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

the cupboard. I’d brush after. My teeth were foul anyway with the late night chicken even after a brush. In between the kitchen and the shower I decided I did not think in the marrow of me he was cheating. Stupid, I thought. What else? A bender wouldn’t explain the oddness. A ghost then, or something inhabiting him, some obsession relating to the book, fuck anyone else’s opinion.

But Daniel had been so reasonable that my lifelong belief in the – yes, I know, implausible – world of spirits visible and invisible was shaken. If I wasn’t much for belief in anything else, why should I believe in them? I decided I had two options: 1. Call my parents and ask them again about the cold bitch incident, get something concrete on that or: 2. Mull it over some more before venturing to make any decisions. I decided on the latter. My parents would be unkeen to hear from me outside our allotted phone call day, and the worse for having the old bruise prodded. I rinsed off the conditioner and shampooed. I let the gunk that was left on my face stay on a bit longer. Cold steam about me. I leaned in to the narrow strip of heat. Ghosts though. The rattling window. The vacant stare and the yelling about stabbing. It wasn’t much evidence. Tom’s leaves on the pillow. Could be just a deep involvement with the text and its delusions, with the physical object which contained the text. His sweat-dirt smell. I liked this explanation. It played to my own obsessions. It allowed me some dignity. And hinted that whatever was off would be easily solved by waiting out til the book lessened its grip on him.

I got out and dried and put my loungewear on, black and loose. I had to pick up my party clothes from the tailor soon but too much thinking assailed me. Swirls of the nights past, the hill, the book and its weirdness and whatever it might be hiding. I padded into my room and lay myself down operatically on the bed, thinking of my haunted man, pushing back the idea of myself as a dull, everyday, cheated-on woman, then pulling that image to me again and hugging it tight with all its thorns. My little throw pillow said ‘be well’ on it, a relic from another relationship that had sickened and faded from this world. But I kept it because I wanted what it wished. He might be fucking someone else. That would be easier. Snap off ties. I looked up at the picture I had stuck to the ceiling: a forest in the mist from on high. What did it matter? We hadn’t been going out long enough for it to matter. Get on with life then Órla. You’ve done it so many times, or someone else has done it to you – left, with little notice. Why this little game with yourself that it has to hurt? Revelling in being pained when really you are bringing that pain into being on yourself like it’s a kind of obligation. I regret myself greatly, as an academically-minded woman, reduced to the cyclical obsessive.

Better minds than mine have worked this game out and kicked it. Stop then. Stop thinking. But better minds than mine have also burned in anguish for days. I yelled out an obscenity, at Tom, myself, the immortal fraughtness of relationships between people.

I determined as the only option that I would be in this haunted theory and keep Tom in my life for now, and allow myself to obsess in this one respect. It was so capacious an escapade; the diary entries had carried him out into the streets, all night, and had removed him some place I could not get to which I told myself I was interested in reaching for out of curiosity. He had seen some ghost of something, that much was convincing to me. Ghost of self-reproach, ghost of a conspiracy-hunter. I let myself dream myself then into all roles, turning them about to understand. I was Tom – his strangely vacant look and absent hours. I’d see him tonight, unless he wandered off again. I was James Lennoxlove, riding his foaming horse back from the ball, blood in his mind, then nothing, nothing, then dates of entry that seemed innocuous but were not. I wondered what the party would have in store for me, me as Tom, me as myself. And then, an inevitability, I could not fend off picturing him kissing some other girl, hand on her curves. It excited and appalled me. I thought of myself rushing in and catching him at it. Over and over on my little track, occasionally sighing to the naked room.

Walking Wounding

Tom called me in the afternoon when it was already beginning to get dark.

‘We have to talk,’ he said.

‘Yes we do,’ I said. I am fierce and he won’t get me down, I thought. I was all dressed up, lipstick a shade darker than my own lips and applied patted down to a matte block. Eyeliner a sharp, strained flick.

I met him on the still-bright street, him coming languidly in his beautiful white suit like he had been born in it. I thought in fact I did not know much about his background, other than what he had thought to tell me – very little, and what I had seen and heard. That he was English and spoke with the chalky vowels that would make him perfect for audiobooks, and slightly alienating in conversation. He took my arm. We began walking in the direction of the party, two or so miles away.

‘Well, look at you,’ I said with an air of suave stupidity. Then, ‘Are we talking?’

‘I’m sorry about disappearing yesterday, Órla,’ he said. ‘I had to go and clear my head. I hadn’t slept well. I’d had the weirdest dreams. And I – I decided not to just sit about and feel sorry for