Bitterhall

by Helen McClory

  James

  I was reading another segment of the diary one day at the kitchen table, like I wanted to be caught at it. I had questions I needed other people to ask me before I could collect my answers from the floor of my understanding. The diary started in at a nameless period when James Lennoxlove was twenty, with entries about once or twice a year, until it stopped, without reason, as diaries often do, because the unreason is death, or a feeling like words are insufficient.

  James Lennoxlove of Bitterhall was alive in the early nineteenth century. He talked often about going to India, and primarily of his great passion for all things, particularly the Northern Lights, which he saw one day riding home from his ‘natural’ brother’s household. I was re-reading this passage at my table – a marvellous fabric high in the evening sky like fairies dancing in luminous green skirts, here now there, and the horse not frightened at all, which made me think she could not see it, for even a dumb beast would shourly surely be stricken with wonder and awe – James wrote as if for publication, but I doubted he’d achieved it. He’d been quite upfront about his brother being illegitimate, and the fact that they had both had to struggle in the wake of his father’s poor handling of family affairs and subsequent death. The illegitimate brother was a Catholic, a fact that worried James deep in his soul, and far older than James, which seemed to raise questions about inheritance. The father left James the big house and Mungo the business interests, though it was Mungo who had a huge family and James no prospects of employment and no wisdom for managing estates. Both brothers only knew of each other’s existence after the death. In fragments I saw it, through James’ descriptions and offhand notes of account. It was a difficult relationship between two essentially kind people who wanted to like one another, the hospitality of Mungo’s wife Mary over a Christmas that James attended at their home, excruciating. (A priest housed up, who he had glimpsed walking blackly about the frosty grounds between the pigpen and the chapel, giving him a mortal fear of papist attempts at surveillance or general menace against All Good Scots.) James’ continual befuddlement at what to do with the crumbling house he had been given evident, wanting as a young man to put on dances but finding his efforts at enticing guests fall flat on each turn, as the details of small scandals emerged from his family’s past and present. Oh James, I thought, I knew his loneliness, this man who was long-dead, and stung for him, and imagined being him, holding out for RSVPs to my party, so lovingly planned, for the barrels of drink to get in and the food and the extra servants, and the date on the calendar drawing ever near, and all in place, and no one coming.

  He Sees Me

  I was finishing the Northern Lights moment – James was talking about how he had arrived home and tried to stable his horse but had felt such awe (his favourite word) and woe in his heart that he forgot to lock the stable doors, only to rush down, in the middle of writing the entry, to find the horses were quite calmly sleeping, the gate rattling open but no temptation at all, for the country was dark and cold, though the world above it brilliantly dancing still like a ballroom full of swirling bodies to which he below a single mortal was witness – when Tom came in from the outside world, sweat-drenched in his workout gear and clinked about loudly in the fridge.

  ‘What’re you reading?’

  ‘A diary,’ I said, without looking up. My whole body was ringing with lights too, first from the passage and now from this entrance, two different kind of stirrings.

  ‘Cool,’ said Tom.

  ‘How was work?’ So far our conversations had been this slender and polite, and it made me wonder if there was any way we could build a bridge between us that might hold a more meaningful weight. I had managed so effortlessly that first night with Órla, who was at that minute working on her PhD thesis (the human detail in medieval manuscripts, ‘meaningful errata and doodles through the ages, basically’) at the university library. I thought she had the right idea, looking to the trivial for something greater, but it was hard to see in the scribbles, asides about the weather, bickering complaints, anything more than a human mind slouching in the face of the great overwhelming questions of their age, peacing-out rather than engaging. But that was what we do, was Órla’s argument, but even as we seem to disengage we can’t help but be doing the opposite.

  Tom was eating something he had pulled out of the fridge, and drinking a glass of juice. I saw him move about on the periphery as I remained bent over the diary, reading the same passage over and over, catching the flow of the letters, their sense long discarded. He came up behind me, and stared down at the page. I made no move to cover the diary, assuming he would quickly lose interest. He did not display any sort of response to it.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said with a sigh, ‘work’s all right, same as always.’

  ‘Do you like working there?’ I had not grasped exactly where ‘there’ was, or the nature of the work Tom did there beyond ‘marketing . . . ish’. He often did late shifts, and came home in casual or dressy clothes, carrying boxes of leftovers from events, mostly creamy sorts of booze or prepacked products unavailable in local shops, wildly flavoured crisps with Korean labelling, lollipops with animals wholesale preserved inside. These he donated to the household, though I was not in a rush to try any of them.

  Tom made a disdainful noise, ‘Pays the bills. I’m going to find something else soon though.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t just quit and leave you hanging for the rent.’

  ‘No, not worried about that. Just wondering, if you were to leave, where would you like to work?’

  Tom swung round in front of me into a seat. I was startled by the intensity of Tom’s look, but then, I was always startled by anyone’s eyes, should they be aimed right at me, and not somewhere in the region of me, or behind me, looking at someone else. He had his office bag on the table and was pulling out – a small furry thing. A soft toy horse. A horse with a fish tail, iridescent.

  ‘A kelpie,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Tom said, snorting, ‘it’s like, a horse-mermaid. Listen.’

  He pressed its sides. A muffled, crackling whinny ruckled out, turning into a kind of song at the end, upbeat, repetitive. I reached out for it and stared at its eyes, which were heavy and large and full of shimmering particles that swirled around as I moved it about to the sound of the tune.

  ‘Who’s marketing this?’

  ‘Uff, vodka-type company. It’s like, not quite vodka, it’s their special recipe from this old source, made of grasses. The company was purveyor to a tsar, or something. Not a tsar, cos it’s Estonian. You won’t have heard of them.’

  ‘No, probably not,’ I said.

  ‘Check this out though. This button here,’ said Tom, reaching, pushing it, ‘is wifi enabled. It’s listening now . . .’

  ‘Listening?’ I leaned in. Tom leaned also, both of us holding the toy. Sandbaggy body with something firm inside, the soundbox and the internet enabling device. I noticed Tom’s fingernails ragged and his fingers not nearly as blocky as I had expected.

  ‘It’s like a marketing thing.’

  ‘Gross,’ I said. ‘What a piece of shit thing to do.’

  ‘What a piece of fucking shit,’ said Tom, almost laughing.

  ‘Listening to us? To everything we say? Not another one. It should probably be illegal, companies monitoring us for nefarious marketing information.’ I leaned further forward, almost pressing my mouth on the body of the thing. ‘Hey, if you are listening, Fuck. You.’

  ‘This kind of shit is exactly why I want out,’ Tom said. ‘You can’t even bring up, like, the moral implications of this, people just look at you. Dead silence.’

  ‘Oh, I have an idea,’ I said, illuminated by swirling internal lights. ‘Yes, okay. Yes. No one should be in right now. You up for coming to see where I work? And playing with one of the new toys?’

  We Have the Room

  We walked quickly; shortcut between the lanes. No foxes. Leaves in great piles between parked ca
rs. Tom had stuffed the thing in a plastic bag, I carried my lanyard. Up the steps and into the low grey university building, swipe, no guard, never any guard, down one flight of stairs. The narrow corridor of the basement stretched away, lighting up as we walked.

  ‘It’s spooky here.’

  ‘It’s mostly boring,’ I answered, stopping beside the door humbly marked ‘copier’. ‘Here’s where I spend most of my time.’

  First the antechamber, coat hooks and gloves and the over-the-foot socks, which always gave me a sting of aftermath, bloodied footprints, police tape, though this quickly left as I keyed in the code and opened the second door, and let Tom go in ahead, let him work out the purpose of the place. Long rows of shelves retreating in parallel lines, like in a library, but each shelf empty, set deep and padded with black foam, cradles for what was to be put there.

  ‘Looks like – a Bond film,’ said Tom, in a whisper. This place was conducive to quietness. We walked to the end of the room, a strange act divorced from sound barring the click and hum of lights blinking on again with us as we advanced, the floor of the room being padded too. At the end of the wall, taking up a good chunk of the space was the specialist 3D scanner and printer. Beside it stood, tall and thick, the big grey safe containing those objects I was to begin copying in the morning.

  ‘Pass me that,’ I said, reaching for the bag in Tom’s hands. The crackling of the bag a disproportionately ugly sound and unnaturally loud. I pulled out one of the deeper scanner trays and plopped the kelpie inside, taking a moment to adjust it manually, before moving to the controls to see via the camera that it was correctly positioned.

  Tom watched silently. I murmured to myself and touched the screen and stood back. ‘Bear with me, it takes some time for it to get things calibrated.’

  ‘What’s it doing?’

  ‘It’s scanning the shape and weight of the object, then it scans for materials. It can recognise some things easier than others; plastic, of course. Paper, leather, wood. To my knowledge no one has used it to scan a cuddly toy. Then it attempts to see if it can recreate it,’ I pointed a foot towards one of the canisters under the printer, ‘with the raw materials it has available, using its clever little robot fingers.’ I tapped at the next part, the grey square where, in other printers, a simple jet could make an object out of liquid plastic, but here, a number of needly fingers could spurt and sew together, in theory, anything of anything we could give it that it recognised how to use.

  ‘The loom of all things,’ I said. Ah, was I proud, those days, a show-off caretaker.

  ‘I always thought the advanced scanners replicated stuff out of . . . I don’t know, rearranged atoms,’ said Tom.

  ‘Maybe one day.’

  ‘So what’s in the trays?’

  ‘Cellulose, ink of course – though here we have some special ink canisters that we mix to recreate the exact types used in the object we want to replicate. Inks from medieval Europe, Japan, and so on. A heavy resin that resembles ceramic. We can also do a good approximation of specific glazes and ceramics, though that one hasn’t really been tested. When it gets particular, it’s a laborious process, but there’s Jenny down the hall who tests for composition in the objects and June who specialises in proprietary blending of the inks and glazes, all on site, unless it proves really tricky to source . . .’

  ‘What kind of things do you copy?’

  ‘We haven’t copied much yet, three things successfully, so far. It’s taken a year to get the room set up and the machine ordered, installed and working up to standard. There’s a box full of dud test subjects somewhere around here.’

  ‘But, like, what kinds of things?’

  Lights flashed in the scanner tray. I rechecked the controls. It was at seven per cent physical, two per cent material.

  ‘The aim is to copy important rare objects from all over the world to create replicas, mostly for museums – and, if some here have their way, for some private collectors who will pretend they have a real Ming vase or whatever to impress their friends. Lots of money in that,’ I said looking at the trays. ‘Though it would have to be a medium sized Ming vase.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What do you mean, why?’

  ‘I mean, why do you need to do that?’ Tom said, looking at me. I pretended to re-examine the controls, though the percentages had not changed.

  ‘Why do you need to do anything? So that we can have a record. So that things won’t be irretrievably lost. There are bibles that are nine hundred years old that exist in libraries, where a single frayed bit of wiring could seal their immolation. We can copy them, allow the real one to be put in permanent storage, and have the copies available to be touched, to actually be leafed through. Delicately of course – the copying is so good it can replicate the fragility of the pages. We’re working on how to finesse that. It’s a library of Alexandria, with more politely asking for things, rather than just pulling them out of passing ships. And we can take pretty much anything deemed worthy of copying. The downside is it takes months to do the process properly. Paperwork, permissions. For books, every single page has to be individually scanned on each side to allow replication. Objects are faster. So with this one, we’re just copying in the outside. There won’t be any devices inside this.’

  ‘Okay, good.’

  ‘Yes, good. Sorry for the screed. I just get – excited.’

  ‘No, you should. It’s pretty cool. What do you think will be inside our copy?’

  ‘Well, it can’t do working machinery that well from just scanning. You have to upload a programme for that, with full outlines for moving parts.’

  ‘So no wifi. What will it have then?’

  ‘The best estimate of the machine,’ I said.

  In Silence

  Tom wandered off to look at the empty shelves. I monitored the progress of the scanner. Technically I wasn’t allowed to leave the room while it was scanning, but technically I wasn’t even allowed to be there, wasting materials like this – I would write it off as another dud though, I had decided, having earlier made a mistake in overestimating duds, it would be easy enough.

  ‘There’s a coffee machine just outside the kitchen,’ I said.

  ‘Replicant coffee?’

  But he went anyway, leaving the doors open so he could let himself back in. In the silence, I stared at the machine. It began beeping. I had expected this. It frequently hit up against a materials issue and now it was beeping, but even the beep I enjoyed, pitched as it was, a low pleasant noise, something akin to bleeps from old space films; the only small reprove I would give it was the lack of colourful pastel lighty-upness from the console. The codes described a need for a particular filler and some liquid plastic. I had to refill the trays, and walked to the concealed cupboard in the wood-effect wall, tapped the pad embedded in the door, which always gave me a small thrill: the future here, right here, at my fingertips, even if the wooden look was more something from a seventies den room. I walked into the cupboard and stared at the grey bins of stuff. I was thinking that my favourite was the wool, my least favourite, the leather, which came also in a liquid form for the jets, and sloshed about, ominous, stinking. I was thinking, perhaps I don’t hate the smell of it, if I think of it every time I come in here, obsessed with its disgusting potency perhaps. All was still.

  Epiphany of the Copied Good

  Tom appeared at the doorway of the cupboard, holding two cups.

  ‘I got you milk in yours.’

  ‘Cheers, thanks.’ Not moving, staring, as Tom filled the entranceway, positively dewy, interested, wondered, turning his head around to take it all in, but also – discomforted, perhaps by the narrow space of the cupboard, or the closeness between them, or my darting eyes, their avoidance, which I knew annoyed some people, and couldn’t help, especially this close. I leaned over and dragged out the trays, and merrily said, ‘Needs a refill . . .’ and Tom and I moved some ballet of clumsy feet and coffee – thankfully unsloshed – and trays lifted and fit
ted one by one, and somehow we were both back in the cupboard again, with the pretext of – showing the trays, and their contents.

  I took off the lid on the leather refill to display it, and Tom winced and covered his nose.

  ‘Smells like a dead hamburger. You know what I mean.’

  ‘There’s also the gilt bottle, up there, smaller. Real gold. There’s an idea that we might make a dirt bottle too one of these days, refilled to correct environmental sources for each object.’

  ‘That way you’d be really able to fool people.’

  ‘No, that’s not it at all,’ I said. ‘Well, now you’ve said it. Maybe. Okay. But it’s more – verisimilitude. And excessive pushing at the limit of what we can do, how far we can go.’

  ‘Dirt would convince. Get the right patina on it, and it’s like, why even have the real thing?’

  ‘You’re testing me, Tom.’

  Tom leaned in to read the label on a proprietary ink, ‘Kells blue 0004. That Kells?’

  ‘That Kells,’ I said. ‘You don’t really think this is—’

  ‘No, no, sorry. I think it’s amazing. Just, has to be in the right hands. Otherwise the world would be overrun with fakes.’

  ‘It’s still hideously expensive to do, and there’s a lot of paperwork around to prevent forging.’

  ‘Unlicensed forging.’

  ‘I just want to keep the old things safe, Tom, that’s all I want to do. And I get to do that here, in a very regulated environment where everyone is working incredibly hard to do it, together. To save the past, but let people in. To touch it. To understand. To be allowed closer – to never let it be lost. No more things lost through human carelessness. Everything right here, on these shelves, and out in the world, and the originals kept in the perfect preserving conditions.’