by Sarah Moss
Patrick sees her first, and his excitement makes Jon turn and Izzie wave so hard she almost loses her balance in the water. Mummy, she says, Mummy, look, and Jon, Patrick in one arm and takes the tea in the other hand, gives her a kiss on the cheek. Pat lurches, casts himself onto the air between his parents, spills his father’s tea. They won’t always love her this much, she thinks, holding her son, no one else, not even her children’s future selves, will ever be so pleased to see her coming as they are today.
the weight of water
The light is as it was this morning. These midsummer days move too slowly to see, especially with the curtains of rain and cloud closed upon the woods and shore. In the oak tree, a peregrine sits, unseen. If it does not hunt soon it will die but if it flies now the weight of water will drag it to the ground where dusk will bring harm: foxes, humans and still nothing to eat. A small bird now, a squirrel, even a mouse would buy the peregrine more hours of life, more time for the rain to stop.
once there stood
SHE CAN’T FIND it.
There’s always one in her drawing bag, kicking around with the paper pad and the pencil case, and usually another in the box, but today there isn’t. She must have had one in the café, mustn’t she, she can’t have made that whole sketch without. Probably. Try to use it less, Annie says in the weekly group, just draw what you see the way you see it, don’t be always correcting and second-guessing yourself. It’s funny how you can’t avoid taking art lessons personally.
You’d think that maybe people, the over-fifty-fives, would paint with their unconsciousnesses, their repressed selves or what have you. You’d think, or maybe hope, that the quiet wives in pastel jumpers and beige make-up would splash scarlet and crimson and slash black lines, that the ones in long skirts and flat shoes would betray a passion for order in neat little pencil sketches, and perhaps that the two men – chinos under eight-month bellies – would show a turn for raging dancers and stormy skies. People do, sometimes, betray the wildness they carry in their heads. The older she is, the more she thinks everyone’s at it, because it turns out that being a little old lady doesn’t stop you wanting to bash the panels of cars parked on the pavement with your umbrella and snatch and stamp on the phones of people having loud conversations on the bus. Quite recently at the supermarket Mary was in the queue behind a lass who was expecting, she’d asked when the bairn was due, just touched the bump, so round and taut, and the lass told her where to go in terms she’s not going to repeat and then started crying, right there by the cereal bars, and though she was shocked and upset Mary also felt a wee surge of admiration. It’s cheering, somehow, when it’s the unlikely people quietly amok, Sheila Hepton up the road, mother of three boys and kept the house so neat you didn’t want to sit down for fear of squashing a cushion, never seen without lipstick and foundation in thirty years of neighbourliness, turned out she’d been at it with Alan’s boss for years, up to all sorts Mary hadn’t even heard of until Jeannie next door told her. There’s no reason, really, why high standards in make-up and housework should indicate high standards of morality, after all don’t we all go deeper than mascara and folded towels, but still. Not that Mary approves, not that she really considers that sort of thing admirable, better to splash paint or take up cycling or even sell up and buy a ruined farmhouse out in the hills and spend ten years rewiring and plastering and plumbing like the McVeys than ruin your marriage for a man no more handsome or interesting than your husband, and honestly in Mary’s view after a few years no one’s going to be more handsome or interesting than your husband; setting aside the violent and deranged, getting married is like voting in that whatever you choose the outcome will be at best mildly unsatisfactory four years down the line. Anyway, turns out most people don’t express their secret selves on paper but draw exactly what you’d expect from looking at them, you could see someone on a bus and make a perfectly accurate assumption about her artistic tendencies, which is why she needs the thing. The whatsit. She likes to get things right. She doesn’t want to improvise around mistakes, she wants it done properly in the first place. And it was here, it was definitely here, and now it’s not, and she never loses things, never ever, and it can’t have just vanished, it’s not as if there are children or even a cat to move things around.
She knows it’s not in her handbag, there’s no reason it would be and she’s already looked twice, but she’s now, she thinks, into the ritual phase of looking for something. Leaning on the back of her chair as she passes, she carries the handbag over to the table. Her younger self would have upended it, let everything cascade over the tablecloth. Maybe her younger self would have painted differently too, but she’ll never know what she might have done if she hadn’t been a doctor’s wife and the mother of Melissa and Marcus. She pulls out a chair and sits down, and David, reading a book on the future of the country in his armchair, looks up and asks what she’s doing. You mind your own business, she wants to say, but she says, oh, just going through my bag, it’s getting a bit heavy. Looking for the thing. Looking for the word for the thing. He’d only worry, or take her off to the doctor, and they can’t do anything, can they, about – well, about this kind of thing. If that’s what it is.
He grunts and looks out of the window. She thinks he’s not really all that interested in that book, which looks to be another five-hundred-page lump by another – what’s the word – preposterous, propensity, no, the other one, wealthy, well off, ha, prosperous, that’s it, another prosperous and preposterous Englishman about how the world is ending because no one’s doing what the writer thinks they ought to do, learning obsolete words for insects or scrubbing floors on their hands and knees with wooden brushes or exposing babies to germs, usually something the writer imagines that women or the lower orders did before he was born. She doesn’t know why David goes on buying them. Keeps the old brain ticking over, he says, as if hers isn’t, as if all that walking about in the rain and reading tedious books will stop him getting old and dying like everyone else. Anyway, she can’t sit about here all day. Why is her handbag on the table, she doesn’t like bags on tables, not once they’ve been on the floors of cafés and ferries and even public loos, you wouldn’t put your shoes on the dinner table, would you? She stands up slowly and leans on the table while the cabin around her tilts, wobbles. It’s not dramatic, the way the earth moves lately. There are no earthquakes or bombs, just an instability, as if all the surfaces are delicately balanced and easily tipped. The children had toys like that, Weebles, they were called, egg-shaped people about three inches tall and you could force them all the way down to the ground and they’d spring up lurching from side to side and eventually sway themselves upright. Like one of those things that hangs from a big clock, the ticker.
She takes the handbag over to her armchair and bends her knees to put it on the floor, which is one of the places she might think to look next time she wants it. It’s not easy, standing up again, even holding on to the chair back. Things aren’t always exactly where she thinks they are these days, as if everything is out of the corner of her eye, as if her hands and feet are guessing a bit. Outside, she sees, down by the water, there’s that nice family staying in number five, the baby boy and the little girl with about the same gap as Marcus and Melissa. She and David hadn’t bought the cabin then, not until David’s dad died when Marcus was four – well, the cabins weren’t even built, the holiday park was just woodland like everywhere up here though the pub is old, her dad remembered walking up to the pub while the road was still a track and the deliveries came by boat. Did they go on holiday, when the children were so young? She doesn’t think so, just family visits, mostly her parents because they could see David’s every Sunday anyway, and David not always with them. He used to work so hard. She took the children on the train, she remembers it now, and prams were so big in those days, handy for the shopping and good in the weather but you couldn’t be always popping them into cars and lifting them on and off buses and trains the way people do now,
she just used to carry Marcus in her arms and Melissa trotting alongside and were there still porters, then, for the luggage? David, she says, were there still porters, do you remember, on trains when the children were little, or did people help you when you needed it? What, he says, lowering the book. Porters, she says, when did there stop being porters on the trains? I have no idea, he says.
The young man down there, the father, is holding two mugs and he’s smiling and talking to his wife and the baby has wrapped himself around the girl and lain his head on her shoulder. She remembers that weight, the lolling hardness and the smell of baby hair. There won’t be grandchildren, she thinks, which is silly, the ages people have babies now there’s still time, even for Melissa, though Melissa’s babies will presumably be in – in that place. One of Queen Victoria’s daughters, and not New Zealand but the other one. And Marcus is, what, coming up forty-five which would be fine if he were married, or even living with someone, but if you allow at least a couple of years for all that and assume that she’s not much younger than him, time’s running out. They said Mary was an ‘elderly primigravida’ back in the day, waiting for David to qualify and get set up in practice, but by today’s standards – Melissa does have a boyfriend, they’ve seen him on the computer, a man with a beard and one of those New World names that’s really a surname, or quite often a town. Warwick, that’s it. Imagine looking at your baby and thinking, let’s call him Warwick. Do they even know how to pronounce it? War-wick. War, candle-wicks, candlesticks, they’ve some around here somewhere, candlesticks, in case of power cuts, must be candles too, surely, you wouldn’t have just the candlesticks. Pewter, with handles like teacups. She’d like to know what the children on the shore are called, hopes they have real names of the sort that served everyone just fine for centuries, saints and the Old Testament, Romans and Greeks, forebears. Melissa, she’d probably just be called Honey these days. They do these things better in France, with that list of names acceptable to the state, stops people who don’t know any better being ridiculous, though trust the bloody French, wasn’t there some trouble over Mohammed? Still, there won’t be any French babies called Chardonnay. Miel, wouldn’t it be, like a vacuum cleaner? Something like that. She remembers Melissa with two plaits and a missing front tooth, je m’appelle Melissa, j’ai huit ans, j’habite à Bearsden avec mon père, ma mère et mon frère. There, some things you don’t forget. Test me again, Mummy, I got ten out of ten last time. The things we learn to say first: here I am. I announce myself. My name is Mary, I am – well, it doesn’t matter, does it? Getting on. Not dead yet. Je suis, tu es, il est. Nous sommes, vous êtes, ils sont. See? She even remembers the accents. Circonflexe. And she can still do poetry, Deep asleep, deep asleep, Deep asleep it lies, The still lake of Summerwater Under the still skies. Herself in little white socks and the dress her mother made, real Liberty lawn with the red berries on it, stepping forward on the stage and seeing her parents in the middle of the front row, smiling, Dad mouthing along with her, Mum in that hat. No, Semmerwater, not summerwater, took her ages to remember to say it right, Dad listening to her every night when he came back from work, and here she is getting it wrong again sixty years later. Or sixty-five. Once there stood by Semmerwater, A mickle town and tall; King’s tower and Queen’s bower, And wakeman on the wall. Then what? Came a beggar, halt and sore, ‘I faint for lack of bread.’ King’s tower and Queen’s bower, Cast him forth unfed. There, all the words, she can still do it. And then the shepherd feeds the beggar. They gave him of their oatcake, they gave him of their ale. And then? The rhythm goes odd, she remembers that, the lines stretch out. Something about glimmer of scale and gleam of fin, weed and reed in the gloom. And a lost city in Summerwater – Semmerwater – deep asleep till Doom. An odd choice, really, for a young child, though people worried less about that kind of thing in those days. And she still knows the songs, doesn’t she, most of the hymnary, she’d be willing to bet, second and third verses too. They stand, those halls of Zion, Conjubilant with song. Has anyone ever said conjubilant? One of those hymn words. And Christmas carols, the music teacher didn’t like them to be holding papers so they learnt everything, all the verses, even if you weren’t in the choir you had to do it. And our eyes at last shall see him, Through his own redeeming love. For that child, so dear and gentle, Is our Lord in Heaven above. The floor tilts and she rests a hand on the curtain as she sings quietly to herself, And he leads his children on, To the place where he is gone. Flickering candles, cold stone underfoot, the scent of pine on the air.
The mother has perched herself on a rock now, with the baby on her knee and what’s probably the mug balanced at her side, not really a good idea when the mugs belong to the lodge and they’ll surely have to pay for breakages. The father is showing the little girl how to skim stones although he’s not very good at it himself. We were like that, Mary thinks, we were just like that, although she’s not sure she can remember a single occasion when David had time to play outside with the baby and the toddler. He must have done. Maybe it happened so often it wasn’t memorable. And later, certainly, once he was settled in General Practice, there were sometimes days off, he used to take himself out hill-walking, all weathers. She did see his point, he was working all week, on call half the weekends and why shouldn’t he have a day to himself, it wasn’t every week, but once the children were at school she could have gone with him if he’d been willing to come back mid-afternoon. She’d have liked it, a few hours up the Campsies between washing up the breakfast and going back to the school gates. The father is taking the child’s hand, showing her how to reach back and then skite the stone over the waves.
Why did she come over here, anyway? What time is it? The light never changes, these dull summer days, hour after hour of grey pallor seeping through the trees, the sky at breakfast no different from bedtime. Still raining. Coming up five. If she makes something complicated for tea, it could be time to start cooking, or at least arranging things ready to cook. She made a plan when they went to the shops, wrote out a list of meals and ingredients. There was fish, wasn’t there, in the freezer? And potatoes, new potatoes in the summer, and you’re allowed to eat butter again now after all those years when it would kill you just to look at the wrapper. There’s mint in a pot on the veranda, and she remembers buying courgettes. She could scrub the potatoes now, and pick the mint, and maybe say hello to that nice family if they happen to come back while she’s out there, find out the names and all.
Mary unlocks the French window, but the key doesn’t work. David looks at her over the top of his book. It’s already open, he says, what are you going out there for?
She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know why she’s opening the door, and the weather the way it is. Where is she going? Everything turns.
Deep breath.
To pick leaves, she says, for the potatoes. She tries to pull the door and it doesn’t work, but when she turns the other way and pushes, it slides and the afternoon comes in, damp and chill.
David’s put his book in his lap. Leaves, he says.
She makes a laugh. Oh, you know, she says, for the potatoes, you’ve always liked them like that. Butter and a bit of what’s-it.
Mint, he says. Butter and mint. We haven’t had herbs out there for years, Mary. Don’t you remember, even when we had the pots right up by the window the rabbits got them all?
Now that he mentions it, she does, yes. She made unseasonal garlands of holly and hawthorn which had no apparent effect at all. Squirrels, more likely, she says, I doubt the rabbits could have climbed up on the table. Oh well then, no mint.
No, he says, no mint today.
He is still looking at her.
She does not look back.
where the bodies lie
In the shelter of the big pine tree there’s an anthill, and within the anthill is a city. Within the city are many chambers: nurseries, granaries, the throne room and a crypt where the bodies lie, and within the chambers are worker ants, two hundred thousand of t
hem, and the winged queen.
The city is south-facing for warmth, its roof angled like a solar panel to intercept the sun’s rays at right angles. The temperature is falling and a team is moving the new brood into a warmer room. Their city is well built and they’re safe enough from the weather, the settlement thatched like the roof of a Japanese palace to guide the rain from one panel to the next, to direct it downhill and away through the soil to the loch.
They close the entrances and wait.
what it’s like being
DON’T USE THAT, says Mum, you’ll scratch the tray, it’s non-stick, that. Becky drops the wire scrubber into the washing-up bowl, which is full of brown water with squashed peas and bits of potato bobbling against her hands. Well how do you want me to clean it, then, she says. Elbow grease, says Mum, which is what she always says, and mind out, I want to get the kettle on.