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

to make me realise how many other times I’d had to talk an inebriated man down off their short emotional ledges or make their way to a stomach pumping. And how many of those men were no longer in my life. The good ones pay you back in kind, I told myself, unlacing Tom’s fancy shoes and throwing them gently across the room. I also wasn’t sure what kind of role I had to play with Tom, now. Perhaps he would pass out of his own volition before any further drama started.

The door opened. Daniel. He shuffled into the room and looked helplessly. I felt immediately better. An assistant. A coconspirator.

I slapped Tom’s chest. ‘The state of him,’ I said.

‘Yes, I see,’ Daniel said in his low mild voice.

Tom was unbuttoning his shirt. Daniel looked at me, his hands gripping the doorframe. I answered with a smile. I remember clearly in my mind I had no idea what my smile signified but looking back I had decided that something was happening, the crux of Tom’s moment of hauntedness, while we were all drunk and in a stranger’s house. A crosscurrent of strangeness was blowing through the room, and I was weirdly elated. That must have made my smile come across badly.

‘Mm, I need – I need to go,’ Daniel said, and he slipped a little way into the hall.

‘Just because you fancy him doesn’t mean you can use that as an excuse to leave him in his hour of need,’ I called out. ‘Get us water, then, if you’re going.’

I could have laughed. Daniel came back. He did a good line in excruciated looks.

‘Oh come on,’ I said.

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Daniel said.

‘Except for water.’

‘Oh, okay. But I’ll come back, I will.’

I sat back down on the bed near Tom though it worried me, though it made me fizzily excited. His body was tensed right up, his hands gripping the bed sheet like a woman in the midst of labour. It was to me an unnatural ability in one so utterly wasted, whose muscles should have been lax as old rubber bands. In a corner of my brain I was awaiting then some violent outburst, but another part of me, the part that saves or damns us all in the great moments of our lives, was saying it would be all right and that I must stay to be witness. If it was worse than rattling windows it would be actual apparitions, heads turning around three hundred and sixty degrees, deep growls, a body distorted further than human parameters allow, random Latin and Sumerian and the like. I knew, then, that I would stay through it all, if it did happen, mad bitch like.

I helped him get off his shirt and threw it by the shoes. He was dry and cool to the touch, his hair catching the light. I didn’t like how red the room was. But then I did: what better place for what I was willing would happen soon. And the glow from the red paint set off Tom’s blue eyes so that even drowsy they looked startling.

‘Do you want to lie down?’ I asked him.

‘No. No!’ he said, and he caught me in those swivelling eyes and I shifted back involuntarily.

‘What’s happening with you?’ I asked.

‘I’m waiting on him,’ Tom said, and he looked to the doorway where Daniel had disappeared.

‘You need to sober up,’

‘So do you,’ he said, and laughed again, more normally than before.

‘Who are you waiting on?’ I asked.

Tom looked at me and I couldn’t understand the look. A shadow passed over his face. I thought about men, and the ways in which they look at me, and I couldn’t find the right place to file this one away. I was sobering up, I thought. How long since the last drink? I wanted Daniel back. For water. But he did not come back for twenty minutes and, when he did, he was drunker than before and had no water. In the interim I went into the guest toilet and grabbed the tooth glasses and gulped down one glass full after another. Five I think. I had coaxed Tom into sipping some, when he became alarmed and got to his feet. He glared at his own reflection in the dark of the window pane.

‘You!’ he said.

I thought of what to do. In some stories the devil is a reflection. That of course is significant in an easy way to parse – you (as character) are playing your own devil – or the domestic space reversed. That’s our room, our familiar body but just a bit weirder. Devil double that is yourself and not you and wouldn’t that be the medium by which the devil could speak to us on his preferred direct yet unheimlich terms?

Then, as I looked between Tom and the reflection, I noticed it too. There was no metaphor, no academic lens through which to interpret. The reflection was not his.

Double

In the window pane was a sketch of the room we were in, and me at the end of the bed, and a man in the bed that was the shape of, almost but not quite, Tom Mew.

‘Fuck,’ I said, sotto voce. In case he heard? I don’t know. I know. The face was looking up and I met its eyes.

‘Who the fuck are you now?’ I asked.

‘What are you doing?’ said Tom, loudly, and he had my arm. So, in the mirror, did not-Tom. It opened its mouth, and there was a hateful expression on its face that gave me the chills. Tom clamped his hands over his own, but the hands in the reflection did nothing. The pane of the glass began to rattle. I felt something in my back molars as if a low sound was building.

The not-Tom opened its mouth still further.

‘Fuck you think you’re doing,’ I said, and I threw a pillow at the glass. It bounced off and fell to the floor. The figure got up