Water Theatre by Lindsay Clarke Read Free Book Online

don’t know what’s got into me. It’s being back home again – after school, I mean. Being stuck in this place.”
    Martin sat down across from his friend again. “You don’t know how lucky you are. I’d give anything to live out here.”
    Adam slipped the coin back in his pocket. “It can get pretty boring.”
    Martin shook his head. “Not for me. I feel great when I’m out here, in the wilds.” He glanced across at Adam, ready to withdraw at the first scoff, but encountered only an interested, affirming nod. “Which is weird really,” he went on, “given that I’ve lived near the centre of town all my life.”
    â€œNot so weird.”
    â€œI suppose not, but…”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI don’t know. Every time I come out onto the tops it feels a bit like coming home. As if the country where I belong is just over the horizon, and I know it’s there, but I can only remember a few words of the language…”
    â€œWhat kind of language would that be?”
    The word “poetry” was at Martin’s lips, but it would not pass. He saw it would render him too vulnerable to this new friend. So he merely snorted in demurral and looked away. In the meantime, Adam had felt it necessary to make amends. “Go on,” he urged, “it’s interesting.”
    â€œIt mostly has to do with the wind,” Martin offered uneasily, “and the way the sky reflects in water, and the sound of water, too. The feel of stone.” He hesitated there, amazed that he had risked this much, then saw a way through. “I’d have thought you’d have sensed it. Living so close, I mean. You must have felt it trying to get through to us?”
    Now it was Adam who frowned.
    â€œYou talk as though it were alive,” he said. Aren’t you being a touch anthropomorphic – muddling it all up with human stuff? What interests me most about these moors and crags is precisely the fact that they’re inanimate. Not the foxes and the harebells, I know, but the rocks and becks, the things that aren’t alive, that aren’t messed up with life and living.” Adamlay in the pallid shaft of light cast through the dormer window, staring, it seemed, into a close, countervailing darkness. “Sometimes I go out there and it feels utterly indifferent to everything – whether I’m there or not, whether I live or die even. It’s just numb, unconscious of itself, as though it had been dragged into existence and was left lying there, sticking it out, enduring whatever comes because there’s nothing else to be done.” He glanced back Martin’s way. “And you know what? I’m grateful for it. It clears my head. It reminds me that I’m human and, because of that, I’m not just trapped in the way things are. I’m free to act, to alter things, to make a difference.”
    Martin considered this, then said, “I know what you mean, but it’s not the whole story.” He was thinking about the days when he went out onto the moors or followed a beck down a crag, and it felt as though everything around him was breathless with a kind of expectation. “Perhaps it wants change as well?”
    â€œWhat on earth does that mean?”
    â€œI’m not sure. But it feels as if it might.” Martin looked up to glance, cautiously askance, at Adam. “Change, I mean. As if at any given moment something new and marvellous is about to happen… if only someone said the right word.”
    Adam ran his fingers through his dark hair. He decided that Martin had taken Wordsworth too seriously, but there was something formidable in his earnestness, a feeling of weight and substance, and Adam was in no mood for that kind of argument. He got up off the bed and crossed the room to put a record on his portable gramophone. Carefully he placed the needle on the disk and, as music