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

nice fantasy mansion. Perhaps he had given himself a newly discovered brother for just the same reason I gave myself back my parents.

That wasn’t a deep dig for the amount of effort spent. I went inside and stood in the hall. Mrs Boobs sat on the stairs glowing white as the space inside a circle and looked at me with narrowed eyes.

‘Darling,’ I whispered to her, putting my hand out to meet her bending ear, ‘you don’t know, do you?’

I was cold in my sweat and my lungs still burned and though I was strong I was dizzy and all this might explain the sudden shift of the hairs on my neck and the sound – close, Christ I jumped – in my ear, of a voice right up near it as if from someone standing behind me.

‘I can tell you,’ it said, ‘if you’ll let me.’

James, James

I never loved a boy, and that’s a fact. I never fancied a man. I had no space in me for it. I never saw a ghost either, or believed in them, or believed anyone who said they had seen a ghost wasn’t doing it for the attention or because they had dodgy eyes and wanted to see one. I never heard voices. I was a picture of gleaming mental health. I was so in my body I had to give it to other people hard just to make it through the weekend. I had no twinges and no weak parts and nothing deviant and nothing branching and nothing but that straight path that goes all the easiest ways, paved with primo paving stones. I didn’t even have to wear glasses. I still don’t need them but other than that I am not what I was. Past me would say I’ve diminished: it’s true I can’t be looking good, here, now. I can smell myself. The last time I saw my reflection it laughed at me and was another man. There are waves in my hair and I mean water waves, and my lymph glands are swollen with nineteenth-century dirt. I’d also say that I’m not diminished enough. Don’t look at me like that. I fucking know.

I didn’t see James that night in the hallway of the Minto house. I saw Minto. He had just unlocked the door in mime-like silence; that’s the way he moved. I didn’t know it was him at first – in the mostly dark hall, and never having seen him – and thumped the space above my heart, that gesture you do for shock, and muttered, ‘Oh, hallo.’

‘Hallo and halo to you, fair youth,’ this white-haired blur said. Like that.

I made my way towards the kitchen as if I had been going there before the interruption. Minto followed behind. He held his hands in a funny way, like a tired praying monk, limp. Praying to the pale flowerbeds, I think now, that line the sides of the corridors wherever he walks, (he told me this another time – it was a method he used to make himself go anywhere, to think of a way prepared beautifully). I made myself cheese on toast and he hung about the whole time in silence behind me, or sometimes shifting to the side of me, not in a creepy way, but watching what my hands were doing. His face was padded weirdly, most of it going under his eyes and some on his cheeks, making them disconcertingly full.

‘You haven’t asked what I know,’ he said.

‘Mm,’ I answered. I was at that point stuffing my mouth with hot food and my body was loving it. Liquid cheese oozed on the diagonal and between my buttery fingers.

‘I know that you’re the new boy,’ he said. I nodded without looking up, ‘I know that you have a follower.’

Minto: this large and crumpled man, bristly, pale husky eyes, pyjamas under a shabby but expensive-looking striped suit blazer, primrose woollen scarf, hot pink slipper-booties. He was swaying lightly on his feet. I thought through my own shit; posh old drunk, what a shame. Insomniac too, or up ridiculously early. They say old people stop sleeping so much. My grandmother stopped sleeping the night through a month before she died. She had a lot of photos to organise she said, but after death the albums were not around. I remember a fire in the back garden, odd yellow smoke falling flatly over the edges of the pit. Obliteration is organisation of a kind, a controlled permanent filing into particles of carbon. Me and her were a lot alike, really.

‘Ah-huh?’ I said, thinking food food food, and waiting for the total exhaustion to take me down though still I felt all awake. Minto raised a thin, red hand and extended his pointing finger towards the empty space to my left.

‘There,’ he said, ‘he’s quite clearly there. Hello, friend of my houseguest.’

I turned – yes I did – to see – yes – nothing. But not completely nothing. The universe had been opened to the idea that there was something, and through that fissure something hissed completely silently and completely unreal, but only for now. At the time I’d snorted. I’d had enough and bustled my plate to the sink and went through to my room and Órla sleeping there, my landing spot, and the cat came up and arranged herself on my feet and in the dark I fell towards safety, for perhaps the last time.

Occupation

The ocean is full of plastic. I’ve touched plastic things dozens of times today. Small nubs of it, smooth flanks of it, crinkling skins of it. Touched it with my hands, my lips. I feel the gyre multicoloured flop and spin. Plastic is in the gullets of guillemots and stamped into valleys of landfills. It’s a weird, upsetting occupation of the earth, if you think about it – our production, natural since it comes from us. I think at some point in the distant future what’s left of humanity will look on plastic