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

‘Dunno.’ By the window a gull hovered on the currents. It was day; the bothy was steady against a hard wind, my breath in clouds. I closed my eyes. I wanted to tell him how beautiful it was here, dawn especially, which was happening now. And then there was no one who saw it at all and it was more of itself that way.

‘So you’re way up there. I think – you have an address for where you’re staying?’

‘Let me check,’ I said. I walked out to the car. The sky was high gold over the plain of the heath with scratches of clouds against the upper atmosphere. I thought, ‘I could take a picture and post it. But I’m not doing that.’ I opened the car and the GPS turned on – Badr went on talking in my ear – I peered down. For some reason I was shaking – tears streaming stupidly down my face – but everything was fine. ‘It’s just beautiful here,’ I think I said.

‘Okay, cool,’ said Badr. ‘Okay, so, mate, someone’s going to drive up. Join you for a bit maybe. Would you prefer, eh, me or Órla or would Daniel be the best for this. Or someone else . . . ?’

I muttered your name into the phone. The Atlantic air should not look this good. Maybe it’s late, I thought. It’s winter now, already. I had slept, hadn’t I – ball in front of the stove. Like a soot sprite, from a cartoon. A stand of thin trees marked a property a hundred yards away. I blinked it away. Besides that and the road there was so little under the sky. I could hear the ocean breathing in and out over the hill and down the cliff to the beach, rope ladder or careless slip. My hand dropped to my side. Badr’s tiny voice going nothing against all of this. My master looked at me. I followed him away.

Conflare

James and Tom were frozen. They went outside anyway. Whoever made the bothy constructed it so that the door didn’t have to open into the wind. James and Tom couldn’t stand to be far from the heat of the fire – funny how little it takes to get down to a wire thinness and vague with it – they missed nothing of their life, they were a dot on the surface of a rock, a lichen, a hole to whisper in. James and Tom held some heart of rock they had pried out of the ground many hours before up to their mouth and said what they wanted, for five minutes straight. They had never been so honest. And it didn’t matter at all.

Tap water from the outside pole they sucked through chapped lips. James whistled; Tom turned. Horses ran across the fields; one horse – each frame of it – four hooves off the ground and a steaming back. Like an intro to a lavish television show – like an advert for summer here where the land had given up as well as out and was the low browns of nameless dead plants and windflattened grass, stones scarred under the light. They walked to the gulley where the little crooked stairs led to the beach at low tide though it was high now it was narrow and James and Tom thought they could have jumped it. Or could have fallen in trying to and been rushed away into the grey churn and fallen into the kelp forest and the mouth of a basking shark, the nets of a fishing boat trawling for silver fish. On the rocks that made the gully were jellyfish of lichens, big rusts swimming against the soft brown of the cliffs below the brown of the empty land, always above the reach of the sea. There was a cave at one end of the beach, visibly drinking the water in. Tom and James listened; the waves wrote about themselves above the wind, the sound of pen, scratching. They walked into the cave, then, or another time.

A group of players are scratching on fiddles in a big warm house and there are men and women dancing. James and Tom can hear them, almost as if they are in among them, among their flicking sweat and swirling dresses. Their sweat runs down as Tom and James touch the hard rough wall. They can smell the alcohol on their breath and a feeling of hope swells them. They are inside. Outside is the stable where the murder happens. A strange, unfathomable death.

Tyres on loose chip road.

Tom and James walking over into the dimness, night back down, cold again.

Behind the wheel in a figment of light is Daniel – the man – Daniel.

He gets out, looking around him. Small, confused. People who don’t know they are part of something seem smaller and more vulnerable. Whoever he thinks he is looking for is not here.

Swoon

‘Tom!’ James says. He points at himself. I’m one man in the landscape. I’m a bundle of papers. I’m an object going to the plastic heart of the wrecked ocean. It’s everywhere and it’s broken. My heart is full of love. My body is strong and young. His parents are dead. His voice is a gull rising up between us.

‘Remember this?’ I say, holding out a small soft thing. It’s the toy. Mer-unicorn all bright white and glittering eyes. I take it, pass it one hand into another. James murmurs something in my ear.

‘I can’t make it play anything,’ he says.

‘Tom,’ says Daniel, ‘It’s okay.’

There’s a sea that I could just walk straight into. I am so ashamed. I don’t even know why any more. I begin to walk, but Daniel holds me, just a moment, as I dissolve.

Sunk

The fire is crackling again when I wake up. Daniel smiles at me – a smile I’ve never seen before – and I try to get up off the boards to get away from it,