Candia McWilliam - A Little Stranger

Margaret had been the stranger whom our family could not accommodate. Though we were four, we were almost overcome by her single strength. What was the strangest thing of all? I took her in because I hated her on sight, and was ashamed of myself for doing so. When she went, so did the fear which had made my life little better than a stretched skin against the weather. Together we had turned the gingerbread house of family life into the smelt blood and ground bones of the most cruel tales.

While I was getting better my friends came and read to me, real stories about Olivia who has a garden, Katherine and her battling husband, double-crossed Viola, Helena whose husband beats her and says her love annoys him like a stone in his shoe, and Brutus’s wife, who dwells in the suburbs of her lord’s good pleasure. Each of these stories has a hard centre.

Our daughter emerged into this world of pearls and swine, eccentric, laughing, at the heart of things. Held by her slapped satin feet, she bellowed disapproval and glee and the resolution to wear out twelve dozen pairs of dancing slippers before morning.

It is possible, without knowing it, to live at the margin of your own life. Life leaks away and you watch it go, a rope of water coiling down to nothing and the dark. It was my good luck that the tide came inshore and carried me past the shipwrecks and lost things of my former existence, and out once more into the day’s eye and the loud resounding blue and white.

Candia McWilliam was born in Edinburgh. She is the author of A Case of Knives (1988), which won a Betty Trask Prize, A Little Stranger (1989), Debatable Land (1994), which was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and its Italian translation the Premio Grinzane Cavour for the best foreign novel of the year, and a collection of stories Wait Till I Tell You (1997). In 2006 she began to suffer from the effects of blepharospasm and became functionally blind as a result. In 2009 she underwent surgery that cut off her eyelids and harvested tendons from her leg to hold up what remained. Her most recent book is her critically-acclaimed memoir, What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness .