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

house, clutching my drink, climbing the stairs, bleering into rooms. Tom Mew, yes, Tam Lin, yes. I caught glimpses of him talking to other guests, to a man with a black mask over his eyes, a woman in grey satin with her hair impossibly high. Fuck you, I thought, with lighthearted venom. I should describe the house for you: from the ground floor, it was one of those millionaire’s mid-century affairs that could have easily gone wrong. In other hands that style results in crumbling office blocks and blighted schools – great heavy slabs of concrete at an angle suggesting gargantuan collapse or upheaval, giving the central rooms a grand high ceiling. But with money, there’s the design and materials to make a balanced and captivating space. Glass in long rectangular sheets, wood panelling, glowingly polished parquet, a strange, floating wooden staircase that peeled upwards to infinite height, it seemed, right before the doors. It worked beautifully. It was large and airy but still felt like someone’s home. Some of that was the decoration, all the plants everywhere, including a giant dark-leafed swiss cheese plant that must have been growing there for decades. On inspection it was planted straight into a square of soil in the floor.

I took myself and my drink of the moment upstairs, the gap in the steps made me woozy. There was a cream-carpeted corridor that ran in a mezzanine overlooking the party’s main stage, but I chose to go back further. I found a parallel corridor, interior. It seemed larger than it should have been given the footprint below. I found two bedrooms, one with a shock of red on the wall, the other all painfully white from furniture to floor. In another a study, lit by a single green standing lamp tall and gently curved like the light on the ferry of the dead, I thought. Dark green walls incongruously lined with dark wooden shelves of cloth-bound hardbacks and framed pictures of family. There was Mark, little, with his mother and another man, not the man I’d met earlier. Sad and slight, shorter than Maggie. Mark graduating from university. Black and white Mark in front of a nineteen-fifties car – I realised it was not Mark, but some relative. In the middle of the desk, in front of a closed laptop, stood a large pink cake with a lighted candle on it. I crossed the silent, deep pile carpet towards it, holding my breath. The feeling in the room was one of intense melancholy. I despise melancholy. It is a sentimental emotion. On reaching the cake I pushed a finger to it, up to the hilt– it was dry and woolly. A completely realistic cake made of felt. The candle was glowing and flickering, but it wasn’t real either. It functioned like a candle, so I suppose it was as real as it needed to be. I blew on it; it went out, and after a moment of darkness it came back on again. I realised the small, shuttered window in this room must look out on the mezzanine. But when I touched the shutter to pull it back I had a horrible feeling that it wouldn’t – that there would be a vista outside of a night world somewhere other than here. I recalibrated, steeled myself, and flung it open. There was nothing there. No window at all.

I left that room and found a large tiled bathroom, replete with huge, sunken bath that looked like something wholesale lifted from a Victorian boys’ school. Then two more bedrooms that were more lived-in than the others, big soft headboards and a wrinkled pair of tights on the floor by a vanity. ‘It’s a house,’ I thought. ‘People live here, and I’m intruding.’ I retreated, passing by the cupboard where Tom was briefly to lose his mind, though it had not happened yet. I heard a cheer from below. I heard a whole house seizing up around a population of strangers. I told myself I was having a damn good time, even so.

Interlude

Loneliness can come at you out of nothing, especially with the obscure sounds of a party and old music reeling below you. There are sound clips you can listen to, to recreate this intense effect – usually pop songs from another era altered to sound as if played through several closed doors. The feeling brought on by these snippets is a specific type of aloneness. Late in the cold hall of a dingy club, the place where the coats are or a red-lit back stair. Everyone else is in the dancing part, close and warm and sloshing beer around. You, though, you are wallowing in isolation. Run down, picking at your clothes, coming down off whatever, no one to love. It’s fucking magic that someone can do all that with tweaks to a sound file.

On slowly and majestically descending the stair I saw out the window a glimpse of Tom’s white back. I followed. He went into the space behind the foot of the stairs – there was another corridor there, with the cloakroom to one side, and doors and doors along it. Our feet clattered on the hard white floor.

‘Tom!’ I called. He was ahead of me, walking fast. Footfalls echoing, sounds of the party pressed hollow from all sides, muted chattering and laughing, glasses clinking. The corridor emptied us out into the back part of the house, an almost-mirror of the front. It was the place we had danced out through before. I could see clusters of guests to my right, and the merriment was set in and intractable. Tom hesitated a moment before plunging out through the French windows and I hurried after.

We stood on the slightly raised balcony, garden sunken below and dark. Night sky with a frosty dampness in the air. I looked at him, he looked away. What was he looking for? I loathed this being the one running after; I wanted to be the one people