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

get my breath back. Listen to that sea. I’ll get myself sorted, won’t I? Don’t worry. I don’t think you do worry. About me. Why would you. I’m not sure if you’re here at all.

The Structure

My life was circles I understood. The daily routine cycle is the same cycle for anybody. Wake up, get up, go to work, I won’t go on, it would just be tedious. The start of the sex cycle is meeting the girl. This one I met in the club. Don’t remember much about how we got together. The usual sex cycle is as you’d expect it: so, meet the girl, sex with the girl, maybe hang out with the girl or leave the girl or fuck a few more times then gone, then go looking and meet the girl. The calming circle was the bluebells, as I mentioned, just whenever I needed, think of bluebells for a nonspecific length of time until whatever is bothering you has been defeated. The fantasy life cycle interlocks with the others and is a new – no, a returning circle I didn’t expect at my age. When I was little the fantasy life cycle was that my parents were not dead. It went: parents not dead, parents come for me, we go to a new big clean house full of toys, the reason they went away comes out. The reason was different every time. Sometimes it was a good reason like my father was on a special mission with the government and had to fake his own death and my mother’s mission is to save me. One I returned to a lot was the bad one, where my parents had deliberately crashed because they knew I would be a bad son and had come back (from the dead) because my grandmother was that tired of me she made a kind of sacrifice, and so the big dream house becomes a kind of prison for us all full of terrible words gone over again and again until I had to murder them both usually with an axe or a heavy table or an antique blunderbuss I’d seen on TV. I was given anxiety medication after some outcry when I was little and that cycle slowly trundled to a stop. It couldn’t really work that one anyway after my grandmother died when I was nineteen. I was free to think what I wanted.

The fantasy life cycle I only now – right now I mean, standing here saying it – get for what it was because it came to me in a different form, not the fantasy of reunion with my parents but union with another – now I get it. I know I should save myself. Fucking shameful. I’ve been kissing a fogged up mirror, right? I have drilled down in circles but now I know at least there’s mud at the bottom, seawater, rocks around me and there are arms around to catch me up. Whether I deserve it or not.

Gym

In the middle of the typical daily cycle was how it began. I was standing smoothly lifting yellow dumbbells in front of the mirror wall with all the other people in the gym behind me and my body getting stronger, at that moment in the biceps. The tension of the muscle under the skin with no give at all, that was really satisfying. There’s nothing like that feeling of hardness in your body, like nothing can hurt you, nothing can press in. I had on my favourite teeshirt which was blue and made me look even hotter. I like simple pleasures including the way I look. Simple. At the apex of my curl as I was prodding the bicep and smiling, Badr passed behind me, saw me and wandered over.

‘How you been, Joe?’

He called me Joe because I looked like a Joe, a simple strong adult Joe. He knew my name was Tom – it was one of our things. Badr looked warm and expansive with a little smile himself. He had been going to the gym about as long as I had with no visible difference to his physique. We’d talked about that and him getting a trainer, but after some questions back and forth he decided against putting the work in to either building muscle mass or trimming down. Trimming down, that was what I liked; not getting musclebound but being my taut living maximum self-reliant self. Half-arsed gym was just a part of Badr’s daily circle. Today in addition to his uniform of black sweatshirt and tracksuit he had a dark grey baseball cap on that said ‘chill’ on it.

‘Alright, Badr. Nice cap.’

‘Still the trouble, eh?’

‘Yup.’

I had told him about the last girl and trying to be her flatmate and her putting the rent up on me when I started bringing other girls back.

‘I have that room you know. Remember I said?’

‘Oh yes. Still free?’

‘Still free pal. Come on round and see it. Give it a shot.’

‘I might just do that, Badr.’

I texted him in the changing rooms. I thought, what a muppet, what if he’s still here all ready to go and he wants you to come over right away before you get showered. Something about the idea of him being close up beside me while I was texting him felt alarmingly intimate. Then I thought, I have no attachments and he probably likes the way I stink – he’ll have to if we live in the same house. He was there in fact, but leaving when he got the text and replied right away, telling me to come round and giving me his address. I showered with simple pleasure and longer than usual.

Daniel

What shall I say about getting the tour of the house? It was a shabby crumbling kind of place. Boxes of cereal open on the fridge and the bathroom, that rough Lynx smell, but I didn’t care – situation in my current abode was unbearable – it was time to step into a