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

‘Yes, I remember it a bit. No I mean, was there any kind of fuss?’

Mark shrugged. ‘Only when he left. Almost broke the door slamming it. Almost knocked my mother into the Noguchi table on the way out.’ I sighed. I drank my tea loudly. I remembered.

Baited

After breakfast I went into the garden. No neighbours close enough to peer over the high hedges and see me (bare feet on the cold slabs and wet ground, wrapped in only half a suit and a green silk robe) and my deep obsessive thinking. Not of the night – time enough later for the night, faces to meet, stilted speech and recovery; oh that kind of proximity and flatmates, such illadvisedness – but I was thinking instead of a way to get back from a sudden onslaught of hard sharp edges and images coming on, not with me yet, but which I could sense like a tide drawn out and waiting to rush over me. I could almost see these images, hatefully overdone, before seeing them directly. It was the knowledge that I would be mentally unwell soon. Like, I imagined, epileptics know with their auras. A different kind of experience entirely, I’m sure, nothing changed in my vision, no pain in my head beyond the hangover stuff, just a sense. Of crouching. That I would like to start running, like a dog, before the tsunami comes sweeping detritus, grey water and – no. I would not begin to catalogue dangers. That would lead me down to thinking again.

It is always this repetitive. To understand it also takes repetition. To speak it to myself to position myself and try to fight the vertigo of unseen horrors was also to engage in it, engage it. The enemy that makes itself by being looked at. But which cannot entirely be quashed by not looking either.

There were no bees outside.

Reconstitutional

Órla came up to me as I stood by the pond. Lipstick-haunted lips, weary, smiling face, those wide, clear, arresting eyes. She printed a kiss on my cheek. Though later when I looked it was not there. We began, piecemeal, to put our stories together.

‘You all right?’ she said,

‘Is there a bruise?’ I touched my face, suddenly realising there was indeed a bruise there, under my eye.

‘More than one, I’ll bet.’

We walked around the pond, looking in. At some point it had been a swimming pool. Now it was a stretch of dark water, ligatured with die-back rushes.

‘How’d it get started?’ I asked.

‘I came in from the toilet, and saw you kissing. I thought he had passed out. Then you saw me – you don’t remember? It had been weird before though, so weird. I don’t mean to make an accusation with any of this. You were snogging. Tearing each others faces off,’ she said, and I swore I could see a smile play over her face.

‘You don’t mind then? You aren’t hurt?’

She pursed her lips and shook her head, ‘No, um. That part – after we kissed. Well, it was all of us in it together. But that part’s not really the issue. That night was something strange, Daniel.’

‘Tell me how it was,’ I said.

He Kissed Me

‘Tell me how he was.’

‘I was with him in the bedroom, while you were off somewhere, before all of what happened – he’d been missing in action most of the evening. Then he just walked in from somewhere and he was – different. His eyes were glassy, like he was drugged. He was cold, in his hands and feet and also in the way he moved. I’d never seen him like that,’ Órla said. ‘Well, a little bit. He hides it under affability.’

‘He was frightened of something.’

‘Yes, he was. He has been frightened. For a while, I think. Of something. I didn’t realise it at the time, brushed him off. What of it though?’

‘Then what . . . ?’ I said.

‘He stood at the window – the reflection there.’ She shuddered. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what. I was drunk too. But I think I saw something there.’

‘What?’

Órla swallowed. We stopped by a bank of dead flowers, pale as a spring sky with patches of brown, we were moving further from the house and closer to the night before by moving away. I could feel the awful images just waiting to get me. I rubbed my temples.

‘A different man,’ she said, in a dreamy voice. ‘I backed away. The moment passed. I feel like I failed some kind of test. When you came in, I pretended I wanted you to get water. I needed a moment.’

‘We were all far gone by then.’

‘No, it wasn’t that. And not Tom. I think he was nearly sober. You don’t believe me, do you?’

‘I don’t know what you want me to believe. He did whisper something to me, after we—’ I said, ‘but I didn’t want to even try to relay what he had said. Because it barely made sense, even through the drink. His sibilant, hot voice in my ear. Lennoxlove’s diary, of all things. He had said something obscured and anxiously fast about Lennoxlove, and himself, speaking of seeing a groom in a dark barn, but in a cupboard somehow, of being a witness, but I just put a hand up. And without pausing a fist hit my face. I made the choice that I would not alarm Órla with partial information. I would wait.

Órla walked on a few steps. I tried to feel if my body had been through something. All I felt was an ache a few degrees left of my shabby corporeal form.

Narrative

‘I came back in the room, ah, after washing up’ she said, ‘and you were on your feet, looking fucked and dizzy, and he just punched you. To be fair, you did get him right back. I thought you might knock him down. That laugh he gave. I’m amazed we got him calm again so quick. What was any of it about?’

‘I can’t say I know.