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

move myself on to fantasising about another dumb straight boy. These and such other types of indulgent late evening shit, in the garden, with the lights going out in the house, with everyone casting themselves adrift into the booze-eased night but me. Here we return, almost, to where it begins.

I like that she is not a stranger to me, I thought. Flashing eyes that lay herself open, scrutinising me at the same time, that’s a bit of a gift. No one wants to be seen more than me. I drank more of the beer and felt cold creeping up my legs. I thought that I would learn more about her and what she wanted; what’s with her and Tom – what does Tom want? He’s the one. To get fucked. She’s going back with him into that room. They are fucking on his bed. It’s not his doing, it’s hers. Her desire, getting him to – I winced at this thought as if it were one of the intrusive ones. But it was all me, and did not really hurt. Two people were together and I was left out, and that was just the world being the world. I meant no sabotage or creep, I had nothing in my heart, other than the violence and infinite loop of violent acts, dulled at present, thank God. Nothing, I thought, outside, to do with them inside.

But Not Yet

It was later. Foxes crying outside, huffing, foxes in the lanes behind the houses. I was awake for the hour when the bakers and the delivery men, now up and dressed in the dark, are leaving in the dark. A neighbour was rolling the bins to the kerb. A rumble felt in the teeth.

It was later, time flickering. This was habit: sleeping all right, shadowy terrible violences as usual and Badr’s roast chicken, occasionally looking at that stolen book, not reading it so much as acknowledging it for a future time, at fallow then, and Tom was a late riser, I supposed, as I hardly ever saw him. Stayed out longer too, I hardly ever went out after coming in from work but he never seemed to come back. It had been a few weeks. Just a glimpse would do me, then. Foxes crying, shortcut through the lanes to the library, to the rattling carts and typing, or down to my place of work in the digital archive. I was given nothing to go on. And Órla, I hadn’t seen her at all, and missed her the more, even, than my crush, the way that if you woke to realise mirrors all were without your reflection you’d wonder what was going on with your being in the world.

Call me Daniel the monk: for those new weeks, at least where it counted, mostly sexual and socially inactive in the world, though my thoughts I confess were not pure. But I was strong. And so I worked. And to do so, this task of surviving and life’s work, kept out of everything’s way, and outside of it, hands in my back pockets, scarf soft at my neck as I breathed into it. The rain, wind. Books arriving for Minto. Minto asking me via note to sell some read ones. The printer was almost ready to go into use. I had to get the room fitted out for perfect storage. Badr got a pay rise. I got a cold and recovered binge-watching a comedy series on Netflix. Not miserable. At night the sounds of sex in the house. At night Lemsip and gin, mixed together. No word from Mark for a while, perhaps he knew about the diary, perhaps, perhaps. Perhaps Mark, after a lifetime, had decided he hated me, and was letting me out of his life this way, by silence. Just the usual myself, my only always reality of dreadful things.

James

I was reading another segment of the diary one day at the kitchen table, like I wanted to be caught at it. I had questions I needed other people to ask me before I could collect my answers from the floor of my understanding. The diary started in at a nameless period when James Lennoxlove was twenty, with entries about once or twice a year, until it stopped, without reason, as diaries often do, because the unreason is death, or a feeling like words are insufficient.

James Lennoxlove of Bitterhall was alive in the early nineteenth century. He talked often about going to India, and primarily of his great passion for all things, particularly the Northern Lights, which he saw one day riding home from his ‘natural’ brother’s household. I was re-reading this passage at my table – a marvellous fabric high in the evening sky like fairies dancing in luminous green skirts, here now there, and the horse not frightened at all, which made me think she could not see it, for even a dumb beast would shourly surely be stricken with wonder and awe – James wrote as if for publication, but I doubted he’d achieved it. He’d been quite upfront about his brother being illegitimate, and the fact that they had both had to struggle in the wake of his father’s poor handling of family affairs and subsequent death. The illegitimate brother was a Catholic, a fact that worried James deep in his soul, and far older than James, which seemed to raise questions about inheritance. The father left James the big house and Mungo the business interests, though it was Mungo who had a huge family and James no prospects of employment and no wisdom for managing estates. Both brothers only knew of each other’s existence after the death. In fragments I saw it, through James’ descriptions and offhand notes of account. It was a difficult relationship between two essentially kind people who wanted to like one another, the hospitality of Mungo’s wife Mary over a Christmas that James attended at their home, excruciating. (A priest housed up, who he had glimpsed walking