in here, look at the kettle’s steam, she needs to get Josh to put the heating on. Don’t if you can help it, his mum said, evenings only, we try to do, the cabin’s not well insulated, costs a mint if you’re not careful. It can’t be more than fifteen degrees in here. She pulls her big wool scarf from the sleeve of her coat hanging by the door, still damp from yesterday, wraps and tucks it so the ends don’t get in the bacon, sets the flaking non-stick frying pan to heat on the electric ring, turns on the grill with a vague idea about toasting the baps but really for the heat.
There’s nothing happening out front. Rain, the loch, the trees, more rain. Ostentatious rain. Pissing it down. You’d think it couldn’t keep up like this, that the water would run out. She holds her hand over the pan but it’s barely warm, those old electric rings take for ever. Voices out there, car doors; she leans over the sink to see the family from the lodge behind going out, or at least trying to; the dad’s sitting in the car watching the rain while the mum’s trying to get one of the little boys to put his coat on and the other one’s peering round the door. Justine, that’s her name. Northern accent, somewhere near Manchester, said this is the first time they’ve been here and honestly probably the last, no way it’s worth the money, and Milly didn’t say Josh’s parents were letting them stay for free. The child in the coat is now jumping up the steps to the front door one at a time and Justine’s gone back inside, presumably to find the other one, while her husband hasn’t moved. They must be going somewhere the little boys don’t much fancy, though there’s one of those indoor adventure places over towards Stirling, she’s seen the leaflets, probably full of hectic kids and parents wishing they’d saved their money and stayed at home but still, better for the boys than being stuck in the cabin. Here’s Justine, pulling the big one by the arm, and the jumping child sees his chance and dashes back inside.
Milly shakes her head, puts a couple of teabags from the tartan caddy into the teapot, pours the water, watches steam roll and plume. The pan’s beginning to warm up, another minute or two. The old couple next door have found somewhere to go too, their car’s gone. Unless someone came in the night and nicked their shiny boomer- mobile. She chatted to him the day they arrived, when he came to put the rubbish out while she and Josh were unpacking the car, of course he knew Josh’s parents and the people they bought the cabin from when Josh was a kid. Doctor, final-salary pension scheme, the whole works, probably bought some fabulous Victorian pile in Bearsden for tuppence ha’penny in the ’70s, probably they’ve got a gîte in Provence or Tuscany or whatever as well though really in that case she supposes they wouldn’t be here. Barra’s not, it turns out, going to be entirely a refuge from all that, plenty of second homes and upper-middle-class English people of a certain age at play in their weirdly Puritan ways, weaving their own kaftans and foraging seaweed that they sling in the backs of their enormous SUVs, but they don’t, Josh says, stick around much past September. Weather a couple of winters and we’ll start to fit in. Good practice, then, anyway, this holiday, though on the island there’ll be things to do, work, community events. Joining in, that’s what they’re after, a collective, a way of life that recognises people’s dependence on each other and the land. She just hopes it turns out to be worth leaving all her friends. People will visit, won’t they? Justine’s bringing – dragging wouldn’t be quite fair but you can see she’s losing her temper – the second child out and the dad’s got the engine going and the wheels turning almost before the doors are closed. Can’t wait to get out of here, apparently. That’s it then, she thinks, the morning’s drama. Josh has probably gone back to sleep, which means that if she wanted to she could eat three of the baps herself, and if she takes him the last one on a tray with a bowl of cereal as well and a big mug of tea – well, he likes cereal, no need to say how many baps there were in the first place. It’s a pretty benign kind of faking.
always wolves
She steps out of the trees above the shore, nervous, ears cocked, her fawn a few paces back. The trees behind them shiver in the wind, cast off rain. In her mind there are always wolves, day and night, a pack of them slinking on the edge of scent and sound. They creep nearer when she sleeps, when she and the fawn bow their heads to drink, when the trees cluster to make hiding places. The wolves in her mind are fleet on land, fast as pike in water, hungry. They can scent her fawn from their hillside lair, from deep in the forest and they are coming, always coming.
She nibbles some leaves, to show the fawn what to do. They both glance back, into the woods.
a stone falling
IT’S LIGHTENING UP, Mum says, barely raining at all now, you’d better make the most of it and get your boots on, you need the vitamin D. I read about it, most kids in this country have a deficiency and it puts you at risk of all sorts, you need to get at least half an hour’s sunlight a day. But I’m busy, Lola says, it’s not sunny and the rain doesn’t look any different to me. She’s colouring in. You weren’t busy five minutes ago, Mum says, and there’ll be plenty of time to be busy later. You don’t want rickets, do you? Or MS like Judith down the road? Come on, Jack, you too, you didn’t want to come in from the beach yesterday, you can go back there now. It wasn’t raining as much yesterday, Jack says. It’s not raining now, says Mum, or barely. Come on, boots and coats the pair of you, you can’t just lounge around this room all day, you’ll go mad, we’ll all go mad. Lola looks up but Jack isn’t moving either, just lying on the sofa closing his eyes and trying to touch the tips of his index fingers together from outspread arms. Mum’s started pacing up and down again, French windows to kitchen door and back, twisting her hair up tight round her finger and letting it go, which means that sometime this af
ternoon she’ll probably start crying and apologising for crying and crying some more. Lola won’t go mad. She’s got a head on her shoulders, Lola, Dad says, take a fair bit to put her off her stride. She allows herself the purple, her second-favourite colour, for the girl’s trousers. Come on, says Mum, I mean it, get your boots on, you need to be out in the daylight or you’ll be ill, people don’t recover, you know, from MS. Jack misses and spreads his arms again. Lola outlines the trousers. Why doesn’t Dad have to go out, asks Jack. Dad’s doing some work, Mum says, remember? He did go out, sort of.
Dad took his laptop to the pub for the wifi. Might as well catch up, work doesn’t stop just because the boss is on holiday, we’ll be down another week at the end if I don’t keep an eye on things, book in the quotes and that. Mum gave up her work last year, so Dad says she can’t say anything about his. It’s not easy, running your own business, there’s no one else to blame if your cash-flow goes tits up.
Go on, Mum says, boots and coats both of you, and Lola sighs like Mrs Singh at school and puts the lid on her purple pen. Only promise me you won’t go on the big swing, Mum says, I don’t like that one, and you won’t go too near the water, will you? I thought you wanted us to go to the beach, Lola says, you know the beach is near the water, right, but Jack’s shaking his head. Lola, he says, please don’t. Just don’t go in the water, Mum says, and you stay off that swing, and watch out for the stones, they’ll be slippy. Yes, Mum, says Jack. Mum doesn’t go out enough to know that the stones won’t be slippy, it’s not that kind of rock, but the wooden steps will be. And Lola, Mum says, come straight back here if your chest feels tight, OK? You can see the next thing she says will be come back in, actually I don’t want you out in this weather, you know the rain starts you wheezing, don’t want you having an asthma attack when we’re all the way out here, and now she’s thought about it Lola does want to go out so she pushes her feet into the boots and jumps down the steps, pretends not to hear Mum changing her mind.
It is raining. A lot. You can hear it drumming. Lola feels her chest cramping as she breathes in cold and the smell of trees and earth and rain. She checks in her pocket for her inhaler. At first she thinks there are two in there and then she remembers that one of them is a lighter she found in Mum’s handbag, in the lining where Mum keeps the cigarettes they’re not supposed to know about. Lola likes lighters, the way you just flick with your thumb and there’s a real live flame right there in your hand and you think it will burn you but it doesn’t. There’s a bit of a wheeze when she breathes out but often when she runs the breathing gets easier so she sets off fast down the path to the shore, hurdles over the boulders in the grass and leaps off the edge of the field to catch the small rope swing. It’s always been there, ever since they started coming here when Jack was a baby, and every year Dad comes and tests it before they’re allowed down here on their own. At the furthest point, she whoops as if it were a much bigger swing and a much bigger drop than it is, and lands in a heap on the stones. Jack’s watching from the grass. Lola gets up as if it doesn’t hurt. I can do that, he says. Go on then, she says, but instead he uses the rope as a handhold while his feet slither down the bank.
Lola goes to stand in the water in her wellies. She likes the way your feet can feel the whole loch around them but they’re not wet. She looks at the waves patting her ankles and raises her gaze slowly, making a line over the ripples – like chocolate on a biscuit – right out between the islands to the other side, where there’s the road and people going places, and then the bottoms of the hills before the cloud cuts them off. Lola and Jack haven’t been anywhere for days, not since the beginning of the week. We’ll make some trips later, Mum says, we don’t want to be driving all the way back down the road before we need to and we’ve plenty of food. Mum doesn’t like the single- track roads, can’t see how Dad can know there’s nothing coming the other way when you can’t see round the bends. Lola balances on one foot and kicks the water with the other, watching the shapes of droplets in the air. Jack’s found a stick and is aiming it at the trees and staggering at the recoil.
Wet feet. Oh well, not very wet. She watches the drips bead on her thick socks before they begin to sink in and darken the blue, and then she bends down to dabble her hands. She likes the way it looks as if your fingers bend at a funny angle at the water’s surface. In summer – well, it is summer, on sunny days, she means – sometimes there are little brown fish, and if you stand still for long enough they’ll come and nibble at your feet and fingers, their mouths so small you’re not even sure if you can feel it or not. You have to close your eyes to work out if you’d know they were there if you couldn’t see them and it’s still hard to tell. Lola likes experimenting with the five senses and what people think is there and what they can be persuaded might be there. It’s easy to imagine touch, people are always feeling a little push from what’s not there and you only have to mention insects, fleas or midges, to raise bites. Seeing is pretty reliable, though in the dark sometimes you can make people see movements of things that don’t exist. Or in the woods, especially near that place where Dad says people were buried. What was that, she says, over there, something moved, did you not see. She can make Jack hear things that aren’t there if she talks about them after Dad’s said goodnight and shut the door. There’s a scratchy noise, she says, like claws, and at first he says he can’t hear anything but after a while she can call werewolves and zombies to the window, or even under the bed. His bed. She stands up. Her coat’s dipped in the water at the front and she can feel it through her leggings. Smell is pretty easy. Farts, or even gas; she made Mum call the gas board one day, insisting there was a smell until everyone else smelt it too and Mum was going round unplugging everything because she thought the toaster or something might just turn itself on and start a fire. That was pretty funny.
Jack is still busy with woodland warfare, not even looking at the loch. She splashes back to the shore. Dad can make stones skim way across the water, twenty times sometimes, and he’s taught her too but she’s not that good. She picks one up and throws it as far out as she can, but after a promising swoop it tumbles and lands over where she was standing before. She’d like to watch a stone falling through water. Does it wobble and glide, like paper in air? One day she will go diving, will take the seals’ eye view of wavering plants and sleeping fish. She’s seen people diving from boats and coming up encased like astronauts in helmets and bodysuits. Rain wouldn’t matter, for diving. She throws another stone, a more pointed one that goes a bit further. She’s not going to go back yet, Mum’s probably worrying but then she shouldn’t have sent them out, should she, and if she wants them back she’ll just have to come out and find them like a normal person. Though the water on Lola’s coat is now soaking her legs. She shivers, runs unevenly over the stones in her wellies to the big rope swing, the one Mum doesn’t like. Jack’s scared of it too. You have to lean right over the water to pull it back and then jump from a rock. You fly out over the loch and if you don’t keep it moving after two or three swings you find yourself dangling over the loch with no foothold to get airborne again, but Lola can jump and she’s not scared of landing on the rock, nor really of the water: if she falls in she’ll just have to go back to the lodge and change her clothes, which has happened before and will happen again, and Mum gets upset about what she thinks could have happened and Dad thinks it’s funny. She’s got guts, Lola, Dad says, no one’s going to bully her, see, Jack?
Lola climbs the rock, hooks the swing with a stick, grabs the rope as it begins to escape, and takes to the air, landing neatly with her bum on the branch from which years of bottoms have worn the bark. She crosses her ankles and leans back, lets her hair swoop low over the waves. She’s flying over the dark water in the rain, spread on the air, her feet and her belly and her head passing through different spaces at the same time. She could keep going, could follow her trajectory far across the water before she would tumble and, as she entered the water, ears and hair slick b
ack, elbows fold, legs fuse, glide and turn, become a seal, and she would swoop the loch, would rise and eye the cars and lorries storming north, dip and drift to the island. The seals in the zoo have a pool with glass walls and she’s watched them swim, like underwater flying, gliding on currents the way a seagull wheels and coasts on the wind. Sometimes she doesn’t much want to be a girl, stuck on land. Back over solid ground, Lola takes her weight on her hands, parts her legs to release the branch and drops at just the right moment, lands on her feet like a gymnast after backflips.
There’s a girl on the bank, watching.
She’s about Lola’s age. She doesn’t have the right clothes. No such thing as bad weather, Dad says, only bad kit, though Auntie Sue said once that Dad’s preferred kit seemed to be a pub and a pint. The girl’s wearing shiny shoes with straps and buckles and pink flowers on them, white tights and a denim skirt – denim’s terrible in the rain, holds water like nobody’s business, you can tell who shouldn’t be on the hills because they’re wearing jeans, and her coat is the sort that darkens in water. Can I have a go, says the girl, and Lola shrugs. It’s a free country, Dad would say. Take turns, Lola says, I haven’t finished. And my brother might want a go. I saw him, says the girl, in the trees. She comes down to the rock and realises she can’t reach the swing. He pretended to shoot me, she says. Lola shrugs again.
The girl casts around and then picks up the stick and pulls in the swing. She jumps onto it well enough, better than Jack, but she clings to the rope and holds herself upright as she flies. Witch on a broomstick, Lola thinks. The girl has black hair and dark eyes. She tucks her feet up under her, makes herself as small as possible. She doesn’t like to fly. If you ever got Mum on a swing, she’d probably hold on just like that. The girl swings in over the beach and back out over the water, scrunched up. In again, and Lola feels her face beginning to smile because she knows exactly what’s going to happen. This time the swing crosses the water’s edge, but only just. Out, back, still a pendulum but now swinging only over the loch. Lola steps up onto a flat rock, for a better view, and folds her arms.