Life and times

The novelist and academic on bookshop browsing, parental panic and going down like an lead balloon

The author Sarah Moss

‘INJURED LEG, CAN’T RUN, late home.’ I’m on the platform at Coventry, about to board the train to give a talk in Birmingham, when my teenage son’s text, sent an hour ago, appears. I had thought before I left that he was having a longer run than usual and that I would rather like him to come home now.

I call my son just as the train arrives, ready to abort my evening and rush him to hospital – but he doesn’t answer. I call home, alert my husband, board the train and then send my son a number of texts intended to balance rising maternal hysteria with polite curiosity as to his location.

He runs cross-country – fields and woods, country lanes with no pavements – so could be anywhere, and it will be dark soon. What if he’s lying in a ditch, what if a car hits him, what if he can’t walk and wolves come upon him in the forest, and why has he turned his damn phone off again?

I text again – ‘Where are you?’ – and get an immediate response: ‘In the kitchen – why, where are you?’ He’s hurt his knee, he says, but he can walk, more or less, and he is going to have some dinner now. I’M GOING TO talk at the Booksellers Association annual conference dinner. I love independent bookshops, the way they work as hubs for readers and writers of all ages, the way each one is differently curated to offer unexpected joys as well as the book you’re looking for, the way they sit on lucky high streets giving off unopened worlds of new books between the estate agents and the charity shops. They can order any book I want within 24 hours, so I never buy books online. I’m happy to meet so many of the nation’s booksellers but inevitably nervous about my talk. My new book, Ghost Wall, is creepy and dark and doesn’t obviously lend itself to after-dinner comedy.

I turn out to be right: following the comedian Robin Ince and the authors of What Would Boudicca Do? ,allican do is smile sweetly at the audience and tell them that they’ve had their laughs and now I’m going to talk about Iron Age human sacrifice, and then they can eat some more. The room goes quieter than I expected.

IN THE MORNING, the teenager can’t walk and I take him to A&E.

I COME HOME from an afternoon of meetings late and tired. Either my bike is putting on weight or I’m somehow losing fitness despite a lot of running (often this mysterious disease is cured by pumping up the tyres but, just now, that is beyond me).

No one’s had time to clean and the house is messy and the PE kit has to be washed by morning and it’s recycling day tomorrow and, while I’m considering all this, the cat is sick. She ate a fly earlier, my younger son says – it seemed mean to take it away when she’d spent all that time hunting it – and no, he’ll be sick himself if he has to clean it up.

I do what must be done and then look at the piles of paper on the kitchen table. At the top is a parcel for me. It’s probably a book to review, I think – but it isn’t. It’s from Kitty Macfarlane, a brilliant student of three years ago, and it’s the CD of her first album, Namer of Clouds ,anda copy of her first published article, based on an essay she wrote for me in her final year. I put the CD on and stand in the kitchen, not cleaning, not cooking, but listening to her beautiful music and feeling that the future is in good hands and what I do is worthwhile, after all. Ghost Wall (Granta, £12.99) is out now

What if he’s lying in a ditch, what if wolves come upon him in the forest, and why is his phone off?