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

my whole life for this day. Warm clothes and towels and the like for the runaway, first aid, a camera, driving licence. I picked up the car and drove back to the house to see Badr one last time. In the end, it was him who was to play the worried wife.

‘Take care on the roads at night, hey?’ he said, and handed me a small fold of paper. Mark MacAshfall had dropped off a note or something of Tom’s, thought it might help.

‘Goodbye!’ Badr said, and lifted Mrs Boobs and waved her white arm. She gave me a baleful glare.

I went through the city. A light went green, I indicated left. The streets were unfamiliar. Under surface thoughts of work – a conference was upcoming, my supervisor had not responded to my last two emails – a burn of worry in my guts, over Tom, and Daniel. I wondered if the two of them hadn’t had some kind of repression-led showdown, and one or the other hadn’t been killed. As much as the image struck me as interesting – a twist on a murder ballad, a good story for me to tell many years from now in beautiful knitwear, grey hair at my temples, sat at the head of table at a faculty dinner – I was fighting a frantic sense of doom.

It flared and sunk. There, a bus pulled out, and I saw a grave with Tom’s name on it, and Daniel’s, intertwined with ivy. A small child carrying a shopping bag waiting beside a bin: I’d been left. School – please drive slowly. And I’d miss it, the drama, I’d not be in time to stop whatever it was. Partly-demolished shopping centre. Another right, another right, doubling back. And Tom, I’d missed a sign, whatever had gone on between us three in the bedroom at the party, the rattling windows. The intense and beautiful activities in that huge bed. I went red. I swore, I took another right and got stuck behind a bus.

After at least an hour of steering and braking and breathing hard I veered off and sat parked awkwardly up by a supermarket and rubbed my head. I wasn’t even heading the right direction for the motorway. A police car slowed to look in at me and I smiled and nodded, and it went on. I prodded the GPS. I brushed my hair which was in some state, and saw the bodies of Daniel and Tom sinking off black-shaded cliffs. Scrolling waves covering them, and the north wind as a cloud with an angel’s face, blowing above it. I thought of old-woman-me, at a dinner table, several glasses into the wind, declaiming on the beautiful boys who had died because of me, because of love and trouble between them. I was a Tennessee Williams play, describing a tableau. I was playing up, no doubt. No more of that.

Hours later. Stopped in a turn-off to eat a sandwich in a roadside parking place, I hoped to push the panic down my throat. After I’d eaten I unfolded Tom’s paper, or papers, rather – getting it buttery at the edge like some kind of heathen. I looked. Flipped the little sheets back and forth. Blank, creamy-coloured but raggedy with age. It occurred to me it must have come from the diary, but I could see no clue on it. Mark must have thought it had some meaning for Tom, so I wondered if there was lemon juice on it, or a hint of a message to be decoded, perhaps via creases, or faint scratches. The only comfort it seemed to offer was the kind I got from all old things long carried through the world in the protective casement of their books. I shook off a crumb and put the paper back in my bag.

It was November; I was somewhere parked by moorland, watching rain blowing in grey down the sweep of a hill, and I felt numb. Daniel had let me know Tom was alive but in some kind of state. I had no experience with madness, and so I thought then only two things: firstly how frightening and baffling it was to have grazed it a little with the tips of my fingers, the world of madness in which a completely unwritten-on piece of paper could sing just for you, that running off north out of your life was an acceptable thing to do; and secondly I felt resentment at the fact Daniel was there with him already. I remember rolling my shoulders, and the look of cars thundering past on both sides of the road, on home to loved ones, to lives. No one crossing this moor was going to work, unless they were postmen or van drivers. And there was me in a hired car with no one really wanting to see me at the other end of the interminable journey. I should have left it to Daniel and Tom to sort out. After all, I was the third wheel. I felt like I was nothing to them. Despite my involvement I felt I was almost a nothing, and felt in myself nothing but a little miserable. And how petty it was that I was this way, with all that was actually happening to Tom. I cracked my fingers and turned out back onto the road. It’s true, Whitman, we contain multitudes; it’s just that much of it is dross.

Later again, dusk. I still had a fair way to go yet. I had been startled out of my fog by a stag standing on a rock by the side of the motorway. Noble, as they always look. I left it behind and took it with me, imagining a monk drawing it in the margins of a book of hours, red and gold, a beast with eyes and lips like a man. I imagined it shot through with arrows, or like the famous tapestry of the captured unicorn, surrounded by deliberate plants, contained