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

high Anglican church is up ahead – a large willow planted right on the tight bend opposite it with a curved mirror hammered into it to warn of traffic bearing down – and this is all I have to change – I have to make it so my father looks in that mirror, instead of being distracted by some operatic birthing scream or general mindlessness. I’ve always hated willow trees. I’ve always hated that little church, though I only ever saw it once, the day after I passed my driving test.

I stand in front of it (I’d parked my hired car in the tiny church’s car park). A mirror breaks at the moment of my crowning. I come from the place that mirrors show. And I wondered if the willow retained the memory, and in what way it knew, by the texture and weight of a car slamming – crumpling – a horn sounding – and my mother, sobbing and falling out, grappling and gubbing on the road with glass and light trembling in her hands. And I have already almost made it out of the mirror, sopping wet. Some shard of its glass must have still been in the gouges in the bark – I was too fearful to investigate or stand at the dusty bend and feel about for it. I rubbed my Adam’s apple and kept my shoulders hunched. My mother dies when I am three and my grandmother considers it not right to talk about it. No, she didn’t die that day – no, she did – I wanted to be Victorian for a while because if death was in vogue I could be fully allowed it and the forms for it would be clear and there’d be plenty of people like me, plenty of death for the Victorians. It was normal to have a tragedy, one was not complete without it. But this was the early two thousands, I’d missed the Neo-Victorian by a couple of decades. And I was too well-built for life and had too many friends.

So part of the fantasy was that bit, rewinding, adjusting. The rest was: in our beautiful house my young parents and I lived together none of us knowing how to cook, eating toast for every meal and playing computer games together. I didn’t have to extract myself from this dream when I turned eighteen. When my grandmother said I should leave home and then croaked in the back garden in the middle of throwing a box of my things into a fire – don’t get sentimental, she had said, as I slammed my door. When I was eighteen my mother was only a year older than me, and I could have kept on imagining myself as small, and theirs, and loved, but I did stop, because that’s what I did. If you are trapped in a crashed car you pull yourself out. There is no other thing that occurs to you.

Contained

Reviving hot drinks in the kitchen. I felt light; I watched the night sit in the garden and heard Daniel’s voice. Mrs Boobs came to me, tail a question mark. I was tired – good. I didn’t want anything. We played about with the copy and the original. Daniel laughed at them both like they were the same thing.

‘You know what’s worse than this?’ I said, raising up the copy. ‘This,’ I said, raising up the original. ‘The wifi spying on us, listening to everything. It’s a lumpen device of late capitalism.’ Daniel looked puzzled, I think because it probably seemed like I was angry, all of a sudden. I wasn’t, I wasn’t. I think he got it when I got up, rushed for what I needed, took him outside and set the thing down and poured vodka on it and then lit that piece of shit up.

‘Yeah, life is weird,’ I said, standing over it, breathing in the acrid justified smoke. ‘I think I’ll be thinking about your copier, you know, for a while – trying to get my head around it, before I can have an opinion. I normally know right away, if something’s right or wrong.’

The device fizzled, made sounds, I leaned in, heard, just then, I swear, a piece of Daniel speaking, or was it Órla – Tell me how he was – it said. I knew it was us, I knew it hadn’t been said yet. I leaned in.

‘Do you hear that?’ I asked.

‘You have a strong moral compass?’ Daniel asked.

I looked at him. Silence. The air in the little garden jolted me awake. Looked at him. He didn’t look my way. The good smoke of our breaths met in the air.

‘Let’s get back inside,’ I said.

We had to peel off our clothes – such a stink on them. We threw them into the washer. And then I stood there and then something in us realised, right then. All of a sudden, I thought – Daniel wants me too. See, all this time I hadn’t known. Not true, liar, said a voice in the back of my mind – you want him, you want to hold onto him – my heart started drumming. And all that we did was stand there a little while in the cold of the kitchen like we had each forgotten our lines. It’s all right, I thought – but I wanted, as well as to feel his skin against mine, to put my head on his shoulder and cry, just sob. I hesitated. Then said I was off to the shower.

Thought Silencer

I turned the water on full blast and the heat up to almost unbearable levels and punched my face against the stream and muttered, fuck fuck fuck, under my breath. Everything that had happened and not came back to me that night in waves. I doubled over. Desire – longing – hail – the long muffled room – the uncanny passing figure. I dunked my head and said haaahh and put it back into the water