Gorgeous boring summers

I drove in the dark and the rain the other night with a licensed wing woman in the passenger seat and another human in the back, all giving me pointers like I was driving the Fury Road. The next morning I performed a few three-point turns on a quiet cul-de-sac, my baby’s new home. Some manoeuvres were less seamless than others. I saluted an impatient SUV whose driveway I was hogging. I went back in the afternoon to make sure I had locked my doors.

Later that day, I got the train down the country and sat in the designated quieter carriage. Two people near me were braying on their phones about how they were never getting the train again because it was crowded and the seat reservation system wasn’t working. I, seasoned, thought: what babies. Then the train was stopped for ages halfway home because the Gardaí had to board. The phone people must have felt so vindicated. I was raging. Next to me, a young woman was watching Saint Peter’s Basilica mass, I’m pretty sure, on her phone. Beautiful World, Where Are You representation. When I was getting off the train a man was having some cans near the door and his very young son told his dad to stop being so stingy and then his dad say alright and handed him a can. Turns out I was in some sort of Joe Duffy/Punchdrunk production.

That night I drank some alcohol-free gin and tonic and told my mother I had no news and then I watched the spy thriller series The Night Agent on Netflix. A man with a tragic past and a handgun + a self-sufficient woman + going on the run + the highest echelons of the state are comprised, I repeat comprised! That’s my ideal thing on a screen.

I remembered the few months when I was a teen and devoured Robert Ludlum’s novels. I reread a few of them in recent years and realised I still love ‘em. Even if the books have aged badly (I have to say that because the women usually thank the men who save their lives with the ride), those thick paperbacks with silly titles bring me back to summers spent at home far from anything. Months I’d have to pretend to classmates in September that I found boring.

When I was fourteen, Dan Brown had me telling my sister the church’s been lying to us for two thousand years. Once I finished the book I stormed into the living room with plans to avenge Mary Magdalene.* I read my mother’s copy of Rebecca the summer I was fifteen, lying on my bed under a slated attic roof. My mother’s handwriting on the inside cover told me she had read it at the same age. That edition has a wonderful 1970s paperback gothic romance cover. A beautiful woman in a long dress runs from a house on a cliff. When I was sixteen I met Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. For a few weeks, I lived years among aristocrats and artists between the wars. Structurally, Gaudy Night is such a perfect novel it intimidates me. And the series of books that lead up to it are such ambitious and beautiful kindling. I’m faint thinking about how much I love the universe Dorothy L. Sayers created. The ending of Busman’s Honeymoon? Reader, I bawl.**

Of late, all I want to do is be sitting down and reading one of the books I have on the go - a historical romance by Sophie Jordan, an essay collection from Ann Pratchett, the most recent Kate Clayborn, some slow-burning science fiction, all the novels I revisit to calm me down. But life knocks and robs me of this wanted time. I find the slices of joy at night before sleep, on weekend mornings.

I knew those summers were great at the time. I knew I was lying every September when I played them as months of nothing.

*Although saying all that, I am more of a Digital Fortress gal than a Robert Langdon fan. Love techno thrillers. Love seeing movie stars typing some code into a black window and racing against the download clock. I get so excited when a movie involves computers. There is a decent amount of computer stuff in The Night Agent, including finding some vital clues in metadata.

**Spoiler alert but I actually think this book is why I’m mad against the death penalty. God, I love stories.