Idea in Stone by Hamish Macdonald

Author:Hamish Macdonald [MacDonald, Hamish]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: 21st Century, Fiction, Fantasy, Amazon.com, Retail, Fabulism
Goodreads: 10860176
Publisher: hamishmacdonald.com
Published: 2006-06-14T15:00:00+00:00

Stefan stepped off the airport bus, back in the city. He walked with casual, slow steps to the path that led down into Princes Street Gardens. In another time, the Gardens were a fetid loch where the sewage ran down from the volcanic ridge on which the Old Town rested. The water contained the drowned bodies of dogs and witches. Today, it was a verdant park containing living dogs and sunbathers.

Stefan sat on a wooden bench marked with a memorial plaque and looked out at the people in the small grassy valley. He watched a group of shirtless boys kick a football, their skin nearly as pale as the white ball. Backpackers lay next to their packs and bedrolls. Stefan envied their portability, but didn’t feel any compulsion to be one of them. Beyond the far side of the park, trains creaked and sang like metal whales as they pulled themselves along the tracks.

The cast would be well on their way to Spain now. But Stefan was not. He had enough money to stay in the hotel that night, then a few more nights in a hostel. Beyond that—he didn’t want to think about what would happen beyond that.

His concentration flitted away like a moth. He got up and headed across the Waverley Bridge toward the Old Town. The city revealed more of itself to him now; he could navigate his way from the Grassmarket to the Cowgate to the Royal Mile—though the capillaries of wynds and closes seemed to open and close, or change their destinations, and a few corners of the town stayed out of his reach.

The Mile was alive with the tail ends of the Fringe Festival. Actors offered him handbills for their shows, but he refused them. He had no more inclination to be involved in theatre.

A scrawny man in cycling shorts made a show of twisting himself through hoops. A young woman dressed as a flapper posed robotically on an oversized music box, and further down the street a man stood rigid in Roman robes, his face covered in white greasepaint to make him look like a statue. Stefan wondered if this really constituted theatre, this standing still for money. He passed a trio of youths with dirty bare feet sitting on the sidewalk. One, with blond dreadlocks, played a bongo. Hardly an instrument, thought Stefan. The drummer’s friend, with thin facial hair like moss, blew into a didgeridoo. Bong practice, Stefan quipped to himself. The third just sat with a floppy beach hat in front of him, a few copper and silver coins glinting inside. A small troupe of pastel-coloured clowns ran hand in hand through the crowd, laughing.

Theatre fulfils a spectrum of purposes, Stefan supposed, but he was through with it. He’d unleashed his father’s play on the world, where it was working some kind of change. He didn’t fully understand the effect himself. He was glad to be a part of it, and to finish the work his father’s death left incomplete. But he felt a twinge of resentment: that was not what he’d asked for in his letter, to be used.

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