Gilmour, David - Lost Between Houses by Gilmour David

Author:Gilmour, David [Gilmour, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Literary
ISBN: 9780307369260
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Published: 1999-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

WE WENT BACK TO THE COTTAGE but it was starting to get boring up there. I was lying around the house and getting in quarrels with my brother; even school was starting to look good. Finally the old lady had had enough.

“God’s teeth!” she declared one afternoon, “what’s gives? Why don’t you go down to the city for awhile?”

So I went to stay at my Aunt Jean’s house. She was the wife of my drunk, dead uncle who croaked on the living room couch, six in the morning. A sad story that but anyway. She lived in a big brownstone house on Poplar Plains, this narrow, windey street that runs from downtown up to my neighbourhood. Her son was sort of weird, a gun nut, a hunter and a member of some religious cult. After he hit puberty, we never really got along. He scared me a bit, not that there was anything hostile about him. He was just sort of long and pale and creepy. Anyway, they’d shipped him off for the summer to work on a shrimp boat on the west coast and his room was empty. So that’s where I went.

I liked my aunt, she was nice, and I liked staying at her house. I’d get up late, just before noon (it was the middle of August now), and perch my chin on the windowsill while I was waking up, peer out onto the street and watch the cars climb slowly up the hill. She left me lunch in the kitchen, a tuna sandwich and a cookie and a glass of milk, all laid out nicely, like I was still a kid. But that was fine. We didn’t know each other very well. She worked as a volunteer somewhere over by Eglinton with the St John Ambulance people. Organized book sales and auctions, things like that. She was a little lonely I think.

Anyway, I’d go downstairs and eat my sandwich and watch TV and just hang around the house. Sometimes I’d listen to the Beatles on her stereo. I could turn it up real loud. There was a song I liked, “It’s Only Love,” a slow, mushy one and it had this part in it when the guy’s voice goes way up and it gave me goosebumps.

I used to play that part over and over again in that big empty house. There wasn’t much else to do, most of my friends were still away at their cottages.

Some evenings, when it was just getting dark, I’d go to the front door and open it and just stand there, this soft sad summer street, no one around, all the colours kind of muted. There’d be these lights twinkling in the windows, I could smell the lake, the stars winking over top, the wind in the trees, the leaves making that funny swishing sound and some nights it made me very sentimental.

Sometimes I’d go for a walk barefoot around the neighbourhood just so I could feel the stones under my feet, the hot pavement.

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