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

myself. I went out with some friends and lost track of time. I slept on a sofa. Felt like shit when I came back. I didn’t think you’d spend the night at mine, and then when you had I felt guilty – and—’

It all sounded right, on the surface, though it was completely different from the work away day excuse. There are some people who are so charming that the red flags they give off are such a beautiful shade of crimson you can only gaze at them and smile a little ruefully.

We passed down a long road of fancy wine bars and pinch-points of milling pedestrians. We turned heads, us two, the way we were dressed and our frozen expressions. Other costumers would come in our wake, but none as fine. The city shifted around us, a few hydraulically huffing lorries and buses shunting ahead of us. The gangling queues at the bus stop spilling over the pavement and forcing us to edge through, break apart, blowing vapour in our faces the flavour of bad cocktails and sweet farts. I thought we should get on whatever bus would take us a bit closer to the house where the party was to take place but the kind of performance of honesty we needed to get into in that moment couldn’t happen on a bus. Sometimes your agitation comes through at the level of your cells and must burn away. I knew even so early in it that this was an apex moment for us: folk can encounter such times in quite ordinary places, others in the city of their dreams, right before the turn to dusk, on the eeriest day of the year.

‘What else, Tom?’

‘What else what?’

We were pushing past a crowd and heading for a great stone bridge that crosses a waterway of cliffs and riverine trees. Posh flats overlooking it with the kind of view I’d imagine you’d get in a post-apocalyptic world that has grown verdant without us. My mind supplying the handful of survivors living by windows, surviving in the luxury of last days. Resting their elbows they look down on the crumbling vestiges of monumental architecture, striped trees, the slipping bodies of foxes through the ravaged underbrush.

‘What else were you feeling when you saw me? At the flat. Cos I think you were going to say, and forgive me if I’m wrong – jealous,’ I said.

‘Jealous?’

‘Conflicted then.’

‘What were you up to with Daniel, if I should have been feeling jealous?’ he said, stepping round an old woman holding an unnecessary golf umbrella as a walking stick. There was a hum in the air that was part crowd, part traffic, part swarm of inner bees.

‘I didn’t say you should be feeling jealous. I said what I thought you were feeling. Fuck me, I think you were jealous because you don’t like the friendship I have with him,’ I said.

‘You know he’s gay, right?’ He said with ugly condescension.

I stopped. I worked out how best to present my face while my mind thought: no? But no. He isn’t, I thought. Is he? Something spun out inside of me, revealing a great depth below. I thought of our feet resting against each other. I thought of talking with him for hours, just wanting to talk and listen and never stop. What closeness means. Tom was ahead now, white suit, dapper. And there, at my centre, the truer part: what did it matter, the definitions for what he – Daniel – and I might have? I ran my hand at the edge of the bridge wall. It was there for me.

‘But you were feeling lonely, weren’t you,’ I said, ‘when you were at breakfast? Outside yourself and us. What’s been up with you, Tom? What’s been going on?’

We walked in silence. Ahead of us everything stood rich and red-tinged with the sun getting low. I had used the wrong words, and I had no others. Something bubbled up from the void inside me.

‘I miss you,’ I said, startling myself. I cast around in my head for whether it was true at all, had been true all along, or I had made it true in saying it.

Tom stopped to lean over the bridge. Light played over his features as they moved through various guises of the thoughts underneath, settling on nothing, looking so arduous to me that all my frustration dissipated and I was concerned, more than I ever had been, that he really was in some kind of trouble. Spiritual or financial, something else, I had no idea. The water ran gold below us, on through the darkening trees, just crying out for a dipped arm to cling to.

‘I can’t tell you,’ he said, suddenly hoarse. I had his arm. He didn’t seem the type to swoon, but you never knew.

‘What’s the big secret drama, eh?’ I said, with a bark of a laugh. ‘You had a few nightmares and, uh, you’ve been really into some book? Tell me about it, maybe? I’m listening.’

‘What?’

‘Did you notice, with that diary you’ve been into lately, there’s something wrong with it?’

He shook his head. I pulled him gently away from the side of the bridge and we walked unimpeded to the end. Sunshine was everything, before it began to leak out all at once. I had the feeling that Hallowe’en would properly start when it was dark, and I had to walk us quickly, his white coat tails and mine, black, flying. It seemed of the utmost importance to get Tom indoors before the light was gone. I spoke quickly, too, telling him what Daniel and I had potentially discovered. He said little, but I supposed he was listening. Everyone gets kicked out of their own contentment every once in a while. That could be all it was. The party, the party, I thought, rushing past old trees and the first headlights, walking ahead of Tom now, turning my head to check he was there, and stolid he always was. We were