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

‘Don’t – ah’ said Tom. ‘Ah. The man who I’ve been seeing.’

‘You’ve been seeing a man,’ said Daniel.

‘Yes,’ said Tom. He seemed quite lucid. ‘You might have noticed I’ve been – not right. Lately.’

‘Nah,’ I said. I sat back down on the bed, on the end, and hugged one leg. It was getting late and the distant noise of the party downstairs was working again to make me the normal sort of gloomy. Home, I thought. My own bed. But something else. I looked over at the two men. My boyfriend and his flatmate, close on this bed, together.

‘All right, yes,’ said Tom, licking his lips, ‘I’ve been trying to kind of keep a lid on . . . everything. Stupid. It didn’t make much sense and I felt – embarrassed.’

‘Embarrassed to be haunted?’ I said, moving up. I needed to get in range of him, I thought. I attempted to push my hair back from my face but it was still up in fancy rolls. I touched my lip, and the lipstick on my finger was the red of the walls. Tom paused and looked back across to the blinded window and his glance caught me in the lip touch and just as I’d hoped – ‘Órla,’ he said. And then he was leaning over and kissing me. Deeply like a drowning man taking gulps of air, he pulled back, a face swimming, red colours, his terrible blue eyes. ‘He’s coming to take me away tonight,’ he said. ‘You, you two, are all I have left.’

And because I could not hope to make sense of it and because all I cared about in that moment was desire I just leaned over to sheepish Daniel and grabbed his bottle from his hand, swigged. Huge wet dribbling gulp. I closed my eyes. All the best things are done with your eyes closed. Eating something really good, kissing, pausing to take in the world through senses other than your exhausted eyes. I drank and thought about an old manuscript in a dimly-lit room, resting on a pillow. The unseen world spun about me in my drunkenness and darkness behind my eyes.

‘You’re one crazy fucker,’ I said lightly. I got off the bed and shambled to the toilet to wash up. In general I had no idea how things would proceed but the situation felt potent and deliciously murky. In the toilet I flittered about for the light switch, then screwed up my eyes at myself in the mirror. Oh hello, another reckoning with my drunkenness. Had what had taken place really just happened? Or was I overtired and playing it up? The limit seemed just about breached, but not quite. I neither felt sick nor well and the tips of my fingers were numb but I was in my body all right. I tried to think what would happen next and could only manage an image of Tom on the bed, handsomely dishevelled. I peed and flushed the toilet. This room was pristine and every element had been selected for maximum knobby chicness. Marble ledges. Bronze taps. A shower with multiple heads that came from the sides. There were cute little packets and bottles for the convenience of guests. I fumbled through them knocking several to the floor. I dabbed at my eyes and unwrapped and bashed a toothbrush around my mouth and stared at myself foaming and snorted. I washed my hands and splashed my face with water, before realising my mistake. I attempted to fix my mascara while the room stood about me, judging. I’m coming for you later I told it. Maggie was fancy all right, I thought and I dimly visualised her piled up hair and bony, freckled neckline. I supposed I might get to know her beyond the bad first, and surface, impression and like her more. In short, I delayed. I delayed – I straightened up and walked out. There, in the bed, Tom and Daniel were kissing.

To Be Suddenly Unseen

Violent alienation from yourself is almost the worst for not meaning anything to anyone else. You know when you can tell a terrible inevitability? Picture yourself in a clearing in a forest. All the birds have stopped singing, not a single leaf moves, not even the clouds are moving; they have covered the sun. There’s a sense that a spell has been laid down in the roots in the ground, in the black bark, long before you came, and is now hissing into the grove. Fate feels cool to the touch, settling down on you like that. Your own reaction to it is quiet. I stood against the wall and watched them go at it messily. Hands in hair and holding shoulders. Shaking. All of us, shaking, though they had forgotten me completely. In the few minutes I’d been in the bathroom, I had been scraped from the world like words on reused velum. Perhaps I was even invisible. I’d never been that before. People notice me, remember me. I’m brash and forceful, I know this. I know myself and the lines of me clearly enough. Here though were two men I’d thought of, I realised, as slightly opaque to themselves. Well, isn’t that an icebath to your sense of stability. I no longer felt drunk. But I had a number of questions.

For the moment though I watched them not out of voyeurism but because I wanted to let them. I was the intruder. I had walked in from the party. Another guest, another woman entirely. Here were lovers going at it fresh and new and joyous and my mistake to have opened the door. They, in their innocence, continued not to notice me.

Tom and Daniel kissing, not stopping. They moved around each other: lines of gold and ink flowing sinuously together. Like they were describing a beautiful and awful thought in flesh before me and in me. Desire, being formed and being brought towards its obliteration in action. It was