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

new place or die like a shark when it stops swimming. Badr was enthusiastic and welcoming – I guessed early on he must have been bullied as a child and did everything he could now – desperately – to make day-to-day life smooth for himself and everyone else. Seeing him at home clarified it all. He had a houseplant for every dropped friendship. He was one of the good guys that doesn’t get anywhere. I slapped him on the back, I listened to him talking. I could be around him a bit and move on at the next opportunity.

I could see the mysterious door where the hermit owner of the house stayed. Badr introduced me to Daniel. I saw Daniel out of the corner of my eyes that first time. So I can’t tell you anything. Not yet.

I went through the downstairs and saw the room I was going to take. I crawled all around that place testing it out with my sensory organs. It was a done deal. I would move in, into the new sex cycle that had just begun – if I’m honest – with an overlapping of the last one. I got myself set up to be a better man in a little while and Badr would hold me to it meanwhile and my cat would hold me to it, both kind soft beings.

And Daniel?

I don’t remember the days without Daniel. This is important: the time between meeting him and knowing him has compressed under the weight of everything after. I can just about remember the early days of knowing him, making myself talk louder and more confident than I felt. I told myself it was the beginning of a new cycle so I was going to feel rocky. If I believed in astrology, I’d say something was in retrograde – that messes you up, right? I don’t really know anything but I’m sure astrology has to do with cycles too. I respect that, I just don’t believe it. Funny now there’s no moon or sky and only the end of the land and the sea has all the answers I’d ever been asking for. I remember the night of the party – let me keep this. I remember the night of moving in. I got it into my head to think Daniel was a soft thing too, shook his hand – pleased with its dry firm grip – and went on my way, trying so hard to carelessly slot him as a detail only for the new rotation. But even that early I felt the first shocks of coming disruption as he sat with Órla and I saw them together and myself pretending to be outside of it all. I took to the room where Daniel was not to try and find my footing there. I slumped into swearwords and laughing like roaring, trying to hold up my picnic bluebells – you’ll have already worked out that I had other distractions which were all variants on the bluebells – like he was just some ungracious scrolling on the singular surface moment of a day and not. Already. Fuck. I sat myself solid as a side of beef in the living room with my friends and the desperate warmth of Badr and we talked about somebody’s girlfriend and my job in advertising and media. Which I’d explain was a lot of meetings and strategising war for things that don’t matter. Yeah, right in front of my colleagues, I didn’t care then. As if they didn’t know. And I drank a beer and another beer and each sip made me think it was my lips that were foaming not the drink, I was wrenched inside because I was moving into the place and I knew, as much as I resisted: he is something. Daniel. This is not a circle this is an end, a gap, a plummeting point.

Daniel, when I let myself see him clearly at last in the basement of the university, looked like this: a quiet man, watchful eyes, a tripped step look. I mean the kind of person you look at and think nothing, then look again and get startled – what am I trying to say? Some horror that is not horror, the rollercoaster loop-de-loop of someone who sees you but who is also a lot of other things at once. Emblematic embedded eyes. Step it back: they were brown eyes, I think. I mostly saw him in low light always.

He was four inches shorter than my six one and looked like he didn’t care about food or sunshine but would be rosier and darker if he did eat and go out and didn’t work so much but might not know how. He looked like the wind from a mountain was blowing on him and he was barely standing against it but in a fierce determined way, even when he was at rest he was holding himself against that wind. He liked to wear lots of layers. He loved jumpers and touching things with his fingers as if checking their quality. I’ve never thought about anyone more than I’ve thought about him and it shows, like I’ve exhausted all my thoughts on him and then pumped myself round the track again twelve more times.

Let me tell you, sexuality didn’t come into it. It was just a door creaking open to let the fucking ghosts in. Daniel was a harbinger. Everyone is drenched in ghosts – there are so many more dead people than alive – so it takes a cut to let them get in. My cut was Daniel. My means of infection was the diary. This I am just now setting out from myself, from my fallen position. Now, inside, I’m glad of the windbreak, this stove, aren’t you? I can taste smoke in the back of my mouth and it reminds me I’m still alive. I had to stand on the edge where the breakers come in before I even would