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

because I have never been able to find anyone who would request to live with me.

I went up the stairs to the room in the place in which I live and set the stolen diary square on my table and read it from start to one quarter or so through in two sittings (break for tea, taken in a dwam, a cup of tea and some bread, chewed slowly and carefully while eyeing but not reading the diary, so the crumbs didn’t get near). It was easy enough to read it, that flowing handwriting, welcoming me in. It felt like being plunged into a warm bath after a long time standing naked. What a beautiful pink there was in the sky when I came to and the great garden trees blue-black against it, my face mushed and hot where the heels of my hands had been pressed against the temples. I was crying. Relief I thought. Not a whole life, this one being gifted to me, or that I had more rightly stolen, not even that. I wondered if I could ever be loved like Lennoxlove loved the world.

I decided not to read any more for a little while.

Fixes

A good day looked like this – nothing. A good and bad day looked like – I went into work early and down into the basement of the university, stopping in on my boss, Dr Glaister, who understood budgets and all warm palms needing shaken and the requirement too for staff morale and so for her to be at a kindly remove, providing a good email promptly, cakes on staff birthdays, plants in every space that could take a plant. Stopping in to say things were going well – they must always be going well, the personal is professional, and there to the staff room – kitchen, low calm lighting – to deposit my noodle box by the kettle and swipe for coffee and consume this, consume moments of amiability any passing colleagues might have to offer and proffer my own, and after that to disappear into my project; the blessed calm of it in a room padded and soft with no sound but me and my machine, everything smooth if it was to be running that day, and to my small side office, easily answered courteous emails, emerging for lunch and if no one about, then, then, the slip into thinking, gulping down a bottle of water while the kettle steamed up the glass cabinets, and pouring hot water into my desiccated meal, staring in wait at the staff kitchen table at my noodles swelling and pieces of carrot thinking of anything else I could; someone might come in and make small talk and I’d smile easily and make it back. I’d eat and they’d eat, and always the smile, it faltered as their fork approached their lips and I’d keep steadily thinking to myself, talking politely, meanwhile imagining certain images I find soothing, such as picking several daisies, say, or imagining myself on a calm fogbound lake with everything cool and my raft perfectly sanded and smooth, standing in soft clothes. Back to work. Finish work. Walk home, sometimes the pace of my thoughts keeping up with me, over even the blast of classical music in my headphones, until home, and sometimes too much breath too little chest and fragile bones and I might just shake myself apart and so I would go, if it was really bad, up to my room and curl up in a ball hugging a pillow and gasping until I relaxed, slept, woke up a little better or rather more resolved to be better. There were no really bad days then, only my hands got so tired of holding myself up. It was natural. I forgave myself that. And began each day knowing I would survive it, and hoping for normal if at all possible, and never expectant, like a disciple awaiting the descent of the most holy all the days of their life, in some desert cave, getting to know it well, stones are peaceful, the heavy, reassuring grace that any day can be broken down into measurable portions, toil preferable to the works of the devil that swings and slithers up to them at night, whispering their doubt that any such an end will come.

Men of the House

It was the day before Tom moved in. My heart throbbed in my wrists as I went downstairs after that first reading session, as I tried to recover my decorum, such as it was. I tapped my fingers on descent. I wasn’t sure yet if I had experienced a change in my life, as happened at times, from one Daniel to another, before-Daniel being somehow brimmed up and spilt over by Lennoxlove’s writing to be mingled with it, to become something else – I hoped not more tender, Christ, possibly not more tender than I was already, I might actually die from that, or disappear up my own fundament to nevermore emerge.

The kitchen empty as it usually was around that time and pleasantly dirty in its pre-Badr state. Badr came in from work around seven. Minto was about, surely, in his room, sometimes his little white face and beard and twittering eyes as he slipped out to his toilet. Owner of the house Minto, the recluse, the hermit. One time only I was in there and saw the faded armchair, striped wallpaper-like pyjamas, damp spot and the bed. And. All. Those. Books. Minto fumbling but charismatic too, a deposed king of somewhere whose borders were now shrunk to this. The smell of the place, not awful but certainly lodged in the back of my head, so that when the door opened, as it infrequently did, I remembered the foost of it rather before I smelled it. One time only I’d been in there was the day I’d moved in, and handing Minto – tremulous red hands stuffy with arthritis – an antique cheque; after that, envelopes