The below is an extract from Chapter One of Cold New Climate by Isobel Wohl, the first book published by Weatherglass Books. If you like what you see, you can pre-order the book from our shop, and receive it in March, a month ahead of official publication.
In the mornings Lydia looks out over the hills at the wind turbines and watches each crisp white blade move across the blue behind it and become perpendicular to the horizon. As each one passes the zenith of its motion another blade follows, and another, as the first blade is coming back up. Lydia watches and drinks coffee. She decides not to read the news.
Stray cats rub past her lower leg and occasionally climb onto her breakfast table. There are tortoiseshells, black ones, white ones with brown and ginger spots. Some are fat and glossy. Others are bony and irritable. These hiss.
Don’t feed them, Liz said that Marty’s cousin said, when Lydia called to say she’d arrived at the house that the cousin had agreed to lend her. It’s cruel. Apparently people do it all the time, people feel bad for them and feed them for a while but soon the cats show up expecting it and of course no one wants them around pestering so they stop and the cats starve, by that time there are kittens and that’s why there are more and more and more of them. Taking over the town. Robert says feeding them’s like hurting them. The future ones who will be more likely to be born, that is, because they’ll suffer. Do you want me to tell Tom you made it all right?
When the day gets hotter she goes into the house and opens her laptop and begins to work at the kitchen table. She can hear the cats rubbing against the wooden door and meowing to be let in. The current project is an energy drink called ENGINE. The company board says that they do not want the packaging to look too industrial because they do not want anyone to associate ENGINE with engine fluid, so Lydia comes up with can designs in pale green and silver, evasive and full of pep. There is no Wi-Fi but she has a dongle and most of the time this works all right.
She cannot entirely stop herself from Googling in fits of boredom the weather this coming week and double-checking how to say Hello, how to say Do you speak English and May I sit and With you. May I sit with you. Someone will say that to her soon. She would like to understand it, and then she can say I don’t speak Greek, possibly in Greek but also possibly in English to underline the point. Anyone who will be able to speak to her in English will understand if she says in English I don’t speak Greek.
She tweaks a design and sends an email suggesting that the brand reconsider biodegradable material and receives in reply an email with a reiteration that the material suggested is outside of the packaging budget. Would she please stop going over old territory. Lydia apologizes. The cats sound lonely.
In the late afternoon she walks up stony paths and into the town. She goes to the bakery, where she says hello to the girl who told her about the wind farm dispute. They no longer speak about the climate.
On the way home Lydia sometimes stops at the convenience store, where in the back of the glass cold case there is good yogurt in a round terracotta dish covered in plastic wrap. This yogurt, the label says in English, is locally produced. She buys some, and also eggs and cheese and sometimes gummy worms, which are near the register and difficult to resist. When she gets home she puts these items away in her cupboards and refrigerator.
I don’t want to check in with you, she texted Tom back on the fourth day of her absence, that’s why I’m away.
The Aegean is a darker blue than it was in the pictures she saw on the internet. She eats anchovies and whitebait alone at the seaside cafe.
One day a man in a Panama hat sits at the table next to hers.
I don’t speak Greek, she says.
He looks at her quizzically and says, Okay. Then he opens his newspaper. When the waiter comes he orders an ouzo in English.
The bodies of the anchovies are silver-white on the back. When they were cleaned they were sliced open along the long tapered belly and there is a groove where the spine was. Lydia likes the salt and the lines in the white flesh pattern. The sun sets. When the striations of color are close to fading Lydia walks back up the road to the town, past kittens, who follow her for a few minutes before giving up and lying down by the roadside.
*
Each night Lydia orders a small beer at the town’s only bar and sits at a stool near the high table in the sandy front yard. La Isla Bonita and Africa and Romeo and Juliet play on repeat. From the television near the open door Lydia can sometimes hear a brisk commentator announce some sports event she cannot see and cannot understand. She can tell when there’s a goal because of the cheering that blares from the speakers. She tries to use her peripheral vision so that the people exiting and entering cannot tell that she is watching them.
Across the street she can see the unfinished new town hall and sometimes, once it is dark, teenagers who step past the slices of unused white stone. The girl at the bakery told Lydia that the government started to build this new building but then quit halfway through because they found they did not need it and also they had no money. Lydia asked if this was connected to the cost of the wind farm. The girl scoffed and asked if Lydia had heard of the debt problem. She said she had.
Well, said the girl, and shut the case of pastries.
Often at night a pair of moonlit adolescents enters the structure one after the other; often one offers the other a hand as they make their way up unfinished steps, giggling, and pass through gaping doorless rectangles; often it is the boy who offers a hand to the girl but not always, and one night Lydia believes there are two girls but she cannot say for certain because it is very, very late and they are fast and careful.
Lydia wonders who will sit at her table.
The young men who enter the bar, Lydia notices, generally come in groups with young women. The older ones sometimes come alone.
On the third night a man comes up to her and asks, Do the Americans really like Trump?
Lydia says that some do and some don’t.
When the bar closes she walks again down the winding path to the house. It is very steep.
Around one A.M. she wakes up hungry. In the anodyne light of the fridge she puts a slice of wet white cheese on a chipped plate and eats it with her fingers.
*
When Lydia met Tom she was very young and he was middle-aged and knew Italian. He still knows Italian but now Lydia sometimes notices that there are small drops of clear or yellow sputter on his pillow. When she wakes up in the borrowed house she’s glad not to see it. She sits outside on the terrace and sees the sun come up in pinks and wafty blues and oranges.
Sometime in the past couple of weeks he went to a faculty meeting, unless it was cancelled or he decided not to go. At any rate there was a faculty meeting scheduled on the whiteboard calendar that hangs on their metallic fridge door on the Upper West Side. Caleb’s birthday was circled in blue, a big 19 scrawled on top. She won’t be there.
On the ninth of October Lydia was supposed to have a drink with Liz, and she hasn’t seen her in months, though that’s not unusual. Now that Liz and Marty have kids it’s tough, or that’s why Liz says she doesn’t have time. Still Liz was instrumental in the Greece plan for emotional reinvigoration, even if she did not entirely understand why it was necessary. In her most affected moment Liz said, Lydia, boredom is the price of intimacy.
Lydia remembers when they were inseparable.
By the roadside she finds what she thinks is wild oregano and picks a few sprigs. When she gets back to the house she checks online to see if she is right before she eats it. She is. She picks the leaves off and puts them on sliced ripe tomatoes. At least she does not have to go to dinner with Tom’s friend Bob Mackenzie, who has a habit of spitting in flowerpots.
Sometime in the second week she realizes she wants to text Tom about the sunrise but does not have service, and anyway she has said she will not do that. On Caleb’s birthday she sends him an email and embeds a photo of the landscape. It shows the turbines.
Cold New Climate is published on April 15th.
Pre-order it from Weatherglass Books now, though, to receive the book in March, a month ahead of official publication.