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

always giving me a male name – a must-see somewhere in a country neither of us had ever visited. We talked about the psychic toll of working with objects that will outlive us – obviously Daniel did not feel the same way, since he had agency over these objects, since he was the transformer, the source of continuity. And I was only the witness, even if an educated one. Half-way into the second bottle we began talking about desire.

‘Desire is the main concern of art,’ he said, ‘all art comes from the need for something. There’s never a moral side to art because of that. When artists create something they sometimes push into the grey zones of their own morality, and on past that, because the art allows for it, and one must self-define.’

‘Okay, but my work brings me into contact primarily with moral art. Hyper-moral: guides for the good life, prayers begging God through various intercessors for them to be cleansed of sin. All the high beautiful words, the illustrations, the body of the book submit to this. It’s not desire in the carnal sense, it’s not need in the need for hungers of the body. It’s spiritual clamour. To call it desire is to reduce a great thing into a lesser thing.’

‘You think bodily need is lesser than spiritual need? You think they aren’t connected?’

I sat up straighter and nudged the bottle with my glass until he poured me some.

‘Uh, well.’

He smiled, ‘they are both equals. We have our bodies and we have – don’t have – our selves. You know what I mean.’

‘What even is desire?’

‘Nothing should ever be denied. No desire should be rejected.’ He told me who had said that, but I forgot instantly in the haze of the wine. It wasn’t Blake, though I’m sure Blake said something like it. The room seemed lit with a rosy glow. Every object in it, even the light, had been placed there to make up the scene in which we now sat. I pictured Tom’s muscular back against the toiling sunbeams of a Blake illustration. I tried to see into the depths of myself and wondered if I desired something in this moment that could be understood in the regular terms that I knew. And what I would do with that knowledge. Nothing, I supposed. I glanced at his face. His eyes were squinted with drink, he kept pulling small thoughtful faces, as he tried to address my glib questions. We talked and tipped back the wine. Badr came and went, never stopping to chat, but looking on us fondly as we drank, like a mother whose benevolence is secure even in the most foolish of moments.

‘Do you ever get touch starvation?’ I asked.

He looked up, startled. ‘It’s all I know. I think,’ he said, ‘if I were to be touched, I think I would jump out of my skin,’

I thought of my books in the archive, lying, waiting to be touched. I thought of a skinless Daniel. In my mind he resembled uncooked sausage meat, his delicate skin laid aside like clingfilm. I pushed my hand over the table very lightly, a little above it, as if pushing a glass for a ouija board. I pushed until my fingers were hovering just over his hand on the desk.

‘And if I touched you now?’

Daniel looked slightly left. I lowered my index finger. The gap between us was only a few millimetres. Voices from the otherworld addressed him from stage left. He raised his eyes to meet my eyes. That was about the whole of it.

Dim Spaces

Tom’s room. Dark and dingy, covered in cat hair. I would spend most of the early autumn nights lying in that bed with Tom, us fucking, touching. At first. Then later lying awake pretending to sleep as Tom lay awake pretending to sleep. Something had come to lie between us shining and sharp and his, not mine. He slept so little and try as I might to boldly ignore it each shift in the bed clapped me out of my chance at sleep, and I couldn’t figure out how best to start on it without the situation degenerating into a blowup. I might strike you as the kind who batters her way through life but I have at least an idea when not to push. I suddenly switch to a tread with a delicacy you’d scoff at. Socialisation as a woman, you might say. I’d say I saw, as through a glass darkly, the vastness of what had got into him, and wide-eyed lay watching for it to emerge. Though that might be hindsight’s untruthfulness casting me as wiser than I was.

But anyway, before all that, that night of the housewarming, I watched Daniel covertly as he stood looking about at Tom’s room. Him commenting and prying without trying to look like he was meaning too much by it. Stop it, I wanted to say, just come out and make your move, if you’re going to. But of course, he wasn’t.

Standing in the room I was burdened by the overwhelming stink of Lynx (I would buy Tom a nicer cologne as soon as I felt able to) but nearer, I got a waft of Daniel’s scent. I moved a little closer. Not flirting. He smelled of old books. Chewed wood. Bitter lemon on his breath. He seemed to know things and I was hunting to know. He did not move away. Something else. I couldn’t place him. I didn’t want him. I was deciding. Handsome, or not handsome? Friend or foe? Too soft, or pliant and supple? Straight or gay, or in between? The light from the hall outside shone on the side of his face as he looked about saying meaningless things. I wanted him in that way of wanting to know in the non-biblical sense. I wanted to unscrew my hair out of its bun and hug the Daniel right out of him, absorb him through my lips and eyes