Summerwater

by Sarah Moss

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.

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.