Bitterhall by Helen McClory (story books to read .txt) 📕

a much easier idea unaffected by the account I had just read, sanitised by images taken from various TV miniseries: pristine cuffs, beautiful flowers in small china vases, writing sets, turns about a room that was this one, but repurposed, for use by a plucky young man with a dramatic and love-filled future just waiting to be entered.

But I’m young yet, I thought. Ish. And though James is dead, who’s to say it wasn’t like that for him, just as perfect and beautifully framed? Aside from that one aberration.

Gnaw

My poor heart and all its tangents: I put my fingers through the narrow gap of my window and tapped that way to be heard by something, or someone, or nothing as chance or the rules beyond me allowed. In the next section of Lennoxlove’s diary a year had elapsed. James was twenty-two and it was spring. He talked of how it had been a long time since his last entry, without giving reasons why. He never said what had come of what he had seen, what decision he had made, if justice was served, what form justice took back then.

James Lennoxlove was alive in his fragments and chose to use the next particular span of writing (a single page) to talk about the oncoming of the future and his tailored suit ordered from Edinburgh, and, at last, in strangely oblique language, the person he was in love with. ‘Person’, that was how he put it. My eyes widened. I switched on the reading light, prepared, with a thread of excitement, to read a little further on, but tentatively, and for some reason my eyesight blurred; outside the world was closed down to a few frames of light, and I could smell woodsmoke from some chimney, which is a disaster for the kind of mood I was in, and I rolled my eyes and got up, went downstairs and sat in the living room on the sofa with Badr and watched whatever it was he was watching, until normal life blunted me the right amount. Badr made popcorn, and laughed loudly, and turned his head to comment on this or that, or to ask me to pass the bowl. Maybe I wouldn’t know Badr in a few years; maybe Badr would move in with someone, or move out to his own space, and in a few years we would be nothing to each other but casual former flatmates, figments on whatever social media site would be popular then, seeing each other once in five years at a meetup in some pub. Maybe is a word to soften; it was going to happen. And Badr would have a whole other life, and eventually or sooner than hoped would die, and be buried, and I would die and be buried. I gnawed on my popcorn.

Be Well

Just as I was in this pit of myself Tom passed by the living room on his way out, grabbed the top edge of the doorway, hung there, ‘I am going out tonight,’ he said, ‘to the – gym, yes. The gym. Anyway. Take care,’ he dropped down again.

‘All right, man, be well,’ Badr said.

There was a sheen already on Tom’s face, a flicker of alarm that transformed itself into a smile, and from this to a wink at me. I looked at the TV, too flooded by the stupendous or stress-drenched possibilities present in that wink, in my interpretation of the wink, and also by the idea of Tom in all his health coming to dust one day, and no more gym for him, or any autumn nights, to address my flatmate in any kind of an acceptable way beyond a mutter. And by that time Tom was out the house, and the hallway was shuddering at the violent close of the front door.

I wanted to get up off the sofa and run after Tom, jog out to him and accompany him down the street towards the gym in the crisp, cool air, asking, as if it were that easy, what was wrong, if anything was, whether a momentary pain or a great unbearable one, or a desire, a momentary one or a great unbearable desire, that I might, just maybe, be able bodily to fulfil.

It would be nice not to have to think such large ungainly things while watching a historic rerun of Whose Line is it Anyway?, but if I had thought with frantic morbidity since childhood about the passing of all people, their various destinies and pains, mostly inaccessible and forbidden to me to aid, awkward as I am, frightened as I am, closed off and cowardly and dealing too poorly with my own shit as I was, particularly then, then the thoughts had become habitual, nothing to be done, not so much a train of thought as a permanent line. It cannot be helped. People die, people go, nothing is permanent, and I make eternal return to this idea, for fuck’s sake, Daniel, people try to say what they mean in small ways and large and sometimes are misunderstood, or cannot bring themselves to complete a thought, or are at cross-purposes, everything is euphemism to hide various taboos, so what? It’s not so difficult. We are permitted our troubles and privacy as much as our desires. Some things are unutterable, and that allows them a certain fullness of being. Or else they are too trivial to mention. If Tom is troubled, it’s the kind of trouble he can fix with a workout, or if not then he will try another method. No terrible pain everywhere in everyone, maybe just a little pain they want to keep to themselves and for themselves, see, these people on the TV have quite enough energy to make jokes despite what burdens they may have, what madness they might similarly be wracked by. Be well. Badr had a shit day at work, and here he is, quietly eating popcorn and making sure you’re doing all right, in his own