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

a bit, thinking it was probably a filthy knife, come from I didn’t know where. I went and washed my hands. When I came back to my seat, the bill was in a little dish with three hard white mints, sitting right beside the blade of the knife. Nothing was settled, though, I thought, looking at my finger, a divot out of the flesh.

Alight Here

It was dark when I drove by the station and dark as I doubled back to it, several hours later. I had been driving around for hours this time and in some ways there was nothing else to do with these hours – dark was a larger than ever part of my day and my senses were too – not in a bad way, necessarily. Just life – changing. The question of what to do with the clothing, real or unreal, remained with me. My runs in response, or simply due to a new cycle, were being replaced with driving around at night, hours spent pushing up into the countryside, northwards each time. The clothes sat in my kit-bag on the passenger seat. If I had wanted to dress up, I couldn’t have done. Whoever had owned them, they were about half my build, with tiny feet. They stayed with me. I took them where I felt I had to go. Prowling up the A9, crossing deep into inky mountainous places that must look good in the daytime – I recognised some of the names and looked others up after – but for me in those hours were only a curve of the road lit up, the occasional skirting of tiny roadkill or, once, a deer.

The station had a kind of bunkhouse near it, but I couldn’t bear the thought of going inside and being turned away from a room – there was bound to be none for me, in such a small place. So I parked and I went walking into the nothing that is the damp autumnal Scottish countryside – hearing my shoes skiff on the rough surface of the road where the lights of cars circled the hill roads but never seemed to reach me. I am being dramatic; I wasn’t there for long. Just long enough to look at the sky where the stars were out and the high wind was under the stars and I could hear a river, rushing, down on the other side of the station line. Or perhaps I am conflating two moments, one where I stopped at a train station with a bunkhouse, another where I stopped in a passing place and went to a river. The darkness made both seem to happen in the same place at the same time. Dreamily I stepped off the road into the slippery, sheep-eaten grass and went downwards. Did I cross tracks? I might have had to scale a fence, I don’t remember. I had my bag slipped over my shoulders.

Seen

I meant to go to the river and look at it, but when I got there – whichever dark river it was driving itself loudly through this empty country – I thought perhaps I was coming there for some kind of assignation. And pretty swiftly I saw a path on the other side of the river that seemed likely for me. It was a hiking trail. I crossed the river – it was not deep for all that noise. It bit icily into my shoes and made my life miserable, but was no risk. There on the path – ahead – was the figure. I’d never seen him looking like this. He was almost naked, his body glowed in the little light from the moon. I walked up to him – he didn’t disappear. He looked at me shivering. He was small.

‘Here, you must be freezing,’ I said, and I unzipped my coat and threw it around him. He looked up. I still couldn’t see his face clearly. The cloud came over the moon and it was hard to make him out. But I knew it was not a lie; I knew he was really there, and that we had been meant to meet. It was an inevitability that felt like a hand in a hand.

‘Come with me, back to my car,’ I said.

He said nothing. He might not have been there I thought, in a moment of panic. But I could see his outline, I could hear him breathing. His hair unmoving in the wind, though it was pretty long and wild.

‘You’ve came,’ he said. ‘I’m glad.’ He sounded faint. I got one arm over my own and dragged him back to my car, where he stood faint and stupid after I opened the door awkwardly guiding him into the back seat, one hand gripping his arm – wiry thin – the other pushing his head down, crushing his messy hair. Oily residue – I wiped that hand on the back of my jeans hoping it wouldn’t leave a mark. I turned on the engine and fired up the heat. In the overhead light, small as a candle, I saw him clearly, though he kept turning away, all skittish. I sat silently waiting. I coughed. He finally faced me, in the mirror anyway. His resemblance to Daniel was uncanny. I almost cried out his name. But I only stared. Slowly his face became distinctive – his own – as his mannerisms shifted it. A certain lowering of the chin. His eyes softer and more intent at once, like someone after a day of destructive bad news who hasn’t slept since, who has understood his situation is changed forever and accepted it, but never let his body recover. It’s not so hard to recognise, when you see it. He, under my questioning stare, looked around himself with a smile on his face – bemused, polite, pleased, I thought, but not wanting to seem so.

‘You’ve some things of mine,’ he said, almost so quietly I had to process the words before