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

after that policeman caught you with Out.’ He said, ‘Juvenile delinquent. But here we are, promises, piecrusts.’ He ripped open the marshmallows. Several dropped into my lap and I found them on the floor underneath my legs and put them in my mouth. I hated the cloying sweetness, sudden and inhabiting my whole mouth, but the texture was enjoyable. It took a lot of concentration to chew and finally swallow. Refocus. Mark was sitting next to me again. Hot chocolate. Stinging smell under the sweetness.

‘Do you ever feel like you’re permanently missing the important things, the fulsomeness, like all the facts are not available to you, and so you’ll make an error, a stupid one, one that other people would easily see?’ I said.

There was a silence.

‘Fuck sweet things,’ I said, ‘I think I came here to get something.’

‘Hmm,’ said Mark, ‘that’s life. Oh,’ he sang, then, ‘you’re talking about the hunt for clues that you don’t even know are clues, in order to solve the mystery of how someone mysterious feels about someone else, or how anyone, even yourself thinks about anything in general? The impossibility of knowing, a person, a situation, this,’ He opened his arms and gestured at the room.

‘Yes!’

‘No. Drink your hot chocolate before it gets a skin on it.’

A Glass of Water, an Open Invitation

I blinked. I remembered at last why I had come downstairs.

‘You sidetracked me!’ I said to Mark, and got to my feet. I felt less drunk than I had done just a second before – as if a window had just been pulled open and fresh wholesome sobriety came blustering in. I wouldn’t have wanted to test my chances behind the wheel or anything, but I was happy to remember my purpose.

‘I was supposed to get some water for Tom,’

‘Didn’t you just ask me where Tom was?’ Mark asked.

‘Yes. I forgot,’ I said, getting up.

‘In the joy of my company.’

‘No. I hate you,’ I said to him, patting him on the arm.

‘I hate you too,’ he said, smiling and handing me a glass of water.

Meanwhile in other rooms there were people waltzing still. They had been waltzing for hours, though now in candle light, the music soft, the people drooping like dancers in a competitive marathon, but still, when I walked between them, carrying my water glass close to my chest, smiling, they moved around me with sleepy flickering grace, they did not look as if they would stop until the sun came up, and the sun might never come up; such was the power of this house.

I climbed the stairs and went to the guest room. Órla grabbed the water and said she did not need it, even as she was giving some to Tom and drinking the rest herself. In her left hand an empty toothglass. She went to fill them both in the en suite. I sat down on the bed next to Tom.

As I sat, the frame of the bed rattled. The room rattled, and I rubbed my face. The party, downstairs, I thought. A quake in the house from merrymaking.

Tom gave me an oorie look. By that I mean, like something coming forward into his expression, slowly and strangely, like a large horse coming forward to you in snow and fog. Perhaps this had as much to do with my drunken eyes struggling to pull into focus as the man himself. He had taken off his jacket some time ago, and his shirt was open. The hair on his chest was light and there was a scar, horizontal in the flesh, like the mark of a pocket cut above his heart. I had not seen that scar before, but it looked old. As I looked, the scar undid itself and became wet with blood – I flinched back; the scar vanished.

‘Hello,’ he said, leaning forward, for me retreating. And kissed me.

I pulled back again. His lips had been very cold. There were faint shadows under his eyes, delicate purples in the tanned skin. I meant to get out of the bed and back away, but I was drunk and he was lovely, and he was weird and something was happening, now, so I held him by the shoulders and looked him in the eye, though he would not focus and nothing made sense. When someone is not themselves, what does that mean? Beyond the usual, more understandable outer states of, for example, broaching on the overly drunk and raving mad. But Tom was not more drunk than me and he was not mad, but. What boundaries arise and how do we negotiate them in our hunger and need? Tom and Órla . . . But I was thinking more of what I should do or not do, with my body, with my need. I felt his pull; he was pulling me. He was something else. I was a shiver. I was hard. I unbuttoned my shirt and threw it away. Then I kissed him back and we both merged together in the oorie warmth of our mouths.

There has been a lot of pain in my life, I was thinking, rationalising; I see pain in my head, I have a pain, a madness of a particularly personal sort, even in our impersonal, public days, a vivid made-up repeating suffering that is embedded in the drab fabric of my days like a stain I fixed with hot water long before I even knew what I was doing, and all of what I try to do I have to do around that pain. I was near sobbing at this point, only a few seconds having passed, Tom still letting himself be held by me, his mouth open a little, his eyes someone else’s – so I should just accept what is not pain, and that I can, and not overthink.

‘Are you Tom?’ I asked.

He smiled at me, in a kind of condescending way.

‘What does it matter? I want this,’ he said. His voice was unlike himself; softer. Even the