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

‘Awake, at last,’ he says.

My body won’t let me do much, it’s too weak. I go out of it. I wander across the brown grass. James says if I want, I can keep going, the cliff path, the point where it churns white below. There will be no gulls when I go, nothing at all to see. I shake at this. My throat pinches. Daniel’s holding his phone. Watching me, but not trying to stop me, not trying to engage, but I can feel he wants to. I feel but maybe I don’t feel correctly.

‘Órla’s being stubborn,’ he says, ‘she’s coming up too, she set out a little bit after me. I couldn’t get her to wait for you to come back. So, now we’ll wait here. She’s bringing some food, something to eat. Are you hungry? Do you want to wash your face? It’s a bit dirty there.’

‘I thought she was going to wait outside the house, holding the cat,’ I say. I have my eyes closed because it asks less of me.

I hear Daniel laugh, gently. I listen to the crackling fire. Wind outside now. I think of the gully in the wind, cliffs like the cliffs I had run to in the city. I am called to go. I think I am called to go. This is no place, right here. I think, ‘It’s a matter of opening the door and bolting for the edge to go right off it. You can.’ Then I think, ‘Who wants you to do that?’ And the question horrifies.

There’s Daniel, knitting. No, not knitting. He’s removing the back of his phone. He’s removing pieces of paper from a book and folding them up into boats. He’s surrounded by paper boats. The ends of his trousers are cuffed, and around his black firelit boots a fleet of boats are sailing. In his focus he looks so calm I sob. He looks up. I put my face back down under my head there is smooth fabric.

‘My jacket,’ he says. ‘I used to go hiking, I used to go off and camp on my own all the time on the side of mountains. I haven’t for ages and I don’t know why.’

‘Because a room swallowed you, and a machine. And the story you fed to the machine,’ I said.

I expect him to ask me questions, but he doesn’t. He only looks like he is thinking and returns to his phone. I want him to ask me questions about myself, but he doesn’t. I sit, nothing to do. If he asked me a question, anything at all, it would prove – something. That I really existed. That was it. I want to exist so badly, and I only do if other people confirm it. Otherwise. Otherwise. Only I exist.

I hear a car. It’s Órla. Surely Órla and Badr. And Mrs Boobs. I try or something in me tries to remember why I went. James. I, or something in me that is James, remembers James, standing holding a lantern. James’ battered shoe. I remember also a shoe on a roadside. I stooped to pick it up. A piece of glass. Life scatters everywhere. I want to hold it together. Force it to make sense. But I am tired again, and what if it won’t? What could happen to me. I don’t think I care. I get up and go to the door.

But there is no car and I’m out on the cliff, cold and sweating. I’ve run. A scrap of a voice calls, but I can’t tell what it is, if it has a body.

I want a time back that I never had. My throat pinches. I am looking at water if water is there, too dark, I can’t even see my hands, I remember a knife, and horses stamping, and the smell of men, blood, horseshit, scorched wood. I am overlaid. I am too full. I go to my knees that get wet and I am like cold blood there, so fucking wretched that crying, tearing the grass a little, I find a small rough stone and hold it. Just an ordinary stone. I lean in and tell it things nobody knows about me.

Daniel Lightfoot

Rise

I’d never been that far north before and expected it would have a kind of epic quality to it, this place where the land gives out; it was less dramatic than I thought, even in the hardness of early November. Firstly came the hint of the sea, an ever-wholesome marine smell sucked in through the car’s air vents, while a certain quality to the sky suggested that the moisture in it had come a long distance without the rule of soil. Dissolution, it said. The land that rolled past the car speaking with subtlety of its finality, with lower and lower hills, flattening out as if to make for the sea a welcoming landing spot – though in truth there are cliffs there, so I could feel safe that the sea would only rise to meet it after I was dead, when all the world’s seas are coming in to lap up a portion of what our neglect has promised them.

I wasn’t overly worried or thinking about anything beyond the practicalities of the journey until I parked up just off the main road and approached the bothy on foot along a winding gravel path. I wondered for a moment who might build something like this here. All I could see it being used for at that moment was bafflement and disorientation. It looked like an art installation, it didn’t belong at all; crisp, bright pinewood, almost offensively yellow and new in the gloom. The windows were small slits in the façade, too small to allow an outsider to make out the whole of any scene inside it, though I noted there was light, which meant occupation, I hoped, still, by Tom. There was nothing on either side of this house –