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

with appalled nostalgia – like it’s amber from another era where our secretions could not be stopped – but that day I sat under a dodgy light on a plastic and petroleum-product chair attempting to open an acreage of boxes set on the floor to meet some new-birthed plastic and petroleum products and pretend I was happy doing so. I struggled with layers of tape, finally snapped them with my teeth. The latest plastic simulation of a thing, thingness being adspace, in my work. I plunged in up to my forearms and packing peanuts swelled around me like smooth blood cells and my eyes closed over and the sounds of the office receded. I wanted to just sit with my hand in there, rustling. I wanted to sink into the slurry of dry tiny pieces. I had not slept. Out by the neck I slowly raised from the box one of fifty toy mer-unicorns. Mallory in her tall heels primped over and eyed it, and me.

‘The vodka people, right?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, turning the thing. It had a switch that set it on and it began to sing an unpleasant upbeat tune. We listened in silence. I liked Mallory for that.

‘Well,’ she said with a sigh, ‘it started off weak and it struggled in the middle there, but by the end, it really managed to finish and be done.’

‘How much did they pay for this?’

‘Too much. It’s got to be in violation of some of rule about flogging booze to kids. They should have just stuck with the cartoons. But there was muttering about them too.’

‘Who would want this?’ I said. We looked at each other.

‘No one. It’s going in a hole in the ground, to sit there for a thousand years.’

‘Such great triumphs mark out our days from the lineage of humanity,’ I said.

‘Funny. Who said that?’ Mallory asked in a tone without any sense of enjoyment. That was also part of the game, and I liked her all right for saying it, and I desperately wanted to walk out of the building and start running and run to the sea again, or up the cliff. Instead of answering I imagined a corner of a dark woollen picnic blanket, and the way cheese and butter sandwiches gleam and bulge when tightly bound in cling film, melting slightly from the heat of a summer’s day, and how they feel as they come loose and my childish fingers poke flute holes in the soft white bread.

We would make a copy, Daniel and I, spending some hours in that long oppressive basement room – I can still feel the air conditioning blowing my lips blue. Do you know what precious means? I thought it was a slimy word used in jewellery copy and by Gollum. But though it has an ugly sound in the mouth it means more than important; tiny and rare and not self-replicating, and so mortal though longer-lived than either of us will be. I thought precious afterwards as I lay hard in my bed, almost crying. I thought of Daniel’s hands on the neck of the new thing he had made. It was worth a thousand years of occupation of the dirt for that, I think.

Recycle

I touched the smoothed edges of the rock where I came to the end and thought of plastic inhabiting everything. Microbe-sized multiplying and seething in its shiny ever-new pill bodies. I’d been able to avoid thinking of all this, when I was fine, before. So now I thought of the ionic surfactants that wash down the drain. I thought of the rare metals in phones dragged out of the rocks in unknown poor regions of the world, names I don’t even know – the county or the metals. I thought of the phones I’d tossed away when they began to run slowly or just look a little tired. I thought of factories making plastic goods and realised I didn’t know what they’d be like, though I have watched videos before of production lines. There’s a lot I can’t see clearly – all I have is the conveyor belt and no other details of the warehouses or people working there. What the work does to their eyes or their fingernails, I don’t know and can’t bear to know. I thought of the volume of plastic shit being made at these unknowable factories spewing out, like the doors of factories were mouths or anuses, factories like bodies. I thought about the sticky backing glue on labels I had peeled off at work. Boxes of new textures and shapes immediately discarded. I thought about guilt, which I didn’t really feel for any of it. It’s my fault and it’s not, since I am going to die, I thought. I thought of myself, standing here, how easy it would be to take a step forward and stand nowhere ever again. I thought of seabirds’ guts. I thought, isn’t it stupid. Some children when they learn about dying are horrified by the idea. Then there are others who think, well, that’s one way out, and that stays with them all their life, that sense of horrific possibility. There are others who don’t think either of these things but I’m too tired to think of them.

I tried to think of every good thing I had done and all I could manage was standing under a tree in somebody else’s garden, with a man I – I wanted. I’d fucked everything else up, even just by existing I was just a walking carbon footprint. I had never loved anything as I should have, I had lacked capacity to see between wanting what I was told to want, and my real desires. And even when I finally dimly got the hint there had been a kiss that almost but didn’t happen, and the name for that’s a ghost kiss. A kiss that does happen can be a mistake but a ghost kiss never is, aching just beyond the borders of myself. A