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

admit it: I wanted Daniel to be near me always because I wasn’t cycling, I was falling and the darkness was already rushing past me.

Daniel, Daniel

Fear was a new feeling in my adult life; I thought I’d put that fucking brick down on my road from childhood and walked away from it forever. What could I fear when everyone I’d ever loved had died already? Before the day I moved into that house, I breezed through life, I was healthy. I was blowing by fast and sleek and no impediments; work was shit – Cloudberry Corporation, ad campaign planning for fuck’s sake – but life in Scotland was an improvement on life in London, where I had been before, in that at my new work no one cared after five o’clock, and drinking was mandatory but not skewed with upmanship. I was too young to complain about the cost of pints and rent – necessities had been a gouge for longer than I could remember, and my grandmother’s money softened that a little anyway. Life was all right, before. I had Órla on board, a girl who seemed like she wasn’t easily hurt and would be a good friend once it was all inevitably over between us – I saw she was smarter than me, but did not worry, since I guessed she was smart enough to be kind to an, let’s face it, idiot, like me once the fucking was done.

I saw Daniel on the side of the room and put him away for the moment but as soon as I was leaving the flat, that first time after I agreed to move in I was afraid of an unknown pressure of wanting. This unknown shape. This Daniel whoever it was. Wanting things is the worst possible thing. You should never want. You should just fucking be, right? That’s what better men than me had told me. And especially not to want to the degree I did. So when I moved in I threw myself into work, so when I was living there I was out a good amount of the time, out with Órla, in with Órla, who seemed to like Daniel a decent amount, and gave me an excuse not to talk to him and an excuse to look between them and get coffee and sip it and go off to work and hear her talk about her funny odd little new friend.

Thread

Fear though, it had sneaked into my life and I couldn’t shake it. Things change, all right, but I’d always been in charge of that change, or could see the shape of it. I was good like that, adaptable. So. Like I said, this wasn’t about sex. I wouldn’t care, would I? I could fuck a man. No worries there, though I haven’t. Hadn’t. This was like metal filings finding out about magnets. Only the magnet is so unassuming they think, why this magnet. Why now. I am being honest now – as honest as I can be, and sharp with myself, because I am so lost and truth is a small iron thread coming out of my arteries through my chest wall and you’ll tell me I have to follow it up hand over fist somehow out, somehow into light again, out from under the shadow I’m in. It might lead to you, it might not. It might kill me. I am repetitive, you’ll think. Shallow, a whole load of other judgements. Fuck you, I know, don’t look at me. So are all people who are in a crisis or in love or full of ghosts. So are all people. It’s a lot. It’s a lot.

A Partial List of Objects I Unboxed at Cloudberry

The ones I remember:

– On my first day, a box of a thousand shoelaces with the name of a celebrity stamped along each in Arial Black font, to be handed out at a national football match.

– A box of fake maps to ‘stars’ homes’ in a small Scottish town where none of the actors actually live; I don’t remember what this was for.

– A box of white tee-shirts, torn up and with fake blood on them, advertising a new crime drama for an online network we represent.

– A box of samples of gin-flavoured dick-shaped gummies for some club.

– A box of holographic jumpers to be given to local ‘influencers’ who were fans of gymnastics.

– A box of seventy obsidian black shell-shaped objects with screens (that were not phones) whose use and associated company no one in the office could work out.

– A box of anatomically correct dolls without hair (an ill-advised campaign to do with alopecia awareness).

– A box with nothing in it but packing peanuts.

– A box of plush polar bears with their eyes crossed out, to signal their extinction; a promotion for a computer game.

– A box with leaflets of infographics that detailed not just our company but individual people working there (all women) including their estimated clothing size; a promotion for a new clothing app.

– A box of American flags and guns in the colours of human skin, complete with nails and some with freckles and warts; a promotion for a Chinese gambling firm.

– A box with 3D printed food snacks that had gone mouldy; a promotion for a new 3D snack company which went immediately bust before we could give them feedback.

– A box with mocked-up old scrapbooks and photo albums; a promotion for a genealogy service.

– A box with toddler clothes advertising a breast milk enhanced beer (we told them no).

– A box with several mer-unicorns stuffed with recording devices.

An Introduction to Him

To understand myself I’d realised early on in life I had to understand one or two people at least very well and mould my thoughts to their shape to keep myself tough and on course. I’d done it in the past with friends and work colleagues though suffering from the move north and the small cultural barriers there were between me and people at