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

possibly be. But then again, now I write this, it could have been my eyes attempting to understand the gloom. We find patterns always where there are none. We make them, because we need there not to be nothing. I resolved to ignore the shape. If there was something, it wasn’t mine. I took out the blank piece of paper and put it in Tom’s hands. And he looked at it, and held it close. I talked softly to Tom, having him like a child to me, like a lost child who belongs to someone who is not there. It occurred to me I knew nothing about his childhood, not one thing.

‘You’re tired,’ I said, ‘come on up now, let’s go in.’ He looked at me and smiled. You can imagine in what way. Emboldened or desperate I took him by the wrist and stood up. That was enough. The wind shook out my hair and this man looked up at me. At some point as I was half-dragging him back he must have let the piece of paper go as I did not see it again.

I held Tom’s wrist all the way back across the heath, never turning my head, trusting Daniel to follow. That journey, a few minutes only, was one of the longest of my life. I understood hardly any of the sounds I heard. I hesitate to write even approximations of them. But I had my Eurydice, my Tam Lin, my child, my burden, and I did not let him go, and I looked nowhere but the way to the light. Inside the bothy we would listen to the wind rage itself hoarse, until morning came.

Tom Mew

Find

There is no easy way to get back yourself. I hugged my body and the arms around me were this other man’s, who was very cold and was also two shadows meeting. I felt sick and alive. What did James say to me on the cliff? Which James? Which cliff. Interior design cliff. Some beautiful image, they’ve made here, with the text underneath setting the tone of it all, cleverly so the consumer has to supply that little bit of hunger of their own. What time am I writing this from? You know I did not die. You think you know yourself and then. The ocean below a cliff at night’s the fucking worst. It sings. Complete yourself with a final set of experiences: falling and drowning. If there’s too many voices around you that are whispering and pulling, just pick definitively. The way down is the simplest and the quickest. I was thirsty, I was so tired. Have you ever been so tired, I wondered, looking at James. This James unravelled – loose – on a stone beside me, or sometimes nearer. He said: ‘If you want to make gains, you should be eating more protein, ideally from a grass-fed source.’ It seemed perfectly rational at the time. Daniel sat there, not looking at me. Did he know how far away I was? Black bubbles up my throat, the sting of it like there was already salt water flooding it. Pity is a kind of drowning. That feeling was the worst – that he had wanted me, and now I disgusted him, or something like that, so he wouldn’t look to me. I knew I was in a state. I started touching my hair and feeling just sick – it was so greasy. I had done that. For some time I watched Minto or just my idea of Minto come creeping up behind Daniel, and I wanted to warn him he was going to be tossed downwards by the old menace. But I couldn’t speak because I couldn’t speak. The ties of Minto’s dressing gown dragged along the ground – his old pale face was a hermit moon. He had thrown a man out of a window, right? Or furniture or something. Anyway his house was full of broken things; windows, musty books, men. If I was in charge of things I’d put him as a cartoon character, a sticker of a cartoon face, best for crisps or perhaps a start-up for a mystery book club.

With that actual bastard noise in my head the wind outside it was a comfort – actually some girl was away waving at me. Bitch, I thought, she wants something of me and I’m so tired. ‘I don’t want to help you. I’m exhausted,’ I called. I’d been working in the stables all day and loving my master, who never looked at me, though James said, of course I did love you, in the way I could, which was not to look at you ever, to order you to saddle my horses and suck the splinters out my fingers and help me ditch the body. I disgusted myself with the sweat smell of horses which was me. How low I was in his eyes. He never wanted me, I realised. Someone did. I turned to see the woman again, across the darkness, a single light that hit me now on my arm, now on my face. I wondered at it – so precise and bright it couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be her that wanted me, could it? Had I failed her too? I was sure I must have. I failed her because I couldn’t place her, at least not right then. I couldn’t see that far. I was falling sick, I thought. I kicked out my foot to shake the pins and needles out of it, and a pinch of stones rolled off the edge of the world and I thought, dully, how simple it is to kick away even something so old and sturdy. Across the heath I saw figures in white – white gowns flapping, little white ruffles at the throats of the men, white cuffs, unbearably white – dancing to music that the wind swallowed. It was the turn of the year. I remembered it was November,