The Brilliant & Forever by Kevin MacNeil

Author:Kevin MacNeil [MacNeil, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857908926
Publisher: Birlinn

This is a Castle, This is a Kite

Her father gave her a castle. Stephie tried to think of what to say.

‘Um. Wow.’

They read the flatness in her voice as shock.

‘Look at her,’ Stephie heard Fatima whisper. ‘She’s overwhelmed.’

‘My little princess can’t believe her luck,’ said her father as he put a proprietorial arm around Fatima, his latest.

Stephie thought for a moment. ‘I don’t deserve it.’

‘Make the most of it, princess,’ said her father as he led Fatima away, beaming.

Stephie looked at the vast, cold castle and wondered what to do.

Time in a castle works differently. Each day, huge and silent and empty, will not be filled. Filling time in a castle is like trying to fill the sky with kites.

Stephie didn’t know what to do. When she bought a bike, it rained. She got a guitar, but her music was just noise. She grew sad. The locals avoided her because she frowned all the time; they believed sadness was a disease. Which it is.

She took up photography, but threw her camera away when she realised not one of her pictures had a person in it, smiling or not.

Stephie began talking to herself. Since people avoided her, she avoided them. She thought it might be useful to learn how to cook well instead of ordering takeaways all the time, but cookbooks don’t account for solitude and in any case her energies were draining away with each eternal day. Many years later, her father returned with a new Fatima. ‘It’s been six months already,’ he said. ‘How are you enjoying the castle?’

Stephie pointed at a beautiful yellow kite she had made. Her father’s smile faltered as his eyes took on that sad yellow sheen.

She placed a hand on her father’s shoulder, looked at him closely and said, ‘I didn’t deserve it.’

The close-up camera revealed that her dress had a yellow kite over the heart area, which I had mistaken for spilled custard.

Custard that is really a yellow kite. This was one of the main benefits of the B&F, one of the reasons it was so attractive to islanders; it let us see beyond the people we thought we knew and look directly into their mind.

‘The B&F gives us all greater empathy,’ I announced. It gave me a good surging feeling to realise this truth, to sense understanding as an actual, physical thing, shared here among friends and strangers.

But I immediately tuned out of her interview. When a writer starts showing more interest in her own characters than the real life human beings around her, it’s time to engage the mind in other pursuits. Also, I heard her say, ‘I do my sun salutations, perform a bowel movement and then the Muse deigns to visit me; she whispers precious visions in my ear.’

‘Guys,’ I said, ‘I’m starving. Let’s split for lunch.’

A great many burger vans, pizza trucks and cupcake tractors had set up on the west side of the Castle Green and it was to Honest Johnmurdo’s Authentic Italian Family Restaurant & Mini Marquee we headed.

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