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

‘Oh look at you, like you know,’ I said, ‘no “why what” from you. I got the coat from a charity shop, by the way.’

‘Don’t tease,’ he said, ‘I know what you mean.’

‘Oh you do, eh?’

‘Tom, right? You’re asking me if I know why you’re with Tom. You want me to be the judge of you and him. But you phrase it or believe it like you think I’ve come up in my mind first with the question – the dilemma – of why you are together. Which is quite presumptuous of you.’

‘That I’d be thinking it was a preoccupation of yours?’

‘Just that,’ he said. We both took a breath.

I saw how clever he was even for all the distraction. I saw something bright and dark in his eyes. I determined we’d get drunk and have a grand time and I’d go home without saying bye to Tom and probably never have a conversation as meaningful with this stranger again. Petty, yes. But forgive me; I’d forgive you for it. I didn’t know what the substance Tom and I had was yet, or what Daniel and I’d come to have, or Tom and Daniel. It seems so tangled now, but then it was a matter of talk. Talk gets to be tangles, later, and we were bound up in words long before we were in bodies. And I love it for that, too.

Speech as Union

We stayed up late in the cave of our new friendship, covenous in the kitchen while the others socialised in the merry light of banality. It turned out Daniel and I had studied partially the same things at our universities, with codicology being the common passion. Daniel had turned himself to digital replication – I knew of the basement lab, the work they were doing there in general if not specifics, because I’d seen the applications to copy out manuscripts on my supervisor’s desk and been along to conferences on digital humanities where they discussed the university’s investment in the new setup. In my mind a copied thing was a brilliant idea, faster than a facsimile and almost impossible to tell apart from the original. But I wasn’t sure how that fidelity – I wanted to say, uncanny fidelity – might recontextualise the thing itself in ways I didn’t like, and if I didn’t like it, what cause I might have to feel so, whether it was merely kneejerk or in fact valid. I wanted to press to see if he loved the physicality of old manuscripts, as I did. Surely. The fullness of a book that’s really a thousand years old and how delicate and indomitable it is.

‘I love how many lives a manuscript has lived in those years,’ I said. ‘How people change it with drawings or marks of wear, defacements.’

Daniel looked sad. ‘But every time we touch a book, violently or even gently, with the tips of our fingers, we’re wearing it down and away.’

‘Oh no, I don’t think of it like that. We have to be careful, yes, but the book tells us in the handling what it can take. I turn the pages with clean fingers, I listen to the pages crackling gently, and the spine. I go with purpose, and both I and the book are working together, in revelation of its contents. What else is the technology of a book for but to be touched and interacted with?’

‘My work is to help lift those interactions into another space, and let the old book live a new life. I know some people might say, oh well you just make facsimiles, how is this special? But I make copies indistinguishable on the molecular level, really that close in, to the originals, so that people can touch those instead. So that they can keep learning. So that—’

‘So that nothing is lost,’ I said, ‘I don’t believe that’s possible. But good effort, anyway. Good use of the 3D printer, rather than to make tat we don’t need. Worthy. Though I’m yet to be convinced it can replicate something so well that nothing is lost in the translation from original to copy.’

There was a pause in which we hunted for something to say, our abashed silence colouring the air. I knew I hadn’t offended him, though it might have a lesser man. There, I was already admiring him. He caught my eye and smiled, at last. A blink and you’d miss it, I thought, and smiled back at his turned-away face.

‘I feel like I know you, already, from so little,’ I blurted. ‘Isn’t it weird?’

‘Do you?’ He said. For a moment I wondered the deviousness or depth of the question – was he hinting that he and I had met? It struck me as not at all unlikely and I thought of him stepping off from the otherworld in which he clearly dwelled, the world of doubles, ascending into my dreams. His passive figure peering at me from behind a distorting toadstool, or drifting next to me as we went over a city, chatting sinuously, quietly, about the Rutland Psalter. And then another, more base, startling thought.

‘You’re not flirting with me I hope,’ I said.

‘No, I’m not,’ he said, looking aghast, before his face settled into calmness again. ‘I don’t think so anyway.’

He seemed like he might flirt without knowing himself for it.

‘You have one of those faces,’ I said, ‘the way you move about. Avoiding my eye. Smiling a lot.’

‘Does Tom have one of those faces?’ he said.

‘Is it nerves—’ I began to say. Our words clattered together. And we got up a little while later and did stuff to get away from these questions for now.

Performative Utterance

I kept thinking, you will never touch me. Only by accident will we ever touch. I poured wine. This was another day, when for some reason the two of us were alone. I can’t remember now, why. We began to talk about art. The point of art and artists we loved – Daniel almost