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

in, and trying not to let it out I take a swig from one of the beers. It’s flat and stale and tastes of my own mouth. I click tongue against teeth and think good, the taste of it, think of that. A small body flashes on the old stone wall, moonlight white. The new housemate’s cat prowling. I let it go without trying to get it to come to me. That morning it had looked orange saucers at me from the housemate’s – Tom’s – briefly open door as the housemate – Tom – made a cup of tea and yawned good morning at me in his boxers in the kitchen, while I held my robe – Christmas present ten years ago from a long-gone boyfriend – tight around me, not knowing where to look. Knowing exactly where to look, I had thought, that bulge, the trail of hairs blond but still there. And people think I’m a prude. I shake my head. Cat’s going over the old stone wall. A little bell sound. A bell on its collar. Then she’s crouching to leap down the other side, her white tail there a moment and gone. Silent snow, I think. Without the bell she would catch everything and sink her teeth in. But she can’t. So she will go through all the gardens of this part of town causing no harm at all. The cat is called Mrs Boobs, Tom told me.

‘Was fucked when I named her,’ he had said, in his English voice – sounding to me like a crisp, low round of applause in a half-empty theatre – as he smiled into his tea, and raised his eyes to mine, ‘and somehow it stuck.’

‘It’s pretty memorable,’ I had said, politely, lost in his wide, shimmering blues. It mattered not a bit what he had said, but everything around it: cool, brilliant, probably brutish, seen across some distant ground from my own poor territory, my peripheral beinghood – Midlothian, adenoidal, not, as I am constantly made aware, aesthetically gifted in the face or body. Tom is aesthetically gifted. I could almost hate him, I think, but I know it would merely make me an idiot if I don’t wait to see what he is; all his sticky, tender layers, underneath, outwith and beyond me.

Tonight is okay; tonight it’s early autumn and a few stars, and no one about, everyone passed out – or busy – in their own beds. You are loved, Daniel, I tell myself, with a slight, drunken kind of sincerity that is also unstable. You are stable. Neither of these are true things, I know, I know, but it is something I am now saying to myself, a different kind of repetition. From today onwards. Only when I’m not likely to blurt it out and have other people hear, and look at me with confusion and pity. New housemate, new housemate’s new girlfriend – Órla – neither of whom love me, no one has ever wanted to stay with me for long. They know, I think each time a loved one, a friend, a lover, dumps me, they know the kind of terrible person I am.

‘You are loved, Daniel,’ I say out loud, but softly. No one, not even the cat, hears me, thank God. I am trying to make it happen, cringing at trying, and though powerless not to try, at least, through the small degrees I am capable of believing it. It’s all been done so many times before. Swing, I think instead, and feel the wind lift my hair. All the stakes, for this moment, are small. My life, my body moving in the dark against all the other darkness, moving, swells of small life, cats creeping over many walls, their teeth unable to clamp down on throats, because a little bell declares their sublimated intentions. I am loved. The world loves all in it. A man long dead is the current target of my affections.

Pathetic Fallacy

I found the diary in a friend’s house three days before Tom moved in and I stole it and ran away. It was the handwriting that made me do it; I would say, if asked, I’m a sucker for gorgeous handwriting. That is, not handwriting that is perfect, but which seems to exude a quality of welcome dalliance across the page, an open pleasure in the act of writing down just exactly what you wish and at your own pace, directed at no one and in private. James Lennoxlove of Bitterhall has just this kind of quality in his writing, which is all that is left of him, the man himself being dust. I even liked how our names might look together, that juvenile of me: Lennoxlove and Lightfoot. The great tall L of Lennoxlove with the loop through the top, full of air, finding its twin in my L, if he, Lennoxlove, wrote it out by its side.

It wasn’t clear how Mark came to be in possession of the diary, an accident of boxes from his mother’s and uncle’s merging households. How I decided to take it is simple impulsiveness. Mark, the kind of rich boy who found me amusing and so, in a moment of spurred viciousness, I stole this diary. Vicious to me, I knew Mark wouldn’t care. Would laugh. Would say, Oh Daniel, in a way that would madden and wind me for days. Because I was all reactions, as I often told myself. Easily wound up. I put the brown-red clothbound book down the front of my trousers and let my bulky jumper and nervous smile conceal it. I gave a hurried excuse about being home for breakfast with my mum.

But I didn’t go home to mum. I went to the place I live, the eternal non-home of my generation, the rental house where I and my two housemates have our various lives, decently set out so that they do not overlap or hurt one another too much. All strangers, yes,