Before the Grass

Jim announced he was getting off Facebook the way other men announce they're giving up the drink: to a wife who had heard it before.

Karen didn't look up from the list she was writing. Grass. Gutters. Post that letter. Big shop. "Right," she said. "Off Facebook. After you do the grass."

"It's the doom scrolling," Jim said. "It's rotting my brain. Kills your attention span. Dopamine! I read a thing about it." He had read the thing on Facebook, but decided not to mention this. "I'm just wanting to be more present, for yous, you know?"

"Present at the gutters," said Karen. She paused, then picked up letter from the worktop and deposited it in her bag.

The phone went face-down on the table. A statement. He'd leave it there, reachable for emergencies, a man with a family has duties, but otherwise it was dead to him. He turned it over once before nine to check the ringer was on, and that Karen hadn't texted. That wasn't scrolling. That was logistics. He was very firm with himself on the difference.

The grass could wait till the dew was off it, which was just sense. The gutters needed the big ladder, and the big ladder was behind everything in the shed, so really the gutters were a whole weekend project, not a morning job. He made a coffee and drank it hot, which felt like the first thing he'd properly tasted in years, and he stood at the window feeling the great clean silence of a man who had quit something, and he thought about how he'd word it to his brother. Aye, just came off it, mate. Cold turkey. Clarity's unreal.

He turned the phone over to check the time. The time led to a notification. The notification was a man he'd done his apprenticeship with marrying someone in Tenerife, and he watched forty seconds of it before he caught himself, set the phone down hard, and felt the warm shame and the wee thrill of it both at once.

A walk. That would reset him. Get the blood pumping, then the grass. He left the phone on the table, looked back at it from the door lying there beaten, and stepped out into the Ferry, where the morning was doing that thing of being four seasons at once.

Just down the road, a lone bin was sitting out on the pavement. Blue. Funny, he thought. Could've sworn it was green this week. The thought drifted off before he could catch it. He came out at the front and the view of the Tay opened up. He walked along by the sea wall with the wind off the water and felt, almost, that thing the article had promised. Fife lay low and green across the water. Behind it the Lomond hills just peaked out, hazed at the edges, and Jim stopped at the railing and breathed it in and thought, this. This is what I've been missing. Right here.

The Lomonds, blue in the haze. Bluer than usual? Funny how a hill could look like that, he thought. Like another planet, at least somewhere you'd need a flight to get to. Did you know, he found himself thinking, that the rice paddies of Sa Pa are best seen at dawn? He did not know how he knew this. A man in a conical hat stood knee-deep in water that held the whole sky. A wee boy went past on a bike with no stabilisers, wobbling, fierce with concentration. And the thing about the Verdon Gorge, his mind went on, warming up now, is you want to jump at first light before the wind gets up, and the rock walls were ripping past, the river just a thread far below, the stark sound of the parachute snapping, then a still and turquoise world. A buff Tayside seagull dropped out of nowhere for a chip on the pavement and near took the ear off him; he didn't flinch. Guys, you can get a six-bedroom villa out here, overlooking the bay with its crystal clear water, for less than you'd think, honestly, less than you'd think. Somewhere a machine was running. And did you know, the secret to clean stripes on your lawn, a quieter voice in a different accent was saying now, gentler, closer, is you go diagonal first and then straight back over the top, the mower turning a neat green strip across an ordinary back garden, back and forth, back and forth, the grass laying down pale and dark and pale, somebody's washing on the line, a green bin by the fence. The tide had turned and was coming in over the mud, unwatched. And Jim, gazing out over the Tay towards Fife with the thin Scottish sun on his face, thought, distantly, I really should do the grass. His thumb moved independently. And there it was, the small familiar buzz against his fingertip, the wee double-tap of a heart turning red, the most natural sound in the world.