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

chase. But perhaps that too would have been dreadful. He turned, eyes low. And I thought of Daniel, who never met your eye. And I thought, Tom’s been drinking, he’s been following something. He was a little out of breath. Shaky.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

He laughed.

‘I’ve been listening to that music all night long,’ he said, then, lower, ‘it’s getting to me.’

I had a strong need to touch him on the arm to prove he was there at all. I almost touched him. I didn’t. Just then Maggie, the host, came out through the doors carrying a silver tray with tiny misshapen translucent bowls on it.

‘Take one,’ she said, ‘you can eat the bowls. I printed them this morning, isn’t it exciting, living in the future? Don’t worry, gluten free. Please.’

I took one and put it in my mouth. It felt like putting a retainer in, but began to dissolve immediately. It tasted of passion fruit with an undertow of meat.

‘Delicious!’ I said, drool gathering at the back of my mouth. I swallowed.

‘Tom, isn’t it? Have one,’ she said. But Tom for reasons unknown had turned pale and was pushing past us, back inside.

‘Oh,’ said Maggie. ‘Oh well. His loss.’

‘Yeah, well. Sorry about him. He’s been a bit off today.’

Maggie smiled. She was an elegant lady, in all you’d imagined an elegant lady to be when you were a little girl: tall, smoothly moving, impeccable dark lipstick, hair that looked as if it had snaked itself into position that morning, a thirties-style diadem held impossibly in place.

‘I’ve been watching the two of you since you came in,’ she said, ‘and I’m impressed, and a little unnerved.’

‘By what?’

‘By your beauty, yours and Tom’s. By the way you keep gliding past each other in my house. You two lovers, my dear, seem to have different objectives tonight, and it intrigues me to see it.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, more for conversation’s sake than anything else. I supposed I knew exactly what she meant.

‘Oh, just that you’re kind of, rambling about the place as if to claim it by touching everything – I’ve been watching. Oh, yes.’

I kept up eye contact, and smiled – politely I hoped.

‘While Tom,’ she continued, ‘has been rambling about as if evading claims. He’s a furtive type. But I’d say that’s not typical for him? God, he’s a sculpture though, a classic for the gallery,’ she said. So it is with the rich, they can say whatever they like. But I couldn’t be annoyed by her, angry at being found out, made insecure by implications, or even to laugh at them, coming from her, a woman in her late fifties at least. She won me over with the devil winking in her eye and her soft fluidity of speaking, ‘You keep an eye on that one. Don’t let him slip through your fingers.’

‘I will,’ I said. Murmured, like a good little swan.

‘See you in another room,’ she said, ‘with your man by your side,’ she said. With that, vamping off indoors, to another cluster of guests who all turned their heads to her, and raised each nearly-empty or white-slurred glass.

The Drinking

I rubbed my face and ladled myself more of the cocktail stuff and drank it down, seething it through my teeth. Then I fetched another, and had a conversation with an austere couple and their small, bashful teenage son, who peered down at me through his glasses like a wary creature caught under a magnifying glass. His skin was a mess, like mine was at his age, and I asked him something about school, and I asked all the adults about their jobs, and pretended to listen. I was seeking reassurance that there were people who were normal – and mostly they were and I loved them for it. I asked nobody if they’d ever seen a ghost, or if they felt slightly aroused at the idea of demonic possession, or the fairies stealing their beloveds. I went back to the punchbowl. I talked to Mark and Daniel on a sofa and in the kitchen. I went to the punchbowl. Hours passed. I went to the punchbowl, but I was strong. I chattered indomitably. I frightened an old lady by pointing fingerguns at her. That was when I went to the toilet and freshened up my make-up and had a long piss. Sitting on the toilet and looking at my overlit, not entirely Grecian, side profile in the mirrored wall I was hit with the clarity all toilets in such situations provide: a good gauge of my drunkenness. I decided it was necessary to stop drinking for a bit, now, and to reassess where my drinking had got me which was nowhere. Under the layers of conversation I had attempted to pull over it, my heart obscurely stung. I also decided I was ugly, and had a small cry.

Sometime around midnight I found myself on the stairs with Daniel, feeling empty, dizzy at the gaps in the stairs, a little anxious and drunk – party feelings. Tom was nowhere and everywhere, and a bottle of someone else’s single cask malt whisky was firmly in my slippery hands. Daniel was telling me about the diary again.

‘Shh,’ I said. I looked him over. He looked so awkward, then, behind his glasses. He and the teenager overlapped. ‘How old are you?’ I asked.

‘Tinder age, or real age?’ he said.

‘I can’t imagine you on Tinder.’

‘Lots of times. Every time was intimidating.’

‘I’ll bet,’ I said. Poor Daniel.

‘I’m thirty-six,’ he said, ‘same age as Mark.’

‘No way! You don’t look it,’ I said, ‘no grey at all, and you don’t have the kind of – the kind of look people have. Old and tired like. You look young.’

‘Well, thank you. I won’t tell Mark what you said.’

‘I’m twenty-eight. Sorry,’ I said, then, ‘I think I’m going to make some terrible mistake with Tom.’

‘Oh, really?’ Daniel was looking down the stairs and out the window at the front of the house. There was