Water Sports

Millicent screamed. She’d disturbed a tarantula spider under a piece of wood, not some tropical monster but the real thing, native to the Midi, though still of a healthy size.

Always something up with Millicent. She wanted to work up a tan, so here we were, among the dry stone terraces, the parched rows of lavender and withered vines, the dead and dying almond trees, cracked and twisted under the weight of heat, the abandoned farmhouses, when the land got too hard to work.

But wait. Close by one of them, a pair of wooden shutters set into the hillside opened upon a large cistern of crystal clear water. I could have jumped straight in. Just don’t let those shutters close on you again. Nothing to cling onto in there, no one to hear you, no one to know, up there in the lonely sun-baked hills.

Her face now a lobster red, Millicent kicked at the empty water bottle.

I beckoned. ‘Come over here and take a dip.’