Weekend by William McIlvanney Read Free Book Online Page A

there was for him a certain appropriateness in the idea of a ghost. He felt Willowvale was, in a way, haunted,though not by a woman in a black dress. It was haunted by something less easy to escape.
    Willowvale might be a monument to Edward Muldoon’s failure but it was a big monument. The grand exterior might now be undermined within by small, often gimcrack rooms full of one-night lodgers and squabbling families waiting for good weather, but the grandness of their surroundings made the smallness of their presence all the more questionable.
    The real inheritance left by Muldoon’s vision, Andrew came to think, was not the building but the warren of dreams it housed, the inevitably shifting terms our lives have to inhabit but seek constantly to make over into dubious certainty, whether complex or simple, important or trivial. What haunted Willowvale, Andrew believed, was the revenant of human aspirations. What people met in its corridors was perhaps the ghost of something in themselves, the unfulfilled stature of their dreams, looking for flesh.
     
     
     
     
    Ghosts didn’t bother her, Jacqui was thinking. People did. Faced with the living dangers people presented, ghosts were an indulgence. Come to think of it, how many ghosts had she heard of haunting working-class houses? They always seemed to be found wandering through castles and mansions. Maybe there wasn’t room for them in a high-rise flat. Poor people’s lives were too crowded with harsh reality to leave space for a ghost as lodger. They had to give their full attention to the real dangers.
    She was doing that now. Standing alone, along from whereKate and Alison were using Alison’s mobile phone, she could hear the sounds of a street-fight coming from somewhere that sounded closer than she wanted it to be. She couldn’t see it yet but it had come nearer in the last minute or so. The swearwords going off like fireworks were louder. The frightening noises (flesh hitting stone?) and the shouted names and instructions were threatening to invade her space.
    She shouted along to them, ‘Hurry up.’ Alison nodded but Kate continued talking, presumably to Andrew Lawson. How long did it take to tell him they were going to bloody Willowvale? She was still considering the possibility of backing out when the two of them joined her, laughing and saying it was all fixed.
    ‘We’d better get home and packed,’ Kate said.
    ‘It’s no big deal,’ Jacqui said. ‘We’re going for a weekend, not a fortnight.’
    ‘What’s that?’ Alison said.
    ‘Something you don’t want to know about,’ Jacqui said, as she led them in the opposite direction from the sounds of violence to look for a taxi.
    ‘Don’t expect too much to happen till Saturday night,’ Alison said. ‘That’s when the Willowvale effect takes over. It takes that length of time for things to happen.’
    Jacqui looked at her.
    ‘I can hardly wait.’
    ‘Andrew Lawson,’ Kate said. ‘He sounded as if he wasn’t sure who he was, never mind who I was.’
    ‘He would be pissed,’ Jacqui said.
    ‘Unlike us,’ Alison said.
    ‘I think he was. Or maybe he’d been sleeping. He sounded like that.’
    They were laughing.
    ‘In fact,’ Kate said, ‘I think he’d gone back to sleep before I put the phone down.’
     
     
     
     
    When he woke up, he was still sitting in his chair. Daylight was remaking the furniture. The stiffness in his neck told him reproachfully that he had slept here all night. He waited for his brain-cells to regroup. How long was it since he had checked on Catriona? Hopefully she was still asleep. Oh, hopefully. The fervour of his wish made him feel guilty. This guilt replaced the guilt that she might not be sleeping.
    He waited. Sometimes it seemed to him that he was always waiting. For what? For death? But whose death? His or someone else’s? He shied away from a thought that confronted him with guilt yet again. He wondered how he had come to be trapped in such a warren of