Summerwater

by Sarah Moss

the moment of fear as she fights to get her elbows through her sports bra. One of these days, she thinks, one of these days a woman is going to die doing this, or at least dislocate her shoulder,

and isn’t that the point of climbing a mountain, to look down on the people who haven’t?

They should again soon, really, never mind the thinness of the bathroom walls, must have been two weeks, three – four? – and even when she doesn’t feel like it, it seems to be good for them, like oiling your bike chain, doesn’t have to be fun but it stops things falling apart.

You should get a different kind of person here, Justine’s kind of person, those who don’t need fried food and warm sweet milky drinks always on demand, gift shops and public toilets, people who want to get out of their cars, who aren’t scared of weather, whose idea of fun involves using their own two feet to get away from all that.

and all that chatter about minutes and seconds and splits and Personal Bests, are we not measured and recorded and found wanting often enough already these days? Why not just run?

The land under our feet, far under our feet, beneath our buildings, roads, pipes, subway systems, mines and even our fracking; under the valleys, the deepest lakes and the abysses of the ocean floor, is always shifting, forming, changing state. We write on the surface but the surface moves.

There are moments in his retirement that seem to be the opposite of dancing, a daily game of hide and seek in which the unspeakable objective is to avoid the beloved.

What kind of basis is that for a lifetime together, lying about the one thing she’ll never do with anyone else? (Never again, not in her whole life, not if she lives to be a hundred? Well, things happen, don’t they, not things you plan, who’s to say?)

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?

People get on best, in Claire’s view, when they’re apart at least half the time, and she’s not sure that doesn’t apply to kids too.

Women’s magazines always say that, a long scented bath, as if everything from baby weight to infidelity will dissolve in enough hot water, as if you can spend enough on bath salts to cover the smell of self-loathing and repressed rage.

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.

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.

Deep asleep, deep asleep, Deep asleep it lies, The still lake of Summerwater Under the still skies.

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.

Well, prime might be pushing it. You probably don’t notice when you’re in your prime, do you; in fact, if you’re thinking about your prime it’s almost certainly over.

The thing is, it’s all downhill from here, which is a daft thing to say because it’s not as if people in their thirties are getting younger either, look at it that way and it’s all downhill from birth, death approaching minute by passing minute, kids too, but he knows what he means. It’s different, being past the midpoint. It just is. The young are younger and the older not so old.

It’s typical, isn’t it, when a man watches porn he’s dirty and dangerous and it’s degrading to women but she can just sit there on the sofa for all the world to see, getting all hot and bothered over her laptop.

And the dancing around the room, he’ll think later, later and often, was why he didn’t see the flames sooner. The dancing was why he didn’t notice when the laughing stopped and the shouting sounded different.