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

Tom buttered his toast and sat looking at it on his plate.

‘Not hungry?’ I asked.

He lifted his food and began eating it. Not totally mechanically – he did smile when I spoke, nodded a few times. It was morning, that was normal. Daniel did the same, though he talked, too, small passing things, through his hands. The book was still on the table. We had taken turns to read it all the way through last night. And now it was there, and no less conquered for our going through it. I wanted to look at my phone, do something normal and distracting but it was in Tom’s room and I couldn’t make myself go back in. Not until the curtains were open and the day was better established.

‘Birdie,’ Tom muttered, ‘that was her name.’

‘What?’ said Daniel, but he saw Tom’s face and turning to me, said, ‘Oh, you know, I need to get out to post something. I wonder if you’re up for a walk to the shops?’

‘Me? Sure. Tom, uh—’

Tom was staring at the book on the table, holding a crust of bread against the table, butter side down. I took in what he had just said. I felt a stab of horror at it, but so vague and plunging it was hard to stanch, hard to locate the source. Birdie, is what he had said. I scratched my fingers through my hair; it was knotted and needed brushed. Tom sat staring at the book. What if I grabbed it and threw it away? But the thought of touching it gave me unholy discomfort. I’d have crossed myself, if I still did that. Delays of gesture and sloping feelings all about me. Chilled, I felt. The men in the room moved about, or didn’t move at all.

‘Go on without me,’ Tom said. ‘I’m just going to do some reading I think.’

Neck of the Woods

We went on a walk. There was a place I liked to go. I’d found it years before, in my first year in the city, following a bus route looking for adventures. Some pathways wound through a wood up to a hill, hardly a unique thing, but this place I liked for its atmosphere. First we had to get there. After breakfast I told Tom I was leaving for home. Daniel had to make a run to the post office, we’d walk out together, he’d come back maybe after the library. We went quickly round the corner.

‘How does he seem to you?’ Daniel asked.

‘Spacey. But, like, he’d had bad dreams so it was understandable.’

‘He ate his breakfast okay.’

‘I don’t think Tom’s ever skipped a meal,’ I said. ‘Anyway, it was just toast. You can eat toast at any time. It’d be the meal for the end of days.’

Daniel nodded.

We walked not saying much. We boarded the bus heading generally south, keeping silent there as well. We needed to be somewhere no one from our regular lives would chance to come across us. It was like going off to an anonymous hotel together. Daniel, sitting in the seat diagonally in front of me was wringing his hands. I leaned forward and tapped him, but he didn’t notice and kept going. Wash wash wash. I moved to sit beside him, and pried his hands gently apart, and let them drop. I think that was it, the first time we’d touched, and I could tell it did something to him. All I tried to think was, the walk would calm him down. I looked at the passing world with glittering eyes.

We got off in suburbia and walked to a pathway beginning at a doorway in a high wall. The track went through hill woodland. It ran alongside where part of a university campus had once been, and before that, a sanatorium for shell-shocked soldiers of their War to End All Wars, and before that, I’m guessing some nobleman’s house in woods that were at that time far away from the city. The woods belonged to the people now. Just in balance, the buildings that once housed the university, the old lecture rooms and admin’ and that, were now the demesne of wealthy residents who could pay for the idea of the permanent view. Can’t leave it to the students, after all, and have us hoping for too much. But I’d found it years before. And it was still in that way mine.

We set off into the woods with the sunlight streaming, followed the trail up, hardly speaking at first. It felt weird to be in nature. Everything had an edge to it. Trees massing, dropping their leaves around us in slow flashes of yellow and brown. Birds everywhere and nowhere, rustling and singing their throats out. A steep alignment of a climb and tracks that branched off to be enticing for leisure and snuffling dogs. Of which, strangely, there were none, so early it was. Near the top there was an uneven meadow hedged in yellow gorse, and the other green-brown hills of the city filled the space between the neat boxes of Victorian and twentieth century homes. I sighed. And the sky above it all with racing clouds and patches over the sun. I say over the sun, like our local weather was something grand. We forget so easily our own smallness. The great blackness of void outwith this world in miles unfathomable, blah blah blah. I tried most of the time to get locked into the physical reality of the senses and the analytic mind. Put my attention where it best needed to be. At work, at my studies. I can think to myself, here, ‘Trace with your own living fingertips this evidence of effort and diligence of numberless people. Those who made the books are more numerous than the stars we can see.’ I don’t know if that’s true. But, to centre myself I could think acutely about the scratching of their quills. Dip, raise, curve along, point. The pigment