Read Online Wait Till I Tell You by Candia McWilliam - Free Book Online
Authors: Candia McWilliam
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and then turning out to be entirely legal. He knew too well the uningenuity of the family, their suicidal love of the recessive plaster and subsiding stone.
Moreover, other people had begun to come to his gatehouse, not people he invited, but lovers and other conspirators. He heard them in the night, their voices, and, far worse, their pencils or their knives as they wrote their names, their feelings, their bodies’ intentions on the walls of his house, in the plaster or, with incisions that filled Bill with grief, in the stone. He heard them enact the words they wrote. He heard Jim loves Sandra, and he heard Sandra does not quite so much love Jim. He heard Alan 4 Bruno. Leah and Daniel he heard weekly for one summer and was to a certain extent let down when it changed to Leah is Crazy Over Liam.
Daniel had used words that seemed beautiful to Bill in the summer nights. He heard about Daniel’s feelings and he understood them. For once it did not make him think of the mess, the scribbling mess of it all. With Daniel, Bill could tell, it was romance, with a capital R. Leah loved it and then had had enough of it by the autumn. By the time the days were getting short, she wanted the smaller words and the quicker dates – with Liam – by the gatehouse.
There were boys buying and selling there too. He found the equipment and swept it up with his metal pan and wee wooden brush totted off a skip. The foil went all soft and black but nothing could destroy the plastic bottles and disposable syringes. He threw them out and understood as he never had before his mother’s feelings towards his own unexceptionable private squalor of skins and butt ends, bottles and cans.
In a country so rich in emptiness, you would have thought there would be places to live in that’d not been written on. You’d be wrong. Bill had moved north to the Black Isle, he’d moved west to Ardnamurchan, and he’d tried out Ettrickdale. Always the place where he settled started off unwritten upon, but he began to hear the movements and the breaths and the sighs and then the scratchings and even cutting and he knew that the marks of love or commerce or loyalty to God or football were about to be made, as though people could not act or think or speak without making a record of it in writing, writing that was not especially good to look at nor that ever said much that was new, nor that would be revisited. They wrote, it seemed to Bill, in order to attach their flimsy human selves to something that would last longer than they might. They were weaving themselves into time.
‘Why not write on trees?’ Bill had thought of saying, one night when he heard a man who had grunted for over an hour in the porch of a folly at Achiltibuie saying,‘Ech, Moira, wait till I get my felt pen.’
Buildings had no defence against those who wrote on them. They were bound to hold the record of the visit as an ear holds a note. These were not visitors who wrote one line of verse with a diamond in an upper window, or initialled out of sight a hidden sill. They were writers who did not know more of what they wrote upon than that it was old and might last. The knowledge seemed to spur them on.
Bill’s present home lay up the loch from the Heronry. He lived in the game hut of a shooting lodge. It was, naturally, draughty, but Bill appreciated it by moonlight when the silver came in through the thousand slats and he lay there under the lead bell of the roof like a bird himself, but alive. He hung boughs of fir from the game hooks and slept in the striped and scented green listening to the words of love and then the frustration of the writers when they could find so little flat upon which to inscribe their most recent version of the truth.
The nearest town, Lochgilphead, was a good hitch away. He’d a reasonable living housesitting and was getting a tremendous weekend sideline in marital counselling, the demand for which rose in the winter. From the years of residence in
Moreover, other people had begun to come to his gatehouse, not people he invited, but lovers and other conspirators. He heard them in the night, their voices, and, far worse, their pencils or their knives as they wrote their names, their feelings, their bodies’ intentions on the walls of his house, in the plaster or, with incisions that filled Bill with grief, in the stone. He heard them enact the words they wrote. He heard Jim loves Sandra, and he heard Sandra does not quite so much love Jim. He heard Alan 4 Bruno. Leah and Daniel he heard weekly for one summer and was to a certain extent let down when it changed to Leah is Crazy Over Liam.
Daniel had used words that seemed beautiful to Bill in the summer nights. He heard about Daniel’s feelings and he understood them. For once it did not make him think of the mess, the scribbling mess of it all. With Daniel, Bill could tell, it was romance, with a capital R. Leah loved it and then had had enough of it by the autumn. By the time the days were getting short, she wanted the smaller words and the quicker dates – with Liam – by the gatehouse.
There were boys buying and selling there too. He found the equipment and swept it up with his metal pan and wee wooden brush totted off a skip. The foil went all soft and black but nothing could destroy the plastic bottles and disposable syringes. He threw them out and understood as he never had before his mother’s feelings towards his own unexceptionable private squalor of skins and butt ends, bottles and cans.
In a country so rich in emptiness, you would have thought there would be places to live in that’d not been written on. You’d be wrong. Bill had moved north to the Black Isle, he’d moved west to Ardnamurchan, and he’d tried out Ettrickdale. Always the place where he settled started off unwritten upon, but he began to hear the movements and the breaths and the sighs and then the scratchings and even cutting and he knew that the marks of love or commerce or loyalty to God or football were about to be made, as though people could not act or think or speak without making a record of it in writing, writing that was not especially good to look at nor that ever said much that was new, nor that would be revisited. They wrote, it seemed to Bill, in order to attach their flimsy human selves to something that would last longer than they might. They were weaving themselves into time.
‘Why not write on trees?’ Bill had thought of saying, one night when he heard a man who had grunted for over an hour in the porch of a folly at Achiltibuie saying,‘Ech, Moira, wait till I get my felt pen.’
Buildings had no defence against those who wrote on them. They were bound to hold the record of the visit as an ear holds a note. These were not visitors who wrote one line of verse with a diamond in an upper window, or initialled out of sight a hidden sill. They were writers who did not know more of what they wrote upon than that it was old and might last. The knowledge seemed to spur them on.
Bill’s present home lay up the loch from the Heronry. He lived in the game hut of a shooting lodge. It was, naturally, draughty, but Bill appreciated it by moonlight when the silver came in through the thousand slats and he lay there under the lead bell of the roof like a bird himself, but alive. He hung boughs of fir from the game hooks and slept in the striped and scented green listening to the words of love and then the frustration of the writers when they could find so little flat upon which to inscribe their most recent version of the truth.
The nearest town, Lochgilphead, was a good hitch away. He’d a reasonable living housesitting and was getting a tremendous weekend sideline in marital counselling, the demand for which rose in the winter. From the years of residence in
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