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

a room. It’s where everyone loves you, all your mates are there. You’re gathered round in some low-lit, cosy place. There’s no sound at all except a high wind of a storm. You can see people laughing and smiling, you can feel them very close to you. It’s warm and it’s never ending. You don’t have to worry about how little sleep you’ve had. Money isn’t even a thing. No one is going to turf you out. You’re not going to fail to do something right. You’re perfect, you’ve always been perfect. You touch your forearm against another guy’s when you raise your pint and it’s fine. No one flinches at the touch of you. Your grandmother is resting in a room upstairs. She doesn’t see what you do but she’s alive and she’s well. She just doesn’t feel like getting out of the bed. Two strangers, younger than you, beautiful, work behind the bar. One is heavily pregnant. They smile fondly over at you. There’s a vase of bluebells on every table, by each twinkling tealight. The room is totally silent. Everyone is speaking but there’s no need for sound. You catch your own eye in the reflection in the mirror above the fire. You’re loved. You’re safe. You will never feel bad about how little you are again.

Habitual

I entered this new cycle reluctantly, but soon gave in to its plans for me: a few snatched hours of sleep – then work in the day time; Órla’s during the evening – or out with her, or at the gym; then as little time as possible at home until it was late enough that I wanted to run. I did want to, I think. It was a need. Just like the changes to my diet. Where I normally ate three regular meals and drank as many coffees as work sociability required, now I ate something sugary for breakfast – some gross chocolate bar. At lunch I tugged the sliced meat out of sandwiches. I had to eat this in private, so no one saw – in the stalls at work, cramming rolled up ham into my gob and flushing the bread. You can manage any pattern your body needs to fall into, even if it seems a little weird – you can make it work for you. It can be done, it just takes a bit of fixing. That’s what I told myself. Do it carefully, know it’ll probably right itself in a few weeks. I was losing weight, I was feeling like my internal organs were slowly and without pain dissolving into a gel inside my skin, while my bones were like rubberised pipes. At the same time I was in better shape than ever. I could run and run. Badr stopped me one afterwork-sesh in the gym. ‘Haven’t seen you in a while, Joe. Seen you less than before you moved in, what’s going on?’

I just laughed and told him ‘It’s the work, man.’

He looked serious, ‘Ah, it’s that. Well, keep it up. Don’t let them find your weak spot!’ he said, and I knew that he thought it was want I wanted to hear, and I almost started crying.

‘No chance of that,’ I said and laughed, and he slapped me on the shoulder, gently, so as not to knock the dumbbells to the floor.

Right as Badr was going I saw that man again – the one from the puddle, the one who had passed me in the hall. In old cartoons, you could always tell what object a character was going to lift up, a book or an apple or whatever it was – these were distinctive because of the layering of transparencies, which gave them a colour scheme that was a little brighter, that you came to recognise as though it was more ready and willing to be lifted. I saw him with that kind of feeling, though by then I was used to him. Almost. He was part of my days and slightly above it all. His face below the dirty hair had a foxy look, what I could see of it, as he kept it turned away when I – made cocky by its constantly appearing – looked up and around for it. I began to think ‘that coy lad’, when I saw him. Which made it easier – made me smirk. At the end of long runs, towards the dawn, I would see him. He peered at me, or passed by in a flicker – I was sure it was him – through absurd apertures like puddles, cracks in fences, reflections in the black screen of my mobile or work computer. He was there and it was like he wanted to be seen even as he obscured himself – he wanted to speak, but he was reluctant.

Plans Moving Forward

At that point, within my new cycle, I felt less and less of a need to speak – at work or any other place. I wasn’t sulky or grim, just quiet. When you don’t need to speak you shouldn’t. When you don’t need to eat or sleep, same – like I said, you can deal, your body finds out a way. You should always wash though, out of consideration for others.

I took the diary around with me more often, as a kind of guide. I had noticed that entries after the murder were longer; Lennoxlove wrote about a woman who was a rider in a local hunt. He didn’t describe what she looked like, only that she was ‘spirited, clever, compassionate, well-educated, the best of all in all disciplines they put a hand to’ and ‘unwed by the terms of local conditions, but nevertheless unable to be mine.’ He referred to this woman as F. I got stuck on this section, puzzling. It was, after a third look, written a little differently, less thick with waving corn and the sound of feet on gravel than earlier parts, more on abstract feelings, but with urgency. More