by Sarah Moss
She’ll go round the front of the old people’s cabin though she’s no need to go down to the shore, just so she can walk across their view, not particularly fast. No hurry, is there? They’re sitting in old-people chairs and they’ve each got one of those awful old-people dentist lights shining on books in their laps, as if they’re about to do fillings rather than turn pages. Young people nowadays, she mutters, cluttering up our landscape in their horrible clothes, shoes like fridges. It’s what her gran says, I don’t know why you don’t want to wear pretty shoes, when I was your age I was desperate for a pair of heels, I don’t know how your dad can let you leave the house wearing those tights and nothing over your rear end, I wouldn’t have stood for it. Becky stares in and yawns widely, not covering her mouth, and the old man looks up from his book and stares back. He looks as if he’s on TV, she thinks, lit up like that behind the glass, as if the next thing is for someone to creep up behind him with a blunt instrument. She goes along the side of the gravel track, not that anyone would hear her footsteps over the weather, past the cabin with the sad woman who never goes out and the two kids. They’re still having their tea, and the scene reminds her of her old Playmobil dolls’ house, the stiff-jointed figures you could arrange around a green plastic table, the tiny plastic cutlery Mum was always telling her not to lose. The rain is seeping through her leggings and Alex’s hoody is beginning to cling to her hands at the cuffs. Maybe she’ll take it off when she gets there, maybe she’ll crawl into the soldier’s tent and pull it and her T-shirt over her head in one smooth move and toss her hair – she practises tossing her hair though the hood is still up – and the soldier will seize her and they’ll kiss, though actually he’s old as well as weird and whatever they say about old men he’s not shown any sign of wanting to kiss her, but he’s mostly interested in what she says and at least it makes a change from Mum and her banging on about recycling and sustainability and why they can’t use cling film any more.
Becky reaches the road, where all the potholes are full of brown water, and sets off into the trees.
beginning to rise
Deep in the woods darkness is beginning to rise, gathering under wet branches and between heavy leaves. In their den, badgers uncurl, snuff the air, lumber into the evening. The vixen stirs and stretches out for her cubs to nurse. She’s hungry, and when they’re done – before the slow smallest one is done – she shakes off the runt, nudges them further into the dim warmth and gets to her feet.
The vixen threads the dusk, quick and low. The traces of small creatures have been washed away and there are no little birds on the wing. She snaffles a fat drowned slug, trots on. She knows a place for bacon rinds, stale baps, a chilly feast of fish skin and potato peel. As long as the cubs stay where she left them, as long as no hunting owl wings the night in her absence, as long as no late car strikes as she crosses the road, she will return and feed them again.
hold off your tornados
JOSH DOESN’T LIKE the weather. Well, of course he doesn’t like the weather, he’s not a masochist, unlike his mum he doesn’t even secretly believe that rain is God’s way of stopping Scots having sinful levels of fun. (He shouldn’t be mean, though, didn’t she after all hand over the keys knowing perfectly well that sinful levels of fun would be exactly what he had in mind and a whole year before the wedding, she’d have had some grief from her own mum about that.) But this time last year it was exactly twice as warm as it is now. He got sunburnt climbing the Ben. He was carrying a litre bottle of water everywhere. There were folk swimming all along the beaches. The water and sky were blue and he remembers spending about half an afternoon just sitting on a flat rock a couple of miles along the shore path watching the leaf-shadows on the sand and stones and the birds on the water, feeling as if his skin was photosynthesising sunlight. Felt good, right enough, but for the first time there were hosepipe bans even on the islands where people don’t own hosepipes, don’t ordinarily want more water than the good Lord has already seen fit to pour on their leaking hoods and shoulder-seams. In some ways this year feels safer, as if being cold and wet makes climate change less bad than it was last year, but it’s not right, this kind of downpour. It’s as if the weather’s got stuck, as if the whole arrangement, the Gulf Stream and the space winds, the water cycle itself, stuff we don’t notice, has stopped. Won’t the water be running out, somewhere else? There’s only so much in the system.
* * *
He said he’d cook this evening, so he’s flipping through the recipe book his mum keeps here though he knows fine well what he’s going to make. Pasta surprise, they call it: couple of onions (sprouting a bit but that’s OK, you can eat the greens), red pepper with the bit that’s gone soft cut out, garlic also sprouting, wrinkly mushrooms but it won’t matter once they’re cooked, tin of tomatoes. It’ll do the job but Milly’s right, they really do need to go shopping tomorrow. He just likes it here with her, afternoon sex and morning sleep, the world centred around being in bed together, doesn’t want to break the spell. They’ll be back in the world soon enough, you probably don’t get many days like this, days when love is your primary activity, in your whole life. Break the fishbowl more like, Milly said, break the bell jar, you know if we drove round to the station we could be in Glasgow in less than an hour, go to the Kelvingrove or the Women’s Library, they’ve a festival on. She needs her friends, her tribe. It’s not that he disapproves of women or libraries or festivals, any of that, he just doesn’t want to go. It’s not his thing, same way she doesn’t want to go to the football, and they’re supposed to be on holiday, doing things together. He missed the game at the weekend, didn’t even mention it. The book’s more photos than words. Roast lamb with apricots, which seems a strange idea and his mum never made any such thing, certainly not here where she tends to keep things simple, frozen pies and fish fingers because it’s her holiday too, isn’t it? Smoked haddock fishcakes, look a right faddle. Broccoli and stilton quiche, that’s Milly’s kind of thing. Though he’s never made pastry and anyway they’re out of eggs. We could go over to the pub, he says, if you fancy getting out, they do food.
Milly looks up, refocusing as if he’s just pulled her from another horizon though he knows she’s reading that book for the second time this week. I’m going to run out of proper books, she keeps saying, if you had wifi I could at least download e-books. Proper books means paper books, taking over their whole flat at home, piles starting to grow even in the kitchen. When they have their own place, on the island, he’ll build shelves for her, all the shelves she could want. She shows him pictures, sometimes, in magazines, houses with shelves up the stairs and over the doors, nothing like any house he’s ever been in, but he could do that, for her. The pub, she says, mm. What is there down the road, in the village? He shrugs. Another pub, he says. Not that I’m not happy to cook, I just thought if you wanted out— She’s looking at the weather, at the rain dripping off the roof and the vagueness of the blotted loch behind the trees. Nah, she says, let’s save the money and go out properly another night, somewhere good. There must be something maybe round the other side, on the main road. I looked at the menu in the pub here, we’re better at home with pasta surprise.
He used to eat at the pub here with his mum and dad, for a treat.
She picks up her book again. She’s curled up in his mum’s chair like a cat, her feet tucked under. He remembers her earlier, laid out under him, the whole length of her his, her hair the brightest thing in the room. Later, maybe, again. Take her mind off things. He takes the onions out of the cupboard and decapitates them. He looks at her while she reads, while she won’t see him admiring her and feel weird.
She’s looking up. There’s that girl, she says, the miserable one. Not that I wouldn’t have been miserable, stuck here with my parents at her age.
He’s chopping the pepper, noticing it bleeding into the scratches on his mum’s white plastic chopping board. She’s not really one for peppers, his mum. Meat and potatoes and a green vegetable
and nothing wrong with that. Which girl, he says, to keep talking rather than because he thinks it’s interesting when a girl walks across the park. Two cabins up, she says, her brother goes out in the red canoe. He shrugs. There are always kids here, messing around on the beaches. He and Kieran used to spend hours there when they were little, on the swing or just paddling and playing with the stones. He heard some kids playing down there earlier when he was bringing in the laundry Milly had so optimistically hung outside, some kind of war game, lots of shrieking. It’s better for them, isn’t it, than being inside playing war games on a screen? The kids on the island still play outside, all weathers. You know which girl, she says, mum in the hippy patchwork trousers? Don’t know which dad, they all look the same, white bloke going grey, hiking boots, beige trousers with those awful zips. Vaguely, he says, though what he remembers is Milly talking about it. Some women, she said, just never got the memo when the second wave ended, where does she get those clothes, don’t think I’ve ever seen patchwork dungarees in a shop. Feminism, he’s learnt, has waves, though the tides seem very slow and there’s time to write a lot of books Milly thinks he should have read in between each one. Simone de Beauvoir, he’d vaguely heard of her without knowing what it’s all about, which was frankly just fine. Someone else, someone from now, he did read but didn’t really understand, or at least didn’t see how it was what he’d call feminist. He stirs the pepper. She’ll be going to the pub, he says, would she not be too young? Milly’s left her book and she’s opening the door and craning her head round it. Cold air and the smell of rain blows through. She would and she’s not, she says, looks to be going up the road. For phone signal, I suppose, must be missing her mates, she’s going to get soaked with no coat on. Like you, he says, missing your mates, and she closes the door and comes over to him, stands behind him at the electric rings and puts her arms round his waist. Her breasts press soft against his back. She smells different here, the wrong shampoo or something. Nah, she says, I’ve got you, haven’t I, not to mention I’m not fourteen. Poor girl.
At fourteen, they have agreed, they would not have liked each other. She was mostly into dance and he was mostly into weed. It’s a good thing, really, they didn’t meet any earlier. But she is missing her mates, he knows that, or at least missing her phone, missing the chorus of agreement and amusement and outrage that lives in it. He does wonder, sometimes, if the island is such a good idea, if she’d manage without the tribe who share and shore up her indignation with the version of the world they all inhabit. That’s why she wants to go, a new beginning, clean air, learning to bake their own bread and see the stars and hear the birds, but he’s not sure she’s really understood that mostly the people who’ve always lived there aren’t that interested in air pollution and sourdough and she’s always liked thinking about birds and stars more than actually looking at them, here or at home. She buys books, tells her friends how birds have compasses in their minds, seem to be able to steer by the stars even though they fly during the day, how all the stars were named by men. She doesn’t buy binoculars. Maybe she’ll start a book group.
They could go out, there’s a point four miles down the road where you get five bars’ signal. Sometimes you see people sitting in their cars in the layby, refuelling on news and human contact, though Josh is finding that the longer he has no internet access, the less appetite he has for it. And when they drove down the road three days ago and his phone began to tremble and exclaim with his friends’ past moods, it was like reading the weather forecast from last week. Unless there was a tornado or a tidal wave, unless there is a swathe of devastation still producing stories five days later, no one cares. And you can, he thinks, hold off your tornados and tidal waves as long as possible, thank you. No need to go looking, not just now, not while there’s the two of them, here, warm and dry with a bed for sex and sleeping and a table and chairs for sharing food. Maybe that’s all you need, really, a bed and a table. And bookshelves. People used to get by fine, didn’t they, before sofas and all that, generations of his family on the island. Uncle Seumas’s already offered him work, they’d have something, and Milly’s right, the schools up there are often wanting teachers, she’d soon find something. You can get help, at the beginning, a young couple and especially once there are kids on the way, and she wants kids soon, she’s always been clear about that. Look, she said, all of five months in, we’ll see how this goes but just to save time, I’m not interested in a man who will never want kids. I like being with you but if you never want to be a dad, it’s a matter of when not if we break up and it’ll be easier all round to stop seeing each other now. Call me, she said, picking up her bag, if you want, and she left the pub, didn’t even let him see her onto her bus. He called her before she got home. He can imagine her pregnant, the curves of her softened and swelling, more belly and more breast. It’s hard to believe that he’s really the one with whom her genes will pass down into the future. If there is a future; it’s not as if having kids is looking like a kind or clever thing to do these days but you have to act as if there’s hope, don’t you? You can’t plan your life around the end of the world. Mind out, he says – she’s leaning her cheek on his shoulder – I just need to chop the mushrooms. Can I open some wine, she says, do you mind?
She needs it, he thinks, to get through the evenings here with him. He’s not enough for her. How will they really manage, on the island? It’s his dad who grew up there, Josh himself has always been a visitor, family right enough but it’s not the same as living there. I love the community there, she says, the way everyone knows each other, the way there are old folk and the little ones at the ceilidhs, when do you ever see pensioners dancing with millennials in the city? And she’s right, it’s great, but what some would call the closeness of the community is also the challenge of living there. No privacy, nowhere to hide: the delivery guys know what you ordered online, the neighbours know when you went out and came home and probably also what time you turned out your bedroom light. Morag at the shop knows what kind of biscuits you like and how much beer you’re buying and people don’t say much, not to your face, but you know that they know. They know that you know that they know. He sometimes thinks maybe the visibility holds people to higher standards but his dad reckons they just get better at hiding and at shame, at seeing and not seeing. Not, his dad says, that it’s not a good place to live, you just need a certain set of skills. A bit like here, really; Josh wonders if that’s why Dad bought the lodge, to remind him of the watchfulness of home.
He hasn’t answered but she’s choosing a bottle, taking last night’s glasses from the draining board. The mushrooms are too wizened to slice so he just hacks them a bit and chucks them in with the pepper. We’re getting through it pretty quick, he says, was it two bottles last night in the end? She’s pouring, red. Yeah, she says, but we started early. Mm, he says, just give me half for now.
She gives him a full glass and a dirty look, wanders back to the window, opens the door again. He sees her through the glass, sipping her wine on the deck as if the background was a holiday ad instead of the weather. He stirs the veg and then tips most of his own wine into the pan because the surprise is going to need all the help it can get.
She comes back in, wet footprints across the lino. There are raindrops in her hair. Even the little Russian girl’s not out, she says, the one on her bike. Well, he says, you were worried when she was out the other night, you can’t have it both ways. You know if we do have kids on the island, they’ll be out in the rain? She shrugs, runs her fingers through the back of the new haircut which is fine but he liked it long, liked the way it took up space. I was concerned, she says, I wouldn’t say worried, you barely see the mum all day and it didn’t sound like a party for kids last night, did it, I did wonder where she was, there was a lot of drinking.
She’s halfway down that glass already. Cheap shot. Nip over and introduce yourself, he says, maybe they’ll invite us next time. If there’s a next time I bloody will, she says, the
y were certainly having more fun than the rest of us, maybe that’s what we should all be doing here in the rain, having parties, getting to know the neighbours. He fills the kettle. What, he says, him next door at a party, he hasn’t been to a party since 1963. Anyway you were giving me the impression that you were having fun, actually. She comes back over to the stove, pokes at the veg and then pats his bum. Was I really, she says, well jolly good.
Imagine him, marrying someone who says jolly good, even ironically. Just as long as she doesn’t say it to his mum. Or in the hearing of pretty much anyone in his family. He starts a pan of water; there isn’t one that’s big enough to do pasta properly here so it’s going to be a bit gluey. Oh well.