‘He was frightened of something.’
‘Yes, he was. He has been frightened. For a while, I think. Of something. I didn’t realise it at the time, brushed him off. What of it though?’
‘Then what . . . ?’ I said.
‘He stood at the window – the reflection there.’ She shuddered. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what. I was drunk too. But I think I saw something there.’
‘What?’
Órla swallowed. We stopped by a bank of dead flowers, pale as a spring sky with patches of brown, we were moving further from the house and closer to the night before by moving away. I could feel the awful images just waiting to get me. I rubbed my temples.
‘A different man,’ she said, in a dreamy voice. ‘I backed away. The moment passed. I feel like I failed some kind of test. When you came in, I pretended I wanted you to get water. I needed a moment.’
‘We were all far gone by then.’
‘No, it wasn’t that. And not Tom. I think he was nearly sober. You don’t believe me, do you?’
‘I don’t know what you want me to believe. He did whisper something to me, after we—’ I said, ‘but I didn’t want to even try to relay what he had said. Because it barely made sense, even through the drink. His sibilant, hot voice in my ear. Lennoxlove’s diary, of all things. He had said something obscured and anxiously fast about Lennoxlove, and himself, speaking of seeing a groom in a dark barn, but in a cupboard somehow, of being a witness, but I just put a hand up. And without pausing a fist hit my face. I made the choice that I would not alarm Órla with partial information. I would wait.
Órla walked on a few steps. I tried to feel if my body had been through something. All I felt was an ache a few degrees left of my shabby corporeal form.
Narrative
‘I came back in the room, ah, after washing up’ she said, ‘and you were on your feet, looking fucked and dizzy, and he just punched you. To be fair, you did get him right back. I thought you might knock him down. That laugh he gave. I’m amazed we got him calm again so quick. What was any of it about?’
‘I can’t say I know. I think you’d have strange ideas about it. A haunting.’
‘A haunting,’ said Órla.
The pool lay black between us and the house. Through the glass we could see Mark moving about, in and out of the kitchen, Mark’s mother sitting on the fainting couch with a paper, a group of three freshly-washed strangers standing, looking back at us between the huge houseplants. We could see our reflections in the glass, and the reflection of the water.
‘I have to say, I don’t know him all that well – how well do you know anyone?’ Órla said, ‘I don’t mean to make anything of it, but that night, with you – it was not . . . entirely Tom.’
‘Mmm.’ Thinking I believed her, and I didn’t believe her, but I only said, ‘Do you remember what we talked about, after he left?’
‘He begged us both to stay near him. He was frightened.’
‘Are you worried where he might have gone off to?’
Then, when she didn’t say anything, I asked, ‘Do you love him now?’
‘That’s not a very helpful question,’ she said, touching my hand.
‘I think . . . I think he’s become obsessed with something, a book of mine . . .’ I said.
‘A novel?’
‘A diary.’
I couldn’t feel my toes. He had kissed me. More than that, grabbed me, stroked me, illuminated me. And everything with Órla too. And he’d hit me, and gone off somewhere which was something else to think about and understand. Later. Probably he’d a lot to sort out in his mind. My own head was thudding and yet I had never been happier to be where I was, or more physically strained by it, a disturbance below the surface of the body, which meant below the surface of the mind. It was clear to me, even then, that morning, that Tom was rolling off the edge of something. Órla walked in step with me, our arms interlinked. We did not have to say anything. Tom was a large figure floating over us like in that one Chagall painting, The Kiss. I felt the silk on my arm meet the wool of her coat. Tom was becoming our project together. He was in development and we must understand through observation, nothing further. I was loved, I thought, all of a sudden, that was why I was so happy, despite the fragmentation and the aches. Tom gone, hopefully to the flat, to his own bed and a comforting shower and second sleep, Órla at my side. And that morning I knew that I loved her, even with so little to go on I knew that she loved me, because, and through which, we had become conspirators, earnest ones, and we would always work for good together – or what we thought was good.
‘Shall we go in?’ I asked.
A fat wood pigeon burst out of a hedge and flew over the house. There was no such thing as always.
Resolving
Órla and I left in a taxi, and resolved to plan what to do in a few hours. I needed to excuse myself and go lie down in my room. She came back later in the evening, and we kept a vigil waiting for Tom to show. Only around one a.m. did she receive a text from him, a little star, no words. He did not come home that day, nor for three more days, but he sent cryptic messages. Órla responded with screeds of words, and each reply was an emoji, nothing else. A star, a moon, a hill, a horse, the sea. I tried to remember what we had done the day we knew he had vanished, and then a little bit before the party, when Órla and I had gone on a walk together and talked about everything else besides Tom. If we had neglected to realise how severe this problem was, then it was understandable, but perhaps not forgiveable, not redeemable, unless we did something to recover him.
The fourth day brought a texted photo of a Highland cow, apricot coloured, standing beside a telephone box, looking as Highland cows do, nonchalant and charismatic. I began looking for photos that looked similar online – it turned out there were lots, but only of a handful of places. Órla texted back instead of words, a globe and a question mark. Finally an answer came – a list of numbers, coordinates.
I packed and ran for Badr’s car – left, with instructions to use it any way we needed to recover him – while Órla stayed behind in case he should wander in, our ghost boy, our prodigal love. ‘Swear you’ll not start sending me emojis, by fucking Christ,’ she said.
I smiled and touched her shoulder lightly. And headed north.
Órla McLeod
Between Dog and Wolf
When I was a girl, I wanted to be exorcised. I liked the idea of possession and of some priest bending over me muttering the right prayers to rip the demons out. Speaking from my adult mind I think it was that I craved to be so open to the world as to take within my body something huge and lurid and melodramatically evil, to be utterly defiled and then – to be cured of that. To become again only a girl, bruised but ultimately just as I had been. Or to be killed by this expansive suffering, and to be through the other side and heaven-bound after the purgatory of my short life. Sometimes no one is around when you’re eight and you’re watching telly late at night. You see what you shouldn’t and it becomes a part of you. I wanted to be a nun too. A possessed nun seemed to me the pinnacle of career ambitions. I wanted to be pure and heaving with violence. At the same time godly, meek and being rent apart.
What has this to do with anything? Tom. Daniel. See, I’ve always had the attraction to the splintering, inhabitational and polluting. Or at least to a cultural idea of pollution and plurality and its holy cure. The idea that someone skilled, a person with a vocational calling but in all other ways normal, can scoop a body out from its demons. And now the one is split from the many and made quite confounded. Possession – symptomatic of a cultural overspill and tainting. The patriarchy perhaps. You have to have an idea of property and who a body belongs to, to have possession. You know that what it must be most of the time in recorded cases is severe mental illness clashing against religiosity and fear of the dissolution of the self as a realm of contagion/corruption. But some of the rest of the time it might not be. It gets to be demons, sometimes. There’s a margin for error.
There’s a margin for anything. I love margins. Being reductive we might argue, for a moment, just for fun, that’s where the true faith and selfhood lives – that’s a part of my thesis: marginalia and doodles are where the action happen, the moments of truth set not even against but below or aside the TRUTH of the text in handmade books. The self constructed in multiple tiny wonky lines, often curses and pictures of fantastical horses. Or dicks. Of course faith and the self, they live nowhere; constructed like the recursive heads of mushrooms in that forest of consciousness that is all of us alive. I get notions too about how margins mangle and complicate the divine and allow room for the glorious catastrophe of bodies inhabited and the concurrent spin out of the self. Messing up the greater body with other seeming rowdy parts. Let me be clear: I don’t think sexuality has anything to do with the devil or the angels. But the self, yes, and its plurality.
This is a long introduction to me.
When I first met Tom I was drunk and high, and he was sweating in a work shirt clutching a pint of cider. He seemed hale and dubious. Didn’t speak much, but what he said he said close and simple. Seduction by agreement. I led him away from his friends; we snogged by the stairs in the club. I was too old for that kind of thing but the blue and pink neon lighting hid that fact under its own issues. Between the dog and the wolf, the hour of evening howls, we stepped close and pressed bodies. Around about the time Tom became dispossessed of himself I was my worst self, irritable with him, like I might be at a child who was not mine but was foisted on me. But then, in that first moment with thrumming bass and our lips meeting and his hand on my back still holding his cold pint glass there against my spine, I considered myself smitten, though distinctly aware I was so. Tom was wildly handsome. In a domesticated way like a wolf raised by English Labradors. Like something confused but living the life it knows.
You could see the effect of him entering a room, hackles going up on the other lesser dogs, hairs on the backs of necks. A communal desire that stands between wanting to have or harm – dangerous that. He could not be anything else. Not until he met Daniel, and read the book, and let a certain split work through him – the devil’s split – muckily creating a space where his scrawling footnotes could begin.
Tom Decays
That book, that diary, drab red-covered handwritten relic on the kitchen table in the Minto house, contained its own world – not for expanding upon yet. I want to step back a moment here and think of texts, generally. It’s significant, but not unexpected, the role which texts have played in our assumption of madness. Our reading of them – I mean, mine and Daniel’s – the fact I think of ‘reading’ Tom and his decay at all.
We’re both big into our texts. I’m the academic who foregrounds the text within its book – the vessel that survives to pass a book down through the years to us, the text only a passenger (and one of many passengers if we’re talking about a book of any age). Daniel’s the one who for a living replicates books. Who knows a book’s physical specificity is utterly upended in our age. There’s a kind of sadness in that which cries to him to value the uniqueness of a thing at the very same time he is destroying that uniqueness. So he’s tormented and I am practical. I’ve talked to Daniel about the pleasant balance in our tendencies; it’s why we are writing this book together. But in deference to an idea of reality we’re doing it separately so that stories that emerge are individual readings, not conjoined.
There’s a poem I found once that I’ve never managed to remember enough details from to locate again. I had memorised a few lines of it – I had a few lines memorise themselves – while it hovered before me on some site:
I have a kind of appalling tenderness in my head
A bruise from a fall in childhood
I know, stupid. An obvious tablecloth escapade, a literary trick whisking the reader from the expectation of one state (mental tenderness) to another (physical damage). I know poems are famous for doing this. But it’s still funny to me. Give me a break, because of my studies I mostly encounter old and middle English poems on stolid religious themes. There was another bit:
And so I hear them run their nails against the binding of my skull
And so I let them in. And in the letting in
something gush out.
‘Gush’ is one of those words underrated for its awfulness. Gush, like the sound a tongue makes when you’ve been smacked in the face and your mouth is filling up with blood. I can’t remember who or what ‘them’ is. What’s important is they are plural. I’ve been thinking of this unsettling fragment of poem – which let’s be honest isn’t that good but got itself stuck fast in my head through a mix of repulsion and chancing on my pet obsession – in how it relates to Tom and the diary that he became obsessed with.
Tom is a book that did not want to be a book. He’s populated by characters he has no say in. He’s marked by our hands holding onto his edges and wearing him away. He’s a book with something like that poem in it – content not worth the pages it is written on and not needing the pages to be written on since now we’re taking it out to put it in another place. I think that’s what the internet does to texts. See John Berger. Or any other theorist. But stamped or scribed indelibly in its original setting, anyway there is a split from the text-Tom and the form-Tom. From his inner content and his being. A proliferation maybe rather than a split. Let me be clear – this is not about mental illness. Don’t be tender yourself. This is not about mental ill health. This is about plurality and possession. He’s both the story Daniel and I tell of him here – inevitable errata, derivations, blah blah blah – and the body he has and the inner life he has, which Daniel and I are trying our best to give lines to. He’s the diary. He’s the diary’s omissions. He’s the ghost. He has succeeded where I haven’t in becoming plural. And it’s not just down to me it happened – he split himself. He was split. Something clawed at him and he let it in and in the process let himself out. Selfletting, like bloodletting. Each red bead of him a letter and some of it captured here.
Distraction/Decoction
To get to it: I was late for the housewarming. Tom went ahead of me from his work while I scrambled to finish a bit more research – there was always a bit more to do before I felt like I could afford to quit for the night – and got myself to Tesco for a wine – under six quid with a non-cringey label – I could give to the hosts. I was glad Tom was moving in somewhere new without me, that he hadn’t even thought to ask if I’d move in with him. Took the pressure off us for a while. Let me say again at that point Tom was not more than he was. I still didn’t have a clear idea whether he knew how to clean up after himself and wouldn’t want me for a combination housecleaner and sexual services provider as some had before. Likewise I had flaws I wasn’t ready to inflict on him yet. Relationships tended not to survive the full onslaught of me in one of my righteous, didactic moods.
When I got into the house I saw how things had been tidied away not just stuffed behind things as I’d have done. One person at least was house-proud. Or maybe the lads were just better at hiding the evidence of a rush clean. Tom let me in; he introduced me to Badr, and some of his workmates, and some of Badr’s workmates. The first group had dim faces I remembered from the club. All men. Badr had a couple of female colleagues. They gave small tight waves and hellos. My stomach dropped. I would have nothing to say to any of these people. After a while I got myself out on the pretext of opening the bottle. In the kitchen was another housemate. He introduced himself as Daniel. How shall
I say Daniel looked? First impressions: He stood in the light of the refrigerator, slight, soft. His fluffy brown hair a little too long on his head – later I learned there was a small bald patch back there – and he was swaying as if he was listening to some music playing in another room. He talked very softly but in a way that enticed one to lean in to listen. He gave the impression also of not wishing to be overheard by someone listening in the wings, and along with that had a slightly surly, distracted air that made it seem tha
t this someone was waiting on him, and if he did not go soon he would be late, suffer some kind of ticking off. But here he stayed because he did not want to let you down either and was as generous as he could be with it. He was, I saw, a man of interior ambiguities and the whispers of the fairies in his ear. He looked like he slept in his socks.
‘Nice coat,’ he said, then lightly flinched as I looked at him. A tricksy man then to like right away but he had enough going on that I somehow did.
‘Here,’ I said, handing him the wine, ‘I don’t want it. I don’t even know why I brought it.’
‘Beer?’ he offered me a cold can.
‘I hate beer, I always drink it and hate it. Does the job, but . . .’ I said. We sat down at the kitchen table and I was about to ask all the usual who are yous. Then something strange in his look stopped me. The way I found myself looking back. It was kinship, there in our glances performing itself, hard to put into words without sounding trite. And I said instead, ‘You’re wondering why, aren’t you?’
‘Why what?’ he said. ‘Not really,’ he poured himself some bitter lemon, and made me a glass too, with vodka. I tried some. Not bad. Laughter came from the living room. While Tom sat on his throne, easy monarch of any place. He told stories, then, if you can believe it. He had anecdotes and courtiers fanning themselves. And I was irked at my jealousy and tried to outrun it with this strange man there whose manner intrigued and who, so quickly, was vitally connected.
‘Oh look at you, like you know,’ I said, ‘no “why what” from you. I got the coat from a charity shop, by the way.’
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