The Fell by Sarah Moss

Author:Sarah Moss [Moss, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

not reading

ALICE GOES TO bed. She might as well. Electric blanket, book, but she keeps realising she’s moving her eyes along the lines, turning the pages, not reading. It’s nice enough, being warm and comfortable, but she can almost feel Matt through the wall, feel his fear. And Kate, out there on a night like this, you could almost feel her too, on the wind and the rain, in the dark. There’s nothing she can do, she reminds herself, which could be the motto of the last six months, and the way things are looking also the next six months, and who knows about the six months after that. A person can doubtless live like this indefinitely, the background murmur of dread only a little louder week by week, month by month – well, that’s obvious, isn’t it, people don’t die of dread, nor even imprisonment, or at least they do but not directly from being shut away, from lack of access to healthcare and poor diet and suicide and violence and many of the reasons that put them there in the first place, shame on her for comparing her comfy house, mortgage paid off, with her kind neighbours and her garden, to a prison. It’s been years since she did the visiting scheme, Mark never really liked her driving off there, coming back, he said, with the smell of the place on her clothes, but she kept it up for years and you don’t forget what a prison is like. No electric blankets, that’s for sure. No trees through the windows, no home-made cookies. I’m just glad, one man said, that I can see the sky, because I can look up at the clouds and think that if my kids are looking up they might be seeing the same ones, I know the moon’s shining on them the same as on me. It was always surprising, disturbing, that the people in there were so much like the people out here. You’d think, she’d thought, Mark probably went on thinking, that criminals are different from the rest of us, hardened or something – well, by the time they came out, maybe – but it wasn’t so. There were plenty of people who’d got caught doing stuff only incrementally worse than what most of us chance, maybe not burglary or assault but speeding, a little shoplifting, cash-in-hand to a builder, she’s done all of those herself though the last shoplifting was years ago, Susie in the pram and she never even knew why she did it, just the odd packet of expensive ham in the supermarket, a lipstick she had no reason to wear, little luxuries they couldn’t afford and didn’t need and she’d never done it before and never did it again once Susie was old enough that she might have noticed. It was the risk, maybe, spice in a life that had contracted to the baby and the house, the possibility of being seen when she was otherwise invisible.

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