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

to be holding in his big old spiky hand. Later I had copied out a poem from the scan of a page, learning how to read the old language there, in the old hand. This was the book I wanted to write something meaningful on. Cheek of me. It was much older than I was, and surely everything that could be was known about it. I was determined to come right up in my mortal body and lean in, find out the right question to ask of it that it had not been asked before. So that I would have permission to touch it again.

Some Quiet Hour

Tom began to be haunted; this was a week or so before the party. It began with a sigh in his sleep late at night or early in the morning. I lay awake with the cat up on my chest vibrating with purrs. Then she stopped purring and I heard him mumble, Not like that. I reached out a hand to stroke his hair. He turned over and curled up into a kind of hunch, muttering louder. No, he said. In the throat. By his tone it was hard to say if he was afraid of the action he was seeing, or instructing on it. I pulled my hand away and he groaned, the cat leapt.

Some moments let anything in, wonder and fury and the devil, all without much movement at all, breathless and gentle on the surface.

I got out of bed and went to the dark kitchen for water. I peered back across into his room and saw his big shape on the bed and decided I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t wake him. I’d wake him and he’d have the misfortune of remembering what dream it was. Where if I let him sleep it would pass on by in the next REM cycle into the abyss where dreams go to drain away. The house was quiet. Mrs Boobs came in and mewed at me, and I let her out the back door. Then a creak from upstairs. A series of creaks. Daniel.

‘Oh, hullo,’ he whispered from the stair, ‘just came down for something.’ I sat. He was fabulously layered in his dress. The slippers on his feet, in an almost but not quite matching shade to the thick, red terry robe swishing about his knees and letting out glimpses of striped pyjamas. Topping the robe was a long, old kind of dust-grey velvet smoking jacket, and that scarf he was always wearing wrapped double round. His tortoise-shell glasses were on his face crooked. True the heating was never on in this place so he might well have been cold, but he looked too like a Victorian body, sans little sleeping cap. If those were in any place available and the cap slightly less ridiculous in the general fashion he’d have been right on the purchase. His hair was all up as if he’d run his hands through it repeatedly, which I was to learn later was a thing sure enough he did when distracted. As he looked about I had the sense he hadn’t been sleeping, that for all the associated garments sleep was the furthest thing from him and so was company and that my presence was unwelcome. He found his way to the table, and put his hands on the chair nearest mine. I could have easily leaned over and righted his glasses on his prickled pinched face. Imagine.

‘Ah, right,’ I said.

‘You didn’t happen to see a book in here, earlier? Clothbound, old? I was reading it.’

‘Not sleeping, then?’

‘I keep odd hours,’ he said.

‘I’ll bet. I see you as a Minto type, you know. In future years you’ll be the owner of this house, a cryptid to the other occupants.’

‘Christ,’ he said, rubbing his eye. ‘That’s grim. You haven’t seen it then?’

‘A book? No,’ I said. ‘Sorry if I upset you. Wait—’

‘Don’t worry about it. I didn’t expect anyone to be up. I feel a bit underdressed.’

At this I laughed. He looked hurt a second and then smiled. I made a note not to tease after midnight, unless we were both in the clear mood.

‘The book though. I saw it earlier,’ I said.

‘Where?’

‘In Tom’s room—’

That clattering intimacy of talking over one another.

‘Oh,’ he said.

‘D’you want me to get it?’

He shrugged. ‘Don’t want to wake him.’

‘Oh, he’s not sleeping well,’ I said. ‘Could stand to be woken.’

And I tapped Daniel on the shoulder and tugged him towards Tom’s room. Something fun about the idea of sneaking in there together. And Tom talking in his sleep. What secrets he might spill, and Daniel to work them out with later.

Formal Settings

I remember Tom coming up to my flat just the once, early on. Sure he came loads of times but the only instant I can remember is in the light of everything after it. Late night, following drinks after his work. Him sullen and large on the bar’s low stool, hunched shoulders. Not responding to probes about what his job entailed. ‘Everyone’s a wanker there,’ he said, staring off at the wall of gins, ‘shallow bastards looking to get ahead. No need to ruin a good night,’ he said. I hopped up for beer, a juniper IPA for him, some local porter for myself. I felt like he’d respect that. Beer but fancy. The right level of risk, something to talk about or reject. I suspected Tom cared deeply about the taxonomy of crafted objects, consumable or otherwise, or would, if pressed in just the right way to explain his feelings on the subject.

He took a sip. Fuck that perfect pre-Raphaelite mouth, that caught the eye from the other side of any room like the sight of a bruise on an eyesocket. I wonder if that tender side to his features made him this solid and blank as defence. I wondered about his childhood. Around us the wide space of the pub buzzed thickly, Friday bodies shifted uncomplaining to make room, to move