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

within its boundaries as if it was choosing to never step through them. As though to be trapped was to be thought of, to be beloved. It was already too late to do anything different but chase north, and to feel self-conscious in the chasing.

Daniel Lightfoot

Grip

I don’t know at what time Órla drove in, but the distant lights of her car turning off the road triggered a panic in him. I looked over and saw his eyes open and his mouth, and heard him murmuring again a lot of senseless words. As I stared, he mouthed the sounds of the sea, and in my head I heard the door bang open, though when I looked up it was shut tight. Such a simple thing, precognition. I should have stroked his hair then, no matter how dirty. I should have been tender to him. At no point could I have really been said to be tender to anyone other than myself. I only sat aloof and talked back with Tom quietly, until, right as the car could be heard rolling over the gravel path to the bothy, Tom made a sudden run for the door, and out into the wind.

I swore and I stumbled, picked myself up and tried to guess at where he might be. Órla’s lights blinded me, and I knocked on the driver’s window as she was pulling on the brake.

‘He’s out there,’ I babbled. ‘Quick, come, have to get him – we have to go, quickly before he does something.’

At the cliffs I was overwhelmed by the smell of the air again in the dark, and the sense of infinite, not even uninterested stars above us. I was afraid, of course I was, then. Give me mortality, don’t give me the inhuman gigantic nothing that is all around us. I shone my phone light over and picked out Tom, running, a slip, glowing in his white jacket. His shoes were off, we’d never find them. I held out an arm, only just stopping Órla from tumbling into one of the sea-cuts in the ground. I had moved to stop us falling without even thinking. So it often is that without thought I was all the safer. Tom was on the other side of a fissure, dark like everything else, but I could hear him ranting.

‘Tom,’ Órla said in a tight, positive voice, ‘hey, it’s me. Are you – you coming back in?’

And this was something I hadn’t known, that the scene of an attempted suicide can feel so awkward and mundane. Tom paced about, waved, let his arm drop. The whites of this, unevenly moving, hurt to look at in the darkness, and also suggested a startling of some white bird that was trying to fly but could not, had forgotten how to rise.

‘I’m fine,’ he said, sounding hoarse. ‘Umm, how are you, Órla?’

He paced. He shouted sometimes, though I could barely make out what he was saying. I thought: a poor, bare, forked animal, then of the constellation of the great bear, and the wind’s bite and the yawning gap in front of us all, as metaphor, as hunger. I asked myself if I too wanted to fall in, and found no answer. And just like that, a calm feeling came. I counted myself safe, and that Tom was safe, because I was here to save him, I held Órla back from rushing round, in case, in the shock, he might have fallen. I heard her cry out nonsense. I felt, in that place, as I never had, burnished with purpose and the cold. I felt myself swell up with the sense that this was all awful, and we were all very much alive.

How? Above us the night sky spun, as did we, my fingers and toes lost all feeling, and I stamped from one foot to the other, and the sea breathed in and out, older than any living thing, smashing itself into fragments of sense. I sat on the ground – and I could have laughed at how little I was, and how uncertain, except on the matter that I was alive, and Órla, and Tom, here in the dark, as we had been in another dark, warm and gentle with each other. A tenderness could be brought on again, I thought, if I thought very carefully on how to enact it. I don’t know how long we waited there, stuck in our places, filled with that sound of the sea making itself and making the shape of the rocks change. A heartbreaking scale of events. And I pulled up little handfuls of grass, and asked myself what friendship was and what desire was, and had no answers because I was small and stupid, and that was fine, thinking away and watching until there was a break in tensions, a moment when Tom decided he had had enough of confronting death, and sat down, and Órla, quicker to move than me as always, picked her way over and took him by the arm. It’s as simple and mundane as that, in the end – the reason he didn’t kill himself that night, was not even that we were there, nor that we did anything at all. It was him, or timing perhaps. A hesitation, or a clearing. That’s it, that is sometimes enough, and is all that we have.

Órla McLeod

Meet

At the bothy by the cliffs we met again. Daniel and I ran about in the morning after our beautiful Tom, who ran in turn away from us through the whipwind and the dark in all different directions, nearly slipping, clambering over some rocks, nearly lost off the edges. Just like in a dream he was never any closer, or we were never any closer to him. There was too much land out here, and nothing of it. It had no shape in the dark, only little things to trip me. My own clumsy physicality got underfoot. I was tired, my