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

The planchette began to move.

B I T T E R H A L L

‘Bitterhall?’

‘The Lennoxlove estate,’ Daniel said. ‘Did you do this, Órla?’ he said, very softly. I shook my head. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Believe me, don’t believe me,’ I said.

We both sat back, and let our fingers drop from the planchette. Then, after a quiet moment, laced them together across the board.

‘I’m sorry,’ we both said.

When I’m Gone

Daniel had a message from Tom at last – a potential location. I helped him load a bag into the back of Badr’s car and then watched him drive the car off, holding my body with my arms, wishing I smoked. He was running off to get to the boy far in the North, where the land runs out. And me? Hours somehow drained away. I stood in the park, wandered there on my break from the tea shop. I stood looking between texts in my hand, barely visible in the smothering autumn sunlight and my mind barely audible over the rumble of a skateboard and a busker banging a drum with his palms and singing. In one text, Daniel was asking if I wanted to come with him. I had said no, it made more sense for me to wait. In the second, Tom’s emoji list. I had read both parts of these messages countless times. I touched my face and felt the bags under my eyes. I felt about in my pockets for a tissue and blew my nose. A little gasp escaped from me, and I went up to a tree of some type and put it against my back and let the gasps come again.

When people go, sometimes they are really gone, and it’s as if Tom had moved from one room of the party to another in an unreachable universe and I felt, grinding against my ribs, a sense that he would not come back. But would be everywhere. Everywhere was the dim reverberation of thirties music. In every place I was wearing my beautiful suit, and perpetually looking for Tom Mew, catching glimpses of his back as he split through the crowds.

How I imagine It Goes

I am standing in the road by Daniel’s house, Mrs Boobs in my arms and Badr is by my side. Badr’s silver car comes lumbering round the corner. Daniel is driving, but I cannot see into the car to see if Tom is with him. I have my phone on, but as in all dreams, the print is hard to read, shifting between states, first one answer, then another. I sob, the cat leaps from me. The car is approaching. And then, I decide: he lives. Tom is right there. And then I decide: he has gone north for reasons that many go north, a catastrophe. And there is no one in the car. And the police are standing, shadowy, dream-like police are taking my details. Whatever other faults he had, he was not that kind of coward, I tell myself. I tell myself at the counter of the shop. I tell myself in the library, staring at the nothing of the page in front of me. There are no texts while Tom is missing. I mean, every book is wiped, empty vessels, as much as he is plural. There is nothing to get from clever observations; everything has been taken. Except the hours to wait.

Tom Mew

Gully

I’m fine. Where are you – really – and with me there’s a lot, two – I’ll stand up and get orientated, just give me a minute, yeah – but there’s a pounding on the rocks – here, listen, the wind’s quiet – we can set this out – straight. Just – stay back. It’s steep. No need for both of us to get hurt. You will. I think you will, or you are already dead.

So, now, right. Let me give you the whole outline, then we’ll be on track: I was born – listen – on a corpse road under a spitting willow in a smashed up car in which my father had just signed out. Move on a few years, right, I was a little boy, I had a picnic in a field of bluebells that were the memory of my mother – I held them (mother and bluebells, not willows nor corpse roads). I was a happy child, I held them against my grey plastic or whatever that material is, feels like plastic doesn’t it, the standard desks, and to hide my co-workers’ faces with such things. Like a bunch of them so really blue that nothing beyond can exist. I was drinking coffee; bluebells – I was tweeting latest client acquisitions; rockpool with my grandmother shouting in her shock cold loving voice from the white part of the shore – I pressed some woman’s head into a pillow yelling get it; bluebells and the shining light in the days before the days I had to be in. I was fine.

Now I get that this is all past tense. Because of you and other things. I’m going to stop calling you you now. There are so many yous. It’s too confusing. It’s like there’s a box full of matches that are you and each one of them can go up and burn the rest. Woosh, that flare of heat. I was fine. I’m going to sort this out. I am here. And you are. And the sea, this day, overcast and the whole of the present and the past is crashing in you see and I can’t – be anything. Cope. Forgive me, I’m talking bollocks again. I’m in some stupid pain, if I’m being honest. Let me just say it, explain it – before you decide if I’m worth pursuing. I’d totally get if you didn’t want to go down that route. Well, now I’ve said this so far, I feel calmer, right, so let me just