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

and I hesitate to call it that. Not house, nor dwelling, nor residence, nothing fits for a place so jarring. Stepping along on the crunching gravel I had a momentary, faint tilt into dizziness, a sense I could fall. There was no horizon because it was already too dark, and a dozen or so metres back over a few humps of earth was, I later discovered, the cliff. The cliff where Tom had been taking himself at intervals since he had arrived to stand in his temptation to give into the whispers of gravity.

I found Tom in the bothy, worse than I had expected, and about as bad as Órla had. He was filthy. He wore the same clothes he had gone to the party in, several days before, and in addition to not washing or removing the clothes he had been, it seemed, lying on the gritty strand or sitting in the smoke-filled bothy, not sleeping. His breath was awful. His greasy hair stuck up in wild patches, turned a dishwater grey. Purple halfmoons under his veiny eyes.

I couldn’t tell you how we passed that first night. But in the morning, we took our walk to the beach, where I hoped he would feel refreshed at the water’s edge (I don’t now know why I could have thought that) and where he fainted. And I, in the weird mood I was in, tensed and almost expecting something like this to happen, just watched him slump down. I made no sound or rush to find help, deciding, quickly, that given how far out we were from the nearest village, help would not come before either Tom woke up of his own volition, or he slipped into a worse state. So I stayed still, down on my haunches looking at my friend’s grey face on the pale sand, his hair blowing about. I reached a hand to his cheek and felt the cold there. I don’t know why I wasn’t more concerned, or agitated, at least. I stayed with him a while, taking in his face until its features lost all shape. Then I took in where we were.

The beach was a narrow shelf of sand ending in rocks, and the cliffs high and dramatic on either side of our small bodies. The sea storming in and out was murmuring and breathing, if considered in human terms, with every now and then a slap and fizz as a wave beached itself closer to us. And I thought, looking down at Tom, how much like a place of disaster this could be. If I listened to the enemy. If I made certain choices. The sky overhead was dark, even though it was morning; it was hard to tell where the sun was. Of course I considered this as metaphor. Wind getting up. If I knew this part of the country better, I could tell if a squall was coming in or not.

I searched my mind at last, digging, really, to see if I could overturn the bad feeling I felt should be within me; was I responsible, somehow, for all this coming to pass? I thought of our kiss with that familiar flare of griminess in my stomach. How drunk he’d been. I hissed through my teeth and remembered that this was something my mother had done, now and then, to herself, an anxious intake of breath in response to nothing. To picking up a pen and beginning to write a shopping list, for example. I hadn’t thought of her in a long time. If the voices were hers too, then, that was something. I looked down at Tom. Should I put him into the recovery position? But I was wary of touching him. How drunk I’d been that night too. But had I done this, to him? Look at his face, it’s pale and worn now, but then it was awake and healthy. I pinched a piece of grass seed from his hair, and wondered where the leaf had come from. I held the seed up to my face; it looked like wheat, ripe.

I decided I’d put that night down to antic happenings, not self-villainy. I’d been drunk, and so had Órla, and this was something else, and it was wrong of me to claim it as my doing, that was the thing; wrong to take credit for something, even if it’s negative. I stared at his closed eyes, the wet spatters on his cheek. An inch of water would drown him, water gurgling down into his lungs. Things are not always your fault; that constant I must tell myself. I crouched further and touched Tom’s neck, taking his pulse, because I felt I should.

‘Tom,’ I said. ‘Tom, you’re all right.’ Though who ever is? He woke shortly afterwards and I helped him back up the steep steps to the cliff top, I put him to rest on the bothy boards. Órla had texted, insisting we stay until she arrived, and I was thinking of all the food I should have brought with me. Then the image of spoonfeeding a pathetically weakened Tom stove-warmed soup floated into my mind, and I dwelled in torment and arousal for a while. Sometimes we spoke, Tom and I, sometimes he seemed to listen to voices and respond. I found myself listening to it, and thinking, perhaps. Perhaps some people need to stop living, if they are suffering. And that thought made me cold, and I shuddered, and fussed.

‘There, Tom,’ I said, ‘we’ll get help soon.’

Órla McLeod

Hind

I was excited, I’ll admit it, to get to be on that ride. I had contacted my supervisor to let her know I was off on personal business and moved shifts at my work so I wouldn’t lose any money this month. It meant a delay going up, but that was fine. Daniel was first response, I would be the one with the full kit. So I packed a bag for the rescue as if I’d practiced