Bitterhall

by Helen McClory

  Silence.

  ‘I mean there’s something wrong with him, a little.’

  ‘I always feel like I’ve known you forever,’ I said, ‘I am sorry, if I push you.’

  ‘Do you think I should love Tom?’ Órla said, suddenly shifting along the stair to lean on me, ‘Ah shite, I’ve had too much to drink now for sure.’

  I felt her weight pleasantly on me. But again, a sting of worry. I knocked it off with another drink, burning my lips. My vision had begun to swing about.

  ‘I am the worst person to ask,’ I said.

  Órla pulled herself back up to sitting; she looked over at me. In the dark her eyes gleamed. Her lipstick was a little blurred. She opened her mouth, and closed it again, and laughed.

  ‘Oh I know that,’ she said. ‘Ah well!’

  And with that, she stood and went downstairs. I stared after her, then drank the rest of the bottle, only a glug, from the tilted end. She’ll be off to find Tom I suppose, I thought. To find him and take him to the garden, to the hedge, to press herself against his smoky mouth, to let him push his hands over her body, shivering cold though it might be, with the luxuriousness of the other who wants you, drunk and uprooted and starry. And I imagined looking on, and her eyes on me. Tom oblivious, and then she would say, Daniel wants you. Daniel, come and take him, if you want.

  ‘I would take him by the hand,’ I said quietly to myself.

  In the Kitchen

  ‘I could, you know.’ said Mark,

  ‘Mark, Jesus. Don’t, Mark,’ I said, grabbing him by the arm. We sat on the floor of the kitchen. I remember I couldn’t remember why we were sitting on the floor.

  ‘She’s a good looking woman. You know I’m willing to do this. For you, brother.’

  ‘I need more to drink!’ I said, and got up too quickly to my feet, the room rebounding, spinning, aggressive. ‘Is your mum in bed?’

  ‘What, I think so?’ said Mark, passing his uncertain gaze across the room, ‘she’s not in here.’

  ‘Are Órla and Tom still here?’

  ‘Yes, Daniel, remember? I told them to use the guest room,’

  ‘One of the guest rooms,’

  ‘One of them, yep.’

  ‘I feel like I knew that already,’ I cast about with my hands, ‘Oh . . . I want to sleep with him,’ I said balefully. ‘She knows I do, and it’s like a joke to her. I feel like a teenager or something. Fuck.’ I knocked over the glass I was trying to fill with whatever liquid was in the tall shaker jar jostling in my hands. It was white and smelled like feet.

  ‘Is this the punch? Man it does not keep well. I don’t want to be selfish, though, I don’t want to hurt Órla. I love her.’

  Tender.

  I sank back down to the floor. Floor was safe. Cool.

  ‘You know I like you best of all when you’re drunk, Daniel,’ said Mark, ‘You love everyone. Drunk, not drunk. You’re a blinkered blethering prick but you love everyone with all your fucking heart. Don’t drink that shit, come on. It’s time for – hot chocolate.’

  ‘Alcohol in the hot chocolate?’ I said.

  ‘Alcohol. In the hot chocolate,’ Mark said, hammering about in the cupboards. ‘Found it. And look! The guest star – marshmallows!’

  ‘Looks stale. Is it stale marshmallows now? In the MacAshfall residence?’

  ‘Does the job though,’ said Mark, stirring the mixture, ‘like me. You know I’m the man for it. Did you see the way she looked at me? Yeah. Fucking . . . get in there. Whisk her away. Leave Tom. To your tender ministrations.’

  ‘I already told you,’ I said, ‘it’s not good to try and steal anyone away from anybody.’

  ‘Hmm, learned your lesson then?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘No more stealing?’

  ‘Come on man, what stealing? Stealing what?’

  Mark pressed buttons on the microwave, sounding them out as he did so. After a moment he spun on his heels ‘You! Stole! My! Diary! Well, not my diary. My ancestor’s diary. My. Ancestor!’

  I scoffed. Forgive me, Mark.

  ‘I thought you weren’t going to steal ever again after that policeman caught you with Out.’ He said, ‘Juvenile delinquent. But here we are, promises, piecrusts.’ He ripped open the marshmallows. Several dropped into my lap and I found them on the floor underneath my legs and put them in my mouth. I hated the cloying sweetness, sudden and inhabiting my whole mouth, but the texture was enjoyable. It took a lot of concentration to chew and finally swallow. Refocus. Mark was sitting next to me again. Hot chocolate. Stinging smell under the sweetness.

  ‘Do you ever feel like you’re permanently missing the important things, the fulsomeness, like all the facts are not available to you, and so you’ll make an error, a stupid one, one that other people would easily see?’ I said.

  There was a silence.

  ‘Fuck sweet things,’ I said, ‘I think I came here to get something.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Mark, ‘that’s life. Oh,’ he sang, then, ‘you’re talking about the hunt for clues that you don’t even know are clues, in order to solve the mystery of how someone mysterious feels about someone else, or how anyone, even yourself thinks about anything in general? The impossibility of knowing, a person, a situation, this,’ He opened his arms and gestured at the room.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘No. Drink your hot chocolate before it gets a skin on it.’

  A Glass of Water, an Open Invitation

  I blinked. I remembered at last why I had come downstairs.

  ‘You sidetracked me!’ I said to Mark, and got to my feet. I felt less drunk than I had done just a second before – as if a window had just been pulled open and fresh wholesome sobriety came blustering in. I wouldn’t have wanted to test my chances behind the wheel or anything, but I was happy to remember my purpose.

  ‘I was supposed to get some water for Tom,’

  ‘Didn’t you just ask me where Tom was?’ Mark asked.

  ‘Yes. I forgot,’ I said, getting up.

  ‘In the joy of my company.’

  ‘No. I hate you,’ I said to him, patting him on the arm.

  ‘I hate you too,’ he said, smiling and handing me a glass of water.

  Meanwhile in other rooms there were people waltzing still. They had been waltzing for hours, though now in candle light, the music soft, the people drooping like dancers in a competitive marathon, but still, when I walked between them, carrying my water glass close to my chest, smiling, they moved around me with sleepy flickering grace, they did not look as if they would stop until the sun came up, and the sun might never come up; such was the power of this house.

  I climbed the stairs and went to the guest room. Órla grabbed the water and said she did not need it, even as she was giving some to Tom and drinking the rest herself. In her left hand an empty toothglass. She went to fill them both in the en suite. I sat down on the bed next to Tom.

  As I sat, the frame of the bed rattled. The room rattled, and I rubbed my face. The party, downstairs, I thought. A quake in the house from merrymaking.

  Tom gave me an oorie look. By that I mean, like something coming forward into his expression, slowly and strangely, like a large horse coming forward to you in snow and fog. Perhaps this had as much to do with my drunken eyes struggling to pull into focus as the man himself. He had taken off his jacket some time ago, and his shirt was open. The hair on his chest was light and there was a scar, horizontal in the flesh, like the mark of a pocket cut above his heart. I had not seen that scar before, but it looked old. As I looked, the scar undid itself and became wet with blood – I flinched back; the scar vanished.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, leaning forward, for me retreating. And kissed me.

  I pulled back again. His lips had been very cold. There were faint shadows under his eyes, delicate purples in the tanned skin. I meant to get out of the bed and back away, but I was drunk and he was lovely, and he was weird and something was happening, now, so I held him by the shoulders a
nd looked him in the eye, though he would not focus and nothing made sense. When someone is not themselves, what does that mean? Beyond the usual, more understandable outer states of, for example, broaching on the overly drunk and raving mad. But Tom was not more drunk than me and he was not mad, but. What boundaries arise and how do we negotiate them in our hunger and need? Tom and Órla . . . But I was thinking more of what I should do or not do, with my body, with my need. I felt his pull; he was pulling me. He was something else. I was a shiver. I was hard. I unbuttoned my shirt and threw it away. Then I kissed him back and we both merged together in the oorie warmth of our mouths.

  There has been a lot of pain in my life, I was thinking, rationalising; I see pain in my head, I have a pain, a madness of a particularly personal sort, even in our impersonal, public days, a vivid made-up repeating suffering that is embedded in the drab fabric of my days like a stain I fixed with hot water long before I even knew what I was doing, and all of what I try to do I have to do around that pain. I was near sobbing at this point, only a few seconds having passed, Tom still letting himself be held by me, his mouth open a little, his eyes someone else’s – so I should just accept what is not pain, and that I can, and not overthink.

  ‘Are you Tom?’ I asked.

  He smiled at me, in a kind of condescending way.

  ‘What does it matter? I want this,’ he said. His voice was unlike himself; softer. Even the accent was different. A thrill ran through me, up the back of my body. I was alarmed and I was hungry. I launched myself again at his face, the room blurred, vision shrank and all was touch, strokes, kisses, hot tongues. Above it my mind always threatening the tip into disgust, or worse the harm. But I closed my eyes and I let myself be carried by the trembling oddness of what was happening.

  Hangover Deluxe

  Bees were buzzing somewhere. I could feel the heat of the sun through closed eyelids. Kept them closed because I was, I knew, on a precipice – if I opened my eyes I would be awake. It would be, as you know, a bad thing to be awake after drinking quite as much as I had. I took some measured breaths. So far so okay, so . . . open. I cracked my eyes. Whiteness. I wrinkled up my face. It’s easy enough if you do it all at once, I thought, and forced myself to, sitting upright with my eyes open, and my body was only marginally upset with me. I laid my hands on the red cover. Still wearing at least the upper part of my suit, then. My hands interested me as something slightly alienated from the rest of the scene, aching, an echo of something last night, and now it was black suit fabric against red duvet fabric, then my hands, which had pulled back the covers and helped me into bed the night before, during a period when my mind was, at least it seemed to me at that moment, away from the controls. Piloting blind.

  I was in one of the guest rooms, the slope of the ceiling high up like a church. Me in bed in a church. In a big red bed. And in the bed, more than me. Visible one – by arms over the edge of one side and two – by a pair of feet on the pillow next to me. I saw part of a black suit on the floor. Tom’s white suit was nowhere to be seen. Oh, I thought, that doesn’t seem right, and scrunching up my face again, got out of bed to deal with direct matters and rehydration before all of this. No trousers on. Boxers on. Socks on. Whatever I had done, I had done with my socks on. I went mechanically towards the en suite, barely seeing, I stuck my hands under the tap, drank from them salty sweet and cold, used the toilet, washed up, ran water over my eyes, came shuffling back out across a vast carpeted floor the exact same sanguineous colour as the walls.

  The great red bed was installed in the massive high-ceilinged room. Light from the big window, white woolly-sky light, still too much. Who on earth had decided to make the room this way? Who wanted their guests to be struck in awe at atmospherics, acoustics, an assault of one single lurid colour, to think what, first thing, when they woke to face whatever the day would bring them? I stood and stared at the bed. It really was large enough to fit three adults quite comfortably, without them even having to touch in that space, even if they were journeying sleepers who rolled about and kicked. It could not, I thought, fulfil its place in the narrative of sacrifice, suffering, grand rites, that the room suggested for it; ludicrous to think so.

  The way rich people live. I would suggest to Mark they changed the sheets to something a little less satanic.

  I contemplated going over to the bed to pull back the covers to see who it was.

  I knew though, of course, for the moment I was too stunned to let myself know, to remember all that I remembered, saving myself from myself.

  I decided, for self-care, to reconstruct my memories of the night after coffee. I recovered my trousers, changed my mind and pulled off a long dressing gown from the back of the door. The MacAshfalls provided gowns for their guests. They were, yes, an incredible lot of people, I thought, admiring the jade-green silk and the tiger stitched across the back.

  Too Much of a Body and Things Done With It

  Down the great planks of the staircase, right at the bottom and into the kitchen, large and mild and elegant and familiar – I reached out my hands and grabbed hold of the counter in the centre of the room, bent over, sucked in air, and let out a long gasp.

  ‘There is a woman in my bed.’

  ‘Melodramatic as usual,’ said Mark, coming out from the pantry. ‘I’m making some food for the masses. Sit down, and I will tend to you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, and immediately rubbed my throat. Prickly skin. Grimy, ‘Christ,’ I said.

  ‘Sinner,’ said Mark, looking amused. I threw up my hands.

  ‘Seriously though, Danny, you have a good time last night?’

  ‘You sound extra posh and atrocious when you’re angling for details,’ I said, ‘Danny. Echh.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with Danny,’ he said, putting down a cup of tea and a plate of reheated sausage rolls in front of me. ‘This now, fruit later.’

  ‘Fruit, oh no. No.’

  ‘Fruit, you idiot. I’m just letting you know, you’re getting an apple after you eat this muck. How do you survive?’

  ‘With an unexpected grace.’

  ‘And how are you feeling anyway?’ said Mark.

  I looked over at him. It was not a Mark sort of question. I bit into the pastry of the sausage roll and felt my stomach rumble awkwardly. Margarine and meaty blandness. If Mrs MacAshfall had made this, or Mark, I felt sure it would have alcohol in it. And some type of fruit. Meat and fruit together. I shuddered involuntarily. Through the window I could see a willow swaying. Curious thing.

  ‘Did Tom . . . uh . . . last night?’ I asked.

  ‘Use your words, Daniel.’ Mark’s big, smirking, kindly face.

  ‘What . . . ?’

  ‘Because, well. I confess I heard something.’

  I put my hand over my head, ‘Yes, I remember it a bit. No I mean, was there any kind of fuss?’

  Mark shrugged. ‘Only when he left. Almost broke the door slamming it. Almost knocked my mother into the Noguchi table on the way out.’ I sighed. I drank my tea loudly. I remembered.

  Baited

  After breakfast I went into the garden. No neighbours close enough to peer over the high hedges and see me (bare feet on the cold slabs and wet ground, wrapped in only half a suit and a green silk robe) and my deep obsessive thinking. Not of the night – time enough later for the night, faces to meet, stilted speech and recovery; oh that kind of proximity and flatmates, such illadvisedness – but I was thinking instead of a way to get back from a sudden onslaught of hard sharp edges and images coming on, not with me yet, but which I could sense like a tide drawn out and waiting to rush over me. I could almost see these images, hatefully overdone, before seeing them directly. It was the knowledge that I would be mentally unwell soon. Like, I imagined, epileptics know with their auras. A different kind of experience entirely, I’m sure, nothing changed in my vision, no pain in my head beyond the hangover stuff, just a sense. Of crouching. That I would like to start running, like a dog, before the tsunami comes sweeping detr
itus, grey water and – no. I would not begin to catalogue dangers. That would lead me down to thinking again.

  It is always this repetitive. To understand it also takes repetition. To speak it to myself to position myself and try to fight the vertigo of unseen horrors was also to engage in it, engage it. The enemy that makes itself by being looked at. But which cannot entirely be quashed by not looking either.

  There were no bees outside.

  Reconstitutional

  Órla came up to me as I stood by the pond. Lipstick-haunted lips, weary, smiling face, those wide, clear, arresting eyes. She printed a kiss on my cheek. Though later when I looked it was not there. We began, piecemeal, to put our stories together.

  ‘You all right?’ she said,

  ‘Is there a bruise?’ I touched my face, suddenly realising there was indeed a bruise there, under my eye.

  ‘More than one, I’ll bet.’

  We walked around the pond, looking in. At some point it had been a swimming pool. Now it was a stretch of dark water, ligatured with die-back rushes.

  ‘How’d it get started?’ I asked.

  ‘I came in from the toilet, and saw you kissing. I thought he had passed out. Then you saw me – you don’t remember? It had been weird before though, so weird. I don’t mean to make an accusation with any of this. You were snogging. Tearing each others faces off,’ she said, and I swore I could see a smile play over her face.

  ‘You don’t mind then? You aren’t hurt?’

  She pursed her lips and shook her head, ‘No, um. That part – after we kissed. Well, it was all of us in it together. But that part’s not really the issue. That night was something strange, Daniel.’

  ‘Tell me how it was,’ I said.

  He Kissed Me

  ‘Tell me how he was.’

  ‘I was with him in the bedroom, while you were off somewhere, before all of what happened – he’d been missing in action most of the evening. Then he just walked in from somewhere and he was – different. His eyes were glassy, like he was drugged. He was cold, in his hands and feet and also in the way he moved. I’d never seen him like that,’ Órla said. ‘Well, a little bit. He hides it under affability.’