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

Around ten minutes later he got up swiftly and walked shirtless into the living room, and I followed behind like I was a wife, or a cat.

‘Where is it?’ he said.

Daniel was still on the sofa, with a mug in his hand and the TV on. ‘Hmm?’ he said, ‘Oh, Tom. Hi. The diary’s in my room.’ Tom stalked out. I looked at Daniel. He mouthed humour him at me. I picked up a pad of paper from the floor and scrawled in biro, some kind of episode? And underlined this.

We listened to Tom ascending the stairs, footsteps up to Daniel’s room. His tread made it half-way back down the stairs, where he sat, and I looked at him, again dumbly like a wife, or a cat. I felt oddly like he had come down with another person. I couldn’t see from where I stood if he had the book or not – I thought not since he would have had to have kept it down the front of his pyjamas. Nowhere else for it to go.

‘Am I overthinking it?’ I whispered to Daniel, who only shrugged. I wondered how Badr was doing. He was the only one of us at work today. Though Tom should have been. I got up and made more food. So it always goes. Breakfast, tea. In the midst of some kind of internal or external strife. Coffee, instant soup, checking your emails on your phone, chaos in the world, biscuits, the economy destroyed, a stadium.

The next thing I knew, Tom was in the kitchen with me, bustling about.

‘Can I get some of that hot water,’ he said. And he made himself a soup from one of my packets and sat drinking it while leaning on the counter as if nothing whatsoever had happened.

I let him drink for a while. Then, nearly bursting: ‘Where were you yesterday?’ I said, in as close to a correct, coolish, non-enraged, still meaningful tone as I could manage.

‘Oh shit, I didn’t tell you, did I? Company away day,’ he said. Then he finished up and went off for a shower.

I took my soup to the doorway of the living room. I could have stood in the entrance to a shelled stadium. That would have done.

‘He’s cheating on me,’ I said to Daniel, ‘d’you think?’

‘Hmm, maybe,’ he said, bending his head to sip more from his mug, the sensualist. ‘But it’s the better option than what you were thinking before.’

‘Fuck you,’ I said, with affection.

I walked through the house, past Minto’s door, into the kitchen, into Tom’s room, back into the kitchen, and then to the back door, opening it but not stepping through as if I could be both standing in the warmth and out in the cold air standing in the garden. I snuffed that air. Mrs Boobs came and snuffed it too. I was upright on my place, I was disgustingly subservient to this man’s actions, and needing, needing to know. The wife faces the sea her husband is sailing on, and does not know what is his fate, and it’s the nineteenth century, and even now, some of us find ourselves so. What’s he doing if he’s not cheating on me, I thought. Daniel came up to me, with the coat on his shoulders. I wanted to laugh at him there. The world’s least imposing gangster.

‘Do you still think there’s something supernatural, cold bitch?’ he said.

‘So I’m the cold bitch now? Me, the spooky one?’

‘It’s a beautiful day,’ he answered, closing his eyes and raising his head up in the brightening light from the window. Dark eyebrows, darting eyes. Soft lips. Nobbly nose. Such surprisingly beautiful detail and I suddenly thought, with morning clarity, that we were forming a tiny cult between us.

‘Something is happening with him,’ I said.

‘If he’s cheating on you with somebody,’ Daniel said, ‘you don’t have to overthink it. The strangeness is guilt, or something. Or perhaps he has secret business all of his own that relates to none of this.’

‘I met Minto last night,’ I said.

‘Oh really? What – what did he say?’

I explained.

‘Do you feel vindicated in some way, that old Minto senses something in the way you have?’

‘Are you a therapist? Because that’s how a therapist sounds, I think. At least, in shows.’

I opened the back door at last and went out. Bare feet on painfully cold concrete slabs. A snail there going about its business I stepped around him. Let myself enjoy the plumes of my breath. It was Hallowe’en, and the invisible was all around me, pressing on my legs like a cat. I didn’t really feel that uncanny. Tom was a dilemma and a sliding desperation to which I felt sharply alert. And rightly so.

Plumping

Some days it takes four hours to get ready for an event because you have to pull your soul up from a deep well and shake it out, let it dry in the sun a little bit. You know what I mean? I walked home the forty minutes to my flat and climbed the three flights of stairs. Everyone was out somewhere. With slow movements I entered the shower, wet and conditioned my hair. Vee had some fine potions on her part of the shelf. I clapped and smeared cold white slime on my face. I think I was crying but the shock against my skin drew me out of it.

So, what I knew: Tom had vanished all day and into the night. He said a work thing. There had been the weirdness with the book. The book’s sense of inauthenticity. Now a totem he could not live without to the point that even when he had it he thought he didn’t. I hadn’t slept. I was becoming entangled and with what, given he didn’t give much away. I started shaving my legs. Slops of white dripped on my belly and went down the drain. Wine, I thought. I wrapped a towel around me and got the wine from