by Sarah Moss
You can see the girl realising what has happened. Her shoulders clench. She becomes even smaller. She wouldn’t, in Lola’s view, have had to be especially bright to see that a swing hanging over the water before you get on it is going to be hanging over the water when it stops. I can’t get down, she calls. Lola nods, although the girl, twisting on her rope, can’t see her. I can’t get down, she shouts again.
Lola glances round. Jack is standing in front of the trees, watching, his weapon held now across his body, as they’ve seen the police sometimes in city centres and at train stations nurse their machine-guns.
Can you help me, shouts the girl.
Lola can, of course. Easily.
She thinks she probably won’t, this time.
What’s your name, Lola asks. The girl twists herself, trying to face Lola, but she has no purchase on the air. Violetta, she says. I’m Violetta.
Violetta, says Lola. Violetta who? The girl says some syllables. Shit-chenko, says Lola, Violetta Shit-chenko? Shevchenko, says the girl, Shevchenko.
She spins the other way, drooping now, her feet hanging down over the water. Her hood has slipped off her head and the black hair is beginning to smear her face, to drip from its points. The front of the denim skirt, hitched up around Violetta’s thighs, is dark with rain.
Please would you pull the swing in, she says. Maybe, Lola says, in a bit. Where are you from? Glasgow, says the girl, aren’t you?
Lola looks at Jack, tips her head, and for once he gets the message and raises his gun, takes aim. It’s none of your business where I’m from, Lola says, I’m asking the questions here. So, where you really from, Violetta Shit-chenko? Somewhere people scream and yell like baboons all night and keep everyone awake with their so-called music? Somewhere people don’t know how to behave? I bet you’ve never been on a holiday before, have you. We heard you, you know. My dad heard you. He was talking about it. He was thinking – Lola sighs – he was thinking of calling the police, actually. Because it’s not fair, is it, one lot of horrible baboons keeping all the babies and old folk awake all night, ruining everyone’s holidays.
Lola jumps off the rock and takes a little turn along the beach, ending at the edge of the water near Violetta. So where are you really from, she asks quietly.
Glasgow, says Violetta. Govanhill. You can see she’s going to cry, any minute now. She’s not even trying to hold it back. I’m getting a bit sick of this, says Lola, I asked you where you’re really from. You’re supposed to have left, you know, people like you, did you not get the message?
Lola picks up a stone. The water’s pretty deep out where you are, Violetta Shit-chenko, she says, and you don’t want to know about the pike.
There are hundreds of stones on this beach, just the right sizes, and she doesn’t need them to bounce.
beginning to drown
The sky has turned a yellowish shade of grey, the colour of bandages, or thickened skin on old white feet. Rain simmers in puddles. Trees drip. Grass lies low, some of it beginning to drown in pooling water, because even here, even where the aquifers are in constant use and the landscape carved by the rain for its own purposes, the earth cannot hold so much water in one day.
Under the hedges, in the hollows of tall trees, birds droop and wilt, grounded, waiting. Small creatures in their burrows nose the air and stay hungry.
There will be deaths by morning.
the audacity of small craft
DAD’S DRIPPED SOUP in his beard, and when Becky points it out Dad says he’s saving it for a snack later. Alex is going to throw up, he thinks, actual vomiting over the table. His own soup in his stomach bubbles and heaves. What’s got into you, says Mum, cheer up, it can’t rain much longer. Alex turns away. Look, Mum said, back in May when he said he’d stay at home this year, we’re happy to leave you at home for the day but two weeks is too long, not to mention I know perfectly well what you’d get up to, you and your friends in an empty house, not to mention this is our family holiday, of course we want you there. No, you’re coming with us. If you wanted to do something else you should have made a proper plan weeks ago. Weeks ago, he was revising for his exams, and by ‘proper plan’ it turned out Mum meant ‘return to the 1990s when there was work for unqualified sixteen-year-olds’.
Nothing, he says. I’m going out in the kayak. Mum looks at the rain rolling down the window. But you’ll get soaked, says Becky. Breaking news, he says, kayaker gets wet in Scotland. It’s called watersports for a reason, eejit. Don’t call your sister an eejit, says Dad. Going out where? Alex shrugs. Round the island, he says, not too far, I can’t spend all day stuck in here. You’re not stuck, Dad says, leave any time you feel like it, no one’s stopping you. Aye, right, says Alex, so that’s what I’m saying, I’m going out in the kayak. And no, you’re not stopping me, he does not say, and I do feel like it which is why I’m leaving, see? He gets up, takes his bowl to the sink before anyone can tell him to. What about the clearing up, says Becky, why can he just walk away, you’re going to tell me to wash up, aren’t you? Mum sighs. It’s only four bowls and a pan, she says, I’ll do it myself rather than have any more arguing. OK, says Becky, fine, you do that, it’s not that I mind doing it, I just don’t see why Alex gets to go find himself on the loch while I have to scrub pans, it’s really sexist. I told you, says Mum, I’ll do it.
Alex, heading into the bathroom where his wetsuit is hanging over the bath, reflects that if Becky were really interested in social justice rather than the evasion of chores, she would see that making Mum wash up in no way fucks the patriarchy. Anyway, Dad’s the patriarch round here. Or likes to think he is. Alex locks the bathroom door, feels a weight lift from his skull at the sound of a minute’s privacy. It was all very well when they were little but it’s not decent to make him and Becky share a room, not any more, however many bedrooms the cabin doesn’t have. Mum and Dad could sleep on the sofa bed, couldn’t they, dress in the bathroom? He considers a quick wank while he has the chance but decides he’d rather just get out there. Away from here.
The rain is pretty horrible, just not as horrible as being in the cabin. He pulls the red kayak out from under the deck and Dad opens the French door to tell him to be careful, not to scrape it on the gravel and make sure he puts that life jacket on. As if he might have had it in mind to wreck the kayak and drown, not that it wouldn’t have some appeal given the alternative. How many days left before they can go home? No, best not to think of it. As he lifts the kayak he sees movement in the French windows next door, the little girl and her baby brother with hands pressed against the window, watching him, and now waving as if he were a train and they people standing on a bridge. After a moment, feeling stupid, glancing around to make sure no one else is watching not that you can ever tell on the holiday park, he shifts the kayak and waves back. Train driver. He needs to get out of here. Later, he’s going to take his phone down the pub where this year they’re willing to pretend they think he’s old enough to be in the bar with a glass of Coke and the free wifi and maybe this is the day he’ll see if they’ll sell him a beer. Cold water runs down his neck. He balances the kayak on his shoulder and carries it over the grass towards the jetty. A gust of wind throws rain in his face. His phone is back at the house, always switched on in case some coincidence of weather and wishing brings a flash of reception, so in his head he composes a post to his group chat and sends it out on the wind. SOS. Mayday.
The wind slaps water around his ears and tugs on the kayak so he stumbles, bangs his shin on one of those stupid rocks people use to stake their claim on the open grass. Fuck, he says. Bloody fucking rock. Assholes. Cunts. Sometimes, alone, he goes on like this for a while, takes out and airs his bad words, but the weather extinguishes his swearing. The Scottish sky is better at obscenity than any human voice. He shifts the kayak, bows his head, remembers the board games in the damp lodge, the smell of soup and the pitch of his sister’s voice, and keeps going. He won’t die, after all, out here, and he might kill someone if h
e stays in there. His dad, for example, he might kill his bearded, soup-dribbling dad. Shut up about the soup, he thinks, but its viscous tomato smell seems to hang in his hair. Not blood, he wouldn’t want to spill his father’s blood, but the satisfaction of approaching from behind with the pan in which his mother fries stinky eggs so the whites are all snotty and slimy and form strings as his father shovels them into his mouth, with that pan or one of these very rocks—
The pebbles on the beach are dark and shiny with rain. He likes their sound under his feet, the proclamation that he is here, real, that he has mass and force and velocity. A child has dropped a shoe on the beach, the wrong kind of shoe, patent black with a pink flower, and if he wasn’t carrying this fucking kayak he’d put the shoe somewhere more deliberate, upright at least and further from the waterline, the way people do with found objects, teddies and bobble hats on walls, as if making impromptu shrines. On the way back, maybe.
Right, he can go out along the jetty and launch from there or he can just bloody man up and walk into the loch. Dad might be watching. He walks. It’s not a drysuit, you have to let the water in and then let your body heat it around you. It’s so cold his feet and ankles read pain rather than temperature. Calves. Knees. Bloody hell. He stops to lower the kayak.
When he was younger he used to pee in his wetsuit, to warm it up.
There are three white birds sitting on the water halfway between the shore and the island. Gulls. Hooked yellow beaks, the black flashes on the heads, bigger than you think, not much bothered by rain.
He’s up to his thighs and the kayak is pulling on its rope like an impatient dog. Right then. It would have been easier to get in from the jetty.
Much easier.
Oh fuck.
But it was a slip, not a fall, and now at least the wetsuit is properly full of water and will soon be insulating him the way it’s supposed to do. He tries again, and this time ends up more or less in the kayak and more or less the right way up. Go, then, to the island. To the far side. To the end, even, to the town where there’s the station and he could, if he had any money, take a train back to the city, if he had his keys go home, though home, he thinks, beginning to paddle, is not where he would go, or at least only briefly for a shower and a change of clothes and to stuff some things into a rucksack. Once you’re floating on it, the loch is rougher than it looks from the shore. He finds the rhythm of his paddle, likes as always the percussion of water and body and boat, the audacity of small craft carrying a living soul across a body of water. He’d have no phone, and more to the point no money, but there’s not always a guard on the train and if there is you can hide in the loo. He can see a gust of wind coming down the loch, the water ruffling like stroked fur, and shoves the kayak round to face it. He’d go home, and he’d take a hot shower – you’d need one after travelling in a wetsuit – and he’d raid the kitchen, no, he’d put a frozen pizza in the oven before getting in the shower and then, there’s no way round this, he’d borrow the credit card Mum keeps in her desk because although she doesn’t like credit cards, doesn’t like debt, having one gives you a credit history and what if her purse gets nicked while she’s out, and he’d go on the internet and find out how you get out of this country because people still do, it can be done – not America, though it’s the obvious choice, where people have always gone, but racists and guns and complete fucking nutters, it’s not even funny any more, and anyway from what he’s heard it’s about the hardest place to get through immigration. Australia, red earth and big skies. He’s OK at surfing. Windsurfing on calm water, anyway. They have farm jobs, don’t they, for young travellers, for Europeans, and they’d stretch a point, wouldn’t they, he is Scottish. He could pick fruit, whatever grows there. Mangoes, warm and heavy as breasts. Does it rain enough in Australia for mangoes? Hm, breasts. Or Canada, aren’t they nicer than the Americans, couldn’t he take kayaks up rivers or something, though that might have been long ago. It wouldn’t be worse than here. He knows where the passports are, stupidly in the top of Mum’s chest of drawers, along with her jewellery, to make things really easy for burglars. I know, she says, but when I hide things I can’t find them and anyway once someone’s in your house you probably want them to find what they’re looking for and get out, anyway you can’t live your whole life anticipating the plans of imaginary burglars, it’s not as if we’ve actually used the passports in years, only for banks and such, yours and Becky’s expired anyway. Well, he’s only thinking about things, isn’t he. There are lakes in Canada, and mountains, he could be there now, could be taking supplies back to the cabin where his girlfriend is waiting for him, his girlfriend with long pale hair and tits like you wouldn’t – he’s almost past the island and the waves begin to slap the side of the kayak so he can feel each blow. Head to the wind, then, and it’ll be really fast coming back. He likes the way you can wander in a kayak on a loch, go over here because you feel like it and then over there to have a look, the activity is ‘kayaking’ rather than going somewhere and coming back. He could stop on the island, there is even a jetty where the little ferry stops in summer for people who walk around on the trails and read the signs about the birds and animals that mostly aren’t there any more, and sit at the picnic tables to eat ham sandwiches and crisps. Not that he wouldn’t take a ham sandwich and crisps just now. But he’s liking being out here, wants to keep going, maybe even right up to the top of the loch, to where the river comes in off the hills, after all it won’t be dark till nearly midnight and it’s not as if he has anything else to do today.
He paddles on. The sky rolls, clouds the colours of bruises. He licks his upper lip to find out if his nose is running or if it’s just rain, and finds he can lick a surprising proportion of his cheek, sweet to the lip’s salt. Let it run. The rain doesn’t matter now; insulated in the blood-warmed water of his wetsuit in a kayak on the loch, he has forgotten how it feels to be dry. Drops patter on the boat, wind sings through the heavy air, waves smack the hull and the paddle dips, twists, pulls, drips. He pushes on, matching muscles against wind and current while on the shore trees lean and toss. To the east, gulls tumble up the sky, wheel and call. Who would choose to huddle in a cabin when you could be out here?
Onwards, wind and rain and running sky, weather pouring overhead down the valley and away south over sodden hills and fields. Alex’s shoulders begin to ache, and while the kayak is fine it’s true that much more wind would make things difficult. Just a little further, until he’s parallel with the tree that looks to rise from the water itself but has in fact twisted its roots into a rocky islet, a tree he climbed a few times when he was younger. He remembers inching out along the branch over the water, knowing there were more rocks biting the surface, that if he fell there would be blood and brokenness and Dad saying I told you so and that these were reasons to keep going. Well and here he is. He doesn’t have to do that any more.
He spins the boat, knows exactly when to plant his paddle to point the prow down-wind and down the loch. He is right in the middle, as far from both shores as can be and he would like, he thinks, to be further, he would like a greater expanse. He rests a moment, balances, lets himself and his craft drift. He has been going to school for twelve years, three-quarters of his life gone in the routines of bells rung and queues for nasty food and the feel of nylon trousers, another one to go. It’s a lie that Highers are going to be different. Another year. Well, ten months. Jesus. And then what? University, only he’s no idea what he’d do there, he’s OK at Maths but what do you do with a Maths degree? Then fifty years of work. You shouldn’t be thinking about retirement before you’ve even started, there’s something wrong with that and anyway he’ll be basically dead by then, sixty-six. If there’s still a planet to live on, if the crazy governments have spared anything. He picks up the paddle, but once the kayak’s going the right way he’s only really steering, dipping and pushing for stability while the water pouring off the northern hills and the wind pushing along the loch carry him back. Hot s
hower, he thinks, and please God not more of Mum’s sloppy brown ‘home cooking’ for tea. It’s not much of a holiday for me, she says, I don’t know if you’ve noticed that there are still meals to cook and toilets to scrub and actually more of it with everyone in the house all the time and no shops to pop to when we run out. And whose choice was that, who the fuck goes on holiday somewhere there isn’t even a chippy? It’s pretty weird when you think about it, all these middle-class white people coming here to have less privacy, comfort and convenience than they do at home, how’s that a holiday? It’s a break, Mum says, from what you think you need but you don’t really, back to basics, haven’t you noticed we’re all talking to each other more without our phones? Yeah, he said, arguing more, I had noticed that, aye. And where’s everyone else? Alex’s friend Amir went to one of those all-inclusive hotels somewhere in like Spain or Turkey or whatever, said there was free food all the time, cooked breakfast and then fruit and biscuits out all morning and then a lunch buffet and ice creams and cake in the afternoons and then dinner, and two swimming pools even though it was right on the beach and loads of hot girls lying around bored on sun-loungers. They had barbecues, he said, in the evenings, chefs in their white hats out on the patio, all the burgers and steaks you could want. It was unbelievable, Amir said, the food and the girls, and a really good gym so Amir had basically spent the whole two weeks working out, surfing, eating and chatting up the girls and barely even saw his parents. Even if you discount at least the more exciting half of what Amir says he did with the girls, which Alex does, at least half— he hears the wind coming before it strikes, has time to brace but it’s a near thing. Fuck.