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

blackly about the frosty grounds between the pigpen and the chapel, giving him a mortal fear of papist attempts at surveillance or general menace against All Good Scots.) James’ continual befuddlement at what to do with the crumbling house he had been given evident, wanting as a young man to put on dances but finding his efforts at enticing guests fall flat on each turn, as the details of small scandals emerged from his family’s past and present. Oh James, I thought, I knew his loneliness, this man who was long-dead, and stung for him, and imagined being him, holding out for RSVPs to my party, so lovingly planned, for the barrels of drink to get in and the food and the extra servants, and the date on the calendar drawing ever near, and all in place, and no one coming.

He Sees Me

I was finishing the Northern Lights moment – James was talking about how he had arrived home and tried to stable his horse but had felt such awe (his favourite word) and woe in his heart that he forgot to lock the stable doors, only to rush down, in the middle of writing the entry, to find the horses were quite calmly sleeping, the gate rattling open but no temptation at all, for the country was dark and cold, though the world above it brilliantly dancing still like a ballroom full of swirling bodies to which he below a single mortal was witness – when Tom came in from the outside world, sweat-drenched in his workout gear and clinked about loudly in the fridge.

‘What’re you reading?’

‘A diary,’ I said, without looking up. My whole body was ringing with lights too, first from the passage and now from this entrance, two different kind of stirrings.

‘Cool,’ said Tom.

‘How was work?’ So far our conversations had been this slender and polite, and it made me wonder if there was any way we could build a bridge between us that might hold a more meaningful weight. I had managed so effortlessly that first night with Órla, who was at that minute working on her PhD thesis (the human detail in medieval manuscripts, ‘meaningful errata and doodles through the ages, basically’) at the university library. I thought she had the right idea, looking to the trivial for something greater, but it was hard to see in the scribbles, asides about the weather, bickering complaints, anything more than a human mind slouching in the face of the great overwhelming questions of their age, peacing-out rather than engaging. But that was what we do, was Órla’s argument, but even as we seem to disengage we can’t help but be doing the opposite.

Tom was eating something he had pulled out of the fridge, and drinking a glass of juice. I saw him move about on the periphery as I remained bent over the diary, reading the same passage over and over, catching the flow of the letters, their sense long discarded. He came up behind me, and stared down at the page. I made no move to cover the diary, assuming he would quickly lose interest. He did not display any sort of response to it.

‘Yeah,’ he said with a sigh, ‘work’s all right, same as always.’

‘Do you like working there?’ I had not grasped exactly where ‘there’ was, or the nature of the work Tom did there beyond ‘marketing . . . ish’. He often did late shifts, and came home in casual or dressy clothes, carrying boxes of leftovers from events, mostly creamy sorts of booze or prepacked products unavailable in local shops, wildly flavoured crisps with Korean labelling, lollipops with animals wholesale preserved inside. These he donated to the household, though I was not in a rush to try any of them.

Tom made a disdainful noise, ‘Pays the bills. I’m going to find something else soon though.’

‘Oh?’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t just quit and leave you hanging for the rent.’

‘No, not worried about that. Just wondering, if you were to leave, where would you like to work?’

Tom swung round in front of me into a seat. I was startled by the intensity of Tom’s look, but then, I was always startled by anyone’s eyes, should they be aimed right at me, and not somewhere in the region of me, or behind me, looking at someone else. He had his office bag on the table and was pulling out – a small furry thing. A soft toy horse. A horse with a fish tail, iridescent.

‘A kelpie,’ I said.

‘No,’ Tom said, snorting, ‘it’s like, a horse-mermaid. Listen.’

He pressed its sides. A muffled, crackling whinny ruckled out, turning into a kind of song at the end, upbeat, repetitive. I reached out for it and stared at its eyes, which were heavy and large and full of shimmering particles that swirled around as I moved it about to the sound of the tune.

‘Who’s marketing this?’

‘Uff, vodka-type company. It’s like, not quite vodka, it’s their special recipe from this old source, made of grasses. The company was purveyor to a tsar, or something. Not a tsar, cos it’s Estonian. You won’t have heard of them.’

‘No, probably not,’ I said.

‘Check this out though. This button here,’ said Tom, reaching, pushing it, ‘is wifi enabled. It’s listening now . . .’

‘Listening?’ I leaned in. Tom leaned also, both of us holding the toy. Sandbaggy body with something firm inside, the soundbox and the internet enabling device. I noticed Tom’s fingernails ragged and his fingers not nearly as blocky as I had expected.

‘It’s like a marketing thing.’

‘Gross,’ I said. ‘What a piece of shit thing to do.’

‘What a piece of fucking shit,’ said Tom, almost laughing.

‘Listening to us? To everything we say? Not another one. It should probably be illegal, companies monitoring us for nefarious marketing information.’ I leaned further forward, almost pressing my mouth on the body of the thing. ‘Hey, if you are listening, Fuck. You.’

‘This kind of shit is exactly why I want out,’ Tom said. ‘You can’t even