Bitterhall, Helen McClory [red queen free ebook TXT] 📗

cars parked in the lanes. I wondered if they would break a windscreen.

‘Do you think it’ll break the windscreens?’ asked Tom.

‘Wouldn’t that be amazing,’ I said, looking at him. Tom laughed.

‘All right,’ he said. A pause. Quiet rattling sounds. ‘You know, I feel like I know you a little better now. I hadn’t – before.’

Fuck, I thought, that pause between hadn’t and before, amid the gravelly sounds of the hail falling. I stood in silence, let my gaze go lax. Then Tom crouched and scooped a handful of the stuff, now in a layer an inch thick, and put it in his mouth, and crunched on it.

‘Ehhh!’ I said.

‘It just came right out of the sky, didn’t it?’

I laughed. We stood for a minute more; the din began to lessen, and stopped all together. We walked back, almost grabbing each other for balance, rolling on marbles, homeward to the house on the not especially notable street, the place where we lived, darting through dark shadows sharpened by everything streetlit around them, and, ahead, Tom’s little rescue on her haunches under the shelter of the entranceway yowling to get in.

‘There we go,’ said Tom to Mrs Boobs, letting her go ahead, and I on the step feeling in need of rescue myself, of something to brace against, attempted to stuff back inside myself all the feelings, hopping, roiling about in me, a man of autumn weather suddenly, fallen leaves, a ragged and chilled end to decadence, with hope and desire the last indulgences to go – great blocks or sometimes little falling pieces hard and pure, watching Tom go in ahead, following his pet, into the smells – foost, bodies, bleach, popcorn, tonight – and the closeness of this place. I shut the door promptly behind me, and hurried into the kitchen to make tea.

Reckon

‘How will we tell them apart?’ asked Tom.

‘Put them on either side of the fridge,’ I said. ‘What do you think?’

‘I like it,’ said Tom. ‘Listen – I kind of like them. I mean, the fact you can do that. I didn’t give it enough credit before. What you do, I might not fully grasp the technology or the point, but I like that we did this.’

‘Why, I asked, ‘why do you like it?’

‘Because it’s your thing,’ said Tom, looking around, ‘Your – passion. You’ve got a life’s work, a mission. Who has that? I don’t.’ He picked up the toy, the copy, and held it against his head, as if trying to read its mind or perhaps wipe his face with it.

‘You didn’t like the copier room,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘I can see why people might think it’s oppressive.’

‘But you don’t feel like that. Too used to it.’

‘From the minute I first walked in, when we’d just fitted the flooring and the shelves weren’t in, I was happy there. To be in that place, it’s just – calm.’

‘I think the copy’s better than the original,’ Tom said, staring out now at the garden, replica in hand, cat weaving around his legs.

‘Why’d you say that?’

‘Well, because it doesn’t have the wifi device spying on us. It’s just a lump.’ He placed the object back on the fridge and looked between them both. ‘Yeah, life is weird,’ he said, ‘I think I’ll be thinking about your room 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.’

‘You have a strong moral compass?’

Tom nodded, and looked at me. Silence. The fridge hummed. Looked at me.

‘Think we could burn the original?’ he said. ‘I think we should burn it.’

‘Yes. Outside, or on the stove, or . . .’

We settled on lighting it on the stove then carrying it outside to smoke and crackle on one of the paving slabs just beyond the back door. The fur caught quickly.

‘No EU standards here,’ I said, wincing.

When the fire got down to the soundbox, it began to sing. The normal grating jingle it had given out before; only our listening to it in the circumstances we had set in motion gave it a kind of poignancy, a feeling immediately unrooted by my thinking that it was poignant. The two of us stood around the tiny fire, staring down. Cheap sentiment, I thought. Chemical smoke poured out of it, and incongruous sounds. Tom poked it with a stick. I looked up at the woolly sky, trying not to cough.

‘It’s going to a better place, the world of silence,’ I said.

‘You’re so weird, Daniel.’

‘You’re the one that wanted to set fire to the original.’

‘No, I like it. It’s like, we made the better version, now we can rid the world of this menace,’ he said, ‘one of them, anyway. I think there are a few more. It’s just a prototype though.’

‘You didn’t say that. A prototype! Oh well, there it goes. Try not to breathe in the toxic shit.’

The singing continued longer than you might expect. I hoped the neighbours heard, and wondered about it, as the plastic of the soundbox melted off, as the wires sparked, and the sound died away. In the hush I felt empty. And then, standing there looking at the smoke severing from the burnt body and going skywards on its lonesome, I began to feel good.

Reckoning

Inside I washed my face and neck at the sink, and stripped to my boxers and with urgent disgust threw my clothes immediately in the washing machine. Tom washed his hands at the sink. ‘Good idea, can I chuck my stuff in?’ he said. Tom stripped. Bent a little loading his clothes. The dimples on his back, straightening up again. I methodically got out the detergent and poured out a measure and set the machine, and stood back, watching. Tom would move away soon. And I wobbled my head. He would go to the small ground floor shower and close the door, and steam would come out from under the door. And I wondered.

‘You okay?’ said Tom. ‘I hope smoke